drink talk learn

on unimportant presentations. originally written in 2023.

My friends and I do something called a Drink Talk Learn once or twice a year. A DTL is an excuse for us to get together for drinks (whether in person or virtually, but usually the latter since some of us live in other countries now) and each do a presentation on a group-voted theme.

The mechanics have been laid out by Michal - whose DTL on Shadow the Hedgehog's moral alignment went viral - but we customized them, as I assume most friend groups who adapted this practice have.

Some changes we made:

• 3 minutes is crazy short. We do 5-7. (Most of us go way over it, still.)
• Heckling is fine in person, but virtually the delay makes it awkward. We're also a fairly polite bunch naturally, so death by screech doesn't super work.
• Dress code depends on the theme we decide for that hang, and is not always business casual.
• We had a bunch of awards the first time and then never did awards again. Not for any bad reason - it was just a bit of a hassle.

It's a whole lot of fun! All my friends are funny and smart and have strong feelings about things, and I love watching them present.

In general DTL combines a number of things I like: being with my friends, thinking hard about my obsessions, pseudo-intellectualizing them for fun, and using Powerpoint. (I love you forever, Morph transition...!)

If you're at all interested in trying this out with your group of friends, I highly recommend it. You can look up "Powerpoint Party" for ideas if you don't know where to start, but I'm also going to lay out previous themes we've tried and presentations I've done, because this is my blog.

I won't list all my friends' presentations though, since we've done this six times and we're like nine people. That's too much. Anyway, here we go!

👯 january 2020: the inaugural DTL

Since this was our first DTL, we went all out. We had a rubric and shit that we co-designed on Google Docs. We had awards too, which I'm pasting here:

• Best presentation: highest total score among all presentations
• Most creative: highest creative score among all presentations
• Closest to 7 minutes without going over: yeah!
• Closest to 5 minutes without going under: yeah!
• Best topic: people like your topic
• Most controversial topic: people have strong feelings about your topic
  • (alternatively, you got asked a lot of questions)
• Best griller: asks the most/the hardest questions (either/or)
• Best grilled: best defense during Q&A
• Best charred: had a tough time defending, poor kid
• Best visuals: people like your powerpoint/prezi/what have you
• Best dressed: people like your OUTFIT
• Most sober: you seem like you have your shit together/you’re intelligible

My topic was "guessing who my friends' biases in Seventeen would be if they chose to stan" and I theorized that they'd either like someone similar to them, similar to their friends, or similar to their type. At the time, I was crazy into Seventeen and was very familiar with their (public) personalities, and it was also just a fun excuse to call my friends out or indirectly compliment them.

Some friends' topics included:

• A fan theory on Adrien Agreste from Miraculous Ladybug
• A deepdive on their favorite professional Dota players' lore
• Their literal thesis deck (they weren't able to make something else in time)

🖥️ may 2021: try to care about something new

On our second DTL, we switched things up: Each person provided a list of 3-5 things they could give a presentation about, and we drew each other's names to see whose topics we could choose from.

The friend I drew said on their list that they'd like to see the presenter go through their MyAnimeList, which seemed like fun!

I went through and gave some first impressions based on the above parameters, and later ended up watching one of the animes on her list that I ranked highly based on said parameters. (It was Kaguya-sama: Love is War.)

🖥️ august 2021: life updates

This one was a bit more chill. Since we were still in the middle of a general quarantine and unable to really meet up or catch up, we thought it might be fun to do something more simple like a life update. Not much to say about this one! It was nice catching up, especially since my friend group is so low-communication lmfao.

Here was mine.

👯 june 2022: i was sick

We usually hold in-person hangs at my place, but another friend was hosting this one because it was her farewell party before going to grad school in Canada. This was a week after my trip to the US, where the mask policy was already pretty lax, so after two years of safety I got Covid LMAO...

Anyway, I didn't go, but my friends looked like they had a good time! I don't think there was a theme? One of them assigned us to different characters in the Barbie Cinematic Universe (BCU) which was excellent.

🖥️ august 2022: whatever you like!

There wasn't a theme for this one either! My topic was something like "which of my quarantine blorbos could I actually date IRL" - which was truly just an excuse to a) think about my blorbos and b) break out a spreadsheet and metricate the very un-quantifiable process of finding a partner for fun.

A preview: a slide on things that I think are good qualities.

Some of my friends' presentations included:

• Recipes for traydors (drinks that taste good but hit hard)
• Mapping [the presenter]'s compatibility with their Seventeen biases based on astrology
• A tierlist of all the Ghostfaces from the Scream franchise

👯 january 2023: powerpoint karaoke

All three of the friends who lived out of the country were visiting for the holidays, so it seemed as good a time as any to get together in person and do our first complete, in-person DTL. Unfortunately, this did not happen – but we DTL'd anyway!

The gimmick for this one was "make a Powerpoint and have someone else present it on the spot." (I've since learned that this is called Powerpoint karaoke?) It was a challenge to design the Powerpoint in such a way that would be fun for a) the presenter and b) the audience, but we were successful. (And also sufficiently tipsy.)

My presentation asked the presenter to swipe left or right on the characters of Fire Emblem: Three Houses based on their background knowledge and basic info I provided (+ Tumblr memes to give them an idea of their personality, if they totally didn't know anything about the character). I took into account the following when deciding on the info to include in the PPT:

1. Some of my friends played Fire Emblem and were super into it. ("If they present this, how do I make it not boring to them?")
2. Some of them had some familiarity with the characters, based on the tweets of those in our friend group who played the game. ("How do I not tell the whole story of the chara on the presentation, so the presenter can talk about their own impressions?")
3. Some of them know nothing about the game or characters. ("If they're presenting, what information will be useful to them to assess the characters? If they're listening, how do I help the presenter?")

The area at the bottom was for the person assigned to present this PPT to stick post-its that had the names of the characters in the appropriate boxes. I was taking advantage of the fact that we were in person and had a projector set up.

The person who got my presentation was my best friend Dom, who I'd place in the second category. They presented beautifully and hilariously.

The presentation I drew was "Pokemon Scarlet/Violet Smash or Pass," where I was... to play Smash or Pass with the Pokemon of the Paldea region. As a Pokemon fan, IT WAS SO FUN. I don't know if it was as fun for the people listening, but it was fun for me to do lol.

🎮 february 2024: game night

(To be updated with a writeup and screenshots.)

tips for anyone organizing a DTL

As the person who usually arranges our hangs, here is some unsolicited advice for anyone looking to do this.

Themes can increase focus AND excitement. Having no theme is nice and leaves a lot of room to do whatever you like, but sometimes that gives people choice paralysis. By setting a theme, you give yourselves an area to work within and take away some of that stress.

Crowdsource from the friend group for maximum fun. I made polls upon polls to make sure everyone was not just down with the chosen theme, but excited about it. The more excited everyone is, the more likely the event will be a success! This is where you might nix the first tip – if everyone seems more interested in talking about a topic of their choosing, it's obviously better to just let them.

Don't let DTL be the only thing during the hang. The DTL is usually an excuse to hang out and play other games and chat afterwards. This keeps it from being too like work lol.

Drinking is optional. I know it's called a Drink Talk Learn, but eh. This should just be a thing in general. None of us have issues with alcohol, but sometimes some people aren't feeling it, and that should be fine. The hang should still be fun even without drinks ^__^

Avoid presentation themes that involve assigning people to others, unless you can adjust on the day of. Heed this rule especially if you know your friends are prone to dropping things.

theme ideas

• No theme - go wild!
• Present on something that someone else in the group is into
• Powerpoint karaoke
• Life updates
• Everyone hosts a game
• Holiday-themed prezo (or anything relevant to the date/time period you're holding your DTL)
• Prepare a prezo for a specific person to present (but you won't know who you're presenting for until the day of)
• Presentation must be related to the thing binding your friend group together (all met in high school, at work, at D&D, etc.)
• Prezo topic must start with a certain letter (whole group decides on the letter)
• Prezo must be a list/ranking of things
• Prezo must be about the group (each person as a Sanrio character, etc)
• Prezo must require/involve audience participation (plus points if physical participation, if in-person)
• Prezo must be something you have no expertise on

a reflection

I'm so used to my friend group going all out on DTL that I forget most people don't get excited about making Powerpoints, lol. It's definitely a little nerdy, and best utilized by people who are very intense about small things, like myself and my friends.

But I recommend it to anyone! It's honestly just nice to let yourself feel as much passion as you do for something, no matter how small, and share it with people who encourage that passion regardless of how familiar they are with the source of that passion. And if you don't have a friend or two to do this with, I'll do it with you.

Happy Drink Talk Learning!