June 07, 2021

85. Corsets For Snakes

1 hour 9 minutes

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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.

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By Jim Stormdancer

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