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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-11-18 04:00:47+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-11-17 12:08:49+00:00.

Hello everyone! I am trying to get back into writing posts and wanted to start with something short.

Edit: the “hiatus” in the title refers to the episode being pulled for four years not the whole show. Sorry for the phraseology here.

I haven’t seen Seinfeld, but…points to user flair.

What is Seinfeld?

Or rather, who is Seinfeld?

Jerry Seinfeld is a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, etc, with a varied and colourful career. Among the many gems he has created, is The Bee Movie. He also got in trouble once for dating a 17-year-old girl when he was 39…but that’s a story for another time.

Seinfeld (the show) is a fictional account of Jerry Seinfeld’s life in New York City, with three of his zany friends: George Constanza, Elaine Benes, and Cosmo Kramer. It’s often described as a “show about nothing”, focusing on the daily lives and mishaps of its characters. The show ran from 1989-1998, for 9 seasons.

Seinfeld was incredibly successful. 76 million people watched the finale. It’s loved by critics and viewers and has earned billions in syndication. It also heavily influenced shows like Arrested Development and The Sopranos.

But that doesn’t mean the show was free from controversy. 🇵🇷 🔥

The episode

The episode I am going to be discussing is season 9 episode 20, “The Puerto Rican Day”. It aired on May 7, 1998. It is the second most watched episode of Seinfeld ever, with 38.8 million viewers. *TBF it is the episode before the finale.

Seinfeld and his friends are driving through town, when they get caught up in traffic because of the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. Some other things happen, but at one point the character Kramer accidentally sets a Puerto Rican flag on fire with a sparkler. He then proceeds to throw it on the ground and stomp on it in an effort to put the fire out. People around him quickly notice and voice their disapproval, before a Puerto Rican, because he is just so damn fiery and patriotic, verbally attacks him. Kramer yells “Momma” and flees, closely followed by the Puerto Rican and several others, because they are just so damn fiery and patriotic. They proceed to damage Seinfeld’s car and throw it down a stairwell, causing Kramer to quip, “It's like this every day in Puerto Rico.”

Unsurprisingly, Puerto Ricans IRL did not like the comedic destruction of their flag nor the stereotypical portrayal of their country.

The backlash

Within a day, the episode drew complaints from Puerto Rican activists and community leaders:

But Manuel Mirabal, president of the Washington-based National Puerto Rican Coalition -- who's been complaining to NBC and Castle Rock executives since late April, when only the show's title was public knowledge -- was not laughing yesterday.

Instead he staged a news conference at which he demanded that NBC, Castle Rock and Seinfeld himself apologize during next week's final episode and promise that "Puerto Rican Day Parade" will not be aired in syndication.

"When I watched last night, at first I wasn't too upset, but I was concerned that the Latinos depicted in the show were very stereotypical, like in West Side Story,' wearing the kind of clothes that people wore 40 years ago," said Mirabal, whose organization monitors congressional action and government policy affecting around 7 million Puerto Ricans living in the United States and on the island. "Then Kramer started running around with the Puerto Rican flag. . . . At the point at which the flag was burned, my blood started boiling."

Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer also condemned that scene -- in which the bumbling Kramer accidentally sets the flag ablaze with a sparkler, provoking a riot among parade marchers who trash Jerry's Saab. Kramer then makes one of his typically loony comments.

"The burning of the Puerto Rican flag as a sight gag was insulting to the millions who hold that flag dear, as was the slur that men rioting and vandalizing a car is Like this every day in Puerto Rico,' " Ferrer said in a statement.

Ferrer's office in the Bronx -- where many of New York's 800,000 Puerto Ricans reside -- received "a couple of dozen" calls protesting the fictionalized flag burning, according to his communications director. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office reported none.

Ironically, the real-life Puerto Rican Parade is scheduled to be broadcast live June 14 by WNBC, the network owned-and-operated station in New York. Parade President Ramon Velez said he, too, was disturbed by the flag-burning. "Otherwise I didn't have too many objections. I'm not condemning anybody," he said. "There is a positive aspect, in my opinion. That is, millions of people are now exposed to the fact that there is a National Puerto Rican Parade."

Concerns had been raised about the episode several months before it had aired:

He (Mr. Mirabal) wrote to Mr. Wright last month, before he had seen the show, to express his concern and to suggest that NBC have Hispanic consultants review the program for offensive content. Until that point, NBC had said only that the episode would be titled ''The Puerto Rican Day Parade.''

In a response to Mr. Mirabal, an executive with the ''Seinfeld'' production company said that the episode could have been written about the St. Patrick's Day parade or Columbus Day parade, but that they did not occur during baseball season.

NBC swiftly apologised

''We do not feel that the show lends itself to damaging ethnic stereotypes, because the audience for 'Seinfeld' knows the humor is derived from watching the core group of characters get themselves into difficult situations,'' the network said in a statement.

NBC's president, Robert Wright, added, ''Our appreciation of the broad comedy of 'Seinfeld' does not in any way take away from the respect we have for the Puerto Rican flag.''

The protests continued into June with people sending angry letters to NBC and even demonstrating outside Rockefeller Center. NBC responded by removing the episode from reruns.

As for the Seinfeld cast and crew, they objected to the objections. From ‘Seinfeld - Season 9 - Inside Looks - "The Puerto Rican Day"’:

Jason Alexander (George Costanza): “If you don't see the irony and the humor in having him (Kramer) be responsible for a burning flag then you've just missed the point and I just kept thinking this is so sad that everybody is they're so oversensitized that they just don't get the joke it's not it's not a shot at anybody if any if it's a shot on anybody it's a shot on Kramer um and it it was you know it was it was the second to last episode so it was really a sad thing to have that sort of Downer happen towards the very end.”

Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld): “I remember speaking with the head of uh a a some sort of Puerto Rican Pride Coalition and he spoke to me and told me that they were going to uh protest uh the episode and they were very upset that we had done this um and I said but you haven't seen the episode yet I said how do you how do you know that there's something in there that you want to protest and I'll never forget his exact words were “we assume that it's offensive”. So that's when I knew I wasn't dealing with anything that was you know really legitimate it was just someone wanting to and the really the only thing the episode was about was traffic it had nothing to do with the Puerto Rican Day Parade I mean it was just one of the we just thought it was the funniest of the many parades that they have in New York City that that cause these terrible traffic snarls.”

George Shapiro (executive producer): “Jerry after the series ended went to the broadhurst theater in Manhattan to do uh his show called ‘I'm telling you for the last time’ which was a standup show on Broadway culminating in this HBO special I'm telling you for the last time and they protested across the street from the stage door every night ‘Jerry Seinfeld is a racist’. It was like a big protest he was getting death threats it was getting serious he had we had security we had plane closed policemen there and uh the last show which is the one that went out live to HBO uh it was a great show and Jerry was exhilarated you know he he felt he did the best of all the shows for the full week and he comes out of the stage door and across the street are the protesters and before anyone could notice Jerry strides across the street with his long strides goes up to the guy shakes his hand the guy smiles at him he shook a couple of people and it sort of diffused the whole...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Ataraxidermist on 2024-11-16 20:07:33+00:00.

Welcome everyone! And please point out if I made a mistake here or there, English isn't my native language. But drama is.

This is a story that happened on the fringes of the already complicated video game industry. If you don't know a thing about video games or tabletop games, fear not, this is less about gameplay mechanics and more about good old questions of competence and management. If I speak about games, I will make sure everyone understands what's going on.

And without further ado, let's take a look at the main components of today's presentation.

Shadowrun : A wonderful land where you can get sliced to ribbons by a katana-wielding maniac, crushed to death by a robot or fried by a magical electric shock all in the same day.

The one and only Shadowrun, created in 1989.

Picture a cyberpunk world, a dystopia ruled by mega-corporations where citizens get arms and brain parts replaced by cybernetics. So far so good? Cool, now add a magical event that suddenly has people turn into elves, orcs, trolls, and whatever. Yep, the idea behind it is to pick a high-fantasy world in one hand, a depressive cyberpunk universe in the other, and smash these two together. You can have a team with a native American shaman summoning spirits and flinging fireballs fighting next to a ex-military wielding a shotgun and hiding blades in his artificial arms.

Somehow, instead of dismissing the setting of Shadowrun as a hookah-fueled hallucination, people played it. Or maybe it's because it was so odd that it got fans.

The standard game has you play as a shadowrunner, a mercenary for hire conducting deniable operations for whoever pays most. Destruction of assets, theft, sabotage, assassinations, your morals (or lack of) are the limit. Thing is, targets are often mega-corps, and combat is, like in real life, short and extremely lethal. As a result, avoiding fights is more important than winning them, and if combat is unavoidable, you better tip the scales in your favor before the bullets start flying.

It may not be the juggernaut that is Dungeons & Dragons, but Shadowrun made its place among the tabletop classics and is currently in its sixth edition.

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons though, Shadowrun saw few video game adaptations, despite the population of video games players and the population of tabletop role-playing games players overlapping quite a bit.

there had been a game on Super Nintendo in 1993, another on Sega Genesis in 1994, but otherwise not much happened. There had been yet another attempt in 2007, but unlike the previous two which did offer a story and a way to immerse yourself in the nightmarish hell of a future without socialized healthcare, this one was a straight up online shooter game meant to have you kill other players with the help of firepower and some spells.

All this to say, there was ample space for a new video-game.

Harebrained Schemes : Magic, trans-humanism and big robots.

Founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, two dudes with prior experience in video games. Oh, and Weisman also happens to be one of the creators of the Shadowrun franchise. Harebrained Schemes (shortened HBS) came at the right time to bank on the kickstarter craze. Remember kickstarter? It's the platform that allows you to pitch a project, and if people are convinced, they can throw their hard-earned currency at your face in the hopes that you won't change your mind or turn out to be a fraud. Be it for a book, a game or a potato salad. if you're convincing, people will cover for your expenses and then some.

But how can you be seen when swimming in a sea of projects screaming for attention? One solution is to use a well-known license that will bring interest just by virtue of attaching an important name to whatever you're concocting. You guessed it, Weisman got the rights from Microsoft, owner of the Shadowrun license, and proposed a new video game based on the franchise on kickstarter.

The numbers speak for themselves. HBS had hoped for 400.000 dollars, they got over 1.8 million.Harebrained Schemes : Magic, trans-humanism and big robots.

The project took off, and in 2013, out came Shadowrun Returns. Unlike the 2007 action game with lots of bullets and little in the way of words, Shadowrun Returns had a scenario. And instead of adrenaline packed action, this was a tactical RPG: meaning characters moved one after the other and you had all the time in the world to ponder your next move. In returns, you start as a down on your luck runner with no cash and no prospect who gets a message from your old pal Sam. Sam is dead, and the message was to be sent out in case of untimely demise with a simple proposal : Bring his killer to justice, and get paid. Naturally, things get complicated fast, with a serial killer, a cult and mega-corporations all coming to blows.The project took off, and in 2013, out came Shadowrun Returns.

The game had okay reviews. Nothing mind-blowing, the gameplay could get weird at times, the cover-system was obtuse, the story was nice, the Shadowrun universe was pleasant. But it had easy to use modding tools. For the uninitiated, modding is when you play with the code of the game to create your own campaign, or tweak the rules to make certain enemies stronger for example. The campaign, aptly named "Dead man's switch", was a showcase for the possibilities the modding tools the studio offered.

Returns truly tried to emulate the tabletop game, instead of giving a single story, you had the tools to create your own campaign and share it with others. But somewhere in there, Harebrained got another idea. Players did like the Dead man's switch campaign, so why not make the next one more than a showcase?

Dragonfall came out in 2014. Originally an expansion for Shadowrun Returns, an expanded version was soon sold as a standalone game, and was considered a notable step-up from the original. As a rule of thumb, if asked which game to start with, people will either tell you to start with Returns because it only goes up from there, or skip it and jump straight to Dragonfall for the really good stuff. Unlike Returns which required the hiring of bland mercenaries each run, you had a solid cast of companions this time you got to know.

Ex-frontman for a punk band currently slinging fireballs in the name of a spirit who expects followers to do badass things, and also tends to lose followers when they bite more that they can chew? Check. Computer genius who notably isn't socially awkward and shy? Check, although not being shy still doesn't make him good at people skills. Or any other skill in life. Pale woman who barely speaks and sports cyberware that belongs to a museum? Check. A dog to pet in your hideout? You better check that too.

Gameplay was largely similar, but lively companions and a scenario taking place in an anarchist Berlin (anarchist in the sense of no clear leader, not the bomb-throwing kind), made the game into a success. Or at least enough of a success to warrant a successor.

Shadowrun Hong-Kong was pitched on Kickstarter. This time, Harebrained only asked 100.000, as they had leftovers from the sales of Dragonfall and Returns, and the kickstarter was a way to gauge if interest in the Shadowrun universe was still there on one hand, and add additional features on the other.

With 1.2 millions raised, Interest was there, and Shadowrun Hong-Kong came out in 2015. The mechanics had been polished, cover actually made sense and the story delivered once more. This time, you were accompanied by an orc worshiping a rat spirit who can eat anything without ever falling sick and whose former partners tend to be former by virtue of brutal death. We got a shy nerd (I know, but she's still cool once you get to know her), an ex-cop who desperately wants his badge back, and some more exotic team-memb...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Huge_Trust_5057 on 2024-11-12 01:10:58+00:00.

Did write a draft of this one months ago, but forgot to polish and post it!

Thumbnail

Just like the internet of other countries, It is not unknown how korean people love making dubious claims on the internet.

however there was one claim, so dubious, that led to an entire IRL event dedicated only to see if it was true. This is the story of the T24 social festival.

In 2010, a post was made on a korean internet site asking what the weirdest thing they did in the military was. Since korea has a mandatory military service, stories of the military was a subject people loved to talk, and boast, about.

One person made a comment claiming he had built a 24-men tent alone. A 24-men tent is one of those huge tents that can fit 24 people. Other comments had called this comment: "bullshit". A 24-men tent usually requires at least four, ideally eight men to build. The claim that one men could build this alone looked like nothing more than a joke.

In 2012, this comment was put into the spotlight again as a post was made on SLR club, a korean internet site, calling it an "average korean soldier boast". Like the original comment, this post got comments calling this impossible. But there was one comment calling it possible, just with a single word:"It works", by a user named "Lv.7벌레", which may translate to "Lv.7 Bug",which is how I will call this man for the rest of this post.

This soon became a controversy, and became a bet where Lv.7 bug bet 500 thousand won, approximately $400, on how he can build the tent, in two hours, alone.

Now for most people, this claim was simply BS. A 24 men tent used in the korean army is really large and heavy, and as I said, standard procedure requres 8 men. The tarp itself weighs a hundred kilograms, and the pillars also weigh a hundred kilograms.

While it may be possible to set up the smaller pillars and the tarp, the largest problem was the central pillar. It is a ╓╖shaped pillar, made out of three heavy sticks, that need to be raised, while also making sure the small stick protruding from the pillar goes through a small hole in the tarp. Here's a korean drawing about how to set it up. usually at least five people are reqired, with two making sure the sticks don't fall off from the holes, and three pulling the pillar up while also making sure the pillar doesn't fall apart.

Someone actually asked the korean ministry of defense, and their answers varied from "it's impossible" to "maybe, but not easy"

a video of a foreign man building a similar tent by himself surfaced(sadly can't find the video now) -but if you look closely, the middle of the tent sags down, meaning that the pillar wasn't built perfectly, and possibly used only two pillars. Properly doing this alone was just impossible.

Or was it?

While this started as a silly comment, people started seriously thinking they should organize a whole event to see if the bet was true. The event gained enormous traction. A video game company promised to sponsor the event, Someone actually managed to get a 24-men tent, and people started to make trailers for the bet. Other businesses took interest and promised to sponsor it, the media picked this up and was reported on the news. Singers also promised to show up and perform for the event.

The bet was officially on, and it gained a name-the T24 social festival.

2012, september 8th, the event actually happened in the yard of a school. Over 3000 people showed up to see the event in person, and hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, joined the online stream. The event gained massive online traction. An entire bus route was scheduled only for the event to ferry people to the event. Even a few singer groups were somehow contacted to perform for the event. The man, the legend, LV.7 bug showed up in the back of a truck, and started building the tent.

See for yourselves.

This man did it.

In 1 and a half hours, he managed to build it by slowly raising the pillars by himself, and climed up on the tent to show it was legitimate.

He was very relaxed, and he even spent many minutes cheering for the audience or taking a selfie and posting it on the internet, and taking a break. So technically, he put it up in about an hour, excluding all the break time. Which is, honestly,impressive!

News of the event spread, and many news outlets picked up the event, even a TV outlet that reported on the event. The korean military's twitter celebrated him, and there are rumors that even some officials of the american army viewed the event, although there is no proof.

The event quickly became a meme, and more people wanted more fun events lile this one. However, the next "social festival"s were failure after failure, including an attempt to make a comic about shipping the prosecutor's office twitter and the historic folk village twitter, and a mass blind date for single people(which failed for very obvious reasons)

LV.7 Bug became a microcelebrity, even showing up in TV shows. However, he soon got into some drama with a webcomic artist who refused to draw a comic for the event then used the meme anyways, then later got into a legal dispute about bushcrafting. He eventually lost an legal dispute about internet defamation and later, cut most ties from the internet, except from a small youtube channel.

The T24 social festival is still remembered as one of the very few wholesome events that happened on the internet. It didn't matter if his claim that he could build a tent was true, it entertained thousands, even millions, and made an event to be remembered.

Thank you for reading.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-11-11 13:19:06+00:00.

Hello hobbyists!

This thread is for community updates, suggestions and feedback. Feel free to leave your comments and concerns about the subreddit below, as our mod team monitors this thread in order to improve the subreddit and community experience.

Sorry for not posting this and replying to the "state of the subreddit" thread, but we've decided to keep rule 9 as is for now.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-11-11 04:00:46+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-11-04 04:00:54+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
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Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-10-28 04:02:00+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
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Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-10-21 04:02:18+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Constant-Leather9299 on 2024-10-15 15:06:37+00:00.

Poland. Year 1990.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Poland transitions to democracy and a free market economy.  The economic state of the country is still in shambles, but there is a lot of hope for the future. For Polish people, 1980s were synonymous with violent political oppression and poverty. For Americans, 80s are a source of nostalgia for stuff like playing DnD or trying out cool NES games. The Iron Curtain was now gone and all that stuff started arriving to Poland too, but in the 90s. Too bad everyone was dirt poor though. The new and cool Western products were an object of fascination. After all, all of it was previously completely unobtainable.

Why on earth am I rambling about the economic state of 1990s Poland in a Hobby Drama write up? Because it's a backdrop from where the hero of our tale emerged.

1. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KATAN: POLISH TTRPG SCENE IN THE 90S

Kryształy Czasu (English: Crystals of Time) are a tabletop RPG system created by Artur Szyndler sometime in the 1980s - one of the very first Polish TTRPGs, in fact! According to Szyndler, the work started around 1984-1985, but the system was completed around 1990. Clearly his passion project, it was originally distributed in the form of floppy disks or in handwritten notebooks at fantasy fan meetups by the author himself. Later on in 1993, a revised version of the system was published by a Polish fantasy magazine Magia i Miecz, spreading it far and wide. 

How was the system? Well... According to an article I found, Crystals of Time were never really well regarded. Common criticisms included lack of proofreading, an absurdly inconsistent universe that regurgitates common fantasy tropes, lack of balancing, rules bloated with tons of unnecessary dice rolls, and insane random encounters/effects that could literally end the game on the spot (such as a side effect of a spell being able to erase the entire party of players from existence) and - most importantly - a characteristic, inept writing style. Put a pin in this last one. My brother - a hardcore TTRPG fan and a Game Master for many years - described it to me as "about as fun as filing tax documents" and that he "thought someone wrote it as a joke". Take that as you will, but I've never heard him say stuff like this about any other system.

However, it should be noted the system did have legitimate fans - its biggest strength was its accessibility (and the fact it was free). What other options were there? Back then you couldn't just walk into a store and buy a DnD manual. You couldn't even pirate it because no one owned a computer. The least you could count on was a barely readable photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone's DnD manual. In English. So good luck with decyphering all of that!  If you even know any English in the first place. So you're stuck here. You're stuck with Crystals of Time.

Author of the aforementioned article, Piotr Muszyński, writes that Crystals of Time garnered a lot of goodwill from the public at the time because it was a Polish product created in a time when they were automatically seen as lesser than the cool, shiny, Western stuff that just started to show up, so the system got some praise for the effort alone. And while CoT faded away with an advent of other imported TTRPGs such as Warhammer, DnD or Old World of Darkness, it still had a very small yet dedicated fanbase of nostalgic middle aged fantasy nerds. Crystals of Time were mostly forgotten... until they suddenly came back into the spotlight.

In the strangest way possible.

2. THE RETURN OF KATAN: A CROWDFUNDING SAGA

Poland. Year 2014.

Artur Szyndler starts a campaign on a crowdfunding website polakpotrafi.pl. Crystals of Time are back, baby! 

...This time, as a novel - titled Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga: Labyrinth of Death, part 1 and 2 (Kryształy Czasu: Saga o Katanie: Labirynt Śmierci, część 1 i 2). As a true fantasy epic, a new modern classic that will surely be discussed and analyzed for eons. The goal of the campaign was raising money for the creation of the first volume out of planned 13 entries (each split in 2 books) in Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga. The description of the campaign goes into detail about turning Crystals of Time into a franchise, which are unusually ambitious for a mostly forgotten TTRPG from the 90s. As Szyndler himself wrote: "as you can see, our foresight extends further than the astrologers are able to foresee" - and goddamn, he wasn't kidding. So, what was the goal? A mere 55 THOUSAND Polish złoty (~15000USD). A small price to pay for a literary masterpiece. And this is when people started getting skeptical.

As the wider internet learned of the campaign, they started noticing quite a lot of red flags. To release a book, you'd feasibly need a team of a couple people, like editor and beta readers. Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga boasted a team of nearly 40 PEOPLE(!!!), including 12 editors and 14 graphic designers. The campaign also had an official youtube channel, which posted a lot of trailers to drum up hype. The trailers are quite amateurish and consist mostly of recitations of very bad poetry about the island archipelagos of Ochria. And there's also a traditional dwarven funeral song, which is 22 minutes long. In case you need some cool tunes for your sex playlist.

It's not a secret that the author also had quite an ego. Take a look at what he had to say about the book!

"The scale of CoT. How many times do I have to say that the thing you knew up to this point was merely 1-5% of everything I came up with? Over 25 years ago, before Magia i Miecz, it was 3700 pages - including the universe. Some have seen these documents - a pile of 1,5m height. And now the scale of CoT is right before your eyes. And this is just the beginning...

"The last thing is what the beta readers said. You read this book for the first time for all the action. It's hard to stop reading - I promise. For the second time, you'll read the book to understand the world, because the information are scattered across many chapters. You cannot know everything without getting to some longer descriptions. For the third time, you'll be reading it for the schemes, mysteries and subplots. Decyphering it all is an essence of all 13 volumes. I don't recommend doing it during the first read. There is too much to comprehend. You must understand, this isn't a normal book."

"As I said from the start, this book will shock you with its ideas. The things that nowadays seem absurd will be soon throughly analyzed." 

"The writing style is what it is. You have to accept it, or not read at all. Sometimes the suspense will be jarring, but I will remain consistent."

"As some of you already noticed, the competition isn't resting and already started to create bad reviews for the book. A few of the sponsored "counter-articles" were already detected by you all. I didn't expect them to be so fast."

"Biggest assets of the first volume of Katan's Saga are the 25 vibrant characters of our party and their unbelievable experiences, as well as the plot of the novel rushing forward like a meteorite."

Artur Szyndler also stated that he hates writing descriptions of this universe that he's so proud of, so he'll put them in between chapters in the form of poetry. Or, as he calls it, a "rhymed prose". He also defiantly defended himself from doubters by stating that "if someone is looking for a beautiful writing style, they should go read Mickiewicz instead." Normally it would've been a little worrying to hear these things from the next literary sensation, buuuuuuuut.... Oh hey, look, this masterpiece will have exactly 700 different fantasy races and 25 main characters! And if you give Artur 20000 or 50000 złoty, he will make YOU into one of the protagonists of his book! It would be a shame not to take this golden opportunity and be forever immortalized in literature!

And then Szyndler uploaded a few chapters as samples to the campaign page. This is when the internet got their first taste of the book.

And oh boy, the result was not good.

3. HALF-FJORDS, HARMONY AND BAD POETRY: SZYNDLER'S LICENTIA POETICA

Before we dive into the endless void that is the book's plot, we should talk about how this thing is written.

Let's say this straight up: the book is a car crash and attracted bile fascination ever since the internet saw the sample chapters for the first time. Due to its clumsy, yet weirdly captivating writing style and absurd over-the-top plot, it frequently loops back into being the greatest unintentional parody you'll ever read. The book is full of word salad, grammatical and spelling errors and features a stream of consciousness-type narration, which was confirmed to be a result of Szyndler literally dictating the book to people who were writing it down for him. (Or, as haters referred it to as, "the transcript of a TTRPG campaign ran by the...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-10-14 04:02:21+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/emiliers on 2024-10-10 10:28:06+00:00.

I've been wanting to write about this debacle for ages, and I've been half-hoping that either someone else will get to it (didn't happen) or that the situation would reach a definitive conclusion before long (also didn't happen, more on this later). Since neither of those panned out, here I am with this hopefully not-completely-inadequate write-up about how a much-loved mobile game turned into a complete meme.

(This is my first hobby drama write-up, so if I've done something wrong, feel free to tell me.)

What is King's Raid?

King's Raid is a gacha game that was initially published in Thailand in September 2016. It was later bought by Korean company Vespa and then released in Korean and English in February 2017 before finally being released in Japan in March 2018.

For those who don't know, a gacha game is a live-service game that has lootbox mechanics where the player uses premium in-game currency (often bought with real money) to pull for either characters or items. While gacha mechanics are fundamentally equivalent to western lootbox mechanics, most people who play gacha games differentiate them from western live-service games by their anime aesthetic, and players also most often gamble for characters rather than items in these games. For reference, a popular gacha game is the megahit Genshin Impact.

While King's Raid's anime aesthetic was typical gacha, and its story was mostly generic "hero's journey" fantasy, it differentiated itself with its gambling mechanics. Namely, the player gambled solely for weapons, and all characters in the game could either be earned for free with enough daily logins or outright bought with premium in-game currency (which can also be earned for free in-game by doing certain daily tasks). In other words, as long as you invested time in the game, you could get your character of choice with no risk at all.

Another point in King's Raid's favor was the somewhat equal gender distribution on its roster. Now, this probably sounds ridiculous to those who weren't in the gacha space at the time, but back then, most gacha games in English featured predominantly female casts, with few if any male characters. (Off the top of my head, games released around the same time such as Girl's Frontline, Azur Lane, and Genshin Impact's predecessor Honkai Impact 3rd all had exclusively female rosters. In fact, even the whiff of adding playable male characters often sent players into a tizzy. That's not to say male-only roster games weren't being made, but they were often not being licensed globally -- just look at hugely popular Touken Ranbu, which debuted in Japan in 2015 but didn't receive an official English translation until 2021.) In fact, many gacha players might even argue that this uneven gender distribution is still an issue in today's gacha games. But, with King's Raid, it not only had a roster of both men and women (some of whom were even furries! if you're into that), it also featured equal opportunity fanservice for them. Want every single one of your characters in a swimsuit? You can do that! Want to dress all your characters in suits? You can do that too!

It's hard to state just how free-to-play friendly King's Raid was during its first few years to those who don't play gacha games, especially since it seemed to eschew a lot of the predatory gacha practices of the time -- some of which are still in place today! But needless to say, it was popular enough to earn it a top spot on app store charts and even netted it an anime adaptation in 2020.

Signs of Trouble

While there are disagreements about when the decline of King's Raid began, with some arguing that the growing power creep (harder to get weapons, increased grind, etc.) were the first warning signs, for the sake of not confusing the gacha uninitiated any further, I'll stick to talking about things that took place outside of the game.

In 2021, even with the aforementioned power creep, King's Raid was in a relatively good place, and the playerbase had mostly positive feelings towards the game. At this point, the anime adaptation had basically concluded, and while it was mediocrely reviewed, it did bring a slew of new people into the game. Meanwhile, the game itself was actually gearing up for the final chapter of its main story, which eventually dropped in May 2021. (Yes, a gacha game story that actually ended!) And while the playerbase also had mixed reactions to that, it was still nice to see these beloved characters' journeys come to an end.

Riding this hype, in March 2021, the developers posted their Q1 2021 plans for the game, including an announcement for a King's Raid 2, basically a completely new story set later in the same universe with new main characters, though still available on the same app as before. At the same time, they also announced a PC client, which ended up never materializing (what will soon become a trend for Vespa, as you'll see).

While they initially announced King's Raid 2 for the end of the year, it eventually became abundantly clear that they wouldn't be able to fulfill their promises. Despite numerous requests for more information on this second season, even just in-progress screenshots, Vespa continuously pushed off these requests, often showing just minor changes to current content instead.

Finally, in November 2021, Vespa announced what everyone in the community had been expecting: that King's Raid 2 would not be finished in time and would have to be delayed until sometime in 2022 -- later revealed to be June/July 2022.

At this point, the game hadn't received any new content in a while (those of you who play live-service games know this is a fairly clear indicator of something seriously wrong) and was going through endless holiday event reruns. Most people did not realize it was about to get a whole lot worse.

2022: Slow But Steady Decline

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what happened in 2022, I just want to give some additional outside context. For much of King's Raid's run, it was Vespa's only game. However, in late 2021, Vespa released a new game Time Defenders in Japan, which eventually got a global release in April 2022. This game did extremely poorly, supposedly releasing in an extremely unfinished state, and ended service in September 2022. Some King's Raid fans attribute Vespa's split attention -- and the poor revenue Time Defenders generated -- with Vespa's eventual downfall, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In retrospect, the release of Legendary Costumes (costumes that were sold for a limited time, in a limited quantity, and for a whopping ten times as much premium in-game currency than normal, always-available costumes) was a sign that Vespa was probably in dire financial straits, but since they continued to release updates reworking older content, dedicated fans still believed that Vespa was actually working on King's Raid 2, even as actual events, including reruns, trickled to nothing -- because why else would they fix old content if not to attract new players for their new upcoming content? Though it's also important to note that a lot of the...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Moonymont on 2024-10-08 11:15:05+00:00.

INTRODUCTION

The advent of the world wide web fueled many hobbyist pursuits. People from the MENA region were no different, their main hubs being forums spread all over the internet, all with their main points of attraction. Anime/Manga, Movies, TV shows, and yes, literary work. Which is our main topic for today.

INFLUENCES & BEGINNINGS

Real stories and oneshots:

All forums had their own subforums for written stories, some more robust than others. Early on, there was no differentiation between what was a real story, or what was pure fiction. Forum visitors didn’t really care much about it, though, so it continued on that way for a while. The posted stories tended to be short and contained in the OP (unless the poster deliberately trickled it through multiple posts in hopes for more engagements). There was no regulation of story sources, and no rewards for posters save for very short and unspecific replies.

Translation of romance novels:

The translation of Harlequin Romance novels by the company branch in Cyprus into Arabic brought their novels into a new audience, and soon enough Lebanese and Egyptian publishers raced to get their hands on publication rights, adjusting the novels and neutralizing some of the references this new audience would be confused and alienated by. Internet forums had the lion’s share with driving the interest, posting the novels serially in written form and then later on by scans. Some even established teams to purchase and translate the original copies and post them in the same serial manner at first, then by downloadable word files locked behind reply-wall, therefore driving more traffic into their forums.

TV shows and series:

While the translated novels did ignite an interest in written romance novels in online spaces at the time, it’s the local TV shows that built the beats of the stories written. Now extending beyond a few posts, these new stories, closer to the people’s hearts by their familiar settings and beats, quickly gained an audience that rivaled and then surpassed that of the translated novels reigning over the literary sub-forums back then.

Societal issues and daily life:

If I were to describe Arabic web romance novels with a few words, they would be serialized women’s fiction. Not only are the relevant subforums and their management populated by women, the stories always talk about the challenges women of the region experience. Some extend beyond women’s issues, though, and would discuss societal and political issues at length, and in such a raw way that raised awareness to many tragedies the region faced and is still facing.

KNOWN CONVENTIONS AND TROPES

Arabic romance novels as published online tend to be long, the TV shows influence contributing in them having something like a slice-of-life/telenovela feel (those were popular, too, I should note. The Lebanese also brought them to broadcasting channels with their dubs. My mom used to watch Rosalinda and all the other Thalia works). The novels would star many characters, most of them to be paired up in the most dramatic plot-lines possible. There were fandoms and hatedoms for many of them.

A few other known tropes/conventions:

• Second marriage and its complications
• Marriage to quell a blood feud between two rival clans (most of them having a sorta Enemies-to-Lovers plot-line)
• Family drama of all shades and forms
• Depictions of strong familial bonds and female friendships
• Not setting the stories in one particular country and writing the story in Modern Standard Arabic*****

*****This is one point I want to talk more about, because it’s an interesting one and a convention I personally followed on a number of occasions and still do.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting because it has a marketing and escapism aspects.

Marketing, because novels written in local dialects tend to mostly attract those of the same locality, while those written in MSA would provide a writer a bigger audience.

There are outliers, of course. Egyptians have one of the most recognizable and easiest dialects (since they have a massive media industry), so stories written in Egyptian dialect tend to have a more diverse audience than say, a Khaliji dialect. There’s also the case when the story is just that good that people would read on regardless, like the time I saw Egyptian women casually waxing poetry about a Qatari writer’s works on a Facebook post asking for recs, only for their comments to be supported by others of different nationalities.

So yes, MSA + Unspecific Location combo became quickly accepted, so common in frequency that it became a trope itself.

Escapism, because using MSA kinda masks where a writer is from. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the ongoing wars and instability wreaking through the MENA region. This is only my theory, but I think this choice some writers make in using MSA and setting the story somewhere unspecific gives a sense of comfortable distance for the writers and their audience who are unknowingly experiencing the same grief. It gives them the joy of pursuing their hobbies without having to mind the reality of their situation.

Sometimes I would be following a story and later realize a writer is from a country undergoing hardships from her apology for the lack of updates. I remember this particular Libyan writer, pen-named Bard al-Mashaa’er (Coldness of Feelings) that used to post novels with a steady schedule, until she began her latest story, her epic political romance Junoon al-Matar (Madness of the Rain). She was away for years, leaving her readers wondering and praying for her safety, only to recently make her return and continue on with her novel.

Some writers, though, don’t return.

AUDIENCE

Passionate and unrestrained. Readers wouldn’t shy away from their critiques, and would analyze each chapter with words and words of predictions and cheers, which writers fueled with rewarding the correct ones with a mention at the relevant chapter update. Later on and with the rise of social media, Facebook groups became a new host for their discussions, with each writer having her own group.

CURRENT STATE

The status of the Arabic romance web novels scene changed. Most popular forums fell off radar. Rewity forum, being one of the biggest surviving forums, continues to host new and updating novels to this day. The rest are either on social media or on Wattpad.

For a decent time now, publishers have picked up on the potential market for online-published novels, actively browsing the forums and Facebook groups in search for writers with a considerable following to publish their works traditionally. Some even get adapted to the live-screen.

FUTURE

I think it’s a hobby with a massive industry potential, especially with the appearance of companies like the Jordan-based Abjjad offering e-book reading services in exchange for a subscription. Maybe the next step would be an e-book publishing service capitalizing on it?

For now, it’s a beloved hobby partaken by many in the MENA region, done for the very passion of it. I know it’s accompanied me in my teenage years, and developed my interest in both reading and writing. It’s introduced me to many great writers, many interesting intricacies, and many valuable perspectives.

Thank you for reading.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/just-got-toasted on 2024-10-07 10:37:42+00:00.

Introduction

The video game industry is a challenging one to break into. It's an extremely demanding profession that requires a lot of time, money, and mental energy to succeed at. Over the course of the 30+ years of the industry's existence, many ambitious teams and projects came and went with various results. There are plenty of tales of smash success, comfortable mediocrity, and flops. It's the successes and flops that usually print themselves into the memory of gamers, and those stories carry over from one generation onto the next.

The story I will try to present here will fall into the latter categories.

The Beginning

We land in the Czech Republic, a tiny country in continental Europe, in 1997. After being mostly viewed as a niche enthusiast hobby from the end of communist rule until the early 1990s, the commercial success of several point-and-click games began the country's first steps toward stardom, which will arrive after the turn of the century. Our game fits under the point-and-click category as well. In the roughly 100k town of Ústí nad Labem, a tiny game company named TOP Galaxy is created. The guys from this studio don't have a lot of information available about them because they only released a single game. You will soon find out why. This group of ambitious developers gets to work almost immediately after formation.

Overly ambitious, perhaps?

TOP Galaxy had a big vision. It includes international distribution, several language localizations (including voice acting and subtitles), more than 20 hours of gameplay, and an blend of excellent 3D graphics and air-brushed (yes you read that right, air-brushed, not painted) 2D graphics. Due to factors we will discuss later, only two of these things would materialize. Now, a brief summary of the game's plot line.

The Plot

The game is set some time after 2020, when virtual reality on Earth was outlawed in 2003 due to its addictive nature. American journalist Jimmy Dix goes to a so-called "entertainment orbital station" named "DreamLand," built in 2016, and is researching the mystery of virtual reality players who supposedly go insane following a visit to the station. He travels to seven separate virtual environments (a laboratory, Frankenstein's castle, ancient Egypt, 1930s Chicago, 17th-century Macau, an airbase, and a jungle) in his effort to solve the mystery. For whatever reason, there are also cyborg monkeys used as cheap labour.

The Development

The aspirations of the young team would catch up with them at a breakneck speed. The 1998 deadline for the game's release quickly became impossible due to the game's increase in complexity; yet, strangely enough, the physical edition still bears the copyright year of 1998. Thus, the game was postponed. The development was also struck by other unknown problems, which likely led to the developers decreasing their ambitions. As a result, plans for an international release and localization were put on hold, but despite this, English subtitles and the main menu indicate that some localization work has already been done. One of the few last straws to this dreadful development cycle was the game's enormous size, which prevented it from fitting on two CDs, so the developer had to resort to three, further increasing the costs of development. The final number, you ask? After conversion and adjusting for inflation, the total cost was an colossal 847 thousand US dollars — at least for the time and nation's being. The game lacked any anti-piracy features, which made the situation even worse, as the game leaked before release. Although that wasn't the final nail in the coffin, this was one of the last ones.

The Release

Finally, the year 1999 arrives, marking the game's official release. The game's technical and visual aspects are praised in the reviews, which are largely mixed and most critique is sent towards the voice acting and snail - paced narrative. Remember the 20 hour playtime? Yep, that is one the reasons for it. The last nail for the coffin would arrive in the from of the retail price. 110 US dollars. While the exact number of copies sold is unknown, there are unconfirmed reports of 10,000 copies being produced for retail. The inability to secure a international publishing deal was just a finishing touch on the figurative coffin that is the commercial failure of the game, though "annihilation" might be a more accurate description. The team behind the game would follow up by closing its doors only a year later.

The Impact

The enormous failure of TOP Galaxy and Dreamland: Final Solution is quickly forgotten, as Hidden & Dangerous was released less than a year later, making the Czech video game industry globally known and setting the stage for many classics, such as Mafia, ARMA, Operation Flashpoint, UFO, Euro Truck Simulator, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the smaller Amanita Design titles and plenty of others. The moral of the story? I am not sure about the entirety of it, but "don't bite off more than you can chew" might be among the lessons to learn from here.

For the curious, the game can be found here.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-10-07 04:02:26+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit on 2024-10-05 14:49:45+00:00.

You probably haven't heard of astrophysicist Michael H. Hart, but if you're into science fiction at all, you almost certainly have heard of what he's famous for. He's best known for his work on the Fermi Paradox, the question of why humanity has never contacted aliens, given that everything we know about the universe suggests that we should have come into contact with them by this point. Although the paradox named after Enrico Fermi, he essentially just brought it up in a casual conversation once, and Hart was the first to actually put together and publish a detailed mathematical analysis of the concept.

Nowadays, the Fermi Paradox is well-known both in scientific circles and within popular culture. Hart's work on it is enough to make him a reasonably important figure in the field of astrophysics, and a genuinely impressive person even if he were a complete dumbass in every field outside of physics.

Which is probably a good thing, because Michael Hart is a complete dumbass in every field outside of physics.

The 100

After publishing his influential 1975 paper on the Fermi paradox, Hart decided, like a lot of people who are really, really smart about one highly specific topic, that he must also be smart about everything else too. So in 1978, he published a book called "The 100", intended as a list of the 100 most influential people in history. He wasn't a historian, of course, but everyone knows that all those historians are just people who weren't smart enough to get into one of the hard sciences, and that any astrophysicist willing to descend amongst them like a God among mortals will clearly understand their work far better than they ever could. So who made it into his top ten?

Well, in tenth place is Albert Einstein. Fair enough, dude did a lot of sciencey stuff. He's a pretty big deal.

Ninth is Columbus. Yeah, I can see that, contact between Europe and the Americas is pretty historically important.

Eighth? Gutenberg, who invented the printing press. Yep, books are cool.

Seventh is Cai Lun, who invented paper. Good thing he did that or Gutenberg would have just been sitting around looking sad waiting for someone to find something he could stick in his printing press.

Sixth is Paul the Apostle, fifth is Confucius, fourth is Gautama Buddha. All major figures in their respective religions, makes sense.

Third is Jesus Christ. He would probably have been ranked higher, but Paul's role in spreading Christianity means he gets a big chunk of the credit. Basically, think of Paul the Apostle as the Ralph Nader to Jesus Christ's Al Gore as far as this book is concerned.

Second is Isaac Newton. And in first place as the most influential person in human history?

Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

The Reaction

Obviously, there was plenty of controversy over the very existence of such a book, something that Hart went out of his way to emphasize in the second edition, with exactly the level of humility you would expect from someone who decided to write the definitive guide to which historical figures are the most important: "Critics objected that Hart had the nerve not only to select who he thought were the most influential people in history, but also to rank them according to their importance. Needless to say, the critics were wrong".

As for my opinion? Even beyond the inherent silliness of ranking every historical figure by how influential they are, the list is kind of dumb. Why is Isaac Newton, a physicist whose work was theoretical rather than directly affecting the world, ranked so high when many other important thinkers didn't even crack the top 100? Why do the founders of religions get highly ranked based on what happens with their religions millennia after their deaths, while the founders of nations don't get a similar level of credit for the impact of their countries? If Jesus is responsible for everything Christianity has ever done, why isn't George Washington responsible for everything the USA has ever done?

But the main controversy was over his placement of Muhammad as #1, and even more so the act of placing anybody above Jesus Christ in terms of importance. (Keep in mind that this book was published only twelve years after the "bigger than Jesus" controversy led to mass record burnings and death threats against the Beatles.) This might lead you to suspect that Hart is just a Muslim biased in favor of his own prophet, but he's actually Jewish. This led to an enormous surge of popularity for Hart's book among Muslims--look, even non-Muslims recognize how awesome and great Muhammad is! Google his name and a good chunk of the results are from Islamic religious sites or Youtube videos talking about his placement of Muhammad as #1.

But of course, this is a list of the most influential figures in history, definitely not the best or most moral figures in history. Hart put Muhammad first because he had a significant impact, not because he necessarily thinks that it's a positive impact, or because he likes Muslims. So what does Hart actually think of Muslims?

Well, he hates 'em, along with pretty much every other group that isn't pure white Judeo-Christians. Surprise, turns out he's unbelievably racist! I've tricked you all. This isn't just book drama, it's also white supremacist infighting drama.

The Racist Bit

Between The 100 and his work on the Fermi Paradox, Hart had become reasonably famous by the mid-90s, enough that American Renaissance invited him to give speeches at a number of their conferences. If you're not familiar with American Renaissance, they're a white nationalist organization willing to just barely pretend they're not Nazis, at least most of the time. Hart, who you'll remember is Jewish, was apparently gullible enough to believe them. All went well for about a decade, with Hart giving rousing speeches on the necessity of turning a quarter of the USA into a whites-only utopia, apparently under the impression that the people he was talking to would let him in if that ever happened.

This worked out until the 2006 conference, when Hart brought along his friend Herschel Elias, a first-time guest who wasn't too sure about this whole white nationalist thing. Hart assured him that these people weren't Nazis, and that they had absolutely no hatred towards Jews, after which David Duke, former grand wizard of the KKK, stepped up to the stage and immediately proved him wrong with an anti-Semitic rant about "a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit".

Hart stood up, screamed that Duke was a "fucking Nazi", and ran out of the room. Duke's next words are unfortunately lost to history, but I'm guessing they were something along the lines of "no shit, Sherlock".

Afterwards, Hart organized his own conference dedicated to talking about the inferiority of every minority group except Jews, which seems to have had no real impact on anything, and with a poster that just screams "graphic design is my passion".

Although his work on the Fermi paradox is significant, Hart's various controversies mean that he's not particularly well-known or admired in the field of astrophysics, or even in science-fiction fandom, where the Fermi Paradox is a famous and popular trope. He's a classic example of someone who's unbelievably smart in an incredibly specific field, while simultaneously being too stupid to realize that the Grand Wizard of the KKK might be a bit anti-Semitic. Although the term "Fermi-Hart paradox" is occasionally used, it's unlikely to become popular any time soon. As for The 100, although it sold very well (60,000 copies by 1992 and probably many more by this point), it's not really taken seriously by anyone as a work of history, and its main legacy is taking up shelf space next to Guinness World Records and Ripley's Believe It or Not in hundreds of used book stores.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/revengeisspecialty on 2024-10-02 22:50:40+00:00.

I cannot conceivably provide the full extent to what occurred, because it’s such a breathtakingly insane story of lying and manipulation that doesn’t seem possible due to the time required to maintain it. Regardless, I will do my best. Attached at the bottom is the original article which exposed the wrongdoings of Averra, as well as a video essay by the same author, which goes more in-depth into the investigation and drama. This is my personal recounting of everything at surface level, with information from other people who were personally involved, as someone who was fooled by his lies.

Background: What is NationStates, and What is Alcris?

NationStates (or NS) is a political simulation web game created in 2002 by author Max Barry, as an ad for his book Jennifer Government. He probably didn’t realize to what extent his game would become popular, however, as it’s persisted all these years and still has a thriving community - as of now, over 300,000 accounts, or nations, exist on NationStates.

People govern these nations, but they can also move their nation to communities called regions. Regions can consist of tens of thousands of nations, to single digits. These regions are basically like communities, with different themes, oftentimes with vastly different focuses on different aspects of the game. The vast majority of respected regions, however, all share one element - they almost always have some form of regional government.

Regional governments range in size, scope, and structure, but they’re usually made up of a dozen elected officials who decide how the region, or the community, is run. They establish constitutions, write and vote on laws, and maintain foreign relations and embassies with other regions. This aspect of NationStates can be called simulated government.

Alcris was one of these respected regional governments. Founded on April 6th, 2021, Alcris had, at its peak, 129 nations, as well as embassies, or relations, with upwards of 30 regions, including big names you might recognize if you play NationStates such as The South Pacific, Conch Kingdom, Forest, and others.

Alcris was supposedly founded by three childhood friends who grew up in Switzerland, named Averra, Wintermoore, and Gelenia, so it made sense that Alcris had a Swiss-style government, featuring a directorate and direct-democracy - while other regions had UK parliamentary or American presidential systems, Alcrisian government was centered around a singular executive council, called the governmental council.

Each member of this governmental council was tasked with controlling a different aspect of Alcris - the Foreign Affairs Councillor controlled relations with other regions and managed diplomats, the Security Councillor controlled moderation, the Council Chair organized voting, etcetera. They also voted on laws, called acts - while other legislative systems might need a simple majority, for an act to be passed in Alcris, it required all councillors to come to a consensus. If one councilor voted against the act, or if two abstained, the act would not pass.

Theoretically, this meant it would force the executive council to come to a consensus if any act were to be passed, meaning that any flawed legislation would have to be reworked to appeal to everyone. In reality, it was designed to benefit one man and maintain his control over the Alcrisian government, as he systematically lied and manipulated people for years, suppressing opposition, guilt-tripping and harassing anyone who criticized him, with an extensive network of alt-accounts who voted in his favor, occupied seats in government, and maintained his image.

Secession

On August 3rd, 2024 (so about 2 months ago, at the time of this writing), 14 people signed a secession document titled A New Dawn. The contents of the secession document started with the termination of a merger agreement which had happened a year earlier, and proclaimed the founding of a new government called New West Conifer, or NWC.

The document pointed to culture clash, disagreements in government, and failure by the Alcrisian government to preserve the culture of the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer, the two regions which had been merged into Alcris as per the merger agreement.

Discontent had been brewing for months. It wasn’t until a channel in the previously locked New West Indies Discord server was opened, that talks about secession began to emerge. When the secession document was released, it was posted in the Alcris Discord server.

Immediately, Averra, one of the co-founders of Alcris, took action. He declared a state of emergency, and nearly 30 people, many of whom hadn’t publicly signed the document, were kicked from the server.

Now that the eventual outcome of this has been established, we’re going to start with what led to this.

The Alt-Accounts

As noted earlier, the secession of New West Conifer included the termination of a merger agreement between Alcris, and two other regions, the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer (Evergreen Conifer was included as it had been merged into the New West Indies a while earlier).

The New West Indies had originally been in favor of the merger with Alcris due to concerns around the region’s longevity and activity. Before the merger, the NWI was suffering through a bout of inactivity, so the decision was made to merge with a region they had close relations, and even a dual-citizenship agreement with. That region would be Alcris.

But why did Alcris want to merge with other regions?

Besides the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer, multiple other communities were merged into Alcris around the same time. Laraniem, and Mithra, two other regions, both agreed to merge with Alcris due to concerns with longevity and activity. The mergers, combined, doubled the Alcrisian citizenry, strengthening the preexisting Alcris community with new people.

Except there was no preexisting Alcris community.

The three original co-founders of Alcris, that being Averra, Wintermoore, and Gelenia, were the same people. Their nations were controlled by one person, using Averra as his main account. He possessed multiple Discord accounts for them, and as the sole founder masquerading as three, he had unlimited control over Alcris.

But that wasn’t the full extent of his alt-accounts, because the entirety of the Alcrisian citizenry were puppets. Averra possessed 35 alt-accounts, posing as different people. Alcris masqueraded as a lively community of multiple people, pursuing relations with other regions, before merging them into Alcris. He negotiated dual-citizenship agreements, and, in the case of the New West Indies, managed to vote in favor of secession with his own alt-accounts. He preyed on small regions suffering from inactivity, pressuring them into mergers. Because, without these mergers, there’d be no real people in Alcris. Averra somehow maintained this veil long enough to ensure the success of these mergers, bringing in new people who had no idea what they were getting into.

Corruption

With these 35 alt-accounts, Averra could rig every single election. Every single administration included at least two of his alts on the governmental council, and always himself. With two alt-accounts on the governmental council, he could block any legislation from passing simply by abstaining twice.

With such a large number of accounts voting fraudulently, it isn’t a surprise that Averra placed first every election - in fact, his vote count, alongside one of his other alts, was inflated by almost 400 percent.

There were three major political parties - the Progressives, the Moderates, and the Protectorates, although their names would differ over time. Averra utilized them to display a theater of competition in elections, fielding different candidates. In reality, all three political parties were controlled by him, and they fielded candidates that happened to be alt accounts, entering office only because he would vote for himself.

Opposition parties, made up of actual people, were suppressed. The first major opposition party was formed shortly after the New West Indies-Alcris merger, named the NAPP, made up of former members of the NWI.

Each political party had a supposedly private Discord channel so they could communicate. It just so happened that Averra owned the server and thus could see every channel. When he spotted NAPP members criticizing recent legislation he had written in their private channel, Averra proceeded to use one of his alt-accounts to apply for NAPP membership.

When the alt-account, named Hsui gained access to the channel, he accused NAPP members of personally hating Averra, before pinging Averra’s main account, inviting him into the channel.

The NAPP was dissolved shortly after, although further opposition parties would be formed by NAPP members in the future. All would be suppressed just like the NAPP. Averra would continuously hold a grudge against former NAPP members and went out of his way to make sure they never entered office. With his mass amount of his alt accounts, he utilized Alcris’ ranked choice voting to inflate the vote counts of himself and his alts, all while placing oppo...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Upbeat_Ruin on 2024-10-01 17:34:03+00:00.

The world is full of infamously bad works of fiction. I don't mean fanfics like My Immortal or legolas by laura either; I mean original books that somehow made it to a publisher and ended up in printed and bound form, for unsuspecting readers to pick up. Some are bad on purpose, like Atlanta Nights. That trainwreck of a book was an elaborate troll campaign by a team of authors to expose a vanity publisher as just that. Or Naked Came the Stranger, a book created as “proof” that publishers will greenlight any slop that comes their way, because sex sells!

And then you get books that were not in fact satire. They are shamelessly, gloriously bad. Things like Theresa the Empress or the Maradonia saga, published by authors who legitimately thought they were penning masterpieces. Look, I'm not going to be harsh on them. I don't believe that talent is a fixed trait. Everyone who writes has the chance to be a good author if they study the components of a great work, put their heart into it, and are willing to find and correct the mistakes they make. I'll get a little more into this later, because I firmly believe that the author and story I talk about here had the potential to be great.

Back in the year 1970, nerds shared their fanfic and amateur novellas by means of meeting up at conventions or by mailing zines. God bless 60s women mailing their Spirk fanfics to each other – we owe modern fandom as we know it to them. One such zine was called OSFAN, the zine for the Ozark Science Fiction Association in St. Louis, Missouri.

Enter the main character of this story. No, not the protagonist, the author. His name was Jim Theis. In the late 60s, he was a starry-eyed teen who loved the Conan the Barbarian series, the codifer of the sword-and-sorcery genre of the age. Wanting to emulate the epic series, Theis wrote a short story, entitled it The Eye of Argon, and sent it off to be published to a zine. It was accepted, and it appeared in OSFAN-10.

The basic plot of Eye of Argon is as follows: Grignr the barbarian, freshly escaped from an altercation in the city of Crin, rides across the desert and fights off two enemy soldiers before arriving in the city of Gorzom. He wooes a prostitute, Carthena, at a tavern, but gets into a battle with hostile local soldiers. Following the fight, he's arrested and taken before the city's prince, who sentences him to the mines. He languishes in the dungeon and fights a giant rat while the evil Cult of Argon secretly prepares to sacrifice a young woman. Grignr escapes his captors and slips through the secret entrance that goes to the cult's lair. He slays the cultists and rescues the woman, who is revealed to be Carthena. He takes the gem known as the Eye of Argon as he and she escape the palace. Outside the palace, the gem turns into a slug monster, which Grignr narrowly defeats before it gives him a strange vision and disappears. Dazed, he takes Carthena back home with him to Ecordia.

Now you might say, “That sounds a little dull, but I wouldn't say it's the WORST thing I'd ever read.” Well, what put Eye of Argon on people's Hilariously Bad Books radar is that its prose is the most violently purple thing you've probably ever read. Allow me to share an excerpt.

The paunchy noble's sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness. [chapter 2, pp 116 in my copy]

Prince Agaphim is fat, in case you haven't noticed.

That's how the novella is narrated, for seven chapters, at approximately 11,600 words total. This merciless battery of the thesaurus leads to phrases that are either redundant (“the stygian cloud of dark ebony”) or self-contradictory (how, exactly, does someone's face flush pale or pastily light up to cherry red?) The titular Eye isn't a ruby, mind you – it's a scarlet emerald! The armor and weapons wielded by characters change their form and culture of origin between scenes. For example, the blades that Argon's cultists hold are described as “poinards”, lightweight long daggers from Europe, in one scene; in another, they change into “scimitars”, which are West Asian/North African in origin. Agfand, Prince Agaphim's crooked advisor, somehow dies twice during the story (once in Chapter 2, then again in Chapter 7.5). On top of all this, there are plenty of spelling errors, dropped spaces, and misused or missing punctuation.

Most works of amateur fiction fade away into the sands of time, but not so for the Eye of Argon. Exactly how or when it began to circulate in nerd-dom is unknown, but the catalyst is believed to be when sci-fi author Thomas N. Scortia shared a copy to horror author Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. One way or another, the story found its way into the hands of sci-fi convention goers, who made a sport out of seeing how long someone could read it aloud without bursting into laughter. Some leveraged the mockery into a charity function, with donations being made to stop the reader from continuing their recitation.

The Eye of Argon received a printed edition in 1987 and then again in 1995, with the latter version being attributed to “G. Ecordian” instead of Jim Theis. This may be because the authorship of the story was called into question for a while. The widely-distributed copy did not credit Theis, leading some to believed that it was actually an elaborate piece of satire, possibly a group effort like Atlanta Nights. In a 2003 interview with Ansible UK, author David Langford claimed that Samuel R. Delany and some students at a Clarion workshop put together Eye of Argon as an exercise to see how intentionally bad of a work they could create.

That turned out to be completely false, so either Langford or Delany is full of it. Richard W. Zellich, who ran the Archon convention in the St. Louis area, maintined in Usenet posts from the early 1990s that Jim Theis was the true author. According to him, Theis was indeed a real person who attended the convention several times. Furthermore, in 1994, a fan named Richard Newsome provided his transcription of an interview with Theis in OSFAN-13 (which will be relevant again later.) This proved to be the smoking gun that proved Theis really did write the story.

Also for a time, the ending of Eye of Argon was considered lost. The publicly available copy was the Scortia-Yarbo edition, which cut off abruptly with Grignr attempting to excise the goo monster from his leg. This was because the ending was printed on the final page of Scortia's fanzine, which had fallen off the staples. From this copy all the others had sprung. So for thirty years, nobody knew how Grignr's deadly struggle with the slime monster had resolved. Finally, in 2005, the stars aligned and a librarian at Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at Eastern New Mexico University discovered a treasure even greater than the many-fauceted scarlet emerald: a complete copy of OSFAN-10! This edition had the long-lost ending everyone had hoped for! The lucky librarian, Gene Bundy, sent the copy to Lee Weinstein, one of the people involved in the quest to prove Theis's authorship. The online edition of Eye of Argon eagerly added the lost ending to their website, and in 2006, Wildside Press published a complete edition on paperback. This appears to be the copy that pops up when you search for “Eye of Argon” on Google. For some reason, the cover art is just a photo of an acid pool in Yellowstone Park. It doesn't appear that the Theis estate gets royalties when copies of this edition are sold.

As for Jim Theis himself, he went on to pursue a degree in journalism, and he wrote one other fantasy short story, Son of Grafan. According to an interview with Hour 25 in 1984, Theis stated that the mockery he'd received for Eye of Argon had scared him away from writing any more works of fiction. Although he'd tragically been chased away from his dream, it seemed he lived a contented life nonetheless: he earned his journalism degree, presumably had a career in that field, got married, and had two children. Sadly, he passed away at only 48 in 2002, having had heart trouble. In his obituary, he's described as a beloved father, husband, and son. His family requested donations to the American Heart Association in his memory.

I am a firm Theis defender. He was 16 when he wrote the Eye of Argon. Were you a great novelist at 16? No, you weren't. Neither was I. When I look at Theis's story, I see my own early writing: underdeveloped characters, excessively florid prose, and somewhat simple plots that don't meaningfully reconnect with earlier events. The difference is that my writing was tossed up on Fanfiction.net and eventually deleted, or it still lingers on my Google drive and the assorted USB sticks around my house. Theis had the guts to send his off to be published in a fanzine. And it got accepted, so someone thought it was decent enough to show to the world. He didn't do anything wrong. He was a teenager who wrote a clunky story and got bullied for it. That's why I don't make fun of his work.

And in retrospect, is it really that bad? The characters are underdeveloped, but hell, they were made up by someone with an underdeveloped teenage brain. Grignr ...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/BicycleConsortium on 2024-09-30 11:51:48+00:00.

The Rise and Fall of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)

Today we take a deep dive into the world of self-published fantasy books, the book blogger/reviewer community, and unpack all the drama that comes with starting your own awards for clout. This is the non-chronological history of SPFBO's slow descent into irrelevance as told through its biggest controversies.

What the Heck's a SPFBO?

The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off or SPFBO (yes, it's blog off and not book off. No, you're not crazy for wondering. My proofreaders were surprised that wasn't just one of my many typos) is a yearly competition to highlight the work of self-published fantasy writers. Here's the mission statement:

The SPFBO exists to shine a light on self-published fantasy. It exists to find excellent books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It exists to help readers select, from the enormous range of options, books that have a better chance of entertaining them than a random choice, thereby increasing reader faith in finding a quality self-published read.

The contest first began in 2015 (then called The Great Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off) when author Mark Lawrence announced his intent to try to find the best self-published fantasy books. Here's how it works:

• Every year, 300 self-pub authors enter their books for the competition
• 10 blogs are tapped to be competition judges
• Books are divided among these blogs until each one has 30 books to review
• Each blog selects one book from their assigned reading to move on to the finalist stage
• Once all 10 finalist slots are filled, all teams give final ratings on all of the books
• The book with the highest average score at the end of this round wins the cleverly-named award: the Selfie Stick

At nearly ten years old, SPFBO has gone on to have a number of controversies over the years. I'm here to catalogue its slow descent into irrelevance after its explosive debut by talking about many of its ongoing issues through the lens of its biggest controversies.

Mark Lawrence

Let's start by talking about the SPFBO host, Mark Lawrence. Lawrence is an accomplished and popular fantasy author. If you're into fantasy books, you may know that his Broken Empire trilogy was a smash success when it came out in 2011. He's also a reliable and quick writer, currently projected to publish his 18th book in a span of 14 years when his most recent trilogy completes in 2025. The guy has had plenty of critical and commercial success as a traditionally published author including a few badass award wins. This raises the question: why would he want to start a contest to highlight self-published authors? He's objectively done about as well as anyone could hope in traditional publishing and, to the best of my research, has only ever self-published a couple books on Wattpad but the first of those projects, Gunlaw, began months after SPFBO was first announced. What's he got to do with self-pub?

The common understanding is that he's helping out self-published authors out of the goodness of his heart because they don't get enough respect. I am skeptical that's the full reason. A few things to know about how Lawrence runs SPFBO:

• Lawrence does very little actual work - all reading and judging is done by blog teams with Lawrence posting announcements and updates once a quarter or so
• Lawrence famously rarely reads any entries. In the nearly ten years this contest has run, I could only find evidence of him having read a handful of participants. It wasn't until this YouTube video in August 2022 that there was solid proof of him having actually read all of the winning SPFBO books. This is widely known too and being read by Lawrence is considered a big badge of distinction in the SPFBO community
• the competition is centered entirely around Lawerence's blog and he has responded negatively to suggestions of creating an official website or oversight committee for the awards

When you take these factors together, the situation starts to look a bit fishy. Sure you can argue that it's in the spirit of self-publishing to have the competition be run through some guy's blog but Lawrence doesn't seem like a guy who is sincerely interested in self-published fantasy. Rather, he seems like an opportunist leeching off the actual work of bloggers and self-pub authors to drive traffic to himself. The evidence is certainly all circumstantial but I'm struggling to think of any other award where it's an open question whether the guy giving you the award will read your award-winning book.

A relevant consideration here is that Mark Lawrence has a history of obnoxious self-promo. He has been banned by r/fantasywriters for flouting their rules (comment link and backup screenshot because Lawrence likes to delete his comments once he realizes they reflect poorly on him). He seems to be in a constant battle with the mods of r/Fantasy over his promo violations (comment link and backup screenshot) as seen in the frequent potshots he takes at their self-promo rules (comment link and backup screenshot) including this instance where he appears to have directly DMed a random user to ask them to post promo on his behalf (comment link and backup screenshot) because he knew it would get removed as promotional if he posted it. I mean, what else could "Posted with permission since self-promotion is not allowed" mean? So when I say "it seems like Lawrence's motives for running SPFBO don't seem altruistic," that's not coming from nowhere. There is a record of him knowingly engaging in underhanded self-promo. And look, I get that publishers don't support their authors enough and that Lawrence's tenacity in promoting himself and hanging in there as an author is on some level very impressive. It's just also very annoying to watch this man act like it's his god-given right to talk himself up at every opportunity.

But you know what? Even if all the worst things I've guessed about him were irrefutably true with a mile-long evidence trail, that would be forgivable if he was any good at running the contest.

But he's not.

Lawrence is great at soaking up all the praise and attention from "running SPFBO" but it's very hard to find proof of him doing any actual work for the contest. Keep in mind that all blog teams are asked to have read nearly 40 books by the end of the SPFBO year. I'm a big reader, I usually average around 80 books a year and I can't imagine devoting half my hobby time to this endeavor but there are brave souls out there who do every year. Meanwhile, the second any part of the contest takes more than the barest hint of effort on his part, Lawrence abandons it or pawns it off. This can best be seen in one of SPFBO's biggest controversies: the AI cover fiasco. For years, SPFBO ran a best cover contest where a selection of good looking covers were uploaded for users and critics to vote on. In 2023 though, one of the winning covers was revealed to be AI generated which was explicitly against the rules of the contest and violated the self-report form authors had to fill out in order to enter the contest.

People were upset and there were ideas for how to revamp the contest so that such an issue would not repeat but Lawrence simply ended the cover contest completely. The cover contest was an immensely popular part of SPFBO and served to highlight that not all self-pub books have bad cover art but the moment it became more work than posting pictures for other people to vote on, he dropped it faster than Kendrick Lamar drops Drake diss tracks. There's no explanation as to why either. Lawrence didn't provide a reason in his announcement, he did not respond to requests for comments from the news orgs that reported the story, and our only hint as to why is a tweet hinti...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/hawkshaw1024 on 2024-09-27 21:11:14+00:00.

In late 2015, a massive indie RPG called Super Space Funeral 4 & Bubsy was released, to a mix of confusion and outrage. Why? Well, keep reading and you'll find out.

Content note: This story touches on discussions of transphobia, involves tasteless portrayals of fictional transgender characters, and contains some really bad words relating to sex work. I debated if this needs the heavy tag, but almost all of that stuff is aimed at fictional characters, not real people. Links that go to possibly heavy stuff are tagged, though, and I censored slurs in the quotes. If you'd rather something wholesome that's still related to the LGBT+ community, why not learn about Oceanspirit Dennis? Space Funeral 4 is kinda gross.

(0) Background information

People will occasionally remember Space Funeral 4 and ask what happened. Usually, they don't get an answer. Despite the massive waves it made at the time, discussion of the game has just… sort of vanished. Little information survives, except for inscrutable third-hand references.

Before we start, let's all agree to be adults about this, and let's not harass anyone involved in this story. Cool? Cool.

To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive write-up of those events. Most sources have been lost to bit rot or been intentionally destroyed, but I managed to track down enough material to put together a rough and superficial outline. How did it come to be? Why it was like that? Whence the backlash? Well, let's find out.

Okay, so, Bubsy the Bobcat is a videogame character from the "mascot platformer" era. He received two good games in the 90s, plus one more mediocre one, followed by the franchise- and company-killing mistake known as Bubsy 3D. There was a failed TV pilot in the mix as well. Making fun of Bubsy 3D is a tradition as old as YouTube, leading to early hits like JonTron's 2012 Bubsy Collection video. This strange afterlife eventually lead to Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective - a well-received art-platformer from 2013. Fun fact: The word "Bubsy" will appear 147 times in this write-up.

RPG Maker is a nifty little piece of software that you can use to make JRPG-like games, without needing to know much about programming. It's not as powerful as more universal game engines (like Unity or Godot), but it also has a much lower barrier to entry. There's been a thriving community of RPGMaker developers for decades now, and occasionally that community produces a breakout hit. A few examples from the last 10 years include OneShot, LISA: The Painful, Fear & Hunger, and Omori.

Another famous RPGMaker game is Space Funeral, a 2010 art-game by Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy.

(1) Space Funeral and Earth Birth (2010-2012)

Space Funeral is an arthouse classic, best understood as a commentary on fantasy tropes and faux-nostalgic retro games. It uses wildly clashing graphics, stolen pop songs, and absurdist writing to unique effect.

Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy: It wasn’t so much about the sprites or art in particular of RPG Maker so much as a kind of classicist way of dealing with that stuff, which is like the idea that videogames reached their peak in the output of a few large companies in the 90s and ever since it’s all anyone can do to ape those things as closely as possible[.]

In the game, you explore a garish broken wasteland full of strange creatures. Your party consists of "Phillip," who is a perpetually sobbing bald man, and "Leg Horse," who is a gruesomely mutilated ex-human. (Don't worry, he's fine.) An intense atmosphere of dread hanging over it all, even with the surreal humour, and it turns out that the world is actually post-apocalyptic. An artist named MOON was exposed to the world's platonic ideals, couldn't handle their impossible and unreachable perfection, and decided to break the world apart to create room for art and self-expression. You kill her, and the world retvrns to normal - a generic fantasy kingdom made out of stock RPGMaker assets. Is this a good thing? Who knows! Roll credits.

MOON: Nothing could be created which was not a pathetic mockery of the objects of the city. The finest works paled in comparison. In the face of such beauty I felt corrupted, an animal. Our world meant nothing. We were all graceless, creatures of slime.

If you want to know more, here is a Let's Play, and here is a review. This sort of thing is like catnip for artists, and if something becomes popular among a community of creative types, and the creator is cool about things - well, you get fan works. The first big fangame was released in 2013 by DuckStapler, and it was called Earth Birth.

DuckStapler: A satanic ritual summons Phillip and the Leg Horse from their purified land of Space Funeral into the corrupt land of Earth Birth where the evil forces of Science threaten to overtake the good forces of superstition. Dracula tags along with our protagonists halfway through the game.

Earth Birth is longer than Space Funeral, and improves on that game in many ways. The combat is more interesting, for example. However, while the game is well-made, it doesn't have much of a vision of its own. That's fine and all, but it misses the point a bit - if there's any specific idea that Space Funeral really wanted you to engage with, it's that creativity and self-expression are more important than technical skill, and that imitation is a dead end. That's what messed MOON up so much!

(2) Super Space Funeral Deluxe (2012-2014)

One of the people active in the Space Funeral community was SqrlyJack - a webcomics artist, shitposter, animator, squirrel furry, and Michael Jackson superfan. Squirrel + Jack, see? Also a trans woman who wasn't yet out for most of the story, so don't be confused if sources use "he" or "they."

SqrlyJack began work on her own Space Funeral fangame in October 2012. (Archive) Super Space Funeral Deluxe was going to be a straightforward "16-bit" remake of Space Funeral - basically the same game, but with spruced-up graphics and some new content.

SqrlyJack: Also because I was planing on upgrading the graphics, I was going to downgrade the ending graphics. hahaha!

After the release of Earth Birth, SqrlyJack decided to take Space Funeral Deluxe into a different direction. New areas, new party members, and sexy furries in the form of "growlf sex workers." Dracula hangs out with them, in case you're wondering. You know, the vampire? He drinks the wine and he smokes the weed. (Archive)

SqrlyJack: Its like he gets worse and worse in each game

The title was changed to "Super Space Funeral 4: Deluxe Blood Red Edition," since this was going to be a proper sequel now. A demo came out in April 2014, and was received warmly. (Archive)

The demo spans from the beginning of the game in Scum Vullage to after the first dungeon. Even though it’s only the prolog and the first chapter of the game, it’s still quite a lot for a Space Funeral game. Enjoy the demo!

Note that it covers just the remake stuff, with very little new content.

(3) Enter the Bobcat (2014)

You may have been wondering where Bubsy comes in. Well, it's early 2014 now - Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective has released, and the character is back in the pub...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/BeanOfKnowledge on 2024-09-25 12:33:52+00:00.

It is early 2005 in Strahlsund, Germany . The Kastelruher Spatzen (Kastelruhe Sparrows) have just won their fifth Krone der Volksmusik (Folk Music Crown), Humankapital has been declared the Unwort des Jahres (Non-Word of the Year), and the readership of the Ostsee-Zeitung (Baltic Sea Newspaper) honours a man by the name of Claus-Peter Schoschies with the title of Sport-Ass von der Küste 2004 (Coastal Sports-Ace 2004) (Yes, Ass is German for Ace). He has beaten various popular Football Players, a remarkable feat for someone from an extremely fringe discipline: Orthodox Problem Chess. This year is the height of his career: He has played at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and has risen to the rank of Chairman of the regional sports club, honoured with the prestigious Bronze Needle. It's also the height of his career since it will come to a rather sudden, dishonourable end in early 2005. But first, a short explanation:

What is Problem Chess?

Problem Chess is the competitive solving of chess problems. While most chess players will have encountered chess problems along the lines of “Checkmate in two moves”, solving them competitively at tournaments is a fringe activity. Imagine a group of people sitting at a separate tables, looking at sheets of paper and scribbling down chess notations. Not the most exciting thing to view, but a true test of one’s capabilities as a player. International champions tend to be world-level in regular play as well. Eagle-eyed reader will not that I haven’t explained what Orthodox Problem Chess is. There is a reason for this.

A Doctor of Mathematics makes a curious discovery

Someone who is, apparently, an eagle-eyed reader is Dr. Olaf Teschke, who was born in the small town of Sassnitz, close to Stralsund. The Mathematician, who occasionally writes humoristic editorials for chessbase.de, is rather astounded at the Schoschies’ reader-awarded title. Blessed with the robust memory of a chess player, he remembers the Sport-Ass from the sidelines of a regional tourney. But he does not remember him for his remarkable capabilities. Rather, he remembers a player who is “on the level of a middling club player”.He might just be misremembering, of course. So, as any true academic, he decides to double-check.

Short research reveals that Schoschies plays in events organised by the OPCF (“Orthodox Problem Chess Foundation”). Successfully, placing between second and fourth on their European rankings.  This is interesting, since at the time, the German Champion of Problem Chess is Arno Zude, who, unlike Schoschies, is also a Grandmaster of regular Chess. Of course, these are the normal problem Chess rankings, not the elusive OPCF’s orthodox problem chess rankings, which can only be found in one place online: The archives of the Ostseezeitung. All articles detailing Schoschies’ victories also appear to be written by a Gernot Peter, independent chess correspondent. His articles manage to make the rather dull sport sound exciting, even flashy. Strange and stranger still. The again, it’s 2005 and not everything can be found online.

What can be found is an announcement for the next OPCF tourney. Just a date, no address. Teschke writes to the given E-Mail, politely asking where the tourney is held and if it’s possible to watch. Again, the newspaper articles make them sound quite exciting. Teschke does not receive an answer, but the next day, a new announcement appears in the Ostseezeitung, announcing the unfortunate cancellation of the Event. The OPCF must be quite elusive and small indeed.

Speaking of Events and Elusiveness

The OPCF has an impressive roster: A yearly Marathon Tournament in Dresden, a Group Tournament on the Canary Islands, and the yearly Bestenermittlung (Literally: Determination of the Best) in varying towns. Can’t find much about these online either, and at the Dresden Chess club no one knows about the supposedly 27 year old annual event. But let’s leave that aside and look at the most important Tournament, the Bestenermittlung. Schoschies recently placed second after the Russian Dr. Nikolai Garnejew. According to the newspaper articles, this Russian is his main rival. This year, he apparently only had surpassed Schoschies because “Schoschies had too much respect of my capabilities”. I would like to point out again that in Problem Chess, the players sit at separate tables and do not directly compete against each other. Beyond being a dangerous rival, Garnejew is also a unique last name. So unique that it can be found effectively nowhere else online. Perhaps a further look at the other participants is warranted: Impossible to find are equally strangely named regular competitors Ole Lars, Finland and Fridjow Hirsch, Munich. In fact, the Telephone Book lists not a single F.Hirsch in all of Munich. Not even the famous American player, Prof. Bill Farmer seems to exist, just a voice actor of the same name. Somewhat fittingly, he is most famous for being the voice of Goofy.

But what about the highlight of the OPCF’s events? The Demonstration at the Olympic Games? Well, no one else remembers it. In a response to a request by Dr. Teschke, the Committee even outright states that “no Chess Demonstration was held in 2004”. Yes, the unfortunate, but unsurprising truth is this: Schoschies has never played at the Olympics or any other major event, never won any notable prices beyond a Book coupon in the 80s, and Orthodox Problem Chess doesn’t and presumably will never exist. Teschke publishes all these findings online in March 2005. He dryly states that, unless this is proof for the existence of parallel universes, he has just unmasked a Fraudster. It’s not a good look for Schoschies, who had just raised about 6000€ for a visit to the Olympics that, again, never happened.

The Aftermath

Schoschies has faded back into obscurity, after failing to provide proof of the existence of Orthodox Problem Chess. His last statement is a claim that he’ll return the raised money. Whether he ever did so, I haven’t found out.

Teschke still teaches Mathematics at University and considers his involvement in the affair his “15 Minutes of fame”.

The Ostseezeitung owned up to their mistakes. The only article on their former darling that can still be found online details his fraud. Gernot Peter never wrote for them again, most likely on account of him not existing.

In the German chess community as a whole, this Drama is still fondly remembered to this day for its absurdity.

All in all, many people have garner false acclaim for non-existent sports titles throughout history, but this may be the only case where someone managed to do it with such a blatantly non-existent sport.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-09-23 04:02:16+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Huge_Trust_5057 on 2024-09-21 04:38:10+00:00.

It's me, and I know it's only been a week since my last post, but I do have a quite sizable stockpile of half-written hobbydrama posts so I could write this one quickly.

Note: this is kind of part 2 to my old lineage write-up. You don't read to read the first one to understand this, but I recommend you to read the first one.

Video games! If you haven't heard of them, they are games where you play on your computer, or console, or whatever electronics. One type of video games are MMORPGS, commonly called MMOs(although one might say that other smaller genres like MMOFPS are still MMOs but not MMORPGs), where you play as a character in a large multiplayer world.

South korean video game development is mostly done by 3 large companies, commonly refered to as the 3N, due to how all companies start with N. The 3N are: Nexon, Netmarble, and NC software. There's also Neowiz, which does also start with N but is much smaller and isn't commonly refered to as one of the 3N.(I just wanted to mention Neowiz because they made/published and , which I consider really good games. also looks very interesting.)

First, Nexon! The biggest of the 3N. Well known for , a ripoff that's so bad it honestly deserves another writeup. And , a game hillariously P2W it deserves at least 5 other series, and..you know what's going on. They also do have a ton of other games, and they are hillariously P2W. However, it is worth noting that recently, most likely due to F2P/P2Ws becoming less profitable, nexon did try other things like or which were very successful, so I'd say it gets a 5/10, great potential. More on this later.

Next, Netmarble! They are more of a publisher than a developer, really. And they are really, really P2W. They made, uh, ? Its, uh, a CoD if it had guns bought with real life money and had gun lootboxes and gun upgrades. Never played it really. And uh, ? Its like, an online version of monopoly, that's again, P2W. They put luck items on dice in monopoly so its more likely to get the number you want if you use a good dice. It's honestly amazing how far they go to make it p2w.

And finally, the main subject of this writeup, NC soft.

** NC soft **

NCsoft is well known for their biggest hit series, lineage, which is again, the focus of this post. The Lineage series was a wildly successful MMORPG, but it is hillarously P2W and grindy, with many lootboxes, microtransactions, and honestly, borderline scamming and gambling come into play. Many korean gamers don't even consider lineage a game worth playing, and even consider it the game that brought the downfall of the entire south korean gaming industry. The fans of lineage are mostly older people, who played it from the first game (which came out in 1998).

It was, still, an extremely successful and influential game, that even gave birth to an entire "genre" of games, called "Lineagelikes"

"Rougelikes" are a genre for games like , like or . There's also roguelites,like or , which are games with some elements of roguelikes, although the exact line betwen roguelikes and roguelites is confused a lot(and confusing the two is, honestly, my pet peeve). Metroidvanias are games like or . Soulslike is a genre for games like , and similarly, lineagelikes are games like . (although classifying these as a "genre" could be quite controversial, but like, whatever.)

Lineagelikes are very obviously MMORPGs, and rely on two basic principles: easy PvP, and Money above all.

First one, PvP means a player fighting another player in the game. PvPs aren't uncommon in MMORPGs and they are not bad, in fact they are amazing content when done well. The battleground system of and the battles and wars of are great examples. However, the thing with lineage is that PvP is encouraged to the point of borderline bullying. Usually in other games PvP is heavily limited to certain areas or situations. Not in the case for lineagelikes. In lineagelikes, PvP is easy and encouraged. This makes it easy for powerful players, and usually groups, to bully other players. Entirely taking over an area and making sure nobody except your group gets in is extremely common. Wars and battles over these is also common.

Now I'd like to say that again, unrestricted PvP itself isn't a bad thing. EVE online has relatively unrestricted PvP, with PvP being possible even in high-sec areas(but the space police will still avenge them if you do PvP there), and it's a nice feature of the game. However, the biggest problem is when it's combined with the second one:

Second, Money over all. Now generally there are 4 elements which decide who gets strong in a game. Time(which he spent in the game to collect items, level up, ect), Skill(being fast at clicking, knowing game systems, ect), luck(random elemts, lootboxes(ugh)), and money(real life money, spent as microtransactions). When I play and rate a game I always like to rate the importance of these 4 elements as Time=Skill>Luck>>Money. Time and skill being the most important part of being good, luck being an element that often does add some fun and unexpectedness to the game but is bad when its used excessively, and I hate microtransactions. Personally I'd rather quit a game than have to use them.

Now the thing about lineagelikes is that it goes Money>>luck>time>skill. Money buys the best items, often in the form of lootboxes or items for upgrading. Lootboxes and upgrading requires luck(upgrades have a chance of upgrading, and also has a chance of destroying the item), time is needed to level up, and skill is nearly unneeded as lineagelikes have auto-playing, which is that you click one button and the game basically plays itself, hunting nearby enemies and levelling up. Even if you do want to actually play the game and control the player, it doesn't change that much, and you will still lose to someone using better items on autoplay. In other competitive games-say or , there's pro players who got famous due to their amazing skills and can win most people. In lineagelikes, there are no pro players, only "whales" who sunk a horrible amount of money into the game, and has the best items, and thus can win anyone in a fight.

So its pretty self explanatory how these work. It competes players against each other by PvP, and makes sure the only way to win in that competition is by spending real life money. And I dont mean a few dollars either, there's like a lot,lot of money involved here.

To cite a korean post about lineage M, a mobile version of the game: $32.99 gets you 1200 diamonds and a few other items. Apparently that's the materials to make one 3+ earring and 4 basic rings. That's bad, but not like horrible right? Except this is, quote, "minimal spending". On another post about lineage 2M, which is like lineage 2 but 2nd, there's a guide to spend money on the game, and there's cases on how to spend $200/$400/$700 in the game.(the dollars are roughly translated from won). And then there's top tier items, which due to lootboxes, microtransactions,and extrememly small percentages, is traded between users at tens of thousands of dollars, which was the subject of my old write up. It is worth, however, noting that not all lineagelikes are this expensive, and most games, especially ones that aren't the lineage francise and are developed by other comapnies, are cheaper. Personally I'd never do microtransactions even if it was a cent for stuff,but still.

There's also smaller predatory designs like making sure fights break out as much as possible, turning the whole game into a constantly evolving place and giving out stuff so that top spenders need to keep spending money to stay there, and so on. Honestly, it's impressive and there's whole korean youtube videos explaining how the game design of lineagelikes milk literally every cent and turn itself into a neverending slot machine where not playing means losing, and playing means sticking thousands of dollars into the game.

It is a well known fact [citation-needed] that the top 1% of players spend 97% the money. The actual amount of money the top players, often called "nuclear whales", spend in these games are horrifying, most likely spending over a few million won(a few thousand dollars) every months into the game. At this point this really isn't a game anymore, it's just gambling. And it's kind of no wonder why koreans used to be so against video game addiction, as the image of a video game addict wasn't someone in their room playing video games a lot, it was someone throwing millions into a video game and bankrupting themsevles.

** Lineagelikes: it's a genre! **

As much as most people hate lineagelikes, it is undeniable that it was an immense success and basically defined korean MMORPGs for a while. Not only NCsoft but other developers like nexon or netmarble used to jump in here, making tons of lineagelikes every year. Nexon's <[AxE](https://www.nexongames.co.kr/en/game/a...

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1flv4w0/video_games_lineagelikes_predatory_design/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-09-16 04:02:34+00:00.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Huge_Trust_5057 on 2024-09-13 12:38:35+00:00.

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I was working on a writeup about a korean incident where people gathered up to watch a man build a tent, but I accidentally deleted it so I decided to write this one first.

But then I got distracted and abandoned it halfway for a year, then wrote it again.

--Introduction--

MMORPGs are a type of game where you join a virtual multiplayer world and do stuff. They are very often also called "MMOs", although techincally this may also includes other genres like MMOFPS.

By the early 2010s, MMORPGs in korea were slowly going stale. Most Korean MMORPGs were mostly inspired by - A game I once wrote a writeupabout- and while was a very successful MMORPG, the basic formula was going stale.

The player starts in a medieval europe inspired world. You choose from some basic classes like "archer" or "wizard". You only can use one type of weapon per class. You are introduced to the world(a bad god unleashed a bad army on our good kingdom blah blah blah everyone just skips this anyway blah blah). You use basic fighting skills to hunt monsters and later a field boss. You gain the experience from them and gain levels. You use the shiny trinklets to upgrade your weapon. Rinse and repeat 200 times. Also good weapons and better upgrade stuff can only be bough by cash.

This formula was going stale. Most korean players were playing other games like -and later, and . To most players korean MMORPGs were considered outdated cashgrabs for old people.

, also called for short, was a mobile MMORPG game developed by Nexon. Now for most people who know about korean games would shudder at this name. Nexon is very well known for making very P2W(which means that you need to sink a lot of real-life money to excel in the game) games. A good example would be , where everything from extra inventory slots, character customization items, and even world wide chat needs to be paid with real life money. (I wrote this part in 2023- I'd like to add that by 2024, nexon did make some nice games like or .)

But claimed to be different. And the result was different.

--Durango: Wildlands-- The basic setting of this game was that people from the modern world were randomly teleported into a fictional world, called Durango. This world was a place where islands from different timezones would appear and dissappear, and the islands were inhabited mostly by dinosaurs, and things from the modern world would often show up, with the human survivors having an about prehistoric-ish world. And before you ask, yes, you could ride the dinosaurs.

Durango had many differences from lineage-inspired MMORPGs, and many people considered it revolutionary.

-Unlike most MMORPGs, the game focused not only on combat, but also other features like building, farming and gathering. You were free to build things like boxes, houses, workbenches everywhere and you could claim territories in a town. You also could join a tribe and build a town together. You also could farm seeds. You could cook things for your tribe. It was even possible for you to enjoy the game without fighting a single enemy in the main game. Although.. You could say that this isn't unique to durango, as other games like , , also focuses on many interactions and often allows players to shape the world. Still, durango was the first major MMO in korea that does this.

-There was no class system. You did get to choose a job at the start of the game, but what it did was provide basic skills and was almost meaningless after the start of the game. You were advised to specialize in a skill tree like cooking, blacksmithing, melee combat, ect and especially advised to join a tribe with various specialities and get help from them in a skill you can't do but you were free to become a jack-of-all-trades type of character.

-the game was suprisingly not P2W. Of course things like instant crafting and cosmetics were bought by cash, but considering how often they just gave out cash(usually with a very wholesome message) and how it was a mobile, free-to-play game from a very P2W-friendly company, it was relatively anti-P2W, even to a very suspicious extent.

-The crafting system was very intresting. I'm still not sure why this system isn't more widely used in other video games. Say, you're playing a game, and you want to make a stone hammer. It may look like this:"craft stone hammer: requires 2 stone, 1 wood stick, 1 rope." But you may think: hey, can't I make a stone hammer with iron ore instead of normal stone? And can't I use these copper wires instead of rope? used a quite novel attribute-based crafting system. You didn't need a specific type of rock to make the hammer, it only specified that it needed an item with a "hard" and "solid" attribute. So yes you could use iron ore, marble, and even chunks of meat, which would even change how the hammer is colored and the stats of the hammer.

This attribute system could further be used to create a more sophisticated crafting system. For example you could choose to carbonize the steel used in your sword, which would add a "firm" attribute to your steel ingot, and this attribute would give a buff on attacks when you make a sword with it. Or you could desulfurize the ingot instead, which would give it a "high density" attribute and give the finished item better durability.

Every item also had a level, and could have unique attributes randomly. Often you would randomly get a branch with a weak attribute. Or you could be lucky and find a wood branch with a rare attribute which would boost the stats of your tool when you use it to craft one.

This meant that

1. It was possible to make very weird items like "cake soup"(which became a meme, and later the developers held an event where they would cook one and eat it), "boiled bow"(this was actually a strategy because you could boil a lv40 bow in Lv60 water to get a Lv50 boiled bow), "steamed leather boot"(which was edible, and the developers said the point of the crafting system was to "let players eat a leather boot") or "steamed steamed raw fillet"(which was a very overpowered food item and was cooked in hundreds by a tribe's cook). One even created a wearable canned leather clothing.

2. Items were actually unique. A same wood stick, both on the highest level possible, could have very different values depending on its attributes. One with a rare attribute could be used to make very powerful weapon, and could be sold at a high price. And this also meant that weapons and tools could actually be unique instead of being the same copies made from the same items.

The basic progression would look like: you start, you build a small settlement with a bushfire and some boxes on your territory, maybe socialize with your neighbors, then you later move to a more spacious island, bulid a cozy home base with a house and stuff. Then you further progress down the game and reach the highest level, and join a tribe. Usually they would give out roles and you would get one. You could be tasked to specialize in attacking skills, and hunt animals and bring it to the tribe's territory, or you could be tasked with specializing in cooking skills and processing this meat to create food items. Or you could be tasked with specializing in crafting skills and crafting high level, effective items for the tribe to use(as I said earlier, items in this game is actually unique). You could be tasked to guard the tribe's territories on a special island where PVP is allowed, and you could build walls and turrets to defend it. Or you could not join a clan at all and do whatever you want.

This made the game a very unique experience, and the game won second prize in korea's 2018 game awards. But if it ended here, this would be a write-up for other subreddits. This is r/ hobbydrama, after all, and this isn't that type of story.

--Going Down..--

The first problem with this game is that it spent too much years in development. It was revealed in 2012, and was released in 2018. It was brewing for over 6~7 years, without a proper development goal. And it guzzled over 15 million dollars in development costs.

When it was finally ready, Nexon advertised the game a lot, including a reservation where you would reserve your ID to get an item later when the game gets released. This was to estimate how much people would play the game. But apparently they did a bad job at this, as they very, very underestimated the amount of players interested in this game.

What most players saw when they booted up the game with excitement was a loading screen that never ended. And then they were greeted with a screen that notified them...

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