Maybe it’s for the best that this quaint little marketing ploy doesn’t happen anymore. Kids breakfast used to be a kind of Happy Meal. Or at least a watered down version of a Happy Meal, because inside the box would be a little toy prize. You get a prize with every Happy Meal, or so I’ve been told. You ordinarily get multiple breakfasts out of a cereal box, but just one prize.
The prizes were usually themed according to the cereal. It wasn’t just a toy race car, it was the Boo-Berry ghost race car. It would be marked on the box what the trinket was inside. You didn’t want the devastation of Mom getting home from shopping and finding out she got a box from the batch of cereal before the promotion. Just cereal inside? Where’s the fun in that? And another fun note, due to purposeful insertion and/or settling during shipping the prize ended up near the bottom. Or maybe that’s just a Murphy’s Law and cognitive bias thing that it just SEEMED like it was always at the bottom.
The marketing worked. It sure worked on me. Bypassing the cognitive processes of considering the actual nutritional content of the cereal it became more important to pester the parents about what toy was inside - simultaneously promoted on TV advertisements. The basic equation was that the more sugar there was in the cereal equals the cooler the prize was for a six year old. Adding joy to Mom’s attempts to get you off to a good head start on the day - the mentality of searching for hidden Christmas presents and finding out what you would be scoring and pretending to be surprised on Christmas morning. Get a mixing bowl. Dump the contents of the cereal box into the bowl. Retrieve the toy immediately. Return the not so cleverly disguised sugar injection delivery system to the box.
There are plenty of gematria decoders that refuse to grow up and not focus on the shitty quality of the cereal, but just the little toy surprises along the way. And one of those toy surprises was rolled out as Derek was first getting his feet wet in the gematria world. The new cipher. And lots of new, weird, and still completely useless for real life ciphers linger today from this phase. Keypad, Trigonal, Reverse Primes, etc…, each one effectively helping debunk the system it claims to show the value of. If one were to limit yourself to two ciphers, and these don’t overlap in resulting gematriats, there’s just one miss to ignore. If you use the four base ciphers, you are ignoring three misses. And if you have a screenful of dozens of ciphers with no overlapping results you have dozens of misses to explain why the voices in your head are telling you to post a meme about the Jesuits putting snake venom in vaccines.
Somebody’s been busy fucking around and making new ciphers.
Because you can never have too many misses. Your new cipher is your new toy surprise, keeping you distracted until you grow the hell up. The gematria results are your shitty sugar laden cereal.
The Kaye Cipher is a William Shakespeare thing, and naturally not actual gematria. Here’s your free literary genius toy surprise that has nothing to do with the quality of your cereal. Here’s your Golden Ratio toy surprise. Enjoy the irony of how actual math shows that your cereal is not just not good for you, but will kill you after eating too much. Here’s your Trigrammaton spiritual toy surprise. Don’t just try a single gram of cereal, try grams, NO, try a TON of grams, until your database you are decoding off of as your source material is so huge you can’t help but find a match.
The mysterious Cipher X, we’ve covered what that’s probably about recently. The details of the other new ciphers are still hidden from view. Apparently you need to buy a box of cereal, a website membership, to find your toy surprise. In the meantime, the cereal makers are totally unconcerned about your mental health. So unconcerned that the toy surprise in every box is a broken magic decoder ring.
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