89. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With A Towel

00:00:00
/
01:06:16

July 5th, 2021

1 hr 6 mins 16 secs

Your Hosts
Tags

About this Episode

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

Lords:

Topics:

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.
Support Topic Lords