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

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).

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).

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

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

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a couple of months ago, and (as you are almost certainly aware) it was a massive hit. It's a life simulator where you live on an initially deserted island and slowly build a community of cartoon animals, with several hundred to choose from. It's designed to be a peaceful, calm experience where you do nothing but hang out, so of course people have built a greedy, brutally efficient underground economy.

Getting new villagers can be difficult, since your island can only have ten of them at any one time. There are only two ways to replace them once you've hit that limit: the first is to wait until a visitor arrives at your island, then invite them to stay, at which point you can replace one of your current villagers with the new one. The second way is to wait until one of your villagers randomly decides to leave on their own, then travel to other deserted islands to find a new inhabitant. Since the villager on each deserted island you visit is random, it costs 2,000 Nook Miles (more on that later) to travel to each one, and there are around 400 villagers, your chances of getting a specific villager either on an island or as a visitor is extremely low.

Now, there are obviously villagers that are more popular, and ones that are...not. Villagers such as Barold or Rodney tend to be hated, and the difficulty of getting them to leave your island means that there are multiple subreddits dedicated to complaining about them. Meanwhile, other villagers are in huge demand, none more so than Raymond. Raymond's popularity is partly due to his design, but mostly (I suspect) because the initial hype over his character has made him popular for being popular.

Now, it's possible to "give" someone a villager by having them visit your island while that villager is moving out, and since a villager's house is filled with cardboard boxes while they're in the process of moving out, this is referred to as being "in boxes". It didn't take long for people who had Raymond to start selling him to others who wanted him on their island, and having "Raymond in boxes" became a meme. While other villagers are sometimes sold, none of them can hold a candle to Raymond in terms of demand.

Pretty soon, the main currency, Bells, was abandoned in favor of Nook Miles Tickets, items which allow you to travel to a deserted island and which can only be bought with Nook Miles, which are harder to farm than Bells are. (The best way to farm Bells is to travel to other people's islands to take advantage of random fluctuations in the price of turnips. And yes, there are people charging Bells or Nook Miles Tickets in exchange for being able to sell turnips on their island.) Raymond was commonly sold for around 500 Nook Miles Tickets. For reference, each ticket costs 2,000 Nook Miles, and completing tasks such as "Catch 5 fish" or "Talk to your neighbors 3 times" will get you an average of around 150 miles each. 500 Nook Miles Tickets (or NMT) are equal to a million Nook Miles, so people were spending exorbitant amounts on Raymond. For a lot of people, this level of greed, especially in a game specifically designed to be relaxing and stress-free, tainted Raymond by association, so he's now both the most loved and the most hated character in the game.

This was bad enough, but eventually someone realized that this was a good chance to make some real money. When I was finding images for this post, the second result on Google Images was someone selling Raymond for $13 in real-life money. I've heard rumors of Raymond being sold for even more than that, or traded for nudes. On top of this, hacking the game allows you to get items that aren't normally obtainable, such as trees with stars growing on them. So there are now people selling items they've hacked into the game (and which may or may not corrupt your game file) in exchange for real money.

However, some people are fighting back. A hacker recently offered Raymond for free to anyone who wanted him, both in order to help people out and to kill the black market that has started up. I don't know what this is going to do to the underground villager market, but it's almost certain that it's going to take a big hit.

TL;DR People have hacked Animal Crossing to make money off of a furry slave trade.

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

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 7 – Classic and Legion

Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn't want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.

“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.

It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.

It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn't justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We'd effectively be developing and supporting two different games."

Again in November 2009, they said no.

"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”

And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,

"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, 'Oh God, wouldn't it be great if we could have classic servers!' and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn't as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn't quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don't play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn't get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it's not a very good idea to do"

Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.

Enter the private server.

These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.

Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.

One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.

”Nostalrius is a living museum: a near-perfect record of a place, design choices and play styles that don’t exist anymore.”

What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.

"The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides," the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).

But it was not to last.

On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.

Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.

”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”

Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.

And its community exploded.

All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.

Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.

”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”

A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.

In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.

”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.

We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”

It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.

”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.

But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.

”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”

Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.

All seemed lost.

“I want to talk about ice cream.”

It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.

”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”

A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.

”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”

[…]

”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”

[...]

”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, "YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T".”

[…]

”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”

It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.

With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world's most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they'd never do.

To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30's in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”

[…]

”This is not good for my career prospects”

[…]

”I'm legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”

[…]

”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”

It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.

There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.

Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?

No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.

"We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way," Brack says. "And that’s how we’ll be successful."

Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.

If you've been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard's tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.

The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,

"We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good."

Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.

”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”

A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).

Dungeon Finder? Of course not.

Cross-realm grouping? Never.

Flying? Come on.

Achievements? Nope.

Unified Auction Houses? No Way.

”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”

On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.

”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”

Another user wrote, “THAT'S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING'S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.

”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”

Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.

The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.

”Fuck it's so close, SO GOD DAMN CLOSE

I've dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they'd do it but the mad lads did it

Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it's like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”

[…]

”Shit, it's like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can't wait to re-live.”

[…]

”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.

AZEROTH, I'M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”

Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.

”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.

Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”

During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.

“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”

Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.

”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”

”git gud scrub”

For some, Classic was a rude awakening.

WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.

It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?

Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.

Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.

The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.

Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.

“It’s bad, but it’s also really good? I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but it’s still a classic.”

[…]

”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There's an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”

It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.

”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”

A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.

”If there's no sense of challenge, there's no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)

In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there's much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”

Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.

Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.

”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”

[…]

When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn't have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”

Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.

Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.

”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”

For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.

”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”

[…]

”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don't realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.

Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it's hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”

Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.

”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”

But everyone acknowledged there was something here.

”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn't.”

[…]

”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”

And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.

”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I'm a little curious, so I test it out.

Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can't get by as a lone wolf. You can't dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.

”If you've only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”

[…]

”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”

This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.

”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn't really available elsewhere. Social media wasn't a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

"We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes," said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn't until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we'd found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we've always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn't a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film."

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can't help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie's grueling two hours, I can't in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There's nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones ... is trying to deliver something like "The Lord of the Rings" minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

"A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie's popularity overseas."

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

"Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game."

[…]

"This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don't understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back."

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it's where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want."

[…]

"Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That's something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G."

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We've got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I'm fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

"Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard's bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren't just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it."

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

"So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?"

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

"Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city."

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

"It's such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn't even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…"

[…]

"Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO."

[…]

"Fucking half assed expansion."

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

"I don't necessarily think it's confirmed it's not coming so I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope but I'm not too optimistic about it."

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

"As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content."

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

"For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don't mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being "intended" to be a patch."

[…]

"I feel if that's the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it's been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

"Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon's status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way."

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

"It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon."

[…]

"They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now."

[…]

"Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous."

[…]

"We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard."

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

"Most likely scrapped."

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn't want this to come across as a "time travel expansion" so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

"It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to...what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this."

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

"At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe."

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."

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

Oh man, you guys, I can’t believe no one has written up the Sad Puppies yet! This is a tale of literary drama that went very nearly mainstream, tangentially involving a few people you’ve probably heard of, and it’s just packed with comically obvious villains and delicious schadenfreude. I sincerely hope that in a decade or two someone makes it into a heartwarmingly overwrought Oscar-bait docudrama. In the meantime, here’s what happened.

Tl;dr: science fiction had its own, somehow even dumber Gamergate.

This got so, so long, I’m sorry. You guys seemed to enjoy the extended Snapewives etc writeups so I kinda just went for it.

Diversity: The Final Frontier

Science fiction is, historically, a white guy-heavy club. There are notable exceptions, but for the most part when you say ‘sci fi’ people are going to think of classic 1950s-1970s genre giants like Heinlein and Asimov. Early editors and publishers deliberately cultivated a white male only scene. And, relevantly to the entire huge-ass essay I’m about to write, it’s stubbornly white and male. Although the field started opening up in the 80s with authors like Octavia Butler and Lois McMaster Bujold making inroads, and nominations for the Hugos (the genre’s highest awards, ie the Nerd Oscars) were actually about 50% given to female authors in 1992-93, backlash hit hard. From 1998-2009, no more than 25% of Hugo nominees were women, and some years as low as 5%. I can’t find hard numbers for racial diversity but it wasn’t any less bleak.

At a time when wider society was increasingly talking about maybe not gatekeeping literature quite so much, the science fiction fandom had spoken: stories of utopian societies and incomprehensibly advanced alien technology are relatable, but black people? This is not the way.

What changed in 2009 was Racefail. I’m not going to try and even summarize it, because it was an extremely complicated, contentious movement featuring about eight million people who won’t be relevant to the rest of this post. The extremely short version is that Racefail was an approximately year-long series of conversations, essays, responses, and counter-responses about racism and sexism in the speculative fiction community and the ways that non-white-guy people get shut out of the traditional publishing process. This was years before Gamergate, but it was an earlier example of the way online fan communities were starting to exert their authority.

In the wake of Racefail, a new generation of female and POC authors came out of the woodwork to participate more actively in the speculative fiction community, especially by finding easy-to-reach internet-based fans not locked behind magazines or publishers. Almost overnight the Hugo nominations looked a lot more balanced (40% female/60% male authors in 2010, 50/50 in 2011). A lot of really good contemporary talent blossomed, and we got some awesome novels that might never have seen the light of day. Problem solved!

The Hugos

That was just the exposition, sorry. The actual drama is going to center around the Hugo Awards. Like the Grammys and Golden Globes, the Hugos are the industry awards of the ‘Speculative Fiction’ (science fiction and fantasy) world, given out every year for accomplishments in a number of categories.

(It’s sci fi and fantasy, but this post is mostly going to be about the sci fi side, for reasons that mostly come down to science fiction being preferred literature of Logical and ~~Euphoric~~ Enlightened Gentlemen. Fantasy is for girls. Apparently.)

Unlike the Grammys etc, the format of Hugo nominations is somewhat unusual. Anyone who buys a ticket to the World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) can make nominations; the top five nominees are put through a ranked-choice vote by the same community. Every category also has a No Award option, intended to be used if voters think any or all of the nominees don’t deserve to be considered.

The decentralized nature of the award elections means the process can be fairly easily taken over by even a relatively small coordinated bloc. No one had ever really worried about this before, because no single author could ensure themselves an award and who else would bother gaming the Hugos?

Well, these guys would, as it turns out.

The Sad Puppies are born

History? In my spaceships?

The Sad Puppies movement was born in 2013, in the comment section of the blog of a science fiction author named Larry Correia. Correia lamented his lack of industry recognition, describing his work as ‘unabashedly pulp,’ and therefore discriminated against. In other words, modern fans cared more about books with literary and cultural merit than his good ol’ action stories about square-jawed spacemen punching bad guys and hooking up with sexy aliens. And that’s not fair. :c

Correia’s anger reflected a trend in reactionary science fiction blogging, which is a sentence that I did not expect to type when I woke up this morning. You see, the Puppies had their own explanation for the post-Racefail diversity burst: obviously it’s impossible that anyone actually likes books by or about women and/or nonwhite folks, so the increasing success of those authors was just pity awards and book sales, driven by liberal guilt and the desire to look Hashtag Woke. Conservative white male authors were convinced that they were, actually, the ones being discriminated against - some said the industry was anti-Christian, some yelled about the dreaded SJWs. Regardless of the cause, they weren’t winning everything anymore, which couldn’t possibly be the result of a fair process, so something had to change.

(The name ‘Sad Puppies’ is a reference to those emotionally manipulative Sarah McLachlin animal cruelty ads that had everyone crying themselves to sleep back in the day. Correia edited together a humorous video featuring himself as one of the pitiful little doggos who would die of Neglectitis without your ~~donation~~ vote!)

Let’s game the Hugos!

So Correia and friends dubbed themselves a movement and decided they’d raise support to get his latest book the Best Novel award at the 2013 Hugos…

...and failed. Completely. His book didn’t even make it to the election. Clearly Team Sad Puppies had to step up their game, so they advertised more and put together a whole slate of nominations in anticipation of the 2014 Hugos, intending to collectively win multiple categories.

...and failed, again. Of the seven Puppy nominees that reached the ballot in 2014, only one did better than ‘dead last’ and one actually lost to No Award, ie worse than last. “This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre and helping to redefine and expand it,” noted nerd culture news repository Gizmodo, serenely unaware that there had even been a right-wing protest vote bloc.

Under Correia, the Sad Puppies had been pretty much entirely useless at achieving their actual goals. But interest in their club had spread through the rightwing geek internet, and a monster was waking…

Enter Players 1 and 2

deep breath

Time to introduce arguably the two central figures of Puppygate, ie the people I’m most focused on fantasy casting for my imaginary melodramatic reenactment film: NK Jemisin and Theodore Beale.

NK Jemisin is a sci fi/fantasy author and also black woman who incorporates themes of colonialism, oppression, and cultural conflict into her work; she was actually one of the pro-diversity voices of Racefail from way back at the top of this page. She’s also a really good writer. Her work burst onto the scene in 2010 to huge success and near universal critical acclaim and she’s since won approximately every fantasy literature award on the planet, refusing to back down from her political stances along the way.

Theodore Beale is better known as alt right culture war polemic Vox Day, who you might be familiar with if you were unfortunate enough to pay attention to Gamergate. He’s also an author, having created his own publishing house to distribute his Christian-themed fantasy books and “a guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks.” He has been described as a “graspingly untalented bigot” (by John Scalzi) and “holy shit, that guy is a straight up literal Nazi” and once attempted to create a conservative alternative to Wikipedia.

The two are not friends.

In 2013, Vox Day ran for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). He lost, but NK Jemisin used her keynote speech as guest of honor at a large convention to publicly express her alarm that 10% of the SFWA membership had voted for a man who once referred to women’s suffrage as a “complete and unmitigated disaster” and had a lot of thoughts about something called ‘white tribalism’. In response, Vox Day used the official SFWA Twitter to link to a post on his blog in which he said that “genetic science presently suggests that we [ie white and black people] are not equally homo sapiens sapiens,” referred to Jemisin as a “half-savage,” and called her editor a “fat frog,” among a whole lot of other stuff. After a bunch of dumb waffling about civility and drama the SFWA kicked him out.

The incident apparently focused Vox Day on the dreadful oppression faced by rightwing white guys who write books about dragons. This all went down in 2013; now we’re jumping back to...

2015: Shit Gets Real

Puppies everywhere

In preparation for the 2015 Hugos, OG Sad Puppy Wrangler Larry Correia (remember him? No one else does) was succeeded by an author named Brad Torgerson, a guy who had been nominated for a couple industry awards but never found enough success to quit his day job.

About five minutes later, Vox Day popped up to announce his own splinter movement, the more extreme Rabid Puppies. While the Sads’ voting slate was officially a ‘suggestion,’ the Rabs were clear that they meant to be a unified bloc. Finally, someone was taking a stand against identity politics and affirmative action, by… only voting for books written by politically acceptable white guys.

Anyway.

War of the Puppies

2015 was inarguably the Year of the Puppies. Newly organized and energized and taking notes from the still-raging Gamergate movement, the Puppy candidates dominated the Hugo ballots - the Sad Puppies got 51 finalists, while the Rabid Puppies achieved 58. They swept several categories, meaning all five candidates were Puppy-approved. It escaped no one’s notice that Vox Day, Torgerson, Torgerson’s inner circle, and Vox Day’s publishing house were healthily represented, as well as a bunch of other authors who clearly were not on the ballot on the strength of their writing.

The whole thing took the rest of Worldcon by surprise - no one had ever tried to game the results at anything close to this scale before. The speculative fiction community was in an uproar. The Puppies were widely criticized for both their ideology (the Sad Puppies made a half-hearted attempt to pretend to disapprove of the Rabid Puppies and their openly white supremacist leader, convincing approximately nobody) and for their blatant abuse of the process. Much more successful and popular white guys like George R. R. Martin and sci fi writer Alastair Reynolds disowned them. Reasonably famous internet writer guy and former president of the SFWA John Scalzi started an all-out war against the movement, becoming their #2 nemesis - second only to Jemisin, who had become a symbol of everything the Puppies wanted banished from science fiction.

(Funnily enough, Scalzi won the 2013 Best Novel Hugo that Correia started the Sad Puppy movement to get.)

And the winner is…

When the panic died down, calls went out among the Worldcon community to No Award the Puppy candidates. The way this works is that in every category, No Award is essentially a sixth nominee. As the vote is ranked choice, a voter who feels that a given book or author is undeserving of the nomination can rank that book/person below No Award. Anyone who scores below No Award doesn’t place at all (so if NA gets third, the fourth, fifth, and sixth-place books get no recognition). If No Award wins the vote, no Hugo is awarded in that category at all. Prior to 2015 this was a rare occurrence.

The result: No Awards to every one of the categories with only Puppy candidates. No Award beat every Puppy-approved candidate in all of the other categories, with the sole exception of Guardian of the Galaxy winning Best Dramatic Presentation in the Long Form. No wins for Brad Torgerson or Vox Day.

Oops.

2016: Pounded In The Butt By My Reactionary Politics

Okay, So That Didn’t Work

By 2016 the Sad Puppies had completely lost control of Vox Day. They retreated to focus on gaming the votes at the brand new Dragon Awards of DragonCon, which at least kept them quiet. Newly crowned Supreme Puppy Emperor Vox Day vowed to DESTROY THE HUGOS AND LEAVE NOTHING BUT A SMOKING PIT and so forth.

The problem was that no one wanted to run on the Rabid Puppy ticket. Previous years had made it clear that associating yourself with the Puppies was a good way to win absolutely nothing at all, since even people who didn’t care about the ideological fight going on would vote against Puppy candidates in distaste for their gaming of the process. In fact, the only work or author to finish in anything other than last place after receiving a Puppy endorsement was Guardians of the Galaxy, which… probably didn’t need their help.

Guardian’s victory became the movement’s new strategy. Instead of nominating themselves, the Puppies would claim whichever independently successful authors weren’t entirely politically unacceptable. Then, when ‘their’ candidates won, so would the Puppies! It was foolproof.

The authors themselves (at least the ones who knew they’d been chosen by the Puppies; some had no idea) were… displeased. They demanded to be taken off the slate, to no avail. Neil Gaiman called the Puppies ‘sad losers.’ A few near-certain winners dropped out of the race to spite Vox Day. There was disagreement about whether authors who were essentially human shields should be No Awarded. In the end, the Puppies finally picked up a few ‘wins,’ but only with authors who weren’t associated with the movement.

And there was one victory they couldn’t celebrate at all: NK Jemisin became the first African American author to win the coveted Best Novel award for her book The Fifth Season.

THE BAD DOGS BLUES

There were a few Puppy-driven nominees on the ballot in 2016: joke nominees. The Puppies decided that if they couldn’t steal awards from minority authors, they’d delegitimize them. One of their most absurd picks was an obscure anonymous author who apparently wrote nothing but bizarre supernatural gay erotica.

That’s right: the Sad Puppies gave us Chuck Tingle.

Tingle accepted the nomination and used it to troll the hell out of his benefactors. Apparently no one had remembered to register RabidPuppies Dot Com, so Tingle bought it and redirected it to an LGBT charity and NK Jemisin’s marketing page. He arranged for feminist game developer and noted target of shrieking, incoherent Gamergate rage Zoë Quinn to give his acceptance speech. Lastly, he published the classic Slammed in the Butt by my Hugo Award Nomination, which I confess I have not read.

The End of the Puppies

Changes to the Hugo award process in 2017 reduced the effectiveness of bloc voting, but by that point it didn’t really matter. Gamergate had run out of momentum and the world had moved on. The Sad Puppies quietly disbanded; Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies struggled on for another year, but managed only 12 nominations and no wins. NK Jemisin took Best Novel again for the sequel to last year’s winning book.

Finally, in the scene that will almost certainly form the last triumphant shot of the melodramatic dramatization of this saga, in 2018 female authors won all the major Hugo categories, and NK Jemisin became the first person to win three consecutive Best Novel awards, one for every book in her Broken Earth trilogy.

In conclusion, I am going to go look at pictures of real, adorable, non-bigoted puppies. Thanks for reading!

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).

If you don't know anything about lolita fashion, let me give you a quick primer. Lolita is a style of Japanese street fashion originating in 1970s Harajuku. While the name might squick Westerners, the fashion has nothing to do with that awful pedophilic book. The style actually originates from a feminist rebellion by young women against societal and parental expectations that they should dress and act a certain way in order to attract a husband. Instead, early lolitas created clothing which was heavily influenced by cutesy little girl's styles in order to dissuade men from approaching them. These days, lolita is worn around the world. Most people only wear it for special occasions like meetups with other lolitas and outings. They have lolita events at conventions, sponsored tea parties, and a bustling online buy/sell community.

The fashion itself focuses on a few key elements: poofy dresses or skirts, modest cuts with minimal skin showing, lace/ruffles/frills, and carefully coordinated looks where every element matches. There are plenty of sub-styles but the most popular are sweet, classic, and gothic. Sweet lolita is full of pastel colors, baby animal motifs, sweet foods, and fluffy stuff. Classic looks like a Victorian doll, using more subdued color palettes and simple or older-looking prints. Gothic focuses on black or very dark colors, crosses, bats, and spikes, while still maintaining the key elements of the overall style. There's other sub-styles too, like wa-lolita, pirate lolita, military lolita, and country lolita, but most follow one of the main three styles.

Before I begin this story, I should familiarize you with the idea of 'brand' or 'burando'. Brand is the term used when referring to items made by Japanese lolita companies like Angelic Pretty (AP), Baby the Stars Shine Bright (BtSSB), Alice and the Pirates (AatP), Metamorphose (Meta) and Innocent World (IW). Lolita isn't cheap to buy and brand items tend to be the most expensive. A new release dress from AP often runs around US$550. They also tend to have very small sizing, especially in the bust. Secondhand brand dresses can be just as expensive depending on how rare the style is. Prior to rerelease, the AP print Cat's Teaparty was going for upwards of 1k secondhand due to the rarity and desirability. People get insane about finding their dream dress and are willing to pay prices which seem ridiculous to those not involved in the fashion. There are cheaper options out there, especially Bodyline (which has some juicy drama I'll write about in a post soon) and Taobao, but some people pride themselves on being labeled 'brand whores' for only ever wearing brand items.

Kelly Eden and the $1,500 Dress

If you're not familiar with Kelly Eden, she's a cosplayer, model, YouTuber, massive weeaboo, and subject of much drama. She's claimed to be the most kawaii person in the United States, said that her video about Sailor Moon makeup made the price go up, sold all of her Hello Kitty merch after Sanrio refused to sponsor her, and claimed Disney was copying her look in one of their shows. Her house is adorable but all in all she has a history of entitlement and spoiled behaviour.

Back in 2017, Kelly went on a trip to Japan to do some work on a TV show. While she was there, she and her friends decided to hit up Akihabara, a very popular Japanese shopping district. This isn't your average western shopping center with a Banana Republic and Annie Anne's Pretzels. It's multiple buildings across many stories chock full of electronics, games, collectibles, toys, trading cards - basically the dream of every Japanese media collector and gadget geek. It also hosts department stores with some niche street fashion brands, including the main store of Angelic Pretty, the most widely known and popular lolita brand in the world.

Kelly and her entourage decided to visit the AP store for some shopping. Her group wanders the store until she hits upon The Dress. The Dress is gorgeous, an elaborate pink number dripping in ruffles and bows. It's every bit an over the top sweet lolita dress. After telling her friend she thinks it must be expensive, her friend converts the yen price on the fly, saying that it's $148. $148. When the average price of a brand new AP dress is around $550. In her later video, Kelly claims that she knows the average price of an AP dress and that she assumed it was on sale. AP is rarely, if ever, on sale. She asks to try it on and the shop staff decline. Note that this is common in lolita when an item is particularly expensive. They don't want to risk the dress being ruined by someone while they're trying it.

Kelly has a large chest, much larger than what is typically accommodated by brand dresses, and says she isn't sure if it would fit her. After debating the price and if it would fit, she decides to purchase the dress, figuring she could just return it if it wound up not fitting her. After all, it's just $148. She never takes out her phone to convert the price. She never asks shop staff for a conversion. She never considers that AP and other lolita brands have a no returns, no refunds policy. She never asks any questions while handing over her credit card, even after her debit card was declined. She looks directly at the price tag, agrees that it’s $148, and buys it.

That night she gets an email from her bank asking if she tried to make a $1,500 purchase on her debit card in Akihabara earlier in the day. Having never actually significantly considered why the dress she bought was so cheap, she freaks out, says it wasn't her, and cancels her card. The exact card she'd been holding earlier in the day. In Akihabara. At the time there was supposedly fraud. And which was still in her wallet.

Riiiight.

At long last she finally manages to figure out that the dress she thought she’d bought for a great bargain is actually anything but. It’s not $148. It’s roughly $1500. Ten times the price she thought she’d bought it for. Like any spoiled influencer who realizes they’ve made a grave, grave mistake, she freaks out and demands a refund. A refund from a store where giving refunds is Not A Thing They Do. Ever. Note The Emphasis Here.

Thing is, as I said in the intro to this post, there is a bustling secondhand lolita market. Brand new dresses can regularly go for nearly the same price online as in store simply because they’re easier to buy or because the release sold out. Kelly also has a sizable fanbase which is already known for buying her spare stuff and would likely have zero problems getting someone to buy this expensive dress from her. But either she doesn’t know this or she doesn’t consider it, because she marches down to the store after they say over the phone that they won’t return it.

The store obviously isn’t happy to see her. They know why she’s here. She has a translator go back and forth with the store manager, demanding to return it, telling them she’s not leaving until she has her money back. Dresses sold at these stores can’t have any flaws or damage at all, so the moment it leaves the store, while it could be sold second-hand, they can’t take it back and sell it again. The store staff have to thoroughly inspect the whole dress to be sure it isn’t damaged or worn. At long last, after having a fit in the store, they reluctantly agree to return it and she leaves.

After getting back from her trip, Kelly publishes a vlog detailing the whole fiasco. She makes herself out to be the hero who made a mistake and was horribly inconvenienced, but some viewers are quick to point out that she’s definitely not the victim here. Word gets out to the lolita community proper and shit hits the fan. Lolitas, outraged by her mistreating the store staff and talking bad about their favorite brand, bash her to hell and back across social media. A popular snarky lolita YouTuber, Tyler Willis of Last Week Lolita News, does a video ripping her a new one. This is soon followed by another popular YouTube lolita, Lovely Lor, doing a less snarky, more explanatory video also explaining exactly what she did wrong and why everyone is so upset.

Kelly doesn't take it well. She tweets up a storm, blocks a lot of popular lolita and kawaii influencers including Tyler and Lor, and ultimately, unable to take the criticism, deletes the video. It now only lives on in the clips in Tyler’s video. Lolitas continue to make jokes about her to this day and she has zero respect or credibility in the community.

I have other lolita drama I can write up if there's interest, like how one brand's CEO hosted model hunts to find a foreign wife.

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).

In 2015, Neelix was a well respected member of the Wikipedia community. He'd been on Wikipedia for nine years and made more than 180,000 edits. He'd written several featured articles, helped lead Wikipedia education programs, and served as an administrator for four years. So it came as a surprise when, on November 5th, an anonymous user reported Neelix to Wikipedia's noticeboard for "chronic, intractable behavioural problems", accusing him of vandalism on a mass scale.

First, a little background information. Most new pages on Wikipedia go through a process where an experienced user reviews the page and checks it for any issues. Pages that are inappropriate are tagged for deletion and the creator is warned; users who repeatedly create inappropriate pages are banned. Pages created by admins are automatically exempt from this process, because it's assumed that admins know better than to create junk pages. It is this assumption that allowed Neelix to escape notice for so long.

The anonymous user had stumbled across a handful of questionable redirect pages created by Neelix. Some were just silly and pointless, like "Anti-trousers" redirecting to "Pantslessness", or "Sixteen-headed" redirecting to "Polycephaly". But others were puerile, if not outright offensive, such as "Titty cancer" for breast cancer or "Boobie builder" for breast reconstruction. Many users were shocked to learn that these pages were created by an administrator. Another admin remarked that "if I saw this kind of crap from a new account I'd block it instantly as a vandal".

The rabbit hole went deeper. The reporting user originally complained about "dozens" of inappropriate redirects. As others looked into Neelix's page creations, that figure changed to thousands. You can get a sense of the scale of the problem from looking at this list of deleted pages. Tittypumps, tittypumping, tittypumpers, tittypumped, titpumps, titpumping, pumps titties, pumps tits, boobypumping, boobypumpers, boob pump... and that's just for one article. It soon became clear that Neelix had created redirects based on various permutations of the words "tits" and "boobs" for almost every single breast related article on Wikipedia.

Maybe Neelix meant well but got carried away. One could argue that it's reasonable to redirect "boob sex" and "tit fucking" to "mammary intercourse". But it's much harder to defend redirects like "Titty tumors", "Segmental removal of the titties", "Constructions of the booby", "Hypoplastic tits" and "Atrophy of the titties". And there were thousands more of these! Neelix had created over 80,000 redirects, and a substantial portion of them were about titties and boobies. A commentator quipped: "Thank God he apparently never heard the term "jugs" or "rack", or this would have been many times worse".

Some users speculated that Neelix's account had been hacked, but this was not the case. Several Wikipedia editors knew Neelix in real life and were able to confirm that he was in control of the account. Everyone was baffled. Why would an admin create so many terrible redirects? "It just seems so childish", one user said. "These are pages a high school vandal would make, not an experienced editor."

No explanation was forthcoming. Neelix said, "I apologize for creating unusual redirects. When creating them, I did not think the community in general would be against them. Again, I am very sorry." But he did not explain what he was thinking when he created thousands of pages like "Suckling of the boobies" and "Tumorous titties".

With dozens of users poring over Neelix's edit history, other issues came to the surface. In 2013, Neelix had created an article about Tara Teng, the 2011 winner of the Miss Canada beauty pageant. Teng's pageant win and her subsequent activism against human trafficking granted her enough notability for a Wikipedia article. But Neelix's article on Teng was perhaps a bit too detailed for her level of fame. By the time Neelix was done with it, Teng's biography was over 5,600 words long - longer than the article on the Dalai Lama! The article included five different photos of Tara and such important details as "In October 2012, Teng appeared unannounced at restaurant Szechuan Chongqing" and "In February 2013, Teng was asked to attend a sleepover called "Beautiful, You" at G.W. Graham Middle-Secondary School in Chilliwack".

This article was first noticed by users on the Hipinion.com forum, who mocked it in a thread titled "This is the story of a beauty queen as told by her stalker". The Wikipedia criticism forum Wikipediocracy took note of it as well. The article was soon edited down to a reasonable size, although not without complaints from Neelix - he and his friends accused everyone who trimmed the article of being sockpuppets. This incident was mostly forgotten until someone in the redirect thread pointed out a disturbing fact:

Neelix started making breast redirects immediately after Tara Teng posted a picture of herself breastfeeding on Instagram.

Anyway, the community now had to decide what to do with tens of thousands of titty pages. Some users suggested deleting all 80,000 of Neelix's redirects. But there were some good ones mixed in with the bad. And what to do with Neelix? This behavior would have gotten a normal user blocked within minutes, but Neelix was a respected admin. It didn't seem right to block him.

After several days of discussion, the noticeboard report ended with Neelix being banned from creating redirects but keeping his admin privileges. No longer able to make boob redirects, Neelix voluntarily gave up his adminship and retired from Wikipedia. A new deletion criterion was invented: any redirect created by Neelix could be instantly deleted without discussion.

It took until April 2018 to delete all the titty redirects.

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).

A bit of a long post that was inspired by a few conversations on r/headphones asking about what exactly happened (this one in particular recently). And I have the right brand of obsession with the industry to give you all the rundown.

The Main Players

• Campfire Audio or commonly abbreviated as CFA, the "antagonist" of this drama. They are a company based in the US that builds and sells high-end (>$200) earphones that the community refers to as "IEMs" (which means "In-Ear Monitors").
• Ken Ball, the CEO of Campfire Audio. Despite his position, he still participates relatively frequently on audiophile forums.
• "crinacle", an earphone reviewer. More about him later.

Why does r/headphones love Campfire so much?

To remove as much of the industry-specific knowledge as possible, what CFA essentially did was capture lightning in a bottle for what is their most popular product, the Andromeda. Released more than 2 years ago, it still receives massive praise by the audiophile community today and is probably the most recommended earphone for anyone with the budget at-and-under $1,000. In an industry where it is not uncommon for a product's popularity to completely die off after a month, this level of staying power is nearly unheard of.

It would only be obvious that CFA would try to re-capture this lightning in the bottle for future releases, but it seems that they've failed every time. The Lyra, Vega, Dorado, Polaris, Comet, Atlas... all names that you need not concern yourself with but just know that all of them weren't even close to reaching the level of popularity that the Andromeda has.

That is, until late 2018 when Ken Ball announces their new flagship model. Their masterpiece that promises to better that of their one-hit wonder, and the community loses their collective minds.

Campfire's Newest Flagship: The Solaris

The Campfire Solaris: Ken Ball's Mona Lisa. There are many reasons why it was so hyped up by the audio community but probably too technical for a mainstream post such as this. The first wave of reviews were almost unanimously positive as everyone touted the Solaris to be the greatest IEM ever, some going as far as to call it flawless. It really did seem that CFA had matched or even surpassed the hype that the Andromeda had during its release, and the Solaris' future looked bright both in terms of critical response and in terms of sales.

That is, until one person stepped in and "ruined" everything.

Who is "Crinacle"?

If Campfire Audio is (was) r/headphones' favorite earphone company, then u/crinacle is their favorite earphone reviewer. He is a figure with ridiculous influence over the IEM industry with his hypercritical reviewing style, often fighting against the hype but ultimately standing victorious whenever the hype eventually dies off and proves his numerous analyses correct. He is famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) mainly for two resources that he manages:

• The "IEM ranking list", a list where he categorizes all the earphones he has heard into tiers on a subjective scale.
• His database of measurements, which shows how an earphone would sound like on a more objective scale.

The second part is more relevant to this story.

---

Extra context: What are "measurements" in audio?

To be specific, what Crinacle measures is the frequency response of an earphone, i.e. the relative volume between the bass, midrange and treble. That technical tidbit is not required for this story, but it's good to have it in your mind while reading.

---

The Tale of the Three Solarises

Most of the facts outlined be obtained from Crinacle's own subreddit r/inearfidelity. Some of the linked posts were also crossposted to r/headphones, where they were upvoted to the subreddit's front page almost every time.

On the 6th of December 2018, Crinacle posts his first impressions of the coveted Solaris alongside measurements. He wasn't outright negative towards it, but he clearly was not gushing over it and was even pointing out certain flaws that he thought were dealbreakers. At the beginning, this made the community somewhat riled up and doubtful towards what was essentially the first bit of critique of these earphones then.

With the mild backlash, Crinacle then sought out a second sample of the Solaris and posted about it on the 11th of December just in case the pair he had just heard was a dud. To his and everyone else's surprise, that unit sounded different. And better. Crinacle thus promises to find a third sample to confirm which one was the "authentic" Solaris.

Then for a good two weeks or so, it was basically radio silence from Crinacle regarding the Solaris. His initial impressions were a blow to the Solaris' reputation for sure, but it was only a tiny setback for massive freight train that was its hype. Reviews were still pouring in from e-magazines and other formal review sites pushing the Solaris as the next big thing, and for a while even r/headphones was being swept up by the hype.

On the 27th of December, Crinacle's post dropped. It was titled "Solaris unit variance and the dilemma of determining the representative", detailing how all three of the units he listened to sounded different, with the measurements as an objective backup.

Crinacle Versus Campfire

The post made waves across the niche community, being shared on almost every avenue and finally making its way to the Solaris Head-Fi product thread, Campfire Audio's ultimate stronghold and safe space.

The firing shot

Exactly how bad was the response? The entire shitstorm continued for another six pages (15 posts per page) before the most unusual thing happened: the thread got locked. For more than 24 hours.

People got suspicious. Hell, I got suspicious. Whenever threads on Head-Fi get locked for whatever reason, they are usually locked for at maximum a few hours at a time. Campfire is a well known sponsor of Head-Fi so it was not too far of a stretch to assume that they were behind this extended lockdown. As the day passed, the thread finally goes public once again, the venerable Ken Ball leading with his response to everything.

Key points for those who do not understand what he's saying:

• Their products are hand built, therefore variation is within the norm.
• They try to minimise QC issues by measuring the earphones for imbalances in each step of the manufacturing process.
• They claim that each Solaris had less than 1dB of channel imbalance. Channel imbalance in this case meaning that the left side and the right side should sound the same.
• "As for the measured units on Reddit, we primarily trust our measurements over others."

Immediately, people called for Ken Ball to release their own in-house measurements of the Solaris to address the drama, which was met with no response. Crinacle jumped in with his own response here which was basically a rehash of everything that had happened leading up to his final post on the matter.

During March of 2019 after talks of the unit variance drama was still ongoing three months after it happened, Ken Ball finally breaks his silence on publishing Campfire's in-house measurements to dispute Crinacle's claims. Spoiler Alert: he doesn't want to, nor plans to.

Why was Ken Ball's response so bad?

Many people were quick to point out how shallow KB's response was to the whole situation. This post here highlights the consistency of Crinacle's measurements so his criticisms and data shouldn't be brushed off simply because he wasn't a big audio company.

This post here (as well as many others after that, look it up if you're bored) points out how KB dodges the question of unit variance with channel imbalance. The whole point of the drama was not about how well the left and right channels of each individual Solaris was matched, but rather the fact that every individual Solaris that Crinacle heard sounded (and measured) different from each other.

Effectively, the entire point of the drama was missed by KB and the final question of "do these $1500 earphones sound different from each other?" was left unanswered.

Yeah, did I mention that the Solaris was ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS? If you were shelling out that amount of cash, you'd expect a lot more consistency for sure.

The other issue was KB's unwillingness to share in-house measurements of the Solaris to dispute Crinacle. This is fine as the sharing of measurements is not a norm within the high-end earphone industry so they had every right and reason not to.

Sorry, not every reason. One weird fact about KB (and by extension, Campfire) was that they actually used to share in-house measurements of their products. The Andromeda, the Lyra, the Nova, the Jupiter, the Orion, the Vega, just to name a few. I'll steal a quote from fellow redditor u/doomdonker since I think he summarized this situation pretty well:

there was a time that Ken Ball was very willing to supply officially measured measurements to not only end users but for reviewers. I've provided not one or two graphs but graphs for their entire starting lineup. But now he doesn't do so and is actually extremely frigid with regards to measurements to the point calling out people who look at measurements as measurebaiters.

This comment was from a month ago. Yes, people are still talking about this half-year-old drama on r/headphones.

---

Side-note: some prime examples of the schadenfreude that manifested from this drama:

• They hated Crinacle because He told them the truth
• Stopping the hype train
• "Black hole mids"

---

The "IO", a swing and a miss

Oh you thought the story ends there? Buckle up because it gets worse. Remember when I said that Campfire was constantly trying to re-capture the lightning in the bottle that was the Andromeda, and failing every time? Well here was what is arguably their biggest failure yet: the IO.

The IO's release mirrored that of the Solaris to a scary degree, with e-magazines and formal review sites chomping at the bit to get their (obviously positive) reviews out the door and jerking Campfire off about their next big thing.

And of course, everything came crashing down when our madlad u/crinacle dropped hot with some measurements once again, gathering 300+ upvotes and plastering itself at the front of r/headphones once again, subsequently killing another round of sales and Campfire's already controversial reputation in the Reddit community.

(For those unfamiliar, that is a very bad graph.)

Ken Ball Versus the Country of Singapore

Oh boy and it still doesn't end there. Back in the safe space that is the Campfire IO product thread on Head-Fi, fanboys desperately cling onto the last remnants of their sanity as negative non-formal impressions from potential customers start pouring in. And here is when it happened: Ken Ball decided to attack what is a fairly innocuous, rather legitimate set of (critical) impressions by referring to the poster's nationality as a point of suspect.

All hell breaks loose on r/headphones as it was quickly screenshot and posted, gathering 400+ upvotes by the day's end.

Why this matters

• The implication that Singaporeans were somehow a shady bunch was quickly picked up by the community, as demonstrated by this comment thread on Reddit. I personally don't think that KB was trying to imply this at all, but his phrasing was absolutely atrocious.
• Singapore is home to the world's largest English-speaking IEM community, so KB effectively alienated one of his biggest markets. Talk about horrible business decisions.
• The "location" tag on a Head-Fi user's profile is manual input, which means that the original user might not even be from Singapore at all. Now that people now that KB gets triggered by accounts from Singapore, they can just use this to their advantage without even being from the location itself.
• IMO the worst one: u/crinacle is Singaporean himself. It is very clear that KB meant this statement as a jab against the very person who dared criticize his original masterpiece and was quickly noted by Reddit users in the comments. Also note that this was half a year after the initial drama... talk about holding a grudge.

Ken Ball Isn't Racist

And to top this all off here is Mr. Ball's response to accusations that he's being racist, or at the very least, country-ist:

"Oh man, If your saying I am racist of course that is ridiculous and wildly false. I am part Asian and my wife is Asian and so is my daughter am I am a lot of things but racist is not one of them."

Now, I personally don't think that KB is racist, just heavily misunderstood and doesn't know how to phrase himself properly. But throwing out the "I can't be racist because I have an Asian wife" argument is, to put it nicely, absolutely goddamned moronic. Regardless of what you think his intentions are, the end result is still yet another blow to Campfire's reputation.

---

So here we are today. Opinion of Campfire is now at an all-time low though there are still pockets of die-hard fans that primarily lurk around forums like SuperBestAudioFriends and the Head-Fi product threads. The Solaris doesn't seem to be doing as well as the Andromeda and the IO is pretty much DOA in terms of critical response. I heard Crinacle is about to give them a bad review too, so this little drama breakdown might be outdated soon.

Thank you all for your time, and I hope you enjoyed my TED talk.

---

Bonus Content: reactions to this post by the totally-not-biased folks over at the Solaris Head-Fi product thread

• "Tin can ears"
• "Sad"
• "Someone on reddit with way too much free time on their hands decided to write-up a detailed account (of one side of the story at least) of all the drama that went down around the Solaris last fall. Nothing new, interesting or enlightening unfortunately." - Guy with a Solaris as a profile picture

UPDATE: Admins on Head-Fi removed all mention of this post on the Solaris thread as it was "off track".

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).

Jeremy Renner. The actor, the artist, the influencer, the celebrity sensation, the legend. From the outside, he is mostly known as Hawkeye from the Marvel MCU movies, but on the inside, he is Jeremy Renner.

Jokes aside, Jeremy Renner is quite a respected actor who is also really successful, getting tons of recognition and even getting multiple Academy Award nominations. It is why when he recently got into a snow plowing accident which left him in critical condition, many were concerned for him (recently he updated that he is now okay I am genuinely glad he is). But even after this awful injury, all that people can talk about is the thing that has been haunting Jeremy Renner’s career for the past half a decade: The Jeremy Renner app. Designed to be an app to get Jeremy Renner more in touch with his adoring fans, it only took a week to turn into a massive laughing stock that quickly shut down. So how did the Jeremy Renner app start and how did it end so quickly?

There is no escape from EscapeX

Before we can talk about the Jeremy app, we need to talk about the people who made it first: the company EscapeX. The company was founded in 2014 and the year after was able to raise over 18 million dollars in funding. They put that money to good use as they started racking up celebrity deals all over the world, most notably famous Bollywood stars. They would then make a special apps that were basically social media sites entirely dedicated to the stars the apps were named after. They had quite some success, as they reported that in 2018 they got 5.5 million dollars in revenue.

While their foot was mostly in Asian markets, they also had some notable western names they had made official apps for, like

• Akon

• Chris D’Elia

• Dita Von Teese

• Bob Marley (yes this is real)

• The Backpack Kid (yes also very real)

• And ofcourse, the man, Jeremy Renner

The inner workings of Jeremy Renner

The official Jeremy Renner app launched in March 2017. So how did this app work?

Well, when you opened the app and after an exclusive video of Jeremy Renner explaining what the app was about, you would find Instagram but everything revolved around Jeremy Renner. All of the pictures were posted by Jeremy Renner, the posts you could reply to were that of Jeremy Renner, and you could pay Jeremy Renner money- wait what? Yes, the Jeremy Renner app had in-app purchases were you could buy stars and use those stars to boost your comment under Jeremy Renner posts and when you got enough starts to boost your comment into the top 3 you may could get a reply from Jeremy Renner.

Yep, the app was that simple: Replying to Jeremy Renner until maybe at some point in your life Jeremy Renner would acknowledge you. If this app sounds pretty lazy, it gets even lazier when you realise the Jeremy Renner app was just literally Jeremy Renner’s Instagram page. Every post Jeremy Renner made on Instagram he also posted on the Jeremy Renner app. He even copied the Instagram captions which created some awkward posts when he used hashtags or @’s people in posts even though the Jeremy Renner app had no hashtag or @ function. The Jeremy Renner app did include some exclusive Jeremy Renner content.. but almost all of it was related to his music career. Some might then say that the Jeremy Renner app was used to promote his music but my middle name is Some so yeah Jeremy Renner definitely used the Jeremy Renner app the most to promote his music.

While the existence of this app was absurd and the inner working even more absurd, the app was quite a success and it got many fans religiously using the app. There was an actual community on the Jeremy Renner app, with memes, events and giveaways. There were dramas about censorship and contest rigging which are too big to go into now, but overall the app continued to work smoothly for two years… until August 2019.

The One-Two Punch

While it is quite difficult to pin down where it all went wrong, I have pinpointed the two things that one-two punched the Jeremy Renner app into chaos.

The first punch was this comedic tweet. While the tweet itself didn’t catch a lot of attention, it did caught the attention of the youtuber Danny Gonzallez, who a few days later made a collab with Drew Gooden exploring the Jeremy Renner app. As you can see, the video was quite popular, and it exposed a lot of people to the Jeremy Renner app.

The first punch got the manpower, but the second punch gave the tools. On August 20th 2019, Jeremy Renner posted a picture with the caption “Have a rockin weekend everyone!!! What’s the plan ??? “. Comedian Stevan Heck then posted a honest comment:

I will be looking at porno on my computer

While there was an expected backlash from loyal Jeremy Renner fans and an expected ban, Stefan Heck did realise something: everyone who commented on the post got notifications from his comment, and the notification of the Jeremy Renner app was constructed that it looked like Jeremy Renner sent that porno comment. After Stevan Heck was banned from the app, he came the next day back on an account called JeremyRennerPornoTruth where he posted a quote from Ai Weiwei before he got quickly banned again. He posted his experience on both his his twitter and on an article he wrote.

An update Stevan added to the article says everything what happened after:

Update (Sept. 4, 5:58 p.m. ET): Oh no.

All hell breaks loose

It started out calm, with a few accounts changing their names like “Jeremy Renner’s Swedish Dog” or “Italian Jeremy Renner”, but quickly it spiraled out of control. So many people were flooding in the Jeremy Renner app with accounts impersonating celebrities. From Steve Jobs to OJ Simpson to Jeffrey Epstein to Jar Jar Binks to, ofcourse, Jerermy Renner himself. These impersonation accounts started spamming comments, memes and everything you would expect a troll raid to do. It got to the point that the earnest users did not even know which Jeremy Renner account was the real Jeremy Renner. The moderators of the Jeremy Renner app tried to put out the flames but the Jeremy Renners were too strong. Nothing could stop the horde of Jeremy Renners.

And that point Jeremy Renner, the real one, had enough. On september 4th, Jeremy Renner made one final post on the Jeremy Renner app.

The app has jumped the shark. Literally. Due to clever individuals that were able to manipulate ways to impersonate me and others within the app I have asked ESCAPEX, the company the runs this app to shut it down immediately and refund anyone who has purchased any stars over the last 90 days.

The Jeremy Renner app shut down shortly after that.

The Aftermath

After the Jeremy Renner app shut down and the countless articles were made, Jeremy Renner moved on to focus posting on his regular social media. Other than that, he continued being Jeremy Renner. EscapeX on the other hand met a worse fate. After the Jeremy Renner app shut down, they pretty much fell off the face of earth. All of their celebrity apps shut down (yes, even the Backpack kid app), all their socials haven’t updated since 2019 and their website is defunct. It is safe to assume that they won’t be coming back.

To most, the Jeremy Renner app is nothing more than a punchline. What was meant to be a new way for huge celebrities to interact with their fans became a joke that couldn’t handle its own scrutiny. Some still defend the Jeremy Renner app and a few even have fond memories of it, but today it is a funny curiosity that once in a moon someone goes “Hey, remember when Jeremy Renner had an app?”

Also, this post contains 60 Jeremy Renners.

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).

Content warning: discussion of sexual assault for procreation purposes in the Sims 4

xxx

Friendly Introduction

Ah, The Sims, the virtual dollhouse game franchise that has no competitors and keeps churning out content and drama with no end in sight. The game where for over two decades people have been murdering their Sims by drowning or starving them. You know the one.

The Sims 4 drama often revolves around the release of new packs with broken or unsatisfying features like the Wedding Pack that failed to deliver on its promise to have guests sit down and watch the wedding. Additionally, there’s a huge modding scene creating anything from script mods to cosmetic items that isn’t exactly drama-free. The pro-paywall and anti-paywall wars have been going strong for almost as long as the game has existed.

This story is nowhere on that scale. This drama is about a minor change to a gameplay trait so universally despised and thoughtless, EA walked it back immediately. This is the story about the few short weeks when rape was part of the Sims’ official gameplay.

I realize Sims exist only for the entertainment of the player/God. Consent doesn't exist in the Sims world. In the real world, however, it is both very real and very important. It’s not surprising that players would apply this concept to a life simulation. I’ll be talking about Sims consenting to mean performing actions in an impaired state that they, due to their in-game traits, would not agree to if in any other emotional state. In doing so, I don’t mean to at any point trivialize or make light of sexual assault in real life and if I’m insensitive or tone-deaf, please let me know.

To explain why I even had to write that disclaimer, I need to explain two game mechanics that influence a Sim’s behavior before moving on to the controversy.

Get To Know

Sims’ personalities comprise three traits. These are supposed to give your Sims distinct personalities but due to poor tuning and the Emotion System most Sims still feel pretty samey. The traits have always been criticized because they were more fleshed out in previous games. Over the years, EA has made attempts to improve some of these traits to varying levels of success.

In terms of traits, the Hates Children trait is pretty self-explanatory. These Sims hate children and get Tense or Angry in their presence. They get Bored reading children’s books, get Tense when pregnant, and are Happy when they take a negative pregnancy test.

That’s the idea at least. In reality, the negative moodlets aren’t very strong and Sims who Hate Children interact with children autonomously and get positive moodlets from doing so like Sims without the trait do. The hate also doesn’t extend to babies or toddlers, really nerfing what could be a fun trait for those looking to bring some dysfunction into their family gameplay. I think we all agree that a Sim who Hates Children shouldn’t always be cooing over the damned baby, yet that’s where you’d often find them.

Try to Calm Down

Sims’ lives are often ruled far more by their Emotions than their traits. The only time Sims aren’t feeling things is when they’re asleep. They can be Fine, Happy, Flirty, Confident, Energized, Inspired, Playful (and Hysterical), Angry (and Enraged), Bored. Tense, Sad, Embarrassed (and Mortified), Scared, or Dazed. Some whims (wishes the player can fulfill for reward points) and interactions only appear when a Sim is feeling a certain emotion. Flirting while Angry or Sad is bound to go wrong and being Flirty in the wrong company can get awkward fast. Some emotions can also be deadly. We don’t have time to talk about all the Sims I’ve lost because they laughed themselves to death.

Try for Baby

In late March 2021, as part of a large Spring update that introduced bunk beds, EA decided to overhaul some of the traits. Initially, they didn’t list what had been changed but it was obvious in the game. Suddenly, Clumsy Sims couldn’t go anywhere without tripping. Bookworms read books. Cheerful Sims were extra cheerful.

And Sims who Hate Children?

Most of the changes were positive. They would now get Tense, then Angry when around kids “and also move away when they get to the Angry stage,” which sounds about right.

Another bullet point stood out though. Let me quote the changelog (since deleted):

“Asking a Hates Children Sim to ‘Try for Baby’ has no chance of success unless the Sim is Dazed.”

You know, Dazed, that emotion Sims get when they’re sick, do a keg stand, get beat up, take medicine while not sick, are hypnotized, poisoned, electrocuted, or eaten by a Cowplant. (A popular mod that introduces alcohol and a variety of drugs into the game also makes copious use of it.) “Dazed” inhibits skill gain, gives Sims a slower, bedraggled walking style, and sometimes they see stars. The only Whims a Dazed Sim will have are “Go to Sleep,” “Sleep it Off,” and “Take a Nap” (and they’re all the same interaction). In addition to that, they are far more susceptible to death by electrocution.

And that’s the state a Hates Children Sim needs to be in to agree to Try for Baby.

(The WooHoo interaction, the Sims’ equivalent to sex with perfect birth control, remains unaltered.)

So, to have a Sim who Hates Children Try for Baby—an interaction that doesn’t happen autonomously—you have to get them Dazed, the equivalent of tricking someone into having sex without protection against their will. And you, the player, are the one doing it.

You tell me if that sounds off somehow, because to me, it sounds a lot like rape, specifically stealthing, as a gameplay feature.

For comparison as part of the same trait overhaul, asking Non-Committal Sims, also not very likely to want children, to Try for Baby had “a very low chance of success,” which adds some gameplay challenge and realism without any consent violations.

Lecture about Responsibilities

The outrage was quick, strong, and universal. Sims players, who at least online skew young and progressive, were Tense and Angry.

Some had noticed that there was something off with Trying for Baby with Sims who Hate Children for several weeks before EA’s patch notes but didn’t figure out that you could work around someone’s family planning choices by getting them Dazed.

When the patch notes came out and they put together what had happened, it was not well-received.

Some were angry it took away from their gameplay options. The popular 100 Baby Challenge was much harder to play if you couldn’t Try for Baby with anyone. Seducing a Sim while multiple children scream around you is hard enough without having to find out your partner’s traits and adjust according to that (by either not Trying for Baby with them or getting them Dazed.).

However, the loudest and most enduring complaints were not about gameplay limitations but sexual consent. This bug report for the new feature summarizes it nicely:

I realize that this is intended behavior, and not a bug. However, this aspect of the Hates Children trait seems to echo serious real-life issues a bit too closely. While I'm certain this was not the intention, it feels as though The Sims 4 has added elements of date [rape] by allowing a Sim to convince a Sim who does not want kids to try for a baby if the Sim is intoxicated (in the Dazed mood). I just don't feel like complicated issues of consent while intoxicated belong in The Sims 4.

It just didn’t feel right that this was now a feature when iconic elements from previous games, like burglars and the Sexy Dancer (later Party Dancer) bursting out of a cake, had been excluded from the Sims 4 for being inappropriate for a children’s game. But explicit sexual assault somehow didn’t cross that line in the Sims developers’ eyes?

This also reawakened discourse about alien abductions—a staple of the franchise present in every game—from which male Sims usually return pregnant. Wasn’t this sexual assault too?

One notable difference between the two features is that alien abductions and the resulting pregnancy are not player-directed or explicitly non-consensual. The player can’t trigger an abduction but can imagine what happened during the abduction off-screen where they can’t as easily handwave dazing a Sim so the Sim will agree to a pregnancy.

Whatever your view on alien abductions in the Sims, I feel Confident in saying that almost no Sims players have real-life traumatic experiences with aliens that might be triggered by the game. The same can unfortunately not be said for sexual assault. Sure, you can simply adjust your gameplay to not have children with Sims who Hate Children but knowing that the presence of the option to violate their consent is upsetting even if you don’t personally make use of it. (And since it’s a gameplay mechanic, I’m also not judging anyone who used it.)

Nobody seems to have thought EA had malicious intentions. It’s the thoughtlessness they took issue with. How had this made it into the game despite its obvious implications?

Smooth Recovery

We would never find out how this happened (and really, why would we?) but the Sims team responded to the viral tweet I linked in the header within a day:

“You are absolutely right! We appreciate you all holding us accountable to our values – especially when we miss the mark! Consent isn’t something to play with, so we’ve updated our language & will correct the trait in an upcoming patch.”

The patch notes were quickly altered to read, “Sims with the ‘Hates Children’ trait will be very unreceptive to any ‘Try For Baby’ actions” with no exception when they’re dazed.”

This satisfied Sims players, and the next patch a few weeks later eliminated the feature. Now it’s harder to Try for Baby with a Sim who Hates Children but when it happens, players can in good conscience say that no Sims were traumatized or harmed in the process.

In terms of controversy, it was a minor blip in Sims discourse, far overshadowed by the ongoing anger about the introduction of kits, small $5 DLC that include cosmetic items. A whopping 19 of them have since been released and they remain controversial.

Additionally, around the same time several huge Sims custom content creators on Patreon were revealed to be putting trackers on their files and “actively shar[ing] information on patrons, mass-blocking them, and coordinating attacks against them,” so it’s surprising the Hates Children controversy gained any attention at all.

But that doesn’t make it any less Embarrassing, nay Mortifying, that this happened because none of the developers realized that this was not a great idea in any game, let alone one rated 12+.

​

Thank you for reading. This has been sitting in my drafts unfinished for months but the Sims 4 is adding Infants, a new life stage, to the game next week. I can’t wait to terrorize a Sim who Hates Children with some new offspring. That sounds fun in a way getting a Sim Dazed to baby-trap them does absolutely not.

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).

Before we start, fair warning: This comic isn't everyone's cup of tea. You may want to stop reading and participate in a more enjoyable, relaxing activity instead, like hitting your genitals with a meat tenderizer, or asking your parents to tell you how you were conceived.

The year was 2005. Youtube had just been created, and was already becoming a vortex absorbing people's free time. John Paul II had died, and a new pope won his hat through single combat. Shows like American Dad and Avatar the Last Airbender premiered. And DC comics had a great new idea.

It was amazing. It was exceptional. They were going to create alternate universe versions of all their most popular characters, with simplified backstories for new readers. This was the first time anyone had thought of that, not counting Batman: Year One, Robin: Year One, the entire Ultimate Universe, Elseworlds, and the other 27 times that comic creators had done this. If you ignore all those times, it was super original.

But skepticism be damned, because All Star Batman and Robin was going to be created by the dream team: Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Who the hell are these guys?

Frank Miller is a legend among comics fans, even though his star has fallen somewhat. And in 2005, he was legendary. Among many comics, he wrote The Dark Knight Returns (and Batman: Year One).

For us now, it's hard to understand why that was such a big deal. Batman is a gritty, dark hero, so Miller wrote a dark and gritty Batman story. Big whoop. Except... he wasn't. Just look at the old Adam West cartoon, or some of the wacky old Batman comics where his gimmicky villains would rob banks with exploding penguins. And now, Batman is the poster child for a dark and brooding hero. It's hard to say that one person was 100% responsible for the change, but Miller's writing for The Dark Knight Returns had an undeniably massive impact on that. And Batman: Year One has since become the defining Batman origin. On a bigger scale, he shaped comics, pushing them more towards the dark and gritty side that we know and ~~love~~ ~~tolerate~~ generally accept today.

To put it simply: If you've ever watched any modern Batman movie -- from gravel voice to Martha to ex-vampire -- they all took a massive amount of plot points and design from Miller.

Jim Lee is an excellent artist, and general cool dude, who has since gone on to become Chief Creative Officer of DC. He has a stunning history of work both and Marvel and DC, as well as helping found Image Comics. His career has gone remarkably without major scandal or issue. Which unfortunately means that we won't discuss him much further. Sorry Jimbo.

Making a good first impression

As we all know, the opening pages of a story are vital. You have to hook people, draw them in. Make them feel like this is a narrative they want to be immersed in. The first two pages do this pretty well, showing off Robin with his parents at the circus. And the third page is... ah fuck, it's porn. Yeah, that's just straight up lingerie shots of Gotham reporter Vicki Vale speculating about Superman's dick.

OK, kinda weird start, but they can recover and nope, it's more porn. And she's still waxing poetic about the Super Schlong. Still though, it's not like they'd dedicate a third page to it and of course they would, fuck you.

The plot gets thicker than Vicki

Once everyone is fully clothed, the story moves to the circus, and things get back on track. Dick Grayson's parents are killed by mobsters -- not due to a sabotaged trapeze, but by being shot. Mild changes without destroying the beloved characters, that's the key, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, BATMAN IS TORTURING A MAN WITH SNAKE VENOM.

That wasn't a quick change for comedic effect by the way. The story goes from "Batman sees Robin's parents die" to "Batman just hit a dude with batarangs tipped in snake venom which will cause him agonizing hallucinations for a month".

But there's no time to digest the many fucked up parts of that, because the plot is moving fast. The cops arrive! The cops punch Vicki, and take Dick Grayson! And also the cops are either pedophiles or abusers, so at least they did their research. Vicki chases the cops, and Batman chases Vicki!

And then, as a legion of bats scares off the cops, Batman rescues Robin. This is the foundational father-son moment, a broken man reaching out to a child. Batman takes an orphan under his wing, so that he doesn't go down the same dark path.

Or he lifts him into the air by the neck and screams "ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER, YOU'VE JUST BEEN DRAFTED. INTO A WAR." Yeah.

I guess either option works.

The Batmobile lost its wheel (and Vicki lost her arm)

I know this comic may seem crazy as shit so far. But I promise you: as weird as it sounds, the first issue was the most mild one.

Issue two opens with Batman kidnapping Robin. That's not me trying to dramatize it, he straight up uses the word "kidnap" as he pins down a struggling child and drugs him with sleeping gas. He then races off in the Batmobile, hitting Vicki Vale's car with his butler Alfred in it. Vicki is horrifically injured, and has a rib puncture her lungs. Batman doesn't give a shit.

Batman then goes on a monologue, which... holy fuck, it's so edgy. It's like Edward Scissorhands shaving himself in a discount machete shop. I tried to find the words to do it justice, but I can't, so I'm just gonna type the full thing out here. To the brain cells that are about to die, we salute you.

My world.

Welcome to MY world Dick Grayson. BATS and RATS and WARTS and all.

You poor boy. You poor little bastard. Welcome to HELL. Hell. Or the next best thing.

The GAS calms him down in the space of SECONDS. He won't be having any NIGHTMARES. Not the kind that aren't TRUE, anyway. Then he starts FUSSING.

(Robin tries to ask completely normal questions, like "Why am I being kidnapped by a furry with drugs?")

(Out loud) Sleep kid.

The GAS was supposed to knock him OUT. He should be sailing past the MOON, right now. What's this brat MADE out of?

(Out loud) SLEEP. The world I'm gonna wake you up to is no better than the world you already know -- but it'll make a lot more SENSE than that one did -- once I've put you through holy HELL, it will. It'll make sense. A LOT of sense. Holy Hell or the next best thing. So sleep TIGHT punk. Sleep TIGHT, my WARD.

And then it happens. The iconic panel that still rocks the world today. It pops up pretty much weekly on r/Comicsoutofcontext. Batman says "I'm the goddamn Batman" while calling Robin a slur. He'd go on to use the phrase "goddman Batman" at least once in every other issue of the comic. This image would also go on to become one of the Internet's earliest memes. So, silver lining I guess?

So that's when the edgelord energy peaked. I mean, bad as the writing was, it's not like they'd have Batman go on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally.

Batman goes on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally

Some cops catch up to Batman and shoot at him. His (very mature and grounded) response is to think "I guess somebody on the force put out a KILL ORDER on me. Cool. It's about damn TIME."

He then proceeds on a brutal destructive spree, ramming the Batmobile into cars as Robin screams and he laughs like a madman. Words genuinely cannot do this scene justice, so just read it yourself. Gotham cops are some of the most corrupt and vicious monsters in superhero media, so the fact that Batman genuinely seems more evil than them speaks volumes.

A moment of clarity

But as Batman soars off, and the blood of the corpses he left behind begins to congeal, he stops, and becomes pensive. Is he just perpetuating the cycle of abuse? Can he really expect a child to fight a war on crime?

And then he decides "NAAAAAAAAAH, that's pussy talk", and slaps Robin.

The rest of the series

Believe it or not, that was just the first two issues. This wasn't me cherry picking the worst parts out of hundreds and hundreds of pages of content. Alllllll of that bullshit was crammed into roughly forty pages, which were the first forty pages shown.

It'd take way, way too long to cover the entire rest of the series, so I'll give you a highlights reel

• Joker has a Nazi henchmen, who is topless except for swastikas on her nipples. No, seriously.

• Batman locks Robin up in the Batcave. The only food he is allowed to eat are the raw rats he catches and kills with his bare hands. He sleeps on the rocks.

• Batman canonically tries (and fails) to make his voice sound like Clint Eastwood

• Every single woman Batman meets canonically wants to fuck him. Black Canary. Batgirl. Catwoman. The rape victim he meets for two seconds. All of them.

• Batman uses improvised napalm to burn men alive and laughs as he does so. He then has sex with Black Canary on a burning pier as they scream.

• The word "goddamn" is used at least 17 times on each page. If you took a shot every time you saw it, you'd be dead of alcohol poisoning within minutes.

• Batman forces Robin to paint an entire building yellow in a few hours. Why? To fuck with Green Lantern. Batman then painted himself yellow too for good measure. And also drank lemonade.

• Green Arrow is a sexual predator who pervs on Black Canary. My boy Ollie deserves better.

• Speaking of Black Canary, they take an iconic female hero, give her the most terribly written "girl power" moment ever, then reveal that the only reason she ever had the bravery to do anything was because Batman inspired her.

• She also decides not to get too much money, because carrying it around would give her muscles, which are for men. No, I'm not kidding.

• Wonder Woman hates all men (the nicest thing she calls them is "sperm banks"), and is an utter and complete psychopath who holds herself above any government or moral standard. But she's also dominated by Superman, because of his masculine aura. Pardon while I retch.

• Everyone uses the Q-slur a lot. A lot.

It'd be way to hard to dive into all the complexities and fucked up parts of Batman and Robin's relationship, so I'll just repeat what a number of fans have pointed out: This Batman treats Robin like Rick treats Morty. And honestly, probably even worse.

How could this comic possibly get canceled?

Even before it was formally canceled, the comic went through major difficulties. After the fifth issue came out, they switched it to a bi-monthly release. At one point, in 2006, there was only a single new issue of the comic. Then, issue #10 was delayed for four months, then delayed for another month. And then once it was released, they forgot to censor the word "fuck" (but the slurs were fine I guess), so they had to be recalled, delaying it even further.

Jim Lee has talked about how part of this was due to him having too many responsibilities with the DC Universe Online game. However, fans have speculated for years that, more likely, DC and Lee just really didn't give much of a shit about the comic.

Incredibly, this comic managed to run for ten whole issues before DC decided to scrap it. They ended it in the middle of a major storyline, which I'd say would be a loss... except it's more like euthanasia. In 2011, they announced that Miller and Lee would be coming back to finish the story! Twelve years later, and absolutely jack shit has happened, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's not gonna happen.

The comic had started out with massive sales, which quickly plummeted as it was revealed just how far Miller had fallen. It still sold fairly well, but nowhere near the 300,000 issues that the first one sold.

Fan reception

I'm not gonna lie: When I was first reading this comic, I thought it was a parody. I genuinely didn't believe that a professional writer could write this and not be making fun of pointlessly edgy superhero stories. Even after realizing it, it was still a hilarious read, just because of how stupidly terrible it was.

There are some movies that are so bad they're good. And there are some movies that are so bad that they can never be good, but that badness is entertaining. This is the comics equivalent of that. Rob Bricken said it best, commenting "All Star Batman is such a magnificent asshole." If you've seen The Room, imagine that in comic book form. Many fans will still recommend it today, just because the pure shittiness of it all is hilarious. Miller was completely, 100% serious about everything, which just made it even more funny.

Critically, the comic has been widely panned, and is described as "one of the biggest train wrecks in comics history". When said history involves a story where Ms. Marvel gets raped, and the Avengers congratulate her rapist, you know that shit is fucked up. Other critics have said things like

it’s as if Miller was secretly trolling DC, trying to create the least ultimate Batman of all time

As I recall, there wasn't much of a throughline in the original book. Various superhero-related things just sort of happened.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took on All-Star Superman, while Frank Miller and Jim Lee handled All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. One of these series is regarded as one of the greatest superhero stories ever told. The other is All-Star Batman and Robin.

Remember All-Star Batman and Robin? I Sure Wish I Didn’t

The worst part is, the art is truly stunning. It's some of Jim Lee's best work, and genuinely still holds up today. It's just a shame that the art needs to have words on it.

Oh Miller, my Miller

Remember how I mentioned back at the start that Miller's star had fallen quite a bit? Again, blaming a single comic for that is hard, but these ten issues damaged Miller's legacy more than anything else. Fans were impressed by Miller's original idea to "make Batman darker and edgier". And then they saw him write another comic where he decided to make Batman darker and edgier, and realized that the man had exactly one go to option.

On top of that, fans started to become disillusioned with the grimdark era of comics. There's still room for heroes like Daredevil and Batman, but fans lamented the need to make everything dark and edgy all the time.

It also doesn't help that Miller genuinely cannot write women. This prompted the now infamous whorewhoreswhoreswhores comic from Shortpacked (SFW). And nowhere is this more prominent than in All Star. Every woman in Gotham is either a prostitute or rape victim. Women are portrayed as sex objects, and absolutely never anything else. They have a level of depth and complexity that would make Alison Bechdel quit comics forever.

All told, All Star was a perfectly terrible storm for Miller, that came across more as a parody of his work than an example of it. All of his worst traits were put on display, and he became a bit of a laughingstock. He's had other comics that did this (Holy Terror anyone?), but All Star was the most widely known, and thus, damaging to his reputation. He's still Frank Fucking Miller, and wields a tremendous amount of clout in the world of comics, but he is no longer the unparalleled champion that he once was.

I guess at the end of the day, the moral of the story is simple: Don't have Batman say slurs. And abuse children. And murder bystanders. And use chemical weapons...

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).

Fuck you Rian Johnson, there's a new exciting mystery set during Covid. And this one has butt stuff in it.

This is a bit of a bizarre case: an incident in a niche hobby went viral and spread across the Internet, to the point where most of you have probably heard at least something about this. But so many people don't know why the anal play was so controversial, or even what happened. So sit down, relax, and lube yourself up, because we're going to slide inside of the biggest drama chess has ever seen (except Bobby Fischer).

---

A few brief disclaimers before we start.

First, I don't want anyone to say that I haven't researched this well enough, or haven't checked my sources, so during the entire writing process, I have been wearing anal beads, which vibrate at varying speeds. During this time, I have not lost a single game of chess at the grandmaster level. That may be because I haven't played any games at grandmaster level, but I just think the beads are working.

Second, some of you may be worried that I'm not going to approach this seriously, and will spend a lot of time making anal jokes. You're absolutely correct. This writeup will be absolutely stuffed as I jam them in for your pleasure. But I also cover all the boring non-butt stuff as well, so you can stick around for that.

Finally, I tried writing a version of this where I'd stop occasionally to address public response. That immediately became unreadable, because there was so much. So while I'm only bringing up major figures, rest assured that at every point of this drama, there were hundreds of thousands of memes, tweets, and flame wars. This was (and often still is) half of the jokes on r/AnarchyChess. Every single person even remotely involved in chess knew about this. This got front page articles from major international newspapers. It was big.

With those settled, let's dive on in!

---

Setting up the board

Chess is the game with the little horsies and the bloated monarchy running around on a checkerboard. While not the oldest game in human history, it has certainly been the most successful and long lasting over the past 1,600 years. Over those years it has been the game of kings, a way to test improvements in programming, and the easiest way for any writer to show you that a character is super duper smart.

It's a bit odd to talk about something as widespread as chess "becoming popular", but nevertheless, that's what has happened in recent years. In a perfect storm of people staying home due to Covid, new online options to play, streamers looking for content, and Queen's Gambit being a smash hit on Netflix, a new wave of people to play chess. The most popular website, Chess.com noted that their daily users have grown five times larger since 2020, with five million people each day and three times the subscribers.

With that wave came increased attention and focus on watching professionals. Some are just a classic Twitch stream, but there has also been a surge of interest in the world's top players at tournaments. After all, while most pro sports had to be shut down, chess tournaments could continue online with a minimum of difficulty. And as we all know in any hobby: new fans leads to mo money, which leads to mo drama.

Now that the pieces are all in position, let's look a little more at our two players.

Magnus Carlsen became grandmaster at thirteen, and became world champion in 2013. He has held that position uninterrupted since, a record only matched by legendary Soviet chess master Garry Kasparov (Gary Chess to his friends). If I went into all of his various achievements, awards, and tournament victories, I'd hit Reddit's 40,000 character limit, so just believe me when I say that he is good -- maybe even the best ever. Aside from chess, Carlsen is generally seen as a decent guy. He's known for being mild mannered and polite, being both a good winner and loser. He has also managed to turn chess into a genuinely lucrative profession, on top of becoming a model and semi-celebrity with his own chess app.

It can be easy to underestimate the skills of chess grandmasters, and just hear "he's good". It goes way beyond that. Magnus playing a regular person in chess is like Muhammad Ali boxing against a cardboard cutout of a toddler. And that cardboard cutout is soaking wet. Chess scales exponentially, so he's not just crushing the average person, he is annihilating people who have dedicated their lives to the game.

Hans Niemann is the opposite of Magnus in many ways. While he also started chess at a younger age, he stalled for a few years, and didn't become a professional until he was in college (what a loser, am I right?). During Covid, he got a lot more into chess, amassing a significant following over Twitch. Part of that was due to his skill, but a large degree is how... let's say passionate he can get, win or lose. Unlike Carlsen's poker face, Niemann is prone to fits of emotion and yelling. You can get a picture of what that looks like here. This has lead him to be called the "bad boy of chess" (which is a bit like being the academic of the concussion ward). As you might imagine, he's not exactly well liked by many other chess players. According to close friends, Niemann has told them that he doesn't care how he's perceived, because he'll be good enough that major tournaments have to put up with him. He's well on his way to achieving that, with a rapid string of victories securing his spot as the fastest rising star in chess. However, even before this event, there were a number of rumors about him being a cheater.

Magnus and Hans represent the rapidly forming divide in chess, between the old and the new. This has been caused by the surge in online popularity, with far more amateur players being interested. Some don't even play that much, they just want to watch skilled streamers. As you can imagine, this can lead to more than a little bit of conflict. It also means that chess players now have fandoms, which is very weird, and also complicates drama, since each side's fans will follow along loyally.

Finally, the third character in our little drama. Hikaru Nakamura is sort of what you'd get if you crossed Hans and Magnus. He took a more traditional path to becoming successful chess player, at one point being ranked #2 in the world. However, he's far more well known for his Twitch stream, and is often credited as one of the major figures who started the online chess craze. Like Hans, he thrives on his personality -- although he tends to be less confrontational, more comedic. He has followed the time honored Internet tradition of "person who is really good at something uses their skill for stupid and ridiculous purposes", which has paid off. He is a friendly acquaintance of Magnus's, with the two of them collaborating to make the only use the Bongcloud attack opening (a common chess meme) in a professional game. He has a rivalry with Hans, making fun of him on stream for things like his accent (Hans is known for a fake European accent, which he will forget to speak in at times).

But enough setup. It's time for the game to begin

The Opening

For quick development is of the utmost importance, and he who succeeds first in placing all his pieces, from their initial awkward positions, to such places as give them command of the greatest possible number of squares, has the better chance of concentrating a superior force on some important point.

---

Most people hearing about this drama assume it started at the Sinquefield cup, the incident that really went public. In reality though, it was the second incident.

Always do foreplay before full anal

The first sparks of drama occurred a month previously, in August of 2022, at the FTX Crypto cup. You may now pause to laugh at the fact that FTX sponsored an event to convince people crypto was for smart people, then went tits up and lost everyone's money after robbing them blind. But a company who got to the top by brash maneuvering and blatant lying might have been oddly prophetic.

Niemann beat Carlsen in their first match, a major victory for him. When asked how he managed to pull it off, he told reporters that "the chess speaks for itself", and wouldn't say more. Carlsen then proceeded to steamroll him in their next three matches, eventually winning the whole tournament.

This didn't exactly go ignored at the time -- Niemann's fans celebrated, and a few chess fans took note. But the FTX cup wasn't a prestigious competitive event, where players were at their best. It's a little like scoring some points on Michael Jordan in a game of pickup basketball: still good, but it doesn't mean you can beat him in an actual NBA game.

With that out of the way, let's move on to where it gets really juicy.

Pounded in the butt by the Sinquefield Cup

On a lovely St. Louis day, September fourth, Magnus faced down Niemann at the Sinquefield cup. It was a significant tournament, with a prestigious history, world famous players and a $350,000 prize. Ahead of the game, most of the discussion wasn't on who would win, it was how well/badly Hans would lose (or tie). He was never going to beat the world champion (especially since Magnus played white, a major advantage), but he could prove his skill by how close the game was. Except... Hans didn't lose. He won. Carlsen went on to hand Niemann his ass in the two speed chess games which followed, but nobody cared about those. The drama had begun.

This was... an upset can't even begin to describe it. Carlsen has been the world champion since 2013, and the #1 rated player since 2011. Since 2011, he has only lost nineteen times in classical games where he played white (to fifteen players). Given that he was playing against some of the best players in the world, that is a staggeringly impressive record. At the time of this game, he had not lost a similar game in the last fifty-three sittings, over two years. Niemann isn't bad -- he's still competing at a level that most people could barely dream of, especially at his age. But this would be like if a random athlete from Belgium managed to outrun Usain Bolt. While wearing crocs. And hungover. Not to mention, it seriously damaged Magnus's attempts to raise his rating to 2900. The win seemed too good to be true -- which as it turned out, might have been because it wasn't.

Magnus withdraws

In a move that shocked and confused the chess community, Magnus withdrew from the tournament the next day. He refused to state why, only tweeting out this -- a withdrawal message, along with a video clip of Jose Mourinho saying "If I speak, I am in big trouble".

Jose Mourinho. The soccer/football coach. Whose comment about not speaking was because he wasn't allowed to make allegations of cheating.

Oh shit.

It may not seem like it, but in professional chess, this is a Very Big Deal. Withdrawing from a chess tournament, by your own choice, without some kind of emergency, at this level of play... it just isn't done. It's not just rare, or uncommon, it doesn't happen. Magnus had never done so in the past, nor had any other chess player at his level in the past fifty years. Former champion Gary Kasparov spoke out, asking Magnus to explain the decision, and calling it "unprecedented".

Along with the shock of him withdrawing, it meant the few games he'd already played were annulled for the purposes of the tournament -- so Niemann didn't get any benefit from his win. This almost certainly wasn't Magnus's main intent, and he didn't have a choice in it, but it can easily be seen as him twisting the knife.

The organizers politely wished Magnus well, and confirmed that he hadn't submitted any formal cheating complaint. Despite that, they instituted a fifteen minute delay on the broadcast, and increased anti-cheating measures. They later tweeted out that no player at the tournament was suspected of cheating, all of which fueled rumors even further.

Niemann responds

Niemann gave a post game interview, discussing both the game and Carlsen's withdrawal. In it, he said

And I think even if it was a draw, he was so demoralized because he was losing to such an idiot like me. It must be embarrassing for the World Champion to lose to me.

Not helping yourself dude.

Hans then went on to explain that, in actuality, it was all a big misunderstanding. Referring to it as a "ridiculous miracle", he explained that when studying Magnus's past games (a common tactic), he had seen Magnus use a similar variation of his opening against Wesley So at the 2018 London Chess classic. Problem solved, right? Still a good game, just a lucky one. Everyone can go home.

Except Magnus didn't play that opening against So. In fact, neither Magnus nor So played in that tournament at all, and analysts mentioned that the tactic was an unusual one for Magnus, not a repeat.

Whoops.

Throughout the whole interview, Niemann seemed to be struggling. He was unable to give explanations for some of his moves, and tried to argue that a computer's prediction for a move was wrong (it wasn't). All of this just caused even more speculation to grow.

PlayMagnus (Magnus's chess app) tweeted out in response to the interview, with a link to an article called "greatest chess scandals", and a meme. This was quickly deleted.

Suspicions of cheating

As mentioned at the start, the chess world exploded. People argued, analyzed, and took sides, all while the memesters reveled in glorious chaos. The reigning world champion was taking on one of the most polarizing figures in chess. As mentioned previously, the chess corner of the Internet was on fire, and the blaze was quickly spreading.

Professional chess players generally stayed neutral. Some of them, such as Kasparov and Karpov (who, despite their names, aren't a comedic slapstick duo) seemed to take Niemann's side, arguing that the game showed no evidence of cheating. However, most critics added that they would like to hear Magnus come forward with actual complaints and allegations so that they could make a real judgement. Professional chess is relatively drama-free, with many unspoken rules of etiquette, so no one wanted to rock the boat. They were professional, reasonable, and very unsatisfying to read about, so let's talk about the fightin'!

Hikaru became a very significant figure in all this. He had never hesitated to criticize Hans before, and he made his thoughts very clear: Carlsen had withdrawn from the tournament because he believed Niemann had cheated. Given that he was a streamer, his analysis of the situation was far more animated and entertaining than most other professionals. He also claimed that Hans had been banned from Chess.com in the past for cheating, a claim repeated by several other figures in the chess world.

I'm taking time to note Hikaru's response, because he was a crucial part in all of this. Of course it was always going to be a drama within the chess community. But Hikaru is notable for both being an Internet person, and understanding the Internet. He communicates in memes, in jokes, with big splashy statements that throw aside rules of etiquette. No major drama can thrive off of bland, pre-planned press releases and ten hour long analysis videos that end inconclusively. Magnus and Hans may have lit the fire, but Hikaru was the oxygen that it needed to grow into an inferno.

Both sides had a lot of arguments, so I've gathered them all here.

	Magnus fans	Hans fans
Hans's performance fell after the Sinquefield cup started using stronger anti-cheating methods, going from a 270 ELO to a 250	His performance is worse now because he can't cheat like before.	Hans was publicly accused of cheating by a major figure, and chess is a highly mental game. It makes sense that he'd lose focus. Plus, other players in the tournament had similar drops in performance.
Experts looking at the game suggested they didn't see any proof of cheating	That's because Hans did so subtly, and used technology sparingly. High level cheating can be hard to detect without analysis.	There's no evidence of cheating because there was no cheating, Magnus is just mad.
Hans's interview made it look like he didn't understand the moves he made, and made a false statement about learning from Magnus's past game	He clearly didn't make all these moves himself, because he's unable to understand them. His lie about analyzing Magnus's past game proves this even more.	Again, he was just accused of cheating by the world's best chess player. Of course his head wasn't in it.
Hans has a long history of credible cheating accusations	Once a cheater, always a cheater. Why would he stop?	There's not enough proof to say that. Also, the allegations are that he cheated in online matches, not high level in person tournaments.
The tournament had vigorous anti-cheating methods even before they increased them	Clearly, they weren't good enough, and we've seen evidence of people evading them in the past.	This shows that Hans couldn't have cheated even if he wanted to.

An aside: Cheating at high level chess

I figured it'd be worth taking a moment, and explaining why there was such debate. After all, if Hans cheated, it should be easy to find out, right?

The problem with catching cheaters at high levels is that it is very difficult to do accurately. While plenty of cheaters get caught, they tend to either be low level players or they're physically caught with communication devices. The usual method of analysis is to compare the move suggested by a computer to the move played, and see how often they match up. Unfortunately, this is only really effective for amateurs. After all, "this grandmaster who dedicated years of their life to chess made a lot of optimal moves!" isn't exactly an airtight claim. They also have the skill required to play without the computer, so they can use it sparingly, and not get caught by an algorithm. Niemann could have made a move from a computer, then two or three of his own, then the computer, and so on.

So while analysis can prove that Niemann wasn't entirely relying on a computer, and it can suggest that his moves were his own, it is very hard to say that he never used one.

Making it even more difficult, chess is a game where a tiny advantage can have massive effects. A single suboptimal move -- not even bad, just suboptimal -- can lose you the whole game. Think about it like Olympic sprinters. Sure, adding 0.05 seconds to their time wouldn't seem like a big advantage. But at their level, a tiny advantage to one competitor can be what it takes to win.

One last thing: chess is a highly mental game (all those buff chess players you see are just a coincidence). So someone's emotional state, sleep patterns, hell, even their appetite can all provide that tiny edge someone needs. Remember that for later.

Digital anal-ysis

This is the point where the vibrating anal beads theory first started. Note that it started as anal beads, not a plug, like so many foolish butt plebeians thought. Trust me, completely different feel.

People joked that Hans Niemann had vibrating anal beads up his ass, with a friend watching the game. The friend would plug the board into an AI, get the best move, and vibrate it to Hans using the butt toy.

From what I can tell, Chessbrah was first to mention it on a stream (although Eric Hansen may have done so first). Within minutes of him saying it (and no, I'm not exaggerating), r/AnarchyChess had gleefully jumped onto the meme, and were milking the ~~prostate~~ joke for all it was worth. The most iconic version of it was penned by u/XiTro with this comment. Even Elon Musk (thrice cursed spawn of a dozen devils that he is) weighed in on Twitter.

Most treated it as the meme that it was, but a number of people seemed genuinely convinced. Several poor, long suffering reporters were told by their editors to go do a serious article about the potential butt-bead usage. An adult cam site even offered Hans a vast sum of money if he'd play nude to prove he didn't have anything up his... sleeve. The anal beads meme became far more well known than any of the other legitimate complaints about cheating.

Hans finally responds

In another interview on September sixth, Hans discussed the allegations. And oh boy, he came out swinging.

Throughout the entire interview, he was clearly pissed off. He admitted that he'd cheated twice on Chess.com -- once at age twelve, once at sixteen. But in the three years since then, he claimed he had played completely honestly. In addition, neither of the games was significant. There was no money or official tournament involved. Why should he continue to be punished for the mistakes he'd made as a kid?

He even seemed to address the anal allegations, which had clearly left him sore

They want me to strip fully naked, I’ll do it ... I don’t care, because I know that I’m clean. You want me to play in a closed box with zero electronic transmission? I don’t care, you know? Name whatever you guys want.

Hans, buddy, with all kindness: I really do not want to see you strip naked. Please don't.

But all of that became secondary. Because in the interview, he announced that he had just been banned from Chess.com because of the recent match against Magnus. Remember how I mentioned earlier that Magnus had made a chess app? Well, just over a week before Magnus had lost to Niemann, Chess.com had offered to buy it for $87 million. That deal was later finalized, with Magnus becoming a "Chess.com ambassador".

The plot thickens.

Hans accused Magnus, Hikaru, and Chess.com of trying to destroy his career, and announced that he was going to fight back. Why Hikaru? Well, Hans had noticed what was being said in the stream, as shown in his tweet.

The day after this, Chess.com uninvited Hans from a major tournament, explaining that they'd reached out to him privately to explain his ban, and reiterating that it was not in retribution for Magnus's loss.

The Middlegame

We must throughout maintain a favourable pawn formation, in view of the end-game which might be forced on us by exchanges. On the other hand, as soon as we have gained an advantage sufficient to secure the victory in the endgame, we must ourselves, by the exchange of pieces, try to reduce the position

---

The rematch of the century.

On September 19th, both Magnus and Hans were set to play against each other once again, in the Julius Baer Generation cup. The chess world waited with bated breath, and watched the stream to see what would happen.

Magnus made his opening move... then resigned, and switched off his webcam.

People were shocked -- most of all the poor announcers left to deal with it (seriously, just watch their reactions). A number of popular streamers were live streaming the game, many of whom had similar reactions as they watched it. This was a definite breach in etiquette, and it shattered any remaining possibility that Magnus didn't suspect Hans. He was clearly refusing to play against him, and was purposefully making that statement in the most dramatic way possible.

It also pissed off a lot of people, including those who were fans of Magnus and who believed Hans cheated. The common sentiment was that if Magnus really believed Hans was a cheater, he should officially come out and say so, not dance around with middle school "I'm not playing with you" bullshit.

Magnus had stated that he'd refuse any interviews during the Baer cup (for reasons that are obvious in retrospect). However, when asked on broadcast, he replied

Unfortunately, I cannot particularly speak on that, but people can draw their own conclusions, and they certainly have. I have to say I'm very impressed by Niemann's play and I think his mentor Maxim Dlugy must be doing a great job.

Hot damn. You can dislike Magnus, but the man has a genuine talent for subtle burns. Maxim Dlugy was Hans's mentor... and had been caught in a very public cheating scandal.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) sent out a tweet with their thoughts on the situation. They weren't the ones running either tournament, but they explained that, as the governing body for the chess world, they were tied up in it. Their message was similar to what most others were saying: "Cheating is bad, and we'll look into it. But Magnus, dude, get a hold of your shit and do this properly." It was a message that could have been crafted by a dozen politicians, saying a whole lot without taking a side.

(Magnus went on to win the Baer cup anyway, but no one really gave a shit about that.)

Magnus finally responds

The day after winning the cup, Magnus tweeted out an official statement

At this point, the gloves were off. He formally stated that he believed Hans was cheating, calling out not just one game, but his entire adult career. He talked about how cheating was an "existential threat" to chess, and how he wanted to fight it as a whole. At least in terms of worries about general cheating, Magnus is correct. Chess is experiencing a boom in popularity (with far more prize money), and is moving online, which means that people suddenly have much more motivation and opportunitY to cheat. This reframed the issue, from Magnus protecting his own reputation, to him defending the game as a whole from cheaters.

Magnus pointed out that Niemann had not been taking their game as seriously as most players would, appearing relaxed and not paying attention "while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do". This can certainly come off as a tad... egotistical, but Magnus seems to just be stating the facts as he views them. Chess is a highly stressful mental game, and grandmasters excel at studying each other's body language. A game with the best player in the world should have had more of an effect. Was Hans relaxed because he knew he was guaranteed to win? Or was he just really good at bluffing?

But what's that? What's that teeny little sentence near the end that most people overlooked?

I am not willing to play chess with Niemann

What many people would come to realize is that this was massive. If you're organizing a tournament, and you have to pick between the world champion and a guy who is a pretty good player (with a very bad reputation to boot), who are you gonna go with? Magnus had already proven he would follow through on his threat. He was essentially shutting Hans out from a lot of high level play, silently asking organizers to pick a side.

A new challenger has entered the arena -- the Chess.com report

Chess.com had been mostly quiet after banning Hans, just denying that it was in retribution for Carlsen's loss. And then, on October fourth, they released their report (alongside a Wall Street Journal Exclusive. And they brought the receipts.

The document is seventy-two pages long, and includes detailed analysis of over a hundred online games played by Hans, proving that he'd cheated in them. They used software, checked with experts, and looked to see how often he was clicking away from the page mid-game. All of that combined showed a frequent pattern of cheating. Contrary to Hans's previous claims, he had absolutely cheated at high levels and when money was involved, especially against other streamers. Quite repeatedly in fact. And far more recently than he had admitted.

And if that wasn't enough, it revealed that Hikaru's allegations had been true -- Niemann had previously been banned from the site. They revealed messages between Hans and themselves, where Hans apologized for cheating, which lead to him being allowed back. They also had transcripts from a call he made

As you [Hans] admitted to me [Danny] in our call where you confessed that “having a higher rating would mean people tune in more to my streams when I’m battling Hikaru, Danya or Eric (Hansen). I need people to believe that I’m a worthy rival to follow and subscribe”.

You have to wonder why he'd lie about something when he had handed evidence to the people he was lying about.

They explained that they usually kept such matters private, and were only revealing them because Hans had made a number of public claims against them, and they wanted to set the record straight. The report also repeatedly emphasized that Carlsen had not been involved in the decision to ban Hans from the site or tournament, and that they had not been biased against him.

Although most of the report focused on Hans's online play using their site, a few pages were dedicated to his OTB (over the board) play. They didn't make any concrete accusations, but pointed out some irregularities in his game with Magnus, along with suggesting that his rise in success with OTB (over the board) play was extremely rapid and suspicious. However, they concluded by saying that they could find no significant evidence of OTB cheating, but suggested that someone look into the irregularities further, as they had no authority or data to make a conclusive statement.

The report closed with a brutal finale: revealing a personal letter to Hans, sent just after he made public accusations against them. Much of it just details the same things mentioned above, but they closed by offering Hans a way to get his account back, and to play in tournaments again, if he was willing to own up to his mistakes and start playing honestly. Hans had refused. His permanent suspension was no one's fault but his own.

I guess you could say they wrecked 'em. Or in in this case, they rectum.

So... drama over, right? Niemann had just gotten slapped down hard, and was proven both a liar and a cheater. Except it wasn't over.

The holes in the report

Many people, both pros and fans, pointed out that the report didn't necessarily validate Magnus's claims. It could prove he had cheated online, yes, but it couldn't provide concrete evidence that he had cheated in any OTB game, including the one against Magnus.

And as many people were quick to point out, Niemann's skill jump would have been suspicious -- if it weren't for Covid. Being stuck inside for so long with nothing to do but play chess obviously meant that people would grow in skill much faster than usual. Niemann's rapid growth was matched by a number of other players, and in that context, wasn't as suspicious as it looked.

Additionally, the report had included a redacted list of other chess grandmasters who had been banned or suspended from the site for cheating. Some fans argued that, while Hans may have cheated, there was a culture of doing so, and Hans was unfairly singled out to be made an example of.

Finally, some pro players complained that they were worried about Chess.com banning them too if they criticized them. There is no current evidence of this happening, but some have claimed they were sent threatening emails. Chess.com obviously denies that. So far, no one has come forward with any proof on those emails, so we're left to speculate.

Still, Hans would probably fine so long as he didn't do anything monumentally stupid

Hans does something monumentally stupid

On October 20th, Hans filed a lawsuit against Carlsen, Play Magnus Group (Magnus's company), Chess.com, Daniel Rensch (Chess.com CCO), and Hikaru, demanding a hundred million dollars for supposedly destroying his livelihood with slander and libel (among other things). He announced it by saying (and I shit you not) "My lawsuit speaks for itself". You can read the whole thing here, which I highly recommend. Please, I beg of you, read the whole thing. Or at least as much of it as you can stomach. It's like if the Navy Seal copypasta went to Harvard. It reads like a teenager making their first edgy, overpowered OC for some kind of chess fanfic, where the world is against him but he triumphs nonetheless. I mean, there is a motherfucking narrative structure here. Sure, it's not a good one, but damn if they didn't commit.

Regardless of if you think Hans cheated, his legal case is nonexistent. All parties involved -- even Hikaru -- were very careful in the wording they chose. They insinuate or accuse him of cheating online, but avoided anything that could be considered direct slander. In fact, many have since speculated this is why the Chess.com report was so purposefully noncommittal over OTB cheating: they knew he'd take them to court, and only wanted to make airtight claims. Funny enough, although the lawsuit spends a lot of time talking about the report, they skip over the emails in which Hans confesses.

Also, Professor Ken Regan? The guy who the filing cites as "the world’s foremost expert on cheating in chess"? The guy they claim disproved all of the claims against Hans in the report? Yeah, he's one of the guys who wrote the report, and is extremely pissed off about them claiming his support.

Stalemate

If one side or the other emerges from the conflict with some material gain, it will generally be possible to force a mate in the end-game, whilst if both sides have succeeded by careful play to preserve equality of material, a draw will generally ensue.

---

Sadly, there is no earth-shattering conclusion to all this. Magnus didn't hack into Hans's anal beads and crank them up to max when he was on live TV. Hans never managed to destroy Magnus with facts and logic. Chess.com and Hikaru both filed for dismissal in the lawsuit, and while it may drag on for a long time, there is absolutely zero chance Hans will win it.

FIDE is still investigating the allegations, but it is going to be an extremely long process, and one unlikely to produce significant results. They require a 99% accuracy result to convict someone of cheating (barring physical or eyewitness evidence). They're pretty anal about this, and are notorious tightasses. Given that analysis by the best experts in the world has utterly failed to find anything so far, I doubt that Magnus's claims will pay off.

In contrast, the Chess.com report is airtight, and pretty much shut down any complaints in that area, as well as discrediting Hans's word. He still has some diehard supporters, but few people dispute the fact that he cheated online.

I don't think there's any party that came out of this experience with their reputation unscathed. Magnus is still widely popular, but more and more people have grown to dislike how he handled the situation, and doubt is cast on his accusations. Meanwhile, Hans's fate is far harsher. Few people still like him, and he has become more of a running joke than a serious contender. The common sentiment seems to be that even if Hans wasn't guilty of the exact thing Magnus accused him of, he was still a cheater and won't be missed. There's a heavy sense of karma around it.

It's more than a little Shakespearean: Hans had a very solid argument, and could have attracted a lot of sympathy. He was accused of OTB cheating without evidence, and did suffer because of Magnus publicly blacklisting him. If he'd stuck to that story, and avoided shitslinging, his reputation would have remained intact, and Chess.com never would have released their report. Hans has an aggressive style of play, and it appears that translates over into his real life as well. Ultimately, he is to blame for his own downfall. Worst of all for him, he's not just remembered for the cheating he did -- he is forever immortalized as "the butt plug guy". An eternal joke.

Both players have continued their professional careers. But given that Hans was given an extra thorough ass-scanning at security, it seems that people are unlikely to forget. People are left with the unanswerable question:

Did Hans cheat against Magnus?

At the end of it all, this is the question we're left with. We know that he cheated online, that's undeniable. So he was certainly willing to do so. But none of the methods he used online would work in person.

The anal beads theory is obviously ridiculous (probably). However, there have been several instances of people sneaking in communication devices, or finding other ways to get around anti-cheating methods.

Hans has pointed to the fact that he has been scanned for devices at all games he has played in since as proof. The issue is that... it's not really proof at all. All it proves is that he's not cheating in the present, which, given that the eyes of the world are on him, just proves that he's not a complete moron. No one doubts he's good enough to play very well on his own against similar or lesser players. The question is if he cheated against Magnus, which can't be retroactively disproven.

However, Magnus is also left without any way to prove his claims. Analysis has failed to provide any significant evidence of cheating, meaning that he'd have to find proof of the method Niemann used, or get an actual confession from Hans, both of which seem unlikely to ever happen. At this point, the only things Magnus has are speculation and circumstantial evidence.

One theory suggests that Magnus had heard the cheating rumors about Hans before their game (something Magnus confirmed). As mentioned, chess is a highly mental game, and there is a noted phenomenon where players are worse when they think their opponent has a bot (they often doubt themselves, or are distracted by speculation). This may have given Hans the edge he needed for a legal victory.

I'll confess to some bias here. Obviously, I don't like Hans as a person (I doubt anyone really does). And I'll admit, I wanted to believe he cheated. But I also have to admit that, at least against Magnus, the evidence seems to be on his side. In the end, I guess the chess skill was inside Hans all along. Deep, deep inside him.

After all that, I guess there's just one thing you can say: Holy hell.

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).

If I had a nickel for every time Wonder Woman launched a fascist state and took over the world, I'd have two nickels. Wait, no, there were the Justice Lords, so I'd have three. Oh, and the vampires, so four. Flashpoint also counts, so five. And I guess DCeased half counts, since she was a zombie dictator? Wait, there was also that time she became a Nazi after Hitler won...

OK, so I'd have a lot of nickels. Maybe Batman has been making contingency plans for the wrong friend.

But forget all those, because this time is special. Fascist Wonder Woman variants are a dime a dozen, but this particular one was sexy. Which apparently made it all OK, and her dictatorship was framed as a complete positive.

As per usual, I've included various TL;DRs in bold throughout in case (for some weird reason) you don't want to her about how Amazons conquered the world via hogtie. If you want to have extra fun, take a shot every time you see the phrase "submit to loving authority".

(You may have read this writeup before when I posted it in the scuffles thread a while back, because it didn't fit the requirements for a full post. I then read the rules, and realized I was a dumbass and that it did fit the rules. So, here we are.)

It takes one to Earth One

The Earth One concept was pretty simple: Streamlined, revamped versions of classic characters, given a few new twists, kinda like how Batman movies “start from the beginning” every few years with the basic stuff that everyone knows. It was a pretty clear attempt to copy the success of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, with one major change: instead of being long running comic series, they’d be full graphic novels, written and illustrated by some of the best in the business. The obvious problem with that was that the best writers and illustrators needed a lot of time to make a full book, especially given that they had a full time job with other series in the meantime. That meant that the series has been going for twelve years, with only thirteen books released over that time, and certain characters having four to six year gaps in between each graphic novel. However, the comics were a success. Not a massive goldmine like Ultimate comics, but they all had pretty solid sales, and got high critical reviews. Turns out, giving skilled writers the time and space they need to achieve their vision produces some pretty good content. Who woulda thunk?

And then along came Morrison

Grant Morrison is one of the most successful and respected writers in comics today, known for taking on more difficult or philosophical narratives. They were placed in charge of Wonder Woman’s Earth One story, which came out several years after Batman’s and Superman’s. The first graphic novel was pretty much what people expected from Earth One: similar story with some fun new twists. Diana was canonically bi with a girlfriend now, fulfilling years of coding and hinting (also, all Amazons are super duper constantly gay), as well as being the offspring of a rape by Hercules (rather than a child of Zeus). She also got a relatively regular body, with more time being spent drawing her muscles than her boobs, so that was nice. Overall, it brought back a lot of the classic Golden Age version of Wonder Woman, like the frequent bondage (SFW) and weird ideas of what 1950s men thought feminism was, but in general, it was a good comic.

Side note, which is kind of disconnected but is too bizarre not to share: Morrison explained in an interview that

Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane is now shaped like a vagina, it’s the most incredible thing. It opens up in the back and it has a little clitoris hood, everything is a female-based design. It’s all based on shells and natural stuff.

Honestly? Hell yeah. Pussy plane it is.

The real issues wouldn’t start until the second book, and would culminate in the third. Although the publishers of DC repeatedly hammered home the idea that Earth One comics would never cross over or impact one another, Grant Morrison stated they felt such a crossover was “inevitable”. That opposing idea may be partly behind the drama that unfolded next. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read all this, the best way to sum it all up is a quote from a review of it:

“Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 3" is literally the phrase "I want Wonder Woman to step on me" extended into an entire book.

TL;DR: Earth One was a series about classic DC heroes reimagined in a more modern world. It was never a smash hit, but maintains a steady popularity. Grant Morrison was in charge of Wonder Woman's Earth One version, and took her back to her 1940s roots.

The Plot (or lack thereof)

You can feel free to skip ahead past all this if you don't have the time or inclination to read. However, I highly recommend you do. Partly because it'll help you understand how truly bizarre this was, and partly because I must free myself of the curse of this knowledge by passing it on to another. And remember: no matter how crazy or wild this may sound, this recap is somehow less bizarre than the actual comic.

Wonder Woman Deuce (Both the number and quality)

The second books started off a bit weird, with Nazis invading Paradise Island, home of the Amazons. And they were lead by a weird sexy Nazi girl because of course they were. Surprising no one, the heavily militarized Amazons kick their asses using orgasm guns, and Queen Hippolyta told them that they would be taken to the “Space Transformer” where

They will be transported to Aphrodite’s world where Queen Desira and her butterfly-winged Venus Girls wait to purge them of their need for conflict. They will be taught to submit to loving authority. They will learn to embrace peace and obedience. They will be as happy as men can be.

Yes, that is a real, unedited quote. It was revealed that apparently, the Amazons had a magic butterfly black ops site where they’d be brainwashed. Not the most… ethical concept, but hey, it’s Nazis, who gives a fuck. Sexy Nazi girl then tries to take on Hippolyta, but has her entire body weakened by Hippolyta’s… aura of control? I guess? Hippolyta then gives her a magic girdle that encourages obedience, causing her to renounce Nazism, and tells her

If you truly long to be a slave to the ideas of others, well… we can find you a loving mistress to explore your desires in a healthier context.

Remember that thing about BDSM subtext from the first one? Yeah, it wasn’t really subtext anymore. Nazi lady (aka Paula) then developed an obsession with getting dominated by Diana. Remember that, because the thirsty Nazi submissive will be important later. (Sweet holy fuck above, what has my life come to? Why does this sentence exist?)

Oh, also, Wonder Woman’s pet kangaroo Jumpa was made canon, which automatically makes this the best comic of all time.

Speedrunning through the rest of the comic: Wonder Woman became a celebrity on Earth, pushing an idea of female empowerment (which included trans women because Wonder Woman is fucking based) and also encourage the submission of all men (because Wonder Woman is fucking based?). The whole thing came off as a bit “Achieve all your dreams by buying my book and following these 11 principles for life, but there were some decent messages involved.

However, Leon Zeiko (aka Dr. Psycho), the most cartoonishly sexist man to ever exist, was hired by the US government (and a guy called Maxwell Lord) to seduce Diana and take her down. The government was threatened by the military and technological superiority of the Amazons, and wanted to take them out, or seize their knowledge.

Psycho pretends to be a harmless negotiator who Diana saves, and slowly seduces and draws her in, playing up how weak and helpless he is before her, before slowly starting to challenge her ideas. Some of his points are genuinely good (like how a society revolving around an ultimate authority using mind control and eugenics is a tad evil), which are immediately made meaningless by the uber sexism he then reveals in inner monologue or to the military. To get a general picture of how it went:

Psycho: Diana, you have to understand that people are going to be afraid of a bulletproof superhuman wielding a magic sword who says she's going to tear down their society. Just... take it a little slower. Also, maybe don't kill government officials.

Psycho's inner monologue two seconds later: Foolish female, as all women are. She will be a slave to me, because that's what women should be. Consent is meaningless. I'm the bad guy.

With the military, Maxwell Lord builds the totally-not-Iron-Man, aka the Armed Response Environment Suits (get it? It’s like Ares, but it’s modern and related to the military industrial complex. Subtlety of a brick.)

Also, his Dr. Psycho villain name is revealed to be his username on their version of 4chan where he posts misogynistic Andrew Tate style rants. Honestly, as much as I hate most attempts to “modernize” comics, this is absolute gold and should always be canon.

Psycho then somehow proves immune to the lasso of truth, lying to Diana and turning her against Steve Trevor and her girlfriend. He then manages to lasso her and touch her creepily while she’s tied up. Surely that straight up sexual assault will impact Diana later, right? Believe it or not, no, it's just kinda forgotten. Also, he mind controls her, because he can do that I guess. Mind control Diana punched out Steve Trevor, and called her mom Hippolyta, who gave some vague shit about Diana being a weapon and her own impending death. Also, Nazi super lady was drawing swastikas everywhere, but I’m sure that won’t lead to anything.

The swastikas everywhere lead to something. Shocker.

Two seconds later, the Nazi girl confirms her mind control was activated via radio by Maxwell Lord and kills Hippolyta. Also, Hippolyta spends half her death talking about how “all is proceeding as planned”, which will definitely not lead to anything.

Mind controlled Diana gives a speech about needing to overthrow the world of men, giving Lord the power he needs to effectively launch a coup. Diana breaks out of it, her girlfriend beats Psycho’s head in, and Diana beats Nazi girl, who reveals the whole thing was because she was super turned on by the idea of Diana enslaving all men, and wanted to kick start that by killing her mom. Psycho is sent to the magic butterfly brainwashing dimension, and Diana declares war on the world of men.

It’s good to note that this was a first for Earth One books. They’d had continued plots across books before, but generally, each story could be read on its own (given that it could be years before the next one, and they were never 100% sure if they’d get to keep writing). So a big cliffhanger and completely unresolved story were very new.

TL;DR for the second book: Lots and lots of BDSM stuff happened. Diana got dominated by a super sexist guy and used to start a war, and her mom got killed by a Nazi submissive. Diana then beat the everloving shit out of everyone, and prepared to do the one thing that the Nazi girl wanted.

​

The Queen is dead! Long live the totalitarian state!

The third book kicks off with a utopia called Harmonia set a thousand years in the future, with “Diana Day'' celebrations preparing. The day celebrates the end of all patriarchy, and women taking charge. Also, every man shown in it is basically what Fox News anchors think gay men look like. A hooded speaker steps up to recite their history, of how they took power.

In the past, Diana cremates her mother, then goes to get advice from her butterfly mind control aunt, who tells her that

Long, long ago we tamed the beast in man. Here, as you’ve seen, our men are pampered and subdued creatures. Domesticated, content with their privileged lives, their all-consuming hobbies … perfect submission to a loving authority.

It’s basically a Tucker Carlson/Jordan Peterson speech about masculinity, but framed as a positive. Diana is then shown the imprisoned and tormented Dr. Psycho who tells her that her black ops brainwashing island is why everyone feared the Amazons, which… honestly, fair. Again, you really hate to agree with the guy, but they keep having him make perfectly reasonable statements in between all the insane sexism.

The Amazons then set out to recruit allies in the war, revealing that their entire cavalry rides kangaroos, which makes all other issues with the comic meaningless, because it’s the best thing ever. The leader of the rebel Amazons, Artemis, points out that a monarchy is probably no longer relevant, that the war is Diana’s own fault, and that Wonder Woman’s anti-violence stance doesn’t fit much for a person walking around with a sword and massive army. Aaaaand then she goes off the rails and starts talking about killing all men. Because Kirby forbid we have a single reasonable person in this story. Diana then defeats Artemis through the power of BDSM and making out, and gains her alliance.

Also, the Nazi girl is there too, and she’s super chill now guys. Because they believe pollution is worthy of death, but an ethnic cleansing is just quirky.

The battle of the sexes

Maxwell Lord then launches all of the ARES suits, and reveals that he is Ares! Whoa! Who could have guessed. He then has all the women protesting violently attacked and imprisoned, all while repeatedly mentioning “fake news”, “deep fake liberal media”, and all kinds of other political commentary with the subtlety and maturity of a brick through a window.

Then comes the massive battle. Mechanized suits of ultimate war against ancient Greek super soldiers. A devastating battle ensues, neck and neck with neither side having a clear advantage. A vicious struggle for their home, their people, the whole world, a story that had been built up since years ago–

Oh. It’s over in like two seconds. The Amazons realize the suits are piloted by remote control and unleash their full power, with Diana destroying nearly half personally. No Amazons died, because they have insta-heal ray guns.

The world is then 100% on Wonder Woman’s side because sure, I guess America is the only country that exists. She offers complete liberation and free shit for all women. On a side note, she mentions “the women of Lysistrata”, which enrages the classicist in me. Lysistrata wasn’t a place, it was the name of the play. It felt like they googled “Greek women stuff”, and just included it without reading the full Wikipedia entry.

Oh, we're still going? There's more "plot"?

Diana then goes on a spirit quest to Hades in order to get her mom back, which immediately fails. She almost dies, but Steve Trevor saves her. They kiss (which ruins the fucking point about this version of them having mutual respect instead of romance), and then he dies for some reason. They can’t use any of their magic healing on him because… unexplained reasons. I'm gonna be honest here, it felt like Morrison realized the day before the book was due that they needed five or six extra pages to get paid and went "Shit, shit, shit, uhhhhhh... people tell her not to go to Hades, she goes to Hades, she immediately fails".

Ares then sends a second, bigger robot, which lasts about five seconds longer, and he dies in the process. Diana reveals their island is actually a flying island, and goes forth to conquer the whole world, and bring them into submission to a loving authority (there it is again). Diana goes full dommy mommy on the world, and women seize power. There’s one mention of mind controlling half the population being “problematic”, and it’s never questioned again.

Remember that initial framing device, of the future utopia? It cuts in and out, showing a “manly party terrorist” coming into the speech with a suicide bomb, talking about how the Amazon takeover and control was morally wrong. He then talks about how the superior male sex should take over again, because there can’t be a single fucking rational person in this comic. He fails, because “You just can’t get good bomb parts in a utopia”, and is arrested by the “love police” to be taken to “reformation island”. He makes very valid points about how mind control is basically slavery, and how a matriarchy isn't much better than a patriarchy, but he's ugly and cowardly, so he's wrong. It basically gets reduced to "Nice argument, but I have drawn myself as the chad and you as the soyjak"

Also, Steve Trevor is alive again? There's no explanation for how the guy they specifically said could never be brought back to life got brought back to life. It ends with Diana showing that she’d used her mother’s indestructible heart with clay to sculpt herself a mother-daughter hybrid, because why not at this point?

TL;DR: Wonder Woman kicks the entire world's ass with the power of love and BDSM. Steve Trevor dies (but not really), Hippolyta dies (but only partially), and the entire world becomes a utopia ruled by women who have fucked men into submission.

Even more TL;DR: It's 1984 with pegging.

So, what the fuck did I just read?

William Marston, eat your heart out

Marston was the original writer for Wonder Woman, and Morrison heavily drew on his views while writing Earth One. As most people have pointed out, the entire Earth One debacle is basically what would happen if DC editorial hadn't stopped Marston from letting Wonder Woman conquer the world.

Marston's views on women and gender relations... exist. They certainly are things that a person believed. This would usually be the point where I talk about how the 1940s man had some really dated views on women, but Marston's views are genuinely bizarre enough to exist in a vacuum.

He was a pop psychologist (and inventor of the lie detector), who came up with a theory about human nature and sexuality based on studies with his wife and their polyamorous partner called DISC (Dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance). His wife and their mutual girlfriend were also a massive driving force behind Wonder Woman, and their theories were heavily influential on her and the Amazon society, as you can see here. Remember that "submission to loving authority" quote from earlier? Yeah, that was a direct quote from him.

It'd take way too long to get into his views, but the very short version is: Some people are submissive, some are dominant. Society would be super-duper cool if all the submissive people just realized that the dominant people were right, and let themselves get tied up. To his credit, he acknowledges women are every bit as capable of being dominant as men, and that men can (and should) submit to ~~ferocious pegging~~ loving authority.

OK, but why?

The fact that Grant Morrison chose to address Marston's beliefs shouldn't be all that surprising in retrospect. They have a history of taking weird elements from decades old comics and experimenting with them. The weird part is that... there's no "Morrison twist". There's no statement on it, no parody of Marston's values, no critique of 70 year old pseudo-science which has been widely discredited, and is very dubious on consent. It's just "Hey, remember this shite? It's right fuckin' weird mate."

In an interview, Morrison would say that

It wasn’t even so much about trying to be timely. It was about trying to honor Marston’s original vision, and saying, ‘What would this really be like?’ The Wonder Woman: Earth One books are very much set in a contemporary, believable world. The simplicity here is about what would happen if Marston’s ideas were taken seriously, and some of those are very strange ideas.

Ok, yeah, but why? "The guy obsessed with bondage wanted everyone to be in bondage" isn't exactly a surprising twist. Not to mention, again, Marston's views on sexual consent really aren't great. People have also pointed out that choosing to make Steve Trevor a black American, then having Diana lecture him on how him being bound and submissive is the rightful order has some really fucking messed up implications. Finally, there's no mention of what happened to gay or asexual people. Again, while it probably wasn't intentional "gay men get sent to a camp where they're 'fixed' and are sexually submissive to women" has some... troubling implications.

Personally, my thought is that somebody snuck LSD into their lunch for months, but we’ll never really know.

(It’s also more than a little ironic that an author who is proudly and openly nonbinary created a future divided squarely between men and women, with no mention of what happened to everybody else).

TL;DR: William Marston, Wonder Woman's original creator had a bunch of views on sexuality and dominance that he included in his comics, which Morrison then picked up. However, many of those concepts are deeply fucked up, and Morrison plays them entirely straight with no real critique. The only guy who questions them is the uber-sexist who gets mocked and basically raped.

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Wait, why don't people hate this?

I find it truly, utterly, and deeply hilarious that all the Gamergate and Comicsgate people who have been whining about "muh women taking over" have apparently all ignored the comic which has literal feminazis in it. There is a woman. Wearing swastikas. Who says all men must be conquered. And the edgelord crowd just kinda... ignored it.

As for the rest of fans, while a decent number of people pointed out the myriad weird shit involved, everyone else... well, it's Wonder Woman in high heels stepping on you and telling you to put on the leash and submit. It checks a lot of boxes.

And, to be fair, it had some absolutely gorgeous artwork and fight scenes, so you could just kinda skim over the pretty pictures and purposefully block out all the weird shit in the speech bubbles. There's also a decent number of people who think that Morrison did a good job exploring Marston's ideas. As you may have noticed (although it was subtle), I strongly disagree with that, but to each their own.

Finally, there are the fans who just went "Man, this is an absolutely batshit kinkfest with kangaroo armies and sororities undermining the government, hell yeah". Honestly, nothing but respect for those people. DC can often wallow in grimdark and grit, so it's nice to get a bright and fun comic that revels in the weirdness of the medium.

Goodbye Earth One

This also functionally may very well end the entire Earth One line. Green Lantern could continue in space, and they managed to squeak out the third Batman a few months later (because it was already 99% done, and they just said it was set a little while before Wonder Woman). The issue is pretty obvious: if Wonder Woman established a global utopia free of crime and struggle, there’s really nothing for anyone else to do. Gotham is a lot less dark and gritty for Batman when the Riddler is too busy putting on his catboy costume to rob a bank.

They may decide to go the same route as before, and just retcon that the Wonder Woman story takes place years after everyone else’s stories, but the future is left uncertain. The creators for Batman Earth One mentioned that they thought they were continuing the story, and had plans for the future. In a particularly shitty move, DC didn't tell them that the Batman series was canceled until after the third book was released, which may spell the end for the whole series. They had also been planning an Earth One Aquaman book, but insiders have revealed that it was most likely scrapped and repurposed for other comics. DC is keeping quiet on it, and is claiming they'll release the same Flash book they've been promising for years, but they may use Wonder Woman as an excuse to end the line.

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So, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to have a successful authoritarian state, just make all its rulers hot dominant women in speedos and people will be cool with it.

Edit: I can't believe that I almost forgot the best part of it all. This was Morrison's last comic with DC. After decades of working there, Morrison agreed to make one final comic... then went "Hey, Diana fucks now, deal with it", dropped the mic, and left.

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Other comic writeups

Well, that was certainly one of the more bizarre things I've covered. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to wash my brain in bleach. If you liked this writeup, you may want to check out the rest of the series on superhero comics:

Ultimatum

New 52's Red Hood and the Outlaws

Chuck Dixon

Batman's Wedding

The Hank Pym slap

Or, if you want to read some writeups about newspaper comic strips

Chickweed Lane

Stephan Pastis's Divorce

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).

If you’ve ever watched high-level poker on TV, you’ve probably seen plenty of bad beats. A pro player makes all the right moves only to lose to the river card. An amateur makes a dumb move that winds up netting him/her millions. Most pros accept this as a feature of the game, as the element of randomness leads to some bad luck once in a while. But last year featured a hand so strange, so outside the norm that it drew legitimate suspicion of foul play. And nobody could have predicted the wild rabbit-hole this scandal would take us down…

The scene? Hustler Casino, a popular poker hotspot in Southern California known for its high-stakes play. The casino also hosts its own live streams on YouTube, with tens of thousands of live viewers tuning in nightly to see players at the big money tables. Most of the players that appear on these streams are amateurs with deep pockets, but they also manage to draw some big pro names like Phil Ivey, Doug Polk, and Tom Dwan for their games. The casino therefore has a strong reputation among the pros and maintains relationships with these players to ensure they keep coming back.

On September 29, Hustler Casino Live hosted a cash game featuring a pro regular, Garrett Adelstein, widely known as one of the best cash players in the world – and one of the worst Survivor players, but that’s neither here nor there. He was doing fairly well against the table full of amateurs, including Robbi Jade Lew, an LA local with no prior high-level cash winnings who only started playing poker seriously during the pandemic. There was another amateur player by the name of Jacob “Rip” Chavez playing at the table, a former boxing trainer for Jake Paul, who will also become significant later.

The hand

Here is the now-infamous hand if you want to watch it in its entirety. Garrett is dealt 8-7 of clubs, a solid hand with a lot of flop potential, while Robbi has J-4 offsuit, a pretty garbage hand that you should usually fold. But Robbi has good position on Garrett and clearly wants to try something tricky, so she calls his raise and the two of them go to the flop.

The flop comes 10h10c9c, giving Garrett a straight flush draw, meaning he’s one card away from the best possible hand in poker but currently has nothing. He makes a small bet, and Robbi calls – strange, but so far not super suspicious.

The turn card is a 3h, a blank for both players. Garrett again bets small, Robbi makes a small raise to try and scare him away, and Garrett decides to go all-in for roughly $150,000 (a common play for strong draws like his to scare away all but the best of holdings). At this point Robbi still has nothing and has no choice but to fold. But inexplicably to everyone (including the commentators), she goes deep into the tank, thinking for several minutes and even wasting a time chip to keep thinking, before she calls!

The river turns up no help for Garrett, and he knows he’s beat. They turn over their hands, and Garrett is absolutely shocked at her call. The table is amazed at her successful “hero call” and compliments Robbi on her big win, and she engages Garrett in some light trash talk, but Garrett looks like he thinks something is very suspicious about her call and betting patterns.

A quick aside on ranges (technical poker speak here). In a situation like Robbi’s where you are considering a hero call, you have to assign a “range” of possible hands that Garrett could be representing with an all-in. By making the call, Robbi clearly had him on either a bluff or a draw. But strangely, several bluffs or draws STILL would have beaten her, including Ax, Kx, Qx, J8, or any pair. (You can even hear her say “I thought you had Ace high” at 5:27, which is a hand that would have beaten her.) Garrett happened to have the one exact hand combination she could beat within that range, and EVEN THEN she was barely 50-50 to win on the river as Garrett could still win with any club, Jack, 8, 7, or 6. Whether you think she was cheating or not, make no mistake: it was an objectively terrible call on all metrics.

Immediate aftermath and reactions

Garrett stepped away from the table after this hand and spoke to one of the stream managers off-camera. A few minutes later, Robbi was called away from the table to talk with both Garrett and this manager about the hand. As Garrett recounted in a statement after the fact, he questioned her directly about her play logic and shared his suspicions that she had somehow unfairly won the hand via third-party communication with somebody who knew the hole cards. Part 2 here. Robbi eventually offered to pay Garrett back the money she had won from him in the hand, and he accepted, interpreting this as an admission of guilt from her and an attempt to make the situation go away.

Hours later, Robbi fired back at Garrett, saying that she won the hand fair and square by reading him correctly. She also gave a slightly different version of events during their off-camera discussion, claiming that Garrett “cornered and threatened” her until she offered to pay him back. Robbi also appeared on Joe Ingram’s live stream later that night (at roughly the 6hr31m mark) to further defend herself, saying that she paid Garrett back not as an admission of guilt but as a peace offering to get him back to the table.

Interestingly, after Robbi gave Garrett his money back, the player known as Rip got up from the table and yelled at Garrett for pressuring her into it. Several other players also expressed disgust at Garrett’s behavior, but Rip in particular seemed to have a personal stake in the matter, and he could later be seen on stream talking privately with Robbi, indicating that the two had more than a passing relationship with one another. And indeed, earlier in the live stream, Robbi had mentioned that she and Rip were “business partners.” Had Rip staked her in this game, and was he upset that her paying Garrett meant that his cut of her profits would be lower?

Word of this incredible hand spread like wildfire through the poker community in the coming days, and the clip of Robbi beating Garrett went viral online. Poker pros were initially split on the scandal. Several pros like Daniel Negreanu, Ronnie Bardah, Melanie Weisner, Faraz Jaka, Allen Kessler and Liv Boeree came to Robbi’s defense, arguing that she may have just been caught up in the moment and made a bad play that happened to work out. Negreanu also argued that her paying Garrett off afterwards is not necessarily an admission of guilt, but perhaps just a way of avoiding conflict and settling the matter without further drama. Others like Shaun Deeb, Eric Froehlich, Tom Dwan and Doug Polk seemed fairly confident that something was fishy and sided with Garrett.

Hustler investigates

It should be noted that there was another infamous case in 2019 of a casino employee colluding with a player to cheat on live streamed games, and in that instance the casino’s response was to shut down the stream forever and go radio silent on the matter, providing zero closure for the fans and player base. However, Hustler Casino wanted to handle things differently, as the co-founders of the live stream believed in the integrity of the product and wanted to uncover the full truth. They began to review the footage and hired a third-party firm to conduct an internal investigation of the incident.

On October 6, Hustler released a statement updating fans on the investigation, and they revealed a shocking discovery made during their review of the tapes. At one point during the game, while Robbi was away from the table, a Hustler employee by the name of Bryan Sagbigsal walked up and stole $15,000 worth chips from her stack without anyone noticing. The casino fired Bryan and brought the matter to the attention of the local Gardena Police Department, who approached Robbi and asked her if she wanted to file charges against Bryan, but she declined.

In the hours and days following this revelation, online sleuths were quick to draw connections between Bryan and the allegedly cheated hand. For one thing, Bryan had tweeted in support of the production crew shortly after the hand went viral (later deleting his entire account after his theft was made public). Robbi put out a statement denying knowledge of who Bryan was when the police contacted her, but it was later uncovered that Robbi and Bryan followed each other on Twitter, seemingly contradicting that statement.

Doug Polk was permitted backstage access to Hustler during the investigation, and he discovered that Bryan’s desk was located directly in front of the hole card displays during live streams and that a file cabinet had recently been moved right next to the desk, as though to shield himself from view of the other employees. A couple days later during a separate live stream, Bryan was also caught on camera approaching the table and handing something to a different player; it was later revealed to be poker chips totaling $10,000 that he owed the player. Wonder where he got the money to pay him back? And how many different players did Bryan have financial ties to, exactly??

On October 7, Garrett posted a lengthy report on the TwoPlusTwo poker forums, outlining every bit of potential evidence he had that there was foul play involved. He concluded that Robbi was likely part of a (minimum) three-person cheating operation involving Rip, Bryan the employee, and potentially another player at the table by the name of Nik Airball, based on their suspicious on-camera behavior and previously-undisclosed financial ties to one another.

Robbi released her own statement hours later, saying that Garrett’s report was “full of inaccuracies and conjecture” and continuing to maintain her innocence. She also submitted herself to a lie detector test in an effort to further prove her innocence. Nik Airball preempted the report with a statement of his own and explained why he loaned Rip $175k to play in the now-infamous cash game. On October 9, a user claiming to be Bryan Sagbigsal made a post on Two Plus Two poker forums refuting Garrett’s cheating claims and affirming his own innocence in the scandal.

Things get really, really weird

At this point in the investigation, the poker community was HEAVILY invested in the outcome and wild speculation abounded. Many felt that a player of Garrett’s caliber would never risk his reputation with such accusations without good cause. Crazy theories were thrown about regarding possible cheating methods, including vibrating jewelry (sound familiar, chess fans?), the dealer giving odd hand signals and Jake Paul fight tickets being used as bribery for collusion. Poker pros were making parlay bets with one another on who was involved and a bounty for information was created, which eventually grew to over $200,000 for anyone who came clean about their role in the supposed cheating ring.

The LA Times wrote an article telling Robbi’s story, which only intensified the scrutiny on her. The same Times reporter later tracked down Sagbigsal to his girlfriend’s family’s house and he refused to give a statement (despite supposedly posting on the 2+2 forums the day before).

Robbi’s own behavior following the Hustler report was also scrutinized. Some questioned the legitimacy of the lie detector test, which was conducted by a shady bail bond business. The LA Times also disputed her prior claim that she had submitted her phone records to them when they never received any such thing. Many questioned why she had initially failed to file charges against Sagbigsal but later changed her mind when confronted about it. There was even speculation that Robbi had faked DM’s that Bryan allegedly sent her to try and distance herself further from him and explain her apathy to her stolen chips.

Hustler’s conclusion

The memes and wild conspiracy theories were truly out of control by this point. The eclectic cast of characters and downright absurd allegations felt akin to a Netflix melodrama, and it seemed impossible that things would resolve without some explosive revelations coming to light. But unfortunately, nothing ever did, and slowly but surely, interest in the investigation waned as it became clear no cheating ring was about to be uncovered.

Weeks later, on December 14, Hustler Casino completed their investigation and published their findings. They concluded that, while cheating was theoretically possible in the hand, no evidence of wrongdoing had been found, either by production staff or the private investigation firm hired for the task. The report refuted several of the more outlandish cheating theories, from the vibrating jewelry to the hacked RFID card reader system. HCL also announced increased security measures for future live streams, including limited access to hole cards among production staff and requiring signed statements from all players that they are not financially affiliated with anyone else at the table.

Garrett responded to the report by praising the security changes but making no comment on the findings themselves. He has yet to return to a live stream since the incident (his wife just had a baby, to be fair), but said that he has “found peace” away from poker and is open to returning to Hustler or another stream in the near future. Robbi released her own statement to the LA Times, saying the results were “as she expected” and implying that further legal action would be taken on the matter in the future (which has yet to materialize).

So the controversy ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The poker community remains divided on the subject, but for now the Robbi naysayers have been quieted by the lack of evidence. Many still believe Garrett should have to apologize and/or return Robbi’s money before he is accepted back into the community, though that seems increasingly unlikely to happen by the day.

Meanwhile, the J4 hand has become the stuff of legend, and players frequently tweet at Robbi sharing their own success stories with the dubious hand. Robbi’s popularity has grown significantly throughout the incident, especially after the Hustler investigation cleared her and the massive bounty went unclaimed. We may never know if there was foul play in the infamous hand or not, but it remains one of the biggest scandals in the poker world in over a decade.

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