85. Corsets For Snakes

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Lords:

• Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
• Shannon is offering vaccines.

Topics:

• Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
• Best and worst parts of camping.
• Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
• Call Me By Your Name.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/a1u_79xLemA
• Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?

Microtopics:

• Safe and effective vaccines.
• The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
• Teleconferencing an escape room.
• All of the items that came out of this drawer.
• A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
• Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
• How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
• Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
• The novelty of not having your luxuries.
• Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
• Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
• The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
• Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
• The sound of wind through the branches.
• Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
• The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
• The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
• How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
• Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
• The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
• Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
• Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
• The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
• Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
• Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
• Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
• Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
• The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
• Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
• A kid swinging over pits.
• Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
• Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
• Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
• Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
• Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
• Being informed that you are in for a treat.
• Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
• The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
• A snake turning into a cone head.
• A very slow jog.
• Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
• Corsets for snakes.
• Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
• The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
• Wearing clothing with your name on it.
• Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
• Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
• The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
• An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
• Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
• What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
• The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
• The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
• Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
• Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.