Hello! Welcome back.

Last week my title date was off because I drafted my blog post on Sunday in preparation to post Monday morning. I’m giving that pre-preparation a try again this week, but hopefully I can get my dates right the first time this time…

You might expect this announcement by now: the next chapter of The Failed Technomancer is live! A mysterious, bloody-mouthed rozie has 64Bit tied up and is torturing him for information… But what does this creature really want? Why hasn’t it eaten 64Bit already?

I most likely will not have a blog update next week. If I do, I’ll consider that gravy, but I’ve got family plans next Sunday and then I’m going to Dragonsteel MiniCon on the 20th—I am looking forward to talking all about that the following week. So, if you don’t hear from me, I’m not dead.

But if I’ve disappeared for two or three weeks in a row, then I might be dead.

Last week I shared a Bloggyness Review of Pixar’s Elemental, where I brought up that, as a serial world builder, sometimes I struggle with stories where I see fundamental problems in the world building. That leads me to try to mentally fix the issues I find, even if the solutions I invent might be quite a stretch, depending on the story. Other times, pondering on how to fix these world building inconsistencies springboards me into extensive ideas on a detailed universe only tangentially related to the seed idea, one I might never have come up with otherwise. Well, I thought it would be fun to share two recent experiences I had.

Regarding the Former (Fixing): Have you ever read Are You My Mother? It’s a story about a baby bird who falls out of his nest, goes on an adventure, and is eventually reunited with his mother. (Obviously I’m aware that this is a children’s story and that some of the things I’m about to bring up are no issues at all to my 16-month-old—I’m not certain that she’s capable of not suspending her disbelief. But bear with me, because there are some truly odd world building choices at work here that become amusing when overthought.)

Our protagonist, Baby Bird, is born with the ability to talk, think, and reason, and he’s born with a inconsistent knowledge of the world, such as comprehension of what a mother is (although no knowledge of who his specific mother is), as well as basic comprehension on other things (like cats and dogs), but not enough knowledge to fully recognize that a plane isn’t a bird, or that a non-bird creature couldn’t be his mother. Why is this the case? Such things are presented to its infant audience and then left entirely unexplored.

Well, here’s my thinking. Some animals are born more developed than others, or with the ability to grow and gain skills more rapidly than others. For examples, horse babies are able to walk and run shortly after they are born, while human babies are essentially immobile for months; on the other hand, human babies are born significantly more developed than kangaroo babies, despite the kangaroo babies being more capable of locomotion than human babies. So, perhaps this is a species of bird that, for whatever reason, evolved to have weirdly rapid intelligence in specific areas. Maybe the evolution of these birds even took notes from the genetic memories in Dune, explaining the baby bird’s oddly specific knowledge about certain things when it was born.

If this is the case, then I can explain away the two unintelligent animals introduced in this story, a cat and a chicken, rather easily. Avians are not very closely related to felines, so the cat just being a cat while the baby bird is remarkably intelligent doesn’t create any inconsistencies. Similarly, while the baby bird and the chicken don’t share equivalent intelligences, that’s not an issue—humans are closely related to apes, after all, but no ape is ever going to build a rocket and then fly it to the moon.

A huge wrench gets thrown in this band-aid explanation with a later introduction to the story: an intelligent dog. What are the odds that two very different, specific breeds of animal evolved intelligence at about the same time? No, Are You My Mother?, you’ve lost me at this point with clearly lazy world building that I can only save with some real stretching, and I haven’t warmed up to that yet.

(I have read, and reread, this one story, and a handful of others, to my baby so many hundreds of times…)

Regarding the Latter (Springboarding): Unfortunately, I can’t name a specific title for this story, as I haven’t yet rediscovered it among my daughter’s collection of picture books. I can tell you it’s a Mickey Mouse story where Mickey and his friends go on a picnic and interact with a bunch of normal animals.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the internet, I’m well aware I’m not the only person to look at Goofy, an intelligent dog that speaks and wears clothes, and Pluto, a cartoon dog that is for all intents and purposes just a dog, and wonder just what was going on there. I could chalk it up to evolutionary lines, as I did with Are You My Mother?, in which case Goofy spending time with Pluto is like a human spending time with a chimp. But in this story—again, I don’t remember the title, my apologies—Mickey encounters regular, every day, tiny mice; Donald fights with regular ducks; and Claribel has a run-in with a normal milk cow. The odds of this many specific evolutionary branches creating human-like intelligence in one species of a group of animal, and making them all anthropomorphic, all while leaving alarmingly similar analogues alive, strains my suspension of disbelief to breaking. Disney! Surely you can get your writers to create more logically and internally consistent stories and worlds for 16-month-olds?

Well, rather than justify the strange world building of that story, I began to imagine an alternate reality where, human survival became dependent on splicing human genes with that of various animals, creating similarly-sized and similarly-intelligent anthropomorphized varieties of many animal species within a short period of time. This would allow such creatures to exist side-by-side with their normal beast analogues. If I had stayed here then this might have become a possible “explanation” for the Disney universe, but I was having fun doing my own thing, so I continued: these creatures then forgot about their human roots after a post-apocalyptic event, leaving them to become the warring masters of an earth-like planet. After playing with and building on the idea for a while, I eventually decided to combine different species of anthropomorphized animals, because rabbit/caribou hybrids making jackalope people (among other combinations) sounded awesome, and because it can still be justified by the aforementioned gene splicing.

Bloggyness Review: Cassette Beasts

I’ve finally finished this game! I’ve mentioned Cassette Beasts twice before (Monsters! and Outta Here!), and because I like it so much I’m going to provide a more formal review. First, here’s the quick description I gave the game in Outta Here!:

Anyway, of the [monster catching genre games] that I’ve played, Cassette Beasts is quickly solidifying itself as my favorite. The game has a strong visual style (including very odd, but intriguing, monster design), a wonderful pun game, an engaging story with lovable characters, and its innovations on the genre range from a completely new approach to the type-advantage system that’s nearly ubiquitous in the genre to extremely enjoyable local couch co-op. My wife and I play this game together on Switch and are having an excellent time.

In Cassette Beasts, you play an effectively silent protagonist who gets sucked out of his/her dimension and ends up stranded in New Whirral, a… flotsam dimension. There, you discover an island populated with violent monsters, and later learn that you can use cassette tapes to record these monsters and then turn into them. The game itself points out the oddity of how this system works, with many characters stating, in essence, “We’ve learned just not to question it.” From here, you embark on an adventure to find your way home, which took me around 25 hours to complete.

The writing in Cassette Beasts is sharp: my wife and I teared up multiple times, and laughed out loud even more often. The game also evolves a genre that feels stagnant in many interesting ways. For example, since you transform into the monsters you capture, every monster you play is always the same level as your character; having experienced this quality-of-life feature, I’m not sure I’ll be able to live without in other catching games. As another example, rather than managing type advantages/disadvantages through simple numerical differences in damage, Cassette Beasts uses a mostly-logical system of elemental interactions; this ranges from debuffs (hitting a Plant creature with Fire sets it on fire and causes it to burn for a few turns) to buffs (hitting a Metal creature with Poison coats it in Poison and causes its attacks to deal extra damage for a few turns) to completely changing a creature’s type (hitting a Plastic creature with Fire melts it and turns it into Poison).

There’s a lot more than what I mentioned above, but all of it comes together into an amazing package that I can’t recommend highly enough. As an added feature, the game has a “customization mode” that makes replayability ludicrously high. For example, just turning on the “Randomize Elements Feature”—which causes each creature’s elemental type to be randomly changed to another for that save file—makes the game feel completely new and fresh again. Turn on tapes permanently breaking and getting a “Game Over” if your character faints, and what was originally a breezy experience turns nearly every fight nail-biting.

If I have one criticism of the game, it’s that there needs to be a few more moves added to the game, and I think most monsters need a single move or ability completely unique to them, to differentiate them more and to give monsters with lower stats a reason to still be used in the late game.

Bloggyness Review: Mike’s Hot Honey

I’m not getting into food reviews, so don’t expect more reviews along these lines, but this was such an unexpected find that I had to share it. Mike’s Hot Honey is honey infused with chilis, making it sweet and spicy. I’ve enjoyed it on toast, on pizza, and on fried chicken so far, but not on apples. It’s… odd. It took me one or two tries to get used to. But now I can’t get enough of the stuff.

(I’m not getting paid for any of the above, for the record. I’m just sharing things that I like.)

Writing Updates

The Precious Burden of Joy is at over 6000 words! Which means I was blasting through this story last week, considering my last updated was 1700 words… wow. Hopefully I can manage a comparable pace this week—if so, draft 1 will be done in no time.

No changes on anything else, unfortunately. Waiting, waiting, waiting on other projects to be accepted (and begin the publication process), or rejected and then I’ll just self-publish.

Send-Off

What unexpected delights have you found recently? Let me know!