Comedy
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) 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.