89. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With A Towel

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

• Nathan
  • https://twitter.com/NathanShorts
• Chris
  • https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/

Topics:

• Are mysteries actually better when you know who dun it?
• Renting apartments that come with weird artifacts
• Monster Island was a play-by-mail MMO written in QuickBasic that ran from 1989 to 2017.
  • https://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island
  • https://if50.substack.com/
• No Tengo Dinero by Righeira
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIGe1oOJQ
  • Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/raj5mJ1sma4
• Procrastinating because if I do anything I'll feel like I have to do everything

Microtopics:

• The symmetry of USB-C.
• The edibility of USB-C.
• The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
• Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
• Columbo.
• Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
• Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
• The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
• Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
• Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
• Knives Out.
• Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
• Mental air conditioning.
• Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
• A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
• Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
• Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
• Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
• Fold-out wall stools.
• A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
• Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
• Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
• Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
• Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
• Playing an MMO by mail.
• How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
• Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
• Non-player monsters.
• Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
• Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
• Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
• Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
• Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
• Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
• Video Toaster.
• A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
• The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
• Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
• One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
• The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
• Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
• Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
• Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
• Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
• An outline of an abbreviation.
• Bragging about your photogenic memory.
• Where your mind's ear lives.
• Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
• Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
• Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
• Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
• A two year old who draws perfect circles.