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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.
