Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

Hello! Your friendly mod PassingDuchy again with a few community updates!

Reddit and Discord Hobby Drama communities

I did reach out to both communities. The response from both is that they're not interested in affiliating. As such we won't be linking to either community in the sidebar to respect their wishes. Going forward please don't send either community messages about partnering with this community (though I appreciate everyone who did! It was a big help).

Reposting

Based on the previous discussion post we will be encouraging an opt-out request be sent to authors, but not requiring. The only requirement currently is that the full text is reposted and a link to the original post is included at the top or bottom of the repost.

14 Day Rule

The 14 day rule for all drama being concluded (outside of Round Up) will remain instituted.

Post Titles

As Lemmy doesn't currently have flairs/tags, we will be requiring a little extra work on post titles to help community searchability. Your title must include:

• [Repost] for reposts from another community (reddit or otherwise). Reposts must include the full text and a link to the original post at the top or bottom of the repost. At this time non-text posts (podcasts, YouTube videos, etc) are not allowed. If you want to link those you may link them in the weekly Hobby Round Up.
• A [History] tag if your post is a professional history related to a hobby. History is for only professionals having drama with no hobbyists involved (industry drama). This is a little extra work, but a compromise for people who are solely here to read about hobbyists and not industry drama. Ex. A post about the history of F1 would be [History], but a post about fan efforts to have a specific racer removed would be hobbyist drama.
• [Hobby] please keep this to the general hobby eg video games, knitting, board games, TV shows, music, apparel, etc.
• OPTIONAL [Specific Hobby] this is mostly useful for designating a specific fandom, band, brand, platform, etc (eg if your write-up general hobby is music, you might put Taylor Swift here to note the drama is about her specific fandom).
• We will not be requiring markers for post length. If your post exceeds the character count and needs to be continued in the comments, please link to the continued comment chain in your main post (currently mods can't pin other users' comments so we can't assist here).
• A full title should look something like: [Video Games][Old School Runescape] The hat scandal OR [Repost][History][Music] Fyre Festival controversies.

Hobby Round Up/Scuffles

A general megapost for all breaking hobby drama (14 day rule will not apply), news, chat, posts that don't fit the rules, links to articles/podcasts/videos, etc will go up on Mondays (I'm currently looking into figuring out an automod bot to do this to ensure regularity). I've changed the name to Round Up in the hope that users who use both the Lemmy and Reddit communities will see the different title in their tabs and have less confusion when posting between both.

Hobby Town Hall/Community Discussion

Hobby Community Discussion will be like the subreddit's Town Hall and go up on the first of the month. As we are a smaller community this will go up on the monthly first to be used for a four month period and be pinned for the duration. Community suggestions, improvements and concerns should be posted to Community Discussion. If possible please use reports for any immediate concerns as the mod team can coordinate best for immediate response via the modlog. Our first Community Discussion will go up on September 1st 2023 and last until the next one on January 1st 2024.

I'm desperately trying to find a recent dramatic happening in the open source world in which the admin for the most popular website to download a specific package turned the homepage into a slew of antivax/COVID denial messages, to the anger of the community.

I've tried searching but to no avail. It happened just a few months ago. IIRC, it was a specific, very popular open source package. Also, this wasn't the official website, just the most popular mirror for downloading the package.

Any help in tracking down this drama appreciated. Please do cross post to other relevant communities if you're feeling particularly helpful.

Original post from r/HobbyDrama by u/cslevens.

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”- AM, a fictional supercomputer from the short story ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, by Harlan Ellison.

“If you don’t understand how to make something difficult interesting, it ends up being guesswork. There is such a thing as ‘interesting difficulty’, and when programmers tried to just guess what that was, it never turned out very good.”- Shinobu Yagawa, Programmer of Videogames that Hate their Players.

It is just past midnight on a Saturday, now a Sunday. I am playing a videogame called “Battle Garegga”. It is a 2D Shoot ‘Em Up game, often abbreviated as a SHMUP. I am controlling a flying warplane, aesthetically similar to a World War II era fighter jet, but with a far more Steampunk design. The machineguns up front let loose an unceasing torrent of ammunition and shrapnel. The automated drones that surround me let loose an equally impressive wall of bullets.

I feel like I’m flying. The game is in 2D, and looks nothing like reality. But I feel like I’m flying.

I’ve just defeated the boss of the Third Level, a massive Tank that desperately grew more and more guns as I took it apart, piece by piece. I fought it and won. It died. It exploded.

I am flying.

As I soar into Stage 4, I make the conscious choice to die.

 

I fly, soaring, to the top of the screen. I turn my guns off. The drones around my plane fall silent. Enemy planes fly onto the screen, zeroing in on my position. I let them approach. My hands are fully off the controller.

A plane crashes into me, and I explode. I feel like I’m falling. Plummeting.

I chose this death, but I feel like I’m sinking every time I do it. I do it almost every time I play the game. While I chose this place to die, it’s a choice I would rather not make. But it is necessary.

This game actively hates me. Battle Garegga hates to see me do well. And I’ve done very well on Stage 3. I could feel the hate welling up. I could see it. The only thing that could calm the game down was my blood.

So I bleed in tribute. I choose death at my own hand, in exchange for the gift of not being slaughtered mercilessly by a vengeful bit of programming. A few seconds later, I’m revived. I’m flying again. I’m on my last life, but my sacrifice now ensures that the game remains technically beatable.

I’m fly-………….. I get hit by a stray bullet.  I’m dead again.

That was my last life. Game Over.

I can’t hear the game laughing at my loss, but I can’t not hear it either.

I start again.

 

What is a SHMUP?                  

The SHMUP, despite being a well known and recognizable genre, is defined surprisingly poorly. People can agree on certain core mechanics- the player controls a single, solitary thing (plane, space ship, person, etc.) ,and must shoot many, many enemies. Sometimes the enemies are an active threat. Sometimes they are just hanging out. But the point of the genre remains to fly around and “Shoot ‘Em Up”, until either a predefined victory point, or until an inevitable death. Your metric of success is generally “Points”, sometimes awarded simply, sometimes best understood with PhD level mathematics.

Oh yeah, and typically you die in one hit. Get hit by a stray bullet? Dead, minus one life. Lose enough lives- typically two or three- and the game ends.  If you’re dying, you’re not shooting ‘em up, so dying is typically something to be avoided in the genre. Remember this.

For the first few decades of Videogames’ rise in pop culture, SHMUPs were inescapable. One of the very first commercial smash-hit games, Space Invaders, was very firmly in the genre. Several other titles became inescapable fixtures within both Arcades and Home consoles- Raiden, Gradius, R-Type. As Arcades reached their absolute peak in the mid 90’s, SHMUPs were one of the pillars holding up the whole medium.

 

Why SHMUP? Why not SHMUP?          

Like Arcades themselves, the age of SHMUPS was not to last. As the commercial mechanism of the “Arcade” began to die a painful death (a topic better covered elsewhere), SHMUPs began to wither as well. SHMUPs, while well established in pop culture, had always been far, FAR more popular at the Arcades than on Home consoles.

It’s easy to see why.  Firstly, SHMUPs as a genre were extremely financially lucrative for arcade owners. The very nature of difficulty in SHMUPs, with deaths coming easily and punishingly- meant that only the most experienced players could make their playthrough last long. SHMUPs often offered an “enticing” difficulty, where the games were just easy enough to prompt players to play them more, but just hard enough to slaughter those same players regularly.

To simplify the economics: put a quarter in the machine. Play the SHMUP. The SHMUP is just hard enough that you die, game over. But it’s just easy enough that you think you can win. So you put another quarter in and start over.

As a player, you might have mixed feelings on this. But the guy who gets all the quarters LOVES it.

These same qualities, however, meant that SHMUPS never came close to that level of popularity in the living room. Outside of the arcade environment, SHMUPS can seem a bit….. exposed. When you pay full price for a SHMUP game up front, it’s easier for players to visualize how much money they spend. When you play one quarter at a time, it’s much harder to comprehend that monetary cost in the moment. And given that home consoles and home videogames are a much higher upfront cost than playing an arcade game, it led players to differently evaluate how much value they were really getting from their money.

SHMUPs do not seem as appealing from this angle. When you can just restart or continue your game for free, you get exposed to more of the game’s difficulty at once. You have an easier time seeing, from the very first playthrough, EXACTLY the amount of difficult nonsense you will be expected to put up with to win. When you see all this gradually, quarter by quarter in the arcade, it seems less imposing. But on a home console, the SHMUP looks a lot scarier because you can more or less see it all at once. Players, naturally, were intimidated away, and SHMUPs barely hang on to this day as an extremely niche genre.

It also did not help that the technology of home consoles rapidly eclipsed that of Arcades. 3D games rapidly, rapidly began to eclipse the popularity of 2D games. At the time, SHMUP design could really only flourish in two dimensions, so a genre fall was inevitable. Though some SHMUPs would experiment with pseudo 3d gameplay- like the well remembered RAY Trilogy-

Arcades would die, and SHMUPs would die in parallel. And one would argue that when the SHMUP died, it died at a point where the qualities of a good, “proper” SHMUP had more or less solidified.

Just remember this: What defines a good, proper SHMUP? Difficulty that is hard, but visually seems to be beatable. Fair mechanics, that don’t make you quit right away.

Above all else: A proper SHMUP has the appearance of fairness.

 

What is Bullet Hell?- Part 1                             

FUCK THAT.

FUCK ALL OF THAT BULLSHIT.

YOU TAKE THAT APPEARANCE OF FAIRNESS, YOU BREAK ITS NECK, AND YOU SEND IT STRAIGHT TO HELL.                             

I WANT TO FEEL LIKE AN UNSTOPPABLE GOD OF RIGHTEOUS DEATH, WADING THROUGH THE VITRIOL OF MY ENEMIES AND BLASTING THEM INTO AN UNDESERVED NIRVANA.

I WANT TO WALK THROUGH THE RAIN AND COME OUT DRY

IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO RIP AND TEAR                                

STAB. AND. STOMP.

The (Guessed) Origins of Shinobu Yagawa                           

Outside of the SHMUP fandom, there is extremely little known about Shinobu Yagawa. Despite being a prolific and well known creator within the genre, I could not even source an accurate birthyear for the man! The English internet has no information on his education, family, where he lives, nothing. What little history of the man we have comes through his creative works, and through exactly two interviews he has given to the public.

We can logically guess that at some point, Shinobu Yagawa was born. I try not to assume when I write these things, but I’ll make that assumption here quite proudly.  

Continuing this stream of barely-cobbled-together-assumptions, it is likely that Yagawa was a child at some point, and eventually ceased being a child, and then became an adult. He could have skipped one of those, but it is hard to tell. By the time he was an adult, he was living in Japan. Around 1990, we can very clearly say two things about Shinobu Yagawa: That he was making a living as a videogame programmer, and that he was a gigantic fan of the SHMUP genre.

In 1990, Taito (the creators of the original Space Invaders), released a little known game called Gun Frontier. On first glance, Gun Frontier would look like nothing special. It superficially appeared very similar to other games in the genre.

The player controlled a flying plane, with a lot of weaponry. There were many enemy planes, of which to shoot. If you shot said enemies, you would get points. Other than the game being Wild West themed, there really wasn’t much that stood out about the game.

But then, when people tried to play the game, they noticed that the game would…… punish them for playing well. The faster and more often you fired your weapons, the more fierce the enemies would get. If you spammed the screen with your firepower, an expected perk of the genre, enemies would spam right back. This escalation in difficulty was so extreme, that it was possible to accidentally render the game physically un-winnable!

SHMUPs had previously used a similar design philosophy before- it’s called “Rank”, and we’ll get into it more later- but never in this extreme of a fashion. This was punishing, and made the game almost feel spiteful. The game offered you a fun way to play, but if you ever accepted this offer, the game would then punch you in the face. To this day, though acknowledged as an interesting step in gameplay design, Gun Frontier remains very divisive.

Shinobu Yagawa played Gun Frontier and immediately fell in love. The idea of a game with difficulty that responded to the player’s actions was just a concept that he could not look away from. Yagawa knew then that he wanted to make difficult SHMUP’s, but he also knew that he wanted to make them different in an interesting way.

Very shortly after, in 1992, Yagawa would release his first breakthrough game, Recca: Summer Carnival ’92. Curiously, though this was a SHMUP, it was not an arcade title, but instead was developed for the Famicon/NES.

Within the ever-shrinking population of SHMUP fans, Recca is known as an incredibly pivotal title within the genre for multiple reasons. The design of Recca, though it did not incorporate the dynamic difficulty of Gun Frontier, was unlike anything ever seen before. The player’s controllable ship was extremely powerful, with five different weapons, and a shield function that offered straight up invincibility. You could block bullets now!

But you would have to block bullets, because the sheer amount and pace of the enemy fire was overwhelming. The game was not the typical matter of “Shoot everything, and survive”. It required more thought by the player, and nerves of steel.

And all this, on the simple hardware of the NES of all things! This wasn’t just an innovation of design, but a remarkable technological achievement. Yagawa quickly became known in the industry as a genius programmer and designer, to the point that companies would rapidly scout his services. Titans of the SHMUP industry (namely Raizing and CAVE) keep him regularly employed over the next 20 years, because of what he would accomplish with his games.

Starting with Recca, Shinobu Yagawa would birth a new subgenre within the SHMUP, right about the time when arcades would begin to die.

Shinobu Yagawa would create the games that spawned the Bullet Hell movement. And to this very day, people keep arguing about whether his games are any good or not.

 

What is Bullet Hell?- Part 2                         

Bullet Hell (aka Danmaku, Curtain Fire, Manic Shooter, etc.) is a type of SHMUP that revels in excess, and celebrates difficulty. The point of the Bullet Hell genre is to take everything that SHMUPs used to need to succeed- those concepts that gave them the initial appearance of fairness- and toss them into the garbage.

In bullet hell games, it is often hard to see yourself. Bullets are flying literally everywhere. They are big, they are loud, they are obnoxious, and there are thousands of them at any given time. Bullet Hell games are not designed to draw players in- they are designed to scare away the meek.

But if you find the courage to step up and play one, you rapidly find out that they are not as imposing as they look. Are Bullet Hell games difficult? Yes, all SHMUPs are difficult. But Bullet Hell games, specifically, give the player a LOT of tools for success that you would not typically have in other SHMUPs.

While the enemy’s firepower is excessive, so is yours. The player in a bullet hell game typically has massive, highly damaging, and wide ranging attacks, with no cost. In addition, the player’s hitbox- the part of the player that bullets can actually hit- is absolutely TINY. In other SHMUPS, when you fly a plane, you typically die when a bullet hits any part of the plane. But in a Bullet Hell SHMUP, a bullet has to hit a tiny, tiny, TINY hitbox in the center of your plane, or else it does no damage. In some games, this hitbox is as small as a single pixel.

On top of that, depending on the game, Bullet Hell Players are given gameplay mechanics that let them turn the difficulty of the game to their advantage. Many games let players “cancel”, or erase, enemy bullets en masse, either turning them into explosions that harm enemies, or into ever escalating amounts of points. It is not uncommon for Bullet Hell games to devolve into a risk/reward loop, where you intentionally let the enemy fill the screen with deadly, deadly bullets, and then destroy the bullets for an influx of points and extra lives.

Just to be clear: The games are still EXTREMELY hard. But they aren’t even close to impossible. They just pride themselves on looking impossible, is all.

There is debate on what game is considered the “first” bullet Hell Game. While Recca ’92 is very much a precursor to the genre, there are two more prominent candidates. The first is 1995’s DonPachi, by CAVE, which defined many of the aesthetic elements that would define the visuals of Bullet Hell for decades to come.

The second is 1996’s Battle Garegga, programmed and designed by Shinobu Yagawa. While Battle Garegga would introduce many staples of the genre, it is most remembered for being a game that hates you. Yes, you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never played the game at all.

 

Battle Garegga Hates You.                             

Battle Garegga combined the two design elements that Yagawa seemed to love- the shifting and evolving difficulty of Gun Frontier, and the absolute insanity of Recca. But in combining these two things, Yagawa created a game that was, itself, an absolute monster of disdain.

Battle Garegga features an extreme form of gameplay design called “Rank”, similar to the difficulty system of Gun Frontier, but far, FAR more extreme. Rank was previously a soft fixture of SHMUPs prior to Battle Garegga, as a part of that enticing, fair-looking difficulty we discussed earlier.

In general, if you played a SHMUP and scored very well, or you destroyed a certain amount of enemies, the game would invisibly “Increase Rank”, and make itself harder. There would be more enemies, and they would be tougher. Inversely, if you did poorly, the game would “Decrease Rank”, and become easier.

In Battle Garegga, this works a bit differently. The workings of Rank in Battle Garegga are obtuse, unintuitive, and entirely invisible. But to keep things simple, here is a list of things that Increase Rank in Battle Garegga:                    

-Living                          
-Shooting your weapon                   

-Enemies being hit by your weapon                

-Using a “Smart Bomb” to clear the screen of bullets               

-Powering up and Getting Stronger                     

-Collecting Points and Resources                

-Gaining Extra Lives                 

Here is a list of things that Decrease Rank in Battle Garegga:                       

-Dying                        

Did you think I was being hyperbolic when I said this game hates you? The Rank in Battle Garegga, notoriously, increases when you, as a player, do literally anything. If you Shoot ‘Em Up in this SHMUP game, the game will hate you, and become extremely difficult. If you try and play smart, destroy enemies efficiently, and do your best to stay alive, the game will STILL hate you, and become extremely difficult. And if you play the game and try to do as little as possible, the game will STILL hate you, and become extremely hard.                  

Enemies will be tougher, and they will fire enough bullets to make Battle Garegga look like a modern day Bullet Hell SHMUP. But, as a precursor to the genre, Battle Garegga offers ABSOLUTELY NONE of the perks that make most Bullet Hell games tolerable. Your hitbox is gigantic. Your weapons, while cool, are not an unstoppable engine of destruction. While you have a smart bomb, it is slow, and offers you no benefit for cancelling enemy bullets.

It cannot be understated what a dramatic effect Rank has on Garegga, and the obscene degree to which it escalates the difficulty. Here is a video of someone playing Garegga with Rank maxed out (with an invincibility hack), just to demonstrate how ludicrously  and literally impossible it gets.                      

Gun Frontier gained some notoriety for the fact that a poor player could accidentally make the game unwinnable. Battle Garegga gained far more notoriety for the fact that EVEN AN AVERAGE PLAYER could do this, just by playing “normally” . Novice playthroughs typically end at Stage 4 or 5 of the game (out of 7), with the rank having risen so high that the game becomes even more literally impossible than Gun Frontier.

The very design of Garegga, and Yagawa’s philosophy to difficulty and rank as a whole, hates the player. They punish the player for playing the game, in every sense.

And yet Battle Garegga was a smash success, by the standards of SHMUPs. It is so beloved within the industry that Yagawa was more or less given a complete, unhindered, creative blank check for every other game he would be asked to make.

From this point forward, almost every single game Yagawa would make would incorporate the elements that made Battle Garegga so infamous. He would immediately make two spiritual successors with Raizing- “Armed Police Batrider” and “Battle Bakraid”. These games, plus Garegga, form the legendary “Bat” trilogy, and are seen as the “purest” implementation of his gameplay philosophy. All three game feature unique aesthetics, wild and crazy bullet patterns to avoid, and, of course, Rank. All three are games with a Rank system so extreme, that it takes a large amount of research and study on the player’s part to even make them digestible.

After his time at Raizing, Yagawa would migrate over to CAVE, where he would be given the helm on a continuous list of titles. He would develop both “Ibara” and “Pink Sweets”, both of which bring his games into the Bullet Hell genre proper. While both of these games feature an obtuse, unforgiving, and downright spiteful Yagawa-style rank system, they also offered the player concessions more in line with the rest of the Bullet Hell genre. Smaller hitboxes, higher player firepower, and the ability to neutralize enemy bullets for points. In other words, “Yagawa-Lite”.

He would then develop “Muchi Muchi Pork”, which forgoes the Rank system almost altogether. In place of acting as an unfeeling monolith dedicated to hating the player,  the game is instead a mechanically fun and forgiving maximalist Bullet Hell title, that also functions as a love letter to heavyset women in general.

Look, I know that doesn’t fit with the theme, but I felt weird not mentioning it. It’s a solid game, if not completely, completely bizarre in aesthetics. You see what I mean.

Finally, and most recently, Yagawa would be trusted with “Re-making” or “Revising” existing CAVE games. Essentially, he was given the freedom to use the assets of existing games to make what were essentially entirely new titles, that play very differently from their source material.

He would turn “DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu”, into “DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu: Black Label”, which takes the original game and implements the absolute most extreme form of Rank that Yagawa could possibly conceive of. His revision not only implemented rank, but actually created a visible “Rank Meter” on screen. Which, of course, the player would need, because any and all movement of Rank in this title is MASSIVE AND INSTANTANEOUS. While players had much more ways to influence Rank (up and down), this influence resulted in difficulty swings so wild that it’s not uncommon for players to reach Maximum (Impossible) Rank, drop to Minimum Rank, and then rise to Impossible Rank again within seconds. Here’s a playthrough.

Yagawa would turn “Espgaluda II” into “Espgaluda II: Black Label”, which was not as dramatic of a transformation. The original Espgaluda II offered the players the opportunity to temporarily manipulate Rank somewhat (in a tradeoff for points), so Yagawa simply took those mechanics and pumped them up to 11. Gameplay here.

After this, Yagawa would somewhat fade into the background. He is still credited as a contributing programmer for CAVE’s more recent titles, but it seems that he’s decided that his time as a lead programmer and designer has reached an end. Though Yagawa’s contributions to both SHMUPs and Bullet Hell are universally acknowledged and respected, his very design philosophy itself is heavily debated.

A lot of people love Yagawa’s games. But a lot of people hate them too.

 

The Case Against Yagawa                     

I’ve probably made this clear before, but I’ll state it again; Shinobu Yagawa loves making games that are hostile to the player. They punish the player for playing the game. They are mechanically obtuse, to the point of indecipherable. And even if you can get past all of that, they are still extremely hard, and downright unfair in places.

In a genre that prides itself on mechanical fairness (or, in Bullet Hell’s case, the appearance of unfairness), Yagawa seems to relish in the taboo. He clearly does not believe his games need to be self evident. He doesn’t care if people have no desire to play his games, because they are turned off by the hatred burned into their circuits.

This is not something that can draw in new players. This is not something that can even draw in experienced players. Even when veteran gamers look at Battle Garegga, they need annotations or a dedicated commentator to explain what is going on.

At that point, players aren’t even playing a SHMUP. They’re struggling to play the mechanics. It’s not the experience that SHMUPs or Bullet Hell provides- it’s a puzzle. A dissertation. It’s a game so full of itself that it simply will not let you play it.

The game hates you so much, that the only way you can engage with it is if you allow the game to play with you. You have to let the game pressure you, you have to let it force you to a razors’ edge of exasperation. It’s the videogame equivalent of an abusive relationship. Many players hate this, and it’s difficult to argue against them.

And yet.

 

The Case for Yagawa                        

To this day, amongst a certain miniscule subset of this already tiny subset of gamers, Yagawa’s games are absolutely beloved. They offer an intensity completely unmatched in any other game, SHMUP or not.

Yes, the games actively hate you, and they limit player choice. But once you actually knuckle down and approach them on the game’s own level, you realize the intentionality of the design. Yagawa did not make these Rank systems simply with no thought, they both serve and are served by every choice within the game. When you fully understand the restrictions under which you must play, player creativity opens up to a ludicrous degree.

Suddenly you understand the many, many, MANY different ways you can approach the unique problems that Yagawa games create. Some people keep rank as intentionally low as possible, doing their best to milk as many points as possible out of the game while doing as little as possible. Some people (like myself at the beginning of the article) find unique ways to “Yo-Yo” their rank. You find really, really lucrative ways to farm a massive amount of points and extra lives at once, jacking up the rank as the game rages at your success. But then you intentionally suicide- you intentionally spend a life, and time your player’s death- to drop that rank back down to a more manageable level. You’re always low on lives, and the game always remains dangerous, but if you maintain a good rhythm you can safely gain and lose lives like clockwork.

And these are just the surface level strategies. There are so many other ways to tackle the unique challenge that Yagawa has created. These outlets for player choice and expression are why players, to this day, defend these games. Even though the games hate these players’ guts.

 

The Legacy of Yagawa                         

Yagawa’s games were never, and never will be, household names. That is simply their nature. But for a brief window in 1990’s and early 2000’s Japan, they were well known and well liked in the industry. They were gamers’ gamers’ games, known and loved only to diehards, exactly the kinds of people who would go on to become programmers themselves.

Like all things Yagawa, his influence is steeped in mystery and conjecture. But the inquisitive eye will notice many, many elements common in games today that resemble the Rank and Difficulty principles that Yagawa would create.

Most prominent to me are the Soulsborne series, including Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Bloodborne. These games, like Yagawa’s, scale their difficulty in response to player success and failure. Depending on the game, dying can make the game easier or harder, and it can open or close certain gameplay options. Soulsborne games are also unafraid to offer players gameplay mechanics that are cool (e.g. “Humanity”), and then immediately punish the players for using them (“Invasions”). It’s impossible to conclusively say whether anyone on the dev team at From Software was directly influenced by Yagawa’s output, but his games existing in the way they did certainly went a long way in normalizing this level of player and difficulty manipulation.

As another conjecture, many modern SHMUPs, made (by definition) by hardcore SHMUP fans themselves, draw a more direct and clear line to Yagawa’s influence. “Crimzon Clover” directly carries the Yagawa-like gameflow of yo-yo-ing up and down rank.  “Blue Revolver” implements a version of rank that actually favors the player, minimally raising rank for good play, and massively decreasing it when the player dies. SHMUP designers and die-hards, on large, love Yagawa, and his philosophies persist in the genre today.

But amongst this accomplishment and legacy, I’m left only one question.

Why? 

Yagawa dedicated his life to making games that are hostile to the player. It may sound like creative liberty, but as an active player of these games, you can feel that these games are software products that genuinely, genuinely hate the player.

What did we do to Yagawa? Why did he make games like this? Is he as filled with hatred and misanthropy as his games suggest?

 

The Surprisingly Benign Motivations of Yagawa                         

We only have two real instances where Yagawa talks about himself or his games (linked earlier), and they paint a picture of a man who is almost as impenetrable as his games. In every sense he seems like a normal, chill guy, yet many of his answers contradict himself, or make no sense whatsoever.

In his longest interview to date, Yagawa is directly asked about his approach to Rank and Difficulty, and he…… downplays it completely. Then he claims he did it all for the money.

“People often say that [rank is my signature], but I think it’s an exaggeration. I’ve also done games without rank, after all. But it’s certainly the case that my arcade games have that feature. It’s not because of some insistence on my part, but rather because income at the arcades is equivalent with the amount of time one spends playing. It sounds bad, but it was one of my methods for increasing income for arcade operators”. – Shinobu Yagawa

Now that is obviously an extremely cynical and unsatisfying explanation. Which is why, as a writer, I’m relieved that Yagawa immediately backpedaled, and sort of let loose that he made these relentlessly aggressive games…… because he enjoyed them personally.

“If you spend all this time improving at a game, only to have it gradually end more and more quickly, then I don’t think its very fun, and it won’t be played…… I don’t have much fun when I play games that are said to be ‘for beginners’”- Shinobu Yagawa

And then things get weird. As Yagawa talks about his approach to gaming and programming, it came out that the only videogame consoles he actually owns are a Sega Saturn and a DS. However, Yagawa owns a staggering 150 Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s) of various arcade games. A PCB is essentially the inside of an arcade cabinet, the bit that holds the actual game on it. Yagawa, however, does not own any arcade cabinets, and what’s more, has no place to store his PCB collection. So he collected all of these games….. without any means to play or store them.

“It’s a pain finding a place to store them all (PCB’s), and I don’t have free time to play them at home anyway.”- Shinobu Yagawa

In other words, Yagawa might have a natural tendency for doing things he likes (buying PCB’s), but is punished by the natural restrictions of that hobby (space, inability to play said games). Sort of like how his games’ Rank tends to punish those who hoard lives and resources. Sort of how his games like to punish people for trying to play the game.

Hm.

Regardless of his motivations- whether he made games in the way he did purely for money, purely for his own fun, or somewhere in-between- Yagawa clearly loves them. They are digital creatures of pure animosity and spite, but he loves them in a way that only a father can.

“Do you feel like the shooting games you made are the best?”- Interviewer

“That’s not entirely untrue. .”- Shinobu Yagawa

 

Epilogue                   

I’m flying.

The credits are rolling. After three years of playing, I’ve won a run of Battle Garegga.

As my warplane flies off into an animated digital sunset, I look at my score.

Only seven million points. Yagawa’s early games are famous for their scores having an “Overflow” feature. Once you get over ten million points, the score counter runs out of digits, and it expresses the millions as letters instead. So ten million is “A million”, eleven million is “B million”, twelve million is “C Million”, etc.

I plotted my strategy and played my heart out, and I won, and my score wasn’t even high enough to break the scoring system. The current world records are in the J Million and K Million range.

I was flying, but now I feel like I’m falling.  I can hear laughter.

The game knows I would not be satisfied. It laughs because it knows I will come back. It knows I can never win, and I can never escape. This is a laugh of hatred.

Somewhere in Japan, Shinobu Yagawa laughs in his apartment, filled to the brim with Arcade PCB’s. His is a laugh of love and joy. He laughs, playing Battle Garegga on his Sega Saturn, satisfied that he’s created games that people, perhaps very few people, enjoy as much as he does. He smiles.

I frown. I’ve won, and the game still says “Game Over”.

I’ll play more tomorrow.

u/TheMentelgen from Reddit is the original author of this post. Original post here.

“Unto you is charged the great task of keeping the purity of time. Know that there is only one true timeline, though there are those who would have it otherwise. You must protect it. Without the truth of time as it is meant to unfold, more will be lost than you can possibly imagine.”

-Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time

---

On November 28, Dragonflight, the ninth expansion in the popular video game (and frequent Hobby Drama subject) World of Warcraft, released. Our story follows the calamitous ramifications that came from the overlooking of one line of code in the weeks before this expansion's launch. But in the words of Nozdormu there is only one true timeline, and the events which will eventually set this story into motion begin more than 10 years ago, on September 25, 2012.

---

Part 1: Out of the Mists

On September 25, 2012, Mists of Pandaria, the fourth World of Warcraft expansion, released. Players rushed to explore the newly-discovered island of Pandaria seeking riches, adventure, and of course, mounts.

What are mounts (and why should I care)?

For those who haven't played WoW or similar online games, players tend to focus heavily on making sure that their character looks cool. Whether it’s to stand out in groups and show off, or because players enjoy dressing up and decorating their avatars to fit the story they want to weave around them, character appearance and accessories are a central aspect of the game. Much like in real life, people in-game dress up to impress both others and themselves.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but one of the most common ones is collecting mounts (the vehicles that players use to run, swim, and fly around in the world). Mounts are large, flashy and, unlike armor and weapons, don’t become obsolete when a new expansion releases. Like other rewards in the game, mounts come in varying degrees of rarity, with the least attainable often being the most coveted, and some are incredibly rare. Some of the rarest mounts in the game are owned by less than 1% of the playerbase years after their introduction to the game, and ones that can be traded outside the game can go for absolutely obscene amounts of money.

Not all players farm mounts based on their prestige, mind you. Some simply go after mounts that they think look cool. At present there are over 900 mounts in the game, ranging from dragons to an undead flying horse named Invincible to a giant robot helicopter head, so rest assured that there’s something for everyone!

However, every once in awhile you get a mount that’s both obscenely rare and that the community thinks looks especially cool, and suddenly everyone wants it; either so that they can fly around on it, or so that they can flex on the noobs that can’t.

Back to Pandaria: Enter The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent

It’s 2012. As players storm the shores of Pandaria, many charge towards a new world boss called The Sha of Anger, one of a pair of newly added and extremely difficult enemies that randomly spawn in two of the game’s outdoor zones. The Sha can be killed every 15 minutes, but can only be looted once per week, with the chance to award high-quality armor (among other things). Many players are hunting down the Sha to get said armor (their old gear having become obsolete with the new expansion), but many more are after a more elusive prize listed on the boss’s loot table: [The Reins of the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent].

The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent is coveted because of its visually striking design and bright colors. It both looks good and stands out in a crowd (literally glowing with bright white light), which means everyone wants it. But as more and more of the unwashed masses spill upon the continent of Pandaria to slay the Sha in an attempt to get their very own photonegative dragon, one thing becomes clear. It’s rare. Possibly more rare than any mount added to an enemy’s loot table before. Unlucky players who didn’t get the mount on their first try will have to simply wait until the weekly loot-lockout resets on Tuesday to try and kill him again, or bring their alts (additional characters on their account) to kill him for extra tries.

The weeks pass by. Players begin doing the new raids and out-gear the armor offered by the Sha of Anger, but he continues to be beaten to death nearly as soon as he spawns by a massive, rabid community of increasingly frustrated mount hunters. The more kills players rack up without seeing the mount, the more rare they realize it is, which makes getting it all the more prestigious and increases the desire to farm it further. Someone asks Blizzard to confirm the mount is actually in the game and there isn’t some hidden requirement to unlock it, which Blizzard does, insisting that it just has a low drop rate.

Weeks turn to months. Someone runs a database search and discovers that nobody in the game of 10 million players has the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent yet. They take this information to a forum post that’s directed at Blizzard. The community becomes upset as they realize they’ve been farming a mount that may not actually be in the game yet. Blizzard realizes they made a mistake.

Oops, no dragons! - How Blizzard broke the Sha’s loot table (the first time)

So what happened? Well, the Sha of Anger’s loot table works as follows:

1. When a player kills the Sha of Anger for the first time each week, the game internally rolls a random number ranging from 1 to 100.

2. If the game rolls a 1 to 59, the player receives gold and nothing else happens.

3. If the game rolls a 60 to 100, the player is marked as receiving a piece of loot, at which point the game rolls a SECOND random number to determine what piece of gear the player is awarded from a weighted loot table of class-specific armor (so that a rogue doesn’t accidentally get paladin armor, which they can’t use). The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent is on this loot table as an incredibly low drop.

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In reality, Blizzard either never added the Heavenly Onyx Serpent to the loot table, or accidentally set the weighted chance of awarding it to 0. (They never clarified which they had done, only that they’d made a mistake and fixed it).

So we’re a few months into Mists of Pandaria and all is finally right with the world (of Warcraft). The Sha of Anger has begun dropping its mount as intended. Overjoyed (and irate) players flock to kill him with new found hope and optimism and soon discover a second, far more horrifying truth…

It’s still insanely rare.

The reason Blizzard took so long to realize the mount wasn’t dropping was because, even when correctly added to the loot table, it was so rare that it almost never dropped. The game doesn’t officially publish any sort of drop percentages for its loot, but estimations made by players put it somewhere between a 0.02% to a 0.01% drop rate. That means that on average, the Sha will drop one mount every 7,500 kills. One of, if not the, lowest drop rate of any mount in the game.

When it became clear just how rare this mount truly was, many players (such as myself) gave up on farming it. It just wasn’t worth the hours of camping and thousands of attempts it would take (spread out over multiple years or multiple max-level alts) to farm the Sha for such a tiny chance at getting the mount, no matter how cool it looked. Others made as many characters as they could and parked them at the spawn points to get as many kills as they could each week, racking up thousands of kills over hundreds (or thousands) of hours of farming.

And the world (of warcraft) spun on. The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent remained one of the most prestigious mounts in the game due to its unique look, bugged introduction, and tiny drop chance. After ten years of farming it’s owned by less than 1% of the game’s playerbase, and when it occasionally appears on the Black Market Auction House (an in-game market where a single instance of a rare non-tradeable item is made available for purchase at auction with gold) it regularly goes for the game’s maximum gold cap of 9,999,999 gold (currently valued at 900 USD based on the WoW game-time token’s US regional price).

---

“You must decide which path you will take. Which story you will tell. An ancient enemy has returned. You will play a part in the events to come and you will have to make a difficult choice, as we did. My story is already written. But yours - and that of all Dracthyr - is only beginning to unfold.”

-Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time

---

Part 2: The Unwitting Herald(s)

On September 11, 2022, nearly 10 years to the day from the first explorers setting foot onto the shores of Pandaria and beginning the long chain of events that are now so close to their culmination, a redditor by the name of u/Jibbles2020 will make a post that unknowingly heralds the impending chaos.

Jibbles is playing on the Dragonflight Beta, a test version of the new expansion that a small group of players are invited to try out before the official launch in order to test the functionality of new systems and gameplay mechanics. Importantly, items earned on the beta cannot be kept when the beta closes and are not transferred to your main account.

Today, Jibbles is trying out the new race/class combination added in the Dragonflight Beta, the Dracthyr Evoker. After completing the introduction questline Jibbles finds himself flying through Pandaria and notices that the Sha of Anger is up. “Why not?” he thinks to himself, landing and quickly dispatching the boss that he outlevels by five expansions.

The unthinkable happens to Jibbles.

He gets the mount.

What would be a cause of boisterous celebration at any other time leaves a bittersweet ache in Jibbles’ chest. The cruel whims of RNJesus have decided to award him a mount dropped every 1 in 7,500 kills on a test account he will lose when the expansion launches in a few weeks.

Jibbles takes this painful irony in good spirits and posts about his horrible luck on the WoW subreddit where, amazingly, another user, u/Bodehn, mentions that the same thing happened to her while testing her Dracthyr on the beta.

The community shares a laugh in solidarity with these two players, and the astronomical luck (both good and bad) it must have taken for both of them to get the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent within a day of one another on a temporary server that will close within a month.

None among the posters or commenters consider that this could be anything more than a fluke. A freak accident that befell two unfortunate beta testers. Some commenters joke about how this is a prime example of why you should never kill a boss that drops a rare item on the beta. Others speculate that it would be funny if Blizzard made drop rates higher on the beta as a joke. The posts drift off the front page as posts inevitably do, replaced by news of new features and content and release dates in the ever-changing whirlwind of information and excitement that comes with an expansion on the horizon. Jibbles and Bodehn, and their astronomically bad luck, are all but forgotten.

---

“It is time! I will expend everything to bind every thread here, now, around the Dragon Soul. What comes to pass will NEVER be undone!”

-Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time

---

Part 3: Tuesday, November 15, 2022

The timeline that follows is reconstructed based on the progression of information recorded in forum, reddit, discord, and WoWHead posts related to Dracthyr and The Sha of Anger over the course of the evening on Tuesday, November the 15th. Stories told from the perspective of a specific character are speculative retellings based on an accurate timeline of when and how community knowledge about the event developed, and are informed by my experience as a mount farmer of 12 years who has participated in the discovery of similar bugs/exploits over my time playing the game. All events not related to a specific hypothetical character are completely factual.

It’s 6:15pm, Eastern Standard Time.

After an extended maintenance lasting most of the day, phase 2 of the Dragonflight pre-patch has come online and is available to play on the live US/Oceanic servers (EU servers will not have access until tomorrow, as their maintenance is on Wednesday). With it comes the Dracthyr Evokers, available to players a few weeks ahead of the official expansion launch.

It takes about an hour to get a newly-created Dracthyr (who start at level 58) through the introductory questline and to the level cap of 60, at which point they are set loose to explore the world (of Warcraft) at their leisure.

It’s 7:15pm, Eastern Standard Time.

Dracthyr pour into the capital cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar en masse. Most unlock the ability to fly and head to kill elemental lords that have been added for a limited-time pre-patch event which also opened today. Others head to the city training dummies to test out their new class abilities. Others still begin flying to old raids and dungeons to farm armor sets that they think will look good on their new lizards.

We do not know how the event, ten years in the making and mere minutes away from its grand culmination, began. We do not know who first saw the Sha spawning in Kun-Lai Summit and decided to pause for a moment to try their luck. Perhaps it was a player in this last group, flying to some old raid in search of a staff or a pair of pauldrons. Perhaps it was one of those still camping the Sha weekly, hoping desperately for the mount and seeing their new Dracthyr as just another weekly 0.01% chance at the prize that has eluded them for so long. Perhaps it was even Jibbles or Bodehn, hoping in vain to relive their moment of glory.

We do not know how the event that is now at long last upon us began.

But we know what followed.

It’s 7:20pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

The mount farmers, fewer tonight due to the multitudes that have taken a break to enjoy the pre-patch festivities, are given their standard gold and long-worthless pieces of armor.

But this first Dracthyr, who has killed the sha of anger for the first time, receives something different.

They have received the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

Players take notice. It’s common to ride a new mount in celebration upon receiving it, and a character’s guild is automatically notified in the chat window when their guildmate receives an especially rare drop such as the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent. At first the luck and humor of Blizzard’s new dragon race receiving this elusive dragon mount amuses those farming, offering the mix of curses and congratulations that so often follow a fellow player receiving a rare reward.

It’s 7:35pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

A second Dracthyr, either encouraged by his comrade’s luck or simply making a quick pit-stop to try their hand at rolling the dice of fate, is among the masses who have beaten it down. Around them stand the mount farmers, many of whom were present at the kill which occurred at 7:20pm and have since switched to another alt for another 0.01% chance.

This Dracthyr, too, has received the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

When bugs, especially beneficial ones, are discovered in World of Warcraft, the process is often more akin to the breaking of a dam than the flipping of a switch. In a game with as many random numbers as WoW it can be hard to differentiate what should be attributed to luck from what may be the result of something more.

But this is odd.

Mount farmers and guildmates alike have seen a Dracthyr get a mount that should drop once every 7,500 kills twice within the past hour, and each must have been the character’s first-ever attempt.

It’s 7:50pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

Five Dracthyr stand around it this time, and while not every one receives a dragon, two do. Oddly, none receive armor.

Calculating and estimating drop rates is something that almost becomes second nature to long-time WoW players. Knowing how likely you are to get a mount, pet, or piece of armor allows you to more efficiently decide how best your time in the game should be spent in order to reap the maximum number of rewards possible, or be the most likely to receive the specific reward you want. Dedicated mount farmers are especially adept at calculating these rates, as knowing your odds of receiving a mount allows you to estimate the average amount of farming time required to get your coveted prize.

The most accurate way to determine an item’s drop rate is to review data submitted by other players about whether or not they received the item after killing the boss. If 500 players kill a raid boss and 5 get a mount, it is likely that the boss has around a 1% chance of dropping that mount (assuming all players had equal odds to receive the item, as is usually the case with rare drops such as mounts). As with any statistical estimation, the larger your sample size is the more accurate your estimation will be. But while a sample size of two Dracthyr is too small to accurately estimate anything beyond the fact that something has gone wrong with the Sha of Anger, a sample size of five begins to afford a very rough idea of odds.

It appears that Dracthyr have a 40% chance of receiving the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

It’s 8:05pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done every 15 minutes for the past 10 years.

Twenty Dracthyr stand around it. Six ride glowing black and white dragons. Once again, none have received armor.

Only six riders indicates that perhaps the drop rate for Dracthyr isn’t quite 40%, but with a sample size this small variations are bound to occur.

One player, an avid mount farmer who has hunted the Sha for years and is intimately familiar with the way its loot table operates (due to the bug that occurred ten years ago) has just realized what happened.

Oops, all dragons! - How Blizzard broke the Sha’s loot table (the second time)

If you recall, the Sha of Anger’s loot table works as follows:

1. When a player kills the Sha of Anger for the first time each week, the game internally rolls a random number ranging from 1 to 100.

2. If the game rolls a 1 to 59, the player receives gold and nothing else happens.

3. If the game rolls a 60 to 100, the player is marked as receiving a piece of loot, at which point the game rolls a SECOND random number to determine what piece of gear the player is awarded from a weighted loot table of class-specific armor (so that a rogue doesn’t accidentally get paladin armor, which they can’t use). The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent is on this loot table as an incredibly low drop.

Note that each class has their own loot table in order to guarantee that each is able to use any armor awarded to them.

What then, hypothetically, might happen if a class simply did not have a loot table?

1. When that player kills the Sha of Anger for the first time each week, the game would internally roll a random number ranging from 1 to 100.

2. If the game were to roll a 1 to 59, the player would receive gold as normal and nothing else would happen.

3. But if the game rolled a 60 to a 100 and that player were marked as receiving a piece of loot, but the player in question did not have a weighted loot table of class-specific armor from which the game could choose a reward, then, hypothetically, the game would be forced to award the only piece of loot automatically added to each class's table. The Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

It’s 9:35pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, as it has done much more quickly every 15 minutes for the past two hours.

A cloud of fourty Dracthyr riding fourty black and glowing white dragons rises from the corpse.

Another sixty Dracthyr sit down and begin a 20 second logout animation. Most of these Dracthyr have never sat before in their brief 65 minutes of existence. Many will never stand again.

News of the glitch has begun to spread like wildfire on private forums as players attempt to tell their friends of this unique opportunity to get one of the rarest mounts in the game. Most are careful to not announce the discovery too loudly or too publicly, knowing they likely have mere hours before Blizzard notices their mistake and rapidly corrects it, and the more openly they discuss what they’ve found, the sooner it is likely to be fixed.

The clock is ticking. Game breaking exploits like these tend to be fixed in hours, not days, and all know it will not last to the next loot reset occuring on November the 22nd, almost seven days away. A 40% chance is far higher than the typical 0.01%, but it’s not a guarantee, and while players can farm a coin that allows them to reroll for a second drop to improve their odds, many still find themselves among the unlucky few that do not walk away with a mount. These players know that if they want to benefit from this oversight, they need to do it now. But due to the high level that a Dracthyr starts at, the game prevents players from making more than one on any specific realm.

Unless of course.

You simply deleted them.

Hours after their painstaking creation and minutes after first stepping foot on the foreign soil of Pandaria, many of the Dracthyr unlucky enough to have not secured a mount for their player log out and are unceremoniously destroyed. Their deaths make way for the creation of new Dracthyr with, most importantly, new loot lockouts. No such time or consideration is taken in the creation of this second wave, a randomizer allows players to create their draconic cattle seconds faster, and those seconds could be the difference between making it to the Sha before Blizzard realizes and fixes their disastrous mistake. Where a few hours ago players leisurely explored the new introductory questline, taking in the sights and scenery so lovingly crafted by the developers, now a garish wave of blues and purples and whites and golds races through it with one unifying thought in their minds.

Escape.

It’s 10:20pm, Eastern Standard Time.

The Sha of Anger dies, unceremoniously dispatched by waves of fire and a flurry of hundreds of flashing chromatic draconic fists within moments of its triumphant return. Many that felled the monstrosity are themselves dispatched mere seconds later in the midst of the resulting vortex of black and glowing white, having utterly failed in the singular purpose for which they were created. From the ashes of their destruction yet another generation of garish lizards rise and begin the 45 minute sprint to their own demise.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

It’s 1:01am, Eastern Standard Time

The primary news aggregation site for World of Warcraft, WoWHead, has posted an article notifying the playerbase that a loot issue has been discovered with the Sha of Anger that is providing Dracthyr a higher than normal chance to receive the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

Commenters report that Blizzard fixes the issue within minutes of this article being posted.

It’s 1:20am, Eastern Standard Time.

Thousands of brightly colored Dracthyr who have just finished their most recent mad dash through the introductory questline are joined by thousands more that have just read the new WoWHead article. They kill the Sha of anger almost before he can finish speaking.

Each receives 38 gold.

The window of opportunity has closed.

---

“Know that even as things appear to unravel, they do so with greater purpose.”

-Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time

---

Part 4: The Day the World (of Warcraft) Stood Still

It’s November 16, 2022, 9:00am, Eastern Standard Time

Players across the United States and Oceanic realms are waking up to the news, which is now being posted and discussed on all major sources of World of Warcraft information and discussion, that there was a window of time yesterday where one of the rarest, most prestigious mounts in the game was obtainable in a coin flip. And most of them missed it..

Fortunately, the World of Warcraft community is renowned in the gaming sphere for their capacity for level headed discussion and mature presentation of-I’m just kidding they lost their fucking minds.

“I just quit the game.”

“Another joke, after some people had to do over 10k attempts for them.”

“Yeah, glad I didnt purchase DF yet, played the beta.. Im done if they dont remove these mounts. ”

“This is stupid unfair.”

“Welp.So someone has like 2k attempts or more since mop dropped,But some guy just do this and gets nalak,sha and galleon mount. Truly a classic move by blizzard.”

“They need to remove the mounts people got as Dracthyr. This is ridiculous. I farmed the Sha of Anger for years on dozens of toons to get it, around 8500 attempts. People shouldn't be able to log on and get it in one try because of a bug. Don't get me wrong, I'd do it too if I were them. But Blizzard needs to do right by a major community in their game. I'm really frustrated right now. It's shitty that people are being awful about people being upset about this. Y'all didn't play by the same rules. Why insult how I play a game when you want the same reward for doing nothing?”

“it's absolutely asinine that people think that mounts gained through a VERY OBVIOUS EXPLOIT should not be removed - what's even more crazy are the people saying "i didn't get to the exploit in time, so i think you should give everyone the mount for free to make it fair". the mounts should be removed. if you want it, go farm it or buy it like everyone else did. i really hope blizzard does right by the people that put actual effort into getting these mounts over the span of multiple years. this is just sad and gross.”

In addition to frustrated US and OCE players who missed this bug, EU players, who had never even had the opportunity to attempt it because the error was fixed before their version of the pre-patch went live on Wednesday, weigh in.

“Already fixed, big sad for EU & the people who missed it”

“25 kills a week, for years. Just for US to get it via a bug that gets hotfixed before EU even comes up. Those mounts had better be removed. Or compensate everyone else. This is insulting.”

There are, of course, the occasional revelers…

“YEESSSS After so many years I finally got the mount due to this bug.”

“finally got the mount after 30 attempts glad I tried this before it blew up”

Who are usually met with even more calls to have the mount stripped from them.

“They better remove the mounts.”

“This is not fair. Either let it go for a day so others can have a chance or remove it. Already at 1.5k kills and tired of doing it :(”

“Exploited mounts should be removed, because as it stands right now it's both spit in the face of those who spent thousands of attempts to get it and those who would still try to get it after the exploit. What is the point of trying to get it now, as even if you get super lucky and manage to obtain it now, it would be meaningless as people would just assume you got it through exploit by default.”

Some amongst the playerbase see bugs like this (and their subsequent exploitation) as just another part of the game, especially on patch days, and are happy to see their fellow players get an opportunity to secure such a rare reward they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.

“I hope people get to keep them.”

“Honestly they should leave it. The 15 min wait simulator is stupid and puts pressure on people to just sit around 15 min at a time on an army of alts every week.”

“good job to all the people that got the mounts. To the rest of the miserable whiners...... Get a life! Stop bein so miserable! ”

A few people want Blizzard to go the other direction and give everyone the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent.

“The only way for Blizz to make this right would be to give us all the mounts as well”

“They should just give the mount to everyone or at least increase the drop chance to 1%”

Calls to have the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent be raised to a 1% chance (the normal drop chance for rare mounts) have been common for years, and with the player base debating how best to address this issue, many suggest it as a solution that would allow lucky Dracthyr to keep their mounts, but give other players a better chance to get a dragon of their own going forward.

”Yeah, this is a good chance to fix it to be a 1% drop chance. It will still be rare but it wont be absurd”

“...Please blizz either increase the drop rate and/or make it farmable infinitely on 1 character…!”

“No mount/pet should've been lower than a 1% drop chance, period. Introducing 0.01% drop chance collectibles was a mistake.”

However when bugs like this one have popped up in the past Blizzard has generally displayed a policy of quietly fixing them and not addressing the issue further, either with a public response or a rollback of the awarded items. Some players resign themselves to the belief that Blizzard has done all they will do on the matter.

“This is the perfect time to fix all of these low drop chance mounts to something like 1/100. All world boss mounts & Love rocket should be standardized to either 1/100 or 1/200 like every other mount drop in the game.”

“I agree, but they won't do it. Remember when the fishing mount in BFA had a high drop chance at the beginning of the expansion? Ya. I missed out on that bug also.”

And this guy, who has no idea what’s going on and really just wants the undead flying horse.

“Any chance this works for Invincible?”

(It’ doesn’t)

Story too long to fit in post, continued in comments

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58639571

One of my favorite hobbies is following a game development project called Star Citizen.
Why would this be interesting, I don't care about some Vidya games you ask? Let me paint the complete picture of this exhilarating decades long saga.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

To understand the full picture we must go back 30 years ago to the year 1990 when nerds of all continents stared at the little screens of their eye destroying cathode-ray monitors frantically shooting enemy ships in a game called Wing Commander.
This was the Mecca of your dads and various weird uncles that turned out to diddle little children in community kindergartens.

This space flight title released on MS DOS in the good old days before anyone had heard of COVID or Kanye West. It has garnered much praise and attention from the so-called video game critics. Awarded by them titles such as "1991 Game of the Year" "nr 7 best PC game of all time"
In fact it was so good that EA released a port to PSP in 2006 and even to PCs in 2011, 30 years later. Suffice to say there's probably still a gigantic cult around this game even if half of original players died already from the old age or marriage arguments.

The maker - Chris Roberts, at the time working for a game company named Origin Systems - creators of Ultima series, followed up with Wing Commander II and Strike Commander in 1993 which were also successful. Wing Commander III and IV solidified his position as an immortal God of the space nerds.

In 1996 he left origin and founded his own studio together with his brother because in short - big publishers were limiting his creative freedom.

For some reason the first project of a new studio was not a game but a movie that took 25 million 1999s dollars of that sweet founding cash and probably loans. Great plan, you can see the first glimpse of cunning genius that is Chris Roberts.

The 1999 movie turned out to have zero redeeming qualities and was widely considered a 3/10. Main reasons were: bad casting choices, terrible special effects, uninspiring plot and ameteurish, unexperienced direction. In other words pretty good for your first movie ever but maybe start with 20 dollars?

Desperated to keep things afloat he decided to quickly release a game Starlancer in 2000 with his old and tried formula but it was a new millennium. People, tech moved on and everyone already done better and more interesting things.
It wasn't a commercial success that Digital Anvil badly needed.

Shrewdly Microsoft said hello and bought the barely surviving studio for some pocket change in 2000. This is very important in the context of the next game from Digital Anvil.

Chris Roberts had a very ambitious plans. A space trading and combat video game - Freelancer. In fact so ambitious that the game wasn't any close to materializing or feasible for year, second one... third... It was considered a vaporware.
At a point Microsoft came to the rescue and booted him out of the project completely.
The game was able to release in 2003 although in very different, limited scope than crazy plans of Chris Roberts. It was a success nevertheless, known for its gorgeous graphics and art style.

Let me briefly describe the substantially cut version features versus Chris Roberts vision:

Feature	Final Freelancer (2003)	Chris Roberts’ Original Vision
Universe Simulation	Mostly static, scripted NPC behaviors	Fully dynamic, AI-driven world where factions trade, fight, and evolve
Space-to-Planet Transition	Pre-rendered cutscenes for docking	Real-time, seamless landings on planets
Flight Controls	Mouse-based, arcade-style combat	Joystick-based, more realistic space sim
Economy	Partially dynamic with fixed trade routes	Fully dynamic economy affected by player actions
Ship Customization	Limited upgrades to a single ship	Deep ship customization and ability to own multiple ships
Multiplayer	Server-based multiplayer with limited persistence	Large-scale persistent online universe (proto-MMO)
Graphics & Engine	Good for the time, but somewhat dated due to delays	Cutting-edge visuals with procedural planet generation
Story & Campaign	Linear single-player story with side activities	More open-ended story with player-driven choices
Faction Interaction	Reputation system but largely static faction wars	Factions dynamically evolving based on player and AI actions
Player-Owned Assets	No stations or fleets, just personal ship upgrades	Ability to build and own stations, fleets, and influence the world

As you can see the og scope was several times that of an 2018 X4 Foundations and lovely words 'MMO' also appear.

Meanwhile, Chris Roberts dissatisfied, quit the company altogether. In his mind sown the alluring seeds of Freelancer gargantuan full version.

After leaving he founded another company that aimed to produce films, shows and games. However 0 projects ever came out of it. Zero. Null. Nada.

That 'success' somehow prompted him to make another company - Ascendant Pictures this time entirely MOVIE publishing. What's going on with this guy and movies? Anyway, It funded 8 Hollywood movies one of them Lord of War. nice
But... they were almost entirely financed by a loophole in the German tax laws that was closed in 2006. 💀 After germans fixed their law Roberts' activities as a film producer ended as the funds raised by his controversial financing scheme depleted. Pay attention to financing scheme.
It was even sued by Kevin Costner in 2005. I would very much like for a Kevin Costner to sue me 🥵

Anyhow, the business was eventually acquired in 2010 by Bigfoot Entertainment
a small production company from Philippines.

Roberts getting a taste of tax avoidance and funding schemes hired a world renowned entertainment media attorney and in 2011 founded a company named Cloud Imperium Games together with his wife Sandi Gardiner - an actress (There's a funny side drama to her involving attempt to strangle Chris Roberts and some kids stalking). Nicknamed Strangli.

In October 2012 Cloud Imperium Games launched a crowdfunding schem... I mean project that was essentially Roberts long unrealized dream of full version of Freelancer that Microsoft cruelly demanded him to release, on time.

Wing Commander and Freelancer had a cult following and there were tons of sucker... I mean players who wanted to see what happens if you let an ambitious middle aged man that haven't released a single game since 2000 do whatever.
This amounted to 800 million dollars financial schem... Ahem crowdfunding as we speak.

Roberts discovered a gold mine.

To be continued...

I didn't write this, u/Rumbleskim on Reddit did. Their account was suspended so I can't link their profile. Original post here.

[Digital Piracy] The rise of EMPRESS - How one woman turned the pirate underworld on its head, waged a solo war against the entire game industry (and won), went mad with power, started a messianic cult based on high school-level philosophy, and faked her own arrest to spite her rivals and haters

An Introduction to Piracy

Most of us have torrented something at some point, whether it’s a game, movie, book, song or TV show, but just for those who haven’t, I’ll explain the basics.

When you go to a site like The Pirate Bay or Kick Ass Torrents, and click ‘Download Torrent’, all you’re really getting is a link. Programmes like Bittorrent or Vuze are able to open those links, and will let you download almost any file, legal or not. But you’re not downloading it from a server somewhere, a website, or a single person, you’re downloading it from dozens, sometimes thousands of people at the same time, all around the world. Those are known as ‘seeders’. And while you do that, other people are downloading the file from you. They’re ‘leechers’. The original distributor of the file created that torrent, and submitted it to torrenting websites so that other people could find it, but once they’ve shared the full file once, they can break off their connection to the torrent.

This is known as ‘Peer to Peer’ file sharing, and it’s the primary means of distributing media illegally, because it’s basically impossible to stop. If a website is hosting episodes of Game of Thrones, you can shut the website down. If a person is sending out files, you can sue them. But no company or corporation, however powerful, can stop a torrent (though many have tried).

Sharing a movie or a song is easy – you just distribute the file. It will work no matter who downloads it. But games are different. Since a game is made up of loads of files working in tandem and tangled up in a confusing spider-web of code, the developer is able to ‘booby trap’ the game so that it doesn’t work when it’s copied.

For as long as developers have been doing this, savvy hackers and programmers have been working to undo it. When they do, the developers go back to the drawing board and come up with something smarter.

Cassettes were easily duplicated, so the industry invented consoles with more secure cartridges and built-in ROMs that could detect fakes. Pirates reverse-engineered the consoles to make their own duplicate consoles which could run both legitimate and fake copies. So the industry moved to CDs, because they had more storage space and could be fitted with new security features. Pirates cracked the CDs. Developers started requiring a game key, so pirates created key-generators to fool them. The developers came back with copy-detection software, so the pirates cracked the software. The companies started using DRM that forced players to remain connected and logged into the company’s servers at all times. Pirates cracked that too.

This game of cat-and-mouse has been going on for decades, steadily growing more complex and inscrutable. The stakes are high. By some estimates, piracy costs tens of billions a year. By other estimates, it costs almost nothing. To the game industry, every pirated game is a lost sale.

But who are these pirates, anyway?

The Warez Scene

Pirates tend to work in tightly-knit ‘Warez’ groups, and these groups are bound together in a secretive, world-wide, decentralised network called ‘The Scene’. While the Scene has no leader, it has come to adhere to strict rules and regulations. If a release breaks these rules, other groups will ‘nuke’ it – flagging it as bad content. From the outside, they may seem like the Robin Hoods of the industry, stealing video games from the rich and distributing them to the poor, but don’t let that fool you. Warez groups are motivated by competition, not generosity. They all want to be the best. The first group to release a cracked game wins – any cracks to release after that are considered worthless (and are subsequently nuked). There’s no prize, of course. But in the Scene, prestige is its own reward.

In one of their info files (often the only way a group communicates with pirates), the group SKIDROW said the following:

Keep in mind we do all this, because we can and because we like the thrilling excitement of winning over the other competing groups. We absolutely don't do all these releases, to please the general user that rather want to spend their cash on updating to the latest hardware, and sees the scene releases as a source to play all these games for free. Enjoy playing and remember if you like it, support the developer!

The group MYTH said the same thing:

We do this just for FUN. We are against any profit or commercialisation of piracy. We do not spread any release, others do that. In fact, we BUY all our own games with our own hard earned and worked for efforts. Which is from our own real life non-scene jobs. As we love game originals. Nothing beats a quality original. "If you like this game, BUY it. We did!"

The Scene comprises thousands of active groups, most flickering in and out of existence within the space of a few months. Some came and dominated for a while, but couldn’t adapt to the challenges companies placed before them, and inevitably faded into obscurity. Every era of piracy had its big names. PARADOX, RELOADED, SKIRDOW and RAZOR1911 are all good examples. The competition was fierce, so no single group held on to the spotlight for long.

But everything changed when the industry pulled out its trump card.

Denuvo Anti-Tamper

Denuvo is a piece of anti-tamper software, developed in Austria and first released in September 2014. At first, pirates saw it as yet another obstacle which would be overcome and set aside. But it gradually became clear that Denuvo was going to be more of a challenge.

I’m not remotely intelligent enough to go into exactly what Denuvo does in detail, though these people are. It’s difficult to understand because it was designed to be. But the simple version is that it scrambles the code inside the .exe (the file that boots the game) and decrypts it on the fly, using information from Denuvo’s servers, and from your computer. The first time you run the game, it will tailor itself to the nooks and crannies of hardware, which acts kind of like a fingerprint. This way, it can detect if it’s been copied to a different device, or if the .exe has been tampered with.

It’s hard to overstate how big a difference Denuvo made. At a time when games were being cracked less than a day after hitting shelves, this software could keep them out of pirates’ hands for literally years. Many people on the Scene thought Denuvo was truly impenetrable. That reputation got around, and soon almost every game came with it baked in.

There are claims that Denuvo has all sorts of negative effects on games, from slowing load times to taking a toll on hardware. It’s also possible that due to the way Denuvo works, once the company stops supporting older games, or new hardware becomes too different to old hardware, gamers may be totally unable to play. There’s a lot of debate about whether these effects are real but it's hard to know who to trust, because everyone has a narrative to push. Pirates go to great lengths to discredit Denuvo, and corporations work hard to defend it.

“The Denuvo anti-tamper technology is ultimately to protect the gaming industry and ensure game studios have an ability to continue to invest and build new games,” said a representative in a statement. “On PC, a large proportion of games (especially the AAA games) tend to be protected for a period of time to protect the monetization of the games being launched—say six months or 12 months for example.”

It took three months for the first breakthrough. 3DM, a warez group from China, successfully breached Denuvo on 1st December 2014. Thirty days after it came out, 3DM released Dragon Age Inquisition onto the Scene. But major video games made most of their sales within the first month, so that was still a victory for the developers.

Games came out in drips and drabs for a while. In all of 2015, only six games were cracked. 3DM gradually fell behind their biggest competitor, CPY. When CPYp cracked Metal Gear Solid V only nine days after it hit shelves, there were optimistic whispers that perhaps Denuvo could be defeated after all. But that was a folly.

In January 2016, Rise of the Tomb Raider came out, and with it was a new and improved version of Denuvo. Whatever had changed, it was enough to terrify 3DM. Within days of its release, they admitted defeat.

“The last stage is too difficult and Jun nearly gave up, but last Wednesday I encouraged him to continue,” the founder, known by her internet handle “Phoenix”, said.

“I still believe that this game can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years’ time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,”

3DM all but disappeared from the Scene after that. CPY was the only group left with any prospects of taking down Denuvo. They toiled quietly in the background for days. The days became weeks. Weeks became months. And the video game piracy community fell into a long, deep hibernation, fuelled only by memes and indie games.

And then one morning, it awoke. Tomb Raider had been cracked. It had taken 193 days, but CPY had done it.

The day CPY gave us Hope again ...

After that, the games began to release more regularly – around a week or two apart. Since CPY was the only group capable of breaking Denuvo, they owned the Scene in a way no other group ever really had. From August 2016 through to May the next year, almost nothing got cracked without their input. It still took at least a month to crack a single game, but the number of days gradually got smaller and smaller. When Resident Evil Biohazard got cracked within five days, the call once again went out that Denuvo had truly been defeated, for sure this time.

And the scene and outsiders of the scene have completely dismantled and destroyed them. Far cry from the fear everyone originally had. Every new protection is scary at first but when it comes down to it...if there are people smart enough to create it...there are people smart enough to reverse engineer it! Cheers to all the groups and individuals who crushed them and will continue to do so as it evolves.

Over time, CPY started collaborating more with other groups, who themselves picked up the tricks for circumventing Denuvo. BALDMAN and STEAMPUNKS began to dominate between June and October 17. Between them, there were pirated games coming out almost every day. CODEX was there too, first working on collabs, and then on their own. From 2018 to 2020, they made up most of the releases, and CPY made up the rest.

And there was also a woman called EMPRESS.

Long Live the Queen

The rise of EMPRESS didn’t come as a shock; it was a gradual takeover. She first appeared under the name C000005, and had a history working with the popular cracker CODEX. Her first Denuvo cracks under the name EMPRESS came in mid-2017 as part of larger collaborations. One of these, ‘Total War Warhammer 2’, involved no less than six scene groups, plus EMPRESS on top.

She worked her way up from three collabs in 2017, to five in 2018, and a few the next year too, and it wasn’t until her solo debut with the cracked version of ‘Planet Zoo’ that she really made waves.

Between October 2020 and July 2021, EMPRESS would reign supreme. Of the fifteen major cracks during that period, she was behind eight.

But it wasn’t just her skill that drew attention. It was the fact that she bucked every trend in the Scene. She wasn’t part of some secretive group, she was one woman out to declare war against an industry worth tens of billions, and she won, with nothing more than her own intelligence. The normal Scene motivations of glory and prestige meant nothing to her (so she claimed), it was all about saving games. She made the cardinal sin of commenting on the CrackWatch subreddit, and did it freely. She posted polls asking what games the community wanted next, called out her competitors, interacted with fans, and shared her (often enigmatic) philosophical views. And unlike the other groups, she accepted donations.

In short, she was everything the Scene hated. But they couldn’t touch her – none of them could. She was one of the only people in the world capable of breaching Denuvo, so no-one could justify any measures against her. And even if the Scene tried to ‘nuke’ her releases, people would download them anyway – such was her fan following.

Groups targeted whichever games they pleased, insulating themselves from outside input, to say nothing of requests. And a lot of the time, they didn’t update their releases to account for bug fixes or software changes, fating their achievements to obsolescence. Empress doesn’t think they loved video games. They loved themselves, and winning. “Everything they did was just a way to ‘prove’ themselves and boost their fake meaningless Egos,’” says Empress.

EMPRESS became the closest thing the piracy community had to a celebrity. People loved her.

In a February interview with Wired, EMPRESS said she had been called to the purpose through dreams. A copy of Dark Souls 2 floated before her, wrapped up in chains made of numbers, and as she focused, she began to see what every number meant ‘universally’. Looking deeper still, she entered ‘The Zone’, which allowed her to ‘SEE MORE into everything’, and shatter the chains. When asked about her process, EMPRESS said, “By mixing philosophy with coding. It’s very complicated. I have a ‘Goal’ that no one else has. I have no need for Ego.” This is the kind of larger-than-life persona she adopted.

Of course, there were those who simply couldn’t believe Empress was a woman. She had to be a man – or even a group of men. To this, she said:

”to all the GENDER FREAKS out there who keep claiming out of their own ass that I am a male, I am so sorry to ruin your fantasy dreams of a trans cracker is false and yes I am actually a woman. Next time if you want to speak about your pathetic fetishes, you better look at yourself in the mirror.” She would later say, “i am 23 years old, and i am beautiful AS HELL. but i don't care 1 bit how i ‘look.’ i care of what i ‘Do.’”

The Wired interview is revealing and bizarre in equal measure.

“i think the main problem is that people ‘fail’ to see Video Games as the pinnacle and max potential of ‘art,’” Empress says that as a child she was a “very strange girl who did not like the ‘Real World’ as much as other people seem to.” More than the average gamer, she says, she has always taken games seriously not just as a way to pass the time, but as places to go and be. She loved Tetris on the NES, for when she wanted to “go ‘beyond’ the human limits in terms of ‘Response’ and ‘creativity.’” She loved Megaman 1, “for philosophical reasons that people do not understand.”

“i always keep in the ZONE till i crush their pathetic puzzle prisons,” she says. Cracking DRM has taught her that the only real way to view the games industry right now is through the lens of philosophy. Philosophy helps people discern what is valuable, she says. And to discern what is valuable, you must look for higher truths. The higher truth in gaming, she says, is that “wanting to preserve something you ‘Buy’ should NEVER be a ‘Crime.’”

Recently, she cracked Anno 1800, which layered three types of protection, Denuvo on top. “No one else does this because it requires insane amount of focus, dedication and endless passion. I was able to achieve this only in several months of research. it was HELL to say the least.”

The video game piracy community had long been a separate world to the Scene. Each understood the existence of the other, but didn’t care about their motivations, only their results. Gamers didn’t give a shit about the bizarre Warez industry or its search for clout; as long as cracks came out, that was all that mattered. And vice versa, as far as the Scene was concerned, gamers existed only to reinforce that clout. It was a confused but mutually beneficial relationship.

So when EMPRESS came along, espousing virtuous anti-corporate goals and beating the big publishers at their own game, the piracy community fell in love. In fact, her releases were sometimes even better than the official versions. Her fan-following rapidly grew into an almost cult-like obsession. She was half-jokingly called the messiah of video games. The community became full of her bizarre philosophical exercises, reviews, and even a few diss tracks.

“The reason why Ubisoft, EA and such companies never remove denuvo from their games is only because they LOVE feeling superior and ENJOY seeing you the customer as PIG under their control or worse.”

The corporations tried to use her fame against her. She announced her releases ahead of time with a lot of fanfare, and gave regular updates on her progress. So when news got out that EMPRESS was about to crack Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ubisoft sabotaged the game so that players couldn’t fight two of the bosses. Then when the crack released, they removed the bug. EMPRESS’s version had to be fixed by other crackers.

But they couldn’t hold her off forever. The revolution had arrived, and it had found its Robbespierre. When the coveted Red Dead Redemption 2 release came out, she was on top of the world.

But we all know what happened to Robbespierre.

Are we Pirates or are we Dancer?

EMPRESS first began to lose followers through her ‘philosophy’. She had come to believe she had a totally unique view on the world that no one could even begin to understand. As far as Empress was concerned, she had the ‘perfect and totally correct’ answer to all philosophical questions. Whether this sense of grandeur had its origin in drugs, or the praise she was getting, or something else, it’s hard to say. In her first major philosophy post, she said, “I have always had lots of universal philosophy knowledge inside my soul and it always opposes the famous philosophers and thinkers' theories, and pretty much "Everyone else" on this planet.”

Aside from balking at the audacity of using a platform for piracy as her own personal blog, the community was quick to knock her down a peg.

So I guess you read them all? The great thinkers? To verify how you are above and beyond their thinking?

Do you understand how utterly arrogant this post makes you? I will tell you why. To put yourself above thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, John Locke, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Francisco de Vitoria, Friedrich Nietzsche and so many others. Human beings who have helped shape the foundation of the world we live in today. I am talking about the most basic of basic stuff we now take for granted like property, human rights, democratic governance and rule of law. Without these ideas and those who dedicated their lives to refine them, our world could not be like it is today.

This was a strong argument, but as someone else jokingly pointed out:

bitch shut up, they pirated rdr2

Which, to be fair, Hobbes and Kant never did.

The next philosophy post came with a ‘shitlist’ of all the people who had opposed her.

many people has put their heart and soul in their replies, and some of them were "very close" to the truth , while others tried their best to be DICKHEADS and speak with a brain of a cockroach. i list them below.

This didn’t earn her any friends. There were discussions of banning her completely. In order to find a compromise, EMPRESS went and created her own platform, with blackjack and hookers. It wasn’t too successful, but her most ardent disciples happily made the jump, and most of the piracy community was happy to see the end of her bizarre posts.

But the bliss wouldn’t last. Empress was shortly suspended, her followers scattered. No one seemed to care much about that.

Fuck You, Pay Me

You might remember the part when I said EMPRESS accepted donations. That would become a pretty big part of this. The most important thing to EMPRESS was cracking games, but a girl gotta eat. She had a real job. When fans donated money, she was able to take time away from that job to spend on cracking. “How much time I spend in it depends on the amount of donations I receive.” In other words, fans could pay her to get pirated games faster. Empress knew the value of her work, and expected to be compensated for it.

requiring money to keep working on this cancer is something that is a "must", and its not my choice or anyone else's.

The undeniable truth is-- this life requires this whether we like it or not... because otherwise there is no human capable of just magically producing cracks for the most annoying cancer drm in this world.

the most talented crackers in the SCENE left and worked for DENUVO for this same reason ... and to avoid my fate ending up in any negative way too, i am requesting all of your help to keep struggling and crushing this drm with every new version they make.

In September 2020, she approached the piracy community with a confession. After ending her solo career and joining a more traditional Scene group, she was back. The Scene was dead, she proclaimed, and they wouldn’t be coming to help. In fact, many of the recent Denuvo releases by other groups had been mainly done by EMPRESS. There were even questions of whether the Scene was deliberately delaying crack releases because they were being paid off by the industry. Conspiracies ran wild.

If you had high hopes for the scene to make some miracle comeback, I have bad news for you. Even before the busts, the scene's state was already very rotten and most of the people inside are nothing but leechers of fake fame based on on some old ass "glory". I made the Planet Zoo crack in 1 week, I made crack for Total War Three Kingdoms in 4 days and they were both ready to go in early August. But the lack of even tiny bit action from the people who should have moved things forward, made me completely blocked in what it seem to be infinite stagnation. Because I had to wait them, almost 2 months... I couldn't do any progress on Denuvo AT ALL. And as a result I became very tired. And you wait those people to save you? Especially after the busts, 95% of the scene is in dead silence. My mistake was leaving you and going with them in promises of fake support , so I am sorry for that.

This all lead up to the pitch: there was a new Denuvo variant out there, and if it could be broken, pirates could get their hands on games like Death Stranding and Resident Evil 3. But she would need to dedicate herself wholly to it, and that meant relying fully on donations.

The Scene didn’t take this lying down. In the info files of their own releases, they slated EMPRESS’s greed and unsavoury motivations. In their crack for ‘Iron Harvest’, the group DARKSiDERS had this to say:

As we do this without profit from own pockets, we supply them games, buy em... EMPRESS you are asking money for piracy!!

We think thats more rotten then CODEX themselfs!!

We also have our real-life jobs todo and we would not ever ask money!

SHAME ON YOU! For starters piracys basic princible is...: FREE!"

*ALSO THiNG iS

You are calling scene toxic just cuz were on one

biggest groups. We re really chilled and let ppl

do things on their own pace. Most of sceners are

Ä bit angry at the fact that codex used/uses

MONEY for crackers, scene dont do that usually.

But EMPRESS was always ready with a response.

They must understand I do not care about their shitty competition. We are not talking here about making profit from cracking itself, we are talking about saving the right to preserve your games and own them, because in current days no matter how much money you have, you simply cannot buy true ownership anymore. Instead you have to install 3 launchers and go through several sever authorizations in order to play your games. This missions requires extreme dedication and time put into it. So, yes, naturally requires financing as well, one way or another. Don't you think I don't hate asking for money, but it's how the things are.

They said it themselves, they chill and do nothing, because are lazy old bastards, who only speak but never do anything. Also I know about several german groups making money through giving early pre information to p2p sites, so don't give me that scene morality again.

DARKSiDERS, you are bottom of the scene with SKIDROW and you know exactly what I am talking about.

No one had ever seen anything like it on the Scene before. Empress thought she was better than everyone else, and she kind of was (at least, as far as cracking was concerned). However the piracy community started to sour on her over time, partly because of her requests for money, and partly because of her weirdly preachy and arrogant philosophical ramblings, which people often felt forced to slog through because they sometimes held hints about future cracks. Plus some of these philosophical opinions came across as a little transphobic. She was starting to get a reputation as a bit of a nut job who had let the whole thing go to her head.

This wasn’t helped when when EMPRESS released the crack for ‘Immortals: Fenyx Rising’. Pirates noticed that they had extremely low download speeds, and figured out that she was deliberately throttling her own torrent. Why? Because she didn’t want any other pirates repacking and re-uploading her cracks. To clarify, a repacker takes a torrent, strips away the fluff, compresses it down to a tiny size, and releases it again. Repacks are made for people who struggle downloading large files. EMPRESS wanted a monopoly over the spotlight, and tried to prevent repackers getting hold of the game. This led to new beef with the person re-packing most of her releases, ‘FitGirl’, promising never to work with EMPRESS’s cracks again.

In July, she went as far as to hold cracks hostage. Following one of her regular polls, she said “the highest vote choice will not win if i don't receive 500$ for it. the people who will vote for the highest demanded game need to cooperate and collect 500$ for me to crack the game. this way it doesn't have to just be "1" single indvidual suffering for the entire thing when everyone else gets the game for free later.”

No money, no crack. Those were the terms.

Pirates were stingy at the best of times – that’s why they were pirates. But there were no alternatives. It was EMPRESS or nothing. It was a lot cheaper to throw a dollar or two her way than to buy a game at full price. All that talk of ‘saving video games’ was starting to ring hollow. The push-back against her was enormous.

if id wanted to pay money id just buy the game, this is retarded and you should be ashamed of this. you shouldnt crack games for the money you should do it for the ideology or for the competition. this is a disgrace. shame on you

There was also the problem of preference – people wouldn’t donate towards cracking games they didn’t even like. One fan pointed out: “people might still support you so you don't starve to death but you are probably gonna lose respect if your choice of games don't align with that of most people who follow you.”

“Every fu*cking time these kids vote for a childish anime game instead of an open world game.”

But EMPRESS wouldn’t be cowed by abuse. Far from backing down, she continued calling out to potential contributors and sponsors, and promised that if anyone had a specific game they were desperate to get cracked, a simple payment of $500 dollars would make it happen.

This was open to a lot of manipulation – all a company had to do to protect their newest release was pay EMPRESS to focus on something else instead.

“the entire ‘Scene’ rules that accept ‘no money/donations’ is 1 of the biggest problems which always push the crackers back, instead of forward,” says Empress. “if you’re going to do such INSANE EFFORT, you wouldn't just do it for and from ‘nothing’

EMPRESS would try to let her fans decide how they wanted the process of donating to go, but that quickly devolved into chaos, fuelled by her detractors. But her supporters gave as good as they got, and the resulting firestorm grew steadily more toxic until it overflowed into every piracy-related space. All the while, she continued preaching her philosophy and attacking anyone who opposed it.

i suggest you all go for a self re-check, you people have stinking shallow mind and souls... my philosophy is the "UNIVERSAL" type, and the term "Subjective" means NOTHING in my world. [if you STILL not convinced and disagree of anything i said in this post, i congratulate you because it means you didn't understand a SINGLE WORD from what i said. please enjoy an empty pathetic life].

Wanted Woman

The was a great danger looming over EMPRESS’s rise to stardom. The law. After all, there was a reason why members of the Scene kept a low profile. Companies couldn’t touch the torrents, but with just enough information, they could take down the people making them. Other pirates (such as one named Voksi) had been apprehended before, and sometimes the plea deal even involved working for Denuvo. It could happen again. Fans urged EMPRESS to be careful. They thought she was sticking her neck out far too much.

I hope you get all the support you want but keep safe.

EMPRESS promised she would, but it wasn’t enough. Or so it seemed.

In February 2021, she announced that thanks to her haters and rivals, who had leaked her address to the authorities, she had been well and truly nicked.

some serious people ON REDDIT managed to report me to authority with my real address, i am not quiet sure how it happened, but even with putting my philosophical side aside, i think i pissed off the entire internet just by trying to control "MY" own crack for 24 hour is actually something i am still not able to believe. in less than an hour, i will be dragged out of my home here with my lawyer, but considering i was caught red handed while preparing version 2 fix for my immortals crack, i don't think there will be much of hope against it at all.

Her message to those who had insulted her was totally not at all bitter – she thought they were ‘all beautiful people’ who she definitely didn’t hate, because they had just made a mistake. This was all somewhat rich for a woman who was rapidly developing hints of megalomania and power-madness.

And then she made an Obi-wan-esque speech about ‘remembering me’ and ‘contuing on my path’.

Everyone was quick to point out the flaws here. The police generally don’t bust down your door, catching you ‘red-handed’ cracking Denuvo, then call you to tell you they’re going to arrest you in an hour, so you have time to write out a long and dramatic letter blaming others for your woes.

”I will be there in less than an hour to take you in. please don't delete any incriminating data. thanks."

Other crackers weighed in on the hilarity of the whole thing, especially Fitgirl, whom EMPRESS mentioned by name. Some users went straight to mockery.

This infinity crackhead has really gone of the deep end.

But to much of the community, it was just kind of sad.

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

So, to my knowledge, no one has done a write-up on the batshit insane history of the Beach Boys and the various inter-politics of band-members that extends to their fanbase, which is why I'm doing this now. I don't really use Reddit so excuse any formatting errors, I'm not entirely sure how to use italics on this thing, but I feel this story is worth sharing anyways.

Okay, let's start with the basics, the Beach Boys are a classic rock band most famous for being pioneers of surf-rock. They didn't invent the genre but they were one of the earliest commercially successful surf-rock bands to have vocals, basically cementing the vocal-jazz/doo-wop sound vocal style that's all over the genre. The band was formed by the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis), their cousin Mike Love and their childhood friend Al Jardine. Brian Wilson was the group's leader, writing all of their songs and eventually producing their records, with Mike Love functioning as the group's lyricist and arguably their lead vocalist (all of the members sung lead but Mike didn't play any instruments so he tended to sing lead a bit more often to give him shit to do on stage). This was how the group functioned from the early 60s until 1964.

Here's where the issue begins, for various reasons (largely due to having a panic attack on an airplane) Brian Wilson decides that touring and surf rock sucks complete ass, and that he'd rather innovate in the studio. A solution is agreed upon where Brian will write and record in Los Angeles for most of the year as the other Beach Boys tour, occasionally stopping back in Los Angeles to provide vocals on the instrumentals that Brian cooked up. Lyrics are to be provided by Brian, although he eventually elects to just hire other lyricists. To make up for his absence they recruit another musician named Bruce Johnston to tour with them, who eventually just joins the band.

So Brian gets more studio time, drifts away from surf-rock and eventually rock altogether, discovers psychedelics and records some of the greatest records of all time. "Pet Sounds", the Beach Boys fourth album to be recorded in these circumstances, is largely considered the band's masterpiece and consistently ranks near the top of most "Greatest Albums of All Time" charts (it's currently #2 on Rolling Stone's list, for example). It's really incredible psychedelic pop, genuinely a fantastic record and one absolutely worth listening to in full ("Wouldn't It Be Nice" was used in a Fallout advertisement a few years ago and got some attention because of it, "God Only Knows" was performed Bioshock Infinite by a barbershop quartet, I think Reddit likes these sort of things, they're also just very famous songs in general). There's some other material recorded around here that's also fantastic but is not necessary to understand this post.

These albums were weird, and they were critically acclaimed, but they weren't as successful as past Beach Boys albums (at least not in America, they sold fantastically in the UK). After one of them was cancelled near its completion ("SMiLE", an album with it's own insane fan history I may write-up later) the band became significantly less successful, Brian Wilson became reclusive and the power in the band generally shifted to the other members.

For the most part, this has been true since 1971. Brian has come back a few times, most notably in 1977 with "Love You" (a very weird but very good early synth-pop album), but a history of mental health issues prevented him from ever fully returning and the power in the band gradually shifted over to Mike Love. Here's the thing though, Mike Love is an asshole.

Mike Love's many faults are too long to list here, but to put it plainly he's a money-grubbing Reagan-Republican jackass who trampled Brian's creative vision to push the band back towards its surf-rock roots, in the process creating some of the worst records of all time. The Mike Love-helmed Beach Boys albums must be what the Beach Boys sound like to people who hate them, they're truly dreadful. In the mid-90s he somehow got the rights to tour under the Beach Boys' name, and has been doing so consistently since.

This is where the fans split. To those who consider themselves fans of the Beach Boys there are two general mindsets: one that considers Mike Love to be the antichrist and one that doesn't. Can you guess which side I'm on? To those who prefer the Beach Boys' experimental works, he's a greedy businessman ruining the band's legacy, but those who prefer their surf-rock tend to be more in favor of the guy. This split is largely across political lines too, Mike fans tend to be more right-wing and Brian fans tend to be more left-wing.

Many arguments are had over the merits of these two sides of the band. As Reddit leans younger, more tech-savvy and more left-wing, r/thebeachboys is mostly in favor of Brian, but on Facebook it seems way more violent. If you search for concert footage of Mike Love's "Beach Boys" and contrast it with Brian Wilson's solo touring it's apparent what types of crowds they're playing to.

Now, some Beach Boys fans are bipartisan and that shouldn't be left unstated, but this is certainly true for the majority of them. This is where our most recent issue comes to play.

So a few weeks ago on New Year's Eve, after Trump lost the election but before he was out of office, he held a party at his Mar-a-Lago resort and the Beach Boys performed at it alongside Vanilla Ice. "The Beach Boys" in question were Mike Love and a handful of touring musicians but no other members, not even Bruce Johnston who is a republican and has toured with Mike before. To say this caused a shitstorm would be an understatement.

Beach Boys fans are insecure about many things and I'll be the first to admit that, "Pet Sounds" pretty directly inspired the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" and yet the Beatles and the Beach Boys are often considered to be in different leagues which Beach Boys fans don't really like. One thing that fans of Brian are particularly insecure about is "The Beach Boys" being used when referencing Mike Love's touring band. You can bet that when dozens of articles from major news publications come out about "The Beach Boys" performing at Trump's mask-less party in the middle of a pandemic that these fans would be fucking pissed. And they were.

This was easily the most active I've seen Beach Boys fans in awhile, especially on Twitter where just about every tweet about the matter had a dozen Beach Boys fans underneath it clarifying that Brian had absolutely no connection to the concert. In a rare move for him, Brian (or at least his social media team) came out to condemn Mike Love for playing a mask-less concert in the middle of a pandemic to support a man who was voted out of office and wouldn't admit it. Al Jardine, another Beach Boys’ member who regularly tours with Brian agreed, and former Beach Boys’ collaborators had some more colorful things to say (including Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist for Brian’s “SMiLE” project who has pretty regularly shit-talked Mike Love over the years).

While this wasn’t the first controversy surrounding where Mike Love’s touring band choose to play concerts, there was a similar controversy a few months ago when they performed at a party for Trump’s re-election in October and another one back in February when they performed at a Safari Club (Brian Wilson is very strongly in favor of animal rights), but this was truly the last straw. Bipartisanship is nearly impossible to maintain with the current politics of band members, and while a true reunion of the band has been discussed to occur sometime later this year (or whenever quarantine lifts) it seems considerably unlikely. The band, the real band with Brian participating, is probably just over forever now. You'll still be able to see Mike Love's bastardization of "the Beach Boys", and you'll still be able to see Brian tour (and Al too, probably) with his incredibly superior backing band, but the true Beach Boys are done.

I, and I assume many others, have found some hope though. The sheer amount of backlash seems to show that the Beach Boys’ legacy hasn’t been ruined, that Brian’s experimental music has been and will continue to be properly appreciated, and that attempts to destroy with this boomer surf-rock garbage have ultimately failed. It’s nice to know, but we can’t really be sure for now. Knowing Mike Love, he’ll pull some more shit.

I don’t really know how to end Reddit posts but if any of you want a real belly-laugh I suggest you check out Mike Love’s 2017 double-album “Unleash the Love”, specifically its second disc which consists of re-recordings of classic Beach Boys songs. I don’t want to spoil it but pay attention to the vocals, they’re uhhh kinda hard to miss.

And if you want some good music to listen to, listen to Pet Sounds! It’s seen as a masterpiece for a reason. If you’ve already listened to it, then listen to their other stuff like “Friends” and “Wild Honey”. That “SMiLE” album I’ve mentioned a few times in this post was eventually released in like 2011 as “The Smile Sessions” and it’s fucking mesmerising, really worth a listen. Get involved with the Beach Boys fan community too, speaking for the Brian-side of the group there’s a lot of really good and really talented people working hard to preserve the band’s legacy. Brian’s current touring band actually consists of a bunch of Beach Boys fans (namely Darian Sahanaja, the main organiser) who were able to perfectly replicate the very complex arrangements of Brian’s songs live.

So yeah, that’s all. Have a good one, listen to the Beach Boys, and don’t be like Mike Love.

Edit/Author's Note: Just to be safe, I added a couple sentences to show that all of this did have consequences as to follow Rule 10. Didn't really impact the pacing or the point, just emphasized what's at stake in a clearer way. Also, you've all been super cool in the comments, very nice to see people who've decided to check out Pet Sounds after this. I know "thx fer de updoots" is a fucking meme but it's nice how welcoming you all are, I'll probably do a write-up on the history of SMiLE and all of the bootlegs people did sometime in the next couple weeks. Okay, author's note over.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

I am surprised there aren’t any posts about Chronicles of Elyria on HobbyDrama yet! The community was so rife with drama from start to finish that I don’t even know where to begin.

Throwaway because I will probably be doxxed if I post on my main.

What is Chronicles of Elyria?

Chronicles of Elyria was pitched as a Kickstarter in May 2016 as a dynamic MMORPG with procedurally-generated quests, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements. The goal was $900k, but they made about $1.3 million in the initial campaign, and through their subsequent crowdfunding efforts made close to $8 million total over the next few years.

What went wrong?

In terms of lofty ideas, Chronicles of Elyria was right up there with Star Citizen, but with a fraction of the funds. We’d be here all day if I went into detail about all of the game’s proposed features, because it’s like they were trying to be Crusader Kings meets medieval life simulator meets Harvest Moon meets survival game meets action RPG all at once. Browse through their Developer Journals; even without a background in game development, it’s clear that the scope of what they were trying to pull off would have been ambitious for a major studio, let alone a small crowdfunded team.

The game’s initial release date was a laughably unrealistic Q4 2017, so it was no surprise that this would get pushed back again and again over the course of development. However, on March 24, 2020, lead developer Caspian made an announcement that rocked the community: State of Elyria: Into the Abyss (autoplay warning). In his typical long-winded fashion, Caspian spent the bulk of the post outlining the milestones the team reached over the past year, but only in the last few paragraphs did he mention that due to financial stressors from COVID-19, they ran out of money and had to lay off the entire team, shuttering development of Chronicles of Elyria. Because of several factors I’ll cover in the next few sections, the community did not take this well. In less than two weeks, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office reported they had received over 150 official complaints against Soulbound Studios, the most they had ever received for a company in that amount of time. Community whales formed a 'CoE Lawsuit' discord and discussed plans for a class-action lawsuit, demanding accountability and refunds. Some of them even pledged over $20k on the game, and they weren’t going to let Caspian cut and run.

Amidst threats of legal action, on April 9 Caspian dropped another blog post, A Letter from Soulbound Studios to Our Community claiming that the March 24 post came from a “very emotional place.” He said that the community misinterpreted his intent, and that he was actually trying to communicate that he was still working on the game while looking for ways to secure additional funding. As you can expect, this was just as poorly-received as his last announcement.

​

Wait, why did people spend so much money on this game? And how did the drama get so spicy?

By its own design the game stirred up drama even before release. With social stratification based on medieval feudalism literally built into the system, there was no way around it; the developers cheekily called it the “Dance of Dynasties.” There were multiple tiers of "pledges" and if I’m remembering correctly, the prices after the kickstarter were $500 for a Mayor title, $1000 for Count, and $3000 for Duke. The most coveted were of course the King/Queen titles, which had people shelling out a whopping $10000 for the chance to be royalty in an unreleased game. Even with the limited supply (6 kingdom slots per server iirc), these kingdom packages sold out all but one server. A few monarchs even purchased TWO kingdom slots to guarantee their supremacy on their chosen server.

It’s very difficult to overstate the cult-like mentality of the community during the “peak” years of 2016-2018. There was an official CoE discord server where the developers frequently engaged with players, but most of the drama happened in what were called the Discords of Elyria. These were community-run discords for individual kingdoms, duchies, counties, towns, and baronies. Each had their own cliques of ‘advisors’ and elite roleplaying cabals.

No, ‘elite roleplaying cabals’ is not an exaggeration; these people were spending thousands of dollars for a title to justify RPing as nobility to lord over the peasant rabble. This attracted a lot of entitled narcissists; the game’s structure practically encouraged it! I’ll give you an anecdotal example: I was really active within a kingdom discord and was eventually appointed as an advisor (the equivalent of what a guild officer would be in a normal MMO). This title was almost useless until release, so it was mainly just a glorified clique with a secret discord channel where we would theorycraft and talk shit about people we didn’t like in the kingdom. But I was the only one on the advisory council that did not possess a noble title, and a Countess kicked up a big fuss about this. Just like the real-life aristocracy, she was scandalized! Wording it in an RP-appropriate way with paragraphs of purple prose, she claimed that the $60 I pledged to the funding of the game wasn’t enough to prove I was fully committed. She and her cronies were so bothered that they tried to get me off the council. They went around DMing a bunch of people, accusing me of being a spy because I used to RP with some guy that left for a rival kingdom, and dredged up screenshots of year-old discord posts as proof my conduct was “unbecoming” of a representative of the kingdom.

There’s a saga behind that story and many others; I can absolutely go into more detail in another post if enough people are interested in the byzantine “Dance of Dynasties” and the inter- and inner-kingdom drama that went down during the development of this beautiful disaster of a game… and developer involvement in said drama. If you want to waste several hours of your life, there is plenty of RP cringe archived on the read-only forums. For now, that’s just a small slice to help illustrate how detached from reality and cult-like this community was. Going back to the downfall...

​

Early Red Flags

As I alluded to, there were already red flags when the game was first pitched on Kickstarter. Despite hitting the initial $900k and going well into their stretch goals, the devs were still encouraging players to crowdfund long after the Kickstarter ended. There were several additional promotional events (somewhat outdated post that doesn't include everything) selling both cosmetic items and mechanically useful items, despite the developers going through hoops to justify over and over again why the game was not pay to win (it was). Eventually, the constant promotions and gamey tactics prompted community members to question why we were seeing more promotional events than development updates.

The devs then admitted that the original Kickstarter campaign was meant to raise enough to be able to create a demo to attract investors and secure a stream of income that didn’t rely on crowdfunding. Unfortunately, no investors took a gamble on a risky debut from an inexperienced team, and despite Caspian making a few weird statements on Discord and implying they had “other sources” of funding that they did not have to divulge to the community, he too later admitted that they were relying solely on crowdfunding to make this game work.

Well, this news was a departure from their previous claim that all they needed was 900k to develop the game for a Q4 2017 release, and that all funds would be used towards the development of Chronicles of Elyria. No one knew this was all just for a demo to attract investors, and people were justifiably upset.

​

The Community Begins to Turn

There was (and still is, last I checked!) a particularly loyal and obsessive subset of the community. At the slightest hint of criticism they’d quickly jump in to defend the game and devs. The community moderators were no better, and a lot of posts were censored or deleted from the forums. The developers had built up a sort of cult of personality with their over-involvement with the community. Despite a hilarious lack of transparency about the actual development of the game, they were… uncomfortably close to the playerbase.

Caspian complained about specific players on the official discord and publicly accused two kingdoms of cheating during a cheap browser event meant to (surprise) raise more money. A player made a post on the forums saying the community outreach manager should be replaced (he was known for being snarky and condescending). Said community outreach manager actually private messaged people that upvoted the post, basically saying “if you think I should be replaced, please don’t contact me if you ever need anything in the future.”

Yes, that came from the guy handling outreach.

The "Map Selection" event was rife with its own kingdom vs kingdom drama, but the devs weren't able to redeem themselves here. After months and months of delays for a map event, Caspian failed to deliver the high-resolution maps as promised on November 5, 2018, claiming they were taking too long to render.

"Remember, remember, the 5th of NoRender" became a meme and rallying cry across the community in reference to the constant delays and deception, to the point where people were banned just for saying it in the official discord.

Then there was the issue of Prelyria. Prelyria was the low-poly pre-alpha client of the game they were developing. Meant to be like a graybox, it became a lot more involved than that and seemed to eclipse the development of the “real” game. People felt they had been bamboozled when they looked back:

Pre-alpha video May 2016

Pre-alpha video September 2019

Some players with industry experience were pointing out that the amount of time the devs were spending on building the Prelyria assets and developing the low-poly client first (it was a lot more involved than a simple graybox) was actually going to be more cumbersome and definitely not save all the time the devs hoped it would. At this point, Caspian still looked like a well-intentioned idea guy with his head in the sky, and most people didn’t think he was intentionally scamming anyone. Personally, I believe Caspian definitely started out in earnest, but he spoiled his own vision with mismanagement and obfuscation.

Funding was always a touchy subject.

Despite first claiming they only needed $900k to finish the game, then saying no wait actually we need like $3 mil, Chronicles of Elyria raised almost $8 million in total and after 4 years in development had nothing close to a minimum viable product.

We later learned that $500k of that initial $900k came from Caspian himself. This of course was not disclosed until after the Kickstarter.

On March 20, 2020 (four days before the infamous Into the Abyss announcement), the devs released an exciting update claiming that Pre-Alpha Testing Has Officially Begun! Players that had pledged (iirc) $1000 or more now had access to test Alpha I! But excitement quickly faded as players realized this wasn’t really an alpha, but a 10-15 minute demo showing off movement and parkour mechanics and ONLY that. I didn’t have alpha access so I don’t know how bad the demo really was, and those who played it are still under NDA, but I heard it was terrible, and looked like something that could be slapped together in a couple weeks using Unity store assets.

Let’s look again at the timeline Caspian pulled out at the end of 2017 when he admitted the Q4 2017 release date wasn’t going to happen:

• V3 of the Website (Q3 2017)
• ElyriaMUD (Q4 2017)
• Alpha 1 (T1 2018)
• Server Selection (T1 2018)
• Settlement / Domain Selection (T2 2018)
• KoE (T2 2018)
• Design Experiences (T3 2018)
• Alpha 2 (T3 2018)
• Beta 1 (S1 2019)
• Prologue & CoE Adventure Toolkit (S1 2019)
• Exposition (S1 2019)
• Beta 2 (S1/S2 2019)
• Stress Test (Any paid account)(S2 2019)
• Launch (S2 2019)

By March 2020, the only milestones they hit were V3 of the Website, Server Selection in November 2018, and Settlement/Domain Selection (after a series of delays that included a period of radio silence lasting over 100 days, it began somewhere around Summer 2019 and never officially concluded).

​

The Downfall

Now for the big question I’m sure all of you have: why was it such a big deal when he announced they ran out of funding?

Indeed, projects are cancelled or become vaporware all of the time. While it's obvious Caspian and team were drowning in too many ideas and not enough tangible progress, why was this scummy enough to warrant hundreds of complaints to the AG and a class-action lawsuit?

About a week before the March 24 announcement, Caspian launched the “Settlers of Elyria” event. It’s hard to explain out of context, but basically all the unclaimed duchies, counties, and baronies were going on sale, and players could purchase them at reduced prices.

Yes, up to a day before he announced he laid off the entire team, he was allowing people to spend thousands of dollars on fake titles. Worse was the fact that this event was designed for new members of the community that didn’t have a chance to buy titles before or weren’t able to because of the prohibitive cost.

Illegal? Maybe not. Fucked up? Absolutely. This, combined with Caspian taking a PPP loan right afterwards painted a damning portrait of a man squeezing every last penny out of this failed endeavor before he ran.

Caspian kept the official discord open for a couple days after announcing the shuttering of the studio, but on March 29, he “fired” all of the community mods and deleted the discord, claiming that people were saying “horrible, unimaginable things” about him. There were rumors that he was cheating on his wife with a (much younger) community member. Apparently, a dev was corroborating these statements and providing receipts. Whether these awful rumors were true or not, Caspian’s reaction in the mod forum was nuclear.

The Future of CoE

After nearly six months of radio silence, a few days ago on December 17, 2020, Caspian gave interviews to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com and released an “update” video that is a nothingburger rehash of old 'gameplay' footage and platitudes. He keeps saying that CoE is in development, but he has nothing to show. He keeps saying some of the staff have volunteered to work on it, yet based on their LinkedIn profiles it looks like most of the original team have found jobs elsewhere. He refuses to release the results of the studio’s audit. The new FAQ on the website is an obvious attempt to avoid lawsuits and in the two interviews he hilariously continues to extol his own transparency while being as transparent as a brick wall.

People are still able to find justifications for Caspian's actions and to this day are in the community-run discords and subreddit trying to keep the hype train going. Maybe it's a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost fallacy, but a lot of people still maintain absolute trust in his vision. I personally did not invest a significant amount of money (but I did waste my time, RIP), but it's still as saddening as it is maddening. Yes, those "Dance of Dynasty" posts on the forum might be cringey now, but people put SO MUCH creative energy and passion into coming up with lore for their kingdoms and duchies and towns and such, and despite being a skeptic for most of my time with the community, it was an incredibly unique experience to be part of this group. I just wish they would move on; put that energy into something productive and not waste it on a failed game. Caspian used them and he will continue to use them if people keep giving him a platform.

​

EDIT: added more links

EDIT2: Obligatory "wow I didn't expect this to blow up!" but I really didn't! Thanks for the gold x2!

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

G'day Curd Nerds! I'd like to tell you about a bit of hobby drama that is not so much a tempest in a teapot as it is a bit of a ripple in a teacup. It's drama that's so small, in such a peaceful little corner of the internet that I almost hesitate to bring it here- except, the resolution has such a unique blend of petty and wholesome that I thought perhaps others might find the story diverting.

The ingredients:

First, the Cheeseman: On youtube, there is a man whose entire channel revolves around cheese. His name is Gavin, and telling you this is not doxxing because that is literally his channel name. You can find his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber/featured However, in the spirit of not using real names (even ones so thoroughly public), I will be referring to him here as The Cheeseman.

I came across his channel in March and got hooked on his videos because literally all he uploads (aside from Q&A livestreams) is videos where he walks through cheesemaking recipes, explaining the process the whole time in a very mellow, soothing voice, and tasting videos for the cheeses he's made. His videos are very calming, and exactly what I needed because, y'know, pandemic. His channel has 251K subscribers, which is nothing to sneeze at, but also not enormous. It's also home to one of the most generally positive comments sections of any I've seen; I don't often read comments sections so it's very possible I've missed things, but generally all I see is positive comments and conversations among folks who have attempted to make the cheeses in the videos.

Next, the cheese: Grana Padano

Grana Padano is a type of Italian cheese similar to Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's a hard cow's milk cheese with a grainy, crumbly texture. It's also PDO, that is "Protected Designation of Origin", and has been since 1996. Essentially, just like champagne is only champagne if it comes from the Champagne wine region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling wine (and Destiel is only Destiel if it comes from Supernatural, otherwise it's just sparkling bury your gays), Grana Padano is only Grana Padano if it comes from the Po river valley in northern Italy, otherwise you cannot use that name to describe a cheese.

Which brings us to: The Consortium for the Protection of Grana Padano Cheese

This is a legally-recognized group whose purpose is "preserving Grana Padano and its Protected Designation of Origin (in Italian, Denominazione di Origine Protetta or DOP) status; in promoting it, supporting its development and taking care of its interests and in providing correct information to the public." You can view their website here:

https://www.granapadano.it/en-ww/the-consortium.aspx

They have all kinds of detailed explanations of exactly who they are and so forth, but the salient details for the purposes of this drama are that 1) these are the people who make the cheese, and have a vested interest in keeping tight control over the name, and 2) they do have the legal authority to do so. For the purposes of this writeup, I will be referring to them as The Consortium.

Step 1: Warming The Milk

So a while back, the Cheeseman had uploaded a video entitled "How to make Grana Padano Style Cheese". I don't have the exact date the original video was uploaded, nor can I link to it, because it has now been taken down, however I can deduce that it must have been uploaded about 15 moths ago, which would have been sometime in August 2019. Because most cheeses take time to age, the Cheeseman generally uploads an initial preparation method where he makes the cheese, and then after aging for the prescribed length of time, he uploads a second tasting video where he shares the results of aging the cheese. The tasting video for the Grana Padano Style cheese went up October 17, 2020, and is viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Qj2i3PMy4 The video description indicates a 14-month aging period.

In the original video, the Cheeseman makes it very clear multiple times that the cheese he is making is inspired by Grana Padano, and is intended to be as close as he can get to the style of this cheese, but no matter how close he gets, it can never be called Grana Padano because of the PDO status. However, that wasn't good enough for the Consortium.

Step 2: Curdling

Three days ago on November 26, the Cheeseman uploaded a video, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q&t=2s

In it, he shares that he was sent a cease and desist letter from "an intellectual property company" on behalf of the Consortium, wherein they declare that the Cheeseman's video "is a clear infringement of the Consorzio’s intellectual property rights." They go on to say that "Indeed, your video seems to describe how to create counterfeited replicas of Grana Padano."

​

Let us all take a moment to contemplate the implications of counterfeit cheese.

​

Ok moment over.

​

They conclude by "kindly asking" for the removal of the video within 5 days of the receipt of the letter, and caution that if he fails to comply, they "will not hesitate to take the necessary steps to ensure the protection of its trademark rights."

The Cheeseman included in the description of the video a link to the PDF of the letter, which you can view there, if you're so inclined (there's not much more there than what I've included, though). I've chosen not to include it here directly because even though he posted it himself, it still includes some personal information and I'd prefer not to link to it directly.

After reading the letter out, he talks a bit about the letter and the original video, playing the snippets where he specifies that he is not and cannot make true Grana Padano cheese due to the PDO nature of the cheese; however he theorizes that he must have gotten pretty close with his recipe based on their concern over "counterfeit replica cheese". He concludes by encouraging his audience to go check out his original Grana Padano video soon if they're interested, because he does intend to comply with the takedown request and remove the original video exactly within the timeframe requested (and no sooner).

Step 3: Pressing and Draining

This is where things get interesting, because at this point, the Cheeseman shares that the Consortium has actually apologized to him.

The very next day on November 27, 2020, the Cheeseman uploaded a video (viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE ) updating his audience on the Grana Padano situation. You see, he received a letter from the Director General of the Consortium in reference to the cease and desist letter, and the Cheeseman's video on the subject. As with the previous video, the Cheeseman linked to a PDF of the letter right in the video description, and although I will pull some quotes from it, I will refrain from linking it directly here. Basically the gist of it is that they were aware of his video and were going to let it slide (and indeed, it had been up for over a year unchallenged), however the video had been "reported to us [...] by our direct superiors at the Ministry and the EU Committee."

The Director General went on to say "We had not intervened before because your good faith is clear from your video and we are very sorry to see you and your community so angry towards us."

The Cheeseman responds: "Well personally I'm not angry, but the community has spoken I suppose, [Director General], that's just what they do on the internet" (This is, quite possibly, the most understated and true description of the internet that I have ever heard.)

The Director General adds a postscript:

"Ps. On a further note, you didn’t quite get the “real recipe” of Grana Padano...it is “slightly” different [smile emoji] So if ever you come to Italy, once this awful pandemic is over, we would like you to be our guest and we will take you to one of our dairies, where one of our master cheesemakers can teach you all the tricks of the trade."

The Cheeseman's response to this is gracious, but reaffirms that he doesn't believe he's in the wrong, and shares his intension to re-upload a "grainy Italian hard cheese" video.

Step 4: Aging the Cheese

As promised, yesterday (November 28, 2020), the Cheeseman reuploaded his Grana Padano cheesemaking video under the name "Chease & Desist Style Cheese with Taste Test. To Italy with Love 💛" viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqPP24IU1to

It is, as promised, exactly the same as the original video, except he's dubbed over every instance of "Grana Padano" within the video with "Chease and Desist". He's also combined the making video with the later tasting video, although the original taste test video was not specifically mentioned in the original cease and desist letter, nor was it ever requested to come down. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, that original tasting video (with the name of the cheese unaltered) is still up, and as a matter of fact, it shows up in the first page of google results for Grana Padano!

Tasting Notes:

If you've read all this, I hope it's brought some amusement. I know it's not as dramatic as most stuff in this sub, but a small-time home cheesemaker getting communication directly from an international cheese consortium was a level of absurd that I had to share. If there are any further developments and if people are interested, I will be happy to provide updates.

[edited to add the link to the apology video]

[edited again because I messed up numbering my steps and it was driving me nuts]

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Supernatural just ended its 15 year run. To catch up, you can read about the recent Destiel love confession; an actor who appeared in 4 episodes and harassed fans; a comprehensive writeup of the fandom in general, especially "tinhatting"; more general fandom drama; or a racist Haiti AU fic. Supernatural provided no shortage of drama.

But if you don't want to read all those previous writeups, the summary for this one is:

Over the course of the show's run, the fans were divided in to two groups. Group One were people who thought the show should be focused on the brothers, Dean and Sam (played by Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, respectively. Some shipped the brothers together. Group Two were people who thought Castiel (played by Misha Collins) should have a more prominent role and fuck Dean (ship name "Destiel"--you've heard of it). (Edit: There is, arguably, a third group of people who watched the show as a show, but I haven't actually met anyone who has).

It became abundantly clear that The Powers That Be (writers, producers, Jensen and Jared) were in the former group (minus the "Wincest" shipping). They shunted Misha/Cas off for episodes at a time with flimsy excuses, tried to write him completely off in one season and then haphazardly brought him back after fan uproar, and hazed/bullied Misha on set (ex: Misha talked about how Jared would tickle his balls out of the cameraman's view so that it looked like Misha was messing up his lines, among other things).

Misha said his final scene was his now-infamous love confession, which many fans lovingly described as "embarrassing." After fifteen years of pent-up tension, Castiel finally gets the courage to confess his love to Dean--and Dean responds with facial expressions that were memeified as "trying not to say a slur" to "trying not to commit a hate crime." Then, after confessing his love, Castiel gets sucked away to supermegahell, never to be seen again!

But fans knew that couldn't be his last scene...As one tumblr post said, "honestly it's quite impressive how supernatural, a show in which everybody dies & no one stays dead, has managed to convince a huge chunk of people that one of its leads is not coming back for the finale"

And it's true. Pretty much every character, major or minor, on SPN has died at least six times. Fans pulled out release photos, social media pics, and lines from interviews to prove without a shadow of a doubt that Castiel would be in the last episode--whether Destiel was made official or not.

What really gave fans hope, though, is that actor Jensen Ackles said he felt "uneasy" about the ending:

"And I just walked out of there kind of uneasy. I don’t know if it was just the fact that I just heard the ending of a show that had been going for 15 years and I’m just too close to it to really accept a finality to it."

And since he's historically uneasy about Destiel, fans connected the dots: Destiel would be canon in the finale!

So did we see Cas again? SPOILERS, obvs.

Here's what happened in the finale: Sam and Dean are bored. After everything was literally resolved in the penultimate episode, the world is pretty peaceful. Cut to commercial. Finally, they find a hunt. Cut to commercial. They follow some leads. Cut to commercial. They fight the monsters. Dean gets impaled on, like, a nail on a barn column or something and with his dying breath he tells Sam he's proud of him and asks for permission to die. This takes, like, a full 15 minutes. Cut to commercial. There's a montage of Sam being sad and petting a dog. Cut to commercial. Dean goes to heaven, reunites with a loved one (not Cas) and drives around. Cut to commercial. Montage of Sam raising a kid and Dean driving around. Cut to commercial. Sam dies a natural death of old age. Cut to commercial. The brothers reunite in Heaven.

Oh, and there was an emo version of Carry On, Wayward Son.

Basically the episode was three montages in a trenchcoat, with the lead characters meeting anticlimactic ends. Dean Winchester dies of tetanus. Sam wears a powdered wig from a Halloween discount store to show the passage of time.

Cas is mentioned twice throughout the episode, one line where Dean or Sam is like "I'm sad Cas is gone" and Sam or Dean is like "We have to move on and keep fighting" and one line that implies Cas escaped from supermegahell, somehow, but no more on that.

The response:

" Wow y’all got hate crimed harder than Sherlock fans did. I am very very sorry"

"GAY RIGHTS TOOK A STEP BACK THIS FINALE SINGLEHANDEDLY REPEALED SAME SEX MARRIAGE"

" that episode seemed like a love letter to Wincest shippers and a HUGE fuck you to destiel shippers ngl"

" they really hated cas and misha so much that they spent the finale pandering to the fans who wanted the brothers to fuck"

But even the Wincest shippers weren't happy, because the ending was boring and Dean's death was lame. But no one was more upset than Destiel shippers, who held out hope that Cas would return. So of course there's the angry hashtag:

" you're right dabb, it WAS bold to end 12 years of queerbaiting with a bury your gays and then never mention your queer lead again, very bold !! #cwspnisoverparty"

" The fact that Cas is trending because the whole fking world is raging about his pathetic excuse for an ending. He deserved so much better. #cwspnisoverparty"

" SPAM REPORT CW_SPN AND GET THAT SHIT SUSPENDED PLEASE THAT'S ALL I WANT and trend #cwspnisoverparty BUT MOSTLY REPORT THAT ACCOUNT THERE'S NO BIGGER FUCK YOU THAN THAT PLS"

And the angry tweets to the writer of the finale ep:

" ANDREW DABB IS THE WORST FCKING THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW AND DEAN WINCHESTER"

" sweet boy..... god i am so sorry i will miss him so much i'm plotting my revenge on @andrewdabb right fucking now. cas deserved better. cas deserved BETTER. #Supernatural"

" The #Supernaturalfinale feels like an insult. Like @cw_spn and @andrewdabb actually just kicked me in the chest and walked away laughing. What the HELL was that? "

And of course it wouldn't be a disappointing queerbait finale if there weren't a Fake Episode conspiracy:

" All I want to say is that I hope @andrewdabb releases the original script, which I very much feel was more found family friendly, but that they couldn’t execute any longer due to COVID. The fandom deserves to see it. #Supernatural"

And it turns out the most likely reason Jensen struggled with the ending is because Dean dies like a punk.

---

EDIT:

OK, let me clarify a few things:

• "Homophobically gay" and "Jensen/Dean is about to commit a hate crime/say a slur" are popular memes describing the 15x18 confession and Destiel in general. Ill-phrased and insensitive phrasing perhaps, but pretty popular (and also accurate).
• The remark about hazing/bullying: Misha has said that the pranking has crossed a line a few times, but the cast seems mostly friendly regardless. On the writing/producing side, his treatment seems unpleasant compared to Jared and Jensen's, but he seems fine with it and gets paid nicely. I don't want to fall down a rabbit hole of conjecture and conspiracy theorizing. If I find the specific interviews, I will provide them, but they are from a long, long time ago and there is a lot of SPN content. Like, a lot. The show's been on for 15 years.
• A lot of people think the show is bad because it is bad, not just because Destiel didn't become canon. The plot, characters, and writing in general were messy as fuck from an objective standpoint, regardless of any personal stakes.
• I forgot to mention that the finale monster of the week were vampire clowns or as the fandom calls them vampire Juggalos.
• Link to one of the interviews where Misha talks about ball fondling: https://youtu.be/8bwzaP3l_28
• In my rush to post the writeup out I glossed over the non-shippy reasons why the episode was terrible and the fandom reactions, so here is an update: UPDATE It hasn’t even been 24 hours and Jim Beaver deactivated his tweet because of fans’ rage tweeting.

Jim Beaver played Bobby, the boys’ surrogate father. He’s generally a fan favorite, but some fans flipped out because he returned for the finale but Cas didn’t:

“y'all somehow managed to bring back jim beaver and mark pelegrino but misha was the one that couldn't make it bc of covid... the third fucking person on the call sheet. ofc he was the one y'all found to be expendable.”

“You literally brought Jim Beaver who’s a person of RISK be there amongst other 80 people on a bridge NONE OF THEM WEARING MASKS and you’re telling me that you couldn’t bring Misha Collins???? naa im calling this homophobia…”

“Like let’s not act as if Jim isn’t 70 years old that you placed there among the crew with no care and also the vamp chick from season 1 that NOBODY remembers... y’all just don’t like Misha Collins there, just say it”

“the show brought back mark pellegrino, jake able, jim beaver, vampire #207 and etc but misha and shoshannah two pivotal and essential characters to sam and deans story and the show were just too much”

He posted, “Thanks to all the kind people and thanks to all the unkind people. I’m deactivating my account. So long.”

Steering away from the Destiel drama, tetanus, juggalo vampires, and wigs were also big stars of the night:

“saw six people go "TETANUS?!" on the timeline and assumed bid*n caught it but its DEAN WINCHESTER????”

“I’ve never seen supernatural but the person who said that dean never got his tetanus shot because he thinks vaccines turn you gay is the funniest person alive”

“things Old Man Sam looks like: https://couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name.tumblr.com/post/635275319674372096/things-old-man-sam-looks-like-an-english

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Background

Supernatural is a CW show about two brothers, Dean and Sam, running around fighting monsters and having a lot of angst and drama with each other. It was goofy some episodes, serious in others, and tried to tackle complicated issues within the episodes. It also featured two conventionally attractive white guys. So you can see why it got popular pretty fast.

It got especially popular on Tumblr, which was the hotbed of all fandom discourse for the longest time on the internet. It was so popular on there, that it became one of the Big Three: Supernatural, Dr. Who, and Sherlock. It was one of the biggest shows on the entire internet, and it was very popular with teenage girls.

The Rise of Destiel

When it first came out, the shipping community of tumblr, a.k.a all of Tumblr, was kind of a mess, because there weren't many non-heterosexual ship options for them, as that's what Tumblr prefers over anything else. So the shippers made one of the first popular incest ships on the internet, Wincest, out of pure desperation. And if you weren't into Wincest, then you just didn't get a lot of room in that part of the fandom.

See Wincest in it's earliest forms on Fanfiction.net Wincest was in the many of the first fics in the Supernatural tag on Ao3

Wincest was so big it was even referenced in the show, when Dean and Sam visit a Supernatural(the in-universe book series about their lives written by a man with prophetic visions) Convention and meet two gay lovers who cosplayed as them.

Wincest was undethronable, until it was dethroned. When Season 4 premiered we were introduced to a new conventionally attractive white boy, Castiel. You see, Castiel was an angel who raised Dean from hell, making them basically soul-bonded forever. Even from the very beginning, he went on about how he and Dean has a special connection, and it really helped that Dean was way more popular than Sam on the show, despite Sam starting out as the main character.

You can see the progression, Wincest was dead, long live Destiel. The fics flooded Ao3, which was now the dominant fanfic site, and each new one spawned ten more based on it. The fandom blazed past everything else, with the most popular fic Twist and Shout reaching over 34,000 total kudos and 1,187,975 hits.

The popularity of the Ship boosted the show into the stratosphere on Tumblr, who finally had their gay ship to drool over. Destiel became fandom canon. One example of the many multi-gif posts made to glorify it

The show was peaking. Many girls I knew in middle school were obsessed, with the show and the pairing. Also me, I was also completely obsessed. I was very much in love.

The GayBaiting and The Fall

A lot of this section is directly ripped from this 2014 article, so please give it a read for more context.

The showrunners noticed, how could they not? They also noticed if they played upon the idea that Dean could be a lil' gay, let the show reference Castiel being so in love with him, and use a lot of romcom tropes, and maybe TELL THE ACTOR FOR CASTIEL (MISHA COLLINS) TO PLAY CAS LIKE A "JILTED LOVER" WITH DEAN, then they could drive the fandom into a frothing mess.

Queerbaiting was born on the back of this show. Queerbaiting refers to when a show teases a gay relationship for clout but never confirms it so they can have deniability. Supernatural proves that if you want a show to be popular, going to the gays never fails. Again, and Again, and AGAIN, the show teased the atmosphere between them. Just go back to the manips post and feel it.

But as time went on, and the show continued, and nothing changed or got confirmed, people on tumblr started losing interest. Newer shows to queerbait with came out, real homosexual relationships started to happen. Voltron. The shows fandom started to repress their Supernatural days and move on, especially as supernatural started entering it's 12th season. A new era had begun...

... .......

Season 15, episode 18

Season 15 was the last season of Supernatural ever, everyone looked upon this with relief, glad it was finally ending and the cast could move on. I actually started to pay attention to Supernatural in this season, out of pure interest for where it would go. The fandom made jokes about how funny it would be if they actually confirmed Destiel this season. Believe it or not, I actually thought it would happen because of Supernatural reaching the era of the Gays, 2020.

And then, episode 18 aired on the 5th of November. And then, Castiel started giving a speech about Dean, while looking directly into his eyes, and then he says, I Love You.

And then he gets dragged down to super mega ultra hell for experiencing a moment of true happiness.

What I want you to do is visit this link, https://www.tumblr.com/search/supernatural, or this one, https://www.tumblr.com/search/destiel, and scroll for a bit.

Because there's no way I can possibly condense for you the pure mixture of hilarity and fucking insanity the entire website devolved into. I'll try but I seriously don't think a single writer could capture the wild west of Tumblr at this point.

It started small, the Destiel tag was #9 on trending, every Supernatural blog in existence was reblogging and going crazy. And then people who had repressed their Supernatural memories noticed something was going on. And then popular blogs noticed what was going on. And then everyone on the entire website noticed something was going on. Tumblr refugees on Twitter noticed.

Tumblr became a supernova.

The Fallout

People were crying because it finally happened

People were making fun of them for immediately killing their gay character

A lot

People made fun of Jensen Ackles for looking extremely constipated during the confession

A lot

A lot

[A Lot](https://eyesandangels.tumblr.com/post/634075957607694336/deans-not-homophobic-hes-just-nevada-speed-at

LMAO

They make fun of the confession scene a lot

I mean come on it was pretty homophobic to kill off your fandom's beloved just after he confesses his love so that you don't have to explore a relationship

Yeah...

Blogs that hadn't posted in years reanimated.

And on top of all of this, other shit was completely going down. Georgia and Pennsylvania flipped colors. A fake Putin rumor spread. Hetalia was coming back. Season 5 of Sherlock was coming back(another queerbaiting show). MHA Spoilers ::: spoiler show spoiler Dabi was confirmed to be Touya todoroki :::

Here's a really funny video recapping some of the insanity

Tumblr rose from the dead to and everyone is still going stir-fucking crazy. This is 2014 tumblr recaptured in it's purest essence so please enjoy the shitshow while you can.

Thanks Everyone

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

I quite enjoyed writing and receiving feedback on my Halsey post, so I thought I'd do another post about a different fandom. This time, we're delving into the extremely chaotic Adam Driver standom.

PLEASE NOTE: SEVERAL COMMENTS, USERNAMES, ETC. ARE LINKED AND SCREENSHOTTED HERE FOR EVIDENCE'S SAKE. DO NOT HARASS ANYONE INVOLVED. DO NOT DOXX ANYONE OR ATTEMPT TO CHASE THEM DOWN.

TL;DR: The Adam Driver fandom is split down the middle. Things came to a head when a fan from one side of the fandom gave Adam a wooden carving of his dog and he called them out in a New Yorker article months later. It turned out the person who made the wood carving is associated with fans who are convinced he is divorced from (or in the process of divorcing) his wife after Adam had an affair with Daisy Ridley. Wank ensued.

I'm going to start with the event and work backwards to the context. Let's start with the basics.

Basic Terminology: What is a Stan?

Eminem's song "Stan" describes a so-called "stalker fan," someone who is obsessed with an artist to the point of shaping their entire life around them. The term gained some prominence on Livejournal gossip blog "Oh No They Didn't" to describe superfans of artists, actors, and celebrities. Currently, a "stan" is anyone who posts exclusively or semi-exclusively about a famous person, group, or band, and a "standom" is a fandom made up of stans.

I've previously posted about Halsey stans; this post, however, is about Adam Driver stans.

Who is Adam Driver?

You most likely know 36-year-old Adam Driver from his work in the Star Wars franchise as the fearsome Kylo Ren, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa. (WARNING: Article may contain spoilers.) What you may not know about Adam is his strange backstory, his marriage to his wife Joanne Tucker, and his rich filmography outside of Star Wars.

Born in California and raised in Indiana in a conservative family, Adam had dreams of leaving his small town of Mishawaka to become an actor. However, after 9/11, Adam, like many Americans, found himself swept up in the wave of patriotism that seized the USA, and he applied to become a Marine. He served for three years at Camp Pendelton, California as a mortarman and speaks fondly about his time in the Corps, as well as the friends he made. He was later honorably discharged for breaking his collarbone in a mountain biking accident and watched with guilt as his friends went on to fight in the ongoing War on Terror in the Middle East.

However, Adam was already reconsidering his career path during his service. A training exercise involving white phosphorous took a turn for the deadly, and he recalls:

I was like, ‘I’m going to smoke cigarettes and be an actor when I get out.’ Those were my two thoughts. I wanted to smoke cigarettes and be an actor.

After leaving the military, Adam, like many marines, had trouble adjusting to civilian life and puttered around the Midwest doing odd jobs. His second application to the acting school, Julliard, was accepted, and Adam dropped everything to move to New York City. During his education, he fell in love with acting and found its controlled release of emotions therapeutic. You can hear his TED talk about how acting helped him express himself and adjust to civilian life here.

He met his wife, Joanne, in his cohort. The two married in 2013 and went on to found Arts in the Armed Forces, or AITAF: a charity dedicated to bringing free, high-quality theater to military bases and to veterans's families.

Adam is famously shy and reclusive. He and his wife successfully hid the fact that they had a son for two years. While he isn't rude to fans, coworkers, or industry professionals, Adam is defensive of his personal space and reacts poorly to being candidly photographed in public.

He does not have social media, giving fans very little opportunity to speak or interact with him. If you want to say hi to him at all, you either have to wait for a charity auction, camp out for a red carpet, or attend an AITAF event and hope that he's there in-person. So when Adam announced a Broadway run in 2019, fans were thrilled at the opportunity to finally meet their idol.

March-July 2019: "Burn This"

Burn This is a somewhat obscure play by playwright Lanford Wilson. A Broadway revival was performed in 2019 with Keri Russel as the main character, Anna, and Adam as her love interest, Pale. The two begin a hasty love affair when Robbie, Pale's brother and Anna's roommate, dies suddenly in a boating accident and Pale comes by to collect Robbie's belongings. Robbie was gay, and the play takes place during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

The play isn't done often, partially because Pale is a challenging role: a fast-talking cokehead from New Jersey with violent mood swings. Pale is openly homophobic, yet spends the play trying to figure out how to mourn his brother. It takes skill to capture the subtlety in Wilson's writing and not downgrade Pale to a violent brute with no emotion. Adam originally played Pale during his tenure at Julliard and took on the role again for the Broadway revival. The play did so well that it was nominated for a Tony for Best Revival, and Adam was nominated for Best Actor in a Stage Play.

The "Burn This" Stage Door

It's common among theater fans to wait at the stage door to greet the actors, get their programs signed, and even (if they're lucky) chat with their idols for a bit. Occasionally, the crowd is sparse, but stage doors for famous actors are usually heavily crowded, even mobbed. Security is often needed for the safety of the crowd and the performers. Tom Hiddleston, for example, had a huge crowd 5-6 people deep at its thinnest when I met him after Betrayal in 2019.

Adam was no exception: the Burn This stage door usually had a moderate crowd after every show, and so the Hudson Theater was outfitted with several security guards and barricades, including a personal bodyguard for Adam himself. Early videos of the stage door show a small crowd, but as the play wore on, security measures became more intense.

In spite of the crowd, the Burn This stage door was usually pleasant and calm. Adam exited the theater promptly after the show ended each night, and he was incredibly sweet and patient with fans outside of the stage door. Throughout almost all of spring, Adam patiently stopped to sign every single person's Playbill, shake hands, and say hi. On one memorable occasion, he carried his dog, Moose, from the stage door to his car before coming back to sign programs. Plenty of videos exist on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, and Reddit of peaceful interactions.

From my own experience at the door, I can personally say he will slow down for fans and happily greet them if they are calm and polite.

If.

June 2019: Someone Jumps The Stage

Stage door interactions slowed down around May. I was fortunate enough to meet Adam at the stage door, as were many friends who went around May 4th; others, however, waited for Adam, only to be told he was not coming. This sort of lag is normal, especially in the middle of a play run that's showing 8 performances a week: the actors are usually tired and want nothing more than to go home and get some sleep.

However, some fans were not satisfied. Some especially dedicated playgoers began staking out all entrance/exit points of the Hudson Theater. Sure enough, on days he didn't sign, Adam was leaving through the main entrance of the theater, accompanied by a small security detail. (Bear in mind that the main entrance =/= the stage door: the stage door was behind the theater and on an entirely separate street.)

A video was posted on Twitter in June 2019 of Adam leaving the main entrance of the Hudson Theater with his head down; in the background, you can hear a small crowd of people shouting after him. One woman gets right to the door of his car, but she is otherwise non-aggressive, and Adam gently turns her down before getting into the vehicle.

Reactions to this post were brief and basically amounted to, "Hey what the fuck OP," but this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to weird, out-of-touch fan behavior.

Days later, a strange Twitter thread emerged, detailing a drunk woman who had to be kicked out of the Hudson and blocked from going near Adam at the stage door. Details of the thread were corroborated by others who were either at the same show or friends with OP. The story goes like this:

A woman got a little too tipsy on 17 dollar beers at the Hudson and sat through the entire show without incident. However, just after bows had ended and the actors had left, the woman stood up, made her way to the front of the stage, and climbed up. She then promptly made her way backstage, where she reportedly gave Keri Russel a huge fright before being escorted out by security. Once she was outside of the backstage area, the stage jumper persisted in trying to dodge security and get in front of Adam, insisting she was a "friend." Adam came out and signed as normal, not once paying attention to the screaming woman trying to dodge several security guards. Adam made his way home unscathed, and the stage jumper was never seen again.

But somehow, this was not the incident that made the news. At this point, you may be wondering why this was not the most memorable incident of the Burn This stage door. How could Adam or Keri not talk about the drunk woman who suddenly appeared backstage?

That's because the incident that did make the news has its roots deep in Adam Driver standom. Those roots dig into some very dark places.

We have arrived at the most famous incident at the Burn This stage door: the dog carving.

Summer 2019: The Dog Carving

In the summer, an Adam Driver stan by the username Missus-Misanthrope waited at the stage door with a special gift for Adam Driver: a wood carving of his beloved dog, Moose.

I have seen a picture of the (supposed) carving, but to maintain Missus-Misanthrope's privacy, I will not be posting a screenshot here. Essentially, it's a small, flat block of wood with Moose's smiling face woodburned into it. I am not a fan of Missus-Misanthrope (or her kin in our fandom) by any means, but it is extremely well-done.

When Adam made his way to her at the stage door, Missus-Misanthrope greeted him and handed him the carving. A GIF of this interaction is here.

At the beginning of the GIF, Adam is looking down, presumably at the wood carving. He nods at it and thanks Missus-Misanthrope with a smile. He turns hands it off to his security team. There is a long pause where he appears to be either waiting for his security team or examining the carving. Finally, he turns back to Missus-Misanthrope without making eye contact and continues signing Playbills. His expression is neutral.

Let me be abundantly clear: this exact GIF is impossible to find. This write-up took a while, partially because I was looking all over for the damn thing. It has been scrubbed from the Internet. The original Imgur post is set to "private." Accounts have been erased, posts have been either deleted or archived, and Twitters have been suspended, deactivated, or moved. It took over a week of me asking everyone I knew, combing individual Twitters by date, and abusing the Wayback Machine before someone eventually found it and sent it to me.

Missus-Misanthrope wanted this GIF gone from the Internet. This was the interaction Adam Driver remembered from his stage door. This interaction would become infamous months later, in October, when it came up during an interview.

October 2019: The New Yorker Article

During the Burn This run, author Michael Schumer interviewed Adam Driver for the New Yorker. The article was released in October 2019 and can be found here. I highly recommend it: it's a stunning interview, capturing a lot of the nuances of Adam's personality as he goes about his pre-show ritual.

However, this interview made waves because of Adam's off-hand comment about fan interactions at the stage door (emphasis mine):

On the couch was a piece of fan art he had received at the stage door. During “Girls,” strangers would often share details about their sex lives with him. (One guy stopped him in the subway and said, “I love that scene where you pee on her in the shower,” then turned to his girlfriend and said, fondly, “I pee on her all the time.”) But “Star Wars” has made him uncomfortably famous. “This one woman who has been harassing my wife came to the show and gave me a creepy wood carving that she made of my dog,” he said.

The stage jumper, the fans pursuing him at all doors into and out of the Hudson, seemed to fade away in comparison to this ten seconds of stage door history. Adam mentions the "creepy wood carving," and it is never touched upon again. But that one sentence sent stans into fits.

Some began gleefully sharing the original GIF of the interaction; others laughed at Missus-Misanthrope or showed her pity. Still more questioned whether or not it was appropriate to give Adam a portrait of his dog at all: even though Adam has featured Moose in photoshoots, stage door interactions, and even a news interview, opinions are mixed about how much fans are allowed to comment on his personal life. The wood carving of Moose seemed to toe that line in an uncomfortable way and ignited heated discussion on what behavior was "allowed" and "not allowed."

But there is a short passage just after Adam's comment about the wood carving that hints at the dark heart of this scandal:

He and Tucker have a young son, whose birth they kept hidden from the press for two years, in what Driver called “a military operation.” Last fall, after Tucker’s sister, who was launching a peacoat business, accidentally made her Instagram account public and someone noticed the back of his son’s head in one picture, the news wound up on Page Six.

Under what circumstances would Adam and Joanne have to hide a child for two years? Recall that Adam was not just scandalized by the wood carving (emphasis mine):

“This one woman who has been harassing my wife came to the show and gave me a creepy wood carving that she made of my dog."

No, something about Missus-Misanthrope herself had made him deeply uncomfortable. The wood carving wasn't the whole of the issue: it was something about how the fandom had treated his wife and the news of their child.

Here was where the real drama about this tiny wood carving lied.

Daiver Fandom and adamdriverfans

Missus-Misanthrope was part of a subreddit called "adamdriverfans." Not to be confused with the main Adam Driver subreddit, "adamdriver," adamdriverfans is incredibly small (only about 3000 subscribers) and, on the surface, appears to be a normal subreddit about Adam and his work. EDIT: It's 3,000 subcribers, not 300. Missed a zero!

However, probe deeper, and adamdriverfans reveals its true nature. The subreddit is, in part, a haven for discussion between Daivers, or people that "ship" Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley and want them to be in a relationship. ("Ship" is short for "relationship.")

Daivers are not to be confused with "Reylos," Star Wars fans who want Adam and Daisy's respective characters, Kylo Ren and Rey, to date. Daivers go one step further and want the actors to be together. Any Daivers found on adamdriverfans are the most extreme iteration of this kind of 'shipper: they believe that Adam and Daisy had an affair, followed by a falling-out somewhere around The Force Awakens, and that Lucasfilm (and their respective publicists) have been keeping them separate. This line of thinking also posits that Joanne is an ice queen keeping Adam on a short leash.

This is not to say that all posters on adamdriverfans are Daivers; many want what's best for Adam and see it as their right to comment on Adam's personal life. But it's challenging to separate posts from true-blue Daivers, posts from those who think Adam and Daisy had an affair, and posts from users who simply hate Joanne Tucker. In my opinion, it's impossible to go near the subreddit unless you believe, on some level, that Joanne and Adam should separate, and that Daisy is a factor in that separation.

Multiple posts exist trashing Joanne Tucker and questioning whether or not the baby is Adam's. Someone doxxed Adam and Joanne and discovered multiple residences, fueling speculation on whether or not they were "secretly" divorced or otherwise separated. There is "evidence" that their marriage is a sham or otherwise a marriage of convenience.

Supporters of Joanne and Adam's marriage and critiques of the subreddit are considered "blind" mean girls ignoring the truth and looking for someone to bully. In reality, the fans on adamdriverfans are hostile towards non-members: One poster even called other women "creepy" for asking to shake Adam's hand at the stage door. Still another post implies that fans who don't believe the rumors are waiting for their chance to sleep with Adam.

For its part, the mods of adamdriverfans posit the subreddit as a place for healthy discussion. Other stans treat adamdriverfans as a joke, leading the mods to be mostly hostile to those questioning the constant dunking on Adam and his wife. Dissenters have even been speculated to be PR people deflecting any discussion of Joanne and Adam's relationship in the hopes of saving *Burn This'*s ticket sales:

4Chan is full of PR people trying to shut down discussion by posting outrageous, disprovable claims in an effort to discredit all info about Joanne. You are a threat because you have a credible story.

This is why Burn This is selling slowly. There are tickets available for every single night and whole parts of the theatre are empty on some nights. Joanne is a PR disaster. They can’t even call on their friends and connections to help fill the seats

It's worthy of note that the Daiver and anti-Joanne communities extends into TikTok and other social media: for example, there is an entire Instagram account called "ihatejoannetucker" dedicated to posting personal photos and making fun of Joanne. Here, I focus on adamdriverfans because it was the main vehicle for Missus-Misanthrope to post her thoughts and feelings.

MissusMisanthrope's Backstory

Missus-Misanthrope had been recognized by Adam for a reason: she had already tried to pass a carving (speculated to be the very same dog carving given in 2019) to Adam via Joanne at an AITAF donor event in 2018.

Bear in mind that AITAF events are primarily for celebrating veterans and bringing accessible theater to them and their families. They are not fan events for Adam Driver. However, Missus-Misanthrope saw her opportunity to interact with Adam when she saw Joanne and a friend at the bar (bolding for emphasis by me):

I am an artist and had two gifts that I wanted to try to get to Adam. One was an anniversary plaque for AITAF, the other was a portrait of his dog. When I saw Joanne, I thought she would be the perfect person to help me accomplish this.

From the second I approached her, she made me feel like garbage. I was polite, I thanked her for her work with AITAF. When I said that I had gifts for Adam, she asked me if I was a veteran. When I said no, she narrowed her eyes at me and asked me "how did you get IN HERE?" as though she suspected that I had... snuck in?

"I donated money that was very hard to come by and purchased a ticket" I responded.

She chuckled smugly and said "oh... you're a DONOR. No. I can't help you."

I was taken aback... I was not sure that I heard her correctly. "You can't do anything? If I give them to you can you..."

"No"

Then she turned to the woman she was with and said "Lindsay, this... DONOR has PRESENTS for ADAM."

Then they both just... laughed? Like how could I EVER think that they would let me give my STUPID presents to ADAM.

Missus-Misanthrope continued describing feelings of hurt, dismissal, and betrayal.

I felt like they both viewed me like I was NOTHING.

I have never felt like such a freaking idiot in my life.

So... that was something. I almost cried. Went into the situation really admiring Joanne. Left the situation feeling really disillusioned and crappy and like I did something wrong. It sucked to look forward to that event so much and work hard to overcome anxiety to travel to NY alone and have some awful crap like that happen.

She implies that, had Adam not commented his gratitude towards donors later on in the event, she would not have felt appreciated or seen (emphasis mine):

Adam was very vocal about his appreciation of the donors to AITAF so at least I didn't feel like complete useless trash.

I hope she isn't treating a lot of donors like this. This could really make some people look at AITAF in a different light if she is the only person they interact with.

A later comment in the same thread underlines feelings of betrayal (emphasis mine):

I have played it over and over in my head and I literally didn't do anything wrong. I mean, even if I had, she is a grown woman... why was she laughing at me? I felt like I was in a freaking nightmare.

Her behavior was so ugly and childish. If she is doing this to people, they NEED to speak up. I don't know why anyone feels like they need to protect her if she is really treating people this way. This type of behavior coming from her can impact the reputation of Adam and AITAF.

I am going to be sending an official complaint to AITAF about my experience. It was just so, so not okay.

By the time Missus-Misanthrope attended the stage door in 2019, she had already publicly expressed dislike of Joanne and became a valued member of adamdriverfans. And Adam, whether through his wife or through other incidents at other AITAF events, knew full well who she was.

October 2019: Your Friendly Neighborhood Pariah

Fans elsewhere quickly identified the "creepy wood carving" girl as Missus-Misanthrope. EDIT: I've been informed that it was not fans, but Missus-Misanthrope's husband, who identified her. Her husband left an angry comment (now deleted) on the author's Twitter.

adamdriverfans, predictably, went absolutely apeshit.

The article was deemed to be "angry" and vengeful towards fans like Missus-Misanthrope for no reason. A poster deemed calling Missus-Misanthrope out in the article "classless." There was worry that Missus-Misanthrope was now in danger due to Adam's comment:

This fan has NOTHING. Who is going to protect her from the onslaught of Adam’s rabid fans and even the media who will likely try and track her down?

Other members of adamdriverfans said that Adam was well within his right to say something:

People are taking this way too personally. The fact is, there are a lot of Adam Driver "fans" out there who have been too creepy, taken things too far, and done gross stuff like deliberately scribble his wife out of photos they took together. Are those fans in the minority? Yeah, I'm positive of that.

But he has every right to his opinion and every right to express boundaries like any other person out there. I'm not even a huge fan of the dude and I get where he's coming from, regardless of how awkwardly he puts it.

He doesn't owe anybody anything. No one is entitled to him being 24/7 super nice and positive and not mentioning stuff like this.

Those who side with Missus-Misanthrope say that Adam was targeting Missus-Misanthrope on purpose:

My issue with the article was not that Adam expressed being creeped out by a fan/defending his wife. My issue is that he targeted someone specific. This fan had been having issues with AD and giving him this specific woodcarving for a YEAR now. I believe that this specific fan was mentioned on purpose. I don’t believe in coincidences.

But what about Missus-Misanthrope? Well...she didn't feel good, to put it lightly. In a statement to the subreddit entitled "Your Friendly Neighborhood Pariah," Missus-Misanthrope defended her behavior at the 2018 AITAF event:

I simply approached her in a common area of the theatre because I was advised by AITAF staff that I could talk to her about handing my gifts for AITAF and Adam off to someone who was able to help. Had I not been told that she was someone who could help me after the AITAF folks said that I should "definitely try to get the gifts to Adam" because "he will love them" I would not have even spoken to her.

All I was trying to do was give something to someone that I admire and to a foundation that I support. I wasn't trying to break up a marriage or be manipulative. I was following advice from people who work for AITAF and it ended up turning into a very unpleasant situation.

Regarding the stage door interaction, Missus-Misanthrope felt attacked and exhausted:

Less than 24 hours later, I was being attacked and insulted for basically just existing in the same place as Adam. I now just wish I had never gone.

This fandom makes me sad and a little bit sick. I am going to just continue existing as I have been in the past. I am just doing my best. If people hate me, I doubt that I can change that. I have no control over what anyone does but my own self. So I am just going to focus on being a decent person and treating others with kindness.

The mods on adamdriverfans followed up with a post on Missus-Misanthrope:

Here at this sub we have had the pleasure and privilege of knowing MissusMisanthrope and we have seen firsthand how brave she has been in the face of so much bullying and harassment – all because she had spoken about incident with Joanne Tucker and for daring to give Adam Driver a gift. What happened yesterday though is on an entirely different level altogether. What has happened to MissusMisanthrope feels like a horror story of the worst possible outcome of being a fan of a celebrity:

Bullied by the celebrity’s wife and staff.

Bullied and doxed by fans of the celebrity.

Finally, being bullied by the celebrity himself.

But curiously, according to adamdriverfans, Adam had pointed out the wrong fan:

The absolutely tragedy of this situation is (and I can not state this enough) is that he singled out the wrong person. Again, HE SINGLED OUT THE WRONG PERSON. There is another person who actively harassed JT and her family on social media (the infamous StalkerChan) but, let’s be absolutely clear about this, that wasn’t MissusMisanthrope.

This meant that there was a mysterious other fan behaving inappropriately, and that Adam had mistaken Missus-Misanthrope for the other fan.

Regardless of the error, the dice had been cast, and the votes were in: Adam Driver hated his fans, and Missus-Misanthrope was, indeed, a fandom pariah.

Aftermath: Exodus, Post Purging, and the Downward Spiral to Doucheville

I want to emphasize how challenging it was to dig up receipts for this post. That's because, shortly after the article broke, Missus-Misanthrope deleted all of her social media, and adamdriverfans began deleting older posts. When I began compiling evidence in September 2020, many old posts, tweets, etc. were completely gone. The GIF of the infamous stage door interaction had been almost completely wiped from the Internet: the original post on Imgur is private.

Shortly after the New Yorker article, Adam opened an Omaze charity campaign: By donating money to AITAF, you would be entered into a raffle to attend The Rise of Skywalker premiere with him.

However, Adam had previously voiced his distaste for peddling his autograph for money:

I don’t want to start getting into favors. It’s not about me and Star Wars. It’s about the people that we’re trying to serve and if you don’t get that then I’d rather not be associated with your money.

As a result, this Omaze campaign was met with negative reactions from those who sided with Missus-Misanthrope, with the general opinion that Adam was now a "sellout," a slave to his wife's desires to "save" AITAF from bad press. Many questioned if the Omaze campaign was an effort to repair relationships with fans after the Missus-Misanthrope scandal. Others questioned whether Adam was on a downward spiral in general, linking his "sellout" behavior to his weight loss and (supposed) fighting with Joanne.

Either way, one comment seemed to sum up the drama nicely:

It seems he is on a downward spiral to Doucheville.

Many announced that they were leaving the fandom after the Omaze campaign and after the New Yorker article. However, given the proximity to the mass exodus from the Star Wars fandom after The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters in December, it is unclear how much of the Adam standom exodus is Star Wars related and how much is Missus-Misanthrope related.

Regardless of the opinions of those on adamdriverfans, the Omaze campaign was a success. A veteran (coincidentally named Joanna) won and met Adam. A fan-run campaign started after The Rise of Skywalker raised a whopping 90,000 dollars for AITAF, funding their 2020 fiscal year and landing a personal thank-you from Adam himself. Needless to say, bad press from Missus-Misanthrope's interactions with Adam and Joanne did not stick.

It is unknown whether or not Adam will do another Broadway run in the future.

EDIT: I'm super overwhelmed and delighted by the positive reception to this post. Thank you so, so much for the great discussion and for reading this (and for giving it awards!). If you're spending money to give me awards, it would be stellar if you could give that money to BLM instead.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

This is a really old piece of drama, but I only discovered it recently after getting into Anna Rudolf’s Twitch channel (note: I don't think this breaks the rules because she wasn't a Twitch streamer at the time, and she's still primarily a chess analyst).

Warning: I don’t play a lot of chess, I’ve never followed chess competitively, and when this happened the only thing I really cared about in life was Webkinz. Even so, it’s pretty clear that this was screwed up.

Anna Rudolf is a Hungarian chess player. At the time this happened, in 2007, she was 20 years old. Since then she’s become an International Master, a Woman Grandmaster, and a member of the Hungarian Olympic Chess Team. She no longer plays competitively, but instead works as a commentator and analyst, and since the pandemic has been streaming through Twitch (her channel is here if you’re curious). If you were a Soothouse fan (RIP), you might recognise her from this video.

This took place at the Vandeouvre Open, whose current website calls them the “Biggest Chess Tournament in France”. At the tournament in 2007 there were 100 players, with the highest ranking being a chess grandmaster named Christian Bauer. Anna had a ranking of 2293 at the time, and was not yet ranked as a master.

Chess uses a ranking system where points are added or taken away based on games won while supervised. To achieve a higher ranking you need to have a point total within that range (for example, at the time Christian Bauer had a ranking of 2634, which made him a grandmaster since it is in the range of 2500-2700). So tournaments are an opportunity for chess players to move up and down the ranking, and have the opportunity to play those similarly ranked or higher ranked then they are.

Anna came into the tournament extremely strong. She was not expected to do particularly well, so there was a lot of surprise when she won her first four games in a row. Her second game, and the one that caused all the controversy, was against Christian Bauer. This caused a lot of talk about how she could have done so well, and some players began to suspect cheating.

It should be noted here that the normal way that people cheat in chess is through using a computer to calculate what the optimal next move will be. As supercomputers became more refined through time, and the Internet has made it easy to communicate their suggestions to chess players on site, concerns have arisen among high level players that any competitor could have a supercomputer.

Another important note is that Christian Bauer himself did not believe that Anna cheated. During the game and directly after the game it didn’t even occur to him. Afterwards he heard other players suggest it, and did briefly consider that it might be a “very unlikely” possibility. But then a friend of his used a supercomputer to prove that Anna’s moves did not line up with what a computer would have suggested, and that caused him to switch back to the “Anna did nothing wrong” side. He also said in later interviews that he made an error late in the game that Anna exploited perfectly, explaining how she won against someone with a much higher ranking. This is in line with what basically every other member of the chess community believes.

While several people gossiped about her cheating during the tournament, one competitor, a Latvian named Oleg Krivonosov, wanted to make actual allegations. He was dismissed by his fellow chess players because his claim had no evidence and no logical basis.

But he did not stop to listen to common sense. Krivonosov was hellbent on the idea of Anna cheating, so he rounded up fellow Latvians Oleg Lazarev and Ilmars Starostits to brainstorm with him. The next day, they went back to the competition and claimed that they knew exactly how she was cheating.

And what was their airtight hypothesis? Well, during her competitor’s moves Anna would get up and walk around, go to the bathroom, and apply her lip balm.

“Aha!” they must have crowed triumphantly, “Her lip balm is the supercomputer!”

Yeah, really.

To be fair, they did not literally think that she had disguised a 2007 supercomputer as a tube of lip balm. They thought that the tube was using the internet to receive signals from a nearby supercomputer, which she then used to make her next move. Which, considering the properties of both 2007 technology and of lip balm tubes, is basically just as preposterous.

Incredibly, they were not laughed out of the country. In fact, Anna went on to play two of them. The first, Lazarev, ended in a draw. Even with the accusation of cheating, Anna was doing pretty well.

The second Latvian she played, Starostits, went out of his way to make sure that she knew that he “knew” that she was cheating. He refused to shake hands, asked the arbiter to take away her bag (which the arbiter did, for some reason), and also got her banned from using her lip balm or from leaving the hall during the tournament.

A large part of chess playing is psychological. When you feel good and you’re doing good, you’re more likely to win or win again. Anna had been doing well all tournament, and presumably feeling on top of the world. This, alongside Bauer’s mistake, is the explanation most people give for her winning streak.

On the other hand, being publicly called a cheater, having your opponent refuse to shake hands, and then being treated like a criminal by the supposedly-objective arbiter, has about the opposite effect. Anna went on to lose that game, although it was a pretty even match to the end.

It also turns out that Starostits, aside from faulty logic and a strong sense of justice against twenty-year-olds who use lip balm, had a good motive to try and throw Anna off. If she had taken a draw in that game she could have finished in the top three. Starostits needed a win.

If that was his strategy, it worked. Starostits went on to take second. Thankfully, Anna also had somewhat of a happy ending in the rankings. She went on to take ninth place (she was expected to land around twenty-second), which allowed her to qualify for International Master and Woman Grandmaster.

In the aftermath, basically everyone sided with Anna. She left her last match crying, and many of her competitors went out of their way to comfort her. During the prize-giving ceremony, the president of the Vandeouvre club made a point to clear her name, telling everyone that she was just the victim of an amoral play. The crowd supposedly clapped for her for five minutes straight.

Krisonov, her original accuser, still could not let go of the belief that she was cheating. He promised to show up at the next tournament they both attended, Capelle-La-Grande, and accuse her again. If he did make these accusations they were dismissed out of hand, as no record of them shows up online.

The arbiters at Vandeouvre caught a fair amount of flack for their whole part in this. There was absolutely no evidence of her cheating at the time, and the arbiter either ignored internal protocols about how to deal with accusations of cheating (which are meant to prevent exactly what happened, a false accusation throwing a winning player off of their game), or the tournament simply didn’t have any.

False rumours swirled around online afterwards. Anna herself didn’t really comment on it, but her supporters found themselves having to clarify that most players she played were not ranked much higher than herself, and that her only incredibly high ranked competitor admitted to making a mistake that lost him the match.

For better or for worse, that weekend still influences her legacy. Anna continued playing for many more years, but that particular tournament is seen as one of the highlights of her competitive play. And the “scandal” is one of the first things to come up when you search for her online.

From what I could find, the incident is still occasionally brought up in general discussions of chess today, mostly in regards to two concepts: cheating with technology, and feminism.

Anna was a young, attractive woman in a field that is generally seen as male-dominated. Most of the rationale of her accusers was “he couldn’t lose to her”, and in an interview done by the Atlantic in 2019, she noted that a lot of the comments she received were very explicitly along the lines of “he couldn’t lose to a woman.”

The other chessplayer she was being interviewed with (Judit Polgar) noted that there were many times when male chessplayers did not believe her results because they did not believe that she could be that good, and that female chessplayers need to have a “strong character” to carry on. She called the experience a “teaching from life of how unfair [chess] can be”.

Even with the attempts in the last few years to promote women within male dominated fields, only two of the top one hundred chess players are women. In just 2015, one of the top English chess players, Nigel Short, claimed that men are just better at things like “chess” and “parking” than women, and later criticised his detractors as “shrill feminists”. Men tend to play chess more than women, and women tend to do worse playing competitively against men than they would playing against women.

As technology becomes smaller, the fear of chessplayers cheating becomes larger. In 2007, Christian Bauer said that he thought there was no worry of “cheating paranoia”. This actually seems to be mostly accurate.

In the thirteen years since, there have been a few large cheating scandals. None of them (from what I can see), however, have triggered any sort of witch hunt or disproportionate rule changes. While the situation with Anna stands out as what chess paranoia could lead to if unchecked, it does not seem to be any kind of herald of the future.

That’s pretty much the drama. If you’re a chess person and notice something I got wrong please let me know and I’ll edit it in.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Introduction

Most people floating around the fandom areas of the Internet have probably heard of Warrior Cats. This past post about some of the franchise's drama does a fantastic job of explaining how the series and its fandom work, but I'll provide another summary for those of you who don't enjoy clicking links.

Warrior Cats (or simply "Warriors" depending on where you live) is a nearly two-decade old children's fantasy series about "Clans" of dozens of wild cats who live according to a code of honor. Originally just a single six-book plot, its success spawned countless sequels, prequels, and standalone stories. There are over 80 books in the series now, including six full main story arcs of six books each—and they're not slowing down any time soon, with five more books releasing just this year and the seventh arc currently underway. The series was created by author Victoria Holmes, while the books themselves are ghostwritten by two other authors, all collectively sold under the pen name "Erin Hunter." Plots in these books typically revolve around bloody battles between the different Clans, mystical prophecies received from the spirits of cats who have died (known as StarClan), and, of course, mountains upon mountains of romantic drama and love triangles.

To quote the other post: "Are the books any good? Well… no, but that’s irrelevant." Some of them are quite good, but most are mediocre at best—and in any case, it's not the books per se that draw in legions of twelve year-old fans. The world Warriors created has generated a massive online fandom of kids, teens, and young adults earnestly designing their own cats and entire fan-made Clans for the sake of fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, and more.

Ashfur: The Origin

In 2007, while writing the draft for Warriors's third main story arc, Vicky Holmes had one thing in mind: Ashfur. This third arc, titled "Power of Three," was about a trio of cats—siblings—who each possessed a superpower that they were destined to use to save the Clans. But that was only window dressing for Vicky's true goal. It was no secret that she had... a fondness, shall we say, for tragic scenes dripping with drama, and she'd had one of these in mind ever since beginning to brainstorm PoT's plot: A mother's children are threatened, and the only way she can save them is to reveal the shocking truth: They are not hers. From this one kernel of drama came everything else.

And so Power of Three, a story about young cats with superpowers, was entirely structured around a scene unrelated to that idea. At the end of book five, a fire breaks out in the forest, and our three heroes are trapped by the flames. Their mother, Squirrelflight, tries to clear a path for them to escape, but her way is blocked by Ashfur—a cat who was a rival for her romantic affections in the previous story arc, in which Squirrelflight was a main character, before she chose her fellow protagonist Brambleclaw as her mate. The scene that follows is widely considered the most recognizable and iconic moment in Warrior Cats, featured in countless pieces of fan art and animated videos: Surrounded by the fire, his eyes aglow with hatred and madness, Ashfur raves about how he's never forgiven Squirrelflight for being "faithless" to him. In a speech rivaling General Hux from The Force Awakens for its intensity and anger, he echoes incels worldwide and recounts just how badly he's been wronged because this woman wouldn't go on a date with him. He utters the infamous line: “Upset? I’m not upset. You have no idea how much pain I’m in. It’s like being cut open every day, bleeding onto the stones. I can’t understand how any of you failed to see the blood. . . .” He even reveals that he secretly helped the villain of the previous arc attempt to murder Squirrelflight's father, just as he's now going to let her children burn to death—all to get revenge for being turned down.

I've already spoiled what happens next: Squirrelflight, to save the protagonists' lives, reveals to Ashfur that they are not, in fact, her children. Her motherhood was a deception, and not even Brambleclaw knows that he is not their father. She does not tell Ashfur who their true parents are, but what she's already said is enough—Ashfur now has a new path for his revenge. He's going to publicly reveal to all the Clans that Squirrelflight lied, destroying her standing and humiliating her.

It is eventually revealed, in the sixth and final book of PoT, that the trio's true mother was Squirrelflight's sister Leafpool, who as a Clan "medicine cat" (essentially a faith doctor) was forbidden to bear children, hence the lie. Ashfur is killed by one of the protagonists, but the full details of the secret are still revealed to all the Clans, shaming both Squirrelflight and Leafpool.

We now skip ahead to book 4 of the following story arc. One of our protagonists visits StarClan (the cat heaven) in a vision, and notices Ashfur present among them. Shocked, they ask another StarClan cat—a wise mentor figure—why Ashfur was allowed into StarClan, instead of being sent to the Dark Forest, the cat hell, for his crimes and attempted murders. Serenely, speaking with Vicky Holmes's full intent, the mentor figure replies: "His only crime was to love too much."

Ashfur: The Fandom

It is impossible to overstate just how big of a deal Ashfur became in the Warriors fandom for years to come. Now, naturally, in a series with hundreds of named characters and plenty of other drama-filled stories to go around, the fandom had lots of things to talk about... but Ashfur was constantly near the top of the list.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's spent time in a fandom with lots of young teenagers that there was a large movement viewing Ashfur as... "Misunderstood." He became practically idolized by lots of young fans—particularly young female fans—as a symbol of romantic tragedy. Contrasting this were fans who, rightfully, wondered what the hell Vicky was thinking when she wrote that line about "loving too much" and pointed out that Ashfur was both a misogynist and a murderer... etc, etc, etc. The Ashfur wars raged for years across every fandom platform—Tumblr, Youtube, forum boards—spurred on in large part by two factors.

The first is easy: Kids don't really have a good perspective of what a healthy relationship looks like. Trying to murder a woman's children because you want her that badly... can seem beautiful, in a twisted way. And it helps when the books themselves end up confirming this interpretation for you.

The second factor is a phenomenon that affects nearly every aspect of the Warriors fandom: A lot of fans... don't really read the books. Remember, the books themselves aren't the draw! The world is the draw. Kids want to make their own unique cats with names like Darknesstalon and Furyscythe (those names definitely wouldn't fit into the world of the books, if it's unclear). They don't care what happened in some new book that released this year. For a lot of people, the world of Warriors is a purely creative one—and a lot of kids actually found their way into the fandom solely through fan content, without ever touching an actual book. So when your whole knowledge of Ashfur is based on fan animation videos that show off the tears in his eyes as he pleaded with Squirrelflight to love him back—

You get the picture.

Working Partners

Around 2013, following the conclusion of the fourth arc, Vicky Holmes passed on her torch. Though she still retains some involvement with the series, the books' plots are now created by a team of writers called Working Partners, while still being ghostwritten by the same two authors from before. WP's involvement with the fifth arc onwards has produced a number of changes in the writing and decisions made about how to handle characters, some negative, some positive.

This brings us to the seventh and current story arc, "The Broken Code," which began releasing in spring 2019. In writing this arc, the new team by all appearances took note of a number of common fan complaints about the series that had existed for years. This included a number of questions about the series's status quo that the books themselves typically ignore, such as "Why do the cats arbitrarily segregate themselves into different Clans when they all have the same culture and almost always have to unite to fend off outside threats?", "Why aren't medicine cats allowed to have children, that's a stupid and unnecessary rule?", or "Why do none of the characters seem to notice or care that their leaders always promote their relatives to positions of power?" (This last one is of course because characters in positions of power are almost always protagonists, and protagonists usually end up being relatives of other protagonists.) Every indication from TBC so far is that questions like these will be addressed in the series itself, possibly ending with lasting systemic change for the Clans.

Even more than any of those questions, the new team became aware of one particular fan complaint: Ashfur. By now the Warriors fandom had been around long enough to become somewhat more mature—though Ashfur stans still existed, the general consensus was totally aware that he was an outright villain who was in no way a dreamy misunderstood boyfriend. And so the time came that Working Partners, in planning out The Broken Code, had a brilliant idea: Make Ashfur the villain. Bring him back, as a sinister Big Bad for the seventh arc, and satisfy the fandom by showing once and for all that he's not some relatable lovestruck sadboi. More than that, retcon his placement in StarClan as a trick all along—Ashfur lied his way into heaven and has been plotting his revenge ever since.

"But, wait, isn't he... dead?" you ask, confused. Yes, but this is Warrior Cats, and death is kinda irrelevant. The entire plot of the fourth arc was about evil dead cats returning to fight a final battle and getting killed again, this time for good. If the new team could come up with a convincing way to make Ashfur insert himself back into the plot as a spirit, there would be nothing stopping them from reusing him.

This would have made shockwaves among the fandom no matter what, but the discourse was set into motion even before the release of TBC's first book. Kate Cary, one of the series's two ghostwriters, confirmed on her blog that a "controversial character" would be returning for arc 7. She gave no details beyond that, but most fans assumed this meant a villain, and speculation began. Could it be this character? Or this one? Or what about this other one...? And Ashfur's name, of course, came up a lot.

And then the rumor started. Ashfur. Leaked to the fandom from an unknown source came the whispers that it was Ashfur—it was Ashfur big time. Ashfur, the rumor said, was going to possess and take over the body of a living character and wreak havoc. Plenty of people believed it. Plenty of other people likewise dismissed it—the writers would never do something like that.

Heh.

The Broken Code

The first book of The Broken Code released in April 2019 and kicked things off with a bang. StarClan has gone totally silent for unknown reasons and isn't communicating prophecies and wisdom to the living cats like they normally do. Over the course of the book, one of our new young cat protagonists is spoken to by a mysterious unseen spirit. You see, Squirrelflight's mate Brambleclaw—now the leader of his Clan and named Bramblestar—is ill, and this spirit knows how to cure him. Acting on its instructions, the protagonist convinces all the cats to bury Bramblestar in snow to bring his fever down.

He dies.

Then he comes back to life! All the characters cheer. Bramblestar shakily gets up... looks around... and then walks over to Squirrelflight. "Greetings," he says in a deep voice. "It's good to be with you again."

Heh.

The book ends with another one of the protagonists on a walk through a totally different part of the forest, when he suddenly encounters... Bramblestar?? But it's a ghost. The ghost-Bramblestar runs towards him, yelling "Help! Please help!" The protagonist flees in terror. The atmosphere of the scene is excitingly horror-esque in a way that no Warriors book before has been.

Things only escalate in books 2 and 3, with each passing book amping up both the intense ominous feeling of the story and the chilling menace of the living "Bramblestar's" actions. In book 2, "Bramblestar" spends all his time with Squirrelflight, creepily fawning over her and insisting she approve all her actions with him. At the same time, he uses his position as the respected leader of a Clan to push for aggressive punishment for cats who commit minor infractions. He argues that he knows why StarClan has gone silent—it's because the Clans aren't obeying their Code strictly enough. In book 3 he pushes the other Clans to join him in a war against the cats that refuse to bow to his new regime, a war that ends near book 3's conclusion with him beaten and captured by the heroes and their allies.

As this goes on, the fandom starts to realize something. The impostor pretending to be Bramblestar... is an incredible villain. His writing hits notes of darkly intimidating behavior rarely seen in this mediocre kids' series, whether it's publicly threatening other cats for disobeying him, trying to murder a protagonist in the dark of night, or even—in one scene—privately gloating to one of the protagonists about how successful his plan to fool everyone has been. And all of this contrasts beautifully with the other side of his personality that emerges whenever Squirrelflight's name comes up: an obsessive, unhealthy, pathetic interest in her. He makes dumb mistakes and is easily tricked whenever another character leads him to believe he might get to spend more time with her. He drops everything and forgets all his other priorities if she's involved. He's a simp. And the two styles of behavior blend perfectly in the scenes where his true personality comes out—when Squirrelflight begins to push him away, knowing that something is wrong, he becomes violent and brutal, verbally abusing her and at one point bodily throwing her off a small ledge. It's a thorough, shockingly cold and real portrayal of a man obsessed with owning a woman. In a children's fantasy book about anthropomorphized cats.

Of course, most of the fandom knew it was Ashfur. The rumors and leaks helped, but even from the first book of the arc it was obvious. His main goal being "habe sex w/ Squireflit" is more than enough to prove that, but there were other hints too. In book 1, a protagonist has a vision of the cats' territory being suddenly set aflame—and of flakes of ash falling into his fur. (Yes, the book uses those words.) In book 2, the impostor references specific past events that Ashfur would be overly concerned with, and is clueless as to significant events that happened shortly after Ashfur's death. In book 3, in the scene where the "horror" vibe peaks, the impostor's spirit emerges temporarily from Bramblestar's body and menacingly threatens a protagonist—and though its appearance is smoky and indistinct, the protagonist can see its eyes are a bright blue, just like Ashfur's.

That book (which released earlier this year) ends with the impostor captured and Squirrelflight about to announce to all the cats that she believes she knows who he really is—but by that time the cover of book 5 had already been revealed. This is the cover, and this is official artwork of Ashfur.

Ashfur: The Fandom, Redux

I hope you were all anticipating this last part, because our story wouldn't be complete without it. Despite all the hints above and more I didn't mention... the fandom, as always, had diehard holdouts who refused to believe it was Ashfur at all costs. Thus did the last 1.5 years in the fan community become a strange rebirth of Ashfur wars, with many of the same elements of the original ones. Because, you see, one of the chief arguments the Ashfur deniers used was that Ashfur would never do these things. He would never try to murder other cats. He would never wreak havoc and turn the Clans against themselves. He would never hurt Squirrelflight like that!

I assume I don't need to provide counter-arguments.

Other arguments came from a variety of places. Some fans, as always, clearly had no idea what was actually going on in the current books, and were arguing from a place of ignorance. Some latched onto theories that the impostor was instead whoever their personal favorite villain was. Some argued that, while Ashfur was evil and murderous, he would never take the actions that the impostor had and try to manipulate all of the Clans, because he only cared about Squirrelflight. These people were essentially in denial, since anyone who follows the news knows that men can do absolutely horrific things to unrelated people when acting on anger about being rejected.

At one point I encountered a post suggesting that Mothwing—a still-living, female, non-blue-eyed atheist—was the impostor and that all the Ashfur theories were ignoring the obvious truth... though it was probably a troll.

Even when the book 5 cover was revealed, the holdouts for the most part insisted there was no proof that the cat on the cover was Ashfur and not another cat with a similar appearance. And when all else failed, they had one argument they could always fall back on: It doesn't matter whether it is Ashfur, it matters whether it should be Ashfur. Ashfur coming back as a villain, they argued, would be a stupid twist. It would ruin the story and there was no hope of the books being good if it really was him. Massive positive fan response to TBC and adoration for its new characters tended to disagree.

The Reveal

And now we come to the close. With book 3 having ended on a cliffhanger like that, most fans eagerly began the wait for the release of book 4 this November. While it seemed like Squirrelflight was seconds away from saying Ashfur's name, most fans were hesitant to assume that would happen. After all, this is Warriors, a series famous for its meandering plot and refusal to let characters actually figure out the mysteries before the last book of an arc. Everyone prepared to be disappointed when they opened book 4 and found Squirrelflight saying "I know who the impostor is... but I can't tell you yet!!"

Nope! A couple weeks ago, a small preview of the book was released online. In chapter 1, Squirrelflight says "It's Ashfur." In chapter 2, the characters trick Ashfur into saying "Yes, I am Ashfur" to Squirrelflight—complete with two fantastic villain monologues, one where he talks about his lust for her, and one where he rages at the other characters that he still has more plans and they haven't beaten him yet.

With any luck, the remaining three books of the arc are going to be fantastic, and all because teen girls in 2010 had the hots for an angsty murdering incel wHosE oNLy CriMe WaS tO LoVe ToO mUcH.

TLDR: Woman writes children's fantasy cat books where a man tries to burn a woman's children alive because she wouldn't go out with him. Online fandom argues for years over whether he was actually evil or just a sexy misunderstood bad boy. New writing team takes over cat books a decade later, sees online controversy, and decides to bring the character back as a villain again, leading to fantastic books with chilling villain scenes and transforming the incel into one of the best-written characters in the series.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

The story I am going to be telling you today involves a lot of jealousy, some drama and most importantly, lots of pettiness. I'm going to talk about the drama surrounding the infamous Vantablack, which, at the time, was the blackest substance in the world.

It was created in 2014 by a nanotechnology lab to be used in engineering projects, particularly regarding space (it can help telescopes and cameras by absorbing stray light, among other things). Here's some pictures of how stuff painted with this substance actually looks like-- I promise you, it's not photoshop. This thing is actually pretty amazing, as it absorbs 99.965% of visible light. As you can guess, this substance was quite the discovery and it became quite rare not only due to its copyright but also due to its relative toxicity, or at the very least heavy duty usage.

Naturally, the art world was gaga over it and wanted to be able to use it. However, it was not something available to the public, much less to the art world which I assume isn't the main interest of most scientists. That was, until a spray version of it called Vantablack S-VIS was licensed exclusively to Anish Kapoor in 2016. Who is that, you may add? He's a famous indian sculptor and artist. Did I also mention that he's one of the richest artists in the world? Well, his cash made it so that this spray paint was licensed for use exclusively for him and his studio. No one else could get it. And believe me, they tried, but they were quickly turned away by the company who made the product.

Of course, everyone was quite angry at this. Artist all over the world were expressing their disappointment at this licensing. Christian Furr, a british artist commissioned to paint the Queen, called black "the dynamite of the art world" (x) and that it was unfair for only one man to be able to use it.

However, no one was angrier than british artist Stuart Semple. So angry in fact, that he retaliated by creating a paint himself named the World's Pinkest Pink, in which you're required to basically pinky promise that you're not Anish Kapoor, have nothing to do with him, or are not planning on buying it for him. Here's a link to the store page where you can clearly see the disclaimer, and a video of him in his youtube channel explaining his reasoning. For those who don't want to click the link, it reads:

*Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor. 

#ShareTheBlack

That in itself it's pretty ballsy, as basically Kapoor is not someone to fuck with. So much so, museums and people who have worked with him declined to say anything about him in regards to the Vantablack license.

Unfortunately, Semple's efforts were quite futile as Kapoor managed to get a hold of this paint and posted a picture on instagram giving it the middle finger.

Fear not, though! As Semple's pettiness was not yet defeated. He then came up with a very black acrylic paint, called Black 3.0 (here's a picture of a piece painted with it andthe youtuber I was watching that actually inspired this post). Not quite the blackest black in the world, but by Semple's own words:

IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE: this is not the blackest black in the world. It is however a better black than the blackest black in the world as it is actually usable by artists. 

....

*Except Anish Kapoor  

At this point, Semple has many versions of his blackest black. A Black 2.0, named "The world’s mattest, flattest, black art material", which is second to Black 3.0 in terms of blackness (absorbs 96% of visible light); Black 3.0 mentioned above (absorbs 99% of visible light); a Black 1.0 in pigment form, called "The OG" or the legacy, and a Raven black that's part of a rainbow collection called Potion. Funny enough, this last one does NOT have a disclaimer against Kapoor! Instead it reads:

After 15 years of making his own paints, Stuart Semple has been able to formulate and release a new breed of acrylic paint. For the first time his FULL RAINBOW palette is available to all artists* can share in these incredible colours.

*YES all artists! It's time the miserable ones had a bit more colour in their life - Stuart wants to share the rainbow with them, he thinks they need it.

I have yet to find any information about whether or not Kapoor himself cares about any of these other paints however. I don't know why he would when he holds the blackest paint already. I have also yet to find if he has commented anything else beyond that one instagram post.

At first I thought this was fun and amicable banter... But at this point I think it's truly just a general dislike for the guy, or at least contempt at his attitude. In an interview Semple says:

“He’s got like 40,000 Instagram followers, doesn’t follow anybody back, doesn’t write back to anybody,” Semple says. “It’s the equivalent of walking into a house party and just shouting about yourself and not having a conversation with anybody. You’d look like an idiot.”

So yeah, it's pretty much not an amicable think. Nevertheless, the drama ends quite in the standstill, as Kapoor hasn't pronounced himself about this issue anymore and Semple has also moved on it seems. I can't really say who's the winner in this, but what I can say is that I LIVE for Semple's pettiness that continues until now, and I like his attitude. But that's just a personal opinion.

E: u/HellaHotLancelot has graciously shared with us this post on tumblr that kind of has a follow up and TLDR of this issue, as well as some memes back when saying you were going to go to these weird events on facebook was The Thing to do. I did not know about the glitter thing which I am DYING for. It's the drama that keeps on giving despite being 4 years old.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Background: Cross stitching is a hobby that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but if you're not, it's the art of making tiny little crosses in fabric to create a pretty picture. Cross stitching has many different styles, from the more traditional to the less traditional.

As with any crafting hobby, there tend to be multitudes of mini ongoing dramas (is DMC really the best thread maker around, it is rude to cross stitch swear words, is it cultural appropriation to stitch sugar skulls, is it disrespectful to stitch Jesus smoking a joint, why do metallic threads exist anyway), but this situation has blown up in the past few weeks and it's quite significant in terms of fallout, both monetarily and time-wise.

Heaven and Earth Designs (HAED)

One popular type of cross stitch is full coverage - that is, that you cannot see any of the fabric under the thread, there are no gaps. These can get pretty intense. In the cross-stitching world, HAED is the Ultimate Provider of Full Coverage Cross-Stitch designs. Here's an example of one being stitched up. They take years to create and are intense labours of love.

The reason HAED is so popular is that they purchase a license to produce cross stitch charts of copyrighted artwork. Again, like in many other crafts, copyright breaking pattern designers run rampant and stitchers tend not to want to give those people their money. Additionally, the owner of HAED has in the past claimed that she hand charts her patterns herself, spending anywhere between 4-40 hours per chart - that sort of quality is invaluable in a world full of people making a quick buck by scanning a picture they found on google through a pattern converter software and flogging it on etsy.

As they purchase a license for the art, HAED patterns get expensive. Kits cost around $200, and the cost inflates depending on what fabric you want to use and how many colours (and subsequently how many skeins of floss) you have to buy. Looking at one I was previously planning on purchasing, it would set me back about $400 total - plus the other tools that you'd use when stitching something this size. Not insignificant.

Floss, Chart Design and some Colour Theory

As I said above, DMC is widely considered to be the premier floss producer (maybe Anchor is you're European). Most kits come with DMC thread included, most independent charters will use DMC, they are by far the dominant force in embroidery circles. This is for good reason - their quality control is exceptional, they give a lovely finish, they feel nice to stitch with and they're available in all good craft stores.

When you're stitching up a large piece, you use lots of different colours to give the piece depth, texture, and importantly, gradient. This means that while you may not know why you need twelve different shades of blue for a small area, it turns out when you stitch it up the detail is fantastic. However, obviously DMC cannot create a colour for every conceivable colour in existence - currently, there are 500 options, which while a lot still means that when pattern makers create designs from existing art, there is some adjustment needed to be made.

Back in 2018, DMC launched 35 new colours to their range to fill in gaps where there currently isn't a good colour option, and to help with transition shades - this doesn't happen often, so it was a Big Deal. Crucially for this story, they introduced 08 and 09, Dark Driftwood and Very Dark Cocoa respectively. Browns are really useful in lots of designs, so these new colours were put to work immediately.

Chart Design is...complicated (and I don't do it myself so bear with me). As I said above, the gold standard way to create a pattern is to create it by hand yourself. A more common (and still very effective) way is to run a picture or design through some conversion software, and then adjust the result after (more common when it's a full picture as opposed to text + flowers).

Important to note that the software is quite sophisticated and will use the surrounding colours to determine the colour chosen, to ensure there is a nice consistent gradient between the colours.

Pattern Maker

When the 35 new colours were added, they were updated in the various common pattern making software. However, for one software there was an issue - the RGB values for 08 and 09 were updated wrong. So when you ran the picture through, it would think it had got it right but in fact it was not. This was quickly picked up by most pattern makers, who would manually change the RGB values in the software and merrily continue on. The pattern software producers also noticed the error and sent out an email explaining the error and instructing the users on how to fix it. However, as you can imagine (because this is a drama post) HAED did not, and continued to make patterns containing 08 and 09 for over two years when the result was a poor match.

The Drama

HAED has its own fans who are very quick to defend HAED and the owner. Some stitchers quickly noted the error with 08 and 09 (there's quite a popular app where you can mock up what the design will look like before stitching), and several people posted questions about why the mock-up was looking a bit dodgy - they were told that the issue was with the app.

Someone posted in 2019 this example of how 09 was fucking up their project. Initially, this was explained away as an issue with dye lots.

As things can take so long to stitch, sometimes if you replace a skein of floss after a few years there may be a subtle difference in the shade because it's a different dye lot. As I mentioned at the beginning, DMC is the premier choice of floss because they are incredibly consistent between dye lots, so this is very rarely an issue, and certainly not to the extent the above picture shows. Thread Bare did an excellent write up of why the dye lot argument is bullshit, with pictures, so if you're interested in more technical detail I would encourage you to look at that.

What makes this drama worse is that the only way you could really get any information from or to the owner is through their Facebook page, which was quick to delete or ridicule commenters who expressed concerns about their patterns.

Even as recently as June 2020, HAED sent an email out blaming the error on dye lots. Quoting from the email "we are seeing this more often" - at what point would it occur to them that perhaps this is an issue with them and not an issue with everyone else?

They sent customers pictures to try and prove there was a dye lot error, whereas it was really just a lighting difference.

Well - as of July 2nd they admitted it is an error with the charting.

[Despite admitting there was an error with the charting, they only closed their store down after 3 days following the backlash that they were still selling known faulty charts with no warning on the site]

But wait - surely this charting error wouldn't affect HAED, as she hand creates the patterns herself? Well, obviously that claim was total bullshit. Honestly - it wasn't super surprising, the rate that new, ultra-complex patterns were added to the shop meant that if you thought about it for at least a few moments you could infer that she didn't hand create these patterns herself.

What's worse is that she also doesn't appear to employ test stitchers. Test stitchers are common and will, as the name suggests, test stitch a piece before or even just after sale, just to make sure the final result is good enough. While you wouldn't expect someone to test stitch an entire 300,000 stitch pattern, most would consider it reasonable to test stitch a small area, particularly an area with the new colours used.

The owner claims that 14000 patterns are affected - even assuming this is a mistype, 1400 patterns is an overwhelming amount to fix.

Reminder - these kits cost $200+ each, and she's not doing anything more than running it through some software.

Now, some of you might think, "surely you can just sub in 08/09 with a similar colour and then it'll be fine"? This is the proposed solution by HAED themselves (see the suggestion in the email to sub out 09 with 3371). In the "re-charted" patterns she's sent out already, this is in essence what she has done, and there have already been push backs that it still looks awful.

To wheel back to colour theory - there is no floss that corresponds to the incorrect RGB values that were used. And - without getting too technical again, but by subbing around one colour for another, it creates a domino effect with surrounding colours. This may not be an issue in patterns that are meant to look blocky, but in HAED patterns they are meant to look as realistic as possible - one colour throwing off the surrounding colours ripple effects all the way through the pattern.

So now there are a bunch of stitchers that are several hundred dollars and potentially several hundred hours into these pieces, only to be told that they will be sent a 'recharted' pattern at some point over the next few months (which will probably not be a proper rechart, but a substitution of a colour one-to-one), and some stitchers are already several thousand stitches into their pieces.

Some additional examples of the errors/ 'fixes'/mockups

This stitcher (the error is the left-hand side of the birdhouse) was sent a replacement pattern that still looked awful when ran through a mock-up, so has changed it herself (it took her four days to frog the error out and start again)

This edited area looks abysmal and has been told by the owner that it is correct and fine

The top left next to the needle minder is very poorly coloured, and this poor person is about 150,000 stitches in.

The HAED 'mockup' vs the predicted result

This fireplace is light purple-brown vs the intended dark brown

The left is the 09 chart and the right is the fix - the right is still not great.

The Fallout

People are mad and upset. This is an expensive item that is faulty, there was a known error for two years that was not fixed, and people who did express concern were deleted/banned from the Facebook page. People may well be hours and hours into their chart only to be told it's going to look shit. HAED are rapidly losing their image as the premier full coverage producer, it is a major fall from grace.

There is no other way to get information than through the Facebook group, and not only are they banning anyone criticising HAED from their group, they're banning members who criticise HAED in other groups pre-emptively.

There is also the question about how this is going to work going forward - if 08 and 09 are removed from the pattern, there is going to be no way to tell if a pattern for sale was affected by this situation or not [Aside from the drama, the HAED website is absolutely awful to browse at the best of times]. You could end up paying for a chart that may never have been charted correctly in the first place.

A lot of people have been moving to different full coverage creators, who do employ test stitchers, run the software with edits made afterwards, and don't just whack in the picture, turn the number of colours to 250 and the biggest size and hope for the best.

A number of people are calling out the owner for lying about creating the charts herself in the first place when this is now very obviously not true.

There are also many stitchers submitting refunds through their credit cards for faulty goods.

There's also some rumblings that not only have 08 and 09 been affected but the other 32 new colours - if that's true it could very well sink HAED completely, if they haven't been sunk already.

Others are contacting the artists that licence their work to HAED explaining the issues and the terrible customer service, and already there are rumours they will retract their licence as a result (no screenshots of this as it's only rumoured at the moment). Some very kind artists are letting people who purchased faulty kits run the original, high def artwork through a better pattern creating software so they have an accurate pattern to use.

For me, personally, the fallout involved a very emotional throwing away of the kit I had invested over a few hundred hours in and picking up one of the other dozen non-HAED kits I have instead.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here