Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

Boy Meets World has a surprisingly high implicit body count. For whatever reason, a character’s final appearance of a season has a fairly strong tendency to include them being in mortal peril, whether comic or dramatic, and then the character doesn’t always return for the next season.

Example: Stuart Minkus is the nerdy kid in season 1. In the final episode, an over-the-credits scene sees Cory and Shawn harnessing their latent psychic powers to blink him out of existence. It’s clearly meant to be a non-canon credits gag, but Minkus is totally absent starting season 2, so apparently our heroes legit killed a guy with their mind powers.

Example 2: Mr. Turner is in a motorcycle wreck during a very special episode towards the end of season 4. We last see him badly injured in a hospital bed, giving Shawn’s hand a weak but reassuring squeeze. This is meant to indicate that he’s gonna be okay, except that when I say “we last see him” I don’t mean “for the episode” or even “for the season,” I mean for the entire rest of the series. And there’s a whole other season that takes place in high school, so it’s not just that the cast left him behind but in good health when they graduated. Dude is gone.

I’m kind of lying, though, because the show’s writers seem to have noticed the problem in a late season 5 episode where Minkus does reappear, claiming to have been in an off-camera “other part of the school” for the past four years, and calls out to an off-camera Mr. Turner. Mr. Turner doesn’t respond, partly because actor Anthony Tyler Quinn wasn’t actually on set and partly because he died a year ago and Minkus is having a psychotic breakdown after being trapped in a psychic mirror dimension for four years by Cory and Shawn’s powers.

A similar author saving throw was made to save the most prominent of the not one, not two, but three siblings mysteriously erased from existence after season 1. Cory’s younger sister is returned to existence after a season 2 obliteration. She came back under a new actor in season 3, so we can be reasonably confident she isn’t dead, but probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the Matthews family’s daughter was replaced by an only moderately convincing changeling, something that might seem farfetched until you remember that Cory and Shawn once vaporized someone with psychic powers on camera and also that the sibling in question’s name is Morgan, as in “le Fey.” The possibility implied by canon is that season 1 Morgan and season 3 Morgan are the same person, but that she was grounded for an entire year so thoroughly that she did not once see Cory during that time, which is probably darker than the changeling theory, all things considered.

God only knows what happened to Shawn and Topanga’s sisters. Topanga’s sister was Nebula Stop-the-War Lawrence, but even the most generous assumptions about her age, the year the episode takes place, and exactly when her birthday is still put her being born no later than 1975, two years after the Paris Peace Accords, her annihilation may have been a mercy.

In any game where you assemble a build from lots of options, the meta-game eventually gets stale as a handful of particularly useful spells get settled on. A pretty consistent way to break this up is with the draft (or some other method of cutting down the options available, like Magic: the Gathering’s ever churning Modern format or randomized Sealed Deck format).

What if you did a draft with a party of RPG characters? Everyone would have to have access to the same pool of features, which means you’d have to have a game altered or built from the ground up to handle it, but as a very simple proof of concept, imagine a game of 5e in which everyone must play a wizard, we assume that all of you learn spells from each other, but when you prepare spells on a long rest, you have to draft your spells. No party member can prepare the same spell as any other party member, so if Alice took fireball, you have to take something else.

One problem here is a lack of any competitive element. The critical thing with a draft is that Alice takes fireball not just because it’s good for her build, but because it’s also good for yours, and she wants to deny it to you. I don’t know how to introduce that competitive element that really makes the draft pop, and without it, I think it might be better to go with sealed deck. Instead of everyone learning spells from each other, no one can learn spells from each other, and all spells are sold as sealed booster packs. A fireball has a certain chance of dropping from each pack, and if you don’t get it, you’ll have to make do with something else.

I haven’t really put a whole lot of meat on this idea’s bones, but I think it could help break up the monotony you get after a couple of campaigns into 5e when everyone starts settling on optimal builds.

I’m moving Friday’s article to today and gonna do another review on Wednesday, because I want to get this one out ASAP: Every last Crusader Kings 2 DLC is on sale for $15 right now. It’s at the Humble Bundle. I have logged more hours on this game than any other in my entire Steam library. The only downside to CK2 has always been that playing with anything less than every expansion installed makes it hard to discuss the game with other people, and for the next week and a half, that’s no problem. If you have any interest in strategy games or the medieval period, pick it up. The game has expanded drastically past its namesake, and includes not only mainland European and Middle-Eastern feudal dynasties, but also vikings and other pagans, African kingdoms, Mongol hordes, and whatever India’s getting up to. Also kind of the Chinese, but they’re not playable. Rumor is that the map was getting so gigantic that adding China to it would’ve rendered the game unplayable on too many machines.

Anyway, now is your chance to get all of the CK2, and unless you are either completely uninterested or completely broke, you should do so.

Train Simulator makes sense. People have always liked model train sets, train simulator is a model train set that doesn’t require an entire room of your house. Harvest Moon makes sense. Having a farm in an industrialized world is quite difficult, there are few farmers left and you must be very good at farming (and probably a megacorporation running a megafarm) to make it work. Roller Coaster Tycoon makes sense. Operating a theme park requires such a spectacularly large amount of money that most people will never even get to try and wouldn’t be inclined to bet ten million dollars on it if they had that kind of money, as opposed to just taking the money and retiring. The Sims makes sense. In the Sims, having a nice house full of nice things, making friends with all the coolest people in town, and becoming phenomenally successful in a glamorous career are all just a matter of time.

But a new phenomenon has emerged lately. Truck Simulator. House Flipper. Mechanic Simulator. PC Building Simulator. None of these are the kinds of things that would be perpetually out of reach for the average middle class person. Indeed, most of these things are just being a middle class person. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I notice that there’s a growing sub-genre of video games where the fantasy is having a job.

Pre-modern people lived for millennia in a paradigm where fate was omnipotent and tradition inviolate. The only way you could possibly hope to survive was to follow the traditions of people who were currently surviving, because the methods of learning to survive in this or that environment were so precise and the consequences for failure so immediately lethal that figuring it out just by being very clever was absolutely impossible. The process of preparing some foods in a non-toxic way is utterly insane in its complexity, and often extremely far-removed from its ultimate lethal effects, to the point where you could skip the cleansing process, prepare your food much faster, feel very smug about all your extra free time for years, and then start getting sick and dying on a timeframe so detached from when you first started bucking the tradition that it’s practically impossible to connect one to the other.

Inuits who use bones cracking in fires to divine what hunting ground to use today are using a random method of selecting hunting grounds, more random than any human could manage, thus baffling any attempt by caribou to avoid places where Inuits tend to hunt them. A group of clever young Inuits who decide that letting cracked bones decide their hunting grounds for them is dumb and just go where the hunting is best will train the caribou to avoid them and die of starvation. The Inuits had no idea that they were using randomization to prevent themselves from accidentally training the caribou to avoid being hunted, they just had a tradition, and if you didn’t follow that tradition, you died. For reasons that absolutely nobody understood.

The ancient world is one where if you don’t live in accordance with the ways of your ancestors, the gods will kill you.

And this is something I had to explain to you, my modern reader, because the gods are dead.

At some point in the past couple of centuries, human understanding reached a tipping point, where if someone is killed and we don’t know exactly why, that’s a mystery. It’s intriguing and maybe frightening because of how bizarre it is.

I don’t want to oversell the accomplishments of humanity, here. Just like a physicist falling from a plane can calculate the properties of a parachute that would save them but probably can’t make one mid-fall, knowing why people die doesn’t always help us save them. We know what heart disease and cancer are, and it still kills a ton of people, because knowing what they are and knowing how to thwart them are different things.

But I do think it’s worth remembering: The days when the world was so ruled by unexplained and inexplicable processes, when human life was so subject to unknowable forces, that to even try to comprehend them and improve upon them was a fool’s errand, that all you could do is keep to the traditions that had kept your people alive all this time and hope for the best? Those days are over. We figure out new and better ways of doing things on an annual basis. We invent new and superior “traditions” so quickly that we can hardly learn them fast enough to keep up, and are constantly at risk of falling behind the people who can adapt to them more quickly.

For better or for worse, we have plundered the riches of Olympus.

We have slain the gods.