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