Hello from the Magic Tavern, Season 3

 

In Hello From the Magic Tavern, Arnie Niekamp, a man who fell through a magical portal into the fantasy world of Foon, records a podcast with a shapeshifter and a wizard.

Earlier this year, I shared my favorite early episodes from the podcast. Today, I’m going to share my favorite episodes from the current season of the podcast — Season 3.

During the first two seasons, Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore recorded their podcast inside the tavern The Vermillion Minotaur.

In the third season, they set out on the road, and met new characters on their journey to defeat the Dark Lord.

 

 

 

 

Season 3, Episode 32 —  Five Years

 

Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore celebrated the five year anniversary of their podcast by sharing audio Arnie recorded when he first arrived in Foon. The audio was recorded before the first episode of Season 1.

Fans who are already familiar with Hello from the Magic Tavern will enjoy this additional backstory about how the podcast came to be.

 

Usidore: Chunt, do you realize what Arnie has found? The greatest form of entertainment in all of entertainment-dom…

Arnie: What is that?

Chunt: A clip show?

Usidore: A prequel. Everyone loves prequels!

 

 

 

Bonus: Earth Games — Scattergories

 

In honor of the five year anniversary, several bonus podcasts, which were originally only available to listeners who paid for access to Stitcher Premium, were released for everyone to listen to for free. 

 

 

In one of those episodes, the co-hosts, Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore, are joined by one of their frequent guests — Momo, a mouse with human strength. Momo is one of my favorite Magic Tavern characters.

The four friends play Scattergories, a game from earth where players have to come up with words for several categories that start with a specific letter.

 

Momo: Does this game have dice? Because Momo doesn’t want to throw them through the wall.

Chunt: Yeah, she is so strong.

Usidore: You know, the way humans always throw dice through the wall.

 

As they prepare to play the game, the characters discuss the rules, and Arnie attempts to ensure Chunt, who can transform into different species of animals by having sex with them, doesn’t have sex during the game.

 

Arnie: House rule, this isn’t for anyone in particular, can we all just agree during this game, no one is going to fuck an animal? Just during the game.

Chunt: That seems pointed.

Momo: Why would Momo start today?

Usidore: Two of the four of us are animals, so it’s a little unfair. I don’t think sex was going to come up in the course of this game, unless there is another rule I don’t know about.

Arnie: Let’s not make it animal-related, no effing during the game.

 

I love how Momo responds to Arnie’s request by reflecting on her disappointment with her love life. 

 

 

Arnie, a man from Earth, eventually realizes he won’t be able to tell whether the other players are giving real answers.

 

Arnie: I just realized, I’m not going to necessarily know if your answers are real or made up.

Usidore: They’re not.

Momo: We’ll tell you.

Usidore: Yes, of course, we’ll tell you if they are made up, but we wouldn’t do that, would we? No way.

 

I love the concept of actors improvising fictional characters playing Scattergories in a fantasy world, because any potential answer could be correct in the world they’re creating.

 

 

 

Season 3, Episode 34 — Mouse Knight

 

Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore caught up with Momo after she was knighted by Sir Trumble who she helped on a quest.

 

Momo: Being knighted sort of slowed down my career for a second, because I became a magnet for a little while. I got stuck to a refrigerator and was just a magnet.

 

I’m amused by the image of an adorable mouse in a suit of armor unable to move because her suit is magnetized and stuck to a refrigerator. 

 

 

Momo also received some help from Usidore and Chunt as she explained her heroic journey alongside Sir Trumble.

  

Momo: I went over…you know that bridge that goes over fire?

Usidore and Chunt: Uh huh.

Arnie: What was that bridge called?

Momo: Um…

Usidore: Flame Lane.

Momo: (Laughs)

Arnie: Flame Lane?

Momo: We crossed that and then we crossed the mountain that’s made of ice, which is called…

Chunt: Oh, that’s the FroZone.

Momo: FroZone, (Laughs) And then, um, uh, we went, crossed that… and um… It sounds like Momo is making this up. I’m not.

Usidore: We know.

Chunt: We know.

 

I enjoyed listening to Momo tell her story during the improvised comedy podcast, especially because the other characters believed she wasn’t making it up on the spot.

 

 

 

Season 3, Episode 35 — Strong Guy Island

 

Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore traveled to Strong Guy Island to recruit warriors to assist them on their quest to defeat the Dark Lord.

Strong Guy Island is home to powerful warriors who each have a comic-book-like name that explains an important aspect about their character or abilities.

The three co-hosts adopted similar names as they prepared to meet the warrior-residents of the island.

  

Usidore: I as Wizard Man must go and speak to Magic Man for a while. We have a Venn Diagram that overlaps, so it’s important that we know who is taking care of what at any given time.

Arnie: And I know BagdEric, it seems rude. But try to understand, he’s a Magic Man. 

Chunt: I’ll try. I can’t promise, but I’ll try.

  

Arnie snuck in a reference to the lyrics of Magic Man by Heart, a song that was released in 1975.

 

  

Season 3, Episode 38 — Distant

 

Our heroes were struck by a magical anomaly, known as the Shattering, that placed everyone in Foon in separate, confined areas they cannot easily leave.

This of course is their way to make jokes and provide commentary about the quarantine measures many people have taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the real world.

In the first episode about the Shattering, Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore discuss working from home.

  

Arnie: Just because we’re trapped doesn’t mean you can stop working, Usidore. You’re going to just have to work remotely.

Chunt: We should probably put Usidore on furlough or something.

Arnie: Can we mute each other? Is there a way? There’s all kinds of runes on this Jewel, and I don’t really know how they work.

Chunt: Go ahead and fiddle around with those Runes. Wait, we’re all using Rune right?

Arnie: What’s that?

Chunt: Rune was this technology that not everyone used. Now that the world is shattered, I feel like everyone is going to rely on Rune.

 

Chunt is using Rune as a clever stand-in for Zoom, a computer application many people use to communicate with each other during the pandemic.

 

 

 

Season 3, Episode 39 — Freshgrave Twins

 

Two young evil sorcerers checked in with the co-hosts during the Shattering.

Snaken and Schnenessa, the Freshgrave twins, who recently graduated from the wizarding school Jizzleknob, discussed what they have been up to during the Shattering.

  

Snaken: The first thing we did was we tried light magic, which was not really our thing.

Usidore: Ooh! How was it? How was it?

Snaken: It blows, Usidore.

Schnenessa: It’s like when you want to take a bath, but you only have a very small bath, but you’ve taken a bath in a big bath.

Snaken: You’re like, ‘In theory I understand what should be nice about this, but this just isn’t doing it for me. This bath is much smaller, and I know what a big bath is.

Usidore: But imagine squeezing yourself down into the tiniest bath, so you can enjoy every single droplet of it.

Schnenessa: If I had never been in a big bath, then maybe a little bath would be like, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ But once you’ve done very cool dark magic and put wheels on a first year, you can’t be in a small light bath.

Usidore: Excess! Excess is evil!

Snaken: When your magic is black, you never go back.

 

 

The episodes features some amusing moments that highlighted the generational differences between Usidore the Wizard and the young sorcerers.

 

Usidore: I’m just saying, I was brought into this world to be a champion for the forces of good by a confluence of fire and rain and birds and squirrels and frogs. And all they did is bring me forth, fully-formed, into this world as a magical wizard and handed me one million gold pieces to make my way on my own.

Arnie: A million gold pieces?

Snaken: Here’s the thing, Usidore. I feel like you are not listening to yourself.

Usidore: Huh? What do you mean?

Snaken: You’re starting with an incredible head start that I feel like you take for granted.

Chunt: Hold on, hold on. You’re saying a wizard who arrives born, a full adult with powers, and a million gold and no debt, somehow has a leg up?

Usidore: I made myself.

Schnenessa: You didn’t make yourself, you were called together. You were formed.

 

This is of course a reference to Donald Trump’s statement that his father gave him, “a small loan of a million dollars.” 

 

 

Snaken and Schnenessa also discussed how they feel so much older than the students who were taking their first year of courses at Jizzlenob. This led the cohosts to reflect on their own ages.

 

Arnie: You can’t feel sad about getting older, that’s honestly the worst thing a young person can do. You can do any kind of annoying things; you can do annoying spells. But old people hate it when young people feel old, because that means we are really old.

Snaken: I don’t know what to tell you Arnie. We’re not as young as we used to be. The first years, when we were leaving, they felt like tiny, tiny babies.

Schnenessa: Teeny, tiny babies. I was confused how they could even walk, they looked so tiny to me. To think we were there, years ago.

Snaken: They spend so much of their time, not casting magic, but watching other people cast magic. That’s their sort of entertainment. They have the ability to do the magic, but they don’t do the magic. They kill a horse or do whatever it takes to watch.

Usidore: Pop-and-lock.

Snaken: Pop-and-lock, to watch other people do magic.

  

I loved this reference to criticisms of teenagers and young adults who watch people play video games online. A lot of older people are perplexed by this form of entertainment, which Snaken was able to highlight through allegory.

 

 

 

Season 3, Episode 46  — Jazzhands

 

Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore met Spirulina Jazzhands, a singer-songwriter who feels her songs are too boring and mundane. The episode features a number of improvised songs.

The cavalier way the episode deals with death is a bit off-putting.

An incoming tide poses a potential life-and-death threat to Chunt, who is part sandcastle during the episode. The way Chunt’s possible impending death is handled is a bit cringe-worthy.

Spirulina also casually mentions she was suicidal during a moment that, to my sensibilities, wrongly made light of suicide.

But the episode more than makes up for these moments by being genuinely funny and featuring clever and amusing improvised songs.

Spirulina learns more about herself during the course of the episode, including that some of her life experiences that she finds mundane are actually interesting and extraordinary.

  

Spirulina: Who hasn’t slept with a centaur, and then the centaur’s mistress comes down and smites her with a lion ring? If you don’t know what a lion ring is, it’s basically what it sounds like. It’s a lion that you wear as a ring. 

This is a very, very gigantic mistress we’re talking about. And the lion ring leaps out at you and somehow you get away. And then you’re backing up and you try to grab a spear to shove in the heart of the lion. And the lion actually dies because you succeed at it, because it was just luck.

Listen, I grabbed a spear and I tripped. It was so embarrassing. Who wants to tell that story?

 

 

  

Hello from the Magic Tavern has had many quality episodes throughout its current season. Here are how my favorite episodes in ranked order.

 

1. Freshgrave Twins

2. Earth Games — Scattergories

3. Mouse Knight

4. Strong Guy Island

5. Distant

6. Jazzhands

7. Five Years

 

 

 

The following people play key roles in these Magic Tavern episodes.

 

Arnie Niekamp plays a fictional version of himself

Chunt — Adal Rifai

Usidore — Matt Young

Momo—Erin Keif

Snaken—Zach Reino

Schnenessa—Jess McKenna

Spirulina — Nicole Parker

Otok Barleyfoot—Nick Baer

Blemish—Martin Wilson 

 

 

Slime Rancher: a beautiful, relaxing game

 

Amid a pandemic, a recession, and a contentious election, no one can deny we live in trying times. And many common leisure activities are unavailable due to precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

As a result, I've spent a lot of time playing video games over the past few months. One of those games, Slime Rancher, is a relaxing way to alleviate stress.

In Slime Rancher, you play as Beatrix LeBeau, an aspiring slime rancher on a planet called the “Far, Far Range,” a thousand light years from earth. 

You capture adorable wild animals, called slimes, house them in pens on your ranch, and feed them depending on their diet. You can sell their poop, in the form of plorts, on the plort market.

 

 

Proceeds from plort sales can be used to purchase and improve pens, gardens, and chicken coops on your ranch. You can also purchase ranch expansions that allow you to build more pens, gardens, and coops. 

Throughout the game, you unlock additional wilderness areas across the Far, Far Range and find new types of slimes. As you discover slimes, foods, and materials, new entries appear in your Slimepedia.

The game has a great sense of humor that arises during interactions with other ranchers, emails from the corporation you work for, and Slimepedia entries that explain the fascinating world around you. 

Later in the game, you can unlock minigames by trading with other ranchers through the Range Exchange. These minigames unlock additional ranch upgrades and ranch expansions.

Slime Rancher was developed by Monomi Park, a game studio based in San Mateo, California.

The game’s core gameplay loop of exploration, ranching slimes, selling plorts, and buying upgrades is incredibly satisfying.

Slime Rancher is visually beautiful and features relaxing music. You can farm a wide variety of slimes on your ranch.

The game is available on Steam for $20. 

If you’re looking for a relaxing game to play during the pandemic, I highly recommend it. 

 

My grandmother's button collection

Last month, my grandmother, Joy Beets, passed away at the age of 93.

She had a fairly impressive button collection, which inspired me to begin one of my own. After my grandmother died, I inherited her collection. 

I spent a day organizing her collection, which was fairly disorganized when I received it.

 

 

The collection includes two Eisenhower buttons, including one of the iconic, “I like Ike” buttons. 

 

One button features Lizabeth Scott, “A Paramount Star.” She was a movie actress who was popular in the 1940s and ‘50s. 

 

 

Another button was from the one hundredth anniversary of Lemon, Missouri, my grandmother’s hometown, which was held in 1977.

Most of the buttons are from the Smoky Hill River Festival, an annual celebration held in my hometown of Salina, Kansas. My grandparents lived in Salina for decades.

The oldest River Festival buttons in my grandmother’s collection were from 1979. 

 

The collection includes River Festival buttons for every year from 1982-2003. For each of these years, my grandmother kept two buttons. One button was her own and the other belonged to my grandfather, Wally Beets. 

My grandmother kept one button from the 2005 River Festival, the first festival that took place after my grandfather’s death in 2004. 

 

 

 

The collection includes a button from the 1985 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals. There are also buttons for the Central Kansas Flywheels festival, held in Salina, from 1987 and 1992. There are two buttons from each year.

I consolidated my own River Festival buttons with my grandmother’s. That means I now have three buttons for 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2001. I was 5, 7, 8, and 9 years old during those River Festivals.

The 1997 buttons are interesting because each one features a different artistic depiction of the festival. 

 

I also have my own River Festival buttons from 2011-13 and 2018-19. 

 

 

The collection includes a varsity letter that belonged to my dad, Rick Beets.  

 

I hope you enjoyed that trip down my family’s memory lane.

Here is a photo of my own button collection, which contains buttons for six 2020 presidential candidates and two Kansas politicians.