166. There's Only One Best Topic

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords: Erica Maxx Topics: Freesound.org and the delight of sharing things without fame https://freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/15543/ https://freesound.org/people/Mrthenoronha/sounds/369065/ https://freesound.org/people/smokenweewALT/ Shutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter account Leisure in the 70s Snow by David Berman https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/snow-14 The some potatoes diet Plants that can see sorta? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/ Microtopics: The Topic Lords discord. Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat. A virtual birthday party crashing app. Piranesi. A website where people post sound. Wav laundering. Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop. Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected. Someone's friend pretending to be a bird. Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil” AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits. Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio. Officer, I was just making a video game! The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound. The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube. The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces. Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords. SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens. The best Wikipedia pages. Toe Cleavage. Cats who have jobs. Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another. Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG. The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it. The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle. Who was solving things? New ways to not be at work. Another word for having a good time. Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure. Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper. Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns. The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin. Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you. A foreskin in repose. Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves. The concept of leisure as a human right. Serious vs. casual leisure. Project-based leisure projects. A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts. Voices hanging close in the new acoustics. Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered. Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat. The Seattle Space Noodle. The last Burger King in Amsterdam. The most normal person you know. Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back. Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years. Eating 40 potatoes a day. Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case. Halftato. Overdosing on potassium. Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium. Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people. The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea. Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves. Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image. Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves. A forest of Max mimicry.