July 05, 2021

89. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With A Towel

1 hour 6 minutes

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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.

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By Jim Stormdancer

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