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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ICanLegoThat on 2025-01-30 14:58:12+00:00.

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The LEGO company has had a pacifist vibe from the start: the LEGO name is a shortening of the Danish words “Leg Godt,” meaning “play well”. Co-founder Godtfred Kristiansen said of their company: “Our idea has been to create a toy that prepares the child for life – appealing to its imagination and developing the creative urge and joy of creation that are the driving forces in every human being.”

Nutshell geopolitical history: Denmark enters WWII as a neutral country, becomes a protectorate of Germany, ends up under full military occupation until the Allied victory. Ole Kirk Christiansen, the Danish carpenter who founded The LEGO Group, lives through the Nazi occupation and serves as a local resistance leader in Billund, and marks the end of the war with the production of a wooden toy pistol, the Halvautomatisk Legetöjspistol (‘Semiautomatic Play Pistol”), aka Fredspistol (“Peace Pistol”) — the company’s first toy-specific patent.

In 1947, the company purchased a plastic injection moulding machine and evolved into plastic toys, including a self-loading, rapid-firing toy pistol. The gun was produced in 1949 and became one of the LEGO company's biggest sellers in the years just after the War.

LEGO was introduced in the USA in 1962, just as the Vietnam War was escalating and the nation’s appetite for violence was waning. As a result, LEGO avoided militaristic themes and even avoided producing parts in "drab green” (excluding trees and baseplates), to make it more difficult to build army vehicles.

Instead, LEGO marketed its bricks to the next generation of artists, designers, and architects. A 1966 LEGO ad shouts the word “Peace” above an image of a child’s creations: “There is, in this nervous world, one toy that does not shoot or go boom or bang or rat-a-tat-tat. Its name is LEGO. It makes things.”

In a 1978 set (#375-2 Castle, aka the famed “Yellow Castle”), LEGO debuted its first weapons: a sword, halberd, and lance. In 1989, the Pirates theme introduced guns and cannons. In 1995, the Aquazone theme brought harpoons and knives. In 1996, the Wild West theme added rifles and revolvers.

But the doors blew open in 1999, when LEGO won the Star Wars franchise, adding lightsabers and blasters to the arsenal. The Star Wars theme launched a trend of licensed LEGO franchise products and the number of weapons has only grown across the Indiana Jones, Marvel, Batman, and Lord of the Rings themes, among others.

As minifigure weapons have proliferated, the minifigures themselves have been getting angrier: in 2013, researchers at New Zealand's University of Canterbury examined 3,655 LEGO figure faces manufactured between 1975 and 2010 and found “the trend is for an increasing proportion of angry faces, with a concomitant reduction in happy faces.” The happy/angry balance has slowly been moving away from the former, and towards the latter.

Three years later, in 2016, the University of Canterbury dove back into the LEGO bin with another study on weapons and concluded the proportion of sets that included weapons increased by an average of 7.6 percent annually, ever since the Yellow Castle broke ground in 1978. There was an average 11.7 percent increase of “nonverbal psychological aggression” which included perceived instances of “forcing, subjection … intimidation, violating one’s human rights … and scorning gestures.” Around 40% of all LEGO catalog pages contained some type of violence, while 30% of currently-available LEGO sets included at least one weapon piece.

LEGO has countered criticism by making a distinction between conflict and violence. Amanda Santorum, a brand manager at LEGO: “We do not make products that promote or encourage violence. Weapon-like elements in a LEGO set are part of a fantasy/imaginary setting, and not a realistic daily-life scenario.”

In a 2010 report, the company stated:

”The basic aim is to avoid realistic weapons and military equipment that children may recognize from hot spots around the world and to refrain from showing violent or frightening situations when communicating about LEGO products. At the same time, the purpose is for the LEGO brand not to be associated with issues that glorify conflicts and unethical or harmful behavior. We have a strict policy regarding military models, and therefore, we do not produce tanks, helicopters, etc. While we always support the men and women who serve their country, we prefer to keep the play experiences we provide for children in the realm of fantasy.”

But there have been mis-steps. In 2020, LEGO released a set for the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft used by the American and Japanese militaries, with no non-military variants. The release earned protests from the German Peace Society – United War Resisters (DFG-VK), a 130-year-old anti-war group. The DFG-VK launched a petition and issued a press release, citing the V-22 Osprey’s involvement in Middle East conflicts, and even quoted the LEGO company’s own 2010 report to highlight its hypocrisy.

The LEGO company pulled the Osprey from inventory. In a press release, LEGO explained:

“The LEGO Technic Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey was designed to highlight the important role the aircraft plays in search and rescue efforts. While the set clearly depicts how a rescue version of the plane might look, the aircraft is only used by the military. We have a long-standing policy not to create sets which feature real military vehicles, so it has been decided not to proceed with the launch of this product. We appreciate that some fans who were looking forward to this set may be disappointed, but we believe it’s important to ensure that we uphold our brand values.”

The V-22 Osprey became a collector’s item overnight, with listings as high as $1,000 for a set that would’ve retailed at around $120.

LEGO blog The Brothers Brick noticed the LEGO company’s position on military depictions isn’t so cut-and-dry. Years earlier, in 2014, the LEGO Creator line produced vehicles that mimic the Apache helicopter and even the V-22 Osprey itself — albeit with bright cheery colors.

And don’t forget the Indiana Jones line, which includes depictions of WWII-era military vehicles — including a Nazi flying wing bomber and a Pilatus P-2 with markings for the Luftwaffe.

Officially, LEGO has never produced a military-themed set, with two exceptions: the Star Wars line (which has militaristic elements), and the green Toy Story soldiers.

To fill the gap in the market, LEGO fan conventions have evolved into one-half artistic showcase, one-half black market arms bazaar, in which vendors offer minifigure-scale weapons, decals, accessories, and custom, brick-by-brick military-themed models spanning multiple eras, regions, and wars (the company’s “no drab green” policy is long-gone; LEGO comes in every color under the sun). The LEGO company does not endorse these products or their ideology, but tolerates the practice (with stipulations).

LEGO generally turns a blind eye, until it can’t. In 2020, amid ongoing protests following the death in police custody of George Floyd. LEGO requested the removal of more than 30 police-themed products, including the City Police Station, Fire Station, Police Dog Unit, Patrol Car, Fire Plane, Mobile Command Center, Police Highway Arrest — even the LEGO City Donut Shop Opening set and the LEGO Creator version of the White House.

LEGO is what it always has been: whatever the builder wants it to be. If you want a peaceful experience, you’ll find it (I recommend the botanical line).

But if you want LEGO to shoot or go boom or bang or rat-a-tat-tat, don’t worry — you’ve got options.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Ataraxidermist on 2025-01-28 17:51:26+00:00.

Original Title: [Videogame community and modders – Team Fortress 2] How to foster and nurture a beautiful mess of a community with lots of creative (if utterly bonkers) minds, only to slowly strangle it to death yet fail to kill it.

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Hello wonderful people, fancy seeing you here. Don't stay out, it's cold and snowy. Get in and don't worry if you don't know a thing about video games, I will walk you through the important aspects and terms, because the current Zeitgeist is inclusion and I make sure to include the noobs, the limited net-worths and the clinically insane. Incidentally, this game happens to be played a lot by these three populaces.

Don't mind the weirdos dancing. It's better that way. They usually are a lot more lively, you would have had to dodge a number of rockets to get here.

It's windy, I know, we keep all of our doors unlocked and open at all times here in Doublecross. Come to think of it, I wonder why. Our documents may be safer behind locked door, I'm pretty sure the other team has no lockpick at hand. Come, let's walk, it will keep you warm.

Ignore the pyro. He... she? They do whatever it is they do.

That briefcase over there? It's nothing, merely our top-secret documents, allegedly. Don't tell the other team, but we write random stuff on papers and stuff them in there. I'm not even sure there are real secrets in the briefcase, but no matter. Mark my words, one of these days, we'll get the other team's briefcase, and then they will be sad because we won.

I too write random things to stuff inside the briefcase. Look at this, I wrote about the history of MannCo's mother company Valve and some of the struggles it went through with this game of ours. Want to have a look?

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Turning valves and gathering steam

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Our senseless and thus essential story starts with a context, and the context starts with a man: Gabe Newell. Or Gaben, for those who must reduce two words into one for better focus on playing a videogame and get wrecked by twelve years old hyperactive children who, if their words are to be believed, have done unspeakable things to my mother.

Gabe Newell makes a step into the world and decides he would work on videogames and for that, he would create a firm with nothing but his two hands, courage, and millions in a truck full of cash he got from working at Microsoft for 13 years. During this time, he was producer of the first three versions of Windows, and perhaps more importantly for us, spearheaded a team to port a game on windows to prove it was a game-worthy platform. That game was Doom, released in 1993 and who would leave an eternal mark on culture at large.

Gabe was impressed how a small team of Nerds managed to create a software that sold more copies than Microsoft had with windows, and Microsoft was already employing hundreds at the time versus the dozen or so who worked on Doom.

Sensing opportunity, Gabe followed the 90's vibe to throw everything away and sink your savings into start-ups. Convinced games were the future of entertaining, Gabe and another former Microsoft employee, Mike Harrington, decided they were wealthy and connected enough to create Valve in 1996. And thus the legend, the myth, is born.

Aware start-ups had a tendency to fail fast, Gabe didn't expect much success. He and Mike were not game designers, they did ports and worked on windows but had little experience on how to actually create a game from scratch. One mediocre game and the studio would be done, that's what they expected.

FPS, an acronym which stands for first-person shooter, is per Wikipedia a genre centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. When doom came out some years back, everyone wanted a piece of FPS, and the genre was evolving fast alongside videogame in general, a young media in full swing. Compare Doom, which came out in 1993, and Quake 2 in 1997. The technological gap is huge, but the design gap? Tiny. It's fast, brutal, and often boils down to corridors and bad things to shoot at without much in terms of story.

And in 1998, Valve gave us Half-life.

Take a look at the first few minutes. No shooting, no... nothing in fact. Just a loooooooooooooong train ride, then a short tour of the facility, until you can finally don the suit and the action start. The action ended up frantic and brutal, as was fit for a FPS at the time. But for a change, the game went out of its way to tell a story, it took time to immerse you into the underground complex of Black Mesa. Instead of short cutscenes that took you out of character, the entire game was spent without leaving Gordon Freeman's point of view. The designers used tricks like unbreakable windows to have you witness events (like this - warning, pixelated 1998 violence) to allow for a form of cutscenes without breaking immersion. The game would bring in about $75,714,289.92.

I could go on, but my focus is another game. If you wish for more information about Half-Life (and Drama surrounding its creation), Valve released a video for the 25th anniversary of the game to give an insight. This article also goes into detail about production and why the design decisions made the game legendary.

Eh... where's that bloody other paper... Hey! I'm talking here, don't get distracted by the others!

The expected "mediocre game" made Valve a household name, and they wouldn't stop there. Half-Life 2 in 2004 would use the improving computer capabilities to bring us the gravity gun, which allowed to make proper use of physics. Portal in 2007 was a puzzle game played in first person, the main feature was the aptly named portal gun allowing you to shoot one entry and one exit portal on flat surfaces, which allowed for creative solutions and outside the box thinking, assorted with the usual hitting your head against the table until you finally found the trick and thought to yourself that was easy, why didn't I notice it right away?

Valve would also go on to create Steam in 2003. Originally meant to facilitate updates for their multiplayer game Counter-Strike, yet another resounding success, Steam would go on to become a platform to sell games, Valve or non-Valve. They were virtually alone as a dematerialised seller for a loooooooooooong time, while physical shelves in shops were slowly losing ground to the internet and always faster download speeds. This fatally gave Steam a monopoly. Monopoly that is often decried, and gave way to anti-trust questions and lawsuits.

That's Valve. High quality games, lots of thoughts in them, also an insane time working on them to the point the term "Valve time" has been coined. It defines the huge discrepancy between a game announcement and the final release, or the total absence of communication and public wonder if they are even doing something over there at Valve. Which meshes well with a huge number of fans awaiting the next video game grail. Just ask "Half-Life 3, when?" aloud and you can start counting the number of tears (18.230 on average), strokes (23 on average), Molotov cocktails thrown and crises of faith (both impossible to count). Here's a chart showing off in greater detail the Valve times as they happened, we will encounter a few as we go on.

Now follow me through the corridor, don't mind the turrets. I thought it would be a hilar...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Kindryte on 2025-01-27 19:47:27+00:00.

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Flight rising is a pet sim website where you grow your clan of dragons, breed them, dress them, give them pets and make them fight. It's a site where staff has claimed they want 'everyone to be able to get their ultimate, dream dragon someday'. There's many diffrent breeds of dragon one can obtain, in many shapes and sizes.

This is the story of the time the community asked for something, and staff complied.

"Can we have more dragons?"

Flight rising is a pet sim where you get MULTIPLE updates each month, and...not a whole lot of those involve lore developments or new dragon breeds. In 2019, staff came up with a solution: ancient breeds.

Ancient dragons were dragon breeds that in lore have either been completely seperated from their more modern counterparts, forgotten, almost completely wiped out or a combination of all three of those. They came with a neat little bit of lore to add some flair to the site and made it so that staff could create new dragons more often.

How are ancient dragons more easy to create than moderns? Well for starters the artists don't have to draw all that pesky apparel on them. Flight rising has THOUSANDS of pieces of apparel, so it saves a lot of time to just have dragons that can't wear any. It also creates an interesting opportunity for staff; they don't have to follow the rules set in place by the modern dragons.

Modern dragons NEED to have a single pair of legs, a single pair of arms, a single pair of wings and a single head and tail. They need that so that they can wear every single piece of apparel possible without any complications. Ancients, however, do not get to wear apparel, so they don't need to follow those rules. You can have a two-headed dragon, a sea-serpent, a dragon with EXTRA limbs; the sky was supposedly the limit!

Sure, the first ancient released still followed the 'one pair of arms, one pair of legs, one pair of wings and one head and tail' rule, but surely this isn't foreshadowing anything, right?

"Can we have ancients that actually LOOK like ancients?"

To staff's credit, the next ancient released was a wyvern; no arms, so it broke the rules modern dragons had to follow~! The community let out a sigh of relief; seems like the first ancient release had just followed the rules by coincidence.

Except it wouldn't be the last time it happened.

From the 10 current ancient breeds, half follow the rules of modern dragons- six if you count the one where the extra body part is not even noticeable due to the poses staff put those dragons in. Sure, we got a wyvern, sure, we got a really neat 2-headed dragon and SURE we got a sea serpent, but most ancients still look like they could've been modern dragons. It got so bad that when a new modern breed was released people occasionally forgot it wasn't an ancient because it had 'ancient vibes'.

Due to this, more and more people began to post in the forums about how they hoped for more ancients that would actually LOOK like ancients and clearly break the rules modern breeds had to follow.

"Can we have more breeds that aren't slender?"

As people began to pay closer attention to the dragons released, they also noticed that most of them had a very similar build, with slender bodies and longer faces. There were really only three breeds that were more bulky or fat. People began to wonder if staff ever would release a new 'fat' or 'bulky' dragon, but there clearly were people who wanted it- the many forum topics about it were proof of that.

"Can we have new dragons for these neglected flights?"

Flight rising has 11 flights, each with their own territory, god and native dragon breeds. Of those flights, two of them have not gotten new breeds since the launch of the site in 2013. The flight we're going to focus on in this post is the light flight.

Light is canonically the flight that focuses on knowledge, uncovering the truth and learning more about the world. They have two native breeds, which were there since the launch of the site. So obviously, players who chose that flight have been a little salty about how literally everyone else got a new breed or two and some more lore while they got nothing. Staff announced that the next new ancient would be either the other neglected flight or light, and after some teasers it became very clear it would be light.

Wish granted

When the announcement post was made, it was revealed that staff had listened to what the community had wanted from a new ancient: The Everlux

It was a fat little bookwyrm-like creature, with many legs and lore that fit in very nicely with the light flight's hunger for knowledge, the dragons in question essentially serving as ancient librarians that were driven out of their homes by a rampaging beast, desperate to protect the tomes they had been guarding for centuries.

People rejoiced, hugs were given and everyone seemed to generally speaking be happy that they got everything the community had been asking for for years.

...Well... everyone except for...

Clutching pearls

Remember how I said the light flight had two breeds before the introduction of the Everlux? Well, I want to touch on pearlcatchers, who in lore generally act as entitled, elitist snobs and walk around clutching a giant pearl.

Turns out, a lot of users have a LOT in common with pearlcatchers, as many were genuinly angry at how Everlux looked. Threads expressing dissapointment or anger popped up left and right, the most popular one gaining tens of pages worth of discussion, which ranged from genuine criticism to fatphobia, entitlement and even arguments rooted in real life religion. It got to a point that a staff member had to jump in, remind everyone that flight rising was a fantasy game without any ties to ANY real life religion and to be respectful. When that still wasn't enough to get people to behave and follow TOS the thread was eventually locked.

Careful what you wish for...?

All of this drama has concluded fairly recently, but things have calmed down, as they tend to do. Everlux are now just another part of the game, and if you didn't know about the drama, you would've never guessed they had the user base so divided. Many users were genuinly surprised by how many users reacted. It had seemed like EVERYONE had been asking for a bulky or fat breed, and now it suddenly wasn't what they wanted at all? It left a little bit of a sour taste in some people's mouth;

Staff had given us exactly what the userbase had wanted, and in return they got a lot of drama to deal with, with some users claiming that it's unlikely that staff will listen this closely to the userbase again, which is a real shame.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to put two Everlux on a nest to make more of those fat little bookwyrms. I actually love them.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-01-27 04:00:57+00:00.

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2025-01-23 16:34:58+00:00.

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Hello hobbyists!

Yes this is a repost. The last thread had 2024 instead of 2025 in the title. Woops!

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

Also...

We're banning X/Twitter links from posts and comments Please use xcancel or another second party website instead.

Second party websites: xcancel.com, lightbrd.com

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/DeepFake369 on 2025-01-21 20:14:15+00:00.

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CW: Transphobia, transphobic slurs, other potentially offensive slurs.  All slurs in question are either spoiler-marked or behind links; click at your own risk.

(I can’t believe I’m writing a post that isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh related, but I’ve fallen far too deep down this rabbit hole to leave this be.  Furthermore, I’m just a lurker on Sufficient Velocity, have limited knowledge of its inner workings, and was not on-site when this event occurred; if anything I say here is incorrect, please let me know and I’ll fix it as soon as possible.)

I finally decided to give Worm (a popular dark superhero web serial from the early 2010s, known for its length, incredibly bleak worldbuilding, and many shades of gray) a shot a few months ago and fell in love with it.  Soon afterward, I found my way to Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity, two of the major hubs for Worm fanfiction.  While I have yet to post anything on either site (mostly due to laziness), one particular subforum on Sufficient Velocity caught my attention after I discovered it on accident through the r/WormFanfic subreddit: the Staff Communication subforum, which falls under the umbrella of Forum Governance.  This subforum is known for handling two things: user requests for potential new features for the site, and commentary on tribunal appeals, which I’ll explain later.

Upon noticing one gigantic thread containing over 400 pages worth of responses regarding tribunal appeals (and a few smaller threads for later years before every published appeal got a separate thread), I decided to peek at it to see if it had anything interesting to read.  Five years’ worth of potential material made it even more likely I’d find something engaging within.

Considering we’re here, let’s just say I found something rather interesting.

(One more thing: unless I see a user's gender, either in their profile or otherwise, I’m referring to each user mentioned here as “they”, because I’d rather not get someone’s gender objectively wrong, especially on this post covering this topic. However, I'm only human: if I miss something here or get something wrong, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as possible.)

What is Sufficient Velocity?

In short, Sufficient Velocity is a well-known webforum that was created as an alternative to Spacebattles due to user dissatisfaction with how Spacebattles was run.  In particular, when Sufficient Velocity was founded, Spacebattles was suffering from two major issues.  One, the moderating staff were embroiled in a scandal for forcibly removing the long-standing and well-loved moderator Athene from her position, then trying to cover it up as her stepping away from the forum voluntarily.  Furthermore, Spacebattles had been founded before the turn of the century and the site owner was refusing to upgrade its servers; the site’s age was starting to show, and users started wondering how long it would take before the site collapsed.  As a result, Sufficient Velocity was born, designed to work around both issues (although Spacebattles persists to this day).

As such, it should be no surprise that Sufficient Velocity mirrors Spacebattles in many ways.  The exact forums they use are a bit different, but their contents are the same.  There’s a creative writing forum (each with a heavy emphasis on Worm fanfiction), news and politics forums, discussion and debate forums, role-playing forums, and all the rest.  Sufficient Velocity’s rule enforcement is generally seen as a bit stricter than Spacebattles’ is, and the average user of Sufficient Velocity tends to lean a bit further left than the average user of Spacebattles (although that may have changed after the creation of The Sietch, a far-right leaning splinter forum that I’m not linking for obvious reasons), but the demographics aren’t too far removed from each other, and many people have accounts on both with no issues.

For the first five years of its life, Sufficient Velocity handled itself just fine.  There were controversies and scandals here and there, but these were usually snuffed out rather quickly and didn’t contribute too much to the average user’s enjoyment of the site.  Calling it a well-oiled machine was perhaps a bit disingenuous, but it definitely ran and didn’t look like it would need service anytime soon.

However, right at the end of 2019, a nasty scandal would take the site by storm, one that hopefully Sufficient Velocity never has to undergo again.

Trials and Tribulations

One of the more interesting features of Sufficient Velocity’s management (although this is also the case on Spacebattles as far as I know) is how it handles rule violations.  Suppose a post reported to or otherwise seen by a moderator is determined to be violating Sufficient Velocity’s rules. In that case, it’ll be flagged by a banner denoting which rule it violated, and often the infracting moderator will post as such in the pertinent thread.  However, no one is perfect; some rules are hard and fast, but many have subjective interpretations.  Thus, users can appeal infractions they believe to be based on an incorrect or overly harsh interpretation of either the rule or the infracted post.

The appeals process works as follows: 

1. The user states their case following publicly available guidelines.  They may do this themselves or obtain the services of an advocate.
2. An arbitrator (this is a separate role from a moderator) looks at both the post that received the infraction and the user’s argument to determine whether to uphold, reduce, or overturn the initial penalty levied.  (They can also increase the penalty.  However, this is usually only done in extreme circumstances and/or as a response to the user’s conduct during their appeal process.)
3. If the user (or sometimes, the other moderators) disagree with this decision, they can attempt to appeal to the Council, a group of volunteer staff members who are elected yearly.
4. If the Council declines to hear this appeal, the process ends and the appeal remains unpublished.  If they accept, the user (or moderators, depending on who’s appealing) have another opportunity to state their case.  (As of more recently, except in particularly egregious cases the Council will always hear an appeal.)
5. Each Council member gets to state their opinion on how the infraction should be handled.  After each participating council member has stated their case or a predetermined number of days, whichever is shorter, the verdict is determined.
6. The verdict is delivered.  Usually, the majority opinion rules, with ties always going in favor of the user.  If no clear majority exists, a reasonable middle ground is usually determined instead.  Note how I said these things usually occur, because this will be important later.

Unlike on Spacebattles, most appeals that make it past Step 4 are available for the public to view; you don’t even need an account.  There are a few types of infractions that inherently cause exceptions to this process, but they aren’t really relevant to the post, so I won’t be discussing them in detail here.

With the necessary context out of the way, let’s get to a time this procedure wasn’t followed, and all the unpleasantness that resulted.

It’s What My Character Would Do

Our story starts in the Creative Writing section.  More specifically, the story WannaBee, a fairly popular Worm and Hazbin Hotel crossover written by RavensDagger, notable for having started when Hazbin Hotel was nothing more than a pilot episode.  For a few chapters, it trucked on with minimal issues and no mods in sight.  However, Chapter Six featured this exchange, which would be the spark that started the fire.

Khepri nodded. "Yes. By the way, who is Angel Dust. Beyond a pornstar spider person thing."

Vaggie rolled her eyes. "Just some wanna be dipshit whose head is too big for his own good. But some degenerates like seeing him get fucked online, so he struck it big. Traps are in right now."

"Traps?"

"Vaggie," Charlie warned. "We're trying to help Khepri, not corrupt her even more."

Khepri raised two hands in surrender. "I was just curious. He's setting up a pole in his room as we speak. Also, he brought a pig with him. A literal pig. I am not sure what the hotel's rules say about that."

Of note, “trap” is explicitly labeled a slur that’s forbidden to use to refer to someone on Sufficient Velocity.  The standards for using such a slur in-story are a bit more relaxed (after all, between the Empire Eighty-Eight and Skidmark Worm has plenty of derogatory terms and swearing to go around), but that’s not how things went.  Several users expressed concern that the slur was included without a warning and requested a disclaimer.  Others argued that the term fit the setting and characters, and wasn’t nearly as offensive in-story as those users were making it out to be.  This included the author, who replied to one of the users requesting a disclaimer with this:

We say fuck a...

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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 2025-01-20 04:01:11+00:00.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

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

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

Previous Scuffles can be found here

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RemnantEvil on 2025-01-15 02:52:49+00:00.

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You might recognise me from weekly threads, or my previous Hobby History on a small country within a sport that is followed by about a billion people, but only really played in a dozen countries.

Last time, I covered the two much shameful incidents in Australian cricketing history – the underarm bowling incident, and Sandpapergate – as well as singing praises for Australia’s history as a juggernaut in the sport. This time, we’re going on a traipse through some esoteric aspects of the sport that people might not know about, simply because it’s very easy to bounce off cricket’s rules.

The odd.

There is a strange relationship in cricket between umpires and players, particularly captains. Unlike many sports, the umpires are as much a part of the game as the players. Here are just some aspects of this odd relationship:

• The fielding team actually has to “appeal” for a decision, usually by all turning and shouting at the relevant empire. There are two umpires and they both rotate locations. One stands at the bowler’s end, directly behind the wicket. The other stands at “square leg”, which is at a 90-degree angle from the pitch and basically the best spot to just stare at the batter’s ass. (And in situations where there’s a leftie batter and a rightie, the square-leg umpire must jog across the pitch so that he’s always on their leg side, i.e. looking at their ass.)
• For a stumping or a run-out at the striker’s end, the fielders appeal to square leg – he’s got the view of the line the batter must cross to be safe, and he’ll call for a video review if he’s unsure. Unless it’s super obvious, given that run-outs can be down to centimetres, he’ll often refer to the “Third umpire” – an umpire who monitors the video review.
• For an LBW decision (that is, hitting the batter’s pad before the bat, and looks like it would carry through to hit the wicket were it not for the batter being the way), the fielders appeal to the umpire at the bowling end.
• Even if the umpire thinks something is clearly an LBW, if nobody actually appeals, the game continues and he keeps his damn mouth shut.
• You don’t really need to appeal for an obvious wicket like a catch or bowling someone out. You might need to appeal if it’s a close thing, such as if it’s unclear if the ball “nicked” the edge of the bat.
• Modern cricket utilizes a Decision Review System (DRS), introduced in the late ‘00s. It allows the fielding side to sort of appeal to the Supreme Court if they think someone was out but the on-field umpire gives them not out. It also allows the batting side to appeal likewise if they were given out but they feel it was a mistake. You can appeal as many times per innings as you like until you reach the limit of unsuccessful reviews – three per Test match innings, two per ODI or T20 innings.
• Common uses of the DRS are when you’re sure that the ball hit the pad before the bat, which would be potentially an LBW, or when you think the ball catches the faintest edge of the bat before being caught by the keeper. And the flip side of both these times is when the batter disagrees.
• If you burn your three unsuccessful appeals in an innings, you run the risk of having an obvious umpire error stand because you can no longer appeal it. In the third Test of the 2019 Ashes, keeper-captain Tim Paine “burned” their third review on a very optimistic call. An over later, a plum LBW was given not out – had it been reviewed, it would have been out, and Australia would have won by a single run.

There are several boxes that are ticked to confirm that something would be out. It has to land a certain distance from the wicket (too short and it might bounce over), it has to be in line with the wicket, and the line of the ball’s path, when continued, needs to hit the wicket. The good/bad thing about DRS is that even if a team does not use it, the broadcaster can still run the DRS and show the audience if a review would have been successful or not.

Paine copped heavy criticism for using the third review, and it perhaps would have changed the match’s outcome. Some noted that it was the downside to having a keeper as the captain, as the captain initiates reviews (with a 15-second time limit, so brief consultation with the bowler or concerned fielders), and keepers are notorious for thinking that everything is out. Keepers are typically the first and loudest appealers.

• Appeals initially started with “How is that?” shouted at the umpire, and very quickly degenerated into garbled “Howzat?”
• A team can actually withdraw an appeal – keep this in mind. They might decide for whatever reason to overrule the umpire and let the batter keep his wicket.
• A batter who is clearly out is under no obligation to start to leave until the umpire gives him out. If nobody appeals, or if the appeal is rejected, the batter is safe. No matter how much the other team celebrates, until the umpire indicates a wicket with a single raised finger in the air, the batter is considered safe.
• The logical corollary of this is that the batter is actually under no obligation to abide by a not-out decision either…

The good.

Adam Gilchrist took over the vaunted job of wicketkeeper from the legend Ian Healy, and I mentioned both men in my previous post. Gilchrist is a legend in his own right – the second most dismissals in Test cricket history, second most catches in his Test career, fifth most stumpings in his career, third most sixes in Test cricket. He averaged 47 with the bat and had a reputation as a steady pair of hands who could bat long and bat well when the team needed it. He was present in a World Cup winning side, and played in three winning Ashes sides. He scored the fourth-fastest Test century, knocking it out in only 57 balls faced – the record is just 54 balls.

The current holder of that last record is Brendon McCullum, formerly from New Zealand, who was also a keeper-captain. If that name sounds familiar from other posts of mine, it is the Baz – the one who brought the cult of Bazball to England as a way to try and get that team competitive again.

He’s also the coat who was critical of Alex Carey stumping Jonny Bairstow in the Ashes for wandering out of his crease and felt that Australia should have followed another of those rules and withdrawn the appeal, to let Bairstow continue batting despite being given out.

Back to Gilchrist. Among all his records and his reputation as a player (his nickname was Gilly, but he also had the moniker “Churchy” after a young English fan mistakenly called him Eric Gilchurch), Gilchrist was also known as a walker.

Not the kind that bites you, a walker is a gentleman of esteem and confidence. The walker is a rare breed, and perhaps that’s not a bad thing. The walker is the one who looks at the long list of caveats about umpires and appeals, and decides that this line in particular is tasty:

• The batter is actually under no obligation to abide by a not-out decision either…

His most famous incident is, of all things, the freakin’ 2003 ODI World Cup semifinal. Aravinda de Silva, a famous player in his own right, is handed the ball as Sri Lanka try to unseat one of the Australian openers, who by now have put 30 on the board from only five overs. A delivery swings in low, Gilchrist gets bat on it, the ball hits his pad and goes skyward to be caught. However, the umpire is unmoved, believing the ball had not contacted bat. De Silva and the Sri Lankans are crestfallen – it is at least five years before DRS is introduced, and they have no chance for further appeal.

Gilchrist, nevertheless, starts to walk. With some trepidation and perhaps confusion, the Sri Lankans start to celebrate. The umpire has no choice – the batter is saying through his action, “No, you’re wrong and I’m out.” He cannot be forced to bat, so the wicket stands.

In his book Walking To Victory (very cheeky), Gilchrist writes:

“Of course, the guys back in the viewing room were a bit stunned at what I'd done. Flabbergasted, really, that I'd do it in a World Cup semi. While I sat there, thinking about it and being asked about it, I kept going back to the fact that, well, at the end of the day, I had been honest with myself.

“I felt it was time that players made a stand to take back responsibility for the game. I was at ease with that. The more I thought about it, the more settled I became with what I'd done. You did it for the right reasons.”

Worth noting that the captain of the Australian side, Ricky Ponting, disagreed. With his own reputation as a ruthless leader and player, when it came to the age-old struggle between the wolves of “Spirit of the game” and “Rules of the game”, Ponting fell on the rules side – if the umpire does not give you out, you’re not freakin’ out.

Gilchrist said that Ponting later sat down next to him (Ponting would bat after Gilchrist, but did not bat for long) and said, “Didn’t you see the umpire give you not out?” Gilchrist said, “Yeah, I did.” And in one telling of the story, Gilchrist claims Ponting’s reply was, “Wrong answer.”

The great.

I’m going to break my own rule and circle back to another aspect of these weird rules and good sportsmanship, but it necessitates not talking about Australia for a little bit.

In 2008, Paul...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Ataraxidermist on 2025-01-14 15:08:28+00:00.

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Do you feel the heat? I know, it’s the middle of winter, but I’m asking you to use your imagination. We won’t go much further if you already start arguing about everything I say, and there will be plenty to argue about. The voices in my head assure me as much.

So, again. Do you feel the heat? The muscles underneath your skin, steely and wired for movement, aching to contract and move the glorious machinery of your body to new heights? The will to sing with a chorus of a thousand fanatics, lost in adoration as a lone athlete beats insurmountable odds?

Then your imagination has taken you back to the summer of 2024 in Paris, city of love, misguided tourists and pollution, not necessarily in that order.

I am your guide, some would say your cursed henchman.

If the sight of popular sports elicit only a sigh of disgust, you may be a creature of the higher arts and spirits, or a meany. Your pick.

There, now that these people are gone, we are among us simple beings. Simple beings who like to see people struggle, complain, and most of all, we like drama.

You know the Olympic Games. In all likelihood, you watched them, enjoyed them, followed them and caught more drama than I did. As such, this won't be an exhaustive tour, as there's too much of it and many small things you already know about. I've chosen the few tidbits I had a front row seat for, as I was living in Paris at the time.

It’s like looking at a living pig while you wet your knife and ponder about which part you will keep to yourself. The rind? The tenderloin? Decisions, decisions. And frankly, I just like to reminisce about a period that was pretty fun all in all. For me, less so for others.

Another reason to limit the discourse is that a lot of the drama is simply too divisive in nature, and as much as I like to complain about the rules keeping us human beings down and stifling our creativity, I agree with this subreddit’s tacit rule of avoiding that can of worms. Fear not, there’s still plenty to talk about.

Now follow me will you, and let’s start from the beginning.  

Let's get the party started

(How did these guys ever get a featuring with Big Ali? Some mysteries will forever remain unsolved. But we got Big Ali saying "Pain au chocolat", and that's priceless.)

Paris started bidding for the Olympics in – checks notes – 2005, when they lost to the cursed Albion and that black cherry on top of it: London. Paris would finally win a nomination as host-city in 2017. That’s twelve full years of failed attempts, losing to London, Rio and Japan.

Do you know how Paris won? By being the last ones standing. Paris got 2024, Lost Angeles got 2028, there were no other contestants because the costs of hosting Olympics were getting prohibitive.

The French weren’t exactly motivated either. Well, some were, but you know the French. As long as there are two French people alive, someone will disagree with the other out of principle.

But this wasn’t just for the sake of arguing.

Since 2005, we went through an economy crash, Covid, and a few other events. The French debt has gone up by quite a bit.

Talking about Paris, Victor Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross professor of economics who has researched the financial costs of the Olympics said :

This will be the first Olympics, since Sydney, where the total costs are coming in under $10 billion. That’s because the IOC was running out of cities willing to host this thing

Under 10 billion is still a number of billion France didn't have.

This wasn’t the only point of contention.

This is Paris.

This is also Paris.

Oh, and that too.

Transport is complicated at the best of time.

Olympic Games would require :

• Closing roads for the bike races and marathons.

• Roads reserved for Olympic transports and emergencies.

• Handling an influx of tourists like never before.

In 2022, the expected number of people to be transported per day during the Olympics was about 7 millions, and 3 million during the Paralympics. That's twice the usual number, and you've seen on the picture how the normal situation can be hard to handle.

New metro lines are to be build, three are already so late they will be finished in 2026. Bus lines will be made longer, more trains are planned. The good part is that all sports venues are on the usual transport lines. The bad part is that it’s unclear if there will be enough personnel to transport all the beer-drinking screamers. Ile-de-France Mobilité, the ones in charge, made a request for new drivers. And nobody answered.

To give you an idea how dire things are, webpages started cropping up to know which bus and metro lines to avoid.

And that's not counting cases of sabotage, a coordinated attack on several train tracks shortly before the event.

Needless to say, the closer we got to the Olympics, the more you heard voices pointing out how we weren’t ready at all. All the skeptics - the only resource France has to spare - were in an even worse (or better depending on point of view) mood. Some Schadenfreude in there too, like sitting at a well-traveled road known for accidents and ready to snap photos.

But let us remain positive, roll up our sleeves (I'm told this is sexy), start the big works, and hire undocumented immigrants (I'm told this is less sexy).

It's the worldwide problem of construction industry employers smelling an opportunity and hiring cheap people they can throw under the bus (which lacks a driver) whenever work inspection comes by. But, how to put it, it doesn't give your country the best image when the Olympic village is built in ways that could at best be described as "morally dubious" while politicians praise the coming event as exemplary.

A special unit was created when the case was blown open, but luckily, there were only seven work inspectors in this unit for the entire Olympic mess, dozens of construction sites and thousands of workers. Most illegal practices will never be spotted, accidents won't be a biggy because hey, they never were here officially. Phew, that was close.

Let's make a pause and play pairs.

I say Laurel, you say... Hardy!

I say apples, you say... Oranges!

I say hiring undocumented immigrants, you say... Corruption!

Mate, you're good at this.

We won the nomination because there were no other contestants left.

Somehow, we still needed corruption just to be sure to win. This wasn't the only problem, further contracts were awarded in shady ways. But let it not be said that I'm a dishonest donkey (I am, but that's besides the point), it was later said no serious corruption was found. Investigation still goes on, but the worst case scenario should be out the window. And then they started police raids again due to suspicion of serious corruption. Go figure.

Illegals, corruption, what else is there... Oh yes! the homeless!

That doesn't look pretty in the city of love, now does it? Sure, France was nice during the pandemic, when hotels signed deals with the state to give temporary lodgings to those without a roof, but now tourists are coming back in full and there's only so much negative net-worth we can accommodate before getting sad. The solution is simple and practical, like every solution should be. [Put the homeless on a bus](https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-pari...

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1i183zw/olympic_games_2024_feel_the_olympic_spirit_go_in/

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-01-13 04:01:05+00:00.

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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.
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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!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2025-01-12 14:50:20+00:00.

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Thanks to everyone who voted! Here are the results:

Best Hobby Drama writeup

u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit for [Books] "A book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason": How "A Little Life" went from universally beloved to widely loathed.

Best Hobby History writeup

u/tinaoe for [Fabergé Eggs] Hunt for the most expensive gift wrap in the world & its egg sleuths.

Best Author

u/ToErrDivine who wrote the epic The Drake-Kendrick Lamar Feud saga. Here is part 1.

Best Series

u/pillowcase-of-eels for their series about Emilie Autumn. Here is part 1.

Best Comment

u/Varvara-Sidorovna for their recollection of their aunt (who is a nun) riding a rollercoaster, The Big One, at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Best Drama Event

The Drake v. Kendrick feud

Congratulations!!

The winners will get:

• a unique flair
• inclusion in our hall of fame and sidebar
• be mentioned and linked in scuffles for the next couple of months

Note: some of you have custom flairs, so I wanted to ask if you wanted me to either replace your current flair, leave it alone, or just add the unique flair to the front of your flair.

The unique flair for this year will include 🥇🥇 Emojis!

Link to the current town hall

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/AggressiveCurrency69 on 2025-01-10 22:16:33+00:00.

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From year 2013 to 2020 a certain style of humor dominated south america but the war would change everything.. (a lot of this is in spanish so you will probably have to use a translator to get details from sources)

THE ORIGINS

so first we will talk about the humor that dominated before the war: "momos" which is a bastardization of the word "memes" now i'll have to explain to you what a momo is and what groups (mainly on facebook) created them, so a "momo" is a meme but it has some key characteristics:

-it uses phrases from cartoons and movies

-it usually has bad grammar on purpose

-uses a lot of jargon like the words "But" "when" "papu" "elfa"

now we are going to talk about the groups that created and shared these "momos" as this is important to understand the war itself, these were groups usually on facebook that shared these "momos" and were referred to, oftentimes in a mocking way as "autistic groups" and "polemic groups", they were characterized for their polemic humor and "wars" and "raids" to other groups, tons of these groups existed and here is a list of some of them:

-Secta moa: the first one of these polemic groups and could be considered the father of all the others that came out later, it was created in 2010 and was closed in 2017

-Legion holk: One of the most controversial group, created in 2014 they styled themselves as the enemies of "seguidores de la grasa" they famously said that they were behind a school massacre and shared CP so overall pretty nasty folks.

-Seguidores de la grasa: the most important polemic group and the most popular one, below i talk about it.

"SEGUIDORES THE LA GRASA"

which translates to "Followers of the grease" were a group on facebook and the most famous and influencial of these "polemic groups" that created "momos", it was created in 2013 by "mr graso" (mr grease) and rose up to become very famous on facebook gathering at it's peak more than a 750 thousand followers on their page, these groups while fun had a lot of problems like racism, sexism and bullying and this is what eventually led to their downfall, from now we are going to refer to "seguidores de la grasa" as the grease.

THE RISE OF "PANA FRESCOS" AND DOWNFALL OF "POLEMIC GROUPS"

By late 2018 and 2019 the polemic groups were slowly losing popularity and entering an era of downfall and degeneration, in 2018 facebook did a purge and various groups were affected by it with civil wars sparking in various groups, this series of events led to the decline of momos and divergence on humor styles but the nail in the coffin was when the grease raided a group known as "super conchetumario world", the users of this server were not happy and seeing the lack of action by the admins they decided to become anti-grease which meant forsaking the "momos" and any jargon and reference to the grease, it was a prime time to do so with the weakening of all the groups and led to the creation of "Los panafrescos" in fact we have the post that created the "Panafrescos" here translated:

Now trought all of this you might have been wondering what a "panafresco" well i'll show you.

THE "PANAFRESCOS"

panafresco would be roughly translated as "chill pals" and they were a shitpost group that sprung due to negative feelings against the grease, they were characterized by memes like "el pana miguel" and "sentado de pana" among many more and like a mongol horde they crashed in conquering all social media plataforms in a very short time and popularizing memes agaisnt momos and the grease and generalizing hate to it's members.

you got to think of it as an actual war with fronts and fighting between groups:

the facebook front: given that panafrescos originated there and groups on facebook were already on decline it was very easily taken with various groups being raided and abandoning the posting of "momos" instead starting to post shitpost to avoid being ridiculed, with the main groups of the grease and legion holk down there was no strong bulwark to defend

instagram front: instagram was one of the fronts that resisted the most agaisnt panafrescos led by the very big group known as "legion momo traficante" but facing the relentless raids from various panafresco groups and the fact that instagram decided to penalize the "legion momo traficante" page it all evetually led to the panafrescos defeating the polemic groups in instagram and winning that front

memedroid: memedroid is interesting because it was already at war with the grease, with it's user wanting to eliminate their influence on the website, panafrescos saw this opportunity and allied with the anti grease users in memedroid managing to drive them off easily

youtube front: the grease had a lot of influence in youtube with various compilations of it's "Momos" being posted by their channels but they lost influence as the "shitpost compilations" created by the panafrescos gained more popularity and views and comment sections were toxic too, insulting anyone that supported the grease and so that front was gained too

there was minor fighting in reddit but it was very small, and so like that all influence the grease had was removed by the panafrescos, it's last remaining vestiges fled to twitter which was safe from panafresco influence and so is that how it ends? with panafrescos dominating with the same memes for 2025? is this how it all ends? Well not really..

DOWNFALL OF THE PANAFRESCOS

With all conquered the panafrescos memes became very popular with the most famous one being "El pana miguel" but the panafresco reliance on only a handful of memes led to their downfall, people started critizing them for overusing the same memes just as they had critiziced the grease for doing the same and the community also quickly became toxic and had a lot of the same problems the grease had specially racism and sexism and with their lack of centralized leadership the panafresco empire fell apart just as fast as it formed creating various splinter groups that did shitpost their own way abandoning the core memes of panafrescos.

CONSEQUENCES

The war which lasted from very late 2019 to early 2021 had lasting impact on the style of humor in south america with even to this day shitpost still being the most common type of humor, the old "momos" from the grease however took on a more ironic approach as nostalgics who remembered the old times of the grease created memes that were a bit of a syncretism between momos and shitpost as in that they mocked the overall structure of the original "Momos".

the grease meanwhile had a bit of a resurgence in the later years after the war and is still alive in twitter and in the hearts of many people but is not taken as seriously as it once was and most "momos" people post are the syncretism on momos and shitpost i described above.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/UnderneathAllThe on 2025-01-07 19:30:55+00:00.

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Before getting into the drama, if you would like to play this terrible game and other perfectly emulated Atari Jaguar games, The Atari 50 year anniversary game collection is available on all current consoles (and Steam) and has Fight For Life in all of it’s terrible glory.

The first part of this very long post is a rundown of video game consoles in the early to mid 1990’s to better illustrate the whole “Bit-war” craziness of the hobby at the time and how this was relevant to the Atari Jaguar Video Game System. The second part is strictly about the hobby drama with the Atari Jaguar and its flagship (more like “flag shit”) fighting game, Fight For Life.

The early to mid-1990’s were one of the most unique times in video game history. Due to the huge success of the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the 16-bit Sega Genesis, there were many tech companies that tried to capture the success and income of Nintendo and Sega. Sega and Nintendo were the two big dogs of the early to mid 1990’s and their 16-bit consoles were leaps and bounds better than anything from the 1980’s.

The console rush of the early to mid 1990’s mirrored what happened back in the early 1980’s where many companies created failed consoles to match the success of the (barely) 8-bit Atari 2600. This caused the video game crash of 1983 which nearly killed the video game market as a whole until the 1985 8-bit Nintendo NES came out and created a standard for video games and became the standard for what a video game system should offer. Games had to meet a level of quality that was missing from most of the Atari 2600 games which was a huge step forward for video games. While there were some poor NES games, the game library as a whole had many amazing games. Also of note, Sega had an 8-bit Master System that was trounced by Nintendo in the west buy wildly popular in Brazil for some reason.

During the first half of the 1990’s, the key selling point for new gaming systems were how many “bits” they were powered by. The more bits, the better. Higher bit gaming systems could better emulate the arcade games of the era as well as allowing for larger game worlds with higher graphical and sound capabilities. This became a marketing method to determine what system was more powerful and this created the “bit-war” of the 90’s. Below is an example of the advertisements the time:

Also of note, while almost all systems had used video game cartridges in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, there was now a move to CD media for games. This was huge for consoles due to the massive amount of space on CDs for large game worlds, perfect CD audio, and a much cheaper medium to have a game on which resulted in lower prices for games. It did however add load times to games due to the transfer of data being much slower than cartridges.

The following consoles came out in the first half of the 1990’s to compete with the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis and every single one crashed and burned as critical and financial failures:

1. Amiga CD-32 – an odd 32-bit CD system that never made it out of Europe with terrible games, terrible graphic quality, pretty much terrible everything.
2. Panasonic 3DO – a 32-bit CD system released for the insane price of $700 (which is around $1500 today) and allowed anyone to publish games on it which led to many soft-core adult garbage games and a mostly poor library of games.
3. Phillips CD-I – a 32-bit CD “Entertainment platform” that was never meant to be a gaming console, but had the notoriously terrible Zelda and Mario games due to a partnership with Nintendo
4. SNK Neo Geo CD – A 24-bit (?) system that was meant to bring SNK arcade-perfect games in an affordable CD format (the cartridge version of this system came out in the late 80’s and the games were $200 each, which is $450 each in today’s money PER GAME). The problem was that the CD format on the system had horrific load times and the game library was pretty much all 2-D Street Fighter 2 type Fighting games which were losing popularity by the mid-90’s.
5. Sega CD – A Sega made 16-bit Sega Genesis add on that allowed CD games, but suffered from a small overall library of games, of which the majority were of poor quality.
6. Sega 32-X – ANOTHER Sega made 16-bit Genesis add-on, this time a cartridge based 32-bit add on system for the 16-bit Sega Genesis that was again mired by a small library of mediocre games and poor graphic and sound capabilities.
7. Nintendo Virtual Boy – the first “32-bit” portable console, it was a primitive virtual reality headset in 1995 which only had black and red for colors, had less than two dozen games total, and also gave people headaches when they played it for more than 30 minutes.

By 1996, all of these systems were either completely dead or nearing discontinuation.

While Nintendo and Sega would release their new systems in the mid-90’s (The 32-bit Sega Saturn in 1995 and the 64-bit Nintendo 64 in 1996), both were trounced commercially by the 32-bit Sony PlayStation released in 1995 due to the PlayStation making every correct choice possible at the time and not succumbing to key mistakes made by the competition. The PlayStation was affordable, easy to develop for, had incredible 3-D polygon graphics capabilities, had numerous big developers making games for it, and was marketed for adult gamers. Marketing to adults was novel for the time and very successful in making video games a cool hobby for adults and not just a toy for children.

Sega lost their entire American market with the release of the Sega Saturn in 1995 due to abandoning the sports games that made their previous Genesis system so popular in the West, as well as making a video game system that was very difficult to develop for. The aforementioned Sega CD and 32-X made many Sega fans upset that they bought poorly supported Sega systems in the past and were now asked to buy ANOTHER Sega 32-bit system. The biggest issue was that the Sega Saturn struggled with 3-D polygon games and was decimated by the PlayStation due to most gamers wanting to move on from 2-D sprite games to 3-D polygon games.

Nintendo released the 64-bit Nintendo 64 in 1996 much later than the competition. Everything Nintendo released on the system had the bold number of 64 next to it to state that it was much more powerful than the other 32-bit gaming systems. There were games only the N64 could do with massive game worlds that had no loading times due to Nintendo sticking with the cartridge form. Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of time, which are both considered two of the greatest games ever made, took advantage of this strength.

However, the fact that N64 used cartridges made other types of games difficult or flat out impossible on the system. Developer Squaresoft famously moved development of the mega-hit Final Fantasy 7 from the Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation as the game was around 2GB in size and was a three-compact disc game that would have needed the space of 30 N64 cartridges if released on the N64 due to the massive size of the game. Nintendo also struggled with being seen as a children’s toy company compared to the more adult gamer branded PlayStation. In this case, the lines began to blur on the bit-wars due to the 32-bit PlayStation doing much better with games that the N64 struggled with and vice versa.

There was one other “64-bit” system however. The swan song of Atari, who would never make a video game system again after the 1993 release of the disastrous "64-bit" Atari Jaguar.

Atari was the king of video games in the late 1970’s to the early 1980’s with their monumentally successful Atari 2600 console. However, due to a glut of horrible games and terrible versions of arcade games (the awful Pac Man arcade port on the 2600 was a disaster), the Video Game market crashed in 1983 and was revived in 1985 by the aforementioned 8-Bit Nintendo NES system. Atari had a string of failed consoles in the 1980’s that included:

Atari 5200 – a system that was a bit more powerful than the 2600, but had a controller that would break after less than six months of use due to a design flaw that could never be fully repaired.

Atari 7200 – A system to compete with the Nintendo NES, but was laughably less powerful and with a poor library of games.

Atari Lynx – A failed hand-held system that was destroyed by the Nintendo Game Boy.

In 1991, Atari decided to make one last attempt to recapture their glory days in the video game console space and the Atari Jaguar was promoted as the first “64-bit” gaming system. Atari focused its entire 1993 system launch marketing budget to hype up that the system was twice as powerful as the 3DO and four times as powerful as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Here is a compilation of every commercial from this era by Atari:

The hype was high for the Jaguar. Upon the system launch however, it became clear that the games were not much better graphically than the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, and the overall game design of many of the Jaguar exclusive games were very poor in comparison to the other systems. Here are some examples:

Nintendo’s Star Fox for the Super Nintendo –

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/red-f1sh on 2025-01-06 04:45:45+00:00.

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After I wrote my post on TWEWY and Hype-chan, I thought it would be interesting to do a history writeup on Kingdom Hearts. Please note that this writeup will include spoilers.

So before I talk about the behemoth that is Kingdom Hearts, we need to cover a few basics:

1. Square Enix - Formed in 2003, Square Enix is a Japanese game company famous for releasing RPG games such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and of course- Kingdom Hearts. Prior to 2003, Square Enix was known as two separate entities: Enix, a company primarily focused on publishing games such as Dragon Quest; and Square, a game development company. Square had a very unsuccessful start in the industry, and released one final stand before they could fall- Final Fantasy. This was the beginning of the Final Fantasy franchise, which would then influence the creation of Kingdom Hearts. Both Square and Enix would merge together in 2003 and begin releasing games under the name Square Enix.
2. Final Fantasy - Following its successful release in 1987, Final Fantasy will then continue to have 16 titles (at the time of posting). Initially, Final Fantasy was created as a turn-based RPG with rich story elements and fantastic worldbuilding. It would eventually branch out into different genres. Various titles such as FFVII, FFVIII, FFX/FFX-2, FFXIII, FFXIV, FFXV have been very popular worldwide. Aside from its storytelling and worldbuilding, Final Fantasy games have been praised for its visuals and soundtrack.
3. ~~The devil himself~~ Tetsuya Nomura - The man, the myth, the legend- before Kingdom Hearts, Tetsuya Nomura was known for his involvement in Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII. He has worked as a game artist and designer as well as a producer and eventually as director while working for Square Enix. Fans often ask "Nomura why?" but never "Nomura how are you?"

Kingdom Hearts (2002)

If you haven't played KH before, then there's a possibility you have heard of it. KH is considered Nomura's crossover fanfiction between Final Fantasy and Disney, well known for its convoluted story and lines such as "Say fellas, did somebody mention the Door to Darkness?" and "Sorry mommy, your poopsies are toast." and other riveting dialogue.

Yes, this is a universe where Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Winnie the Pooh from Winnie the Pooh (1926) exist together.

To put simply, Kingdom Hearts is about Sora, a young boy who fights Heartless with the keyblade while he's accompanied by Donald Duck and Goofy. Sora initially goes to various Disney worlds in search of his friends Riku, who's seduced by the darkness and now works with the Heartless ("The Heartless obey me now, Sora." "You're stupid!"), and Kairi, whose heart is revealed to be taking refuge with Sora's. The overarching antagonist would be revealed to be Ansem, Seeker of Darkness. The series then expands from there to surround an epic battle between light and darkness.

In the same year of its release, Square would put out a Japan exclusive remaster of the game, in it including gameplay updates, additional cutscenes, an enigmatic secret boss and a secret ending. Both the secret boss and secret ending hints at the potentional of there being a continuation of this game, this starts a trend in KH games to include some kind of secret hint.

However, this won't be answered in the next installment.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (2004)

Following where KH left off, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories shows Sora and co. in Castle Oblivion, a castle where memories seem to vanish the further they go in. CoM was released on the Game Boy Advance, which would be mildly annoying to dedicated fans if they didn't have one to begin with. Don't worry, this isn't the first time this happens. This game will be eventually remastered to the PS2 in 2007.

CoM introduces a new enemy called the Nobodies and an elusive Organization XIII, although you only meet six members in this installation. You're also introduced to a character named Namine. Riku is also in the castle but separated from Michael Mouse, more commonly known as Mickey. Riku becomes playable in this game where he outgrows his emo phase and tries to find a way out of the castle.

In terms of sales, CoM wasn't really popular compared to its predecessor since it felt like a downgrade from the PS2. But CoM was key as the start of what was dubbed as "side-games" within the series, games that weren't titled with a succession number.

Kingdom Hearts II (2005)

Kingdom Hearts II continues one year after the events of CoM, and largely revolves around Sora and co. fighting against the Nobodies and Organization XIII. KHII was very well liked by fans for combat improvements from the first game, the impressive visuals, and the soundtrack provided by Yoko Shimomura. Once again, KHII was re-released with a remaster in 2007 with additional cutscenes, but most importantly- the hardest secret boss until KHIII: REmind and a secret cutscene dubbed "Birth By Sleep."

At the time, many fans believed this to be the teaser for KHIII and was very excited as it finally features keyblade wielders other than Sora. Another shock was the reveal of a character that looked exactly like the character you played during the tutorial of KHII, Roxas. Roxas was previously mentioned to have been a former member of Organization XIII as well as being a part of Sora (very rough explanation), so now people are curious what role he will play in KHIII.

Kingdom Hearts: Coded (2008) & Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days (2009)

Again, the answer will not be answered in the next game. Two more "side games" were released: Coded and 358/2 Days.

Fans may not have played the original version of Coded but rather the Nintendo DS remaster of the game, Re-Coded (2010). This is because Coded was originally released as a mobile exclusive for easier access- however it was only exclusive to the Docomo PRIME Series "P-01A" phone, a phone only available in Japan. In addition, it was rumoured that Coded and its subsequent was a result of Nomura ideating while drunk. This rumour was later proved to be false and was a result of the mistranslation of an interview; unfortunately, the links provided in this post don't work anymore but I did find an archive version of the original article on the Wayback Machine.

Nomura may not have been drunk during the development of Coded, but he may as well have been, seeing how weird the plot was. Which is saying something considering this is Kingdom Hearts. People were more willing to believe the rumour because "there is no way a sober man would write lines like this." The story in Coded can be brushed over as it explains events between games, but it is still a part of lore and in a series like this, is considered an important part. Don't worry, this isn't the first time this happens.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days was released in 2009 on the DS, this time playing as Roxas during his time in the Organization leading up to the events in KHII. This was a welcome installation as Roxas was a fairly well-liked character at the time, even if he had very little screentime so far. 358/2 Days introduces a new character, Xion, the 14th member of Organization XIII. It's already been established that Roxas is a part of Sora, imagine people's surprise when it's revealed that Xion is also a part of Sora.

Okay, that's not completely accurate. Remember CoM? Xion is actually a clone created from Sora's stolen memories of Kairi, but since she's still made from Sora's memories she is a part of Sora. Does that make sense? No?

Anyway, 358/2 becomes a milestone marking the beginning of everyone being part of Sora.

~~Kingdom Hearts III~~ Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (2010)

Turns out the secret ending in KHII wasn't actually KHIII, but Birth By Sleep, a title released on the PlayStation Portable. The Roxas lookalike in the cutscene wasn't actually Roxas, but Ventus, a keyblade wielder from before the events of KHI. But it's also revealed at the end that Ventus is a part of Sora as well. BBS would also mark the first time a phenomenon "Norting" happened, where titular villain Xehanort takes over the body of one of the protagonists, Terra.

Here, we move from fiction to reality as development for BBS shifted. So far most game...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-01-06 04:00:43+00:00.

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

Previous Scuffles can be found here

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Proof_Individual6993 on 2025-01-06 00:21:56+00:00.

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This is my first post here after lurking on this sub for a while. I hope you all would enjoy this post as the story here can be a bit wacky at times. 

So here it is! The story of the most Controversial yet Popular Timelines on AlternateHistory.com.

What’s Alternate History?

Alternate History is a genre of science fiction primarily based upon looking at historical events and asking “What if?” in how it could have changed and the future consequences of those said changes on the timeline. In Alternate History Fandoms, a Timeline is slang for a written (Or sometimes drawn out like in r/ImaginaryMaps) piece of work that details an alternate universe that began from a Point of Divergence. A point of divergence in AltHist slang is the start of a timeline in which the timeline diverges from our own. AlternateHistory.com has hosted a wide array of timelines and has remained the dominant alternate history site on the web. It has hosted many famous alternate history timelines such as Reds!, Blue Skies in Camelot, and Decisive Darkness to name a few. I myself have posted my own timeline onto the site and I’m currently writing it.

How can it be problematic? 

While many alternate history timelines have been praised, there have been others who have been deemed problematic. The main reason for why those timelines are deemed problematic is in how they portray historical events and people.

The depiction of the historical people can be deemed problematic if it is completely and wildly inaccurate to what they were actually like to real life to the point of being offensive in how wildly stretched and twisted their personalities and characters have been. These are blamed on the author and the author is usually accused of creating these untrue character traits because of their own political bias and personal views on those said people.

Some of the timelines that have been accused of being problematic because of these reasons include the Gumboverse (Mainly Rumsfieldia but that's a story for another day), Green Antarctica, and of course, the subject of the title…

New Deal Coalition Retained. 

A coalition (Timeline) is born

On July 21st, 2016, a user by the name of “The Congressman” posted onto the Alternate History.com site about his timeline. In his opening statement he says,

“Hi all. This is my first thread. I've wanted to do a political timeline for a while, and I decided to try something familiar to me.

I just want to answer a few questions:

1. This is not a wank. I may be on the conservative side of things but all sides will get a fair shake. Liberals and Conservatives will have fun reading this, I promise (This becomes debated later)
2. This is not a No Southern Strategy (A similar timeline to this one) rip off. Yes, I am a huge fan of the timeline and yes, reading it did inspire me to try a wikibox timeline, but I do not and will not try and copy Gonzo and Nofix's amazing timeline.
3. Feel free to leave any comment you wish, just please make it respectable
4. Also, if any one of you has an interesting idea please let me know. If I like it you may find your suggestion part of history

Enjoy” 

The timelines POD is that Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, dies from a car accident. With this, Republicans are way less hesitant to advocate for civil rights and eventually in the 1960 election, Nixon is full throated in his support for civil rights, defeating LBJ. With this victory, Nixon passes civil rights acts that LBJ passed in OTL, leading to him and the Republicans getting the praise from black people including MLK himself and eventually blacks are solidified as a Republican voter block.

This leads to the Democrats remaining strongly within the South and eventually due to this POD’s consequences, the ideologies of both parties morph. The Republicans turn to Liberty Conservativism (Which is just conservatism but with also a more socially liberal view on civil rights) and the Democrats Communationalism (Which is fiscally liberal but socially conservative). There is also a new party that splits from the Democrats called the Progressive Party which follows Mina-Progressivism (Which is progressivism but with a more libertarian bent), though the party is relegated to only a few states and never wins a Presidential Election in the TL. The timeline has already shown itself to be a bit more on the conservative side of things, however it wasn’t too controversial among audiences. 

Eventually, the timeline progresses into Nixon getting assassinated by Oswald in Baltimore instead of Dallas. This leads to his VP Nelson Rockefeller losing the election of 1964 against JFK, but later due to the chaos of the late 60’s, Kennedy gets primaried in 1968 by George Wallace who wins the election. The US in this timeline is also more ardently anti communist leading to a more conservative West. Many OTL far right leaders rebrand themselves as moderates including George Lincoln Rockwell who becomes a radio host. In his term, President Wallace also uses a more extreme approach to Vietnam via a total invasion/war strategy which actually makes America and South Vietnam win the war. Wallace is also way harsher on the CounterCulture movement, including a certain movie star….

Goodbye Hanoi Fonda!

In the timeline, Fonda is convicted of treason for heading to North Vietnam in the wake of the Death of Wallace’s VP McNamara in Vietnam. With that, she is executed in what is described by commenters who read to be in “Gruesome detail” with even one fan saying how the writing made it look like The Congressman wanted this to happen in our timeline.

This got the attention of the Mods of AlternateHistory.com and The Congressman was apparently kicked for a few days off the site for the Fonda torture porn. However he came back and it seems now, he has completely scrapped the execution and instead made Fonda be arrested for decades before retiring to a secluded area. 

With that, the Congressman continued the TL as normal. Eventually, the US elected both Reagan and Rumsfeld as presidents respectively from 1976-1992. The Cold War continued to heat up with the Soviets and Americans having worse relations. Ted Bundy becomes governor of Washington and Jim Jones mayor of San Francisco. In Africa, Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa continue to live on with Nelson Mandela accepting working in Apartheid to promote equality, but also agrees to expel many blacks and communists out of South Africa. This would be criticized by many users for being completely out of line for Mandela, but The Congressman shrugged it off saying how butterflies changed Mandela’s character. Also Park Chung-hee is elected President of South Korea and while still right wing, is still a democratic president and not the dictator like he was OTL. This would also be criticized as being antithetical to Chung-hee's personality and authoritarian tendencies.

 Also Queen Elizabeth abdicates after her husband is killed by the IRA leading to Prince Charles becoming King and he marries Julie Nixon (Nixon's daughter) who becomes Queen (Yes this happened). The idea of a Queen Nixon led to critics calling the timeline “Queen Nixon” in a mocking manner. Later, Gerhard Frey (Who was a Neo Nazi OTL), abandons Nazism and starts “Freyism” which was made to “restore pride in German culture after WW2” and to fight against communism, and eventually he gets power in Germany and reverts it back to a constitutional monarchy. Also in Chile, Pinochet wins power like OTL and becomes a popular/successful president leading over a great economy and being opposed to South American communists. Eventually, the first part of the Timeline ends with Rumsfield led NATO and the Soviet/Warsaw Pact Allie’s declaring WW3 in 1988 with both sides shaking hands on not using nukes. This would lead to part 2 of the Timeline detailing WW3. 

Multiple parts of the first part of the Timeline were criticized for changing many OTL figures in outlandish ways, and also for accusations that The Congressman was whitewashing Pinochet and Frey by portraying them as anti communist heroes. 

However, during the beginning of Part 2, more drama would come to NDCR.

Battle of the Turtledoves!

For those who don’t know, the Turtledove Awards are awards on the Alternate History site for timelines deemed by users to be great in some way in a respective time period.

In April of 2018, the Turtledove Awards were in swing and NDCR was in battle with other timelines (Including No Southern Strategy) for the title of best Contemporary Cold War TL. 

The thread for discussing which TL is the best for this award slowly degraded into becoming very heated. Many stated that they didn’t think NDCR was good. Criticisms were lobbied at the characterization of Mandela and Chung-hee, and comparisons were made to No Southern Strategy and how NDCR is inferior. The most heated criticisms were of Mandela in which the Congressman and NDCR fans tried to defend the characterization by saying how Mandela decided to work within Apartheid because the anti Apartheid movement was taken over by communists and Mandela decided that working within the Apartheid government was the lesser evil. This was criticized as by the POD of the TL, Mandela worked with communists against Apartheid so it wou...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-01-04 14:38:43+00:00.

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Hello Everyone! Many writeups came over the course of the last year, and here is your chance to vote for which ones deserve recognition as the best.

We are keeping mostly the same categories as last year, but also adding a new one, Best Drama. This is not awarded to any specific individual or post per se, but simply to the most interesting event or topic that was covered in the last year (though links to places where the drama was discussed are much appreciated!)

1. Best Hobby Drama writeup
2. Best Hobby History writeup
3. Best Author
4. Best Series
5. Best Comment
6. Best Drama Event

As with last year, winners will receive a unique flair, inclusion in our hall of fame and sidebar, and be mentioned and linked in scuffles for the next couple of months

How voting will work:

This thread will be set to contest mode. This means that all comments will be sorted randomly and no scores will be displayed. There will be 6 top level comments only; all others will be removed.

Please reply to the top level comment under the category with appropriate links to your nomination. Please only nominate a submission once per category. If you see the one you wanted to add, please upvote it (this is how you vote on each category). At the end we will check all the vote numbers to determine the winner in each category.

You may not nominate yourself.

You may upvote nominations you agree with (that's how the winner is determined).

You may only nominate submissions made in 2024.

Voting will last until 1200 hours (noon, 12pm, whatever format you prefer) on Sunday 12 January, at which point this thread will be locked.

Here is the link to the Town Hall thread, while the voting thread is pinned

Good luck to all!

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/red-f1sh on 2025-01-04 10:28:29+00:00.

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The World Ends with You (or TWEwY for short) was released around 2007-2008, but by the time I played the game it was already 2012. Like many others at the time, I've heard murmurings of a sequel- according to something related to a mobile port of the game. Even though the game tied its loose ends pretty well, I was curious- what were they going to do with a sequel? So I looked into it.

And there she was.

Hype-chan.

Unbeknowest to me then, Hype-chan would continue to haunt TWEwY fans until the year of our lord 2020, where we would finally get an announcement to the sequel of TWEwY.

Disclaimer: I'm not going to go in depth about the plot, but I will mention a few spoilers for context. So please proceed with caution. This is my first time writing something like this, so I hope some people enjoy this ^^

Some context.

Before I can go too deep into TWEwY, I have to talk about Square Enix.

Square Enix is a pretty big name in AAA gaming with well known titles such as Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts under its belt. I don't actually follow Final Fantasy too closely but I was a really big fan of Kingdom Hearts back in the day. KH fans know best how SE loves to blueball fans with hints of a sequel. This started pretty tamely with them releasing a Japan exclusive remaster of the original title with the inclusion of a secret ending foreshadowing the events leading up to the story in KH2. SE would then continue to include a secret ending in the following remaster for KH2 and subsequent games.

Eventually this game of blueballing will eventually escalate to SE dangling KH3 in front of fans for the next 14 years. However, SE will satiate fans' hunger with "side games" to fill in the blanks of lore before the long awaited Kingdom Hearts III. But in the meantime, existing SE fans are already familiar with this play and expect somewhat the same thing from TWEwY2 teasers.

Previously, on TWEwY

As mentioned earlier, TWEwY was initially released in Japan in 2007, and released globally in 2008. Although it was a popular title, it didn't actually reach the heights of FF and KH. The game was originally published for the Nintendo DS and uses the dual screen system for it's unique- albeit unconventional- combat style. Again, the fanbase wasn't as big as SE's other titles, but there was still a dedicated following for TWEwY.

The game's story is split into three weeks and in the first week you learn that your character, Neku, is actually dead and you are fighting in a week long death game for a chance to revive yourself. The story does end with Neku being revived.

What made TWEwY stand out from KH despite being from the same team was how TWEwY seemed to tie its loose ends pretty nicely and there wasn't really any hints for a potential sequel after this title. After all, character arcs were resolved and the final goal was reached.

Right?

Square Enix strikes again

In 2012, TWEwY was ported to mobile under the title TWEwY: Solo Remix. People didn't really think much of it since it's pretty much a remaster of the game but for mobile.

Wait. Doesn't that sound a bit familiar?

So far it seems like the only major change is the new character Coco but she only serves to be the NPC for microtransactions. She shows up in some new cutscenes too but it's really more like filling in blanks from the initial release. I guess all that's left to do is to finish the rest of the game and hopefully-

Oh.

After completing the game and secret missions, the player will see a single still after the main game ending. There wasn't anything else in the game to confirm any other details, with players skeptical about its message- was SE hinting at another TWEwY game? With nothing but a single image, fans just have to wait for news from big boss itself.

The rise of Hype-chan

Fans never got another announcement from SE regarding TWEwY. In the time between 2012 and 2020, there was only one image haunting the fandom. This was different from the wait for KH3, fans of TWEwY only had one image with some girl in a school uniform to speculate with. Who was this girl even, anyway? They never gave us a name.

Over the years, the hope for a sequel dwindled and fans gave the girl a proper name: Hype-chan, the only sign of a potential sequel. Many theories rose from Hype-chan, with people guessing that maybe she's a new ally for us or perhaps she is the child of Neku in the far future? All fans could do is recycle theories about Hype-chan using the context clues from the image itself or from game assets. But alas, there was no answer to our questions.

Eventually Hype-chan and the TWEwY sequel became a meme amongst the online community. A tumblr blog was even made to document how there is still now sequel or any news of a sequel. Theories became less serious as hope was lost to the Reaper's Game.

Perhaps this is the end. Perhaps, there will never be a TWEwY2.

Neo: Hype-chan

In 2018, Square Enix released another remaster of TWEwY on the Nintendo Switch, this time with one more change. The game came with a new chapter but in classic Square Enix fashion, it ended with a cliffhanger. The fans rose up again, we're finally given something other than Hype-chan!

Soon after, SE would announce a sequel the to the series- Neo: The World Ends with You- which would then release on July 27, 2021. And there we will finally find out the true fate of Hype-chan.

extra notes

Before I end this post, I do want to include the reaction from Square Enix's ARTNIA Cafe from 2014. An official sketch of Neku was revealed and fans at the time went rabid at this singular crumb and the fact that Neku was revealed to have a neck, as his original design covered his neck. This was a long while ago but I distinctly remember someone making a Neck-u joke. Anyway other than Hype-chan this was the only other sequel "hint" that was given to fans.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/postal-history on 2025-01-04 12:34:12+00:00.

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Cookie’s Bustle: Mysterious Bombo World is a 1999 Japanese game released for Windows and Mac by an eight-person indie studio. It was their only game and they folded in 2002. The game is very finicky and requires (emulation of) a period Japanese Windows install or specific versions of Mac OS Classic. The gameplay is also fairly mundane. What is not mundane at all is the bizarre imagery, with the titular Cookie, depicted as a teddy bear, wandering through a dreamscape of helicopter crashes, UFOs, hamburgers and shape-changing entities. From an article about the game’s disappearance:

We control Cookie Blair, a five-year-old girl from New Jersey who believes she is a bear. The girl lives in Bombo World, a fictional island where – a hundred years prior – aliens have crash-landed and established their own place to live in, Derocity. Cookie wants to compete in the regional Olympics, but after travelling to Bombo City, she discovers that the whole place is in a state of unrest and, in order to reach her grandma, she will have to develop "a pure heart".

The intended audience of the game was both children and Westerners, but it was developed with a very odd idea of what children and Westerners want, seemingly naive and unfamiliar with the common visual tropes of gaming. Basically any single clip of Cookie’s Bustle will amaze you with the raw imagination of its creator. This is truly video games as art. However, I can’t link any clips here (although there are a few surviving online) because someone calling themselves the creator of the game began relentlessly trolling the obscure video game fandom in 2023, issuing takedown notices to 5-second absurdist clips posted by ClassicsOfGame, a Twitch VOD on the RetroPals channel, and all the ROMs on the Internet Archive and elsewhere of this very clear abandonware. From the American side, this is a sociopathic attack on the fandom, as video game historian SynaMax stated in February 2023 when the takedowns began:

This Cookie's Bustle situation is an abuse of copyright as well as actively destroying both video game history and the efforts of preservationists.

I am not a gamer. I just love the aesthetic of old games and the surprising amount of artistry and freedom that went into even the most obscure retro games. But I have dealt with Japanese culture in my day job, and I’m sorry to say that this is bringing me to disagree with SynaMax’s judgment. This is not a straightforward case of a copyright troll — it’s more like a Gothic horror.

The Leaking of Cookie’s Bustle

Cookie’s Bustle first came to the attention of the obscure video game community when a group of 70 previously unknown and ultra-obscure Japanese games was leaked to the Internet Archive. The source of this leak is known but bizarre. They were initially posted to a private ROM collector’s forum in early 2018, in a folder marked “DO NOT UPLOAD”. Vice writes:

Members of the private forum hesitated to upload [the DO NOT UPLOAD folder to archive sites] in the fear that the private collector would take down the folder and leave the collection out of reach once again. This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors. According to a screenshot uploaded by [the leaker], the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked [it].

This collector mockingly posted a link to the Lost Media Wiki, bragging that he had one of their games and “I don’t get why some people obsess over this game just because hardcore 101 made a comment about it.” This apparently pissed off another forum user so much that he uploaded the entire folder to Mega and posted a YouTube video ranting about the collector’s attitude. This was seen as a very bad thing. According to Vice, the “preservationists” had been hesitant to repost the folder because it would harm personal relationships not just with that especially arrogant collector but with other users of the secret forum going forward. Even the preservationist who Vice quotes took down his own blog post about the leak, in which he lamented that a “bridge [was] very publicly burned”.

The initial collector has come forward on the Cookie’s Bustle Discord and announced that he is not responsible for the DMCA claims. So, why am I telling you this? Eh, I’ll get to that later.

The Claiming of Cookie’s Bustle

After the 2018 leak, some people loved this game so much that they attempted to contact the creator, Keisuke Harigai. Harigai is a relatively uncommon name in Japan, so people have reached out to apparent relatives as well. To this day no one has reported successfully contacting him. The closest anyone came was in summer 2021 when someone heard from a friend of a friend that the creator was supposedly uninterested.

Starting in July 2021, three bizarre IP registrations were filed. First, an unknown company in the Principality of Andorra filed copyright registrations for the Cookie’s Bustle logo. This company is so obscure, based in a tax haven which keeps company info secret, that it was thought to be a fake company when the takedowns began; only a reporter in 2024 was able to confirm that they are a genuine member of the UK video game copyright association Ukie. The Andorran company has not responded to requests for comment by the reporter, Ukie, or anyone else.

Second, INTEROCO Copyright Office UG, a multinational copyright registration service, filed a registration for the New Jerseyite protagonist Cookie Blair using an actual render of the character. The render has incorrect shading, so it was seemingly recompiled from source code, which none of the fans had yet accomplished at that point. This copyright was claimed by a lawyer named Brandon White. No one has been able to reach this Mr. White. This lawyer also filed an extensive trademark registration in the US in 2022, which has undergone multiple revisions and extensions through October 2024.

Finally, a trademark was filed in the UK attributed to the elusive Keisuke Harigai himself. So, while the DMCA takedowns of little channels like ClassicsOfGame were at first thought to be a troll or a collector trying to perversely drive up the price, this is clearly not the case: real lawyers are involved and if Harigai is being impersonated, it’s pretty serious impersonation. As mentioned, the conceited collector who had originally obtained the ROM also personally joined Discord to say it wasn’t him either.

(belated edit) The INTEROCO registration included an encrypted RAR file with a description of the game and screenshots. The RAR password was discovered to be the lawyer's name, and the content within was an extensive English-language description of gameplay and mechanics, and many screenshots arranged in a world map with translations of the in-game dialogue, as if an English-language publisher had been seriously working on a rerelease at one point. The description contains such deadpan lines as

For this seemingly unfortunate reason, [Cookie] is unable to ride the bus. Nevertheless, this was a blessing in disguise as the bus is attacked by terrorists, and blown up right in front of Cookie.

Another document gives a planned release date of 2022. After this one final leak, INTEROCO made the files private and Discord sent warnings to users who had shared files from the RAR.

Okay, so this drama seems to be actually related to the developers. At least, Mr. White has access to internal dev files, the sort which are generally not shown at mere business meetings, and Harigai is apparently personally involved in the UK filing. But the extent of the copyright takedowns is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard of (and I am a longtime fan of DMCA drama). Fan art has been claimed, which is unheard of for an indie game. A rare ROM site which even the Nintendo lawyers don’t know about was forced to block Cookie’s Bustle. Vinesauce got hit with a copyright strike on YouTube for playing it. The Vinesauce subreddit got takedowns issued when they quietly posted a ROM. The Cookie’s Bustle Discord server has had so much material taken down, including uploads to the server itself, that their welcome message warns users that a spy for the claimants is active in the server at all times.

The Secret of Cookie’s Bustle

When the takedowns began in August 2022, a website emerged to respond to theories and rumors about who was responsible. To summarize:

1. Is a rerelease planned? Seemingly there was at one point, but it's now been 2.5 years with no news at all, not even an explanation for the takedowns.
2. Is the American lawyer acting on his own authority? If the contract were broken, how would he have authority to issue takedowns? And Harigai owns the UK filing ...

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The Rise, Baking, Cooking, Resting, and Failure of Concord

This is a chronicle of the life and subsequent death of the hero shooter Concord, made by Firewalk Studios for the PlayStation 5 and PC. One of, if not the most, doomed-to-fail and unwanted gaming disasters of recent time. Now you may have heard of Concord through some grapevines about how controversial it's launch was or about the characters within the game even if you aren't a big gamer yourself. Hopefully this post will help paint a clearer picture of this infamous game, from some humble beginnings to deep, deep holes.

A Studio of Vets and a Nothing-Burger Reveal

This all begins with the studio behind the game, Firewalk Studios. Founded in 2018, Firewalk Studios began after various game devs from other well known studios such as Infinity Ward, Bungie, and Respawn, left to create their own studio and combine their knowledge and experience with FPS games to create something new. Fast-forward to 2023 and PlayStation purchased Firewalk after seeing what they were working on and having "confidence" in them, bringing them onboard as a flagship developer.

From then, crumbs of what they were working on made it through to some game leak communities. As with leaks of any kind you take it with a pinch of salt but there were a few credible sources that gave folks a glimpse of what they could expect from Firewalk. An "FPS that focuses on gunplay and combat with style and theming from Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy" is the general gist that was thrown around. Again, this was all within the leaks community, so only a small portion of fans knew of what to expect come a proper reveal or tease. And it wouldn't be too long until that was.

May 24th, 2023, PlayStation has a Showcase event that showed off future games and drummed up excitement for what was to come in the next year or so. During this there was a small tease for a game from a studio that people were excited to see. Concord was finally revealed or rather, teased barely, for the general public to see and know about. Now the teaser trailer was really just that, a tease, a bare showing of a ship with some aesthetic looking décor and an oddly detailed burger. Then a title drop and date of 2024, that's it. A short description would be used on the standalone trailer uploaded to YouTube later that detailed what the game would be, but for a majority of people they were still in the dark about the gameplay.

And that was about it until one faithful, infamous day in 2024.

How Not To Reveal Your PVP Game

May 30th, 2024. PlayStation has a State of Play stream to reveal and show off new and upcoming game releases. And the headliner first shown game? Well, it's Concord, everyone! Excitement brewed as they were about to finally show off what Firewalk Studios had been working on for at least a few years now, and the Freegunner world of Concord was on display right at the start of the show. They start off with a 5 1/2 minute story-based cgi cutscene of some characters "doing a heist gone wrong", full of Marvel-esq humor and quirky lines, a desperately Star-Lord based reptilian man, some shooting and blasting, some moves and actions that look very much like character abilities, teamwork being shown...and oh no, wait, this is giving some vibes of a game genre people were not expecting this to be. The cutscene ends and some Firewalk employees start talking about the game and the proverbial rug gets pulled from most of the interested viewers, Concord was a 5v5 PVP Hero Shooter.

To say immediate reactions were bad is an understatement. They were unhinged and brutally honest, announcing a new entry into a medium of games that had their big moment in the spotlight years ago that only has a few honorable mentions still going today was an immediate shot in the foot. Not only was it the type of game people were upset with, but initial reactions to the general look of the game and the important characters you will play as were equally as bad, if not worse. Hero shooters were popular, sure, if it were a few years earlier, but to release a new entry in 2024 after numerous others have tried and failed just didn't seem right.

The combination of a hero shooter and "Guardians of the Galaxy" wasn't bad on paper, it actually could've been a really cool idea, but the way Concord presented itself with this was just not right. Like an uncanny valley feeling but for the general game, many people (including myself) just felt that nothing good was going to come from this game at all. Yet as with any IP there are those who did like the idea and were optimistic, and with a beta set only a few months in the future it would only be a matter of time until impressions were made firsthand.

Beta Blunders

July 12th, 2024. The first half of the Concord beta begins, an Early Access weekend for preorders on PS5 and PC. People finally will get hands on with the game after months of debate on how it could play out. Both genuinely excited players and those who want to see just how bad this could be log on (or watch) and begin to try out this new hero shooter.

Now this first weekend was a closed beta, meaning only players who preordered the game and got a code had access, so it makes some sense that overall numbers of people playing isn't a statistic to worry about. So an average number of players for this weekend not being crazy is okay, right? Let's take a moment to compare Concord's closed beta to another up-and-coming hero shooter Marvel Rivals. Rivals had it's own closed beta around the same time as Concord, and the numbers it drew in dwarfed Concord. Roughly 20x the amount of players tried Rivals, which even though Rivals wasn't a pay-to-enter closed beta it still required a sign up and relied on a little bit of luck to get chosen (or gifted a code from a friend). Well, I did forget to mention that every preorder also gets you an additional beta code to share. Neat, you can get a friend to try it too. Oh wait, no, I meant 3 codes, even more possible players. Except I lied again...it was 5 additional codes. For every preorder player they could get 5 more people to try it out, and even with this generous bonus the closed beta statistics were pretty dang low. "Oh okay, well it's still a closed beta overall so who cares about the player count really?", I hear you asking yourself, well these betas serve as a starting point to survey interest in the game. So when a closed beta mainly given out to preorders doesn't hit good numbers, it can begin to show some lack of interest.

Stats aside, the general sentiment about the gameplay at this time was high due to the ones playing the game being people who already put money towards it. It's not surprising for this to be the case, these people want the game to do good, but lets move to the Open Beta where a lot more of the feedback comes from, and where even more disaster looms on the horizon.

July 18th, 2024. The Open Beta for Concord begins and continues through the weekend. This is where games get the most valuable feedback, where things can really begin to shine, or where issues can really begin to show their face. Anyone could download the beta and try it out, they can get a feel of what Concord has to show them.

Impressions were not good, mixed at best. Multiple game review outlets put out media sharing their disappointing time with the beta, stating a general lack of polish and overall empty feeling of nothing really standing out to make the game seem special. General threads are made for players to share their thoughts. There were some good things to talk about, like the gun play (not surprising due to the Destiny vets in the studio), the graphics, the sound, but those are all secondary to the main meat of players worries. The main issue that kept getting brought up, "Why is this going to be $40?" In a field of games that opt to be Free To Play, Concord was sticking hard to it's $40 buy-in to play the game, and people did not like that. It's a hard pill for potential players to swallow that even in an open beta people were discussing what the point was. Even the hero shooter juggernaut that is Overwatch 2 had to go F2P, so keeping this buy-in ...

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Warning: discussion of mental health issues.

Kodama Haruka, commonly known by her nickname Haruppi, was the ace of HKT48 until she went on hiatus and never returned. Her career was filled with tragic moments, much of which we did not find out until after her career. I will start with a primer.

Terminology

AKB48: AKB48 is an idol group founded in 2005 by Akimoto Yasushi. The concept was “idols you can meet”, with a theater in Akihabara, Tokyo where they perform every day. AKB48 has a large number of members as each theater performance is conducted by a team of 16 members, and there are multiple teams alternating on different days. AKB48 also founded sister groups throughout Japan with their own members, teams, and setlists and who perform at their own theater.

HKT48: AKB48’s sister group in Hakata, Fukuoka. It was founded in 2011.

General Election: In 2009, AKB48 started the General Election, where fans could vote for the lineup of a single once a year. Usually, AKB48 singles were a kind of “all star” lineup with the top members of each sister group being selected (the sister group’s singles would feature a lineup of just their own members) alongside the top AKB48 members. Each single would typically feature around 16 members. Since AKB48 and its sister groups collectively had hundreds of members, many fans would complain to the management that they were choosing the wrong members. So, AKB48 created the General Election. The single preceding the Election would contain a voting ticket. For each CD you bought, you received a vote that you could put towards your favorite member. The members who received the most votes would be in the lineup, with the one who received the most being the center. Initially, it was the top 21 members, but was later reduced to the top 16.

Who is Kodama Haruka?

Kodama Haruka, or Haruppi, was a member of HKT48’s 1st Generation. She immediately stood out in several ways. One of which was her unique haircut that she kept for most of her career. She also had a speech impediment, and hosts on variety shows would often make fun of her poor enunciation and make her do impromptu tongue twisters. One thing was certain: she was the ace of HKT48 from the very beginning. She was the center of their theater performances and when they performed concerts and lives at outside venues. She had a close friendship/rivalry with fellow 1st Generation member Miyawaki Sakura, now of K-pop fame for IZ*ONE and Le Sserafim. She also became close with Sashihara Rino, a popular member of AKB48 who was transferred to HKT48 in 2012. Sashihara, who was a veteran member and older than the HKT members, became a motherly figure to them.

HKT48’s Beginnings

HKT48 took a while to get off the ground. From their introduction in 2011 and throughout most of 2012, they did release a single or have an original song. They continued to perform hundreds of shows at their theater and numerous outside lives with Haruppi as their ace. They recruited and debuted HKT48’s 2nd Generation in September of 2012, before they got an original song. In late 2012, it was announced that they would finally get one. It was to be called Hatsukoi Butterfly, and was a B-Side on AKB48’s 29th single, releasing in December of 2012. They called in the members to give them their parts and to practice and record the song. They announced the center first.

And… it wasn’t Haruppi. They announced that 2nd Generation Member Tashima Meru would be the center. Haruppi was crushed. She had a private conference with their manager and asked him “Why wasn’t I enough?”, gradually falling into tears. Everyone was shocked by this announcement. Sashihara said it was perhaps the most shocking moment of her life. All of this was captured on film and released in HKT48’s documentary, directed and narrated by Sashihara herself.

The Singles

HKT48 released their 1st single, Suki! Suki! Skip!, in March of 2013. Haruppi was hopeful that she would regain her position as ace, but once again Tashima was the center. This trend continued as HKT released their 2nd and 3rd singles, with Tashima centering alongside fellow 2nd Generation member Tomonaga Mio. It seemed that Haruppi had been left behind.

Then, in 2014, her luck changed. Haruppi was announced as the center of HKT48’s 4th single, Hikaeme I love you!, released in September 2014. She would continue to be the center for their 5th (April 2015), 6th (November 2015), and 7th (April 2016) singles. Haruppi had regained her rightful place as the ace of HKT48.

The Elections

Each year, Haruppi steadily rose in her Election ranking. In 2012, she was unranked. In 2013, she was #37, and in 2014 rose to #21. Then we get to the 2015 election. As they are counting down the rankings, they announce #17. Once they announced “HKT48”, Haruppi knew it was her. She immediately cried out, and then wept.

Number 17 is perhaps the most painful ranking in the Election. The top 16 make it to the lineup of the single, so it’s just outside of making it. Being in an AKB48 single lineup is a huge boon to your career, but it’s also a matter of pride. Haruppi had 43,985 votes, just short of #16’s 44,637. You can watch the announcement and aftermath here.

Despite the setback, Haruppi persisted, and was ranked #9 in 2016’s Election. She had finally made it.

The Kohaku Uta Gassen Incident

Kohaku Uta Gassen is a yearly music competition held by Japan’s national broadcaster the NHK on New Year’s Eve. The NHK invites popular music acts from past and present to compete. Kohaku is extremely popular in Japan, and around 30% of Japanese households watch the broadcast. AKB48 was a fixture of Kohaku by 2016. That year, the NHK decided they would do their own election. Members of the public could vote for their favorite 48 Group member and they would be announced at Kohaku. Since this didn’t involve buying a single and you couldn’t vote more than once per device, this would prove to be very different from AKB48’s General Election. In addition, only the top 16 would be announced at Kohaku, and the members would get into their positions accordingly and perform their song.

The announcements began with #16 and counted down. This election had very different results from the General Election, with some members who have little popularity in the General Election ranking highly. Once they got to the top 2, Haruppi still hadn’t been called. She ran to the middle of the stage with her hands clasped in prayer. However, two of the most popular members also hadn’t been called: NMB48’s Yamamoto Sayaka and HKT48’s very own Sashihara Rino, who had been #4 and #1 in that year’s General Election, respectively. The results of the Kohaku election concluded with Sashihara as #2 and Yamamoto as #1. Haruppi immediately began crying, having not made it into the top 16 at all.

All of this was broadcast to 30% of Japan. She was immediately widely mocked online. Detractors called her out for thinking she could’ve been in the top 2 when two superstars still hadn’t been called.

To me, this seems like a minor incident, but it’s what marked the turning point in her career.

Haruppi’s Hiatus

In early 2017, Haruppi went on hiatus for unspecified reasons. It’s not uncommon for members to go on short hiatuses, but Haruppi’s lasted longer than usual. After two months, she returned as a surprise at an HKT concert. Fans were delighted that she was back, but almost all the talk was about the same thing: Haruppi had gained a lot of weight. Again, she was widely mocked online. Soon after, Haruppi went on hiatus again.

Haruppi missed the 2017 Election. Throughout 2018, there was little word about her, and again she missed the Election. There was a lot of speculation during this time that she had gotten injured doing pro-wrestling (AKB48 had a pro-wrestling drama during the time that she appeared in), but fans were left in the dark. In October of 2018, HKT48 had a concert that served as the sending-off for Miyawaki Sakura, Haruppi’s old friend and rival, before she went to IZ*ONE. Fans hoped that Haruppi would appear, but ultimately she did not. There was one last hope of seeing her: Sashihara announced graduation at that concert. She would have a graduation concert in April of 2019. As the concert grew near, there was a lot of anticipation that Haruppi would join. However, once again she did not appear.

In June of 2019, HKT48 announced that Haruppi was graduating. There would be no further activities. This kind of graduation is entirely unprecedented in AKB history. Every graduating member performs a graduation show at the theater. Popular members have a graduation concert at a larger venue in addition to the graduation show. The most popular members get a graduation single in addition to the other two. Haruppi was easily popular enough to get all three. She was the ace of HKT48, reached #9 in the Election, and had seemingly fallen off the face of the Earth. It was announced that she would switch to a different agency and focus on acting.

Post-Graduation

Haruppi did return to the entertainment world and had a few roles in stage plays and TV shows. Everyone was relieved to see her return in any capacity, but...

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Fandom can be beautiful. Fandom can make something that you already enjoy into something to be built on, engaged with, and fall in love with over again. This is a story about how a fandom was given something wonderful, engaging, and beloved.

And how they murdered it.

This is a story about rage. This is a story about money. This is the story about how fans grip so tight they strangle things.

This is a story about Magic: the Gathering.

WHAT IS MAGIC: THE GATHERING?

Magic: the Gathering (hereafter referred to as Magic) is a trading card game printed by Wizards of the Coast. The game has you casting spells and summoning creatures with the goal of eventually reducing your opponent’s life to zero. The game is one of the earliest examples of TCGs in general, and certainly one of the most successful. It is not a stretch to say that the popularity of the game is at least partially responsible for the proliferation of hobby stores across the United States.

Typically, the game is played in a 1v1, competitive environment, with various formats changing what cards are legal and therefore what strategies are more effective than others. Popular formats include Standard (the last 3 years of printed cards), Modern (all cards after 2003), or Pauper (only cards printed at the lowest possible rarity are allowed), and Commander, the format this will be about.

WHAT IS COMMANDER?

Commander, formerly known as Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH), is a fan-created format attributed to Sheldon Menery1 and popularized by tournament judges.

There are four major differences between Commander and essentially all other formats of Magic. First, players start with double the normal amount of starting life, encouraging longer games. Second, players are only allowed a single copy of a card in their deck, reducing consistency. Third, the game is not played 1v1, but rather 4-player free-for-all. Finally, each player designates a creature card as their “commander,” having essentially guaranteed access to its abilities while restricting the cards in their deck to only those matching their commander’s “color identity”, meaning that players have an upper bound of how many cards they could have access to, and each player knows what general archetype their opponents could have access to before gameplay really begins.

The net result of the format is that it is one that is fundamentally slower, social, and more casual. These are all intentional to the design of the format. On top of actual rule changes, Commander has a large list of somewhat unspoken social rules that tend towards games being at best a fun way to show off your deckbuilding skills and at worst overly slow slugfests.

Commander as a format started as a judge event, where between or after rounds, judges would use it as a way to shoot the shit and socialize. This lasted for a while, but once Wizards of the Coast started to print Commander-specific products, the format rapidly grew until the COVID-19 pandemic solidified Commander as the single most popular way to play Magic at all, and it’s easy to see why: the format is social and low-stakes, with the idea of pushing your deck to an unbeatable state being seen as vaguely tryhard, and while those circles exist, most games are about having fun with the wide card pool and showing off your ability to create interesting or powerful decks rather than going for the throat.2 Combine this with the four-player nature encouraging people to drag down anyone who springs to an early lead, and the format is an enjoyable mess.

WHAT IS THE COMMANDER RULES COMMITTEE?

Remember how I said that Commander was a fan-created format?

More than just the original rules of the format, Commander was a fan-curated format. The Commander Rules Committee, hereafter referred to as the RC, was a group of individuals in charge of monitoring the format, dictating ban lists, rules changes, and otherwise arbitrating the core mechanics of the format since it was established in 2006. The members of the RC were not paid by Wizards of the Coast. They were not chosen by Wizards of the Coast. The format was run by a panel of players, tournament judges, and passionate content creators. This was an unabashed positive for most players. Unlike Wizards of the Coast, who are ultimately a for-profit company, the RC was able to act in whatever way they thought would best serve the format. Sometimes people disagreed with them, but ultimately, the RC was empowered to shape the format.

Wizards of the Coast, for their part, was fairly content with this arrangement. While the RC was not immune to controversy (here is a thread of basically pure bashing, for instance, and it is years old), this essentially allowed them to outsource the blame for any format decisions. The RC was also a talent-rich pool that could be consulted for Commander-specific designs that the company put out.

The RC was a tight group. Members are clear that they considered each other friends as well as essentially volunteer coworkers on a multi-million dollar project that awarded no money outside of sporadic consulting work for Wizards of the Coast (something that all of them as major community figures would have had access to regardless). They were in it for the love of the game.

In early 2019, the RC established the Commander Advisory Group, hereafter referred to as the CAG. Composed primarily of community members like streamers, professional players, YouTubers and judges, the group served as a sounding board for decisions and a way to check community temperature on any potential bans or rules changes.

PART ZERO: ANGUISHED UNMAKING

On September 7th, 2023, Sheldon Menery died after a long battle with cancer.

Menery was, by all accounts, a thoughtful and charming figure. He built the format and was, to many in the community and the company that made it, a dear friend. Fuck cancer.

Menery was the polestar of the format. Historically his decisions had not always been popular with the fandom, but he had a presentation about him that tended to make things blow over. He was beloved. He was gone. Now the RC had to fill the precepted void that he had left as the spokesman and navigator of the format.

The RC would last for one more year.

PART ONE: JEWELED LOTUS

To talk about the death of the RC, we first have to understand three specific cards. I will be explaining them in pretty simple terms that even if you didn’t play the game, you could understand.

Magic is a resource-based game. Each turn, players can play a card from their hand to give themselves access to more and more mana, a renewing resource that allows them to cast spells and summon creatures. Typically, without specific spells, a player can only increase their available mana per turn by 1. Many spells will create things which can provide more mana on future turns. These are called “ramp spells”, and the most powerful of them are what are called “fast mana”, which are essentially spells that put more mana out than it costs to play them. For instance, the card Sol Ring costs 1 mana to play, but can immediately be used to create 2 mana on that turn and on every turn afterwards, meaning you have netted 1 additional mana the turn it was played and are 2 mana ahead on all future turns.

Fast mana is extremely powerful. When played early, these cards can completely warp a game by making one player able to drop mid- or endgame threats onto a table while other players are still trying to start their engines. Sometimes, this can be enjoyable, leading to a three-on-one mentality and an engaging game. Usually, however, this just leads to frustration as someone jumps ahead.

Fast mana is also, generally, extremely expensive. Other than Sol Ring, a card that has been reprinted so often that it is rarely more than a dollar for a copy despite being the most played card in the format, most spells that would be considered fast mana are extremely rare and highly prized for their power, leading to incredible price tags.

The three cards that we are going to be talking about today are some of the most powerful fast mana that the game has ever printed: Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt. Frankly, for the purposes of this story, their actual effects are completely interchangeable: they make a lot of mana for little to no resource investment. Well, mana investment. What they cost was a different kind of resource: USD.

Prior to their banning, the average sell price of these cards on TCGPlayer were as follows: Dockside Extortionist, $83; Jeweled Lotus, $86; Mana Crypt, $182. (Dockside’s price history is here, others can be searched) I will also note that these were not premium versions of these cards. This was your entry level ticket into playing with them.

Between their power and their price tag, unless you were playing at a very high-powered table where they were expected, someone playing any of these often elicited groans or outright curses in many playgroups. While Commander decks are often not cheap, the bare price floors on these were so high that they could be worth as much a budget player’s entire deck. Every st...

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Yes, there’s a fandom for Fabergé eggs. They call themselves egg sleuths occasionally, which I find incredibly adorable. After a full year of procrastinating I managed to write you up a semi-coherent overview of Fabergé egg enthusiasts and their so far biggest event: the discovery of the Third Imperial Egg, and the extremely dedicated fan archival work done by an American married duo, a middle aged Dutch lady and many more. But before we go into that, let’s establish what the goddamn hell a Fabergé egg is, why some of them are missing and what fans are doing about that.

Disclaimer, these eggs have some pretty confusing names. I’ll to do my best, and link pictures when available to hopefully help, but we’ll just have to hold hands and power through.

1. What are Fabergé eggs?

The House of Fabergé, which sounds like a great drag family name, was a jewelry firm founded in 1842 in Saint Petersburg by Gustav Faberge, later run by his sons & grandsons. Apparently they added the accent because everyone was really into the French in the mid 1800s, but I can’t find a solid source for that (the Fabergés also had roots as expelled French Huguenots).

The Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, first became aware of the Fabergés’ work at a Pan-Russian exhibition in Moscow where they displayed a replica of a 4th century BC bangle. Tsar Alexander III was so into it that he ordered the museum to display their work to “showcase contemporary Russian craftsmanship”, and in 1885 the Fabergés were awarded the title of “Goldsmith by special appointment to the Imperial Crown”.

Within this coveted relationship, Alexander III (who once folded a silver fork into a knot and threw it at an Austrian ambassador) ordered an Easter gift for his wife, Tsarina Maria Feodrovna. Easter being the most important celebration in the Russian orthodox church, no expenses were spared and the Fabergé workshop created the First Hen or Jeweled Egg

Allegedly inspired by an ivory decorative egg held in the Danish court (Maria, born Dagmar, was a Danish princess) the First Hen is only around 64mm/2.5 inch wide, made of white enamel and gold and opens to reveal a gold “yolk”. This opens as well and contains a 35mm/1.4 inch golden and ruby-endowed hen which finally opens to house both a tiny replica of the imperial crown and a ruby pendant (which are now missing). Very Matryoshka doll in spirit.

By all accounts the Tsarina absolutely adored the gift and Alexander put in a standing order at Fabergé. They were to craft a new egg-shaped object each Easter, stipulating that each should contain a “surprise” and that they should all be unique. While Alexander had some creative input to the first eggs (according to letters between him and his brother that were discovered in 1997), Fabergé would get full control over the design and craftsmanship after a few years.

And boy did they use that. Between 1885 and 1916, Fabergé created 50 “imperial eggs”, missing two years due to the Russo-Japanese War, with 2 additional eggs starting but not finishing construction. After Alexander’s death in 1894, his son Nicholas II continued the tradition and added an order for his own wife, Alexandra Feodrovna.

Overall, there were 30 eggs made for Maria and 20 for Alexandra, with the designs becoming more intricate and elaborate as time went on. The eggs ranged in size from under 7 cm to over 36 cm (3 to over 14 inches), contained mechanical tricks and new techniques, used precious stones and gems, and could almost always be opened to reveal a surprise inside. The surprise could be anything from miniature paintings of places and people relevant to the Tsarinas, a rad as hell moving mechanical swan, a whole ass Trans-Siberian Railway train, a singing bird with actual feathers, a miniature replica of an imperial ship etc etc. Or as curator Jo Briggs put it:

We think so much about the external aspects of the egg, but they’re really like the most expensive gift wrap you could ever make

The workshop needed basically the whole year to create the two eggs, starting right after Easter finished. And while everything was under the watching eyes of the Fabergés, we know that the design and actual crafting of the eggs were done by a variety of workers, craftmasters and designers like Mikhail Perkhin or Alma Pihl.

Fabergé also created eggs for other clients, most famously examples like the Kelch Rocailla Egg or the Rothschild Egg, but they were in general less elaborate than the imperial eggs and often copies of one another or the imperial eggs.

Production of the eggs stopped in the Russian Revolution, and when the Fabergé workshop was nationalised by the Bolsheviks in 1918 the Fabergé family left the country. Quite famously, the Romanovs were removed from power, imprisoned and shot in a basement in Yekatarinenburg (or you know, went on to fight an insane wizard and his adorable pet bat while falling in love with a kitchen boy).

And that’s where the eggs get very interesting.

2. What’s the issue with these goddamn eggs?

While Dowager Tsarina Maria actually survived the revolution via a hasty retreat to Crimea and then later UK with help by her nephew King George V (a journey that also included a few of her grandsons, six dogs and a canary), she as far as we know only had one egg with her: the last one she had been gifted, the 1916 Order of St. George Egg, which is described as “understated” and “simple” due to wartime by egg enthusiasts across the globe.

All other eggs were still in the possession of the imperial family. While the eggs had been exhibited very occasionally across the years they were usually housed in the private quarters at the Gatchina, Anichkov, Winter or Alexander Palaces. These palaces were looted and then confiscated during the revolution. The eggs were considered state property, and once the Soviet state started selling off treasures, eggs eventually started popping up in the UK and the US to be sold to the highest bidder.

For the vast majority of the 20th century, Fabergé eggs would show up at auctions, museums or private collections. Most famously probably the Hammer exhibits held by Armand Hammer (American business mogul). He acquired ten-ish (the ownership of some eggs is unclear) Imperial eggs and showed them to the public with great gusto in the 1930s.

However, people really had no idea of how they got there, how many were out there, or which egg was which. The Romanovs didn’t exactly put out newspaper announcements each year with a photograph of their new eggs, after all they were fairly personal gifts.

The exhibitions that were held before the revolution, mainly the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and the 1902 Fabergé Artistic Objects Exhibition in St. Petersburg, had some surviving photos, but they were less nicely labeled museum-esque exhibits and more “a shit load of fancy, shiny stuff in a cabinet” captured from five meters away with an early 20th century camera. There were also so called “Fauxbergés”, eggs that either looked like Fabergé eggs, were of unsure origin or deliberately made to copy an imperial-style egg. With no clear list or descriptions of the actual imperial eggs, telling Fauxbergés apart was quite hard. On the flip side, other jewlers were also creating easter eggs and the Romanovs owned many as well, so there's also imperial non-Fabergé eggs to confuse the matter.

What the first egg sleuths knew was a vague number of eggs between 48 and 56-ish, that their amount was limited, that they were Easter gifts to the Tsarinas and by god, that more information on them must be somewhere. So they got to sleuthing.

However, it wasn’t that easy. Study of Fabergé, and especially the imperial goods, were discouraged in the Soviet Union. Western researchers also found it hard to access material from Russia, and auction houses were incredibly discrete about how and when they acquired them.

In the late 1980s to early 2000s once the Soviet Union disolved, a handful of significant sources were found and published. Marina Lopato, a curator at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, managed to find a handful of inventories and lists from the imperial time, mainly an album of Alexandra’s eggs after 1907 (missing all pictures but including descriptions & locations), a handwritten ...

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Hello, everyone! After spending several hours trawling through posts on this sub, I recently got it into my head to write a post of my own. It took me no time to decide on a topic- that of an incident that rocked not one, but two band fandoms in which I was involved in the early 2010's, and which feels vaguely like a fever dream in retrospect. In covering this incident, I realized I'd have to describe the last 5+ years of the band INXS' existence, so read on for a tale of reality shows, multiple lead singers, and a very confusing song.

(Before we begin, please note that while I experienced most of these events firsthand, I'm sure that there's plenty of information I'm leaving out because I don't remember it or couldn't track down any sources, so if anyone from the INXS fandom happens to be around to help me get the facts straight, I'd really appreciate you chiming in!)

So... who are/were INXS?

INXS was a rock band formed in Australia in 1977, consisting of six members: the three Farriss brothers, Tim, Andrew, and Jon; bassist Garry Gary Beers, saxophonist Kirk Pengilly, and their frontman, Michael Hutchence. If you were alive in the 80's (or if you inherited your entire music taste from your parents, like I did), you've probably heard their biggest hit, "Need You Tonight" (released 1987), at least once. If you haven't, here's a refresher. INXS' upbeat, danceable sound alongside Michael Hutchence's charisma, magnetism, and sex appeal was a winning combination, and the band enjoyed a fair amount of success throughout the 80's. Sadly, the party came to an end in 1997, when Michael Hutchence took his own life right before an upcoming tour. This was, as one would imagine, a hard blow to the band, who essentially went on an extended hiatus for several years.

Rock Star: INXS

Throughout the rest of the 90's, INXS did several one-off performances with various guest singers, such as Jimmy Barnes and Terence Trent D'Arby. One such performance, featuring Jon Stevens on lead vocals, even led the band to make an official offer for Stevens to join them as their new frontman. After a brief tour and some preliminary recordings, Stevens left INXS to pursue a solo career in 2003, leaving the band without a singer once again. It was clear that the band wanted to continue with a permanent singer, so what were they to do? Why, enter the world of reality TV, of course!

Rock Star: INXS was a televised competitive singing contest a la The Voice and American Idol that debuted in 2005. While I have not seen the show (although you can watch it all on YouTube), I do know that the winner of the competition was J.D. Fortune, a Canadian singer with a rock and roll sensibility that seemed like a perfect fit for the band. Later in 2005, INXS released Switch, their first (and what was to be their only) album with J.D. as their new lead vocalist. Switch's lead single, "Pretty Vegas," was unmistakably INXS-like in its sound and feel. Though some fans believed it was tasteless of INXS to "replace" Michael Hutchence via a reality show, it was hard to deny that J.D. had the right spirit, at least. Take a listen here if you don't believe me.

Rough patches

J.D. Fortune went on tour with INXS for the first time in January 2006. I'm not sure how well this tour was received, but it was enough for INXS to continue booking shows AND for them to earn a new record deal. However, in February 2009, trouble arose when J.D. Fortune announced to the press that INXS had fired him. Chris Murphy, the band's manager, put out a statement that did not support this claim... but it didn't refute it, either, stating that "The band have always stated to me that Fortune's services could potentially be contracted again when INXS next tour." Not exactly the kind of statement you'd expect a band to make about their own lead singer, whom one would assume is a bit more important than a contract worker, but hey... Eventually, J.D. clarified his comments in a statement made a month later, explaining that he had been under the impression after completing the last leg of INXS' tour that there had been two more legs left to complete. However, the next two legs were cancelled, and the band refused to return J.D.'s calls for six months. Naturally, upon receiving the silent treatment, J.D. assumed he was out of the band (not helped by his claims that he was dealing with a drug problem while on tour, which alienated the rest of the band from him, although he later retracted this as well and stated that he had been clean for two years, aside from occasionally smoking pot). J.D. also made a point to mention he was "not on a contract. Not at all. I was an equal member of that band according to them." In light of Chris Murphy's claims, this was, to put it mildly, an intriguing statement.

A tentative reunion

For the next few years, INXS worked on and off with J.D. Fortune. In 2010, they performed at the Winter Olympics with J.D. on lead vocals. Though they claimed the performance was a one-off, they embarked on a world tour with J.D. Fortune on vocals later that year. It took until July of 2010 for anyone in the band to confirm that he had officially returned as the band's lead singer, but by then it had become clear that they were a package deal. In November of 2010, INXS released their second post-Michael Hutchence album, Original Sin, which was a tribute to Michael featuring various vocalists (one of whom was J.D. Fortune). To support this album, the band went on tour throughout 2011... which is where I come in. 2011 was the year I discovered INXS, and the year that they played in my hometown. Being both a hormonal teenager captivated by Michael Hutchence's swagger, and the type of teenager who would write "I'm only 15 and I love this music! Today's music SUCKS!" in the comments of 80's songs uploaded to YouTube, I absolutely refused to go see INXS with J.D. Fortune, as I thought it wouldn't be the same. Nowadays, I kick myself over having I missed that show, especially knowing what was to come later...

"Tiny Summer"

INXS' last gig with J.D. Fortune as their frontman took place on August 14th, 2011. This was the final show of the Original Sin tour, after which the band went quiet... for a few days. It's unclear when this began, as there are only three dates in August- the 4th, the 10th, and the 18th- that the Wayback Machine captured INXS' official site, but the capture from the 18th shows an image of the five original band members and the caption "28 days to hear new INXS music." I know that at the time, I wasn't paying attention to the countdown right from the start, but as the day- September 14th, 2011- drew closer, I became aware, and began to grow excited despite my skepticism towards J.D. Fortune as a vocalist. When most of the bands you love are, as I put it in 2011, "either broken up or dead," you take any scrap of new music that you can get. At last, the time had come, and a new track was uploaded to INXS' site. The song was called "Tiny Summer," and it sounded a little something like... this.

So, uh. Assuming y'all clicked on those two links I shared above... Remember those fun, rocking INXS songs? Yeah... this sounds nothing like those. INXS were no strangers to ballads (see "Never Tear Us Apart," arguably their second biggest hit, and "Freedom Deep," if I may shamelessly plug one of my favorite deep cuts from their catalog), but "Tiny Summer" does not feature the sound that they're typically known for. To say nothing of the rough, demo-like quality of the recording. As well as one glaringly obvious observation... that's not J.D. Fortune singing.

Fortunately, a statement was posted alongside this song, but unfortunately, it did little to shed light on the matter of who the singer was and what had happened to J.D. The statement seems to have been scrubbed from INXS' site and their social media (and possibly, the internet as a whole- if anyone has preserved the full statement, please share it with me!), but I managed to find part of it quoted elsewhere. From Andrew Farriss, INXS' keyboardist and main songwriter:

"Without a doubt, amazing song magic happened when Michael and I were a creative writing team. Recently at a party, I met a fellow songwriter by accident, an Irish bloke, and we sat around playing songs on acoustic guitars. Despite his funny accent, we then spent a few days songwriting and singing together... song magic was in the room again."

Why Andrew didn't just name the singer right away, I have no idea. Because the thing is, the vocals on this song are reminiscent of a certain other Irish songwriter... Bono, the lead singer of U2. To hear what I mean, take a listen to one of U2's own ballads, from their most-recent-at-the-time album, 2009's No Line on the Horizon.

This is where things got a bit wild- not just for the INXS fandom, but for me specifically. Because as a matter of fact, there was one band of which I was a fan at the time which wasn't either "broken up or dead." A ...

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