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Hobby Drama
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Upbeat_Ruin on 2024-06-22 18:36:05+00:00.
Hi! Some absolutely glorious drama went down on Neopets earlier this year, and I've been champing at the bit to post about it. This isn't about the A-pea-calypse of Christmas 2023, however; this is something different.
Neopets is a browser-based pet simulation game. It is THE virtual pet site. It wasn't the first of its kind, but it did set a precedent for virtual pet games. It walked so Webkinz, Mweor, Flight Rising, and all the others could run. If you were a kid or an edgy college student in the early noughties, you probably played Neopets at some point. (No, your pets aren't "probably dead". Neopets don't die, dicknips. Your Neopets are either still starving on your long-abandoned account or were wiped from existence in an account purge. Sweet dreams.) Founded in 1999, it continues to this day. Ostensibly the target audience is children, but in practice, most of the site's user base is nostalgic millenials and zoomers. Soon, Neopets will be celebrating twenty-five years of daily omelette distribution, obsessing over magic paint brushes, cake slices falling out of the sky, and spinning wheels to get your pets struck by lightning. Oh, and make that seventeen years of obsessing over UCs.
Okay, so what's a UC, you say. This requires a bit of a history lesson. In 2007, Neopets went through a radical overhaul that changed the site layout to its current form, introduced the premium currency (Neocash), and made it possible to "customise" (dress up) your pets. To achieve this, almost all the pets were converted into standardized (and much more boring) poses and ported to Flash. I say almost, and that's where the seed of this drama is planted.
You see, pets with certain species/color combinations were not automatically converted to the new artstyle. For example, the Faerie Ixi (a pet that looks like a goat) would not be converted, whereas a standard blue Ixi would be. You could choose to convert your pet if it wasn't changed. The pets that didn't get changed were dubbed Unconverted (UC). They couldn't be customised, nor would they ever show any emotions besides the default happy look, but they retained the classic artstyle.
And they became the most coveted assets on the site, bar none. Everyone wants a UC. I want one, you want one, your mother's cousin's roommate wants one. The "Pet Trading" board is a neverending chorus of people screaming about what UCs they want. If you want UC pet traders to even glance in your direction, you'd better have a valuable pet to trade for and a multi-paragraph essay on why you'd be a good owner ready. I don't think actual pet shelters use this much scrunity when adopting out real animals. There's a tier system in place to judge the relative values of 17+ year old JPEGs. ("You think your plushie Mynci is worth the same as my Faerie Draik? Get real!") People have even gone so far as to hack into old, inactive accounts to steal UCs and sell them out for real money (which is against site policy), and people will risk getting their accounts banned forever just to get ahold of those precious, precious UCs. If this behavior sounds familiar to you, I must say: you're correct. UC traders were the original NFT bros. But they're not ready for that conversation.
In the nearly seventeen years since The Great Conversion, the UC situation has gotten so severe that players were begging TNT (The Neopets Team, aka our benevolent overlords) to do something. One common suggestion was to implement a feature to deconvert pets for a Neocash fee. It's two birds with one stone, we said: the move would absolutely print money, and it would also kneecap the UC black market. For years, TNT was all "Yeah, we'll totally do that. Any day now! Sure...”Finally, in January of 2024, TNT announced that they would do just that. They introduced the Styling Studio, a feature that would allow players to apply a skin of the unconverted artwork to their pet. It wasn't the same as actually unconverting the pet, but it would be a way to wear the nostalgic artwork on your account. Also, the mascot for the Styling Studio is a nonbinary emo otter, so the fanbase immediately loved them.
Styling Supplies, the item that allows you to apply the skins, is bought with Neocash. It costs about $14 of real money, although it was released at a markdown price, and most players got free Neocash as part of a site event about two months before. So, many people were able to get the item without needing to pay actual money, or less than they would otherwise. Also, people who already owned a UC pet would get a free Styling Supplies to restore the original look of their pet. Both these details will be important later, so keep them in mind.
And then the Fire Nation attacked. As anticipated, the neo-elite with their UCs did NOT, NOT, NOT like this change. If you go over to r/neopets, you can find posts with screenshots of their angry chat board messages, including such gems as emo poetry about their crushed dreams, "I have multiple grounds to sue for this", melodramatic comparisons to historical monuments being destroyed, complaints about an "important site feature" being paywalled, and language that suggested the UC pets were "survivors" whom TNT was genociding. Yes, people really had the gall to claim that their pixel pets being changed was genocide, in the midst of several ACTUAL GENOCIDES happening in real life. And of course, we had the all-important useless petition against the change being made. No internet drama is complete without one. Many people threatened to quit the site or abandon their former UCs to the pound. (So it wasn't about the artwork after all, despite what they told us for years. They just wanted to feel superior.) Among the more level-headed users, the consensus was "these people really need to go outside and touch grass."
Well, despite the protests, TNT went forward with the change. On the 22nd, Neopets went down for maintenance to implement the big change. (We were warned ahead of time about this.) It was supposed to last until around 10:00 am US Pacific Time on the 23rd, but it went over by several hours. TNT must have underestimated how long it would take to implement the changes. Around 5:00 pm Pacific, the site finally came back up...running at a snail's pace from how many people were logged on. A lot of people joked that it seemed TNT had brought back another piece of early 2000s internet nostalgia: insufferably slow dial-up. Despite the insane lag, users bought the Styling tools they sought and applied the nostalgic art to their pets. Soon, r/neopets was replete with people celebrating having obtained their childhood dream pets at long last.
And what of the former UC owners, suddenly without their bragging rights? Well, to no-one's surprise, very few of them actually quit the site like they promised. Most of them came crawling back on the 24th, quietly took their pets to the Styling Studio (or heartlessly abandoned them to the pound), and hit the boards to start pet trading again. Except now, since Styling Supplies turn into a token of a pet/species combination (e.g. apply it to your Ixi to turn it into a Faerie Ixi, and the Styling Supplies turn into a "Nostalgic Faerie Ixi" token. Makes sense? I hope so.), their language had changed. Oh don't get me wrong, the Pet Trading board was still full of obnoxious clapping and red ball emoticons, but now they were trading "tokens" of certain pet/species combos. Yep, they're called tokens. And they're tradeable digital assets stored on a server, each of which is supposedly unique with a single owner...hmm. It really drove the point home about how this nonsense is hardly different from NFT bros getting mad when someone right clicks their ugly monkey JPEGs.
What's the big takeaway from this drama, you may ask? I've wondered the same thing. I think it serves as a reminder of the impermanence of the internet. Your UC that you worked so hard for...or obtained through "other" means...could go from a status symbol to a whole lotta nothing overnight. It also works as a reminder that at the end of the day, you should be caring for Neopets because YOU want them, not because they're status symbols. Just like real pets, you know? I love my neopets dearly, even though (or perhaps because) the Pet Trading board wouldn't find them "valuable". I wouldn't trade them for all the UCs in the world. Don't be the guy having a meltdown on the neoboards because they can't act superior to the neo-proletariat anymore.
Still, I would love to be a Mootix on the wall in a courtroom as someone explains to a judge why they deserve damages for a website changing how their pixel pet looks.
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[Comics] The Krakoa Era: The Relaunch That Saved The X-Men Comics... For A Little Bit
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Naeveo on 2024-06-21 16:50:41+00:00.
The X-Men.
You probably know them.
For the uninitiated: The X-Men is an American superhero franchise that follows a team of "mutants", average people who suddenly gain superpowers through genetic mutations, trying to protect a world that hates and fears them. It started publication in 1963 through Marvel Comics, and was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. In the mid-70's, writer Chris Claremont took charge of the X-Men and turned them from a team of five mutants into an international team with a rotating cast. Under Claremont, the X-Men would create some of the most iconic comic book stories of all time. By the 80's, the X-Men exploded into a massive multi-media franchise that changed the face of the comic book industry.
But in 2019, the X-Men franchise was in a state of disarray.
This is the story about the House of X, how it saved the X-Men, and how it fell apart.
Welcome... to The Krakoa Era!
Krako-What?: How The X-Men Broke
"The Krakoa Era" refers to a period of the X-Men comics from 2019 to 2024 that explored the concept of a mutant nation-state. It's called "The Krakoa Era" because the mutant state is called Krakoa, and is located on a sentient island also called Krakoa. While mutant nation-states have been done before, like with Genosha, what made the Krakoa Era stand out was how it completely retooled the X-Men franchise into a utopian, queer-friendly, solarpunk sci-fi franchise. Krakoa wasn't just a nation-state; it was heaven on Earth built by mutants, for mutants.
But first, a little context why Krakoa was needed in the first place.
You can read more about it here, so I'm going to keep it simple. In 2009, Disney bought Marvel Comics, but did not get the film or TV rights to a vast majority of X-Men characters. That honor belonged to their competitor, 20th Century Fox. So Disney decided to side-line the X-Men with another cast of characters called the Inhumans, whose film/TV rights they did own.
What followed was a slog of content from 2012 to 2017 that saw the X-Men comics (and films) release stinker after stinker.
In 2017, the tide began to change. Marvel would announce the “ResurrXion” relaunch which promised a back-to-roots approach by getting rid of the Inhumans. However, this would only last for two years.
Because Disney bought Fox and its X-Men license in 2019.
Disney could finally use the X-Men franchise to its full extent.
What this called for was a fresh start. And a man named Jonathan Hickman had an idea.
House of X (2019): Fixing X-Men
In 2019, it was announced that all X-Men comics would be canceled and that the entire line would be relaunched under Jonathan Hickman. At this point, Hickman was a superstar. He was hot off of finishing Secret Wars, an event comic that capped off a multi-year saga that began in Fantastic Four and stretched into The Avengers. This run of comics was so influential that several characters from these comics appeared in Avengers: Infinity Wars and Avengers: Endgame. It's an understatement to say fans were excited.
Hickman's first comic would be a 12-issue series called House of X and Powers of X (shortened to HoXPoX from here out) with Pepe Larraz and [R.B. Silva as its artists. HoXPoX would be the only X-Men comic for 3 months. Afterwards, the rest of the comic line would be launched. Marvel teased that this was because HoXPoX so revolutionary that everything else had to wait. Hickman wasn't just heralding a relaunch, he was changing everything about mutantkind. In fact, Hickman had an entire three-year epic already planned out.
To top it all off, Hickman would also have creative supervision over the entire X-Men line (known as "The X-Office"). He would be managing a room of writers and artists all collaborating together to mold a new era. He'd handle the main story, while other writers would come in to flesh out details, spin-out stories, and contribute to the overarching narrative. For comics this was never done before. Sure, comic creators talked and pitched to each other, but never all at once to develop an entire, cohesive line with a multi-year plan.
What Hickman was proposing was a permanent, collaborative, on-going creative team for all X-Men comics directed by one person. An X-Men writer's room.
Then HoXPoX came out.
Without spoilers, HoXPoX covered both the founding of Krakoa, and the secret past of mutantkind. It's a very dense comic that goes through thousands of years of history.
Here's what changed:
- Everyone was back and accounted for. That really obscure character you like? They're on Krakoa now. And they're back with their powers too! And if they were dead? Well, they got better! ~~Clone characters not included for narrative and practical reasons.~~
- Everyone had a fresh start. Part of the deal with Krakoa was that if you're a mutant, you get Krakoan citizenship and you get criminal/legal amnesty for past crimes. All mutant villains had their pasts forgiven. Everyone was welcome on Krakoa to work together to a brighter future.
- The X-Men solved death. Using "The Resurrection Protocols", The X-Men could now revive any mutant with their body, memories, mind, and soul fully intact in two days thanks to five mutants working together. Any character that was dead is back. Any character that could die could be back in a page or less.
- A new mythology. The secrets past and futures alluded to colonies of mutants in the ancient past, in the far-flung future, in space, and in other dimensions. Mutants were made an evolutionary inevitability anywhere life existed. But even in the most successful timelines, mutants fought advanced machine intelligence. Mutants were no longer fighting bigots, but also preparing for war against machine life.
- New aesthetics. Krakoa was a limitless resource, so all technology came from the island's bio-organic sources. For example, instead of a gun, it was a tree gun on Krakoa. In order to bring this new aesthetic to life, Hickman and Tom Muller standardized the X-Men's graphic design across all comics. They made an entirely new language font for mutants, inserted "data pages" in every issue, and homogenized all logos and title pages.
- New culture. Krakoa was a utopian, post-scarcity society. A government called The Quiet Council is formed to manage and protect Krakoa. They would manage the day-to-day economics and politics of Krakoa while everyone else got to enjoy paradise. Muntankind could now form a cultural identity without fear of human violence, oppression, or judgement.
- New world order. Krakoa strong-arms the entire world into recognizing their legitimacy. Overnight, Krakoa became an impenetrable fortress and an overwhelming superpower. All nations had to capitulate to their demands. The X-Men no longer peacefully lived with humanity, they peacefully ruled over it.
To Hickman, these changes would fix everything wrong with the X-Men.
And it sold like crazy. House of X #1 wound up selling 185,000 copies, a monumental achievement in the modern era. It maintained over 100,000 sales for its entire run. For context, most books struggle to crack 50,000 copies.
Critically, these changes were met with universal acclaim. For once, after decades of mistreatment, the X-Men felt like they were succeeding again. Critics thought the idea of a new mutant nation opened exciting new possibilities. Fans loved it because it fixed long-term continuity problems by just getting everyone in one place. As for newbies, HoXPoX needed surprisingly little knowledge in advanced because so much was changed. Only cursory knowledge of key characters was needed.
HoXPoX was a definitive statement. The X-Men were back. It was going to explore the limits of what the X-Men could do, how they could cooperate, and how they could thrive. What challenges would they face as a nation? What could even challenge them? How far could you push this concept?
Powers of X (2019): Fixing Comics
Alongside the reboot, the X-Office wanted to tackle another problem: getting people to read comics.
Comics, at least in America, are published on a weekly basis. Each comic series has at least one issue come out every month. A common complaint is that comics are difficult to ...
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-06-17 04:02:15+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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-06-16 13:52:32+00:00.
INPATIENT FOLLOW-UP SURVEY: LIFE AFTER THE ASYLUM
It’s very easy to use your problems as an excuse. What’s much harder is to move forwards, as Emilie knows. I find it hilarious that she is the one telling people that they’re ‘inmates.’ You are not an 'inmate’; nor are you a 'number.’ The best way to deal with the Asylum? Leave it. 🐀
This is your story
Should you choose to remember
Well, I hope that it's true
I've finally a reason to let it die
Let it die
You've given me a reason to let it die
Let it die...
Let's see what became of our whimsical cast!
VIPs first, yeah? Courtney Love never stopped Courtney Loving, but she seems to have come a long way since the dark pits of 2005. She recently did an excellent BBC podcast, called “Courtney Love's Women”, about the female musicians that have made a mark on her life. If you need your fix of interesting and problematic lady rock stars, you know where to look next! Nooo, Courtney doesn't talk about her one-time violinist (that would have been wild). That being said, in episode 3, she reminisces about a collab she tried to set up between witch goddess Stevie Nicks and “bitter genius” Billy Corgan, simply sighing that “nothing came of it” – and concludes the anecdote with a quip that feels darkly relevant here.🎤
The erstwhile Bloody Crumpets have gone back to their own things, some with decent success. Veronica is a burlesque dancer and lifestyle-coach-type-person in New Orleans. In the months after she fell out with EA, she underwent life-saving skin cancer surgery (this is your cosmic sign to go get that mole checked! 🐀), and published her own hardback, illustrated, semi-autobiographical book. It got pretty good reviews, and a sweet blurb from Neil Gaiman. Vecona, the Asylum Seamstress, is still a fashion designer; she's grown out of bizarro-goth costumery, and moved on to film noir chic. Lady Jo Hee, the (First) One That Got Away, is rumored to be a cello teacher somewhere. Another Crumpet... sells essential oils, I think? Another is a theater actor who, randomly, had an uncredited role in Men in Black 3. The youngest recruit, who dropped out of the Crumpets to go to clown college, now sings “gay cuntry songs”. (What a resumé. I, for one, am very proud of her.) Some of them are still friends, and hang out once in a while, sans EA.
EA still lives in Manhattan with her partner and her dog.🪞 Per her wishes, that's about all we know. Maybe she's bidding her time for a spectacular comeback. Maybe she's doing angry pull-ups while staring at a list of names taped to the wall, like they do in prison movies. Maybe she's training to become a professional pastry chef📝, which she used to say was her other dream job if the music thing didn't work out. Maybe, like so many of us, she's just taking life one day at a time and trying not to fuck it up.
However she's spending her days now, let us hope that this break from the public eye has given her some breathing room, and time to focus on her health and well-being. Although I suspect that she might have a hard time believing this, a lot of current and former fans truly do wish her the best. Even those still holding out for new art (there's a handful!) would rather she be retired and happy, than working and miserable. We gawk, we balk, we snark, we complain, we wish she would get out of her own way, etc – but I think time and maturity have brought an amount of perspective and empathy, and softened the intensely personal rage and disappointment that used to plague (ha!) the fanbase.
Speaking of which, what became of the fans?
To my knowledge, FantineDormouse pretty much entered the scene, accidentally stepped on the Asylum nuclear button, and exited stage right, never to be heard from again. Not under that identity, anyway. I'd be very curious to hear her side of the story and her perspective on how it all played out, but I also enjoy her status as a Jane Doe, an everyfan of sorts. It could have been anyone!
The Collector, last I heard, got better. He licked his wounds, moved on from his EA obsession, and thankfully found a compatible donor. Oh yeah, right, missing context that I left out because it wasn't useful to the plot at the time: parallel to harassing EA and her mods, the Collector was also gravely ill and actively searching for an organ transplant. I'm bringing this up now to point out, once again, that we often only see a fraction of what people are going through as they spiral into unhinged, self-sabotaging, abusive behavior. (Also: there are no secondary roles, no NPCs, no stock villains in real life. No matter what two-dimensional archetype the internet / the narrative / their own dumbass behavior flattens them into, everyone you will ever interact with or read about, on and offline, is a full protagonist with a complex backstory and many ongoing arcs. We could all probably use the reminder once in a while.)
Since just about everyone else quit (including EA), two former inmates have become the de facto custodians of the shambolic Asylum: Faerie from Wayward Victorian Confessions, and Mika from She Fights Like a Girl / Asylum Oracle. A toast to the REAL Asylum MVPs! This entire write-up is a tribute to their work and dedication. Thank you guys, for everything.
Faerie and Mika (and a number of their predecessors in the game, who also deserve credit) are true blue fans who manage to remain smart, critical, and level-headed – which has allowed them to run and moderate their spaces, in my opinion, with more tact, nuance, and good humor than EA's entourage ever did. These unsung heroes keep the lights on for a handful of us old-timers to hold our... virtual support groups, I guess? Veteran's club? Whenever we feel nostalgic, we can drop by to rant, reminisce, and indulge in our weird little specific interest. I'm happy that after all these years, we can still nerd out and be weird together. Sure, it's giving “Hotel California”, but hey! Do you ever really get over your first love? Or the first cult you escaped from?
For all the rage and vitriol that spilled over the past decade, there's still an overwhelming tenderness and attachment in the way many “reformed” fans talk about EA, whether they still consume her art or not.
Most of it, of course, is tied to the usual reasons that any artist becomes a favorite artist. Namely: people associate her with a pivotal moment in their lives (usually their teens or early adulthood), they credit her words and music for helping them through difficult times, and, crucially, she was a gateway to other things that changed their lives for the better.
I thought about sharing My EA Story to illustrate, but... I really don't need to. Even though the specifics vary, “my” story has been told a hundred times, in a hundred ways, for what feels like a hundred years, by the Great Asylum Polyphonic Ensemble.
Content Warning for the collective ways we were primed to become Plague Rats: mental illness, sexual assault, self-harm, suicide, abortion, death, you know the drill by now.
There was a tweet going round a couple days ago that was like “who was the first woman who taught you it was okay to be angry.” (...) A lot of the answers were Alanis Morisette, Buffy, Fiona Apple, y’know. And i was always aware of those women, but i was really too young to get into them. No, for me, the answer is Emilie Autumn. (...) I was figuring out i was queer and i was fat and i felt weird and awkward and horrible, all the time. But i had good parents and privilege so i didn’t feel like i was allowed to be as miserable as i was. (...) Her music made space for me to feel the things i was feeling. (...) [It]helped me come to terms with my ugly emotions, and maybe in hindsight it wasn’t super healthy romanticizing my depression like that, but it helped me survive y’all.
🔍I discovered her music in a very dark and horrible time in my life and she has helped me through so much, and for that I will be forever grateful.
I was super suicidal, but her lyrics inspired me to hang on a bit longer. Even through my mental health struggles her music has been my friend, and at times strength.
TAFWVG helped me quite a bit, at least the original with the diary entries etc. It helped to know there was someone who tho...
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[Music / Visual Art] Emilie Autumn's Asylum, pt. 7 – Black squares, white tears, cheap junk, art fraud: a 2020s guide to euthanizing your career
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-06-16 13:35:34+00:00.
Is it ever over?
Will it never end?
What accounts for this morbid fascination with the suicidal girl??
Well, you read six installments and came back for more, so... you tell me.
But yes: we are, in fact, almost at the end. Welcome to the FINAL final installment of the Asylum write-up!
(Apologies that it took so long to put out – real life was being super insensitive about my online commitments. Thank you ever so much for the kind words and anticipation - I hope the read rewards your patience. HobbyDrama mods: I will most likely end up splitting this into two back-to-back posts, because reformatting in the comments is a nightmare and I'm not doing that again. Thank you for your understanding!)
Content Warning: BLM flame wars and white nonsense.
Before you get any ideas about where this is headed (2020 was a wild year and nothing is off the table): no, EA did not come out as a raging Holocaust denier, or play Bach partitas at a Proud Boys fundraiser.
The truth is much more nuanced and stupider than that.
BLACKOUT: “WISHING YOU PEACE”
2020 had started out terrible, then quickly gotten much worse, and then a store clerk in Minneapolis called the cops on an unarmed black man over a $20 bill.
You get the mental picture. Grieving, fear, anger. Vigils. Protests. Riots. GoFundMe's for legal fees. Difficult conversations. Google Drives with the complete works of bell hooks and Franz Fanon, “bookmarked for later” and never re-opened. Well-meaning white people and out-of-touch celebrities🔍 awkwardly trying to do their part online. Remember those few weeks when every liberal-leaning individual with “a platform” (ie 120 followers or more on any given social media, including LinkedIn) was either “speaking out” (ie hopping on whichever performative bandwagon would make them look the most not-racist), getting hounded for failing to do so, or getting cancelled for doing it ass-backwards? Aah, to witness history.
EA, who was overall pretty low-key on social media by that point, had been especially quiet whilst her country was figuratively and literally on fire. When she finally tuned in for her usual “Magic Monday” oracle reading post, she did implicitly acknowledge the current events – saying she had been reluctant to post, but that she knew her followers had always been on the side of justice and positive change, and that she was inspired by everyone currently fighting the good fight:
I really didn’t want to do Magic Monday today, because I didn’t want any attention on me or my accounts when it should be elsewhere. ... I am so honored to get to share this spiritual moment with you, but I do want to honor YOU as well by saying that I *know* that ALL of you have always marched in any way you could for love and light and all that is right and just. You don’t need to be reminded or preached at to do so by the likes of me, and thus I wouldn’t dare.
This was too vague and wishy-washy for some fans, who had expected EA to be as vocal about BLM as she had been about other things in the past, like her opposition to Romney during the 2012 election, or her support of the Women's March in 2016:
Listen. I desperately love you and I have been your fan for decades. All week I have waited ... Now is the time to speak in any way and declare open support, even when the community you’re supporting isn’t one you typically focus on. Your entire brand is about giving a voice to the oppressed and not being silenced. You NEED to be posting about and encouraging others to do, to give, and to help. And anything short of that is unacceptable to the person you have created for fans to see. Please please do better if you are truly an ally to any, especially those who have less privilege than you.
In response to the above comment on her Magic Monday post, EA expressed her skepticism at the viability of social media activism, and her discomfort at people demanding shallow virtue signals from random entertainers. A valid and nuanced point, that a number reasonable folks agree with.🔍
She articulated it with diplomacy and zero hint of barely-contained fury:
You are assuming I have more wisdom and resources than you. And I assume that my friends and followers do not have to be told not to be racist. I would not insult you by telling you what you already know. And finally, you assume that what a human does online represents inaction in their real life. ... I can only hope this may be a lesson to you to not look to very very very minor celebrities such as myself in this or any time, but look to yourself instead for the action you wish to see. This is a beautiful opportunity for individual responsibility. Anyone looking to Instagram for guidance is looking for lazy activism and lip service. ... Wishing you peace.
Still, a day later, she caved in and Did the Thing. She posted the black square on #blackouttuesday. You know, the well-meaning online flashmob that had the unfortunate side-effect of making the #blm hashtag unusable for boots-on-the-ground protesters and organizers.
And then... oh boy. One prominent Asylum scholar and historian documented the whole thing with receipts in real time.🔍📝 This link is the source for all the quotes and receipts in this segment. Short of copy-pasting her entire timeline and the content of said receipts, it is REALLY difficult to summarize what went down without trivializing the subject matter, or over-simplifying the point that either party was trying to make.
Still, let me try and milk a readable story from the evidence folder. It went like this.
In the process of mass-deleting every vaguely critical-sounding comment under her #blackout post (as one does), EA somehow blocked one supportive, long-term fan who was actually defending her. Let's call her Adrienne. (Adrienne had corrected another commenter that EA had not used the #blm hashtag, so her black box post was not harming the movement. A civil, constructive exchange had ensued between the two, which was deleted.)
As luck would have it, among EA's (let's face it) overwhelmingly low-melanin fanbase🦠📝, Adrienne happens to be a black woman. And was obviously horrified, when she checked in a week later to see if the new Magic Monday post was up, to find herself blocked by her favorite artist – after EA had spent the last few days sharing proud protest selfies in her Instagram stories, no less.
Adrienne shared the news with her good friend Poppy. Poppy was no less horrified, and conveyed her heartbreak and disappointment to EA on Instagram:
I have been a fan of yours for many years. ... I have purchased so much merchandise that I think in the first year I discovered you I dropped nearly a grand on merch and events alone. I say all this because imagine how I must have felt when you blocked one of my best friends who is also black (...) Black lives matter but you block and ignore your black fans? Black lives matter but you can't be bothered to engage your black fans who comment on your stuff but will have entire conversations in the comment sections of your white fans. I have seen it several times and I tried so hard to say it was a fluke but this just cemented it. (...) You don't care about black lives because if you did you would not have blocked her for absolutely nothing especially when she was defending you from the person jumping down your throat. I wish I could say I was heartbroken, but at this point, all white women seem to do is let me down. I thought you were better.
Poppy, predictably, got blocked on sight.
But Poppy, at the time, had a sizable (5000+) following on Instagram. So when she posted a series of stories about EA ignoring and silencing black fans while trying to score ally points, they made the rounds quickly. In a video that would later be construed as a call to spam EA's social with hate and abuse, Poppy enjoined her followers to go ask EA why she'd blocked her and Adrienne. From a transcript (the original video has been lost):
Go ask her why she’s blocking black fans. Demand...
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Hot-Detail-2852 on 2024-06-15 02:04:24+00:00.
Hello! I'm a long-time lurker of this subreddit who made an account just to post this (because I didn't see anyone else posting it and it's been living rent-free in my head since February), so I'm sort of nervous, but I hope yall get just as much of a kick as I did out of this mess!
Just as a heads-up, most of my sources are in Chinese. This is inevitable, as the drama was just not smth that would impact the Western part of the (already-niche) fandom(s) very much, nor would Western fans really understand the significance of this happening during the Spring Festival Gala. That said, if there is an English source, I will explicitly mention so.
And obligatory formatting mention: Since this post deals with Chinese celebrities, the name format will be [family name] + [given name], unless there is an obviously Westernized name, which I'm sure will not be difficult to figure out.
First off, who is Bai Jingting?
Bai Jingting (English-language wikipedia, Baidu) is a Chinese actor. Currently thirty years old, he is most widely known for his youthful, schoolboy roles, although he has since moved onto more serious dramas as well as ancient-fantasy ones. In particular, his breakout roles include Yu Chuyan from The Whirlwind Girl, Gu Nanyi from The Rise of the Phoenixes, Sun Yiqiu from Ordinary Glory, and Xiao Heyun from Reset. However, he may be best known for being a regular cast member on Seasons 1-6 of a popular Chinese variety show, Who's the Murderer.
A ~~little~~ big background: Who's the Murderer
It would be a lie to say that Bai Jingting wasn't already popular before he joined Who's The Murderer (heretofore referred to as WTM; English wikipedia), a variety show where celebrities act as suspects in a murder case which another celebrity, posing as the detective, must solve. However, it's also not an exaggeration to say that WTM was the probable cause of most of his subsequent success.
(Didn't know where to put this since it broke the flow of the story everywhere I tried, but here is a playlist of the Engsubbed episodes of the show if you want to check it out for yourself! Bear in mind that HunanTV's English subs, particularly the earlier ones, are quite hit or miss lol.)
WTM is licensed by HunanTV (also called MangoTV; I will be using both terms interchangeably) from a Korean variety show called Crime Scene. I've never watched the K-version, so I can't tell you what that's about, but what set WTM apart from many Chinese variety shows of back then was its unique style (briefly summarized above) and relative freedom for the celebs to say things.
This was because it was solely an internet show (as in, it was only ever released on a website and not TV), so the editors didn't have to be as strict on the censorship. This led to some really funny moments and golden lines [I couldn't find any English subbed funny moments, sorry :( ] including sexual jokes, borderline cursing, some culture shocks, and general shenanigans. Add this to a great regular cast and guests (i.e. famous TV hosts He Jiong and Sa Beining, who know and get along with basically anyone; popular singer and comedian Da Zhang Wei; the star of this post Bai Jingting; and even pre-Magic-Man-fame Jackson Wang) and you've got the perfect formula for something that anyone of any age can enjoy.
But you can't talk about WTM without talking about Bai Jingting's role in it; after all, he was one of the original regulars. As a decently handsome and fairly intelligent young man with a relatable sense of humor, Bai Jingting gained a lot of fans through this show. In particular, fans loved his spontaneous, out-of-the-box guesses for the truth of the mysteries that somehow always tended to be correct, and they loved to ship him with Emma Wu, a Taiwanese singer and actor also known as Guigui, who was a perfect 'sunshine girl' to his 'grumpy boy'. (This ship later ended up dying, but you probably saw that coming.)
WTM just wrapped up its ninth season this year (2024) to great success, as expected. However, only true fans know (jk jk, that's a little gatekeepy) of the struggles the show, crew, and guests once faced. Between the 6th and 7th seasons, the original producer of the show (Xiaohezi) had a falling-out with MangoTV and left the channel along with many core members of the WTM crew. Aside from 'stealing*' the work of a former MangoTV colleague (推理开始了/lit. The Inference Starts) to make her own show (开始推理吧/The Truth, lit. Let's Start Inferring), she also made a new show called 登录圆鱼洲/The Oasis, which had a very similar game style to WTM, only without all the murder.
** I put 'stealing' in quotes because it was the phrasing that the Chinese fandom used. However, I have not watched The Inference Starts, so I don't know how it actually compares to The Truth. Granted, the names do sound quite similar, and the format of the show is also suspiciously similar to WTM, murders and all…*
Fans of WTM were furious with both shows, and honestly, some of it was for good reason; The Truth used pictures of MangoTV/WTM stars (even their families!) as murder victims, despite those people never appearing on The Truth at all (actually, they were known to have declined her offer of it), nor probably ever giving the crew consent to use their pictures like that. Pretty shitty and honestly kind of petty, yeah? On the less-lawsuit-worthy side, complaints about The Oasis were mostly due to its 'copying' of WTM's general format yet not executing it well… and that one of the regulars was — you've guessed it — Bai Jingting.
This was a pretty big deal for fans of WTM, as after it was revealed quite early in 2022 (or maybe late 2021, I can't remember) that Bai Jingting would not appear in WTM S7, fans assumed that he was busy with filming dramas and didn't want to be distracted by variety shows. As such, fans were understanding of the situation, and WTM S7 debuted to a lot of apprehension, featuring hastily-written plots (that were still extremely well-done imo), emergency friendship guest stars (including some who were recovering from injuries), and an extremely overworked new crew.
Keep in mind that WTM S7 aired about four months prior to The Oasis, and that fans were extremely touched by how put-together WTM S7 was for a show that had lost most of its core crew members. This, along with some parasocial relationship stuff, made the reveal that Bai Jingting was to star in The Oasis particularly shocking to loyal WTM fans, who felt as if he had betrayed the show, MangoTV, and even He Jiong (the backbone of MangoTV and WTM who'd helped him out quite a lot; this is another plot point for later) and the other overwhelmed guests who had pushed back or rushed other schedules just to support the show. Plus, as I'd briefly mentioned before, Xiaohezi had been exposed to have approached several other WTM stars who refused her offer and stayed with MangoTV, which made Bai Jingting's 'betrayal' even more unreasonable to the fandom.
Obviously, fans were divided; hardcore WTM fans held the opinion that he betrayed the show and his colleagues, and hardcore Bai Jingting's fans retorted that he was free to appear on whichever show he liked. In any case, many WTM fans ended up unstanning Bai Jingting, and he never did appear in another WTM episode again.
Subsequent works (the calm before the storm?)
Wow, that WTM section was so much longer than I'd expected, but you really do need a comprehensive understanding of what went on back in 2022 if you want to understand everything that happened and resurfaced in 2024. Anyway, moving on.
For context, Bai Jingting had never been a household name; he was mostly known for idol dramas (targeted towards younger women) and WTM. But after WTM, he starred in a series of fairly popular dramas: Reset, a thriller webdrama based off a popular webnovel; New Life Begins, an ancient romcom webdrama that apparently won several awards; and Destined, an ancient-fantasy drama costarring Song Yi, his girlfriend that he never officially announced that he was dating. Yes, there is a plot point here as well that I will circle back to.
In any case, it seemed like Bai Jingting was doing pretty well on his own, even without all the promotion and support from WTM, and his fans were happy. Even most WTM fans seemed to have let the issue go, opting for a 'let's do well on our own separate paths' kind of mentality.
The Big One: The 2024 Spring Festival Gala
Now, I mentioned that Bai Jingting was never a household name, right? It was fairly unlikely that anyone older than, say, 30-40 years old would know of or be a fan of him. In addition, he only had two dramas air during 2023, spending the rest of it on variety shows...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1dg7cc4/chinese_entertainment_up_the_spring_mountain_the/
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-06-10 04:02:15+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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
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[MLP/Toys] Dollyhair: The Doll Hair to Stormfront Pipeline-- the time the My Little Pony Community looked the other way because the supply was too good
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Mysterious-Tea1518 on 2024-06-04 18:40:22+00:00.
Setting the scene
The time is the early/mid-2000s, when both internet drama and I, personally, peaked. It's the age of the web forum, where entire communities have popped up around literally anything. Starting first as a yahoo group, the My Little Pony Trading Post and later the My Little Pony Arena arose from the depths of the internet to corral fans of plastic horses long before Friendship is Magic would capture the collective imagination.
At the time, collectors were seeking out then only relatively recently discontinued Generation one (G1) and Generation 2 (G2) MLP. Primarily the former as the later was accused of 2000s pop star anorexia, glorifying unhealthy body images for pastel pink ponies everywhere. You might imagine that with G1 ending in the US in 1992, and G2 dying a slow and painful death first in the US then through Europe in the 2000s, this is a group of die-hard fans of a failed toy line desperate to get their hands on more plastic crack. Most of the conversation around the community at the time fell in one of two camps:
1. Look at this toy I’ve found at a: yard sale, church sale, flea market, thrift shop, or even on occasion an actual dumpster.
OR
2. How do I make my dumpster pony look not disgusting?
Much collective brainpower went into topic #2. Enthusiasts worked diligently exploring new cleaning techniques which at the time were new life-changing innovations like the Magic Eraser. However, since these are children toys, the answer is sometime a heavy lift. Mohawk from a kid who just found scissors? Or maybe the pony is so beyond repair that it requires something more drastic?
Forged in the same fire of the newly budding reborn community, collectors began to learn to re-thread hair into their plastic horses. It’s fairly straightforward using a needle and thread (or later a tool- let me tell you, this is an inferior method, but that’s another discussion) to weave hair back into the toy. Interest began to grow for custom ponies, that’s painting the body, it’s cutie mark (symbols on a horse butt), and changing the hair color entirely to give it a new identity.
Where do you get hair?
Early on some people used hair extensions, human hair (ew), or other doll hair to fix their ponies. But where it really stood out was when you were trying to repair a pony with existing hair- you don’t want to get rid of it all, but maybe you just need a little more in some places. Maybe just a tail. It was almost impossible to find hair that matched.
As they do in niches, companies popped up that provided loose hair for toy repair. Mostly they started in the doll hair space, focusing on repairing vintage Barbies whose prices had begun to climb. Barbies and My Little Ponies actually use a different hair type. Barbies use saran, while MLP use nylon. And with the specialization, companies primarily sold natural colors like human-blonde or human-brunette that look a bit… weird… on a pink horse’s head.
A few companies would come and go, but one came onto the scene that managed to lead the pack. While others faltered with poor UX on their websites, bad photography, or poor product, Dollyhair stuck out for having passable photography and website and *really good* hair. I’m talking hair that matched so closely to the originals, it’s almost impossible to tell. More than that, the site laid out original ponies and what their matching colors were. You could just go online, find the pony you had, find the hair it needed, and easily sew that hair back into your pony. This gained more and more attention as into the late 2000s/2010s prices began to rise and supply in thrift shops and garage sales dried up.
Dollyhair
Owned by a woman named Tina, Dollyhair had a damn good product and people wanted it to repair their plastic horses. In 2003, Generation 3 made it onto the scene, gaining even more collectors. More than that, people were beginning to customize these easily available My Little Ponies to an extreme, with gorgeous linework, custom dying or airbrushing. Conventions popped up to celebrate MLP collecting and the art continued to grow. And, suddenly, Monster High entered the scene and built up customization demand even further. That’s another story for another writer but the crossover was so prolific there was first a Monster High board within the MLP forum, MLPArena, then it grew onto its own. What I’m saying is, Dollyhair was selling a metric fuckton of hair as a preferred vendor for toy collectors. They were well loved as a vendor, with an incredibly niche captive audience, almost NO competition AND the most premium product on the market.
What could go wrong? Well you could be batshit insane and ungrateful of your incredibly forgiving audience.
Order Delays
People would order from Dollyhair and it would take months to receive your order. You’d send an email- no response. “Oh, she has a new baby!” someone says. “Oh, she’s on vacation!” someone says.² This continues in a loop forever, where months pass and then eventually stuff arrives maybe. Maybe it’s the right order. Maybe it’s not. Luckily, it’s toy horse hair, so no one’s life is on the line.
She got away with this for a LONG time. If people wanted it quick, they would trade amongst themselves or settle for lower quality competitors. Feedback threads even have evidence of someone offering to share their own correct order to cover her loss out of their pocket just to help a fellow collector.
Doxxing
But if you’re batshit insane, eventually it’s gotta blow. The first example of this I can find is in 2006. Unfortunately, the original post is no longer available however the user’s description of the situation is.
In that user’s words: “I placed a large order of hair with her, and to make a long story short, she didn't send it in a timely fashion, and when I made a feedback post about it, she registered for the board and flew off the handle at me, haranguing me like she was crazy over PM and showing the entire board what a nut she could be in the feedback thread, which I had initially even offered to delete/retract once I got my hair. She also took the liberty of my posting personal info (name and address) on the thread until the mods told her to remove it.”³
That’s right, you could go ahead and publicly doxx your fanbase. Turns out she had printed a label but never sent the order just delivered the tracking. Eventually the user got an incomplete order and she refused to fix it. Nevermind though, as people *continued to order from her* as she had one of the most accessible and high-quality products. What were we supposed to do?
Enter Heidi
With acknowledgement that there was not a lot of options, a new site (mylittleponyhair.com) emerged!! And if you were worried about the quality, don’t be! Because this isn’t just ANY hair, it’s dollyhair! That’s right, Tina of Dollyhair was SO KIND as to sell mylittleponyhair.com their hair, because the new owner Heidi is her sister! Afraid of ordering from Dollyhair because of Tina’s bad behavior but great quality? Nevermind, this is HEIDI!⁴ Now, collectors are trusting but they aren’t dumb. This was quickly called out, that Heidi had appeared and started a new site immediately after Tina had flounced out of the community. In fact, little mention is made of this website anywhere in the future aside to say that dollyhair and mylittleponyhair are the same site and its stock is tied. ⁵
Hope you’re hungry
To note in this bad behavior is how absolutely personally Tina took all of this. As Heidi disappeared into the background and Tina took center stage again, she was accused of many different bad behaviors. My personal favorite, someone left her a bad review online which led to her taking their personal information and ordering *five different pizzas* to their house, then later getting a call stating “hope it was worth all that hair, honey! Enjoying that pizza, you fat mother f-ing cow!” as well as the same user getting early morning calls about orgies and people showing up to their house for a yard sale they never had. ⁶
It's the intern’s fault
Somewhere down the line, people were getting their stuff eventually but found that it wasn’t quite as normal. Hair is sold in hanks, or a small handful of a continuous circle of hair that is then cut and divided into hanks. These hanks are then made into plugs (about 15-30 strands of hair) and sewn into the pony. Each hank, typically, is 1 oz and about enough to put hair in a pony. Unless you order from Tina, because suddenly people weren’t able to fill an entire pony’s mane with a hank. One by one people came online and complained, and then started weighing out hanks. They were all, consistently, short. People began to ask if this was the new normal, or if their shipping (which appeared to be flat-rate) would decrease because of the decrease in product received. No dice. Instead, Tina showed up in a huff to claim that she had hired a new assistant, and it was her assistant’s fault. This assistant never appeared again.*
So clearly the community, seeing this bad behavior, wouldn’t continue supporting her right? No. Wrong. With the opinion of “well people got their stuff eventually” and “it’s still the best hair you can buy” people continued shopping. Tina would shape up a little, ship things on time for a spell, then once again lapse. Your order would b...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1d84m1k/mlptoys_dollyhair_the_doll_hair_to_stormfront/
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-06-03 04:02:17+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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
86
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[Neopets Classic] How a once-promising Neopets clone turned into a lesson on poor leadership
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/iLOVEkadoaties on 2024-06-01 16:58:16+00:00.
(Note: ‘retail’ refers to the regular Neopets website, currently owned by NetDragon, previously owned by JumpStart - thank you u/fancytables)
BACKGROUND
Before I begin this post, it is important to talk about what Neopets is and why a classic version of it was created in the first place. Neopets is a virtual petsite where you can own pixel pets, converse with other players on the neoboards, play games, meet people through guilds (which are like clubs geared toward certain interests), and partake in daily activities. Because Neopets is now a 24-year-old site, many of its users have been around for a while and remember what Neopets was like pre-conversion.
In 2007, Viacom (the company that owned the domain at the time) decided to “convert” all pets in order to introduce customization–a new site feature where you could spend real money to dress up your pets. While pre-conversion Neopets had dynamic poses and character, post-conversion Neopets were static and rather awkward. Most species and color combinations were automatically converted, but owners of certain combinations were given the option to keep their original unconverted pet. This drove up the value of unconverteds (otherwise known as UCs), and created a fierce trading system on Neopets. In a sea of converted pets, everyone wanted an unconverted.
Players had the option to trade around and work their way up to getting one of these highly coveted pets–but starting from ground zero often meant working on a singular trade chain for years, if not decades. This was a daunting task for many. Soon enough, there was a robust black market for unconverted pets…and when I say robust, I mean, people who desperately wanted these “UC” pets were flooding the “black market” with thousands of US dollars per year.
Millions of players who had been there since the beginning of Neopets would continue to be discouraged by the site's direction for years to come. In 2020, it was announced that Adobe Flash would soon be discontinued. With the termination of Flash, all the beloved Neopets games that relied on it were lost. Three years ago, Neopets further dug its own grave by introducing NFTS. Needless to say, the active player base has dramatically decreased over the years.
NEOPETS CLASSIC IS DEBUTED
Enter Neopets Classic (NPC), a fansite made to model early 2000s Neopets when there were around 3 million active users. For privacy purposes, the name Kiko will refer to the site’s creator (all screenshots with him will be censored in YELLOW). Kiko began working on this project as a way to learn code in his offtime. He began posting screenshots of the progress he was making with NPC on Reddit as far back as 5 years ago (2019). To say Neopets fans were excited is an understatement. When the site eventually opened to the public in December 2020, tons of users rushed to make accounts and create the unconverted pets they had never imagined getting to own, along with names that are probably stuck on frozen accounts from 2003 or so on retail. Instead of Rose6920Neopets, it was possible for a user on Neopets Classic to actually make the pet “Rose”. In its early days, the site was incredibly nostalgic and fulfilling for many people.
Kiko opened a Patreon account where people could show their support through monthly donations ranging from $1 to $25. Each tier unlocked special rewards on NPC’s Discord server, but the most appealing was the ability to make an NPC account for $1. After the initial wave of sign-ups, the site closed regular sign-ups to manage the influx of users as there were easily 200 members already. The only way people could get accounts after this point was by donating, or to wait for sign-up links to be posted about every month or so to the Discord. After receiving an email from Patreon where they warned him of Neopets copyright issues, Kiko moved to Buy Me A Coffee (BMAC).
A few months into Neopets Classic, there was a surge of site bugs and issues that went unfixed and quickly piled up. Kiko was nowhere to be found for almost two months. There was no communication indicating when users could expect fixes to the issues they were facing in game. Not even the mods were able to tell the users when or even if he would be back. He came back eventually, with no word of apology or explanation for his absence. This left users quite upset at the lack of communication while he was MIA, and not knowing whether their ongoing donations were going to waste if the site never started working properly again.
Kiko’s prolonged absence opened a door for many cheaters to abuse the site. This included the use of various bots and scripts that could auto-refresh around the site and auto-buy items from shops. Additionally, several users funneled items and neopoints (the in-game Neopets currency) from their side accounts to their main accounts, which was against the rules. Upon his return, Kiko was made aware of the massive cheating issue and started issuing bans accordingly. He created a channel within the Discord titled “Wall of Shame”, where he mocked the users he froze and immortalized their “crimes.” Ironically, Kiko himself had quite a bit of experience with similar illegal behavior on retail Neopets. He had previously been a black market seller of “UC” pets for real money on retail - and Clraik, a forum-based website dedicated to sharing and engaging in Neopets cheats, did not hesitate to expose this in his ban message from their site. Interestingly, Kiko had previously been fairly involved in the Clraik community and even recruited his first Neopets Classic players from there. He eventually deleted the channel.
Kiko also shamed his own playerbase behind closed doors in BMAC-only channels, but the Wall of Shame wouldn't be the first time he did so publicly. During the Halloween event in 2021, players collected candy around the site that came in different varieties. To redeem prizes, you had to collect certain varieties of candies - and if you didn’t have those varieties, you could swap candies with other users to get what you needed. One user made an unpopular choice to ask for multiples of one kind of candy for less of another and received severe backlash from not only the community but Kiko himself. While some users agreed that the player was acting out of line and applauded Kiko’s condemnation of the user, many others were grossly uncomfortable with the site creator openly ridiculing a player who wasn’t breaking any known game rules. Kiko had started a dogpile where members of the community continued to speak against the user, who then felt bullied off the site. A few friends of his followed suit and quit playing.
ART CHAOS
On March 7th, 2022, an NPC artist (who will henceforth be referred to as Carmariller) asked Kiko for permission to add a commissioned pet to the site that had been commissioned by a user with Neopoints. Kiko said yes and gave her permission, noting that it wasn’t any different from a user paying for a commission, as long as the user was fine with it being on the site. Their stone Shoyru design was eventually added to the site. Later on, several other users pitched in together to pay for a commission of another pet design from Carmariller in hopes of it being added to the site. When the site’s main moderator (let’s call her Lupe) found out about this in a public channel, she made it clear that commissions for pets to be added to the site were not allowed anymore, claiming it was unfair for users who couldn’t pay to affect site art through neopoints. However, those who had commissioned the art were confused and upset that this decision was made in direct opposition to the precedent of the Stone Shoyru. Following Lupe’s claims of unfairness, several users chimed in to express that it was problematic that users had commissioned art to be added to the site. Carmariller took a lot of heat from this discourse, which caused them to take a break from NPC. This series of interactions will be important later on.
ISSUES WITH INCLUSIVENESS
During April 2022, it was announced that a spring Easter event would take place on NPC. In the suggestions channel of the Discord server, a user submitted a suggestion to incorporate small nods to other religions because all the events around the holiday season were Christian-centric. This opened the door for a few users to vehemently disagree, stating that religion had no place on Neopets, that the site could never be “100% inclusive”, and that someone will always be upset. What started off as an innocuous suggestion for more inclusive features on the site ended in a heated debate, with many users feeling hurt and angry by the seemingly xenophobic arguments being made against the suggested features. Users from marginalized groups began to feel unsafe in the server as users were allowed to freely speak out against suggestions to make the site and community more inclusive with no mod intervention. When Kiko eventually came online, he did little to comfort those marginalized voices when [he wrote that he wasn’t interested in “pandering to other cultures”, and that “Christian holidays are...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1d5rgoj/neopets_classic_how_a_oncepromising_neopets_clone/
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[Cooking contests] “Pico de GAL-low”: Great British Bake-Off Destroys Its Entire Premise with Racist Blunders
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ToomintheEllimist on 2024-05-31 13:58:39+00:00.
The Background
Great British Bake Off (GBBO) is a cooking contest show that has been on BBC since 2010. It’s long been notable for its refusal to entertain petty drama: in a 2014 incident known as “bingate”, judges famously voted off contestant Iain because he “lost it” after his ice cream was accidentally removed from a refrigerator. The judges later praise (and favor?) contestants like Nadiya and Rahul who persist through similar mishaps to deliver imperfect-but-intact food. Many fans saw bingate as a declaration of identity, that GBBO is not an American high-drama competition between cutthroat cheaters “not here to make friends” — it’s a cozy apolitical show where contestants help one another, and the worst drama comes from a mix-up between custards quickly resolved with heartfelt apology.
GBBO is a show about food, not interpersonal drama. It’s about British food, but also about multicultural influences on British food. It’s about being polite and caring and utterly British, soldiering on through dropped ice-creams and elbow-smashed rolls. It’s not about corporate sponsorship, and it’s not about politics.
HOWEVER. Then came Series 13. The resultant backlash caused a restructuring of the show, an alleged firing of a host, and a classic series of corporate apologies.
The Blunder
To be clear: what made the Series 13 fuckup unique was NOT (merely) going beyond the judges’ and contestants’ expertise in ways that revealed the hidden imperialism of the show’s assumptions about “coziness," “lack of drama," and "apolitical food." What made the Series 13 fuckup unique was that the show did all that for North American food.
The Imperialism
Butchering foreign recipes, and blundering in describing non-Anglo food, isn’t actually new for GBBO. S1E2, judge Paul refers to challah as “plaited bread” and claims it’s “dying off,” leading Shira Feder to declare “GBBO has zero Jewish friends.” Throughout S10, judges Prue and Paul ask contestants of SE Asian descent (Michael, Priya) to “tone down the spice” and stop using “so many chiles.” Paul openly declares American pie disgusting. In a brownie challenge (S11E04), literally every contestant fails to make good or edible food. During “Japan” Week (scare quotes intended), the challenges include Chinese bao and a stir fry where most contestants use Indian flavors. Hosts mispronouncing non-Anglo food names (“schichttorte,” “babka”) for humorous effect is a running bit on the show.
These incidents were not without backlash, but (until S13) none of it rose to the interest of BBC.
S13E04: Mexican Week
GBBO has had national-themed weeks since S2, with what’s alternately referred to as “Patisserie” or “French Week.” In S11, it finally expanded beyond Europe with “’Japan’” Week. And in S13, in what was no doubt an effort to appeal to the simple majority of viewers who view the show through Netflix from North America, the producers gave us Mexican Week. Or “”Mexican”” Week. At least there were no bao this time?
This tweet of a butchered avocado foreboded everything wrong with the episode. Though the U.K. etc. largely consider avocado an exotic luxury (see: the avocado toast meme), in North America it’s been a staple for millennia, #1 produce item in Mexico and #6 in the U.S. last year. Contestant Carole’s attempts to cut the avocado… like an apple? I guess? result in food waste, and an inedible end product if pieces of the skin or toxic core are mixed in with the flesh. It calls into question the alleged expertise of the contestant bakers.
Then the episode aired. It opens with white hosts Noel and Matt in sombreros and sarapes (costume versions, not historical garb), Noel announcing “I don’t think we should make Mexican jokes; people will get upset.” Matt asks, “Not even Juan?” And Noel replies, “Not even Juan.” As NYT points out: both men have a history of blackface and brownface on other shows, so this is hardly out of the norm for them. It then goes into a montage sequence of the contestants proclaiming their lack of knowledge of Mexican food: “What do Mexicans even bake?”
Then contestant Janusz refers to “cactuses” and judge Prue interrupts him to say “cacti”; Janusz apologizes and corrects it to “cacti.” Cactuses is a correct plural. Then Noel’s voice-over complains about the “tongue-twisting title” of bella naranja. It just keeps coming. Paul and Prue go on to explain to the viewer that tacos typically contain “pico de GAL-low,” repeatedly saying “gallo” as if it is a singular of “gallows.” These are the people, let me remind you, who are being paid for their food expertise. The people who are about to judge food on the extent to which it is “authentically Mexican.” The people who can’t even say the name of the unofficial national sauce of Mexico. But in case you were worried that this buffoonery calls into question the whole premise of the show, fear not — Paul “recently visited Mexico”, and Prue “enjoy[s] a tres leces [sp] cake.”
Meanwhile in the tent, the poor contestants try to make tortillas… with the undersides of mixing bowls. Because there are no tortilla presses, and the show doesn’t appear to know what a tortilla press is. “Bleh!” one contestant announces, after trying cumin, “It’s burning my mouth… Well, it’s meant to be Mexican, isn’t it?” All of them speculate on what “pick-io day galliow” could be.
If I could soapbox for a second: it’s not so much that these fuckups happen. It’s that every single one makes the final edit. 10+ hours of baking, likely 20+ hours of testimonials, and an unknown number of reshoots got turned into a 60-minute episode… and no one bothered to look up the plural(s) of “cactus” or how to pronounce the Spanish word for “chicken.” GBBO has zero Hispanic friends. We all get the history of anglicizing words like “lieutenant” and “bangle.” But it’s not fucking ideal to be evoking that history so blatantly and clumsily, not when (an estimate since Netflix doesn’t do numbers) over 70% of your audience is syndicating this show from the Americas. To paraphrase Taika Waititi: the recent increase in performers of color is great… but behind the camera, most big shows are still whiter than a Willie Nelson concert.
S13E06: Halloween Week
This was the cherry on the shit sundae. Meant to be a North American week. Yes, Halloween originated in the British Isles, but it only became a major holiday in the U.S., and all the bakes were North American. It just added to the clusterfuck to see judges Paul and Prue deducting for contestants melting the marshmallow in their s’mores, presenting the piñata as Halloween décor, and otherwise anglicizing the hell out of bakes with North American names.
The Consequences
That avocado image went viral, as did the blatant incompetence about s’mo...
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[NationStates] The North Pacific Extortion Scandal: A Story of Blackmail, Betrayal and Backpedaling
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/LambdaPhi13 on 2024-05-30 02:25:26+00:00.
Improper Classifications
Sat Apr 08, 2023 12:39 PM
This is certainly one of the events of all time.
Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlepeople of r/HobbyDrama. Please, turn off your cellphones (except if you’re using one to read this very post), grab some popcorn, and get comfortable. Today I shall weave you a tale of Discord DMs and late-night forum posts, a tale of backstabbing and backpedaling, a tale of how a nearly decade-long treaty between the two biggest regions in NationStates fell apart, and what any of that even means.
This is the tale of The North Pacific Extortion Scandal.
Preliminary: What is NationStates?
(Note: I’m going to be using a lot of acronyms here in this post, so each word with a corresponding acronym will have that acronym listed in parentheses right next to it. Don’t question it, it’s just a NationStates thing.)
After reading the title, a good portion of y’all probably thought “Wait, NationStates? That website’s still alive?” Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, it is. In fact, it’s arguably thriving - NationStates celebrated its two-decade anniversary two years ago and, as of the time I am writing this write-up, is home to 291,701 nations residing in 28,154 regions. It’s quite impressive how long it’s managed to last, really.
Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, NationStates (often called NS for short) is a political simulation web browser game created in 2002 by author Max Barry. It was initially created to promote his at-the-time newly-released book, Jennifer Government. The game offers the opportunity for users to create, and subsequently govern, their own nation. These nations can also join a region, which usually functions as a cross between a social club/group chat and a nation in its own right, with its own formal government. There are a variety of different regions that a new nation can join, with a variety of themes, from fantasy to Ancient Egypt to leftism to the United Kingdom. NationStates is also home to the World Assembly (WA), a mock United Nations divided into the General Assembly (GA) and Security Council (SC), which are roughly analogous to the real-life UNGA (except our GA can actually do shit) and UNSC, respectively. The GA generally governs things like human rights, trade, world peace, etc, while the UNSC governs geopolitical relations between nations and regions. All you need to know about the WA for this post is that two types of proposals one can pass in the SC are commendations (essentially saying that some nation or region is good) and condemnations (essentially saying that some nation or region is bad), each giving the nation or region in question a shiny new commended or condemned badge. However, both are generally considered as rewards by their recipients - especially since, beyond the aforementioned shiny badge, commendations and condemnations don’t actually do anything.
One can subdivide the NationStates community into many different sub-communities focused on different things. For instance, there is NS roleplay (or “NSRP”), in which users roleplay as their countries and interact with each other on the international stage (this itself is subdivided into roleplay taking place on the NS forums and roleplay held in a single region). The sub-community that is relevant for this particular event is what is known as “NS gameplay”, or NSGP for short, a fascinating little dumpster fire of a sub-community best watched from a distance. In order to grasp what NSGP actually is, first you need to know the following:
- All members of the World Assembly can “endorse” other members of the World Assembly that are within their own region.
- Each region has a position known as the World Assembly Delegate, occupied by the nation which has the most endorsements in that region. When the WA delegate goes to vote for or against WA resolutions, its vote has more weight than the vote of ordinary nations - while all other nations get one and only one vote, the number of votes a WA delegate gets is equivalent to the number of nations endorsing them.
- The region’s government may incorporate the WA delegate in a variety of ways. In many regions, the WA delegate is the executive leader of that region, while in others the WA delegate has no power beyond its increased WA vote weight.
- In many regions, the WA delegate has actual executive power in the region as per game mechanics, including the power to ban nations and change the region’s appearance.
Now, a very long time ago, in the ancient times known only as the Year of our Lord 2003, a couple of NS players realized something. Specifically, they realized that if they all joined the WA, rushed en masse into one region at the same time, and endorsed each other, they could topple the region’s WA delegate and seize the region for themselves, essentially conducting a coup. These lovely folks became known as invaders or, more commonly, raiders, and they made invading regions into something of a hobby. However, not all were happy with the newfound frequency of invasions. Some of these unhappy people went on to form their own groups to defend regions from raids by rushing into regions that were being raided and endorsing the native Delegate. These folks became known as “defenders,” and depending on who you’re talking to they’re either the heroic saviors of innocent regions or buzzkills who hate fun.
Expectedly, raiders and defenders became consistent rivals, nemeses even, as each faction sought to remain one step ahead of the other. This would evolve into military gameplay, often also referred to as raiding/defending (R/D), and over time, the never-ending conflict between raiders and defenders would gain significant importance in other facets of NationStates such as the World Assembly (where defenders are routinely commended and raiders condemned) and inter-regional politics. R / D is the axis upon which all of NSGP revolves around, with entire regions being dedicated to raiding and defending. Most regions involved in NSGP have regional militaries, and almost all of them care about R / D in some way. Some regions are independent, meaning they engage in both raiding and defending - whatever serves the interests of their region. NSGP is a very unique sociological beast, with its own international relations and even its own political ideologies. NSGP is also a very old beast, resting upon a very long and rich history. I could go on about how fascinating it is that this one browser game that was meant to be an ad for a book has developed its own pretend sociology, history and philosophy, but I think I’ll refrain - for now, at least.
Okay, I think we’re ready to dive into the subject of this post. Strap in, folks, and prepare to behold the absolute clusterfuck known as the North Pacific extortion scandal.
The Revelation
On Friday, April 7, 2023 at 8:39 PM UTC, a post was made on the NationStates gameplay forums that would change the world (of this very niche section of the Internet) forever.
This post was made on the official forum thread of Lone Wolves United (LWU), a major raiding organization. Before, LWU had somewhat amicable relations with the titular The North Pacific (TNP), at the time the largest active region in the game and the most powerful region in the World Assembly. TNP has a very long and storied history, spanning from almost since the first few days of NS’s existence. It’s perhaps the oldest democratic region on NationStates, where governmental officials are elected by the residents. It was famously invaded by the New Pacific Order in 2004, and in its early days experienced many notable coups - these could all be their own HobbyDrama posts (honestly, you could fill this subreddit to the brim with the amount of drama NS has spawned). TNP was also unique in that, while it usually aligned itself with defenders, it was officially independent - meaning it was also the largest independent region in the game. In fact, TNP was one of the leaders in codifying independence, being the authors of the historic document “The Independent Manifesto”, which is where the very definition of an independent region comes from. Furthermore, at the time of this scandal, TNP’s delegate had a little over 1000 endorsements, meaning that their vote was often one of the deciding votes in whether or not a resolution passes or fails. (Even now, the current official delegate has around 770 endorsements, which is a decrease from their previous power but is still a lot). To put it bluntly, TNP is a pretty big fucking deal.
Now, LWU’s post didn’t exactly bear good news. In the post, LWU announced that they were cutting relations with TNP following a stri...
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[Reality TV] You gotta be kidney me. The story of The Great Donor Show. A tale of organ donation and deception.
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-05-28 11:04:03+00:00.
Note: I used google translate to translate all the Dutch sources in this post. Apologies for any translation errors, but I have 0 talent for languages.
I was going to write about the controversies of The Great British Bake Off, but then I came across this mess. Enjoy!
Just a quick note: there are two different types of organ donation law; opt-in and opt-out. In 2007, the Netherlands had an opt-in system. It was seen as very inefficient as it did not meet the needs of patients and there was a long waiting list. Most countries in Europe have an “opt out” system vs the USA which has an “opt-in” one.
The Doctor is in: BNN. Bart de Graaf. And The Great Donor Show.
Reality tv is a diverse genre. There are reality shows about dating, marriage, survival, cake baking, carpentry, …and now, organ donation.
In 2007, BNN, a Dutch broadcaster known for its controversial programming, announced that they would be airing a show called “The Great Donor Show”. It was created by Endemol, a Dutch production company that had created a lot of popular reality tv shows, including Big Brother.
The premise of the show:
It focuses on Lisa, a 37-year-old woman dying of a brain tumour. She must decide which of three patients selected by the producers, aged between 18 and 40, should receive her kidney. Viewers can offer their opinions by SMS text message.
In the Netherlands, organ transplants are subject to strict laws, which prohibit donors from choosing who will receive their organs after their death.
However, an exemption is made in the case of kidney transplants, which can be carried out while the donor is still alive, allowing the donor to choose the beneficiary if there is some link between the two people.
The three contestants were Vincent Moolenaar, Charlotte Trieschnigg, and Esther-Clair Sasabone.
BNN claimed that they produced the show in honour of their founder, Bart de Graaf, who died after waiting seven years for a kidney donation. The show was screened on the fifth anniversary of his death. Proceeds from all the text messages would go to the Dutch Kidney Foundation.
Every-body calm down: The Backlash
The shows announcement was quickly met with both international and national outrage, from politicians, television critics, and medical professionals. Dutch embassies were flooded with complaints . Even the Dutch prime minister at the time, Jan Peter Balkenende, criticised the show, saying it would damage the reputation of the Netherlands. Some Dutch politicians even called for the program to be banned:
CDA MP Joop Atsma wants to see if BNN’s Big Donor Show can be banned.
Atsma hopes that BNN will come to repentance. "The fence is with this program of the dam. A careful medical assessment is thus passed. What are people in the program judged? - On their color? - In their gender? To their sexual orientation?”
Atsma calls Minister Ab Klink (CDA) of Health and Minister of Culture Ronald Plasterk (PvdA) Tuesday to the Question Time in the Chamber. “I want to know if we can ban the program. There is a good chance that it will go against the law. I want to explain if there is a difference in selling an organ to the highest bidder.”
Ronald Plasterk weighed in on the situation::
"The intention of the programme to get more attention for organ donation may be applaudable," said Dutch Education and Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk.
"However based on the information I now have, the programme appears to me to be inappropriate and unethical because it is a competition," said Plasterk, who is a molecular biologist and former chief of the Dutch Cancer Institute.
In the end, the government announced that they wouldn’t ban the program, because there was no basis under the law for them to do so.
BNN’s then chairman, Laurens Drillich, defended the show and explained why they were airing it:
"The chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33%,"…"This is much higher than that for people on a waiting list."
"We think that is disastrous, so we are acting in a shocking way to bring attention to this problem."
He later added that in the five years since Bart De Graaf had died, the situation had gotten much, much, worse.
BNN invited Ab Klink to come onto the show and discuss what the government had done to solve the crisis. But he turned them down. In a poll conducted before the show aired, it was found that 61% of the Dutch population disapproved of the show. Interestingly enough, younger people approved of it much more than older people (44% of under 25s said they would watch it vs 13% of over 65s).
The Dutch Kidney Foundation welcomed the attention that the show had brought to the organ donor issue in the Netherlands, but said that “"their way of doing it is not ours, and it will bring no practical solution". However, the negative attention the show received, made them reach out and ask BNN to stop using their logo in the title of the show. BNN had not asked them for permission and had gone ahead and used their 2007 logo to replace the “o” in the word “show”.
The show aired on the first of June 2007. At the beginning of the broadcast, the presenter, Patrick Lodiers, highlighted the dramatic criticism the show had received, and at the end, he announced that the whole thing was a hoax.
If the vote had been real, then Charlotte would’ve won with 38% of the vote:
In the end, it was the most vulnerable of the three who made the biggest impression.
Twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte talked about the fact that she cannot even drink more than a pint of liquid per day, because that is all her body can handle.
Some 38% of those text messages were votes for Charlotte. However, just as "Lisa" started to announce who she was going to give her kidney to, the presenter intervened.
(Note: it is very difficult to find surviving clips of the program. It is considered lost media. I was able to find this clip on YouTube, as well as the ones linked above, but that’s it.)
It takes some guts: Donation and deception.
It was revealed that Lisa was an actress, but that the three contestants were all real patients in need of a kidney donation. They knew what was going on and agreed to appear on the program to highlight the organ donation issue in the Netherlands.
The reveal had a mixed reception. Ronald Plasterk thought the show was a “fantastic stunt” and that it had inspired him to become an organ donor. He was very happy that it wasn’t real. The then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, was also relieved. Ab Klink still though the show was “inappropriate”, but he did find it positive that it had drawn attention to the issue of organ donations. Joop Atsma refused to change his stance, he continued to find ...
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-27 04:02:36+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.
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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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RadioRavenRide on 2024-05-20 18:16:50+00:00.
If you’ve been around this subreddit for a while, you might be aware of Genshin Impact, an open-world Action RPG developed by Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo). However, the actual core gameplay of this game is not as important to this post as it is to others. Instead, the game’s gacha aspect and how it doles out its rewards is what is important here. If you know what gacha games are, feel free to skip this next paragraph.
Gacha games are free-to-play games that, instead of base pricing, battle passes, or direct microtransactions, base most of their revenue around the gacha, a randomized lottery system where you exchange some premium currency for the chance to get what you want. If you, say, wanted to get Jeanne D’Arc Alter in the game Fate/Grand Order, you would put premium currency (Saint Quartz) into her banner (special pool of characters and items). This submission then corresponds to a certain number of pulls, each of which has a set chance to get the character you want, and usually a larger chance to get characters and items of lower rarity. Additionally, many games have a “pity” system, which guarantees that you will get the character or item you are trying to pull for within a certain (usually large) number of pulls. Got all that? The key thing to understand is that while you can pay to get premium currency, this premium currency can also be gained “for free” through normal gameplay. This is the social contract between players and gacha game developers: have fair rates and generous rewards (preferably in that premium currency), and players will stick around to pay and play.
When it comes to Genshin Impact, this social contract between player and developer can be strained. Few would dispute Genshin’s overall quality: its story, exploration, characters, and general production values are through the roof compared to other gacha games and most games you can play for free on a phone.
However, the gacha system itself is considered to be quite strict: each pull on a limited banner has a 0.6% to summon the limited 5 star character. As such, many players will have to rely on the pity system to reliably acquire 5 star characters. The chance to get any 5 star will increase after 75 pulls, and on your 90th pull you are guaranteed to get a 5 star unit. Key word a 5-star unit, because this guarantee comes with the caveat of the dreaded “50/50”, where there is a chance of getting a standard banner item or character instead of the limited character you actually wanted. As such, to guarantee a limited character, you have to be prepared to spend upwards of 180 pulls on their banner. This would be fine if the game gave a lot of rewards, but that isn’t entirely the case: with 160 primogems per pull, the average player usually gets about 70 pulls per patch (a 6-week content cycle).
This has led to some grumblings and even outrage in the past when players have felt that Hoyo is too stingy with rewards (see 1st anniversary drama). Nevertheless, Genshin players have generally gotten used to this treatment and kept on playing. It’s not like there would be a better game coming along anyway. (Dun dun dun)
v3.6 and a new challenger approaches
On April 26, 2023, during Genshin Impact version 3.6, HoYoVerse announced the launch of a brand new gacha game named Honkai: Star Rail (HSR). Unlike Genshin, which is an open-world RPG with exploration as a key mechanic, HSR is a turn-based RPG without exploration that focuses more on combat.
From the instant its servers opened, HSR was compared to Genshin. Some of this was deliberate, as the two games are by the same developer and share many design elements:
- anime art style
- legacy “expy” characters like Bronya, Raiden Mei, Seele
- gacha (obviously)
- same gacha system (160 currency per pull, 90 hard pity, 50/50 mechanic)
- gear based on RNG
- and so on…
Both players and content creators gave HSR a go, both because of it being a new game by the same company, but also because of a phenomenon in Genshin’s yearly content cycle known as the “dry patches”. As mentioned before, Genshin releases its content in the form of 6-week-long patches, which contain new characters as well as events and sometimes main story content. However, the main story of Genshin is confined to Archon Quests, which only last for the first three patches of a version. This has caused many players to perceive patches released later in a version as “dry” and lacking in meaningful content. Sumeru was no exception, as the main quest wrapped in version 3.2, and by version 3.6 and the release of HSR, Genshin was in its usual lull season.
But there were also other grievances in the Genshin community at the time besides the usual complaints about dialogue or lack of endgame. Version 3.5 saw the release of Dehya, a highly anticipated character from the Sumeru Archon Quest, whose kit was generally considered underwhelming and disappointing. HoYoVerse did not respond to player requests to fix Dehya, and the main Genshin Impact subreddit blocked people’s complaints. While this could be an attempt to avoid spam, blocking all discussion of Dehya’s flawed gameplay resulted in even more anger among Dehya mains. While one could argue version 3.6 had content in the form of a new exploration region and story, it was another desert region, which people were growing a bit tired of. Suffice it to say, that many Genshin players were dissatisfied with the state of their game, and were looking to find other games.
To someone who might be burning out of Genshin, HSR had many attractive elements.
- a guaranteed standard 5-star in your first 50 pulls
- more humorous writing, without the involvement of a third party like Paimon
- Simulated Universe - an actual endgame mode
- on the topic of endgame modes, HSR also has multiple endgame modes that test different characters’ strengths, but Genshin’s only endgame is the pure damage-focused Spiral Abyss
- more pulls (BUT: HSR releases more 5* characters, this will become relevant very quickly)
- auto-battle mode
- no time-gated materials
- PERMANENT EVENTS
Additionally, many of those elements listed above were not available in Genshin.
The full value of those features is a matter of personal taste, but overall, Genshin’s dry state made it easier for players to appreciate a sister game bursting with content. And so it went for several patches, with Genshin and HSR players scuffling back and forth about which game is better.
L + Ratio
In its version 1.6 Livestream, the HSR developers announced they would be giving out Dr. Ratio, the newest 5* character, for free as a thank-you gift to players for supporting the game. Importantly, this news came out of nowhere.
While a cynic might suggest that this was just a marketing tactic used to get players back in time for version 2.0, the sudden news poured gasoline on the Genshin/HSR civil war.
Infamously, unlike many of its contemporaries, Genshin has never given a 5* character for free. There has never been a standard banner selector, and while there was an early game rumor that players would obtain Kamisato Ayaka at AR42, this was misinformation that has become community layspeak for false rewards and not believing everything you hear. The closest they have ever come to that is giving out Aloy, a collab character who is widely regarded as bad and forgettable.
Moreover, Dr. Ratio was…a good unit. While some people believed he would be weak because he was free, they were quickly disproven once players were able to test him out. So not only was HSR giving out a free 5* character, but that free character was actually usable and competitive in the meta.
With that information in mind, the Genshin and HSR communities devolved into open warfare. The phrases “Genshin could never” and “Genshin is the middle child” were thrown around endlessly.
Why is Genshin Less Generous, Anyways?
There are several potential answers to this question.
Firstly, characters in Honkai Star Rail are probably cheaper to make. The game has a lot less freedom of movement, so characters have fewer moves to worry about. For example, in Genshin, characters can run, jump, glide, and swim in the overworld, but in HSR, characters can only run. Overall, this leads to characters taking less time and money to make, which then corresponds to a higher output of new characters. More rewards may be compensation for t...
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[Reality TV/Carpentry] The Chop: How a woodworking show got axed after one episode because of a contestant's tattoos
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-05-20 14:01:26+00:00.
This is my first Hobby Drama post in 8 months!. I am back with some more modern hobby drama! Usually, I write historical stuff, but wanted to change it up a bit :) Oh and prepare for lots and lots of carpentry puns!
Wood you look at that: Reality TV in the UK
When you think of reality tv, the words “trashy”, “exploitative”, “rigged”, usually come to mind. However, in the UK, another word comes to mind…
“Cozy”.
What do I mean by this?
Shows like the Great British Bake Off (GBBO), Antiques Roadshow, Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon, Great Pottery Throwdown, etc. Shows that have a calm, relaxed, atmosphere, with a genial host, where the contestants are (for the most part) kind and cordial towards one another. However, as wholesome as these shows appear on the surface, they have their fair share of controversies. Especially the GBBO, which has a whole section on Wikipedia about its numerous controversies. Everything from issues with product placement, to contestant favouritism, to unfair elimination, production woes, leak of a winner, and even accusations of “racism” aimed at its “Nationally themed weeks” (a post for another time).
All of these issues pale in comparison to the controversy I am going to cover today. Also, unlike the show I am going to discuss, the GBBO has survived every controversy that plagued it. After 13 seasons, it is still running strong.
Chop Chop Chop: What is the Chop?
Announced in June 2020, The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker, was a show unsurprisingly about carpentry. It was originally planned to air on the Sky History channel. Sky is a British broadcaster.
Here is the full description:
Hosted by comedian Lee Mack, TV Presenter Rick Edwards and Master Carpenter William Hardie, The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker sees 10 of the country’s finest carpenters gather in Epping Forest to whittle, carve and chop their way to the final, to see who will be crowned Britain’s Top Woodworker and the chance to stage their own personal exhibition at the prestigious William Morris Gallery in London.
Master Carpenter William Hardie oversees the construction of a grand and spectacular cabin in the woods, adding a new room every week, each on a different historical theme, including Nelson’s cabin on HMS Victory, a Victorian pub, a Gothic bedroom, a Georgian hunting lodge, and a 1960s’ Mad Men-inspired lounge.
It followed a standard reality show format. Every week, someone wood be eliminated until a clear winner emerged. Viewers had a lot to look forewood to. Hopefully the show would be able to carve out its own niche. Okay, enough would puns. I know you’re all on-board.
Like most British reality tv shows, The Chop had a comfortable atmosphere, with friendly presenters that would engage in ribbing with one another and the contestants. Here are some early trailers for the show: one and two. The show was filmed pre-covid lockdown.
Mack, 52, said: “It’s quite ironic that everything was filmed pre-lockdown and pre-Covid and yet most of the contestants spend most of the time with a mask on, because it’s woodwork.
“So people will watch it and go: ‘Well they’re obeying the rules but Rick and Will aren’t’, but actually it was filmed a long time ago – this time last year.”
So, the winner was set in wood, long before the first episode aired. If you want to know more about the contestants, I found their official show biographies.
The focus of this writeup will be a guy named Darren:
Name: Darren
Age: 40
From: Bristol
Occupation: Carpenter/Joiner
Background: Darren has been working in woodwork since he left school, he loves the variety that each day brings. Darren has two children and loves building them wooden items. His favourites were special beds and wardrobes he made for his children which included LED lights.
Meet Darren: Aka “The Woodsman”, Aka “the-Bloke-With-All-The-Tattoos”.
Early on, out of all the contestants, Darren was hyped up as a potential audience favourite:
It remains to be seen which of the contestants, seven men and three women, will become the viewers’ favourite, although Darren, a furniture maker from Bristol, is an early frontrunner.
Nicknamed ‘The Woodman’, his entire face is covered in tattoos and he’s not averse to making controversial statements.
‘He’s quite a character,’ says Lee. ‘We met him again at a photo shoot recently and he’d had more tattoos etched on top of his other tattoos, which I thought showed an incredible level of commitment to the cause.’
His tattoos became a key part of his marketing for the show. This was reflected in his character trailers, as well as in interviews about the show.
Darren is probably one of the show’s most striking characters, due to the fact he is very heavily tattooed – even on his head and face.
He started having his head and face tattooed around 10 years ago.
“I had other tattoos already,” he said.
“But about 10 years ago I saw someone with facial tattoos and started to work with my tattooist on my look.
“I have my daughter on the back of my head and my son on my cheek.
“When some people first meet me they are a bit shocked, admittedly.
“But they soon warm to me after a few minutes.
“Some people ask for selfies with me. I’ve never had a negative reaction to my tattoos. They are just me.”
Darren says his appearance on the show, since the trailers have gone out, has prompted people to recognise him.
“I’ve already been stopped by people who have seen the adverts.
“No one went on the show to become famous.
“But hopefully it will come across on the show that I’m a bit of a character.
There was another difference between Darren and the other contestants: he had prior experience with reality tv.
In 2007, Darren (without any tattoos) starred in “Dumped”, a show in which 11 contestants lived in a garbage dump for three weeks, in a shelter they constructed from discarded rubbish.
Darren quit after three days. He said he did it because he didn’t believe in the aims of the show
Not all the participants were convinced. Darren Lumsden, 27, owns four cars, only recycles because his rubbish would not be taken away otherwise, and throws away his pants and socks at the end of every day. He left the dump on day three. "With me it's a bit like the smoking ban – I'll only be green if I'm forced to be." Lumsden also says rumours that some local authorities only recycle half of what goes into their green bins reduce the incentive.
He also told fellow contestants: “I don't believe that what we are going to do is going to achieve anything. If I don't believe in it I won't be doing any good for myself or other people.”.
Well, he certainly achieved something with his next reality tv appearance…
On the chopping block. The controversy
The first episode of The Chop aired on October 15, 2020. Shortly afterwards, some viewers noticed certain...things about Darren’s tattoos. Certain numbers and symbols…were linked to white supremacy.
“Darren appears to have these two on his face 88 = HH = Heil Hitler 23/16 = WP = White Supremacy There's also: 18 = AH = Adolf Hitler 1488: a reference to the so-called 14 words, coined by white supremacist terrorist David Lane.”
Darren also had a sig rune on his nose…the SS symbol used by the Nazis.
Sky History was criticised by historians and antisemitism groups.
After the trailer for the programme was aired, historian Dr Elizabeth Boyle from Maynooth University in Ireland said she had seen "at least five recognised Nazi/white power tattoos".
The Campaign Against Antisemitism group also criticised Sky History, saying it had ma...
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-20 04:02:24+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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
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[Music] Emilie Autumn's Asylum, pt. 6 – High-concept musician responds to online criticism by waging successful attrition war against her own fanbase
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-05-19 11:18:16+00:00.
Welcome back to the Asylum write-up, where we explore the decade-long slow-motion car crash that is the Emilie Autumn fandom.
Sorry this installment took so long to upload! Just a heads-up, I may take some time to deliver the last one too – these posts take forever to format on Reddit's finicky-ass editor, and my dumb real life is currently keeping me from precious Internet time. Thank you for your patience! You have my word that everyone who pre-ordered the final installment will receive a PERSONAL, HANDWRITTEN letter autographed and illustrated by me, a list of the snacks I consumed while composing this write-up, some exclusive behind-the-scenes secrets, and a pony.
Places, everyone
This is a test
Throw your stones
Do your damage
Your worst, and your best
(...) And if I had a dollar
For every time
I repented the sin
And commit the same crime
I'd be sitting on top of the world today
Quick recap of where we left off. First, there were five to ten halcyon years of pleasant and meaningful interactions between EA and her blossoming fanbase, prominently by way of her official forum. Then, circa 2009-2010, EA's online presence shifted towards sudden anger outbursts, ban-hammering, and an increasingly top-down communication style.
This created a sort of primordial rift within the fanbase, between those who supported EA's right to speak her mind and regulate her own fan spaces however she pleased – and those who thought that her reactions were rude and inappropriate (at best), and that even fan spaces should allow for reasonable, non-abusive criticism of the artist.
Between a poorly-handled book release (see Part 3), the controversial (Part 2) or dubiously true (Part 4) contents of said book, and serious shade from various former collaborators (Part 5), more and more fans had pressing thoughts about EA's work ethic and choices. EA attempted damage control through drastic forum rules that made it virtually impossible to voice any “serious” critical opinion. It didn't work, of course: instead of squashing the mutiny, she created a schism.
Critical fans and active haters started congregating on unofficial platforms.
“WITH MUFFINS LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?”: TROLL LIKE A GIRL
So here we were, the early 2010s. The official forum (which had about 700 members in 2006, if you recall) was now thousands-strong, reaching just over 12,000 registered users in 2012 – not all of them active, but still. In terms of sheer numbers and content creation, the party was POPPIN'... but increasingly in parts of the Asylum that escaped EA's jurisdiction, such as Tumblr, where they could speak their mind freely.
You play the victim very well
You've built your self-indulgent hell
You wanted someone to understand you
Well, be careful what you wish for, because I do
In one wing of Asylum Tumblr, a smattering of call-out blogs emerged, which laid out EA's various lies, faux pas, shitty takes, and general deep-seated terribleness in detailed timelines and screenshots (or, short of that, long-winded bullet points). While many such blogs framed it as “serious” whistleblowing and did their best to remain as fact-based and neutral as they could, there was some genuine disgust, animosity and creepiness towards EA on that side of Tumblr; for some ex-fans, “exposing the truth” was mostly justify obsessive hatred, prying and verbal abuse. Some, for instance, felt the bizarre need to side with EA's mother in their estrangement. (One user, with the URL “emilyautumnfischkopf”, argued in a serious and down-to-earth tone - but with zero sources - that EA's upbringing had been nothing but peaceful and supportive until she ungratefully kicked her loving family to the curb for no reason at all. They were later revealed 🔍 to have an alternate handle as “eaisalyingcunt”.)
Either way, through these blogs, a number of potential drama bombs that had mostly flown under the radar were dredged up from over the years – some of which were hard to ignore, even for supportive fans. Where to begin?
There was that nonsense in-joke song, captured twice on camera during the 2009 tour (to very little outrage, at the time), crassly called “Manatee Retard”📺. Or EA's scathing response, in print, to a wheelchair user who found it insensitive that she used a bedazzled wheelchair as a prop to do sexy acrobatics on stage. (“Your offence taken at my hard-won self-acceptance proves that I indeed have something to fight against”, she wrote). Spoken word tracks where she made trivializing knock-knock jokes about serious mental illnesses she didn't have, like schizophrenia and OCD. Multiple instances of calling Britney Spears a “bimbo” and a “Hollywood fucked-up”, resentfully claiming that she only shaved her head because she was “hopped up on drugs” and certainly not because she was “bipolar”, a word the press liked to wield as an insult anyway. (“That's almost like calling someone a retard!” Yeah, heaven forbid.) The meanest, most distasteful paragraphs in the book. Basically everything problematic EA had ever said or written.📝 In retrospect, it had been a long time coming, but it was a lot to take in – and certainly more off-putting, even to less emotionally invested fans, than silly lies about her age and last name.
In another wing of Asylum Tumblr, some fans had had it up to here and just wanted to have fun. 🎵 If Plague Rats had learned one valuable lesson from EA, it was how to crack a joke in the face of absurd tragedy – and the general state of the EA fandom certainly warranted a few.
In 2012, Fight Like a Girl was released. After six long years, three of which had been peaceful, the Opheliac era was officially over. The new album and ensuing tour confirmed that the Asylum had entered a process of glamorous Broadway-style militarization. 🎵📺
The mood board was “Roman general meets Vegas showgirl meets Victorian street urchin”.🪞 The color palette was, to naysayers, “musty pink and rotten, stale piss yellow”. 🐀 The keyword was “REVENGE” (through the power of... self-expression! sorority! brutal assault with rusty medical implements!). The chorus of the title song had an intriguing run-on line about getting “revenge on the world, or at least 49% of the people in it” 🎵 – which seemed like an awful lot, and was widely interpreted (to cheers, boos, or uncomfortable sighs) as a misandrist jab at literally all men on Earth.
The show was essentially a demo version of the musical, in that the setlist vaguely reflected the order of events in the story – but prior reading was essential in order to get what the hell was going on on stage. This one Broadway reviewer had not perused the literature before seeing the show 🔍, and hated: the set, the choreography, the skits, the plot, the lyrics, the music, the concept. (Seriously, you should read the review. It's not even my show and I feel like quitting show business.)
Pre-show VIP encounters, now violin-free, were lorded over by EA's new manager🐀, whose official title was “Asylum Headmistress”. (Interesting choice – she sounds fun!) The swag bags were less substantial than before, and the “greet” part of the meet-and-greet was rarely more than a quick hug and photo op.
On Twitter, EA continued to embrace her “I am very badass” fronting attitude...
Often wonder if cyberbullies r aware they’re fucking w/ a girl who’s BFs w/ maker of the SAW films & is marrying a knife-throwing scorpion. ([🐀📝](https://waywardvictorianconfessions.tumblr.com/post/125384149499/of...
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/CarpathianStrawbs on 2024-05-18 05:41:28+00:00.
Original Title: [Gardening] Norfolk making seed history + How Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, one of the largest "traditionalist anti-GMO" seed distributors in the US, accidentally featured and tried to sell a Genetically Modified seed.
I'm just some hobbyist, correct me if I'm wrong. I repost now that the drama is "old", per the rules this time.
Background
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
A popular US seed company. If you would like more background see my post below.
Heirloom vs Non-Heirloom vs GMO
- Heirloom seeds are grown with the intention to isolate desirable traits across many generations in order to produce one stable inbred line of plant genetics, resulting in predictable, genetically similar offspring. This is referred to as "true to seed".
- Non-heirloom seeds are not inbred and carry a lot of variability. When two plants cross pollinate, they create a hybrid of the parents that results in offspring that express an unpredictable mix of genes.
- Genetically modified seeds are engineered using gene editing technology, sometimes with genes from unrelated sources.
GMO and Patented seeds entering the consumer gardener market
- In the consumer market, patents can be granted to plants such as roses and apples. One of the stipulations is that these plants have to be propagated asexually by cutting or (non-seed) tissue culture. This means that it is permissible to save, sell, and grow seeds from these plants (if not sterile), because the offspring are not exact genetic copies.
- Patent granting on seeds stipulates that the traits expressed cannot be the result of open pollination breeding (wind, insects). As a result, these patents are mostly applied to GMO seeds, where genes are manually influenced in a lab.
- Previously, there were absolutely no GMO seeds sold to the consumer market due to USDA/FDA restrictions. Companies fearmongering about GMOs were easily dismissed. You simply could not buy GMO seeds outside of commercial applications.
- The implications of GMO seeds, which are almost all patented, hitting the market is that the plants can cross pollinate with a non-patented plant, and pass patented genetics on to the offspring. The offspring would be the lawful IP of the company that owns the patent.
- Almost all gardeners rely on open pollination between their plants, so there is untread territory on what may happen down the line when more seeds of this nature become common place.
- Despite this, the reception of new GMO varieties like the purple tomato and glow in the dark petunia has so far been largely positive.
Purple Tomatoes
- Until now, attaining a tomato variety that was purple both inside and out and could reliably hold that genetic trait in its offspring was just out of reach for tomato enthusiasts. There have been many purple skinned varieties of tomatoes, and many that came close to having perfect anthocyanin rich insides, but a company called Norfolk was the first to make it happen through science.
The Controversy
Timeline
- After 20 years of work, biochemist Cathie Martin and her team successfully isolates the gene that codes for color in a purple snapdragon flower and integrates it into a tomato, making a first of its kind stable variety of purple fleshed tomato.
- Norfolk makes headlines for getting the first USDA approved GMO seed out to the consumer gardener market, obtaining a utility patent.
- Around the same time, Baker Creek releases a seed catalog boldly featuring a mysterious new purple fleshed tomato they called Purple Galaxy, as well as making social media posts and videos claiming it is non-GMO.
- Across social media people begin to notice the striking similarities between the new tomato and the high publicity Norfolk Purple Tomato, finding the timing strange.
Speculation
+ "I think you’re right that these look suspiciously related to Norfolk’s GMO purple tomatoes due to the unique purple flesh and also the deep purple gel. But I find it highly unlikely that these actually are related since the purple GMO event was patented and anybody trying to monetize it would be clearly open to litigation." + "It’s funny how non-gmo is a thing with home gardeners. You can’t even buy gmo seeds as a consumer."
+ "This looks shockingly similar to Baker Creek's Purple Galaxy Tomato that mysteriously disappeared from availability this year." + "Baker Creek are lying liars who lie. That whole catalog is a festival of photoshop, and then if you fall for it you'll only get about 30% germination." + "I’d be unsurprised if they are hypocrites, in addition to being wacky." + "I really suspect that whoever bred the "Purple Galaxy" variety advertised by Baker Creek somehow got some leaked germplasm from Norfolk Healthy Produce's GM breeding program. I don't doubt that it's possible for a natural mutation to pop up that makes purple tomatoes"
Baker Creek responds
- Baker Creek responds to concerns on social media:
"We have had every possible genetic test ran on these tomatoes to ensure they are Non GMO. This is a product of many years of selection work."
- Shortly after, Baker Creek abruptly halts the sale of Purple Galaxy Seeds citing unspecified "production issues". Screenshot credit: @Buckeye on growingfruit.org
- Baker Creek pulls the listing and deletes all social media posts about it, appearing to not acknowledge the tomato any further.
Norfolk responds
Norfolk releases a response to the speculation that has flooded the internet:
Is NHP's Purple Tomato related to the "Purple Galaxy"?
We have received many questions about the purple tomato marketed by Baker Creek as “Purple Galaxy” in their 2024 catalogs. We understand from Baker Creek that they will not be selling seeds of this variety. Given its remarkable similarity to our purple tomato, we prompted Baker Creek to investigate their claim that Purple Galaxy was non-GMO. We are told that laboratory testing determined that it is, in fact, bioengineered (GMO). This result supports the fact that the only reported way to produce a purple-fleshed tomato rich in anthocyanin antioxidants is with Norfolk’s patented technology. We appreciate that Baker Creek tested their material, and after discovering it was a GMO, removed it from their website.
r/Gardening reacts to Norfolk statement
Turns out the "Purple Galaxy" tomato advertised by Baker Creek was a GMO
- "Whatever your stance on GMO, I think we can all agree that companies have a legal and moral obligation to accurately represent their product to their customers."
- "Baker Creek lied and possibly ripped off another company's IP? Color me absolutely not shocked."
- "Baker Creek doesn't produce the majority of the seeds they sell, they buy them from seed farmers. But they should have known better when they saw a variety that appeared identical to a "first ever" gene edited strain in development."
- "The problem is that they [Baker Creek] lied and said they tested it for GMO several times"
- "Being that Baker Creek has in previous years jumped all over the anti-GMO fearmongering, I'm howling at the irony."
- "typical baker creek hot mess"
- "Bakers Creek lost my care or business with its shenanigans."
Norfolk goes ahead and posts the seeds for sale at $20 for 10 seeds
- Seeds, fruit and plant material are only allowed in the USA.
- The seeds are a patented variety and are sold to enjoy in your home garden and with your local community.
- No sales of fruit, seeds or plants are permitted in this agreement, including any derived varieties.
r/Gardening reacts to the patented GMO Purple Tomato seed itself
- "This is why I grow heirloom."
- "It will be interesting when people start making crosses with the trait."
- "Really cool thing about this is that anthocyanins also delay rotting, so these tomatoes are more shelf-stable, making them more environmentally friendly. Anthocyanins are also good for us (like blueberries). It’s a pretty nifty and elegant design, I’m excited to try them out."
- "Just ordered some of these, can’t wait to try them! I ho...
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96
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-13 04:02:29+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!
The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here
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[Warhammer] Laying a Minefield: How Games Workshop blundered into creating its least popular products, and why they won’t just stop selling them
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ShornVisage on 2024-05-10 20:56:00+00:00.
Man, a sort-of-hobby-history post. From me. Who’da thunk it? I’ve tried to source this up better so it won’t get removed by the mods this time, but we’ll see how it goes. And do bear in mind, since a fair bit of this is about capturing player sentiment, a lot of the sources will be ancient, dead forum threads where players ‘theorycrafted’ reasons for their outrage. Let’s get started.
What is Warhammer?
Warhammer is… a lot of things. On its most basic level, it’s a set of two tabletop war games, but on another much more real level, it’s about so much more that saying it’s about two games is unforgivably reductionist. Spanning multiple universes with common and distinct elements, Warhammer comprises four universes, five settings, a hundred series of novels and comic books and video games, several expansive repositories of lore, and a thousand micro-communities that, together, comprise one overall community that spans the globe.
But let’s not get masturbatory (leave that to Slaanesh); all of these things exist to prop up the one, central point of Warhammer: Minis for a game you play on the table. But as you fall inexorably down the pipeline towards the hobby’s tootsie center, you will hear one warning, again, again, and again: Don’t waste your hobby money on Finecast models.
Why is Warhammer so expensive?
Look, I won’t lie to you: Collecting Warhammer, whatever the setting or side game, is never cheap. But the prices aren’t arbitrary, despite popular player sentiment. It’s easy to say offhand that these little bundles of plastic are more expensive than you’d think, but let’s consider all the production that goes into a single Warhammer model for a minute. (Mostly taken from here!)
The initial phase of modern model creation is that someone has an idea. Generally, that idea gets described to an artist, who creates a 2D rendering of what they’d have the model look like. Maybe this appearance prescribes the lore, maybe the lore prescribes the appearance.
Either way, a bundle of those renderings get passed to a 3D artist who turns renderings into something they can print. Maybe they do only a handful of these for a single character model. Either way, that highly-detailed 3D sculpture gets 3D printed as a large master mini, and sent to the crew in R&D.
Because half the enjoyment of the hobby comes from assembling the models yourself, this team has to figure out the best way to break down the components into multiple parts that fit together when cut from a single-piece plastic grid, called a ‘sprue’. If there’s no way to make it work, even if you split the model bilaterally down the side, the model is rejected and sent back to the 2D guy to make some new renders.
If the model passes the ‘breakdown’, however, another 3D artist reverse-engineers the model, breaking it down into component parts as agreed, and arranges them onto a sprue file.
At this stage in production, Games Workshop, being the only industry giant able to practically afford this part, rents supercomputers to run an advanced fluid dynamics simulation on the sprue file. Since melted plastic is injected into molds during production, they need some assurance that there won’t be constant production errors where a certain pocket doesn’t fill, and that the pressure won’t build too high and cause the machines to burst scalding plastic onto factory workers. If they find out that the injection won’t work, it’s time for the breakdown crew to get cracking again, and if they’re out of ways to skin that cat, this entire process starts over from the very beginning.
However, if the sprue simulation gets the green light, the file is 3D printed to create the master sprue, which is used to create a master mold, which is used to make the molding plates for the company factories and then lovingly placed in careful storage. Wouldn’t want to waste all that work, now.
This is the kind of rigor that modern GW products need to pass to finally be sold, and in the face of covering the costs of all of that, plus the actual production of the model you bought, plus the extreme cost of shipping low-density, low-weight products possibly overseas, is $40 USD for a single dude on foot and $55 for a squad of ten dudes really so bad? I say no. ~~Although since I started updating this project to fit the subreddit rules, another price increase has been announced.~~
That is, unless something is wrong with the dude being sold on a more fundamental level.
Finally, let’s talk about Fineca- wait, shit, material history.
Like I said, that’s the modern production process. Several of those steps were impossible in, say, the 90s.
For one thing, Warhammer in the modern day is not sold primarily through a company-produced Sears catalog called White Dwarf, (although that magazine is still kicking around, amazingly) but via the internet. For another, model molds don’t have to be carved by hand by artists into green blocks, so a lot of finer detail and less awkward proportions are possible. And because less awkward proportions are possible, they’re able to use less crude materials than what they started out with.
You see, early Warhammer models were sold in White Dwarf, if not in your local hobby store, and the molds did have to be hand-carved, and so awkward proportions were the best their artists could do, so they did have to use a more basic material: Metal.
That’s right, early minis were made through a much more traditional kind of molding, not a stone’s throw away from how medieval blacksmiths made swords, where melted metal was more poured than injected into the molds and then refined in the factory, with byproducts that were punched out or shaved off the sprues getting recycled.
Upsides:
- Metal just feels higher-quality compared to plastic.
- Metal is generally more durable than plastic.
- Metal is good at holding its shape, even if a heavier bit is dangling off of a comparatively thin portion of the model.
Downsides:
- Part of that high-quality feel comes from the fact that metal is heavier, which means that it’s harder to transport, and, if you like magnetizing your miniatures’ bases, means you need larger, more expensive magnets for every model. But not too large; too strong a magnetic pull, and you could rip the mini off of its own legs.
- That durability is a bit of a joker’s trick; if you drop a metal mini, it could snap the same as plastic, same pain in the ass either way, but it’s less prone to punctures than it is to dents, which sounds better, but painting over a small hole is actually much easier than filling in a dent in a hollow object.
- Most company competitors are using some kind of plastic for their figures, and it’s harder to ‘kitbash’ different model kits together when their materials aren’t very comparable. (This was during a time when GW encouraged kitbashing, mind you)
- There aren’t really any modeling materials that are great at adhering to paint, but metal in particular isn’t very amenable to paint coating its surface, and this is a hobby about painting things. This, as you may expect, causes problems.
In other words, metal did the job just fine, but the medium was evolving by the late aughts, and Old Man GW was falling behind. With them resting on their laurels, other companies had started to leverage new tech, and profits were hitting a gulley. Then, around 2010, some overpaid fellow in R&D came across an alternative: Resin.
Enter stage left
It is very difficult to say how it happened, of course; model companies are understandably cagey about their preferred material formulas. What we do know is that GW saw resin as the upgrade it needed, and the benefits seemed pretty clear.
Upsides:
- Resin is much, much lighter than any metal. Say bye-bye to those transport problems.
- In part because it’s so light, and in part because it isn’t dug out of the ground, resin is cheaper than metal as well.
- Resin is flexile; where other materials break, it is more likely to bend, and what can be bent can be unbent.
- Resin is much nicer to paint than any metal; its surface is much smoother, and paint binds more uniformly to the surface.
- Resin is capable of a lot more theoretical accuracy in modeling. More accuracy, more detail. Who doesn’t love more detail?
So in May 2011, GW announces the switch, and it’s out with all metal production, in with the newly-dubbed Finecast Resin (So named after all that fine detail it can pull off). It should be a slam dunk, right?
Well……
What you may have noticed in that last paragraph was that I didn’t say, “Games Workshop conducted a long series of tests to ensure that Finecast was up to the task of replacing metal across the entire model line,” and that’s because they didn’t. GW already had perfectly good mold plates; why bother checking every single one for production issues? Just swap the metal with the resin pellets and start printing the money.
And the answer for that “why bother?” is that when you change from melted metal to resin, you...
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-05-10 18:28:15+00:00.
“It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say.
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵
THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”
"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you.
I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different.
So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;).
I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this).
Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots.
A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ...
(Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)
Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.
YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER
In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.
It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)
And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.
People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was.
People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)
“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”
It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provi...
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-06 06:02:36.
Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!
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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-05-05 13:23:54.
[Note to mods: I am SO SORRY to break the rules, but my comments are too formatting-heavy - Reddit keeps giving me error messages when I try to post them, splitting the length changes nothing, and the formatting (embedded links, etc) DOES NOT carry over when I copy-paste and try again. I've been at it for an hour. I decided to just make a separate post before I lose my mind - hope that's alright.]
“MIXED MEDIA AND ACRYLIC PAINT ON CANVAS”
You're so easy to read
But the book is boring me (“Misery Loves Company”, 2006 🎵)
It is June 2023. An alert pings on your Instagram. Butter my muffins – your problematic teenage fave just posted! What has she been up to?
It's been almost a full year since EA's last communiqué. She was going to do an AMA on her new blog, Stark Raving Sane. Fans would submit their burning questions, and she would select twenty of them to answer in her next post. You could fill out a form with your name and email and question. Clearly, she didn't like some of the questions.
(Since then, the one interesting that's happened in the Asylum was when EA was listed as the opening act for one single Maroon 5 show in the Netherlands 📝, but that turned out to be – most likely – a Spotify glitch.)
You tap the notification to check out EA's comeback post. The caption reads:
Introducing 'My Heart Is A Weapon Of War,' and I painted her and I love her. Medium: Mixed media - digital (Procreate, Maya 3D Sculpting) and acrylic paint on canvas.” 🪞📝
The art style is yassified-oil-portrait-realistic, unlike anything EA has ever drawn or painted before.🪞 It's a pastel-colored portrait of a button-nosed, elven-faced woman shaped like a Rococo centerpiece. She's got an ethereal smile, a sheer pink heart on her cheek, flowers in her towering hair, and rockin' anime titties. The gold lamé of her skin-tight top blends with her actual skin at the neck, and her arms are non-existent.
You rub your eyes. This surely isn't... no. She can't possibly be serious.People in the comments are trying to be diplomatic:
EA, I've always loved and defended you, but this is clearly AI.
EA does not respond to the diplomatic people in the comments. Instead, she posts another portrait of a diaphanous woman with a cheek-heart and a weirdly levitating necklace. In another post:
Oh, if anyone is curious about my general process, I'm happy to share, as I'd love to see other artists try it. It is thus: I start in Procreate with an Apple pencil, move over to Maya/Zbrush and do some 3D sculpting and lighting to flesh things out and create otherworldly elements in incredible detail, go back to Procreate and... 📝
Commenters are now having mostly civilized back-and-forths over the ethical implications of AI. Many hope EA is reading, wondering if she is aware of those issues. Many say everything would probably be fine if EA would just admit to using AI.
EA admits to nothing and apologizes to no one. No: EA posts more art, in a slightly different, less generic style, that still looks nothing like her own. “Digital painting”, she maintains. Many are imploring EA to please end this charade and stop insulting her fans' intelligence. But then again, some fans are defending her (“She literally just explained that it was digital painting!”), so maybe she's right to do it...?
EA posts a picture of a “buried treasure” that she just randomly chanced upon – a pencil drawing from her teens, once posted on her website in the early 2000s. (It's the one I linked to earlier – the one with the “EAF” signature, and the false age, and the fire reference. Yes, this is the context in which she was posting that.) She's posting it, à propos nothing, because she literally just noticed that she still draws eyebrows the exact same way to this day! In fact, you can clearly, definitely, unmistakably see a very similar eyebrow shape in her most recent art! See?
People are gobsmacked, and dragging her to filth. Desperate loyalists are gently pressing EA to please just post a Procreate timelapse of one of her new “digital paintings”, so that people will stop calling her a fraud.
EA is happy to oblige, and posts a mini-timelapse 📺📝 of what looks like color splotches and blurs being removed from the top layer of a finished piece with the eraser tool.
I'm shriveling with second-hand embarrassment on her behalf. How is she not mortified...? 🐀
EA keeps posting. More generic AI girlies with pale skin and sad eyes, more abstract sploshes that she calls her “morning pages”, but also more Asylum member-berries (“...the original Unlaced violin part... someone please learn this!” 📝) – and more of the massive, medical-themed mixed-media sculptures that she started making the year before, even presenting a few pieces at Art Basel 2022. The difference in style is obvious to everyone but her.
She ignores the peasants screeching about AI, won't even deign address the existence of such a thing; it's all EA, OK? OK. She makes it look easy, because it is to her:
4 hours start to finish in Procreate only with Apple pencil. Did you know that [the art for a card deck she released in 2019] was the first thing I drew on an iPad, because I was recovering from a disastrous TMJ jaw surgery and my face was bandaged and I couldn't get out of bed? I didn't either until just now. 📝
...Because... because you just made it up...??
People are going full tinfoil hat now – she has to be doing this on purpose, right? She just has to.
I can’t help but find it extremely suspicious that she came back after a year of inactivity just to drop the very obviously AI-generated art pieces, refuse to forwardly acknowledge the controversy, and then immediately move on to posting a bunch of artwork that is very clearly hers. A part of me is genuinely convinced that this is some sort of publicity stunt... 🐀
What other explanation could there be to this madness?
Not everyone loves the modern art sculptures, but those are definitely her work. Some of them really have The Vibe. About a piece entitled “Manic Phase” 📺📝:
This is (...) a blueprint of brain activity during a very... interesting period. Just one of many over several years, until a very particular combination of chemicals conspired to bury them just below the surface (...) Every single day, right now, I am afraid of going back there.
Hoop, there it is. Girl... you just spent days covering every inch of a canvas the size of a patio table with spirals of text from your decade-old journals written in minuscule all-caps, after a disastrous three-week bender of trying to pass off obvious AI art as your own. Is it perhaps possible that you may be “there” already...?
The more art EA posts, the angrier people get, and the harder she doubles down. Some AI pieces are accompanied by lengthy blog posts where she elaborates on their meanings. Mostly old Asylum talking points and metaphysical ramblings (that, in some cases, only seem loosely related to the art), but also some concerning news... and another spoonful of denial for the road:
Biscuits has no tits and neither do I at present. I’ve lost them, along with my arse, and most of my muscle mass, because that’s what happens when you’ve got an auto-immune issue and it hurts to eat because your body is attacking itself. (I never say auto-immune “disease” because it’s an ugly brown and I don’t like the way the “s” that is really a “z” feels in my mouth, and it also sounds unnecessarily dramatic and that embarrasses me). I prefer not to talk about this. With anyone. I will fix it. I am fixing it. And I will be able to sing and dance. And that is all.” (“Biscuits” - Blog entry 📝)
...Well shit.
Despite her track record and the context of this disclosure, not many fans accuse EA of malingering (well, okay, some are really pissed and they do 🐀). An auto-immune disease does line up with things she has mentioned in passing for years (bad blood-works, diet restrictions, hospital visits...) – and she did look so thin in those Art Basel pictures that some people accused her covertly creating thinspo.
In light of this, some fans choose to cut EA some slack, or at least temper their disappointment with [earnest sympathy...
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