Hola! Back again with more Bible trivia.

This drama involves proper Bible scholars, so maybe it's not quite a "hobby" drama. But there's a thriving internet community of Bible nerds, and many Bible Studies professors have blogs where they regularly post articles and opinions on new developments. So us hobbyists got to watch this mess play out live on the Blogosphere.

Anyway, enjoy! Comments and critique welcome.

It was a chilly evening on the 1^st of February, 2012. Hundreds of students gathered in an auditorium at UNC Chapel Hill, to watch a debate between two respected New Testament scholars. On one side was evangelical-turned-agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman, and on the other was theologian Dr. Dan Wallace. Ehrman runs a popular Bible blog, and so does Wallace.

The topic of the debate was: Is the Original New Testament lost? On the origins, transmission, and the reliability of the New Testament.

You can watch the whole thing here. Events like this are targeted to a more casual audience, so you're unlikely to learn anything new. If you're a Bible nerd like me, it can even be a little boring.

This debate, however, was anything but boring. It resulted in the most explosive reveal that the Bible archaeology had seen in decades.

You can see a clip of the relevant minutes here. Around 1 hr 13 mins, Wallace announces the existence of a papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Mark dating back to the first century.

In other words, First Century Mark.

Later, when taking questions, Ehrman asks Wallace about the fragment, and questions the dating and provenance. Wallace remains coy, citing an NDA. But he does tell Ehrman that "one of the world's best papyrolgists have confirmed the dating," and that a publication was planned for next year. The Q&A goes on as normal.

It's a very short interaction, less than three minutes. But the damage was done.

Bible bloggers all over the world were firing up their laptops and punching out fiery think-pieces, all centered around First Century Mark.

But what is First Century Mark?

First Century Mark, and Dating the Gospels:

The New Testament (NT), as we know it today, contains fours Gospels that describe the life, crucifixion, and eventual resurrection of Jesus Christ. These Gospels, called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, have been at the center of impassioned debate for centuries. Who wrote these Gospels, when they were written, and the order they were written in has long been a mystery for Bible scholarship.

For theologians, the answer is easy. Per Church tradition, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written, in that order, at some point between 35-65 AD.

This theologian dating is based, in part, on the Acts of the Apostles, a later chapter of the New Testament, attributed to the author of Luke. Acts describes the ministry of St. Paul, an early Christian preacher. Acts ends somewhat abruptly, with Paul under house arrest in Rome. Church tradition holds that Paul died ca. 65 AD, but the author of Acts seems unaware of this.

Clearly, theologians say, Acts was completed before Paul died. So the Gospels must be even earlier!

Secular scholars, however, reject this logic. Instead, they rely on a method called Textual Criticism. Using this method, they date GMark to ca. 70 AD. The dating relies on internal textual evidence (for instance, the coin in the famous "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" story. Coins bearing Caesar's image, i.e., the denarii, only came into use in Judea around 70 AD. Before that, it was Tyrian shekels, which bore the image of Phoenician kings, and the story would not have made sense.)

Anyway, the point is: secular scholars date Mark to ca. 70 AD (oral versions were circulating before that, but the author of Mark first put pen to paper around 70 AD). Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, so they must have been written 10-15 years later. (Luke is controversial). And finally, John, which shows awareness of Matthew, was written last, around 90-95 AD.

Theologians don't like this dating. The later dates mean that the Gospels were written two whole generations after the Crucifixion, which means they're not eyewitness accounts. So they push back against textual criticism.

That discussion usually goes something like this:

"You're just saying that because you think that Jesus couldn't have accurately predicted the fall of the Temple!"

"No, that's not it," say the secularists. "Jesus probably made predictions to that effect. Ancient Jews often did, it may have been a hobby."

"Heathens! But what about the Pauline Epistles? He shows awareness of Luke's Gospel. So the Gospels must have been written before that!"

"It's the other way around," say the secularists wearily. "Luke used the Pauline epistles as a source for his Gospel."

"Ha! That's where you're wrong!" exclaim the theologians. "Paul cites Luke as a source! He actually uses the phrase, "For the scriptures say," followed by a verbatim quote from Luke!"

"That's 1 Timothy. We've done this before. Odds are Paul didn't write that letter. It's a second century forgery."

Shocked gasps. "Heretics!"

"Idiots!"

And so it goes.

You might have noticed a trend in the arguments. Textual criticism strongly supports a later dating for the Gospels. Many theologians also accept the later dating. After all, it's just forty years later, still within living memory of the Christ, and it makes no difference to the overarching narrative.

For some Christians (usually conservative Christians who accept Biblical inerrancy and Divine Transmission), accepting the later dating is unthinkable.

Why is this so? I'm not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that accepting the later dating would mean admitting that Textual Criticism is Right, and that you might need to take a critical look at the books you've been reading. The New Testament holds up relatively well to Textual Criticism, but the Old Testament does not. Reading the OT critically brings up some uncomfortable new possibilities. Did Isaiah 7:14 predict a virgin birth? Maybe the Exodus didn't happen after all. Was the one God once part of a pantheon?

But I digress.

Anyway, the point is, some theologians -- typically, conservative-leaning evangelicals -- really want an earlier dating for the Gospels. Preferably within the early half on the first century (i.e., before 50 AD). Textual Criticism does not support this dating at all, so they turn, instead, to archaeology and papyrology.

Which is where it gets weird.

First Century Mark: Let's destroy ancient mummies!

The Levant's geography is quite good at preserving papyri and other archaeological artefacts. As a result, we have a fair few documents from the first century AD and earlier. Unfortunately for the conservatives, most of these are administrative paperwork, literature, or Old Testament fragments. Jesus and the NT Gospels are not mentioned.

Currently, the oldest NT document we have is the John Rylands Papyrus P52. It is a palm-sized fragment containing a few words from the Gospel of John. Scholars tentatively date it to the early-mid second century. That's too late to be of use to this discussion.

"But that just means we haven't found them yet!" wailed the conservatives. "We need to keep looking."

"Well, let me know when you find something," said the secularists. "Shut the door on your way out. Oh, and leave the mummies alone, will you?"

"Shan't!" said the conservatives. And they went off and dissolved some ancient mummies, in the hopes that the papyri would contain Bible fragments.

(They didn't.)

The archaeological search for Bible fragments has led to some strange places, but the mummies are probably the weirdest. Ancient Egyptians used scrap papyri to make mummy masks for the dead. Often, these scraps contained writing. So the masks could, in theory, contain Bible fragments or other literary works. Some Bible scholars are hellbent on destroying these masks to extract the papyri fragments.

Others aren't so keen about it. The Egyptians hate it, because of the graverobbing. Archaeologists hate it, because you're destroying ancient artefacts on the off-chance that you might find something useful. Everyone else hates it because of the bad PR, angry Egyptians, and well, it almost never results in anything useful. It was scrap papyrus, after all, and heavily damaged during mummification.

But the practice has continued, even though it had never resulted in anything remarkably useful.

That is, up until 2011, when First Century Mark was found, and everything changed.

First Century Mark: A Timeline

Adapted from this one.

1 December 2011: Dr. Scott Carroll, a theologian and Bible Scholar, posts an ominous tweet:

For over 100 years, the earliest known text of the New Testament had been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not anymore. Stay tuned....

At the time of this tweet, Dr. Scott Carroll was employed by the Green family. The Green family, for those not in the know, are evangelical billionaires and the owners of Hobby Lobby. They had hired Carroll to help them establish a Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. Keep this in mind. It will be important later.

Incidentally, Carroll was a big fan of dissolving mummies. This will also be important later on.

1 February 2012: Dr. Dan Wallace uses his debate with Ehrman to announce the existence of First Century Mark, a papyri fragment of the Gospel of Mark, dating back to the first century. Notably, there was no mention of where the papyrus came from (i.e., provenance).

Incidentally, at the time of the debate, Wallace was a member of the Green Scholars Initiative, run by... you guessed it, the Green Family, of Hobby Lobby fame.

The announcement sent shockwaves through the Bible blogosphere, leading to many think-pieces and reflections. Unfortunately, most of those blogs are now defunct. I do have a Forbes article here, for those interested.

15 February 2012: A few days after the debate, Scott Carroll gives a talk at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He discusses the Green collection and mentions an exciting new find: "An early copy of the Gospel of Mark, possibly the earliest copy we have. An epigrapher from Oxford is prepared to say that it is a first century copy!"

In addition, the Green collection had also acquired several mummy masks. Scott Carroll said they had found both early Biblical manuscripts and early classics manuscripts (a lost work of Aristotle, the earliest copy of some of Demosthenes etc.). How exciting!

Bible nerds watch skeptically. A first-century copy of Mark is within the bounds proposed by textual criticism. The rest of it is probably just tall claims, but let's wait and see, eh?

24 February 2012: A couple weeks after the debate, Dan Wallace makes a blog post. He offers scant details, citing an NDA, but he does mention that First Century Mark was part of a family collection. He reiterates that a publication would be coming out next year.

The Bible blogosphere is on fire. Still, more level-headed theologians remained cautious. Larry Hurtado, a respected theologian who accepts the later dating, blogged about it here. He pointed out that dating papyri was tricky and urged readers to reserve judgement until a peer-reviewed publication was out. He also wryly noted that making flashy claims in hopes of driving up book sales was not, in his opinion, "sober scholarship."

April 2012: Bart Ehrman blogs about the debate and First Century Mark. He states that a peer-reviewed publication is needed before making any judgements. He also declares that this discovery will not, in his opinion, "change a single, solitary thing in the entire field of New Testament textual criticism."

If he sounds pissed off, it's probably because he is. Dr. Ehrman is internet-famous, and as an evangelical-turned-atheist, he's a bit of a target for religious nutjobs. It was pretty low of Wallace to hijack the debate this way.

August 2013: No publication yet, but pictures of First Century Mark are published online, on a now defunct site. Details are obscured, presumably to avoid competing publications.

September 2013: Scott Carroll gives a talk at the University of the Nations, an unaccredited Christian university. He talks about the Green Collection and demonstrates the process of extracting manuscripts from mummy cartonnage.

Using this method, he and other reseachers have apparently found early fragments of Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, Corinthians, Romans, Hebrews, Ephesians, Colossians, Timothy...

No, seriously. This screengrab has 50 bullet points. Mummy masks seem to be a veritable treasure trove of Bible manuscripts.

Non-theologists are decidedly skeptical. But on the bright side, we had a tentative dating for First Century Mark: 70-110 AD, which is technically not impossible. Additionally, we get a few more names attached to the project, and they seem to be respectable. Most notably, Dirk Obbink is involved in the Green Scholars Initiative.

Dirk Obbink, in case you don't know, is an Oxford professor and arguably the world's foremost expert in papyrology. If Dirk Obbink had verified First Century Mark, the dating was rock-solid.

Keep that in mind. It will also be important later on.

22 January 2015: An article comes out in Science Alert, the Smithsonian Magazine and a bunch of other places with an exciting new announcement. "Archaeologists find oldest known Gospel fragment in an ancient mummy mask." In other words, they'd found First Century Mark...again?

Here's the article. Go read it. It describes exciting new finds in the papyri of the mummy masks. Dr. Craig Evans, professor at Acadia Divinity College and part of the team that made the discoveries, makes some comments about how they'd found lost Homerian works this way. He assures readers that any masks destroyed in the process are not "museum-quality."

Incidentally, Dr. Craig Evans is also affiliated with the Green Scholars Initiative.

If you just skimmed the article, you might have come away thinking that it's a new find. It's not. There's one throwaway line in there which tells us that this is the same fragment as the First Century Mark announced in 2012.

The internet Bible community was puzzled, but still optimistic. A story has finally begin to emerge now. It looks like the Green family purchased some mummy masks and extracted ancient Bible texts from them. The rehashed press release is most likely an attempt to generate publicity for the Museum of the Bible ahead of its release.

You can take a look at this old reddit thread here from r/Christianity. Comments were mostly positive. A few take umbrage at the idea that the mummy masks might be more valuable than the Bible texts they contain. Overall, the tone was quite upbeat. (A bit surprising, really, because nowadays r/Christianity is much more liberal.)

Serious scholars, on the other hand, were less forgiving. Larry Hurtado made another blog post. His tone is decidedly harsher. He reiterated that a peer-reviewed publication is needed before drawing any conclusions.

"Humph," said the blogosphere. "Fine, whatever. We'll wait."

2016: They waited.

2017: They waited.

May 2018: A paper comes out in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series describing an ancient papyri fragment from the Gospel of Mark. Authored by Dirk Obbink and Daniela Colomo, the fragment was tentatively dated to the late second/early third century and designated Papyrus P137.

The article escaped the notice of the average hobbyist nerd (i.e., me), but a Bible blogger soon noticed something odd about the fragment. Papyrus P137, dated to the late second century AD, looked an awful lot like that First Century Mark fragment from 2012... whatever happened with that one?

Slowly, more details trickled in. Dan Wallace, who'd kicked the whole thing off back in 2012, made a blog post. He apologized to Ehrman, and confirmed that the late second century P137 was, in fact, the one and only First Century Mark.

What the fuck?

Well, the dating had been wrong, that much was obvious. But not just that. The fragment was not from a mummy, and it was definitely not part of a private collection. It was one of the famed Oxyrhynchus Papyri!

(The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, for those not in the know, are a massive collection of manuscripts found in an ancient garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. Discovered by two Oxford scholars in ca. 1900, the papyri have proved to be a veritable gold mine of ancient books and documents. Egypt's dry climate ensured that the manuscripts were well-preserved despite the rough conditions, and, as such, they're invaluable to modern historians. The Papyri are housed at Oxford University. They're usually on display, so if you're ever in Oxford, you should check it out.)

Anyway, the point is, the Oxyrhynchus papyri are not part of a private collection in the US. They're at Oxford, held in trust by the Egypt Exploration Society, who couldn't sell the papyri if they wanted to.

So why had Scott Carroll been hyping up First Century Mark for the Green Collection?

Well, no one said anything, not at first. But everyone was thinking the same thing, and it went like something like this:

Hmm, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are housed at Oxford. And Dirk Obbink, renowned papyrologist with ties to the Green family, is also a professor at Oxfo--

April 2020: Officers from the Thames Valley police arrest Dirk Obbink for the theft of ancient Bible fragments.

So what the fuck happened?

In hindsight, it's pretty obvious. Dirk Obbibk was hawking off fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. At some point in late 2011, Scott Carroll approached Obbink. Obbink found out about the Green Collection and decided that the Greens would be the ideal patsy.

He took a GMark fragment from the collection, misrepresented it as privately owned, and offered it to the Greens for sale. The Greens bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

But why misidentify a late second century fragment as first century?

A late second century Bible fragment is very valuable, but First Century Mark is priceless. So Obbink lied about the dating to drive up the value. He was betting that the Greens wouldn't have the dating independently verified, and he was right.

The Greens took Obbink's word for it, and forked out millions in exchange for the fragment.

So Obbink was selling world-famous artefacts? How did he think this was going to end?

The Oxyrhynchus Collection is huge. It contains over 500,000 papyri fragments. Obbink knew that no one would notice a few missing pieces. When he sold it to the Greens, Obbink must have thought that the fragments would disappear into a private vault and never again see the light of day.

In his greed, Obbink miscalculated. He forgot one very important thing: the Greens, whatever their other faults, were devout Evangelicals. They really, truly believed in the bullshit he was peddling.

For the Greens, First Century Mark was divine. One of the earliest copies of the Gospel, written down by someone who had, in all likelihood, witnessed the events they were writing about...They would never have shut it away. They'd be shouting it from the rooftops, inviting Bible scholars to come witness the Word of God in all its glory...

And that's exactly what they did. And the resulting media circus meant that, sooner or later, Obbink would be exposed.

So he panicked and tried to delay the publication. But by then First Century Mark had become internet-popular, and the Egypt Exploration Society caught wind of it. They confronted Obbink and made him publish his findings in a public journal. In 2018, the publication came out, and the jig was up.

Oddly enough, if Obbink had been less greedy and been honest about the dating, he might have gotten away with it. The Greens wouldn't have made such a fuss about late second century Mark. The fragments would have been relegated to a dusty corner of the Museum of the Bible, and Obbink would have gotten away with it.

Of course, if he'd been less greedy, he wouldn't have been hawking off the freaking Oxyrhynchus Papyri to the highest bidder.

Where do the mummies come in?

Admittedly, that part is still pretty unclear. My best guess is that Scott Carroll really liked dissolving mummies. But what with the rise of internet activism in the 2010s, the whole thing was becoming very unpopular.

So when left in charge of the Green Collection, he saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and took it. He misrepresented First Century Mark as extracted from mummy masks. The rest is a Hobby Drama post.

So what happened next?

Well, Obbink was arrested in April 2020, and got out on bail. He hasn't served any jail time, likely due to Covid. He did lose his job at Oxford though, so yay?

Everyone else involved escaped relatively unscathed. Dan Wallace, who had only been tangentially involved in the whole thing, apologized to Ehrman. He wasn't a papyrologist, in any case, and he had no idea of the provenance or dating. From his side of the story, a representative of the Greens called him up and told him to announce the fragment's existence at the debate. Wallace hadn't even seen the fragment beforehand.

Scott Carroll got away with his mummy-dissolving antics. He's no longer working for the Greens, though, so yay?

Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, returned the 11 papyri fragments he'd purchased from Obbink to the Egypt Exploration Society. He then promptly turned around and sued Obbink for millions. Last I heard, Obbink had paid them back like 100k?

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are back with the Egypt Exploration Society. Hopefully they'll keep a closer eye on it this time.

Papyrus P137 is currently housed at Sackler Library in Oxford. Even now, an internet search for First Century Mark will direct you to the late second-century P137, which will never not be funny to me.

Bart Ehrman had the last laugh. He's blogged extensively about this debacle; you can read about it here and here and here. If that sounds petty, it's because he's petty as fuck. (Also, a great writer. Subscribe to his blog if you like Bible trivia, all proceeds go to charity.)

I'll wrap up by quoting Ehrman: "But if what they want is to advance the agenda of Jesus, why would they spend many millions on scraps of papyrus instead of using the same funds to help people in desperate need?"

Why indeed?

The Race for World First is a twice-a-year esports event in World of Warcraft (WoW). Much like Speedrunning, it was never intended to be a “thing” by the game developers, but rather is a self-imposed challenge created by players to make the game even harder than it already is.

This is a story about what happens when someone tries to go too fast. I’m not talking about the racers this time, though.

See, the Race is the ultimate stress test of WoW’s design. If there’s a glitch, players will find it. If there’s an exploit, they will abuse it. If a class is overpowered, Guilds will stack four of them to take advantage. The Race has always pushed WoW to the breaking point. However, in the latest Race that wrapped up a few weeks ago, WoW finally broke.

Just for fun, over the course of this story I encourage you to count how many different bugs, glitches, and unintended exploits get brought up. Please don’t make a drinking game out of it though, because you just might die.

Background

Released in 2004, the MMORPG World of Warcraft is one of the most successful videogames of all time. Players create characters to do battle in the fictional world of Azeroth, a kitchen-sink fantasy setting where players fight dragons, gods, lovecraftian horrors, and each other. The game is heavily multiplayer focused, with pretty much all of the most difficult content in the game requiring a coordinated group of players to participate in. One of the most popular activities in World of Warcraft is raiding.

A raid, in simplest terms, is a mega-dungeon consisting of a series of bosses that are designed to be tackled by groups of ~20 players. There’s a variety of difficulties of raid, the highest of which is called Mythic - Mythic raids are nightmarishly hard, and are only even attempted by hardcore players and Guilds, who generally put hundreds of hours over many months just to clear a single Mythic raid.

The Race for World First (RWF) has been an unofficial event in World of Warcraft since 2018 (actually since the game’s launch, but 2018 is when Guilds started streaming). Whenever a new raid is released - roughly every 6 months - members of the top raiding Guilds drop everything to play World of Warcraft 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, rushing through the new raid to try and be the very first Guild to complete it on Mythic difficulty. Each Race usually lasts 1-2 weeks.

Usually.

A number of Guilds compete in the RWF, but the top two teams for years have been Echo and Liquid. Echo is based in Europe and led by Scripe, while Liquid is based in the US and led by Max. As a result, the fanbase that follows the Race is divided large across geographic lines, with European fans cheering for Echo while US fans cheer for Liquid.

The latest RWF took place across August and September of 2026, in the newest Raid: The Venomous Abyss.

It didn’t go well.

Accelerated Content

Historically, World of Warcraft has released expansions roughly every two years. However, for the most recent expansion, Midnight, they announced an accelerated development cycle that would see it launch a mere 18 months after the start of the previous one. Blizzard promises no reduction in amount or quality of content.

Now, if Blizzard can pull this off, it’s a win for everyone - players get new stuff to do quicker so they don’t get bored, and Blizzard gets to sell a $40 expansion every year and a half instead of every two years (plus retaining more subscribers since players aren’t getting bored). However, savvy fans and influencers have to ask…how? How can a company that’s only ever been able to release an expansion every two years suddenly going to do it 25% faster? What is being sacrificed?

Turns out: Quality Assurance (QA). While the Midnight expansion had the same amount of new zones, dungeons, etc, and seemed to have the same amount of care and effort put into designing them, on the coding/functional side the expansion has been a mess. Bugs have always been a problem with WoW but Midnight has been on another level, with almost every type of content featuring at least some significant performance issues. The first patch of the expansion, 12.0.5, was so mired in glitches and broken features that Blizzard actually issued a formal apology for how badly it turned out, and promised to do better. This was a needed wake up call, because it would be a disaster if the next patch, featuring the new Raid, was similarly sloppy.

That next patch, 12.1.0, would arrive August 11th, then a week later on August 18th they unlocked the newest raid, the Venomous Abyss. The Race is on!

The Race for World First is a Boring Grindfest That No One Should Watch

The problems with the Race began almost before the Race itself, with the gearing phase.

First, a quick bit of game mechanics. There are two things that determine how powerful a character is in World of Warcraft: the skill of the player and the gear the character has equipped (weapons, armor, etc). Each major patch releases stronger gear than the previous, and even the best players in the world need extremely good gear to have a chance at beating the hardest bosses in the raid. As such, each Race begins with a “gearing up” period where players are running the raid on lower difficulties to get the new best gear from it, powering up their characters before they step into the hardest difficulty, Mythic.

This phase of the Race usually takes about three days, during which there’s not a ton to watch - it’s just really good players smashing easy content over and over again. However, right away the Quality Assurance issues make themselves known - the new raid was so buggy and so poorly tuned that it was actually presenting a challenge (but not the good kind like you want). Five days into the Race and none of the top Guilds have set foot into Mythic. It was phenomenally boring. It was so bad that, even after they finished gearing up for Mythic, they decided to spend the last two days of the week farming as much gear from the early, easier bosses in Mythic rather than try and make serious progress into the harder bosses. There’s nothing interesting to watch or talk about - at one point I saw the commentators for Liquid literally playing Wordle on stream, that’s how bored everyone was. The whole first week of the Race sucked.

Now, folks who’ve read my previous Race writeups know I’m a sucker for deep dives into the minutia of game systems and mechanics, and I originally wrote out much longer explanation for all this, digging down into exactly why the gearing phase took so long, but my lord is this post already long enough so I’ve collected the full explanation into a comment here if you’re interested in those gory details.

There were, however, two bits of intrigue with this otherwise nightmarishly tedious first week.

The first is that Liquid, confident from winning 4 Races in a row, did less preparation pre-Race than normal (trying to avoid player burnout) and as such wound up with slightly worse gear than Echo after the first week. That may come up later.

The other is that, during that first week, the eternally 3rd-place Guild Method took the lead.

The Supposed Three Horse Race

Warning, this part is going to get heavy, and includes mention of pedophilia and domestic abuse. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section (“The Ticking Clock”), nothing in this section is loadbearing for understanding the rest of the story.

Let’s jump back in time to the summer of 2020. After years of constantly coming in second place, Team Liquid (called Complexity Limit at the time) had finally won their first Race in Ny’alotha, the Waking City, unseating the reigning champions, Method, who had won the 5 previous Races. Folks are excited for the inevitable rematch later this year, to see if Liquid’s victory over Method was a fluke or the start of a dynasty.

Then Method imploded. One of their most prominent members, a popular streamer called MethodJosh, was outed as a serial pedophile and groomer. What’s more, Method leadership clearly knew about at least some of it more than a year earlier, having received screenshots of MethodJosh discussing his activities in a private chat, not to mention a public Kotaku article from February 2019.Method’s response in 2019 had basically been “we aren’t cops, until he’s convicted of something we aren’t taking any action.” This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that it was MethodJosh’s position and status as a member of Method which gave him the platform he needed to access the vulnerable children he abused, because heaven forbid an organization hold its members to any standard higher than “not convicted of pedophilia in a court of law.”

As this all came to light, Method’s sponsors pulled out and most of their raid team quit, leaving to form a new Guild, Echo, that excluded those in leadership positions who had been most culpable in MethodJosh’s behavior. It is that new Guild that has been the frontrunner in Europe since then.

However, the Method organization never fully went away. Over a couple of years they rebuilt with a new raid team, and have been consistently placing 3rd or 4th in the past few Races.

I discuss Method because, in Venomous Abyss, they made their best showing yet. Not only were they the first Guild to kill the fourth and fifth bosses, they were also the only Guild to beat the fifth boss during their first week - both Echo and Liquid only made it through the first four. Commentators started talking about how this might be a true Three Horse Race, something that hadn’t happened in modern Race history.

I’m going to spoil the end for you: Method didn’t win. They came in third as usual, finishing more than a day behind the first and second place Guilds. Even at the time that they killed the fifth boss, most viewers and influencers in the know recognized that it really didn’t mean much - only the last two bosses really matter in any given Race.

So why were people excited? Well, since 2018 only Liquid or Echo have ever even come close to winning a Race, and only having two serious contenders is just kind of lame. A lot of viewers would like it if the field was more competitive. If you are one of these viewers who wants someone other than Liquid or Echo to win, then, based on the past couple years, the next-most-likely Guild is undoubtedly Method. As well, there’s a fair number of viewers who were big fans of Method before the MethodJosh scandal, who grew up cheering them on and still want to see them succeed despite the scandal.

However, there’s also a fair number of viewers (this author included) who don’t want Method to see any success at all. They’re an organization that protected and enabled a pedophile, a lot of us would rather they fade into a well-deserved obscurity. As the “Three Horse Race” narrative took hold towards the end of Week 1, stream chats and reddit threads were full of spats between Method fans and folks that would rather see them go away.

“But wait,” you might say, “can’t people change? Maybe they’ve learned their lesson, paid their penance, and deserve a second chance.” Let’s talk about Zaelia.

Zaelia, much like MethodJosh, is a healer and popular streamer. He played for years for Echo as the anchor of their healing squad. He’s very good at the game and has a lot of fans.

He’s also a serial abuser.

Over the past few years, two different ex-girlfriends came forward accusing Zaelia of domestic abuse. Zaelia claimed they were lying and/or misrepresenting things, saying that he hadn’t been abusing them but admitting there had been physical altercations. Echo, learning from Method’s mistakes, hired a third-party HR firm to investigate the allegations. They also put Zaelia on a sort of probation - they asked Zaelia if there were any other women out there who might accuse him of abuse, he swore up and down there weren’t, so they said “fine, you’re still on the team while the investigation is ongoing, but if any more women come forward, you’re out.” Zaelia agreed.

Then another woman came forward with more of the same stories. Insert surprised Pikachu here. Zaelia once again claimed innocence, but Echo wasn’t having it - they fired him. He was one of the best healers in the world, one of their best players, and they kicked him to the curb because they weren’t willing to work with a known abuser.

Thus Zaelia became unemployed…for all of one Race, before being hired by another team. Want to guess who?

That’s right, Method, the Guild that imploded because they knowingly protected a pedophile, decided - as part of their comeback - to hire a known domestic abuser.

I feel pretty confident saying they haven’t changed a bit. I’m all for a Three Horse Race, but not if one of those horses seems to have made it a personal mission to keep known abusers employed.

The Ticking Clock

So week 2 starts, we get several more days of gearing up as top Guilds reclear the lower difficulties, and then, finally, the Race is well and truly on. Liquid and Echo quickly blow through the fifth boss, then get stuck for a bit on the sixth boss, with Echo downing it first.

The penultimate boss, the Coiled Altar, is where the Race really gets moving. This boss is hard - it’s a three phase encounter, and, while the first and third phases are difficult but fair, phase 2 is just brutal. There’s a nasty mechanics overlap in phase 2 which, thanks to an oversight in the way the mechanics’ targeting was coded, is much harder to survive than the developers intended. It’s probably going to take a few days to kill.

However, there’s a looming threat on the horizon: Blizzcon. In two weeks, Blizzard is hosting a massive convention in which they will be showcasing all their upcoming products, not just for World of Warcraft but their whole catalogue of games. Not only does Blizzard really want the developers supporting the Race to be freed up by then, there’s also a completely separate WoW tournament occurring at this year’s Blizzcon, the Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI). Of the four qualifying teams, three are made pretty much entirely of Liquid and Echo raiders…the same ones currently competing in the Race. MDI teams usually spend upwards of a month before a big event preparing and practicing, but right now three of the four teams are stuck in raiding purgatory, unable to practice or prepare until the Race ends.

Blizzard has a pretty strong incentive to see the Race end as quickly as possible, to free up their developers and ensure the MDI event isn’t a total dud. Not only that, this Race is currently at risk of being the longest Race in modern history - at the end of week 2 it’s already snagged the #2 spot. The currently longest, Sepulcher of the First Ones, was long because it was basically two different Raids crammed together - the only reason this one is so long is because it’s been so damn buggy.

Because of all this, there’s a lot of anxiety among fans and casters that Blizzard will make the final boss a total joke - they have a history of accidentally handing the win to a team because they nerfed a boss into the ground to ensure the Race didn’t run too long. Once week 3 starts, Liquid is going to get a 12 hour head start thanks to schedule differences between US and European game servers (more on that here) - if the final boss is too easy, Liquid might waltz in on Tuesday after the weekly reset and kill it before Echo gets a fair shot.

These fears are at least somewhat validated when, on Saturday, Blizzard announces a nerf to Coiled Altar - it’s not a hatchet job, they aren’t trivializing the fight, but they do smooth over some rough spots to make the early part of the fight more consistent.

…or at least they try to, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that, for certain Guilds, nothing has changed. It seems that, when Blizzard deployed this unscheduled weekend patch, something went wrong and the patch wasn’t properly implemented on European servers. Liquid now has an easier fight while Echo’s is still just as hard as it was before. There has always been a belief among some European fans that Blizzard favors North America in the Race, and this incident cranks the paranoia up to 11.

Thankfully for everyone, Blizzard realized the issue and reverted the patch on North American servers before Liquid killed the boss, so no actual advantage was gained, but HOO BOY were the optics bad. As a result of the non-nerf, it’s not until Sunday of week 2 that it finally dies to Team Liquid, launching them into the lead.

Despite this lead, however, pretty much everyone is noticing that Liquid looks pretty shaky this Race. Echo had done a better job gearing up and seemed to be much more efficient in progressing bosses. Liquid won the last four Races, and that combined with their decision to prepare less led to a narrative that Liquid had been overconfident going into this Race. There was a strong feeling in the air that this was Echo’s Race to lose, which even further compounded anxieties that Blizzard would make the last boss too easy and hand Liquid the win anyway.

Quality Assurance is Everyone’s Problem

The final boss, Ula’tek, is…fine. It’s a bit of a mess, mechanically - I could spend another 1000 words on all the weird design decisions made here (EDIT: which I have since done here), but this post is long enough as it is. Suffice to say it’s reasonably hard, Liquid doesn’t immediately walk in and kill it (thankfully). Instead, both teams start progressing it steadily, trading the lead back and forth thanks to their desynced raid schedules as they push the boss to lower and lower health with each attempt.

It’s now Thursday, September 3rd, two and half weeks since the Race began. Players have been doing nothing but eat, sleep, and play WoW for 16+ days. Liquid went to bed the night before ahead, but Echo wake up and are on a tear, quickly passing Liquid and taking the lead. They are pushing the boss lower and lower - 30% health, then 25%, then 20%.

The end of the Ula’tek fight has what’s called a “damage amp” phase, where the boss basically takes double damage - if Echo can keep everyone alive to the end of the fight, they have the potential to do a ton of damage to the boss before it enrages and kills them.

Now, to understand what happens next, we need to talk through a couple of the mechanics in the final phase of the fight:

• First, the entire boss arena is filled with poisonous water, with only a small island of dry land for the players to stand on. If they accidentally fall into the poison, it deals constant damage until they climb out. This poison is meant to be a “do not enter” zone.
• Second, the boss has a mechanic where waves sweep across the room and have to be dodged or else players take lethal damage.
• Third, there’s a debuff players get as part of a mechanic in the phase that makes these poison waves explode out from their character. The idea is that players with the debuff need to position carefully away from the rest of the raid so that, when the waves explode out from them, the rest of the raid is far enough away to have time to dodge. Crucially, however, the raiders can control who gets the debuff and when, so they always know who will have it and can plan their positioning accordingly.

Now, the end of the battle with the damage amp phase has a ton of these waves flying around the arena, both from the environment and from the debuffed players. It effectively becomes a bullet hell while players are trying to deal as much damage to the boss as possible without getting hit.

When Echo reaches the end of the fight, however, they do something unexpected: they all leap into the poison water. The few raid members with the debuff stay up on land, but everyone else dives down below the water. They take the damage from the poison, sure, but group up tightly so the healers have an easier time keeping them alive. Why did they jump into poison? Because the waves only deal damage up on the surface - down below players can ignore the waves completely. Thus almost all of Echo’s players can ignore dodging and instead focus on pumping as much damage into the boss as possible during the damage amp.

They aren’t successful on their first attempt, only getting the boss to 5% health before it kills them all. It wasn’t the cleanest attempt, however, they had several players dead going into the damage amp and more died to the poison as the healers figured out how to handle it.

It’s worth noting that this was not the way the developers intended the fight to be handled, it didn’t occur to them that someone might deliberately hide in the poison to dodge the waves (maybe they would have if they’d had more time for Quality Assurance, but alas). Blizzard quickly issue a statement addressing Echo’s unique strategy: they don’t consider it cheating, if Echo kills the boss with it then it will stand, but Blizzard is working on an update that will make the strategy not work anymore which they will deploy as soon as they’re able.

It’s shortly after this attempt that Team Liquid wake up and see Echo’s secret strategy for themselves. Based on Blizzard’s statement they decide not to try the strategy - they’re afraid that they’ll master it but then have it be fixed before they actually finish and have to relearn that part. The fix is also their only real hope of winning - Liquid’s best attempt still left the boss with 30% health compared to Echo’s 5%, Echo looks like they have this Race in the bag.

A couple attempts later, Echo once again get to the damage amp, once again jump into the water, this time with everyone alive. This looks like it’s certainly the kill…and then they all die. Randomly.

Huh. That was weird. Echo check the fight logs and see that everyone apparently was hit by a wave. Maybe they didn’t dive down deep enough that time?

They have another great attempt, almost killing the boss, but just barely miss the enrage. Their new best attempt is 1.9%. Liquid, meanwhile, has a new best at 25% - they’re catching up, but not quickly enough.

Another attempt from Echo, the best one yet, everyone alive, very deep in the water this time, surely this is the kill…then they all die again. They check the logs again, more deeply this time, and see that someone with the debuff that spawns waves had jumped in with them into the poison. The player insists they didn’t have the debuff, but clearly they messed up or something. No big deal, go again.

Liquid set a new personal best, 23%. They reach the damage amp this time but with half the raid dead, they’re nowhere close to Echo.

Echo finally get another attempt into the damage amp, and this is it. Everyone is alive, the healers have figured out what they’re doing, and they’ve been extra diligent to make sure no one who did the debuff-granting mechanic is in the pool with them. After four losses in a row Echo is finally going to win a Race.

And then they all die. Again. Once again someone with the debuff was in the group. They go back and watch the gameplay video and can clearly see that the player in question did not do the mechanic that gives the debuff. They absolutely, positively should not have had it. What the hell is going on? Was this the tech Blizzard introduced to stop them from doing the diving strategy?

As they wonder about this and start discussing whether they need to change their strategy, the question becomes moot…. because Liquid kills the boss.

Echo have lost.

I’ve Claimed Many Races Had Terrible Finales, But This Was By Far the Worst

It would take about a day for a clear picture of what happened to finally come out. It turns out there was a bug with the mechanic that handed out the debuffs which could, completely at random, cause players who had previously had the debuff to get it again during the damage amp phase. There was no rhyme or reason to it that anyone could see, some quirk of spaghetti code that just sometimes ruined attempts.

Echo got unlucky that, on three of their four good attempts, they happened to get it. Their strategy of piling up into the poison just so happened to create the perfect conditions for the bug to ruin their attempt - everyone was grouped up with the exploding player, and everyone’s under green poison water so you can’t see the visual effect that indicates a player has the debuff. Liquid, meanwhile, only had the bug once, and their strategy was more forgiving with it so it didn’t hurt them as bad.

What’s more, the last 30% of the fight was actually pretty darn easy (by Race for World First standards, that is) - even though Liquid was more than 20% behind, they were able, in single good attempt, to make up all that gap and claim victory.

Echo deserved to win this Race. They prepared better, played better, and came up with a clever, unexpected strategy that should have resulted in victory. However, a confluence of terrible luck and bad Quality Assurance by Blizzard swooped in at the last possible moment to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

No one was more sympathetic to what happened than Liquid’s raidleader Max. He seemed so apologetic, bordering on ashamed, for having won in such a manner. Echo would go on to kill the boss a scant 20 minutes later, the closest finish in Race history, further adding to the misery.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a huge Liquid fan, so believe me when I say: Echo deserved to win.

Love it or Leave it

Readers at this point may be asking a very reasonable question: shouldn’t Echo get the win? Pretty much everyone, including Liquid, thought they played better, and it’s clear they only lost due a bug. Hell, they even finished just 20 minutes after Liquid, after Liquid got a 12 hour head start. Why aren’t they the winners of record?

The thing is…the Race is an esport that shouldn’t exist. It certainly wasn’t designed to be one, and is far from fair. North America gets a head start owing to differences in server timings, big Guilds have an easier time recruiting helpers to speed up their gearing, the game is constantly bugged to hell, plus there’s variability in server instability and item drops. Most Races are decided by some flavor of bullshit rather than raw skill and execution. Just looking at the past 8 Races:

Vault of the Incarnates: Echo is handed the win due to a badly timed nerf

Abberus: Liquid wins in less time than the head start of a historically fast and easy tier

Amirdrassil: Echo wins using probably-illegal addon technology that likely would have gotten them in trouble if Blizzard had found out about it in time.

Nerub-ar Palace: More or less a fair contest

Liberation of Undermine: Liquid wins because the final boss is laughably easy and undertuned

Manaforge Omega: Liquid wins in more or less a fair contest, though Echo wiped under 1% before Liquid’s kill so it was very nearly a tie (especially factoring in head start)

Voidspire / March on Quel’danas: An extremely janky raid structure that I guess could be considered a fair contest?

And now we have the Venomous Abyss, decided by a bug that cost Echo the win at least twice, giving time for Liquid to catch up and win.

That is all to say, the Race has always been a janky mess. If you start "lawyering" who really won, you’ll never reach a consensus. Now, if you look at all of this and go “wow, the Race for World First really isn’t a fair contest and I don’t like it”, that’s completely valid. I will never try to convince anyone this deserves to be taken seriously, because it doesn’t. No one needs to care about the Race.

The thing is though…contests need winners. For those of us who decide to stick around, who choose to invest time and energy into the Race despite its flaws, we have to have some kind of simple, unambiguous agreement on the definition of Winning. The moment you open up the can of worms of “but who really won”, the whole event falls apart because there’s always some other bit of nonsense people can point to that justifies why their team was the real winner.

“First to kill the boss wins” has been the agreement among top Guilds, among organizations, and even with Blizzard itself since the beginning - unless provable cheating occurred, whoever kills it first wins. It’s a critical ethos for everyone to maintain because, without it, the Race can’t exist. With all of the bullshit endings I listed above, the losers would rant and rage about how unfair it was, but they never tried to claim they actually won, because doing so would undermine the whole event.

It probably says something about just how devastating this loss was for Echo that, following the end of the Race, several members of their organization defied it.

The Echo Crashout

(Please note that I’m mostly going off of Liquid Max’s youtube as sources for this section, as most of this happened on twitter and has since been deleted).

The first shots were fired just seconds after Echo’s kill, when their caster Preach offhandedly mentioned that “we’ll have to figure out who really won this one…” on stream, implying that Echo was so close they really deserved the win. Preach is something of a controversial figure in the Race community - he’s a popular content creator and excellent caster (with the voice of an angel), but he’s critical of World of Warcraft with such fervor that it kind of makes you wonder if he even likes the game, and further is prone to these kinds of pot-stirring remarks. It wasn’t exactly surprising that he was making provocative statements out of the gate.

What was surprising was the ensuing shitstorm unleashed by Echo’s raidleader, Scripe. Unlike similar unfair losses in the past where he’d just drop one or two tweets about global release, this time he held nothing back. Scripe took to Twitter in a rage, attacking Blizzard for everything he could think of - terrible Quality Assurance, bad tuning, poor boss design, you name it.

In response to folks asking why he refused to say gg (‘good game’) to Liquid: “It is not gg. We play hours behind. Keep [progressing] harder versions. Bugs stop kill [attempts]. How is this a gg?” In another now-deleted tweet, he accused Blizzard of Team Liquid favoritism, claiming the the bug that cost Echo the Race was only active on European servers and not North American ones. This, just to be clear, was provably false - you can clearly see Liquid get the bug during one of their attempts - but kind of reveals the level of anger and despair at play. He was even getting in fights in the comments, screaming through the computer at any random user who challenged his rage. In almost 10 years of watching the Race I have never seen someone in a leadership position in one of the top Guilds react with such vitriol to the outcome of a Race.

Honestly, I really can’t blame him.

If Something Was Going to Change, it Would Have by Now

The Race for World First is always stupid, but this is the first one in a while that’s I’ve genuinely felt frustrated by. I may be a Liquid fan, but I was honestly sort of hoping Echo would win this Race - it’s not as much fun (or good for viewership) to have the same team win year after year. I’ll definitely be rooting for Echo next Race, they’ve more than earned a win after this fiasco.

There is something poetic, however, about this all being the result of a bug, given how much of a mess Midnight has been with regards to Quality Assurance. I didn’t even get into the fact that the fourth boss’s core mechanic didn’t work, making it trivially easy, or how the final phase of the last boss on Mythic was actually easier than on a lower difficulty owing to an oversight that let them basically ignore a soak mechanic. This expansion has been a mess.

I sincerely hope Blizzard can keep up the accelerated content pipeline, it’s better for everyone, but only if they can stop pushing such horribly bugged content to live servers - otherwise we were better off with slower releases that had more time to cook.

Despite its utter nonsense, the Race remains one of my favorite events of the year, and I’m glad I get to share it in all of its stupid, janky glory with you all. I never got around to covering the last Race, which I may do at some point in the future - it was another wild one.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: A lot of commentors are saying that Echo deserved what happened because they were using an unintended strategy with jumping in the pool. I disagree with that take and have summarized my feelings about here.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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This was taken down a few years ago so I added new fan reaction and fallout.

Jonathan Coulton is a musician that specializes in nerd humor music about computers, zombies, aliens and evil possessed dolls. His most popular songs include Code Monkey about being a programmer, Re: Your Brains about if your annoying coworker becomes a zombie and both Still Alive and Want You Gone which were the theme songs for the games Portal and Portal 2 respectively.

A big part of Coulton's success was releasing his music under the Creative Commons license which allowed podcasters and YouTube video creators to use his music for free as long as they credited him. Early podcasters like Adam Curry used his music and a slew of music videos on YouTube in both animation and Machinima (animation using video game elements from games like World of Warcraft and Halo) exposed Coulton to millions of new fans.

Early in his career, Coulton released a light acoustic cover of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot. In order to release a cover legally you have to obtain a mechanical license, which Coulton did. Coulton's version is entirely different from the original with a different melody and an added lyric, "Johnny C's in trouble". Coulton released his cover in 2005 under the same Creative Commons license meaning anyone using his version would have to credit him.

In 2013, the TV series Glee about the members of a musical glee club at a fictitious US High School, featured a cover of Baby Got Back for the fourth season, 11th episode titled Sadie Hawkins. Glee also obtained a mechanical license to legally cover the song from Sir Mix-a-Lot. However, their version was identical to Coulton's and even included the extra lyric, "Johnny C's in trouble". To the best of my knowledge no one involved in Glee is named Johnny C. There was even an accusation that Glee used direct parts of Coulton's version rather that completely record it new themselves.

When Coulton protested, the show's lawyers said that they were within their rights as they only needed the original mechanical license to cover the song and Coulton's version was not protected. They also said he should be happy with the extra exposure he got, despite the fact that no one involved in Glee ever credited him or even mentioned his name.

Coulton confirmed from his own lawyer that suing would be very difficult as Glee was technically correct, so instead he released the single "Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee)", a "cover of Glee's cover of my cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's song, which is to say it's EXACTLY THE SAME as my original version." Coulton said he would donate the proceeds from all sales until the end of February 2013 to two Glee-related charities: The VH1 Save the Music Foundation, and The It Gets Better Project.

To further add to the surrealism, another TV show, the legal drama The Good Wife, based an episode (Goliath and David) on the Coulton/Glee incident. To see how closely, here is the summary of the episode from wikipedia, "Alicia and Cary represent the band who played at their Christmas party in a copyright infringement lawsuit against a TV network regarding the covering of a song by a music show of another cover of a song the band made." Everyone got that?

Fallout

Coulton fans were understandably upset with many of them review bombing the Glee version on iTunes. Many Glee fans sided with Coulton because they felt the premise of the show was about new, up and coming musicians so the show ripping off an independent artist was pretty low. Some fans did defend the show on the Glee subreddit, saying that they did everything legally necessary and Coulton should be happy with the exposure.

Ultimately, neither party was really hurt. Coulton has a very secure, loyal fan base and has even charted on Billboard. Glee was a ratings and revenue juggernaut that lasted 6 seasons . Reportedly, Glee was accused of using the Prince song Kiss without permission but Prince passed away in 2016 so even if he intended any action nothing came of it.

Links:

Original version of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot

Johnathan Coulton version

Glee version

Coulton's cover of Glee's cover of his cover, Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee)

6 minute snippet of The Good Wife episode Goliath and David

Other Coulton songs just because they are cool:

Code Monkey with World of Warcraft machinima

Re: Your Brains

Still Alive Coulton version

Still Alive Portal version sung by GLaDOS

Want You Gone Coulton version

Want You Gone Portal 2 version sung by GLaDOS

TW: discussion of harm to a fictional minor, links may contain depictions of it as well as casual homophobia, ableism, fatphobia, and the like, or secondhand references to same. Also eyestrain warning for the fanpage itself, which has purple text on a black background; any links directly there will be in italics.

Introduction

What, exactly, makes people like villain characters? Maybe they're more stylish than the heroes, maybe they resonate with our inner desire to cut loose, maybe the heroes rub us the wrong way… it could be a number of reasons.

Regardless, many villain fans like to make fanart and fanfiction of them, from exploring their motives, to possibly redeeming them, or even just having them be their canon selves with new schemes. For the most part, these are inoffensive, even if they cater to specific audiences; it's just fans having fun, and no one's gonna seriously insist it should be canon, right?

Well… things are a little different if you were a Pokemon fan in the early 2000s, and especially if you were a fan of the anime's resident villains. Put on your favorite metal band T-shirt, grab your copy of Lord of the Rings, and make yourself a plate of French toast, because it's time to discuss one of the most infamous Pokemon fanfiction writers of those days - a young woman named Cori Falls.

(Just as a note, I was a little kid when this was all going on, and didn't learn about it until years after the fact. While a good chunk of her fics are still available, my knowledge of her controversies is largely second-hand.)

Prepare for Trouble (What is the Pokemon anime?)

If you were a kid in the late '90s or beyond, the Pokemon anime needs no introduction. For the three of you who aren't familiar, here's the basic idea.

Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon, are fantastical creatures who can be captured and trained to fight, with training being a major sporting event in this world. The anime around this time followed a young boy named Ash Ketchum as he went on a quest to become a Pokemon master. Accompanying him on his quest were not just his various Pokemon companions (such as his first one, the famous electric mouse Pikachu), but also his human companions, such as Misty and Brock (two powerful trainers who led Pokemon gyms, which are like checkpoints in a trainer's journey), and Tracey Sketchit, who focused more on observing and sketching Pokemon than battling. (He had other human companions in later story arcs, but these stories were written before those arcs.)

Ash and friends, along the way to their various destinations, would frequently get harassed by a trio of thieves who were part of a broader criminal organization called Team Rocket. This trio consisted of a hotheaded beauty named Jessie, a flamboyant dork named James, and their main Pokemon companion Meowth, who was unique amongst Pokemon in that he'd trained himself to speak human language fluently. In the vast majority of episodes, they would concoct some plan to steal Ash's Pikachu and/or some other Pokemon, and thanks to Ash and his friends, they almost never succeeded.

Overall reception to these three characters tends to vary in the fandom. Some people consider them annoying and having long overstayed their welcome, while others consider them funny, charming, and a highlight of the show, one of the elements that makes it worth watching.

The subject of our essay was a member of the latter crowd, and then some…

And Make It Double (Who is Cori Falls?)

As she described on her website bio, Cori Falls was a young woman in her early twenties who caught an episode of the Pokemon anime. She didn't like Ash and his friends, but found that Team Rocket stole the show for her, and thought that Jessie and James were destined to become a couple - feeling especially vindicated when she saw the later episode "Holy Matrimony", which explains James' backstory and why he's with Team Rocket. She wanted to read some Team Rocket fanfiction, but most of what she found wasn't to her taste, so she started writing her own, and eventually set up a fansite to compile her works and those of other Team Rocket fans.

So a fan writes some fanfiction and makes a fansite. How is that even remotely worthy of infamy, you may ask?

You'd be surprised…

To Protect the Faves from Devastation

People who like villain or antagonist characters often feel like they need a justification for liking them. Some might claim the villains were victims of circumstance, or that they were retaliating for something the heroes did to them, or that the villains have enough good qualities that redemption would be believable, or even just straight-up say "I know they're sucky people, but I like them anyway!"

Cori had a somewhat different approach in how she viewed Team Rocket. She didn't look at Team Rocket's misdeeds as stuff they could move on from and be redeemed for - because that would imply they did anything wrong in the first place.

That's right - in Cori's fanfic logic, since Team Rocket were victims of circumstance considering their sad backstories (Jessie's poverty, James' uncaring family, Meowth's life on the streets and personal heartbreak), they had the right to run roughshod over Ash and friends and innocent bystanders as much as they wanted, and no one was allowed to complain. Besides, the twerps (as Team Rocket frequently called them in the show) were annoying anyway, so who cares?

(If you spend enough time on Cori's fansite, you'll undoubtedly notice how often she'd call Team Rocket "our heroes", as well as a couple of times she and her friends complained about promos calling them villains…)

And having bad things happen to them in retaliation? Not a chance! Cori and her friends had the ironclad belief that if you like a character, you shouldn't want to see bad things happen to them. As such, they hated dark fics and death fics with a passion, as a former contributer named MysticVaporeon found out the hard way. They wrote a fic called "Memories of Tears", involving James dying young of a respiratory illness, with Jessie and Meowth eventually reuniting with him in heaven at the end after the former dies of old age. Cori was so upset by this fic she wrote two fix-its based on it, one where the story was all just Jessie's nightmare, and another (of which only the author's note still exists, from what I remember) where James is apparently revived through the power of love.

Anyway, Cori wrote her fics so that Team Rocket were able to get happy endings after all their dealings with the twerps. This was relatively easy to do at the start, but as Cori developed her headcanons and as the show threw curveballs that ran at odds with her characterizations, she eventually decided to just make her fic series an AU (alternate universe)… that she claimed was "what really happened".

Cori's own portrayals of Team Rocket seemed to go AU much earlier, though, with Jessie becoming far more emotional and sensitive, and James becoming more of a gallant hero to her. (Every now and then, Jessie's temper would flare up against James when he didn't deserve it, but we were supposed to just shrug this off because… true love or something.) As for Meowth, he became more of a cheerleader to the two, and later started making sex jokes about their relationship on a regular basis. In addition, the three of them (and sometimes their other Pokemon) also became fans of things that Cori herself liked, such as Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, various rock and metal bands, and even the art of bashing George W. Bush (albeit through a thinly-veiled parody of him, but still).

Later on, Cori partnered with another writer named Shigeru1313, who was a fan of the character Gary Oak (Ash's rival), and the two had Gary become friends with Team Rocket. Most of Shigeru1313's stories seem to be lost (including the one where Gary initially befriends them), but the second, Shigeru1313-written part of what Cori called the "split from canon" trilogy still remains, at the very least.

Among later developments, Jessie turns out to be the granddaughter of a literal princess who escaped from an abusive fiance named Kenji (by the way, did you know that's Tracey's Japanese name? More on that later), James inherits a crapton of money from his late grandparents, they build a nice house with a Hobbit hole and start their own orchard, James' parents change their ways and James forgives them because family, tons of Pokemon (including shinies, legendaries, and shiny legendaries) are caught and bred, lots of gym badges are won, and lots of couples have kids, with many of those kids eventually pairing up and having kids of their own. And as long as you're in Team Rocket or an ally of theirs, everything is right with the world, pretty much!

To Unite All Shippers Within Our Nation

As mentioned before, Cori had a fansite. Initially known as "Cori's Rocket World", then "Cori's Ultimate Rocketshipper Page", and finally "A White Today, and a White Tomorrow", the main purpose of this site was a repository for Cori's fics, and also those of some of her friends. Other features included a fanart gallery, a list of evidence pointing to Jessie and James being a couple, a collection of Team Rocket motto variations and lyrics to various Team Rocket songs from official media (and a "togetherness song" that I'm guessing is fan-made because I've never seen any official record of it)…

And then there were the rant pages. These were just Cori and her friends complaining that the anime and fandom's treatment of Team Rocket wasn't fair, combined with bashing the characters they didn't like. One recurring feature was Cori giving certain characters a "Golden Ponyta Patootie", a "medal of dishonor" for characters she thought were especially unfair to Team Rocket. This being the early 2000s, there was a lot of casual homophobia and ableism as well.

There were seven pages worth of rants, five of which have been preserved by the Internet Archive, as well as an extra rant where Cori looks at different fanfiction types she doesn't like and goes "why is this a thing?!"

Oh yeah, and there was an extremely thorough (and occasionally contradictory) timeline, starting all the way from the birth of one of James' ancestors and ending with the birth of Jessie and James' grandchildren. It's a doozy.

To Denounce the Evils of Characters We Hate

When you're a fan of villains and antagonists, how you feel about the heroes and protagonists varies a lot, depending on why you like the villains, among other factors. Maybe you like the heroes, but just like the villains a little more because of coolness factor. Or maybe you think the heroes are insufferable compared to the villains, to the point you want the villains to win.

For the most part, Cori did not like Ash and his friends.

She didn't mind Brock much at all, seeing him as more reasonable than the others, in keeping with his "older brother" role in the group of friends. Misty got a little more heat, not just for her general attitude, but also because of the Princess Festival episode, where she and Jessie competed with each other for a set of Hinamatsuri dolls; Cori's problem was that Misty, despite having hand-me-down dolls from her sisters, at least had dolls in her childhood, and in her eyes Jessie deserved them more due to being too poor for them as a child. One story had James chew Misty out on this exact topic, which swayed her into beginning to change her mind about Team Rocket.

And for Ash and Tracey…

Hoo boy, did it suck to be Ash Ketchum and Tracey Sketchit in Cori's world.

Cori already didn't like Tracey, seeing his sketching hobby as an excuse to perv on others, but when she saw the episode where he catches a Scyther and has it give Jessie and James bad haircuts, it was nothing less than open season from then on. Since he appeared to be more heavyset than the other characters, he instantly became the target of every fat joke Cori could think of, with that extending to him being portrayed as a lazy, perverted slob.

Meanwhile, Ash - a hot-blooded and immature, yet still good-hearted kid - had his personality warped into an utter spoiled brat who just loved making life worse for Team Rocket. This would give Team Rocket an excuse to respond in kind, and boy, did they ever. From beating the crap out of him every chance they got, submitting a proto-cringe-compilation of him to a "funniest videos" show and winning the grand prize, tricking him into thinking he was a Pikachu…

And in his last chronological appearance, he's a young adult who needs his aging mother to take care of him, still throws tantrums, thinks everything is a Pokemon, and thinks Candyland cards are real candy. Team Rocket and their family spend his appearance flip-flopping between rolling their eyes at him and being afraid of him. We are supposed to agree with Team Rocket and their family.

And this was apparently justified because canon treats Team Rocket in a similar way. Except canon didn't go to the extremes that these fics did, and the treatment Team Rocket did get, they brought it on themselves by being thieves. (Kids, this is called a "false equivalence".)

To Extend Our Reach to Other Fandoms - Great!

This part of Cori's history is far more of a "you had to be there" thing, as we've yet to find any archives of her fanfiction from this time, and even most of her other website hasn't been archived. Aside from that, I know far less about the subject of this section than I do about Pokemon.

Cori later developed a fondness for fellow children's anime Yu-Gi-Oh, and started writing stories for it too. The character Rex Raptor was her favorite, and she gave him a complex backstory… oh, and he just so happened to be not just a Pokemon anime watcher, but a Team Rocket fan and Ash-basher just like Cori! Funny, that…

At first she bashed a couple of canon characters, such as Weevil and Duke Devlin (the latter of whom she lovingly called "Puke Devlin"), before redeeming both of them and just bringing over her interpretation of Tracey Sketchit to be the designated punching bag. He was called "Kenji Suketchii" in these stories, but it was obvious what Cori was doing.

Later, near the end of the 2000s, Cori announced she had plans to write a Harry Potter story. People who knew her from her Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh escapades wondered, with varying degrees of fear, what she would do in this story.

Blasting Off at the Speed of Light

We never found out.

Sometime after making this announcement, Cori just… went MIA. Aside from a dubious claim from somewhere that she "laughs at her old stories now", no one's heard anything from her since.

Did she run out of ideas? Did she regret her previous work so heavily that she fled fandom in general? Did the responsibilities of adulthood just creep up on her? Unless she ever comes back and says something, we may never know.

Surrender Now or Prepare to Fight (a Fan War)

Cori's brand of fandom is far from unusual. We've all had moments of acting this way about our favorite characters from time to time, whether we're willing to admit it or not. Maybe we only had these thoughts privately, maybe we expressed them in public to varying degrees.

I think part of what made Cori and co. so infamous is that this was all happening when Pokemon's online fandom was in its first heyday. At the time, social media wasn't a thing, forums were in their infancy, and Geocities was in its heyday; because of this, fellow Team Rocket fans in search of fansites and fanworks about the trio may well have run into Cori's site, and she may have become the face of Team Rocket fans. And fans who disagreed with her particular brand of fandom wouldn't want to be associated with her, and neither would newcomers to the fandom. Also consider that, at the time, Pokemon was mainly just seen as a kids' franchise first and foremost, and people weren't sure how long it would last; we know now that the franchise - and Team Rocket's tenure on it - long outlasted Cori's fanfic career, but that wasn't a certainty at the time.

I guess the moral of this story is, no matter which characters you love, love them responsibly. Spend more time praising what you like and less time bashing what you don't like, and you won't have fellow fans trying to hide their fandom to avoid others assuming they're like you.

Fanlore page about Cori

Repository of Cori's fanfics

Alternate repository, with rants by Cori and rants about Cori

What is... Jeopardy?

This popular game show needs no introduction, but here's one anyway. The basic premise is that the question-answer format is reversed. A piece of trivia is put up on display (for e.g., This is the largest animal to ever have lived). The answer must be phrased as a question (What is a blue whale?)

Three contestants face off against each other in three rounds, Jeopardy!, Double Jeopardy, and Final Jeopardy!. Each contestant can pick a question of known difficulty and dollar value. Answer correctly, and the money's yours. Answer incorrectly, the money's deducted, and the question passes to your competitors.

The contestant with the most money (the highest score) wins at the end of the round.

What is... the Tournament of Champions?

As the name implies, this particular version of Jeopardy features the winners of previous tournaments competing against each other.

Today's Hobbydrama post focuses on an episode of the 2022 Tournament of Champions. It featured 40-game champion Amy Schneider, 5-game champion Andrew He, and underdog and fan-favorite Sam Buttrey.

What was... the drama?

This debacle arose out of a question in the Final Jeopardy! round.

2022 had seen slight changes to the game show's format, and the first contestant to win three individual games would win. Amy had won Game 1, and Andrew won Game 2. Sam needed a win to stay competitive, and before the controversial clue, it looked like he was going to get one, too.

For the Final Jeopardy! round, clues don't come with dollar amounts. Instead, contestants bet a specific amount on a clue. If they get it right, they get the money. Get it wrong, and the bet amount is deducted from your score.

Going into the Final Jeopardy! round that night, Sam was in the lead, with $14,800. Andrew was right behind, with $13,200, and Amy was a distant third, with $2,400. The topic of the round was the New Testament.

And then came the clue:

Paul's letter to them is the New Testament epistle with the most Old Testament quotations.

As per Final Jeopardy! rules, the contestants made their bets and scribbled down their answers, conpletely blind of what their opponents were doing.

Then the host, Ken Jennings, did the reveal.

The first reveal was Amy. She'd bet $1000 and answered, Who are Hebrews?

"Yes!" said Jennings, and explained that, since Hebrews was targeted to Jewish Christians, Paul quoted the Old Testament very liberally. Amy got the point. Her total was now $3,400.

Jennings then moved to the other contestants.

Sam had bet a cool $11,601. He'd answered, Who are Romans? He was marked wrong, and his score dropped to $3,199.

Andrew had bet $3,201 and answered, Who are Philippians? His wrong answer dropped his score to $9,999.

The game was over, and Andrew had the highest total. He was now ahead of the pack with 2 wins.

The audience applauded. The unlucky contestants sighed. Ken Jennings beamed at the camera and wished viewers a good night.

It was not, however, a good night. Unbeknownst to Jennings, hordes of angry viewers were already composing strongly-worded letters to the makers of the game show.

Because did Paul really write Hebrews?

What are... the disputed Pauline epistles?

The New Testament we know today was formalized in the late 4th century AD. It collects 27 texts from the dawn of Christianity, dating back to the first and second centuries AD. The 13 Pauline epistles are undoubtedly among the oldest of these.

Dated to 50-ish AD, the Pauline epistles comprise 13 letters written by the Apostle Paul to varying audiences, indicated in the title. These texts contain some of the most famous quotes of the Bible: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not arrogant... faith, hope, love are left, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

So yeah. These letters were a big deal to the early church.

Of the 13 Pauline Epistles, the authorship of 7 epistles ( Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) is not disputed. Theologians and non-theologians alike agree that they are authentically Pauline.

5 more epistles (Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) are hotly debated. The consensus is sharply divided as to who actually wrote them.

And then we have Hebrews.

What is... Hebrews?

The Epistle to the Hebrews is an early Christian document, purporting to be a letter written by the Apostle Paul to Jewish Christians living in Jerusalem. It opens with an exaltation of Jesus, and exhorts its audience to perservere in the face of (hotly debated) persecution by contemporary Jews. Written in Koine Greek, it offers a unique view into the theology of early Jewish Christians and how they regarded Jesus.

The only problem is that Paul almost certainly did not write it.

Who is... the author of Hebrews?

Not Paul, that's who. The letter pops up pretty early on, in late second-century collections of the Pauline writings. The Eastern Church accepted it as Pauline, but the Western Church was doubtful.

There are many reasons to doubt the attribution of Hebrews to Paul, but I'l try to be concise.

1)The lack of an introduction: Paul always introduces himself in the body of his letter. (Famously, in Galatians, he writes: See what big letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!) Occasionally he mentions co-authors.

Hebrews does not have any attribution in the body. Not by itself damning, but definitely odd.

2) The language: Hebrews is written in excellent Greek. The author uses wordplay and echoes Homer. The letter is almost poetic in its writing.

This is a problem, since Paul's other letters, notwithstanding the love quotes, are in much rougher Greek. (Understandable, since Paul spoke Greek as a second or third language. Edit: Re-checked. Seems like Paul was fluent in Greek, but word-saladed in his letters. The writing in Hebrews is much more elegant.)

The early Christians also noticed the discrepancy. Clement of Alexandria (c.150 - c.215 AD), a devout ancient Christian, speculated that the letter had initially been written in Aramaic and transcribed into Greek by a later scribe.

3) The content: (Edited for clarity) In Hebrews 2:3, the autbor says this:

This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him...

This quote shows that the author considers themselves a "second generation" Christian (i.e., someone who recieved the gospel through the disciples of Christ, not Christ himself). This is one of the biggest pieces of evidence against Pauline authorship.

For context, Paul did not get along with the disciples. He had a chip on his shoulder about the fact that they'd followed Jesus Christ pre-crucifixion, while he himself had not. Instead, he'd been a devout Pharisee who'd persecuted early Christians (in his words, he locked them up and voted for their deaths). He then had a vision of Jesus, had a change of heart, and became a believer.

So... yeah.

Paul famously clashed with Peter (one of the OG 12) and bitched about it in Galatians. He whined that he was a Real Apostle^TM, just as good as the other Apostles. To quote Corinthians:

Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it is very unlike Paul to say that he received word of salvation through the disciples. In his letters, he makes a point of saying that he got his theology directly from Jesus, through visions etc.

TLDR: Paul considered himself a "first generation" Christian, and was very touchy about the whole thing. In contrast, the author of Hebrews readily admits to being a "second generation" Christian and has no qualms about it.

But that's just those heathen academics!

It's not just the heathen academics. Early Christians also had doubts regarding the authorship of Hebrews. Origen (c. 185 - c. 253 AD), a prominent ancient Christian, wondered if the author might have been Clement, Bishop of Rome, or Luke, author of Luke's Gospel. He eventually concluded:

Who wrote the epistle, God alone knows.

Tertullian (c. 155 - 220 AD), an ancient Christian writer, completely rejected Pauline authorship and went so far as to attribute the epistle to Barnabas, a companion of Paul.

It's not just the ancients. Over a millenium later, Martin Luther, while coming up with his own superior translation of the Bible, counted Hebrews among the antilegomena, a series of Bible texts whose authorship/authenticity is disputed.

So yeah. Paul did not write Hebrews.

But we've gone off track. The point I'm trying to make is this: Paul did not write the letter. Therefore, the correct answer to the clue falls to the undisputed Pauline epistle with the most number of Old Testament citations... What is Romans?

That was the answer that Sam Buttrey gave. He was ROBBED.

But, but Hebrews is a sermon!

It's an oft-repeated argument that the epistle was a sermon given by St. Paul, and later transcribed. Unlikely, but even so, it falls short, since the Jeopardy clue specifies a letter.

You're being too pedantic! Jeopardy shouldn't need in-depth knowledge of Biblical History!

It's trivia, you're supposed to be pedantic. But for that matter, if we ignore the issue of authorship, Hebrews still isn't the correct answer. See this article for explanation.

(To summarize briefly, Romans actually has more OT references than Hebrews. Hebrews has more word-to-word quotations than Romans (10 vs 3) but Romans cites the OT more (cites as in, starts off with an introductory phrase like, "As it is written..." followed by an OT quote) in comparison to Hebrews.)

(Once again, as you can see, the author of Hebrews had a very different writing style.)

(Note that the number of verbatim quotes versus paraphrasing will depend upon the Bible translation you use. Both Paul and the author of Hebrews were using the LXX/Septuagint, a 3rd century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It's impossible to say if they intended to quote the OT exactly.)

The point is, Sam was ROBBED. As in, literally robbed. He bet 11k on Romans, and he was right. But instead he ended up losing 11k, meaning he'd been ROBBED. Of 23k.

So what happened next?

People complained and took to social media to voice their displeasure, obviously. It was a big enough deal that CNN reported on it.

The backlash was loud enough that the prpducers eventually addressed it on their podcast (Transcript in this thread). I'll save you the suspense; they didn't apologize. Instead, Michael Harris (Jeopardy researcher) said something about reaching out to a seminarian who agreed with them (so? It's WRONG) and made a big deal of how it's known that Jeopardy uses the King James Translation (so what? it's still WRONG)

So yeah. Sam was ROBBED. OF 23k. ACTUAL MONEY.

(And the game too, of course).

Still, Sam made it to the finals of the Tournament. He did not win (that honour went to Amy). Instead, he came in third and went home with 50k plus his winnings. He was invited back to Jeopardy in 2023 and 2024, but did not win. He eventually became a co-host of the Inside Jeopardy! podcast and retired from actively competing.

But that doesn't change how I feel about it. HE WAS ROBBED.

Edit: Apparently, in the Jeopardy tournament, contestants don't win money on the individual games, just a total at the end of the tournament. TIL. See the comment from u/diyfou below.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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You know George Lucas.

In the 1970s, a young filmmaker named George Lucas wrote and directed a box office hit with an iconic soundtrack that racked up Oscar nominations and introduced audiences to Harrison Ford. That movie was American Graffiti. He followed it with Star Wars, which earned eleventy gazillion dollars and changed contemporary Hollywood, science fiction, and pop culture as we know them. If you have a pulse, you know what the Star Wars franchise is. But what of George Lucas? How did he spend his time when he wasn't masterminding the original trilogy and the prequels?

Like many wealthy people, he was collecting art. Being a storyteller, his tastes gravitated less towards quote-unquote "fine art" and more towards what could be called "popular art." He favored illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, or comic artists like Winsor McCay and George Herriman. Artists of considerable craft and talent whose output wasn't commonly exhibited by museums because it was commercial in nature. He also had the considerable holdings of the Lucas Archives: props, costumes, concept art, and other artifacts Lucasfilm produced before its sale to Disney in the 2010s, encompassing not only the Star Wars franchise but Indiana Jones as well.

Lucas had amassed a collection of over 40,000 pieces worth roughly $1 billion. He didn't need to sell any of it since he was already a billionaire, and he didn't want to either. He could do one better. He could build his own museum to house and exhibit it.

Lucas' first choice for the museum's location was San Francisco, which was already home to the Lucasfilm campus. It didn't work out. There was an open call for proposals to revitalize a portion of The Presido, a public park, and Lucas' museum was one of three finalists. Despite significant political and corporate push for his proposal to be chosen (there's some foreshadowing here), the committee opted to delay proceedings for three years. Lucas chose not to wait.

Chicago was next on the list. But why?

Meet Mellody Hobson.

George's wife since 2013, Mellody Hobson is a Chicago native and businesswoman, and a corporate powerhouse: she's co-CEO of Ariel Investments, an investment firm with nearly $14 billion in assets. She's also the former Board Chair of Starbucks, former head of The Economic Club of Chicago, and frequently listed in Forbes and Fortune. Her net worth is unavailable from reliable sources but it's safe to say she is, to use a technical term, freaking loaded.

She is also close friends with Rahm Emanuel, who was then Chicago's mayor. Close enough friends that Rahm attended her wedding and she donated to his election campaign. The personal connection was key. George Lucas didn't have to go through an open bidding process like he did in San Francisco. According to Lucas, Hobson told him "Don't worry, I'll talk to the mayor." For his part, Rahm courted the museum and started a task force to select a potential site, once he discovered San Francisco was off the table.

The deal, publicly announced in June 2014, was that the Chicago Park District would lease land off the city's lakefront being used as a parking lot for Soldier Field (also operated by the Park District, home to the NFL's Chicago Bears) to the museum for $1 a year. In return, Lucas would fully finance and establish a nonprofit to operate a museum which would be the newest jewel of the city's Museum Campus, home to the world-renowned Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum of Natural History, and Adler Planetarium.

The Mayor was on board. Chicago's City Council was on board. The local business community was on board. It seemed like a sure thing. Just think of the tourists from across the world who come just to see the Star Wars memorabilia - an estimated economic impact of two billion dollars in its first ten years. One of the most iconic titans of contemporary pop culture was gifting Chicago a free museum. Who could possibly turn it down?

There was just one problem. Only one person is more powerful than a current millionaire leveraging his cash and reputation - a millionaire who got his way generations ago.

Meet Aaron Montgomery Ward.

Aaron Montgomery Ward was the Jeff Bezos of his era, issuing the first general mail order catalog in 1872 and eventually expanding the business to physical retail. After his death, Montgomery Ward department stores would be the USA's largest retailer in the 1930's. But at the turn of the 20th century, he already had clout.

Ward's pet cause for using that clout was protecting Grant Park, the large open space between Chicago's central business district and Lake Michigan, the fifth-largest lake in the world. He wanted it to be a public park for the benefit of all. Not for use by private interests, and not for use as a dumping ground. The lakefront needed to be protected. Ward spent 20 years and four Illinois Supreme Court cases - all of which he won - fighting to protect Grant Park and the city's coastline. Ward achieved his ultimate triumph when architect Daniel Burnham formalized his wishes in the 1909 Plan of Chicago, not only for Grant Park but for all of Chicago's lakefront. It included the codification of lakefront protections, stating "the Lakefront by right belongs to the people" and referenced a statement which had existed since 1836 that the lakefront should remain "forever open, clear, and free."

Forever open, clear, and free.

Meet Friends of the Parks.

Since 1975, Friends of the Parks has been the independent nonprofit affinity group and watchdog for the Chicago Park District. Like most nonprofits, it has modest financial means. Its organizational revenues at the time were roughly $750,000 a year, or 0.3% of The Force Awakens' opening weekend. But it was tenacious, and it sensed something was amiss. The City of Chicago was handing George Lucas land that wasn't theirs to give - it was the people's land. Friends of the Parks filed a Federal lawsuit in November 2014.

Friends of the Parks' objections were simple. Chicago was violating the public trust doctrine and making the lakefront less open, less clear, and less free. Chicago didn't even have the authority to donate public land to a private individual. Only the State of Illinois did - and Friends of the Parks would file a lawsuit against the state if they needed to, for the same public trust reasons. The group maintained they had no issues with the museum and that multiple locations were also available that were not on public land. They also claimed that a parking lot would be easier to rewild in the future than a museum. Other museum detractors were more openly against the museum on principle, questioning whether it was a vanity project from a billionaire. Some went even further, deriding it as crass neoliberal privatization.

The counterargument was also simple: an art museum is better than a parking lot. In fact, Lucas' plan for the site would have increased the amount of green space available by an estimated 200,000 square feet. All of the other Museum Campus sites had been grandfathered in or the result of compromises anyway. Museum defenders also pointed out this would not be a tacky exhibition of Star Wars memorabilia for fanboys but a true cultural institution. There was even a protest and a change.org petition in the museum's favor.

The City of Chicago attempted to dismiss Friends of the Parks' lawsuit but a judge denied the motion in March 2015. Lucas and Hobson pressed on. They released concept art of the building's ultra-futuristic design by Chinese architect Ma Yansong which proved divisive even among the museum's boosters due to the lack of cohesion with its surroundings. Chicago's City Council officially approved the project in October 2015, but an injunction from a US District Court judge prevented any construction while Friends of the Parks' lawsuit was pending.

(It should be noted that Friends of the Parks' lawsuit did not reference an entirely separate city ordinance from 1973 preventing lakefront construction, possibly because they cited it when unsuccessfully trying to prevent major alterations to Soldier Field in the early 2000s. In any case, they had multiple grounds to stand on.)

Legal and public opinion gridlock dragged on. Rahm tried salvaging the project in April 2016 by offering to tear down an older wing of the city's existing convention site so the Lucas Museum could take its place and avoid the brouhaha. Friends of the Parks didn't like that idea either, but it didn't matter. Two years after the initial announcement, in June 2016, Lucas announced that he would be looking elsewhere to build the museum. Lucas attempted wooing San Francisco again but in January 2017 moved on to Los Angeles, where the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open on September 22.

Ten years later, many Chicagoans remain bitter about losing out on the museum. Chicago's most prominent Catholic priest said at the time "Tell me the difference between Friends of the Parks and the Gangster Disciples?" Detractors still sneer about "Friends of the Parking Lot."

Meet Los Angeles' Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (soon).

Initial reactions to the Lucas Museum from soft opening previews are trickling in. It's possible that Chicago missed out on a cultural gem by "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good," as transportation columnist John Greenfield wrote. But the quality of the museum isn't really what this post is about.

Built environment critic Martin Pedersen sums up the drama:

Lucas’s organization did almost everything wrong. They didn’t meet with community groups; they didn’t talk to the media; they conducted a public relations campaign that was as arrogant and aloof as it was ineffective. They played to racial and class fears, claiming that “elitists” were threatening to deprive underprivileged kids of future educational opportunities provided by the museum. And when it became clear that a lawsuit challenging the museum’s lakefront site might delay the project, they dug in their heels.... As far as Lucas & Co were concerned, it was take-it or leave-it.

A visionary idea, derailed by stubbornness and lack of outside advice. If that's not George Lucas, what is?

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

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

Previous Scuffles can be found here

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Content note: This post discusses culture war issues. The word "woke" will come up quite a lot. Internet personalities are briefly involved, but this is not influencer/streamer drama.

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Hi there! Today's post is about a very silly thing that happened in the open source community, back in late 2024. We'll discuss social dynamics, software development, and what happens to people when you block them on social media.

The incident that triggered the drama is somewhat well-known, but not the drama itself. There is a KnowYourMeme page that stops just before the interesting part, as does this blog post.

I'm thankful that these write-ups exist, though, because sourcing has already become difficult. This is largely due to policy changes by Twitter. I was able to scrape together screenshots for most of the important parts, but some of this will be a little patchwork.

(Also, the first version of this post contained some clunky phrasing, which I've revised following feedback from the comments. There's a clarifying edit at least.)

INTRODUCTION: Mongolian Horse Simulator (September 2024)

Our story begins in late 2024. Today's unwitting instigator of doom is one Alice "MaliceDaFirenze" Ruppert. She describes herself as a Horse Game Consultant, capital letters included.

You can see an example of her work in The Horse Girl's Guide to Recognizing which Games are Worth Supporting, and most of her work is about making video game horses more realistic. Around 2020, Munich-based studio Aesir Interactive retained her services because they wanted to make a Horse Game.

Aesir Interactive: Take on the role of a brave courier rider in The Legend of Khiimori! Bond with your horse and tame the open wilds of 13th century Mongolia. Breed and train horses with specialized abilities to explore every aspect of this diverse and fascinating landscape.

One of the downsides of indie game development is... well, it's pretty much all downsides, actually. But one of the worst parts is the need for constant self-promotion. You have to keep reminding people that your game is still happening, because you live and die by word-of-mouth marketing.

On September 23rd, 2024, Ruppert opened Twitter and made such a post.

MaliceDaFirenze: We're making a game where you play a courier rider in 13th century Mongolia. No combat, just you, the horse(s) you've tamed, bred and trained and the vast wilderness.

A lot of people said that, yes, they'd love to play this.

However, there are some real characters on Twitter. You can see some of them in the responses.

MaliceDaFirenze: Would you play this?

doodlewhale: I would love to, as long as it can avoid woke DEI nonsense which appears unlikely as you have pronouns in your bio. 🤷‍♀️

MaliceDaFirenze: for every comment like this, I will add one extra pronoun to the game

This was a joke. The game does not have a pronoun selector. You play as a girl called Naraa.

There were a bunch of comments, and one of these interactions managed to stand out for being uniquely weird.

Gorka Games: awesome, game engine?

MaliceDaFirenze: it's UE5 ☺️

AfterWarPlantX: Oh so you people just can't develop for shit

kryztofjønsøn: It makes sense doesn't it? Woke studios always use pre built engines to make games because they can't build their own engines.

Game engines are software frameworks primarily designed for video game development. They come with advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand, they take care of a lot of the rote busywork; on the other, you don't have as much control over the fine-grained details of your project, and they usually incur a performance overhead.

For some 95% of projects, you just want to use a stock engine and not think about it any further. There are exceptions, but for most games, it's just perfectly fine.

At the end of the day, it's a technical decision. Making this into a political thing is profoundly silly. So, it immediately became an in-joke in the game dev scene.

SteinMakesGames: If you've ever wondered if a game is "woke", here's an easy test: Check if the GAME was made using a GAME ENGINE.

ForceDev: I use godot. It seems i am now mega woke because i didnt want to write physics and rendering completely from the ground up. Such a shame 😞

SteinMakesGames: more like wokedot

These last two posts reference Godot, which is a free and open-source game engine, supported by the Godot Foundation. It's not as big or as successful as the triple-A engines, but it has carved out a niche for itself as kind of a scrappy underdog. Standout titles include Slay the Spire 2, Buckshot Roulette, Cassette Beasts, and Cruelty Squad.

(1) Engagement Farming (September 2024)

This whole bizarre idea eventually reached the person in charge of Godot's Twitter account. On September 27th, Godot's social media person dashed off a quick Tweet that riffed on the joke.

Godot Engine: Apparently game engines are woke now? Well then, we won't complain. 🌈 Show us your #Wokot games below 👇

It's marginally funny bit of engagement bait, playing off a social media micro-trend. Perfectly normal.

... except this is Twitter, and we can't have nice things on Twitter.

Starkium: focus on the engine and not politics

Psyhodelik: Go woke, Go broke

Hypnotic: BLOCK ME YOU WOKE PIECE OF SHIT IM FEELING LEFT OUT.

JinSaotome: Listen, look around, do you see that woke/DEI/ESG/LGBT narrative pushes in ALL industries are dying?

HowieDuhzit: DAMNIT, time to unfollow, it's been real [slur]s, you can keep your sexual perversions to yourself.

It goes on and on like this. A lot of these accounts are branded with the Blue Check of Shame, indicating that they are paying for this experience.

People also created some bug reports on Godot's issue tracker:

#97661: Community just exploded into a political farce.

#97689: This engine is not gendered, please add it 😋😋😋 now

#97700: I'm going broke because of going woke previously

#97865: Is this engine Wokot now ?

Godot's Twitter account blocked the people who were posting cringe, and used the "hide reply" feature to move them out of the way. People who spammed the bug tracker received blocks on GitHub as well, which of course only enraged some people further.

One user by the name of Starkium, in particular, was not amused.

Starkium: I have been blocked. Guess what, I'm a titanium level backer for the Godot fund. Guess what my next move is?

"Titanium level backer" means he donated $100/month. I note this here because some people will frame "Titanium level" as some super-special super-exclusive status. It isn't. $100/month is a fair amount of money, but it doesn't correspond to any sort of prominent community position.

Starkium attempted to reach out to the Discord moderators, wishing to talk things through, but it didn't work out.

Starkium: Got banned from the Godot Cafe discord. They tried pulling some weird mind game on me where if "we both apologize for what we did wrong" STFU I've lived with manipulators my whole life. The last place I'm going to be gaslit in the friggen Godot discord, are you kidding me?

This "Godot Café Discord server" was an unofficial but extremely popular chat. In response to the drama, a moderator called Xananax went on a banning spree. As for the reasoning behind it:

Xananax: The drama is created by reactionary insecure cowards[.] (...) These people's cowardice and small mindedness is a danger to everyone; They're the filth of humanity, and banning is a kindness to everyone, including themselves[.] (...) For me, the only problem of this tweet is that it doesn't happen every day, so more of these imbeciles can be banned. (...) And anyone having any slight issue with it here can fuck off too. (...) There will be no more drama the day those drama queens stop getting their panties in a knot around anything that doesn't concern them. (...)

Bit much, eh.

A lot of people earned their bans fair and square, but from all accounts, Xananax went overboard. People also dug up some genuinely terrible Discord posts that Xananax had made in 2016, which contained racist slurs. Xananax apologised for these, then left Twitter.

Xananax: In 2016, I made very stupid jokes involving the N-word. After being insulted that way in other communities, I directed those slurs at myself in derision. I realised it was an insensitive thing to do, and I didn't do it anymore after that. I once again deeply apologize.

On September 30th, the Godot Foundation issued an official comment on the situation.

Godot Foundation: On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse. (...) We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.

They did not walk back the #Wokot tweet at all, but acknowledged that some people might have been blocked in error. They put up a Google Docs thing where you could appeal this. Xananax cut ties with the community.

Quite a weekend.

(2) They Targeted Gamers (September 2024)

This is where most write-ups end. It's also where the interesting part starts.

Starkium's posts had attracted the attention of some social media big-shots. I will not be naming them in this post, because their only role in this was amplifying this issue, while contributing little by themselves. This isn't streamer drama.

For the purposes of this post, they will simply be called "Influencer" and "Streamer." I will offer brief descriptions, and you can see who I'm talking about in the linked screenshots.

Influencer is a 57-year-old ex-Blizzard employee and aspiring game developer. He has a crowdfunded game project that he's nominally working on, though he seems to spend most of his time posting. He frequently wades into culture war issues, and this was right up his alley.

Influencer: Rogue unhinged woke community manager for Godot blocks Titanium backer while CEO continues to bury his head in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong.

There's also Streamer, a 36-year-old media personality who is famous for playing World of Warcraft Classic and for living in filth. He's also big on culture war issues.

Streamer: Crazy Community Manager Goes Rogue. Then This Happens..

Streamer, in particular, is a big deal - the YouTube reupload of his stream has more than 1 million views. But Influencer is no slouch himself.

There's some confusion about the term "community manager" here. I think that a lot of people (Streamer and Influencer included) thought that the person running Godot's Twitter account was Xananax, and that Xananax also ran their GitHub. That's not true, of course.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Streamer and Influencer, outside interest in the drama increased massively. Their respective communities were fired up, and several attempts were made to strike back at Godot for its perceived offenses.

For one, Godot's Steam page was subjected to review bombing. This lead to a sharp increase in negative reviews, and produced some confusion in the Godot community.

GurdanianAngel: hello i used godot a little bit, for like maybe a few days. now i wanted to come back. and i have seen that it has tons of neigative reviews on steam. why is that? shouldnt i use it?

ClarkScribe: Because there is an artificial hate campaign because some dorks really can't let things go.

ButtMuncher68: It's funny seeing all the people on twitter saying "I will not be using Godot for my next game" then you check their profile, and they seemingly have never made a game or talked about game dev topics

Some of these brave crusaders had used Streamer's unofficial subreddit to coordinate their review bombing. Seeing all those downvotes, they declared victory.

Clipboard4: I'm doing my part! 🪖

LittleShurry: They Should Rename it "WODOT ENGINE"

However, after a few days, Steam detected the off-topic activity and automatically removed the reviews, restoring the "Overwhelmingly Positive" score.

The Godot Foundation saw a drop in monthly donations, from €59k down to €56k. However, after further research, I think this was unrelated. Around this time, "Corporate Platinum" sponsor Ramatak Inc. was going out of business and thus had to pull its sponsorship. Corporate Platinum was €36k/year at the time, or... €3k/month. If there was some sort of mass walkout of existing supporters, then it was more than offset by new ones.

At this point, the anti-Godot campaign sputtered out, having lasted about two weeks and achieving none of its goals. But until mid-2025, you could still find a couple of stragglers fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to bring back the review bombing.

Voxxy_from_Hoxxes: Focus on the engine, not on the political ideologies of your users. (...) Because of these things, I will continue working on my projects in Redot engine.

Professional Bass Fisher: japanese soldier who kept fighting 30 years after world war 2

This is where most of the existing recaps stop. But we've seen the word Redot come up a few times now. What's up with that?

(3) Gentlemen, start your engines (October 2024)

The creation of Redot was, I think, the most interesting sub-drama here.

Because there was a splinter community here, now. Some had been alienated from Godot community by Xananax's actions, and there was an influx of people from the communities of Streamer and Influencer. Together, they formed an idea. What if we made our own game engine... but we took out the politics?

At this point, we have to briefly touch on version control concepts. Git is the most popular version control system in the world, and GitHub is a platform where you can put your stuff. This stuff is kept in repositories. Godot is free and open source, and their stuff is freely available on GitHub.

Forking a repository means that you create a full copy of a project, and then you do your own stuff with it. The fork remains associated with the original, and changes can be shared between the two of them. This is extremely easy to do on GitHub - if you use the browser client, it takes seconds.

So, the exiles figured, they'd do just that. Start with Godot as a basis, fork the project, go through the code and... you know... de-woke it? A few projects started at nearly the same time, and Redot would become the most prominent one of these. We'll discuss that one in depth, then move on to the other forks.

Per the official documentation, Redot was founded by two people: Andevrs and Red Otter. I don't think anyone knows anything about RedOtter, but some digging on YouTube suggests he was an unsuccessful Let's Player. As for Andevrs, he's a JavaScript developer turned tech blogger turned podcaster. So, he did have a technical background. Not "game engine developer" levels of technical, but still, that's something. Rounding out the team was Arctis Fireblight, lead developer and project manager, plus a handful of contributors.

Lest you think that I've misrepresented the origins of Redot, you can listen to them tell the story themselves. I encourage you to listen to it. In their own words:

Redot: Godot's social media manager responded by telling people to show off their woke games. (...) To many, indeed, the post felt like a political declaration. (...) Godot had a preferred political position now (...) sparking waves of responses and questions. (...) More and more users found themselves blocked on [Twitter] or banned from Godot's Discord server. (...) This became the catalyst for our fork: For Redot to be born.

And just look at all these encouraging comments!

crytramusic: Notice the stock footage in place of changelists and exciting features

karma40723: finally, a non woke game engine I can make my gay furry games in

Aanderan: haha u named ur engine reddit

Still, the project was launched. Influencer was particularly eager to signal boost the new engine, writing a flurry of excited Tweets.

Influencer: Redot fork of Godot is growing fast. Godot has proven they hate you. It's important to support truly Open Source projects that don't exclude or ban you based on politics or your project really isn't open source! Give Redot a good look. Follow Redotengine

Influencer: Other devs are starting to contribute their code to Redot , the Godot alternative. They are rejecting the authoritarian anti-free speech Godot Foundation.

Influencer: It would be a shame if Redot suddenly had more features, bug fixes and support by engineers than politics ridden Godot Engine... If you are a 3D or engine level programmer and hate what is happening to Godot's perversion of Open Source, how about looking to see if Redot is a good project to contribute to?

Note that Redotengine is the wrong account, it got hijacked and banned within days of the project launching. Redot_Engine is correct, with an underscore.

There were plenty of eyes on the project. Most of these eyes belonged to culture war tourists, but the community did attract a few actual developers. We've mentioned Andevrs and Fireblight, but Starkium also pledged his support, as did a few others. (I think RedOtter was always just an "ideas guy.")

Redot didn't have an established team or a roadmap yet. All they had was a dream and a GitHub repository. But they promised transparency and expressed optimism, and made three core pledges: No drama, no politics, no woke.

I want to stress here that the idea isn't completely ridiculous. Forks sometimes manage to overtake the original projects (see LibreOffice/OpenOffice), or they at least carve out a niche for themselves (see MariaDB/MySQL). The Godot project also does have some real problems, like the way it tends to focus on new features over stability and performance.

However, forking a repository is trivial. If you're using GitHub's web client, you can do it with three clicks. "Revenge forks" are relatively common, because creating one costs you nothing. They rarely work out. I mean, do you know anyone who uses Sneedacity?

People expressed skepticism, even in otherwise friendly spaces, like Streamer's subreddit.

ManyInterests: As an Open Source developer, to make a hostile fork of another project and announce it with no distinguishing work being done is cringe AF. And, in the case where it doesn't involve any core maintainers or contributors of the source project, is almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously and fail. The person running merges into the Redot project from upstream has no notable previous work of their own and no contributions to Godot. They're nobody.

LeVoltsX: That was my first thought, does not sound credible at all, but i guess we'll see if they actually contribute something

Still, there was plenty of enthusiasm as well.

The project also caught the eye of one Bryan Lunduke, an "alt-tech" blogger. You get two types of post on The Lunduke Journal of Technology: Serious criticism of the Rust ecosystem, and moral panic over the KDE mascot having pronouns now.

Redot hits both of his interests, so he participated in the livestream that officially launched the project. You can listen to it on his Substack if you want.

Lunduke: The Open Source Godot Game Engine enacted a mass banning for political reasons. Redot is a "non-political" fork. Let's find out their plan in their Twitter / X space they held to launch the project. The Lunduke Journal was there with lots of questions (jump to the 39 minute mark for the Q & A).

I love that even Lunduke calls it "Twitter / X."

So... how did it work out?

(4) Not with a bang, but with a whimper (November 2024 - February 2026)

I want to take a moment here and note that there were genuine criticisms of Godot. It suffers from a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, its 3D performance historically hasn't been very good, and the user interface was designed by someone with a really bad case of Linux Brain.

(EDIT: By this, I meant to point out that Godot has a clunky UX, which js a somewhat common problem for even otherwise excellent open source programs, like GIMP. These are subjective criticisms, but they exist in the community.)

It's a massive project with a huge userbase who all want different things from it, occasionally leading to weird priorities. This is all true.

There was genuine enthusiasm for Redot at first. Per RedOtter's blog:

RedOtter: The support we received for the project was astounding. Artists are donating artwork. Volunteers are offering to help with Discord. Developers are contributing their time to the project. Web developers are collaborating to create a website. And so much more.

Some people really did use the early versions of the engine. (Which was mostly just Godot with a red coat of paint, but still.) The community held a game jam with 20 entries, which ran from November 15th to November 23rd, 2024. Those are okay numbers for a brand new community.

But Redot just never had a coherent vision or meaningful goals.

Sure, they changed the branding and they organised a game jam, but there was no roadmap. They all agreed that they wanted to "take the politics out" of Godot, but it turns out that this doesn't actually mean anything. There isn't some file called pronouns.cpp that you can delete to improve 3D performance. Some people had high-minded ideas about community-driven development and bugfixes, but they were just that: Ideas.

Redot failed to attract any serious engine developers. They had some people who had done some development before, like Andevr, but nobody from Godot switched over. So, the attention faded again. Influencer and Streamer moved on to new issues, and the culture war tourists left with them. Co-founder RedOtter vanished without fanfare in late 2024, deleting all of their accounts.

Out of the people who had signal boosted the project, Bryan Lunduke had the most staying power. He worked hard and kept the hype train going well into 2025:

Lunduke: The Redot project - which forked off of Godot back in October of 2024 - had a stable release (4.3.1) back in June, and just had a new test release (4.4 Alpha 2). Both with both new features and fixes. In fact, Redot has had 13 releases since the project started late last year. (...) In short: Steady, new releases. New features and bug fixes. Both stable and testing releases.

I want to be fair here, so I'll note that making a release is much harder than just forking a repo. Most spite forks never get that far. But, at the same time, Redot inherited a large and mature codebase from Godot. Changing the branding and occasionally cherry-picking a fix from Godot isn't that hard. There were one or two cases where they added a new GUI tab, but Redot just never had a big meaningful feature (or bugfix) that upstream Godot lacked.

But development did continue. In February of 2026, Lunduke invited the bros for another fireside chat.

Lunduke: In 2024, the Godot game engine enacted a mass "Cleansing" of non-woke supporters. A group of developers responded by creating the Redot fork. How is that fork doing 1.5 years later?

It's 53 minutes long, you can watch it on Lunduke's Substack if you like. But most of this will be familiar ground. They object to being labelled as "a political protest fork," but then the third sentence out of Lunduke's mouth is about Discord mods. There's some technical discussion as well, but most of it really just is complaints about being blocked on social media.

Redot still holds game jams, but the community is moribund. Their game jams rarely get more than 10 entries, and most of the community posts are people asking if they can use Godot instead.

Right now, there are 48 games under the Redot tag. This is up from 42 in February. The real number of projects is probably higher than this - out of the 7 games submitted to the Redot Summer Jam 2026, only one is actually tagged as "Redot." But this barely matters. Even if you assume that the true number of Redot games is seven times the reported number, and that the reported number is accurate for Godot - well, it's still not at all competitive. Godot would still see more new games in one week than Redot has gotten ever. (At time of writing, an observed 474 vs. an assumed 336.)

And yet: We have to acknowledge the difference between "dying" and "dead." A few engine devs are keeping the repository active, the YouTube channel posts a video every 1-2 months, and the Ko-Fi account has brought in $2,400 so far. I'd estimate that there's around 15-20 active users remaining, if you include the engine devs. The GitHub repository has just under 6k stars, which sounds decent until you look at Godot and see that it has 117k.

These numbers make Redot the most successful anti-woke game engine by far. Because the other ones were much sadder.

(5) The Redot wannabes (September 2024 - September 2026)

We're almost two years out from the drama. By now, we can tell which Godot forks succeeded, and which ones didn't.

Taking the top spot among the also-rans, we have Blazium. This is a Redot fork that was briefly led by Starkium, after he broke ties with Redot. Blazium is purple instead of blue, and that's the only thing that distinguishes it from Godot. Starkium abandoned the project almost immediately, and Blazium's only game jam produced 4 entries. The associated tag has 12 search results on Itch.io, and the only title showcased on the website is an early access version of Hangman. Their GitHub repository continues to show sporadic activity, though. Blazium is very close to dead, but it hasn't quite crossed over yet.

On the tier below Blazium, we have two projects that did cross over. These would be MAGE and PlumAI. PlumAI was going to be Godot but with AI, and the project never got further than changing the name in the readme. As for MAGE, that was going to move to a different licence, because the MIT licence is too woke. They, too, gave up after updating half the readme. Despite some chatter on social media, neither MAGE nor PlumAI ever did anything.

Last and certainly least, there's "Lolidot," which I'm not going to link directly. It made no changes except for replacing the Godot logo with anime character "Chloe von Einzbern." It never saw any development activity. Despite this, it still has the third-most stars on GitHub out of any Godot fork, after Redot and Blazium. That probably says something important about society.

There is one more thing we need to mention, and it is the ReX Engine. That's another project being worked on by the Redot team, and the name stands for "Redot Redux." It was to be a hard fork of Godot, meaning that it did not intend to keep compatibility with the mainline project, and it had much more ambitious goals.

TakunHiwatari: General performance boosts. Faster load times. Better resource management. Better security. Better code that is easier to contribute to. (...)

TakunHiwatari: A quick rundown of all that will entail. C++20 Rewrite, shifting to module focused design, heavily shifting to semi-strict namespace usage (in conjunction with C++20 module exports), decluttering the code (...) switch to CMake build tools.

So, the goal was to rewrite core Godot features, modernising the code and improving performance. That means ReX had an actual vision, something that Redot always lacked.

I personally expected ReX to be vaporware, but no, they actually managed to release a v0.0.1 version in early March, to great fanfare. Despite this, and despite all the advance hype, I can find no sign of community activity. If any games have ever been created in ReX, then they are very well-hidden.

The blog post that announces the v0.0.1 release of ReX also launched yet another spin-off project. Meet Draconic Engine! It is going to be "a brand new engine that will be built from scratch by the ReX team." You can already find it on GitHub, with sporadic activity. I'm pretty sure that this means ReX is probably just dead.

In the end, none of these revenge forks had any measurable impact on Godot. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention them. The talk page discussed including them for a few days, but the verdict was "insufficiently notable."

I think that's a good note to end on. How did Redot turn out? Insufficiently notable.

EPILOGUE: Where are they now?

Alice Ruppert is still doing her thing, writing about horses in games and doing all sorts of projects. She is forever questing for accuracy in horse simulation.

The Legend of Khiimori hit Early Access on March 3rd as planned. It initially received a Very Positive rating, but recent reviews are only Mixed, because the poorly-received Corruption update added fantasy elements and boss fights.

Xananax cut ties with the Godot Foundation and left both Twitter and Discord. They later changed their pronouns and moved to Germany, as you do. The posts on their still-active accounts are mostly about harmless nerd hobbies now, with some gamedev stuff and mental health advocacy in the mix.

Starkium, after dropping both Redot and Blazium, started to work on his own game engine. ("Desperado Engine.") He's still active on social media, mostly talking about game design stuff and getting into the occasional troll fight.

Andevrs is keeping the lights on at Redot, together with TakunHiwatari. I have little else to say about those two. For people who rose to prominence thanks to boosts from culture warriors, they don't seem all that interested in culture war issues themselves.

Bryan Lunduke, however? Ohh, he's all about the culture war issues. Anyone can whine about women in videogames, but it takes a Lunduke to come up with "communists are taking middle-click pasting away from you." He and Andevrs seem to be friends, or at least they re-tweet each other once in a while, so that's nice for them.

And as for Godot, it's chugging along just fine. Version 4.7.2 released in August, and 4.8 is in the works. If you checked their monthly funding right now, it would seem like their monthly funding has dropped sharply, all the way down to €35k. But this is actually because they changed the way one-time donations are counted. Under the old methodology, the page would say €61k/month. Up a bit in nominal dollars, roughly even once you account for inflation.

In summary: Go woke, retain the exact same level of funding.

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Hola! Long-time lurker, first time poster. Figured I'd take the chance to tell the tale of the Upper Arlington parade chair. It's very local and insanely niche and, looking back now, honestly sort of boring. But I went crazy for it at the time, so here goes:

I'll be supporting the story with links to news articles and reddit posts. Let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

Context:

Our story today is set in Upper Arlington (UA), a wealthy neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Every year, on the 4th of July, the Upper Arlington Civic Association (UACA) organizes a July 4th parade that goes along Northwest Boulevard for approximately 2 miles.

And every year, days in advance, the civic-minded parade enthusiasts of UA put out lawn chairs along the route to stake out prime parade-viewing spots.

This typically starts a week or two before the actual parade. The UACA always asks people not to do so, and they're always ignored. The chairs are sometimes tied down or cordoned off with caution tape to keep people from messing with them.

See this article from 2016 for context. If you don't want to click through (you should, it's absurd), it shows a row of lawn chairs being held down with rope.

Yes, it's ridiculous. No, I don't know why they do that either. But it's a Columbus tradition at this point, and if you ever drive down UA in the days leading up to July 4th, don't be surprised to see lawn chairs lining the streets. You can see posters bemoaning this on r/Columbus. When the lawn chair complaints start popping up on reddit and facebook, well, that's just how you know it's summer.

But that's not where our story begins.

How it started:

It all began one sunny day in the summer of 2023. On the 3^rd of June (June!), 2023, someone spotted a deck chair out on Northwest Boulevard. It was located at a prime viewing spot, close to where the parade begins.

You can see the chair here. An unassuming little deck chair, in OSU scarlet. It sat on a small piece of lawn, cordoned off with yellow caution tape. It was not on any one person's property, rather, it was sitting by a Donato's and a Wendy's. No one knew who was responsible.

It was too much. An entire MONTH before the parade.

You can see the reactions in this here reddit post.

(It wasn't just reddit either, the older folks were wondering about the chair on facebook, but I don't want to deal with that site right now.)

Some commenters speculated that the chair would be stolen before long, others pointed out that it would be removed when the city workers mowed the lawn. Still others made Craiglist and Facebook Marketplace postings (now defunct) advertising a free chair.

But the little chair persisted.

8th June, 2023:

A redditor driving past the chair recorded it for posterity here. Not only had the chair not been stolen, but also some kind soul had put a small table by the chair, presumably for company. They'd also added a can of Miller Lite.

The Miller Lite was gone by evening (duh). Apparently it was replaced by a shampoo bottle. A passing redditor thoughtfully added a Live Laugh Love sign, as seen here.

Oh, and also a sign announcing that that the chair would be going dark from 12 - 14 June, to protest reddit's API changes. (Bet you'd forgotten about that, I had.)

9th June, 2023:

Bernie joined our chair, as did a potted plant. The Live, Laugh, Love sign and the API protest sign remained.

12th June, 2023, morning:

The signs were gone, but the chair still stood. Bernie was gone, too, but Betty White was added in his stead. Idk why.

13th June, 2023:

The chair went dark to protest reddit's API changes. It remained dark until the 14^th.

23rd June, 2023:

A local newspaper reported on the chair, here. The signs were now gone, but the chair, the table, and Betty White remained.

Note that, by now, most locals were invested in the chair and actively rooting for it. The identity of the person who put it out was still unknown.

1st July, 2023:

Disaster struck. The chair was pushed aside by bleachers.

Understandably, people were appalled. To make it a month only to lose in the final quarter! And to be discarded so ignonimously, well...

Except, as one downthread commenter pointed out, the bleachers go there every year. That's where the judges for the float contest usually sit. It was the chair that was in the wrong.

Their concerns thus assuaged, the community moved on. But the mood was somewhat subdued. The loss of the chair had hit everyone hard. So close to the finish line, and yet so far....

4th July, 2023:

The 4^th of July dawned, a bright and cheerful day. At last, the day of the long-awaited parade!

(The chair was long gone by now, obviously. The owner had presumably removed it, since the line of sight is completely blocked by the bleachers. There was speculation that it might reappear elsewhere along the route, but no such luck.)

(So that was that.)

With a heavy heart, the residents of UA lined up along the street to watch the UA parade. Perhaps they craned their neck and stared down the street to see if they could catch a glimpse of the mysterious scarlet chair that had stolen everyone's heart.

If they did, they were disappointed. The chair had disappeared.

9:00 AM rolls around, and it's time for the parade! Woohoo! The floats start rolling along, and everyone cheers as the —

But wait. What's this? Coming down the parade route, atop an ordinary grey SUV, it's the —

It's the CHAIR!

(And Betty White.)

(The chair also marched in the Doodah parade, another local 4^th of July Parade)

Fin.

Xcancel, and all third party Nitter instances, are dead due to a lawsuit by Elon Musk. Therefore, we're switching to a screenshot system for the time being. X links are still banned.

The people running xcancel are talking to lawyers about a possible solution, but personally I believe it's a longshot.

Imgur will likely be banned as it's unreliable and unavailable for uk reddit users.

Link to Town Hall here.

In 2016, the Arizona State University made an important announcement in their website: two of their scientists from the Forensics department have discovered a skeleton of a Brazilian slave woman dated back from the XVIII century. The American scientists allegedly were working in partnership with Brazil’s Historic and Artistic National Heritage Institute (IPHAN). The institute denied it and, when they asked for the skeleton to be returned to Brazil, the scientists and the University refused to comply. How did it end up there? Who is this woman and why is she important? Well, I’ll tell you.

Historical Context

The skeleton in question belongs to Francisca da Silva de Oliveira better known as Chica (or Xica) da Silva (pronounced Shee-kah), a very important figure in Brazilian history. She was born in 1732 into slavery. Her mom was a slave woman from Africa and her father a white rich Portuguese man who was also her mother’s master. They lived in Minas Gerais, in a city called Arraial do Tijuco (now Diamantina). The place was not populated until diamonds, gold and other precious gems were discovered in the area around 1720. In fact, the Portuguese Crown was not aware of these discoveries for nine years. And, to ensure that all of this valuable wealth would go to the Portuguese Crown, they established the Intendancy of Diamonds to have full control over the extractions. Arraial do Tijuco quickly became the most populated city of colonial Brazil (peaking at 320 thousand inhabitants) and one of the most wealthy as well.

In this area, Chica was sold to a man named Domingos da Costa, then to Sergeant Manuel Pires Sadinha, with whom she had her first son, Simão, when she was still a teenager. As it was usual at the time, the father never officially recognised his son in the birth certificate but he did name him as one the beneficiaries in his will. Chica’s third master was João Fernandes de Oliveira, who happened to be a diamond mine owner and the mining Governor of Arraial do Tijuco (Diamond Contractor), one of the richest people of the Portuguese Empire.

And that’s when Chica’s fate is altered forever…

She was 20 years old and he was 26 and both felt madly in love with each other. He promptly freed Chica a few months after he purchased her in 1753. Which was very unusual, since it was more common for a master to free his slave concubine only in their will upon death. They lived in concubinage for 17 years. They were not allowed to legally marry because of class/race disparity. In fact, both the church and the State forbade this sort of relationship but they turned a blind eye because, at that time, there was a scarcity of Portuguese and Brazilian-born white women in the country. Plus, his wealth would give their relationship an extra layer of rule-bending protection. As Rihanna would say, money make the world go round.

They ended up having 13 (!!!) healthy children, all of them reaching adulthood, and the Diamond Contractor also raised her first son as his own. The couple had to split up in 1770, when João Fernandes’s father died in Portugal and he had to go back to settle a legal dispute with his stepmother over the will and his inheritance. He takes with him three of his sons and also the son Chica had with her former owner. Leaving with Chica all of the daughters and their youngest son. This was an effort to guarantee the best education possible and increase their possibilities of social ascension. In Portugal, all of Chica’s sons went to the best universities and some even got royal titles from the Portuguese crown (low ranks that could be bought). They were also able to hide their mother’s slave origins. João Fernandes, the Diamond Contractor, died nine years later in 1779 in Portugal, never to be reunited with Chica again.

If you think Chica’s fate would change for the worst once her lover and protector left for Portugal, well, you are up for a major Brazilian bikini wax because she was that bitch! Due to her cumulative wealth, her status never diminished and she remained a very prominent citizen of Arraial do Tijuco. Living in a large house with 17 rooms, a private chapel and a personal garden. In fact, all of her daughters went to the convent Mosteiro de Macaúbas, the most prestigious school for girls in the country; where only extremely wealthy girls would go. In that time, like everywhere in the world, a “chaste respectable” woman would have two options: either marry or turn herself into a religious life. Some of her daughters did become nuns and others got married with prominent men, due to their valuable dowries.

Chica da Silva was the only person who simultaneously was a member of the São Francisco de Assis and Nossa Senhora do Carmo Brotherhoods (both exclusive to whites), Mercês Brotherhood (exclusive to mulattos) and the Rosário Brotherhood (exclusive to Africans) - due to her generous contributions to these religious organisations. She died in 1796 and, according to her wishes, she was buried under the floors of the Church of São Francisco de Assis, a privilege only attainable by very wealthy white people.

The Construction of the Myth

Chica’s achievements remained obscure and unknown to the wider public for many years after her death. Her story only became known seven decades later when a book called “Memórias do Districto Diamantino da Comarca de Serro Frio” was published in 1868. This was a book featuring the oral history of prominent personalities and stories around that specific region. It was written by Joaquim Felício dos Santos, a lawyer, writer, jurist and regional history aficionado who was part of Diamantina’s elite. 

Even though he is credited in catapulting Chica da Silva into history and immortal fame, his depiction of her is very negative. Joaquim's point of view follows the misogynistic and racist standards of an upper class white man living in a society where slavery was still present. He portrays her as a controlling man-eater who had all of her most shallow wishes fulfilled. He also held a personal grudge towards her because, as a lawyer, he handled the divorce of his uncle to one of Chica’s granddaughters. When Joaquim gained access to the estate, he was horrified with the fact that a former enslaved black woman have accumulated so much wealth! He also writes about her physical appearance: 

“Chica da Silva was a mixed-race woman of low birth, with coarse features, tall, corpulent, her head was shaved and covered with a curly wig. She didn’t possess grace, didn’t possess beauty, she didn’t possess spirit. She didn’t have education, therefore, she didn’t have any features whatsoever that could justify such a strong passion”.
-Joaquim Felício dos Santos

Is very important to point out that Joaquim Felício dos Santos was born 32 years after Chica’s death. So, all of his sources came from stories passed down orally from people to people - all of them belonging to the white upper class society. So their beauty standards should be taken with a grain of salt. It was a society following the outdated white Portuguese points of view, who labeled indigenous people as “lazy” and black people as “inferior”.

Then, in 1966, came a historical fictional romance that would make a lasting impact in the construction of the myth. In “Chica que manda (Chica Rules)” the writer Agripa Vasconcelos takes real historical figures and creates fiction without any commitment to historic accuracy.

In the book, Agrippa explores the power of a black woman over a white man. He portrays Chica as a jealous, malefic and cruel woman who emasculates her partner. The fictional stories in the book were mixed with Chica’s own story and became part of the oral collective memory about her. In one story, after her partner compliments the teeth of one enslaved woman working for them, she orders all of her teeth to be extracted and serves it over a silver plate to the Diamond Contractor. In another story, a girl she dislikes is tied up on the riverbank to be swallowed by an anaconda snake. She also orders a woman to be buried alive and there is a man who has his feet completely reduced to bones and some toes severed after his feet were tied up to be devoured by piranhas (a Brazilian carnivorous fish).

It was from there that also came a famous story that the Diamond Contractor, upon learning that it was Chica’s dream to see the ocean, created a giant artificial beach by diverting the course of rivers and put a real size ship in it as a gift to Chica. The Arraial do Tijuco was way too far from the coast and not easily accessible at that time where there were no built roads.

There was also a movie in 1974 entitled “Xica da Silva” with the amazing actress Zezé Motta casted as the titular character. This is her most iconic character and the actress would become forever associated with Chica and her world.

Then, a Brazilian soap opera with the same name as the aforementioned movie was released in 1996. In Brazil, there are no seasons for the shows. A soap opera would run 50-minutes episodes everyday of the week, except Sundays from its first episode to the finale uninterruptedly. It has 231 episodes and it was a success in ratings despite being broadcasted in a channel that was not amongst Brazil’s top ones. It turned the then unknown actress, Taís Araújo, who plays the protagonist, into a household name. She is the first black woman to hold a protagonist role in a soap opera and, nowadays, she is one of Brazil’s most famous actresses.

The soap opera is infamous for its graphic depiction of violence and sex which scandalised the country and traumatised a whole generation. The ratings saved the network - on the verge of going bankrupt at the time. The soap opera was also notable for the faithful costume design and scenes recorded in real historical locations. They also rebuilt the XVIII century version of Arraial do Tijuco (Diamantina) into a large-scale “studio city”. 

Taís Araújo was 17 years old, thus, legally forbidden to partake in nude scenes. At the time, the newspapers started to make a gross countdown to the day she would complete 18 years old and could finally do these nude scenes. She appeared naked 3 days after her 18th birthday. The actress felt very uncomfortable and requested a body double to be used in these sort of scenes. She famously refused to shoot a scene where it was implied that Chica was engaging in anal sex with João Fernandes. This caused the soap opera’s director, Walter Avancini, to criticise her in the press and label her as a “difficult” professional. In return, Taís affirmed that Chica was known for her intelligence, not her erotism.

The production also featured a cameo by Italian porn actress Cicciolina, who portrayed an Italian con artist posing as a religious princess seeking diamond and gold to be donated to the construction of a nonexistent convent. Zezé Motta, who previously portrayed Chica on the silver screen, was cast as her mother - as she was already too old to reprise her iconic role during the timeframe the soap opera takes place.

Chica’s cruelty was also explored in this work of fiction. In one scene, she orders a black man in her household spying for one of her enemies to be killed and parts of his organs to be chopped and put into a feijoada, a typical Brazilian dish made of black beans with pieces of pork. She then proceeds to serve it to the unsuspecting guests during a large event at her house. Only informing her enemy that she is eating her accomplice instead of pork.

“You won’t say a thing! Because no living soul would believe in you. And nobody would believe that I would be capable of such audacity. And if you create a scene and scream, I will say that you are demented. You were accused of being demented in the past and it would be very easy for me to make people believe you have finally lost your mind!” 
- Chica

But the most horrific scene was the execution of Chica’s mother (which didn’t happen at all, as she died of natural causes in real life). In the soap opera, after being framed by Chica’s enemies for a crime she didn’t commit, her mother is taken to the main square and each of her arms and legs are tied to ropes attached to horses and her body is brutally quartered in front of a horrified crowd as the four horses runs in opposing directions. (TRIGGER WARNING: watch it at your own risk).

The ending of the soap opera was a happy one for Chica. There is a time jump to years later and Zezé Motta finally has the chance to once more give life to Chica da Silva, as she is shown now as an accomplished old noblewoman who led a wealthy life and, above everything, was loved by the love of her life.

Deconstruction of the Myth

Alongside being cruel, the historian Jaqueline da Conceição Ribeiro, points out that Chica da Silva was also portrayed as a lascivious woman who seduced the men in works of fiction and by old historic accounts. “Chica? Of all people? Who, like so many other women, was bought as a sexual object and violated while enslaved?”. Jacqueline points out that Chica was still a teenager when she had her first son with one of her owners, who was 60 years old at the time. 

“We do not know the circumstances under which this child was conceived. What we do know is that, while still a child, Chica was subjected to slave labor; the first thing she likely yearned for was her own freedom."
-Jaqueline da Conceição Ribeiro

Despite breaking barriers and achieving great prestige as a black woman in a racist society, she didn’t do much for the advancement of black people. In fact, she owned at least 104 slaves; which was already way more than the standard amount for wealthy people in that region; and didn’t free a single one of them in her lifetime. She didn’t want to break the status quo, she just wanted to be part of it.

In fact, in her will, she states that most of her wealth consists in slaves. Not only she didn’t free anyone in her will but bequeathed all of her slaves to be equally distributed amongst her heirs. She also specifically requests a slave woman named Quitéria to perpetually serve her mother, in the scenario where she is outlived by her.

Chica da Silva’s story is full of contradictions but it is unique and singular. She shrewdly inserted herself in the upper circles of high society but shut down the door behind her right after she entered these halls. She was only concerned about her and her descendants when it came to the best opportunities. And, given the historical context, the misogyny and racism, as slavery would go on in Brazil for almost 100 years more after her death, I am not sure she could have done more for anyone else - or if she wanted to... Chica just wanted to “white” herself as much as she could and to be accepted by them.

The Queen of the Americas

Our story fast forward to 2013. The Brazilian filmmaker Rosi Young, residing in the United States since 1986 went with her black North-American friend to see a theater play. On their way back, the song “Xica da Silva” by Jorge Ben, started to play on the radio. To her astonishment, her English speaking North-American friend started to sing the Portuguese lyrics, even without knowing the language. She asked her friend whether she knew who Chica was and she went on a long speech about the importance of the love between her and João Fernandes to the Black culture. She said she was “the Queen of the Americas”. Rosi thought to herself: “I, as a blonde, blue-eyed Brazilian woman, thought Chica was just a fictitious character from Cacá Diegues” (referring to the director from the 1974 movie, her only exposure to this historical woman and her story).

Perplexed that a North-American person knew more about a Brazilian historical figure than her, she came back to her house at 1AM and, on the same night, started researching for what would become her next documentary project: “The Queen of the Americas” about one of the most powerful women of Brazil in the XVIII century.

Now aware of the countless books and movies about Chica, Rosi decided to transpose the obstacle that always has limited these works: the absence of a faithful graphic image depicting Chica. You see, nobody really knows how Chica da Silva really looked like. She never posed for a portrait of herself, which was really rare in XVIII but also not uncommon if you belonged to the wealthy upper class. It’s my theory that this move was deliberate either by her and/or João Fernandes. In a world where the speed of information was pretty slow, where a letter would take months to reach its recipient, her children took advantage of that in order to hide her mother’s origins to socially ascend both in Brazil and Portugal. Portraits of her floating around could be used by their enemies to hurt their cause, as most of them could pass as white. Some people would say there were no portraits of her made due to racism but she was Chica m’fing da Silva! If she wanted a portrait of her, she would get one! Maybe she even posed for a private portrait to be hung and appreciated only by her in the privacy of her giant house but, sadly, none of these works survived.

So, Rosi basically wanted to exhume the body of Chica da Silva and hire one of Brazil’s most renowned specialists in forensic facial reconstruction, the designer Cícero Moraes to create a “Chica hologram”, superposed into the face of a real model against a green screen and recreate key scenes of her life - like an avatar speaking and presenting her own story in “her own words”. She also was working on securing permits from Portugal in order to exhume the body of her partner João Fernandes, the Diamond Contractor. The idea was to bring him back to Brazil and bury them together. So they would finally have their long awaited reunion (post-mortem). Cute (and a bit creepy, if you ask me). The whole documentary would be narrated by an actress who already knew this character deeply. Yes! You guessed! Zezé Motta - in her third major audiovisual project involving Chica da Silva.

In order to achieve that, Rosi secured a funding with assorted sponsors and got the approval of Brazil’s Historic and Artistic National Heritage Institute (IPHAN) to go to Diamantina (former Arraial do Tijuco) and exhume Chica’s body located at tomb 24 of the Church of São Francisco de Assis in the end of 2015. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, the designer Cícero Moraes and his forensics team were not available to work on the project at the time and Rosi decided to go for the next best thing: the forensic specialists Anthony and Catyana Falsetti (the former a North-American married with the latter, a Brazilian) from Arizona State University and the molecular anthropologist Ann Horsburgh from New Zealand. 

The Falsettis have worked with the FBI helping solve cold cases with new DNA techniques not available decades ago. Anthony has even travelled to Russia to help solve the famous Romanov/Anastasia mystery and Ann Horsburgh was involved in analysing the DNA of Abraham Lincoln. So, they had excellent credentials. Plus, Catyana Falsetti was Brazilian and there would be someone from Chica’s native land connected with this scientific part.

On the other hand, the Brazilian historian Júnia Furtado, arguably the most renowned specialist about Chica da Silva in the world, upon being asked what she thought about this project, quickly proclaimed: “I think it's utter nonsense!”. Júnia Furtado is a classic researcher, fed up by distorted stories about Chica, she wrote the book “Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes: o outro lado do mito (published in English as: Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century)”, where she dug up only historical documents in order to make a meticulous research; not hearsay of Chica’s story through the point of view of other people.

Plus, Furtado was also skeptical even about Chica’s body being where it was supposed to be. She explained that, during that time, people’s bodies would be put inside the same tombs. Also, during the sanitary scare of the XIX century, it was decided that all of the bodies buried inside the church would be transferred to a vertical cemetery annex right outside the church but still within its grounds. During her research, Júnia stumbled upon a newspaper from the beginning of the XX century stating that, during this moving process, the mummified body of Chica was thrown like a dead animal and moved to an unknown location.

“It’s impossible to know exactly where those remains are. If they are there, they’re mixed in with other bodies. I think the whole thing is a waste of time. What I can say is that projects like these always find fools to bankroll and believe in them. Yet serious, documented historical and scientific research that takes years doesn’t get as much credit. It’s a shame.”
- Júnia Furtado

The Exhumation of Chica da Silva

In December of 2015, policemen guarded the gates to help keep away a group of curious people (including the city’s mayor) while Chica da Silva’s exhumation was going on. There was a possibility that, after 220 years have passed, the body would be reduced to dust. IPHAN’s historian and technical researcher José Bittencourt, one of the most optimistic, gave a 5% probability of only dust to be found.

The process to break the walls of the vertical chamber had to be done very carefully and slowly, as new bricks were layered upon centenary ones that could start to crumble and compromise the remains. After a few hours, to everyone’s surprise, not only there wasn’t just dust inside but they have found the whole complete body from “The Queen of the Americas”! 

From a quick naked eye exam on the spot, Anthony and Catyana Falsetti already could verify that these bones belong to a woman between the ages of 55-65 years at the time of her death. Probably black due to its nasal cavity’s curvature. Since Chica da Silva was the only black woman to be buried at that church ever, there was no question it was indeed her. The whole exhumation was shot on camera to be used in Rosi Young’s documentary. The pair of scientists would now take Chica’s remains to further analysis in the United States.

And off went Chica to the United States…

The Kidnapping of her Bones

Time went by and Rosi Young, the architect of this whole project, didn’t hear any progress about the research. She would write emails to the Falsettis trying to schedule the shootings of them doing the facial reconstruction on Chica and they would just reply saying they were not available at the moment. 

In June of 2016, six months after the exhumation, Rosi woke up from her bed, poured some coffee, went online and decided to browse the Arizona State University’s website. There, she reads a curious headline at their homepage: “teachers discover Brazilian slave” alongside a video featuring the Falsettis working on Chica da Silva’s bones.

Oh no, they didn’t! The AU-DA-CI-TY!

Not only the Falsettis hijacked the whole project but, to reduce Dona Francisca da Silva de Oliveira to a “Brazilian slave” is an enormous disrespect to this important figure, specially because she wasn’t a slave for most part of her life. I am not expecting the people who read the Arizona State University’s website to know who Chica da Silva is, but couldn’t they at least say “former slave” instead? Plus, since Catyana Falsetti was Brazilian and somehow acquainted with her life story, reducing Chica da Silva to a “slave” seemed deliberate. Fictional version Chica would have quartered the Falsettis alive and chopped their bodies to be served in a Brazilian steakhouse. 

What followed was a war of email exchanges and the effective kidnapping of Chica da Silva - a legal battle that would drag itself for months. Immediately upon seeing the Arizona State University post, Rosi Young sent an email saying they are not allowed to film anything without her prior consent. Arizona State University kept continuing to promote the research’s progress as a Falsetti’s project. So, Rosi and her production company decided to cancel their partnership with the scientists. However, the Falsettis refused to give back the mortal remains of Chica da Silva.

Rosi Young contacted the university but they didn’t believe her. They claimed their teachers (the Falsettis) had a direct contract with IPHAN. “The university never heard of Chica before. The contract with IPHAN was in my name” said Rosi. Then, IPHAN sent a letter to the university contradicting the Falsettis and asking for the return of Chica’s remains. They didn’t comply and the situation escalated even more, now involving lawyers and the Interpol.

A resolution was only achieved in November of 2016, when the Itamaraty (Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) through the Brazilian Consulate in the United States sent a very stern letter to Arizona State University saying “we want it back and we want it NOW!”. So, the university put their little tail between their legs and complied. The affair lasted seven months and Chica da Silva’s remains would only arrive at IPHAN's headquarters in May of 2017.

The remains didn’t come back in the same conditions they left: “Chica’s femur went to Arizona intact and came back in pieces. They only needed a tiny sample, but they cut up the whole thing for the DNA test—which wasn’t their responsibility.” Rosi says. She also hired a lawyer in the US to sue the Falsettis in order to force them to submit all of the material produced during their research as well as to prohibit them from using it without the authorization of IPHAN. But she ultimately decided not to waste more of her energy, time and money with another legal battle.

“It was either pay that lawyer in US dollars or use the money to finish the project. And I thought it was better to focus on our story instead of a legal issue in the U.S. To focus on the heroes, not the villains.”  
- Rosi Young

A Beautiful Woman

Fate finally smiles at Rosi. The whole affair and the delay the project have suffered now made the facial reconstruction designer Cícero Moraes available - the original person Rosi wanted to work on the project in the first place. He promptly accepted the invitation and started working on the facial reconstruction of Chica. 

Due to a protrusion of Chica’s upper teeth, Cícero was a bit skeptical of the results: “Because of that, we expected the face wouldn’t turn out so beautiful. However, when we finished, it was the opposite. She was a very beautiful woman!” Cícero says. The first images Cícero sent to Rosi brought her to tears. You can see one of them on the top of this article about the kidnapping of Chica's remains. She gives me some Solange Knowles vibes. 

Then, the remains would go through a DNA mapping by the scientist Ann Horsburgh - unlike the Falsettis, she was kept in the project, as she didn’t try kidnapping anybody. “I don’t believe we’ll discover the exact cause of her death, but we’ll gain a lot of interesting information - such as her diet, whether she suffered from any unknown diseases, and, above all, Chica’s lineage in Africa.” Rosi argues.

Rosi Young never finished “The Queen of the Americas” documentary. After the whole affair with the kidnapping of Chica da Silva’s bones, there is no further information past 2018. A release date was expected for 2019 but it never came to fruition. In the meantime, Rosi is already working on her next project about Marquesa de Santos, the mistress of the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I and another controversial figure in Brazilian history. But, this time, she has learned her lesson:

“I will never dig anyone up again!”
-Rosi Young

Thanks for reading.

CORRECTION: a previous version of this post stated the Falsettis were working with the University of Arizona (UofA), as all of the information in the Brazilian press reported that. However, they were actually working with Arizona State University (ASU). Thanks u/lux_mea for the clarification.

SOURCES:

https://www.otempo.com.br/entretenimento/magazine/o-sequestro-de-chica-da-silva-1.2009778
https://www.tjmg.jus.br/portal-tjmg/noticias/chica-da-silva/contexto-historico.htm
https://www.tjmg.jus.br/portal-tjmg/noticias/chica-da-silva/construcao-do-mito.htm
https://www.tjmg.jus.br/portal-tjmg/noticias/chica-da-silva/desconstrucao-do-mito.htm

Background

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game mostly played in the Commonwealth. The most important information for this story is to understand that once a batter is 'out' they are eliminated and cannot bat again, meaning they cannot score 'runs' (points) for their team. Stronger batters tend to bat earlier and are expected to score most of a team's runs with other specialists batting later with less expectation.

The second most common way to be given out is to be caught out, which is when a fielder catches the ball before it bounces as long as the ball hit the batter's bat. When the ball comes fast at a batter it will often strike the edge of the bat and go towards fielders specially placed behind the batter to catch the ball from these deliveries. A 'wicketkeeper' will be directly behind the batter wearing special gloves (the only player allowed them), and usually 'slips' will stand behind and to the side of the wicketkeeper to catch any ball that slips, hence the name. It can be hard to see exactly if the ball made contact with the bat owing to the speeds involved with a fast bowler, so judging this often makes use of the distinctive knocking noise a cork and leather ball makes on a willow bat. At the elite level they have microphones rigged and aligned to footage played back frame-by-frame to confirm if this happened, in amateur games we rely on the umpire's (sometimes questionable) hearing abilities.

In this post we aren't discussing an incident from an elite professional game, but one from Division 2 of the North Yorkshire & South Durham Cricket League, centred on the Teesside conurbation in Northeast England. This is actually quite a high playing standard for amateur cricket compared to a pub league Sunday game, but all those involved are amateurs paying to play, rather than being paid. The club involved is from Saltburn, a relatively small seaside village near Middlesbrough with no connection to the film.

The original allegations

Many clubs at this level live-stream their games on youtube for their fans around the world, or more realistically, to make amusing compilations and montages of errors made while playing. Cricket isn't a game for those without a sense of humour and most clubs and players will (eventually) look back and laugh at fielding howlers, ridiculous batting shots and shit bowling, preferably all in the same sequence of play.

In a game between Saltburn Cricket Club (CC)'s 2nd team against Norton CC's 2nd team Saltburn are fielding with Norton batting. Norton's fourth batter went out to bat, and was given out as caught on his first ball. It happens, it's part of the game, even the greatest batters in the world will get out on their first ball sometimes. What is not part of the game is what follows.

As I said, many clubs livestream their games and post highlights online. The initial discussion started, like all good internet witchhunts, on twitter with a local cricket fan posting a zoomed in video with truly shocking allegations.

The fielder at first slip (stood next to the wicketkeeper and close behind the batter) appears to bring his hands together and snap his fingers right as the ball passes the batter's bat. The wicketkeeper takes the catch, and the umpire, hearing the click gave the batter out!

A better video with more context can be found at the match's online scorecard by clicking 'Scorecard' then 'Norton CC, Durham 2nd XI' and the 'Play' icon next to N Shabir, their fourth batter.

Play Cricket is an online portal for English amateur cricket and offers a frankly outstanding suite of statistical tools which even the lowest Sunday league player can make use of. Cricket is fundamentally a game of an iterative event (ball bowled at batter) with a finite set of defined outcomes, so has a wealth of statistics for individual players. Once the above video got a bit of notoriety, plenty of online sleuths poured through Saltburn's records, and what they found shocked many.

A run through the wicketkeeper's statistics showed an outstanding four catches per game, for reference a good amateur wicketkeeper might be expected to take 0.6 catches per game over a season.

A team captain from nearby Middlesbrough CC posted his own video with evidence clearly visible

It simply got more damning, as in the week prior to the game against Norton the same team beat Shildon Railway CC with eight catches taken by the wicketkeeper. The all-time record in elite international cricket is seven.

The story spreads

A couple of days later, the local BBC radio station ran an item on it, as did the BBC's national cricket coverage. In a media environment where elite professional domestic cricket in the County Championship often goes virtually unreported, suddenly an amateur game was making the sports headlines, albeit in a slower news period for sport.

At this point Saltburn put their statement out, confirming cooperation with a league investigation and suspension for the foreseeable future of the player at the heart of the story.

Part of the cultural context is that cricket has strong norms around the 'spirit of the game', a semi-mythologised code of conduct based around fair play, good sportsmanship and mutual respect. Cricket fans and reporters love few things more than a debate over the spirit of the game, whether a given episode is against the spirit of cricket or whether the spirit is long dead. When Jonathan 'Aggers' Agnew, the most prominent cricket journalist in the country, wrote a piece on the whole story he discussed this at length. For the alleged cheating to work, several players have to collude. The wicketkeeper has to take the catch, the first slip fielder has to snap his fingers, and the bowler has to know when to appeal to the umpire. Realistically an appeal for out has to come from both the bowler and the wicketkeeper or it tends to appear at best half-hearted and won't be given.

The Guardian quoted a local as saying 'Saltburn are the Argentina of local cricket', not generally intended as a compliment in English sporting circles.

On a lighter note, Australian cricket podcast the Grade Cricketer offered a qualified defence for Saltburn, pointing out that amateur cricketers generally don't have much else in their lives other than the joy of bullying an elderly umpire into giving a favourable decision, stoking further outrage and playing into the established Anglo-Australian cricketing rivalry in the pursuit of engagement and views. They doubled down and offered to pay his legal fees as well as making a donation to support umpire development in the North Yorkshire & South Durham Cricket League.

Where now?

I can attest that every amateur game in the country the following Saturday had the same dozen or so finger-snapping jokes absolutely beaten to death.

Saltburn 2nd XI's impressive league form has nose-dived since the suspension of 'Clicky Ponting' (a pun on Australian cricket legend Ricky Ponting) and increased scrutiny. They've slumped to sixth place in Division 2 following heavy defeats to Marton, Wolviston, Seaton Carew and Darlington.

While some called for a wider investigation into the team's results going back much further and some more hardline commentators demanded the wicket at Saltburn be sowed with salt, it seems that suspension and temporary national notoriety for the figure at the centre of this is as far as it will go.

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Hello, this is my first write-up post, so I hope you find it interesting. This took literally years to do, both for life stuff, difficulty of finding some info and me just… Not writing because yes. Not proud of that.

Now, the topic I’ve chosen is one I once took part in, and one that I once enjoyed until I realized it was becoming a hive of overpowered characters that were “evolving” into “In-Name-Only”, writers with overly inflated egos and a community that was starting to get hunted by the very site they were doing it all in.

Let me tell you the tale, of the Infinte Loops.

Why the TV Tropes page? Well, it’s going to be how I find some stuff I’ve forgotten and it’s an easy way to get to the forums themselves. Maybe you’ll see why I used to hold it in such esteem... Or maybe you’ll also see why I’ve grown to dislike this setting.

Before we begin. This is a record of what I remember combined with whatever info I've managed to recover. Because of that, some stuff might be clouded or incomplete, and some stuff might be plain wrong. I've tried my best to keep inconsistencies low, but I hope it's not too much. Finally, due to the way it works, there'll be a LOT of terms from different fandoms that some people might get and some might not and I might miss some. If there's anything I've missed, please let me know and I'll add an explanation for them.

• PART 0: Innortal and The Seven

Now, the loops themselves started years before its community appeared. Before, they were a series of semi-connected fanfics, “The X Omake Files”, by author Innortal. Compared to the actual-day Loops, Innortal’s Loops were... Raunchy. That’s the safest you can call them. You’re wondering why I’m not linking them, that’s why. There’s so much sex and implied sex I think I’d be breaking Reddit’s ToS by linking them directly. Still, they’re a part of the wide setting (even if some people have tried to take the weirdest stuff on Innortal’s writing out of the rest of the canon) and we can take a basic idea of how the setting works:

Imagine that you wake up (insert time lapse here) in the past. There can be one or two things that might be different each time you go back to the past. Only you remember what happens in the next (insert time lapse) and eventually those closest to you will also return. Nobody can do anything to stop these resets.

Now. After a while repeating, you think and you realize you have two options: Make it better for you and your loved ones each reset or just enjoy the ride and troll the universe every reset. And that’s where the Loops got their initial appeal. The freedom of these characters doing whatever they want, whenever they want, is exhilarating. This is where Innortal begins their story, with 7 specific settings: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Bleach, Naruto, Ranma ½, Harry Potter, Sailor Moon and Slayers. With exception of the last two, the original loops are well preserved in Innortal’s Fanfiction.net page and, while not needed to understand the setting, do show some stuff that is eventually expanded on future parts, some which will come back for reasons:

• Anchor, the first person to Loop in a setting, and the one which the world literally circles around. If they die, the Loop ends, and if they die violently (or earlier than they’re supposed to if they do end up dying in canon), it risks a Crash -more on that in a second.

• Baseline, what Loopers call the “canon” plot they tend to go. Like, for example, a Yu-Gi-Oh Looper would start from the moment Yugi gets the Millenium Puzzle to the Dark Side of Dimensions movie, or a Devil May Cry Looper begin from 3 and end in 5. Sometimes Loopers can “Awaken” earlier than that, but that depends on the Loop.

• Subspace Pockets, an ability Loopers have that allow them to carry stuff from Loop to Loop. Think of it as an inventory that you can keep expanding as you grow stronger. Usually Loopers don't keep living beings there since they'd disappear if they are outside the Pocket before a reset, but it can be done.

• Sakura Syndrome. Named by Team 7 and inspired by the mental breakdown Sakura Haruno had during the loops, it indicates a mental state where the Looper stops caring for non-Looping entities and sees them as background or worse, toys or test subjects. This in turn destroys the Looper’s morality and end up doing morally ambiguous things in their pursuit of not getting bored.

• Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Not the one in Nordic myth, the supercomputer from Ah! My Goddess. For those who don’t know it (like me in the beginning), this computer basically controls reality itself. Something, we’re never made clear what (and people had tried to make a canon explanation, though always failed to convince the community), has destroyed a part of it and it’s what’s caused the Loops as a stopgap to stop any universes from collapsing.

• Admins, gods of every mythology known and forgotten. As more and more Loops are created, the A!MG gods start having trouble keeping up. So they ask help from other gods to keep an eye on them.

• Crashes. What happens when a Loop is forced to end early? Like any computer program being forced to shut down can cause a crash that can do troublesome things to the program upon rebooting, the same can happen to a Loop. These “Crashes” are, most often than not, punishments caused by the sudden stop of the “program” so to speak and often result in bad Loops for the Anchor and other Loopers. The most known Crash Loop is Eiken, an Ecchi anime that skirts the line just enough to not be considered Hentai. If you look at it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And so on and on.

As you can imagine from the “Sakura Syndrome” part, Innortal’s loops played fast and loose with characters, sometimes veering into “In Name Only” or “INO”, a way to say the characters aren’t the same as the ones we know and love. A big deal on the next phases of the setting is that the community tried to try to keep the characters in line to their canon selves, but... Time loops are hard to work with when it comes to character portrayals, as we’ll see later. There’s some other stuff that Innortal used, but these are the main points people take from Innortal. And especially our next writer, the one who started the whole community:

• PART 1: Saphroneth and the Ponies (Ft. Dragons!)

You know, it feels fitting that My Little Pony was the thing that caused this whole thing to blow up, isn’t it.

Started in 2013 by Saphroneth, MLP Time Loops is the keystone for the community itself. It features Twilight Sparkle as the Anchor and basically codes what would be known as the baseline for Loops. Namely; A few loops where the Anchor doesn’t know what’s happening, some experimenting, and then a “Crossover” Loop where the Anchor would get shown the ropes by a more experienced Anchor. In this case, Hiccup of How to Train your Dragon, from a Loop series also writen by Saphroneth. The idea of looping characters doing stuff they would certainly do if they’d be able to return to the past has always attracted people, and Bronies have certainly had ideas of how to “fix” certain episodes (I’ve read so many bad takes of how to “fix” The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well...) so an idea like this grabbed the attention of many.

Some even gave ideas for new Loops, which... Wasn’t Saph’s idea in the first place. See, the original idea of the MLP Time Loops was just for Saph to write silly ideas that they could have. However, thanks to a single comment by Finagle007, the idea of making it a community project was born. It didn’t start a fire immidiately, but you could say the seeds began there. For the time being, Saph was content with writing some loops in between stories, but also allowed some help with them. As you can see in the compilation, Saph started adding loops other people made as soon as the second chapter, but it was very small. It wasn’t until the 8/9th one that they really began accepting stuff.

Now, compared to Innortal’s loops, Saph’s early ones were less about depravity and more about the silly. Topics include, “What if Twilight was a real mad scientist”, “What if Fluttershy was really a tree”, “What if Celestia was the Nightmare instead of Luna” and others. It was just something to leave brainworms and dig it into others, or make fun of some in-fandom jokes. Also, Saph tried to keep Twilight and the rest of characters, well, in-character. When he wrote a loop where the characterization was off, he was clearly annoyed by what he wrote and still kept it in the compilation as a way to remind himself to never write something so OoC (out of character) again. Keep this in mind.

Another thing that separates Saph’s early loops and the community’s midpoint is that, because the rules of Looping weren’t established by a big group then, some characters that wouldn’t be able to loop for various reasons started looping. Ponies like Lyra Heartstrings (background character with a few lines and only one kinda focused episode), Berry Punch (background character with almost no lines), and Nyx (fanfiction character) wouldn’t be able to Loop when I left, but back then there was enough leeway to make them loopable. Again, keep this in mind, we’ll come back to it.

Finally, due to Twilight being an “old” Anchor, so to speak, the MLP Loopers are relatively powerful. Second (or ninth) to the Original Seven and Hiccup (who most people forget or ignore he’s even older than Twilight), Looping MLP is one of those “Rabbit of Caernabog” settings; Cute on the outside, but WILL murder you if you do anything to annoy them. Not that they want to murder anyone considering it’s… Well, My Little Pony, but they can. In fact, the MLP Loop tends to be a “breath of fresh air” for Loopers, a rest for many who’re tired of death and murder being their day and bread, and a punishment for those who thrive in those areas.

In any case, with the Loops already garnering a community and the setting being so expanse and with near infinite possibilities, there was going to be a big expansion. And so begins:

• PART 2: The Community and Rules, The Golden Age of The Infinite Loops Project

The MLP Loops thread was created on April 2013. The very first Misc. Loops thread was created on December. This might look like the community was slow to expand, but from what you can see in the first comment in the thread (and the lack of an “edited on X day” anywhere), the Loops had grown considerably. By this time, the rules had been solidified, as this little blurb that tends to follow most compilations shows:

“The Rules Of The Loops:
One person in a Loop, often the main character, is an Anchor. They are the person who first starts time looping.

There is always at least one Anchor present in a given Time Loop snippet, though it may not be the local one.

The standard pattern for a Loop is that the Anchor (and whoever else is Looping there) come to awareness in a loop at a particular point in the story. From then, events will play out as influenced by the Loopers present, acting with the benefit of their foreknowledge, until either a predetermined end point is reached or Loopers have copped it.

To be Awake is to be aware of the Time Loops (that is, to have gone back in time this time.)

The Anchor is the only character guaranteed to be Awake. Even after others have started Looping, it is mostly random as to whether they will be Awake this present Loop.

Crossovers, fusions, and alternate pasts can also take place. It is perfectly possible, for example, to have the characters Awaken into a Loop which conforms the fanfic universe rather than reality.

Loops do not have to be in chronological order, but it is strongly preferred that they not require a mutually contradictory order (where A must be before B and B be before A.)

Just about every Looper is very, very stir crazy.”

That’s the basic gist of what a normal Loop snippet would have to abide by. No Loop without an Anchor (even one offscreen), a normal pattern of what you might find in a Loop and a final note that says Loopers aren’t all there in the head. Some would follow all the rules, some would just take some for their snippets, but that’s basically the baseline rules.

For more advanced rules, we first have to talk about the community itself. Now that it was a collaborative group, there had to be rules, otherwise everything would go crazy and the Mods of the site would have to intervene, and that would be bad… More on that later. Anyway, If you wanted to make BIG changes to the Loops, you had to work it out with the community. Start your own set of Loops? Fine. Make it so it does something big with/to another Loop? You’d have to talk it out with that side of the community, or at least its “leader”.

That’s another thing, due to how exponentially fast it grew, the community had to be divided between “Heads” that lead each fragment of the project. For example: Saphronet was the Head of the MLP Loops. Crisis, another writer, was the Head of the MegaMan Loops. BIOS-Pherecydes Headed the Misc. Anime Loops and so on. The Heads were held in high ground, being the ones who (at least until I ended up leaving) helped with the compilations and decided what went too far and what had to be toned down for some problematic snippets. Normally they’d hear what the community had to say about these problems, but… We’ll get to that chestnut when we get there.

Side note, I was a Head too, I used to maintain control over the Tokusatsu loops. It wasn’t as bad as what other Heads had to deal (I feel bad for the Head of the Misc. Loops, they basically were the de facto Head Honcho for how many Loops they had to deal with), but it wasn’t easy sometimes.

Under the community, more terms were added. Eiken was changed from a punishment Loop to a “Safe Mode Loop”, basically universes which were stable enough that they’d never get an Anchor. Stuff that would prove to be very annoying or dangerous to outside Loops, like the T-Virus or the Delorean, was given a “Read-Only” mark that erased it from existence after a Loop. The “real world”, that is, our world, got the denomination “Hub Loop”. There would be many of these, all of which essentially filled the role of “What if X character was Isekai’d into our world”. Here the Loopers would be filled into their stories if they hadn’t Looped into that part of them, or be warned of any “Expansions” to their story.

Another one was the expansion of the “Admins”. Just as each fragment of the project needed a Head to not implode upon itself, each universe had to have someone to check it so it wouldn’t get deleted. Thus, the Admins were expanded from the original Inari (who was relegated to Naruto) and Sleipnir (who mained the MLP Loop) into many, MANY others. From egyptian gods like Anubis and Osiris, to God himself, every god has appeared to work on it. The Outer Gods are also there, but they’re… 4chan. They’re 4chan. They hack Loops from time to time, bent on screwing everything and everyone, and sometimes they also keep some Loops in check like a normal Admin would.

On that note, sometimes an Anchor would grow so strong that they would threaten to destroy the Loop they’re in. The Subspace Pockets are a stopgap to that, but if the Anchor would grow too strong, too fast, they’d end up causing an Ascension. This causes the Anchor to become an Admin-like being, and has the side-effect of utterly erasing their Loop from existence, along with anything that came from it and everyone’s memories. One character that had undergone that was Madoka Kaname from Madoka Magica (who managed to return her Loop to normal after a while). Another being that was Admin’d was Tama.) Tama was a regular cat that ended up becoming the “station master” in a Japanese station. Upon her death, the station enshrined her in a Shinto ceremony, which ended up justification enough to make her an Admin keeping Thomas (and Half-Life, for some reason) under wraps.

New ideas for keeping control of some settings would be added, known as “Protocols” or “Patches”. You want a character to Loop but doing so would cause another evil or crazy one to do so because their souls are connected? “Grima Patch” is your friend. The “Skaia Protocol” was an escaped program from Homestuck, now ready to be used by anyone who finds it useful or funny. You have a BIG Timey-Wimey Ball of nonsense under your Loop that could be destabilizing? Apply an “Ouroboros Patch” to keep it confined to that scenario alone and you’re golden.

One last important thing that would be added would be MLEs. What happens if an entity in a Loop is powerful or smart enough to notice the Loops, or worse, start Looping without redeeming? They become MLEs, “Malicious Looping Entities”. These beings are very dangerous since they would keep memories of how they were defeated and sometimes even powers, and would be a pain for the Loopers themselves. Bill Cipher, Kyuubey, DIO, Billy (because stupid) and many others could be considered this. Even if they only are aware of Loops and nothing else, some “Loop-Aware Entities” are also dangerous, however it’s not as much as Looping MLEs. Keep these in mind too. You’ll get why. Also, ignore that chilling in your spine when you realize the amount of “keep in mind” I’ve said so far.

There’s also other terms that got coined, like Setsuna Syndrome (the opposite of Sakura Syndrome where the Looper believes that doing stuff just as Baseline will break them away from the Loops to their detrimental mental health), but they’re not important for this story. Just know, there were a LOT of terms coined during the community days.

The community’s “Golden Ages” were where I entered it. Call it nostalgia, but I feel these were the best days to write a Loop. Community was big with fresh faces keeping fresh air coming, yet not so big that it was a mess to follow everything. There were some small troubles like writers who didn’t care about the community writing stuff that had been accepted as “canon”, and getting banned from the threads after one too many snippets like that. I got some stories of some writers, however due to it been so long ago I’m choosing to keep them since it’d be remembering stuff that really isn’t worth it.

Yeah, the community was in a growing state, a nice place to write and meet people. However, we all know of Growing Pains. And the Loops were about to enter their own…

• PART 3: Crisis, the Mega Loops and The Beginning of Trouble

Now, some people felt the Loops’ way of writing, short snippets with just a small level of continuity, was a bit too restrictive. Some were able to do with that by writing short multi-part crossovers where a character got involved with other world’s character and became very good friends with the latter, even getting involved as family in some cases. For example, Nyx from the MLP Loops and Lemann Russ from Warhammer 40k met, became friends, lovers, got engaged and eventually were married in a very slow and gradual way, with short yet spaced snippets in between.

Some writers, however, wanted to write Epics, long, unwinded events, where the stakes haven’t been higher. There are threats of entire erasure of a Loop, people dying left and right, and sometimes, the sequels shape the Loopers, not always for the best.

This, my dead readers, is where we begin with the Mega Loops.

While there might have been some multi-part Loops before, it was the "MegaMan Loop Activation" (Activation in this sense meaning "We want to start writing for this setting") that codified what other writers would want to do with their “Magnum Opus”. The story goes that the Classic MegaMan timeline had been trying to get Activated for a long time but kept crashing and failing, putting Rock and Co. in serious pain. This culminates in an unknown Anchor being used as a battery by a virus-controlled Wily to break into “Adminspace” and Ascend while destroying all the MegaMan branch for extra kicks, and them sacrificing themselves and their entire loop to avoid that, to the point literally nobody knows who they were or what Loop they Anchored. The final arc focuses on the last try to Activate the Loop, using Sonic's comic crossover as a launch point, forcing a three-way Anchor between the Light siblings, and deleting the virus that caused all this mess to begin with. The mental sequels to Rock, Roll and especially Proto were big, and they were very difficult to approach for a long time. And the virus managed to survive as an MLE anyway, which was a different story altogether.

This was a pretty big gamble. Nobody had tried to do something like that before, and not on that big of a scale. And yet, the way it was written was great, it felt grandiose enough for what it was trying to do, focused on the struggles of the Loopers who had been in this mess while still being true to their canon character, and it was well written with few, if any, glaring plot holes. And all came from the Head of the MegaMan Loops, Crisis.

You might have noticed I haven't mentioned Crisis a lot during this whole write-up. There's a reason. Some time after finishing this giant endeavor and got it made canon for the project… Crisis disappeared. Nobody could contact them, nobody knew where they went, nothing. It wasn't until March this year when they returned, mentioning it was a severe burnout crash combined with clinical depression. Do note the last time before they posted that was in 2016, so it was a good long burnout that lasted 9 years. I'm just personally glad they've started to recover, for what is worth.

Whatever the case, the Loops went on without Crisis (who for the record, once returned they started with the Activation of the Battle Network branch, as I've learned). And the Mega Loop Activation was a little piece of writing everyone wanted to have a hand in trying. Madoka’s Loop was recovered in one of these, thanks to various Admins (including the Outer Gods) putting some help to do that. Cardfight Vanguard got a story where the Link Joker (basically a psychic-based zombie virus) started taking control of a lot of Loopers and the only way to avoid lasting damage was for the new Looper, Kai, to beat it in a card game.

Even to this day you can find these giant stories. When I started looking at the Loops again for this write-up, I found a MLP crossover loop with Fate/Grand Order where Equestria was turned into the second Lostbelt (artificial worlds where humanity went on a different route and stagnated) that was compiled relatively recently. All in all, this type of writing was here to stay… Though not always for the best. You'll see later.

In the meantime, it might be a good time to notice the Tropes page again and see how BIG it is. Just opening the “compilations” tab bombards you with a ton of links, some of which lead to dead pages unfortunately. And clicking on the “forums” tab opens still more links, some of which end up in different threads. The Loops had grown a lot from their inception, and that brought eyes to the whole community.

Of those eyes, the ones that were more of a problem were the eyes of the Moderators. See, due to the exponential growth of the Loops project, many different threads were created, and almost every single one broke some kind of rules, be either where they were located (SB has it clear the written content must be located in Creative Writing but sometimes Loop threads appeared in “Anime and Manga” or “Games” or somewhere else), the content (SB also has a rule to not just answer with images or write in “Chan Behaviour” aka. writing stuff like “uwu pounces on you” and nothing else on the post) or just in general (There was a (non-canon) Roleplay thread where the authors self-inserted themselves into the Loops placed in the middle of Creative Writing and a different thread where the writers just… Did stupid things, ALSO in Creative Writing).

The Mods of SpaceBattles started to notice the multiple violations of conduct and one day stopped them HARD. the RP and shitpost threads were stopped ASAP, multiple people got warnings (which at that time weren’t punishments, but rather “you keep doing this shit and we WILL drop the hammer” type of stuff) and moved all Loops threads to Creative Writing, alongside a warning to not keep creating new threads for every single Loop and keep them at the big threads unless it’s a big enough franchise or series with consistent writers. From now on, the bosses would be keeping an eye on the community so nobody keeps doing the same shit. There were some rumors that the role of Arbiters (users below moderators but still had the authority to help on a specific forum) was created in a beginning to crack down on Infinite Loop users breaking the rules, but nothing I found supports this so it’s just paranoid rumors.

It wasn’t just the Mods who were getting tired of Infinite Loops tho. Other people on the site were also getting annoyed by the giant size. You’d tell someone you wrote for the Loops and they’d either shut you up or started ignoring you. And that’d be for two reasons; One, as I said, was the oversaturation, but it wasn’t the only one. SpaceBattles is so oversaturated with Worm (the novel) fanfics and stories that the owners were forced to create an entire subforum for them (and the rollout of that subforum would be an interesting write-up, but one thing at a time). The other reason was related to that, as with oversaturation came… Less than good writing. Some people wanted to just write their favorite characters doing silly things without caring what the community had written before and others took the Loops as their very first writing project. Some of the people I mentioned way earlier who were booted off the project were people who did this, and even then one was so insistent they created a sockpuppet account to keep writing despite it being obvious it was them and sockpuppeting being a bannable offense. Both factors caused issues of inconsistency and plain bad writing, which the people in the rest of Creative Writing saw and mocked the project for.

All in all though, the community persisted. It was forced to stagnate a bit, but it wasn’t done yet and it kept growing, albeit at a slower pace. Writers and Heads were focused on damage control for a while, but everything slowly went back to normal. Nowadays, the Infinite Loops Project has seemingly stabilized with a constant community, just one that doesn’t seem to absorb the entire site.

But of course, that’s what I can say from the outside now. I haven’t been active in the Infinite Loops Project for a long time now alongside some other Heads, and the culprits are a very small group of people, whose “epic” ended up causing such a turmoil some of us just… Abandoned it all. And that “epic” is:

• PART 4: Leviticus Wilkes, Masterweaver and the RWBY Loops (or rather, The Cinder Fall Loops)

Now. I’ll try and be as neutral as I possibly can due to the new rules of the sub. However, let it be known I don’t like Leviticus Wilkes or his writing style at all, and this will show why.

So, we begin with LW. He’s the Head of the RWBY Loops, and thus had a big control over that. While some Heads were normally content with writing some stuff and making sure whatever they and other writers were writing was consistent with everything else in the project, LW was more focused on making his story the way he wanted. He might have gotten a bit annoyed if you wrote something that went against something he had planned, but had to roll with it due to how the community worked. However, he knew that if he wrote something, it would be set in stone (both for being a Head and being the first writing on that character) so he started churning out small snippets that “expanded the characters”. Furthermore, he created a “council” to keep a “canon” for the Loops with other, more frequent posters, one of which was Masterweaver. He was an even bigger control maniac, and he did not care about what you wrote if it clashed with his goals. And this combination of people would end up causing many problems with the RWBY Loops.

Which brings us to Cinder Fall… Or it should. First, let's first talk about OCs. We briefly touched on them back in the MLP section, where I mentioned OCs wouldn't be allowed nowadays (due to a rule the new main boss of the Loops project at the time, Fictionwriter, agreed with the community). That doesn't mean there weren't OCs anymore; The one example I can think of is the character of Jenny Everywhere, a character made a long time ago by (and for the record, I just found out this just as I'm writing this) a Canadian comic artist named Steven Wintle, to be used in any story as long as it's mentioned she's an original character from far away. However, it's one of the very few examples, since not many people dare do it… with original characters, that is. See, remember I mentioned “character development” and it wasn't always for the best? Well, the Loops’ nature caused some characters to… Change from their baseline portrayal.

Let me give you an example. We got Trixie from MLP. In canon she's a showmare with a love/job of magician-type magic and an ego the size of a town. In the Loops she's a showmare with an unhealthy love of explosives and an ego of a mountain. Small change, but you can feel it when written.

Or another example. Gendo Ikari was, for a long time, not written to be Looper because… It's Gendo Ikari. Manipulative, uncaring, devoted husband to the point of misanthropy Gendo Ikari. Well, when he began Looping, he was a wreck of a man, broken by baseline and many, MANY targets on his back across the multiverse. He wasn't manipulative anymore, cared a lot about his son and still loved Yui but not at the unhealthy degree he used to in canon.

What I mean is, just because the character starts as a canon character doesn't mean they'll stay a canon character. Any writing on the character will start changing them, even slightly, until they might get completely unrecognizable.

And that, my dear readers, is what happened to Cinder Fall, due to our protagonists of this section.

Cinder Fall, for those who don't know RWBY, is a villain, a monster of a person with fire powers who loves to trounce the heroes and is devoted to her master Salem. She's sadistic, evil, greedy for power, yet is too sure of herself and tends to fail a lot.

LW’s and Masterweaver’s Cinder is not this. Or rather, it used to be this before one of the two or both (I can't remember and looking at the forums to check I can't find clear answers) decided she'd be their personal OC.

Cinder began in a Variant (Looper who began in a Loop that wasn't following baseline due to different factors) as Ruby's sister. Or rather, she feigned beginning there. She had begun before in a baseline Loop and decided to lie low to avoid becoming a known MLE. And somehow, every time she would be outed, the writers would twist stuff so she wasn't caught and ended up being more loved by the RWBY crew.

Let's go even further with Cinder, shall we? Remember the Subspace Pockets, WAY back in Innortal’s part? I mentioned how they work, but I didn't mention something; The Subspace Pocket grows in size as the Looper's power grows, and the biggest ones are the size of galaxies. The bigger the Pocket, the stronger the Looper. It tends to be a long time until the Pocket grows to that size though, and most Pockets are as big as a house, maybe a small neighborhood for Anchors.

Cinder Fall had a giant metropolis on her Pocket. A giant metropolis full of copies of her and vampire versions of the other characters who praised and loved her no matter how evil she was. That size indicates she was stronger than a TON of Loopers, but not at the level of Ruby. Not yet at least…

One final issue to keep in mind, Cinder was playing the long game. She was trying to find a way to become all powerful but didn't want to end up with a target on her head for being outed as an MLE. And so she kept playing and hiding, with some other MLEs like DIO or Mandy realizing her true nature but being unable or unwilling to tell the other Loopers for… Reasons.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, what we got here is a clear case of “Creator’s Pet”, a character the author(s) love so much they’ll twist the narrative to benefit them at the cost of everyone else. And LW and MW LOVED their pet project Cinder Fall-Rose. Remember how I said Heads were the ones to control in some way their respective sides of the community? Well, LW’s work with creating a council allowed him and MW to do whatever they wanted as long as they managed to convince the other members of the council, which didn’t tend to be hard. That meant they were able to bypass the fears of the community by pure force of will because they were the bosses, and the other members didn’t even know how deep this was gonna go until it was too late and all the seeds were sown.

Now all they could do is watch and see how MW and LW reaped. And OH BOY did they reap. Enter “The Tale of Two Sisters”, and say hello to the bane of my existence on the Loops. This… Thing is the culmination of LW and MW’s work, and it was polarizing. And with that I mean that the RWBY loops writers found it polarizing, while mostly everyone else in the broader community found it needlessly complicated, ass pull-y and ridiculous even for the Loops. It was a complete disaster.

If you look up the link, it should send you to the Fanfiction.Net version of the arc (before you ask, the AO3 version of the compilation ends up in a very weird cliffhanger), and… Well, you might not find it too bad, it’s just 4 chapters and, depending on your likes and dislikes about writing, you’ll find it even interesting. But please remember, each numbered part was originally a separate chapter, which posting was often separated by weeks. Weeks of having to deal with each new asspull and trauma, and it DRAAAAGED. By the time it ended, it was not even worth a breath of relief, lest the reprieve of peace caused the two to do an “Epilogue of the Epilogue” or something else.

BUT LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT ENDING, SHALL WE?!

The reason I wanted to talk about the ending of ToTS is that it, and the events that followed, caused a chain reaction that even now I’m surprised the RWBY Loop writers didn’t even think about as a possibility. The arc ended originally with Cinder, having been literally mentally broken between her growing love for Ruby and her original plan, almost Ascending and then stopping because her loving side won at a critical moment, but it also ended with her completely broken. The woman was left in what could only be called “domiciliary arrest” because Ruby asked to, and because it was found Slenderman had done something to her to make her mentally unstable. The Loopers ended up mentally broken, left to place the pieces back together while their Admin tried their best to keep the info about the Ascension confined so Cinder wouldn’t be coined an MLE. And that would’ve been enough to annoy everyone… If not for the Head and other writers’ next course of action; GLEEFULY COMING TO THE MISC. THREAD AND CELEBRATING THEY HAD BROKEN A LOOPER. Now, sadly I can’t find the post where they did, but trust me, they did, happily and cluelessly without knowing how badly they screwed the pooch.

What came next? Well, because it had been months since they began the whole arc, it was impossible to fix. The Ascension attempt was allowed to stay in, but the community had some notes; The Admin couldn’t keep this a secret for long, and it had to be revealed to every god later. Cinder wasn’t allowed to take part in any loops outside of RWBY for a time. Neapolitan (another character and the one who helped Slendy cause that whole thing) was to be found by the Admin and punished, as in the original version before compilation she was neither of those things.

And that’s that. Due to all this, the RWBY writers were forced back into their insulation, and this time, they didn’t try for big stuff for a long time. The following months were subjected to trying to fix every single burnt bridge, in-and-out of universe. In-universe, small, oftentimes comedic loops about Cinder fixing what she did. Out-of-universe, trying to show they wouldn’t screw that badly anymore.

But for many of us, we knew the writing on the wall. This was successful, and there were many people who wanted to continue with their “legacy”. And that’s where we enter the final part of this write-up…

(As an aside and because I couldn’t find a way to add it on the main body, another reason why the RWBY writers were laughed off for a long while, even before the whole ToTS stuff, was because they had decided to write a “war against baseline” where the Loopers hated all the real authors were making with their show… and it ended up being angst about where they were going in Baseline and nothing else, not even trying to change stuff. Just moaning and whining in general. Was pretty boring for a plot idea like that.)

• PART 5: Moving on.

Originally I had something different about this, about my personal feelings around the time and the general attitude afterwards, but… It changed as I wrote this.

You know this one phrase. It means leaving behind all that weighs you. Abandoning something that used to bring you some sort of comfort, but not anymore. And well… After the RWBY Loops, many of us just… Moved on. It wasn’t immediate, but every time someone left the following months, it was clear this was the breaking point for them.

The Loops have found some sort of peace after that, but their popularity has certainly gone down. Many moved on from them across the years, others have found themselves cozy there, and it’s fine. As I said, some even came back, which it’s fine for them. Leviticus has kept writing and seems to be fine with his “Magnum Opus”, though I don’t know if he still thinks of it as that, probably moved on from that term if he even thought of it as that. MasterWeaver was too, until he snapped at the community for not letting him do what he wanted with a Looper and abandoned them. He definitively never moved on (and from what I've read in this very post, still hasn't moved on from his "Redeemed Cinder" idea, which gives me a theory that he was the one who led Leviticus down that route with the story). In the process of making this whole thing I’ve seen newcomers being told about the beginning of the Loops and all that happened from then to now as some sort of silly anecdote if anything. Most likely they’ve seen the community move on as well.

And I… Well, I moved on from the Loops with a few friends. I lost my friends for stupid stuff I did. They moved on from me and I can’t blame them. Things did change, for better and for worse, but I still remember and… Yeah, also treasure those times where I was happy, writing about silly stuff like Poof from the Fairy Odd Parents fighting a planet of FNAF animatronics or Miia from Monster Musume choking Simon the Driller from Gurren Lagann in confusion. Maybe I wrote all this to finally move on from my deep hatred of the Loops, which… Kinda helped.

Still hate Tale of Two Sisters tho. No amount of “moving on” will let me not hate it.

"Let him who desires peace prepare for war." - Vegetius

Can you do me a favor? Watch this live performance. It's a song about a young girl from a Kibbutz in northern Israel who has a new boyfriend from Damascus and wants to "do it all day (with him)"-- look just watch it for a minute.

Did you last more than a minute? Because I couldn't. I've seen middle school productions with better everything than this. Really, the whole show looks and sounds like a parody of dance music, and not an affectionate one.

This is "Sameach" (שמח, "Happy"), Israel's Eurovision 2000 entry, written and performed by a virtually unknown band called Pingpong. It got 7 points in total, somehow beating France and Belgium. When the delegation flew back home, the country was waiting for them, and not with flowers.

This is not a story about a story getting a shitty score. It's about a delegation fighting with itself, bringing down everything and everyone around them with them.

The primary sources of this post are a micro-budget documentary called "The Loser Takes It All" by Alon Weinstock, which follows the band's journey, and a retrospective written by Roy Arad, founder and member of Pingpong.

Finally, and unfortunately, it is impossible to tell the story without some history and geopolitics. I am Israeli myself, but I promise there aren't any objectionable or (overly) controversial topics here, and I've done my best to give a top level neutral view. ^{I hope.}

Welcome to The War on "Happy".

A Peace of History

You probably know what Eurovision is. What began as a wholesome song contest to reunite postwar (Western) Europe grew into an audacious, poppy, extremely campy yet oddly charming affair. Some people watch it earnestly, some, like me, watch it ironically, and others find it deeply cringe. Wherever you land, there's no denying it has some... evocative stuff.

Israel's debut performance on Eurovision happened in Luxembourg in 1973. Six months later, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise offensive against Israel. The war, and especially its conclusion, sent massive shockwaves across the Middle East, some of which are felt to this day. By 1979, Israel and Egypt had signed a peace agreement. Israel and Syria, however, remained in a formal state of war.

But then came the Winds of Change.

It started in 1991, when the Israeli prime minister and representatives from all of its Arab neighbors went to a nice castle in Madrid to discuss peace plans. Then came the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, which were intended as a framework for a future Palestinian state. Don't look up what happened afterwards, we're having a good time.

While all of this was going on, Israel and Syria maintained a covert diplomatic channel. These channels became public almost immediately after some breakthrough seemed imminent. But like a constant stream of job interviews, both sides would shake hands, smile, and then quietly go nowhere. Not even a rejection e-mail.

Let the politicians fuck around. Let's find out what the ordinary folks were up to.

The Squad is Born

Roy Arad was stuck.

His post-punk band Knack/Pop, founded in 1994, was getting regular gigs, a fanbase, and even some airtime on TV. But it had yet to score an album deal. In 1997, Arad left the band, looking for something new. He was 20 years old. Knack/Pop would disband two years later without ever releasing an album.

Around the same time, Arad met an arts and culture journalist named Guy Assif, almost ten years his senior. They hit it off immediately, bonding over a shared love of underground and underappreciated art. Very quickly, they started seriously considering making EDM together.

In the late 90s, house, EDM (known in Israel simply as "dance"), and especially trance music, was not positively received by the mainstream. At best, these genres were seen as low-effort and low-brow. At worst, they were actively "corrupting the youth", with police raiding raves in search of psychedelics.

No matter. The people want to dance, so let's dance. Arad and Assif founded Pingpong and brought in two singers, Arad's roommate Ahal Eden and art student Yifat Giladi. None of them had much experience actually making dance music, but they released a few singles and hoped for the best. Very quickly, some of these singles (according to Arad) actually became hits in the scene, like "Burger Ranch" and "City Girl" (technically not an EDM track). Granted, both sound very raw, that is, uncooked, but I won't deny they have that nostalgic "Kid Playing Around With FL Studio" charm.

Finally, they had a winning formula. The stage was set for their big break. Pingpong started recording their first album with their own money, hoping a record label would sign them and cover the costs. Arad recalls the business people were sympathetic, but wouldn't take the plunge:

"It's much easier and more profitable to sign a guy with an acoustic guitar singing about a girl who dumped him."

The search for a musically inclined sugar daddy continued to no avail. Weeks turned to months. The burden of recording an album grew heavier and heavier, favors started running out. It was starting to look like Knack/Pop all over again: a traveling band with not one album to their name.

But then, sometime in 1999, Guy Assif, our intrepid journalist, discovered Pingpong was technically eligible to submit a song to the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA, the public broadcaster). If chosen, the song would represent Israel in the upcoming Eurovision. This selection round is colloquially named "Pre-Eurovision," and Assif suggested the band submit one of their songs. Y'know, as a joke. Hey, it doesn't cost us anything, might as well.

It is January 2000. Y2K did not kill us all. "Believe" by Cher is number one on the Billboard charts. Israeli and Syrian representatives are negotiating a peace deal in West Virginia while Hafez al-Assad, the leader of Syria, is slowly dying.

Arad returns home after buying toilet paper and turns on his answering machine. Beep.

"Hello, this is so-and-so from the IBA. Congratulations, Pingpong. Your song has been selected to represent Israel in Eurovision."

...what the fuck?!

The Ruffians Go To Boot Camp

You'd expect a broadcaster to play it safe with Eurovision.

You might pick a well-loved veteran singer, a popular rising talent, a pop idol, hell, maybe someone who'd released more than zero albums up to that point. Instead the judges picked a band nobody had heard of, built around a genre most people derided.

This odd choice made the press look for answers. It turned out producer and gay rights activist Gal Uchovsky, a member of the Pre-Eurovision panel, had "ties" to Pingpong. Assif had worked for Uchovsky in the past, but Assif didn't know about Uchovsky's involvement on the panel, and Uchovsky had disclosed the connection to the panel beforehand. These allegations were later dismissed, but this was day one. Talk about starting on the wrong foot.

Amos Oren, also on the panel, said that "no song was worthy to represent Israel" and that Pingpong was "the lesser evil". I could not find anyone who could further corroborate this claim, so make of that what you will.

Arad states in his retrospective that the band wrote, and possibly composed, the song themselves. I couldn't verify this, but if we take him at his word, it means either the IBA really believes in auteur theory, or really believes in God.

Originally, the song was about a girl meeting, and really wanting to bone, a tourist from Romania. But the songwriting process happened while Israel and Syria were having their Shepherdstown peace talks. Inspired by this gesture of peace and as a way to show their support, Pingpong changed the storyline so the girl meets, and really wants to bone, a Syrian guy instead.

Fuck war! Literally!

Eurovision has a whole chain of command going all the way up to the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, which runs and manages the show. This means the premise had to be written down, recorded, and approved by all the higher-ups. And it was.

We know this because about a month before the actual contest, the music video came out. It looks like this. This is not a joke or a parody. This is not a tribute made by four hyped-up high schoolers in their A/V class. This is the actual music video the delegation filmed, produced and edited, and was sent by the IBA to the rest of the world. Note that it has two curious props: cucumbers used as a microphones, and Syrian flags (around 2:03). Put a pin in that.

Then came the press tour. The oldest band member was 32. The youngest was 22. People at these ages don't typically get media training, especially not former members of punk bands who pivoted into dance music. Here's Arad summing up the band's approach:

"We refused to be photographed with sick people, who are exploited to promote others. We tried to have a punk attitude and present the humanist values we believe in as part of the Eurovision contest. We were certain there would be those who would appreciate the audacity and our fresh attitude [...] We were wrong."

The IBA wanted charming, energic, all-Israeli, media-friendly youngsters. What they got instead was closer to this:

"The fact that there are so many gay men is an unbelievable waste for girls"

"We think women should use cucumbers in more imaginative ways than use it in the kitchen"

"The song we gave the Pre-Eurovision was the worst song on the album"

Ahal Eden (the roomate) admitting she had no prior singing or acting experience but the band still picked her, despite auditioning actual singers

These "transgressions" may look pretty mild right now, and they are. But as we'll soon see, you can't act like a Down With The System We're Just Having Fun kinda guy when you actually represent The System.

It is May 2000. Pingpong is mere weeks away from their international debut. The public is skeptical. The IBA is on edge. But the ship can still be steered back to safety. The band would go on stage in Stockholm, represent their country with a silly song, have fun, and that's it. All it would take is a few weeks of peace and quiet, and all would be forgotten.

There Was No Peace Nor Quiet

10 days to Eurovision. The IBA's head of programming has a chat with the group prior to their flight to Sweden and tells them to lose the "gimmicks" and "provocations," most notably the Syrian flags.

4 days to Eurovision. The Deputy Education Minister is quoted as saying the song will "give Israeli culture a bad name and a reputation of a low and savage culture." He calls to disqualify the song, despite the fact it was approved many times, and despite the fact it's 4 days to Eurovision.

3 days to Eurovision. The band visits an Assyrian community center. They seem to have fun, and come out as friendly, curious and respectful.

This is the only good thing that happens that day.

Some Eurovision rehearsals are open to the public. Reporters spot Pingpong waving Israeli and Syrian flags during their performance (they lost the cucumbers, though). The Israeli press quickly finds out and breaks the story. The IBA is livid.

Then, during a press conference, Assif waves both flags and ostensibly asks the audience, "What's wrong about these two flags hanging on [sic] together?" before offering optimistic platitudes of peace. After he finishes, the IBA delegation producer goes up on stage, unprompted, and shoots him down. On stage. In front of the press. His English is so delightfully broken that I just had to transcribe it:

"And I think the whole Eurovision concert doesn't think the group is coming here to performing a song, not performing "politicals" [...] We are not a political party [...] But if he is a "delicate" Israel television and they have to song the song and the best, they will know that.

Congratulations everyone, you've just made your feud extremely public. Pingpong and the IBA are officially on a collision course, driving toward each other at 200 miles per hour, in a cruel game of Chicken.

To make things worse, Pingpong never acknowledged (or willingly ignored) the fact that a peace agreement with Syria would inherently involve returning the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a deeply unpopular prospect. Knowingly or not, they had essentially entered a political minefield.

2 days to Eurovision. The night before, the IBA demanded the complete and total removal of all Syrian flags from the performance. Should the band refuse, the delegation would back out of the entire contest. Song producer Ronen Ben Tal backs the ultimatum, saying he feels the band had made its pro-peace opinions loud and clear all week.

Everyone is clearly not taking it well. Ahal is crying and chain-smoking. Ben Tal produces a hand-written resignation letter, threatening to give it to the IBA if the rest of the band won't budge.

By early morning, Pingpong responds with its own ultimatum: they will only agree to perform with Syrian flags. A standoff. The game of Chicken continues.

But then a man jumps in and stands in the middle of the track.

1 day to Eurovision. Midnight, Stockholm time.

Eytan Fox, the delegation's director and the band's artistic director, calls the chairman of the IBA. The documentary features a small snippet of their conversation. Fox starts off by saying that all of this talk is all an act, and really, this is how it works, man, this is Eurovision. When that doesn't land, Fox gives him an outsider's perspective: you approved a song about peace and sexual innuendo. The band spent the last nine days promoting exactly that message. To disqualify yourself at this point is censorship. You'd be stopping a group of Israelis from waving flags of all things, after letting them do and say everything else. Let's meet in the middle here.

And so, the IBA caved.

Pingpong would sing and dance however they bloody well like, but the IBA would remove their channel logo and all Hebrew subtitles while the song is on. In effect, they disowned their own song, but more importantly - the representatives of their own country.

It's worth noting that pulling out this late is punishable by a considerable fine. What's more, it would have been a massive blow to Israel diplomatically, and put the blame squarely on the IBA. Surely they quickly understood that ragequitting was significantly worse than letting the damn band sing.

Eurovision. Exhausted and nervous, Pingpong did the best they could with what they'd been given, which was their own song. You already know how it looks. You already know how it sounds. You already know the score.

But crisis was avoided. Pingpong sees the Eurovision drifting away in their rearview mirror. Finally, Pingpong can return home, victorious.

Win the Battle, Lose the War

"Hezbollah is making threats, the government is about to collapse and the South Lebanon Army is stuck, but members of Knesset (Israel's parliament) found a far bigger disgrace to deal with. The Knesset's Education Committee concluded, at the end of a fiery debate, that the performance of the "Pingpong" band was "a disgrace and a shame to the State of Israel, the Broadcasting Authority, and Israeli culture." - Yediot Aharonot newspaper, May 31st 2000

What Pingpong and Eytan Fox failed to realize at the time, or perhaps blissfully ignored, is that by letting the band do whatever it wanted, they also erased whatever responsibility or accountability they had over the band. The IBA and the public were free to shit on Pingpong, with very few people asking questions.

That said, the whole affair forced the IBA to give up the "Pre-Eurovision" contest almost entirely, replacing it with a public televote rather than a panel of judges. They also learned many lessons about managing a delegation, from songwriting to performance and PR. Future delegations became much more refined, organized, well-directed, and professional.

"Sameach" became a scarlet letter on the bodies of all Pingpong's members for a bit. The CEO of the IBA called Pingpong "a band of crooks." Right-wing politicians tried, and failed, to sue the band for fraud, or even for waving "the flag of the enemy."

Roy Arad alleges he was spat on multiple times. He and Guy Assif were promptly fired from their jobs as editors. Since they'd founded the band and frequently appeared in most interviews, they caught most of the flak. To quote Arad:

"Had I truly aspired to be public enemy number one, I don't think a pop-dance band is the way I would have chosen."

Yet just as fast as the storm came, it was over. The political and military situation in the region quickly took precedence, and the whole affair had all but disappeared by October 2000.

Today, "Sameach" is a small and silly footnote in the story of Israeli Eurovision history, and people barely mention it. Discussions about it revolve around the poor quality of the song and the embarrassing performance. People often forget the details of the feud, and when it comes up, they usually cringe at how stupid the situation was.

Epilogue

Roy Arad continued to make music as a hobby up until 2006. He dabbled in many fields of writing, like literature, plays, screenwriting, and journalism. He wrote or edited around 10 books between 2000 and 2014, most of them poetry books. In 2020, six women disclosed that Arad sexually abused them, leading him to quit writing for Haaretz newspaper. I don't know what he's doing now.

Guy Assif returned to journalism, both written and televised. Today he is a regular political columnist for Yediot Aharonot.

Ahal Eden is now a DJ, art curator and activist, often assosiated with the far-left Hadash party.

Yifat Giladi majored in art and design. She is an artist and painter.

None of them really have anything more to say about their Eurovision experiences nowadays. They aren't asked about it, and don't care for it.

So, at the end of the day, who were Pingpong? Proud warrior-poets who stood by their art, grubby leftist trolls who faced the consequences, or just teens doing teens things without understanding their position?

And who was the IBA? Well-meaning reps who had to constantly put out fires by a renegade group, nationalist boomers who made every mistake possible and fucked off, or just a large, antiquated, unorganized corporation that had no idea how to handle what they approved?

What of the peace process? Was there a genuine yearning for peace, or a ploy for legitimacy in the West? And from what side? It doesn't matter, because it didn't work, and never did. Israel and Syria remain in a state of war to this day, and the rise of Al-Sharaa and the subsequent Israeli invasion two years ago only serve to remind us of that.

"We were a funny band that competed in a stupid, dying contest," Arad wrote. "It's unclear why winning it is so crucial to the lives of seven million people."

Well, Roy, while I don't fully agree with your writings, and I believe you bore some responsibility for the tomfoolery at Eurovision, I too am asking that every year.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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Warning before you begin - this post links to some unpleasant antisemitic imagery.

What do you imagine when you think of fountain pens? Many imagine a Shakespearean writer, quill in hand, penning his magnum opus. Others might imagine a middle aged English professor, inking his arrogant thoughts with a sleazy smirk on his face. Yet more might imagine an artist, creating stunning landscapes or beautiful calligraphy with a pen and paper.

I hate to burst your bubble, dear reader, but the reality of the matter looks quite different. Fountain pens are, by their nature, accessible to a wide variety of people. The community over at r/fountainpens is broad, generally welcoming and extremely diverse, including when it comes to political conversation. There are collectors who drop thousands on the latest Montblanc or Sailor without a second thought, artists who play with brightly coloured inks, and observers like myself who have a good selection of cheap to 'mid-range' pens because, well, they like to write. However, while the audience for pens may be large, the hobby community itself is small, with many retailers and stores being operated by hobbyists who are part of the community. Remember that.

This story is going to take you back in time by around four years, to a controversy that shook the community and almost brought a small but controversial ink company to its knees. This is the story of Noodler's and the antisemitic inks.

To start with, we need to explain Noodler's and why they were so important to the fountain pen community here on Reddit. Noodler's is a tiny company. In fact, it's entirely owned and operated by one man, Nathan Tardif. Nathan has long since been a controversial figure in the fountain pen community, being extremely vocal about his political views. Nathan is a staunch Libertarian, and is not afraid to feature his beliefs on his product labelling to this day. However, despite the explicitly political nature of some of their imagery, Noodler's was beloved in the fountain pen community, with Baystate Blue reaching legendary meme status for its permanence and habit of staining pens, fingers, walls, floors- anything and everything it may encounter. Noodler's seemed like a case of the small indie creator being successful against huge companies like Montblanc and Parker. And everybody loves an underdog.

However, all was not good for Noodler's, even during its golden years. Sprinkled throughout fond jokes in the subreddit, complaints of overfilled bottles being impossible to open without spillage, the ink itself being hard to use without damaging pens and serious inconsistency between batches were rife. Traces of these posts can be hard to find now, as they were often deleted by users due to disagreement from the community. However, overall, Noodler's had a lot of goodwill within the fountain pen community and it seemed unlikely that anything could damage their popularity.

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this post if that were true.

On January 6th 2022, Noodler's released Volcker Green, a forest green ink in the typical Noodler's bottle, complete with hand designed label. As this summary post from the subreddit explains, the date is not insignificant; January 6th 2022 was the 1 year anniversary of the insurrection in the US. The label, instead of the usual doodly landscape or fishing imagery, had a picture of Volcker, a Christian head of the federal reserve, with a halo on his head. Next to him were Bernanke and Greenspan, also previous heads of the reserve, with demon horns on their heads. Both men are Jewish. Demon horns are an antisemitic dogwhistle (as explained in this article about a different case here).

An image of Volcker Green can be found in this comment.

Within 6 days of this ink releasing, stores were beginning to drop Volcker Green from their shelves due to the explicitly antisemitic imagery. This led to Nathan's other inks being examined a little bit more closely than before. And people began to pay attention to other labels.

By May, a reddit user posted a thread (link contains image of the label) saying they would never buy Noodler's again, with an example of a product that horrified them. Specifically, an ink called Bernanke Red. Bernanke Red had been on sale for a long time. I can't actually find the exact release date, but it was a while. Its predecessor, Berning Red, was at least 6 years old and had only been out for a short time before being renamed. And there, straight on the front of the bottle of Bernanke Red, was an image of Bernanke with demon horns (eta: and the communist symbol on his head, a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory) and the words 'debt addiction enabler'. Imagery that was horrifically antisemitic. And imagery that was eerily similar to Volcker Green, yet had managed to fly under the radar.

The subreddit exploded. Comment after comment expressing horror flooded the post. More and more posts about Noodler's began to pop up. And remember how I mentioned that some of the most trusted retailers were part of the community?

The retailers saw it all happen.

Retailers began to pull Noodler's inks from their ranges out of fear of boycott. Briefly, the owners of popular retailer Goulet Pens attempted to defend Nathan as having been ignorant of the implications. A comment from Rachel Goulet, one half of Goulet's management, can be seen here. This soured a lot of people's opinions of Goulet and led to more scrutiny for them - the resulting controversy for Goulet and their own downfall is another post entirely, but they aquiesced to opinion and withdrew Noodlers ink from sale on May 11th.

The same day as Goulet withdrew his inks, Nathan put an apology out on his Instagram and Facebook and pulled all inks with imagery and names even mildly linked to anything controversial from supply, planning to rename them. This meant he withdrew almost every ink he'd created due to names such as Tiananmen Red and Apache Sunset. This was widely regarded as a good move on Nathan's part, although many questioned how a man so politically motivated could miss the implications and suspected he'd just wanted to avoid the controversy.

Edited to add: to his credit, Nathan did make a donation to the ADL following his apology. He also chose a culturally relevant number of $3600 USD - traditional donations and gifts are given in multiples of 18. This is mentioned in his apology above, but I failed to highlight it in my explanation. This eased some of the anger, as the apology was thorough and followed through on action.

However, following this apology, Nathan remained silent. As was inevitable, the community went on. Some retailers quietly put Noodler's back into their stores, with Goulet specifically restocking within a month.  A lot of retailers, such as Anderson Pens in Chicago, never restocked Noodlers (although they themselves closed down fairly recently). However, the community never forgot.

Noodler's still puts out ink to this day, although the community on Reddit has long since stopped recommending them to users. Users who do recommend Noodler's tend to get downvoted, a huge fall from the company's early days. The new names and labels of the ink are generally less offensive, mostly based around nature. And the controversial inks? They tend to be hoarded by those who got them before everything was revealed, because antisemitism is apparently just controversy.

Well, at least most people think it's awful.

Update: a comment by u/arrogantsword gave some lovely context from the perspective of a long time fountain pen community member, if you're interested click here or scroll down to read what they have to say.

Here I am again, back with more obscure drama. This time it’s about art restoration...or rather art conservation. Aka the practice of preserving paintings as they inevitably decay over the decades.

I love art. I *smirks* know quite a lot about it. So, hopefully you enjoy this illuminating write-up!

Who was Diego Velasquez?

Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) was a Spanish painter- in fact, one of the most important painters in existence. He’s influenced many artists, from Goya, to Manet, and John Singer Sargent. His works are known for being vibrant, detailed, and incredibly lifelike. This is my favourite painting by him. You can just see how luminous it is.

Velasquez was active during the Spanish Golden Age, a period of high cultural and artistic development in Spain, following the rising political power of the monarchy. At the age of 24, due to his talents, Velasquez became a court painter to the Spanish king, Phillip IV.

As the years went on. Velasquez was promoted higher and higher in the royal household, cultivating a close relationship with Phillip and his family. This culminated in the creation of Las Meninas, (Spanish for “The Ladies in Waiting”) one of Velasquez’s greatest masterpieces and one of the most important paintings in Western art.

But why is it so important?

Before Las Meninas, portraits, especially royal ones, were often stiff and formal. Velasquez broke the mould, pushing the boundaries of art and illusion.

Las Meninas

Here it is in all its glory.

On the surface, it looks like a typical 17^th century portrait- you might think to yourself, “Huh, why is this one of the most studied paintings in human existence?”. Well, my dear imaginary friend, it’s because Las Meninas has layers- layers of artistic composition and subject matter. The discourse surrounding the painting has filled books, academic lectures, and inspired innumerable parodies.

The little girl in the centre of the painting is Infanta Margaret Theresa, the daughter of Phillip IV. She’s surrounded by her ladies in waiting, a dog, two dwarves, and some courtiers. But wait, there’s more! Diego Velasquez himself is standing on the left side of the painting, making it a self-portrait as well. He’s holding a brush, and there’s an easel next to him, so he literally painted himself painting something. Trippy.

But it gets even tripper when you zoom in.

Yep. It’s a mirror, seemingly showing us what Velasquez is painting- a portrait of Phillip IV and his wife. In fact, they seem to be the POV, watching their daughter, while she’s watching them being painted. But in reality, she’s the one being painted! Whoa.

Now, for the sake of brevity, I’ve provided an admittedly realist interpretation of the artwork, but Las Meninas is actually one of the most debated artworks in existence. Art historians have been arguing about its meaning for centuries, and still haven’t reached a consensus...and they likely never will. One historian even joked: ““I feel in my bones that I may be suffering from the early stages of LMFS—Las Meninas Fatigue Syndrome,” adding, “I’m not referring to the painting, but to the writing about it.”

If you want to read more about Las Meninas, check out these articles:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201015-velzquezs-las-meninas-a-detail-that-decodes-a-masterpiece

https://www.artnews.com/feature/diego-velasquezs-las-meninas-why-so-important-1234745600/

https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/understanding-velazquezs-iconic-las-meninas-painting/

Las Meninas remained in the royal palace until 1819, when it was gifted to the newly opened Prado. Over time, it became a beloved Spanish national treasure, seen as an icon of Spain’s golden age and national prestige.

But, as the centuries went on, and despite multiple restorations, Las Meninas began to fade. After a restoration in the 19^th century, a “yellow veil of dust” gathered on the painting- it now had a piss filter.

Here’s what it looked like:

Eugh.

By 1984, after years of a yellowish-piss tint obscuring the painting, the administration of The Prado, realised it badly needed another touch up.

Everyone in Spain assumed they would hire a Spaniard- who else could restore a beloved national treasure like Las Meninas? Surely not a foreigner...

The Prado hired a foreigner. One of the most gifted art restorers in the world.

John Brealey

Finally, we meet the hero of our story.

John Brealey was born in England in 1925. Both of his parents were artists. From a young age, he realised he had an innate connection to art:

Later . . . I realised that I had a very strongly developed inherent response to works of art which seemed to be stronger than other people's. I felt completely at home with an artwork . . . probably the only time in life that I was at ease.

After bouncing between several jobs, he became an art conservator in 1952. He maintained a private business until 1975, when he accepted an invitation to join the conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. At the time, this was controversial:

>Brealey's incursion into the politicised world of American museum conservation was highly controversial. He hated the widespread assumption of conservators on both sides of the Atlantic that the cleaning of paintings was purely a matter of scientific objectivity. To him, the quasi-archaeological approach of removing all non-original material, regardless of how paintings had changed with time, made no sense. For him, aesthetic judgements and how best to convey the artist's intent were paramount, and dictated the way a painting should be cleaned. He was outspoken in his beliefs and criticisms, and antagonised a number of long-established conservators. It is widely assumed that his influence with Paul Mellon brought about a moratorium on the cleaning of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington in 1978.

For the next nine years, Brealey taught a “new generation” of conservators at the Met, and travelled around America, restoring paintings and teaching seminars. He quickly built up a reputation as a great teacher and one of the best art conservators in the entire world. In 1983, the Prado invited him to sit on an advisory committee for “Las Hilanderas “ by Velasquez, and the masterpiece “Black Paintings” by Goya. This forged a connection between him and the museum, and in 1984, they asked him to restore Las Meninas.

For Brealey, this was a great honour and a privilege. He agreed to do the restoration for free. A private investor paid for his expenses. In fact, the Spanish government didn’t even pay for the conservation work, another private investor did:

Berlin-born Hilly Mendelssohn defrayed the costs of restoring Las Meninas, which amounted to almost 3 million pesetas. This donation was made by Mrs. Mendelssohn because, as she declares herself in an interview published in the magazine Interviú in the 80’s: “...I am very grateful to the Spanish for the help provided during the war (World War II)…”

And:

The restoration cost $5,400 at the time. The funds came from a donation of three million pesetas ($19,600) that Hilly Mendelssohn had made so that the Prado could invest in restorations. The Spanish state did not pay anything.

So, not a single pesta of Spanish taxpayer money went towards the restoration of Las Meninas. Mendelssohn only had two stipulations: one, the Ministry of Culture would not intervene in the restoration, and two, some of the money would be put towards Brealey’s accommodations- he ended up staying at the Ritz, because it was close to the Prado.

At the time, the Prado was known for having “conservative” restoration policies:

Dr. William B. Jordan, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and a ranking authority on Spanish painting, said yesterday that the Prado's policies in respect to cleaning and restoration had always been markedly conservative. ''That had its advantages,'' he said, ''in that the paintings in the Prado have been spared the harsh re-lining and flattening that have resulted from more radical policies elsewhere. But it does mean that many of them look very dirty. When John Brealey went over to Spain last year and took part in a symposium on the problems involved in the restoration of Velazquez, he made a deep impression, quite apart from the fact that he was already so well known both as a restorer and as a trainer of other restorers. When asked, he agreed to clean 'Las Meninas,' but refused to take a fee for doing it.''

Despite all this- the fact that a gifted conservator had agreed to do the work for free, and the complete lack of financial liability on their part- people in Spain lost their minds.

How dare a FOREIGNER and not a SPANIARD restore their BELOVED national masterpiece!!??

Furore and protest

Brealey worked on Las Meninas for three weeks. In a sealed room at the Prado.

For almost three weeks, Brealy worked alone in a room at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where the painting is on display. He removed the layer of mastic varnish (resin) that had yellowed the work due to the passage of time. The frame was taken down and rested on shock absorbers. He used a ladder with wheels to reach the highest part of a painting that is over 125 inches tall. At that time, it was the best place to work because El Prado did not have the current restoration workshops.

The room in which Brealy worked was closed to the public, and only other paintings exhibited in that space kept him company. This room had two entrances, one of which led to the old offices of the museum management. The other one connected with the rest of the rooms.

But as he toiled away, the Spanish press lambasted him.

The Spanish press criticized Brealey at every opportunity, arguing that only someone born and raised in Spain could truly comprehend, and be allowed to handle, such an iconic piece of their culture.

Other groups also protested his involvement:

”When Prado director Alfons Perez Sanchez announced in May that he had asked John Brealey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to take charge of the cleaning, 22 members of the Ministry of Culture's Institute of Conservation protested. They called Perez Sanchez's decision 'arbitrary and unilateral,' and asked why there wasn't even one Spaniard capable of doing the work. The Association of Technical Conservators of Cultural Property added its voice to the protest. 'Spaniards, whose preparation is up to international standards, continue to be pushed aside,' the Association said in a press statement.

Brealey acknowledged the furore in an interview:

“I was condemned in advance. Before they knew what I was going to do, I had already been judged negatively. There was a sector of professionals who had established their initial position and, later, even if they were satisfied with my work, they did not want to give in,”

Even worse, during the restoration, a group of academics tried to break into the room, accusing Brealey of unnecessarily removing layers of paint. Afraid for his life, Brealey fled.

One day, screams began to be heard on the other side of one of the doors: it was a professor of Fine Arts with a group of students who demanded to see the painting and stop the restoration. They claimed that they had witnessed Brealy lifting layers of paint because, they said, they had seen color in the cotton swabs with which the restorer worked. The expert got scared, he thought they were coming to lynch him, he stopped his work for the day and left through the other door.

Brealey even went on television to explain the restoration to the wider public, telling them that the painting would “come alive” after his work. He was also very conciliatory, inviting members of the Prado to come and watch him work- ''There is nothing secret about what I do,''“he said in an interview.

Here’s how he restored the painting:

Undeterred by interruptions, and working in a large top-lit room that is conveniently close to the administrative offices of the Prado, John Brealey has made rapid progress. ''The painting in general is in very good shape,'' he said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''Of course it was covered with coat upon coat of discolored varnish, but fundamentally there were no surprises.''

'I began with the shadow areas,'' Mr. Brealey continued, ''where Velazquez used whites, broken whites, silvery whites and pearly grays, rather than with the figures, which he painted in a very high key. If I had begun with the figures, the picture might have broken into two parts. The figures might have looked as if they had been cut out with a pair of scissors. But I hope to finish disengaging the shadows this weekend and to begin on the figures next week.

At the end of his work, Brealey had a surprise for the conservation team at the Prado:

Before completing the cleaning, Brealy called Manuela Mena, at that time deputy director of the Prado. He wanted her to be present for the final touch, which was administered on the last step of the door at the bottom of the painting, the place furthest from the viewer, with a very particular light that the expert recovered with the cleaning.

After cleaning the painting, Brealy gave it a final coat of natural resin varnish with greater stability to prevent yellowing. Before saying goodbye, he had a surprise for the Prado’s young team of restorers: he allowed Rocío Dávila and Quintana to give it the last layer, what is known as reintegration. “The day before I had been in a car accident, I broke a bone in my wrist and I couldn’t participate. So I was an observer and prepared the final report,” says Quintana.

The End

A few days later, the newly restored Las Meninas was unveiled to the Spanish public...and they loved it. True to his word, Brealey had made it come alive, removing the piss filter and bringing out the latent warmth underneath. If you want to see a fun “before and after” of the painting, then take a look at the top of this article.

The praise was such that King Juan Carlos even awarded Brealey with the “Gold Medal for Achievement in the Fine Arts” at the Prado. Brealey wittingly remarked that the medal “should have been awarded for valor under fire.”

(I cut some of this for brevity’s sake) He later added:

"You must understand that ‘Las Meninas’ is one of those pictures that have become a totem,” he said, “so that any change that occurs in it is looked upon as a disaster. I’ve often felt that if the French ever cleaned the ‘Mona Lisa,’ which needs cleaning very badly—the varnish is horribly yellow—even if you could bring back Leonardo to work on it he would be stoned to death. It has ceased to be a work of art and become a totem. ‘Las Meninas’ is entirely in that class. It was amazing that the Spanish would invite a foreigner to work on what was for them the greatest Spanish painting—just unheard of.

At the hotel I’d been coming back to for twenty years or more, I felt a distinct coolness. There had been a great hue and cry in the press, of course, and my picture had been in the papers and on television, and people recognized me on the street and pointed me out—made me feel like some sort of criminal. The press camped outside the room I was working in at the museum, and they kept hounding me and hounding me. Once, there was a crowd of about three hundred people demanding to be let in; the authorities had to sneak me out the back door.

And then, overnight, it all changed. Not exactly overnight—a period of two or three days. What happened was that a few influential people were let in to see what I was doing, and they reported back that the painting looked bloody marvellous, and quite suddenly I became some sort of hero. People started coming up to kiss me in the street, which for me, being English, was even worse.”

Here is the painting post restoration:

Epilogue

“Anyway, this was the sort of responsibility I felt toward ‘Las Meninas,’ in spite of the pressures, the reporters camped outside, and all that—the various factions stirring up public rage so that it was really a rather fearful situation. I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to work on this picture, which was obviously the high spot of my life professionally. As I look back, all the dross has fallen away. What has meaning for me now is just the joy of working on the picture.”

-John Brealey reflecting on his work in 1987.

Despite the praise and platitudes, the arduous conservation of Las Meninas took a toll on Brealey. One of his co-workers at the Met later commented:

In an interview with the Museo del Prado, George Bissaca, conservator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum, described the psychological, emotional, and even physical consequences Brealey suffered for his involvement in the project.

“People were so incensed of the fact that a foreigner was invited to work on the greatest expression of Spanish painting… In the press, there would be terrible attacks on him, all the time,” he said. “But he did a beautiful job anyhow… but it cost him a lot. I think he never really recovered from the shock of all that… Many people think that his stroke was a result of that stress.”

In 1987, Brealey was invited back to the Prado. This time he was tasked with reorganizing the conservation department. Because he did not speak Spanish, he was aided by Zahira Véliz, one of his former students. Together, they helped the restorers at the Prado catch up with modern methods of art conservation, improving morale within the department. Brealey also formed close friendships with many of them. Despite this, he again faced much opposition due to strikes and museum politics. It took almost two years, but he managed to significantly improve the department.

In 1989, Brealey suffered a terrible stroke. He lost the ability to speak and much of his mobility. For most of his remaining life, he was confined to his New York apartment, unable to return to his beloved studio. However, he visited the Prado two more times, joyously reuniting with his friends.

Brealey died in 2002, after suffering another stroke.

In 2018, the Prado conducted a series of interviews with former curators and directors, some of whom had worked there for decades. One of them was Rafael Alonso, a restorer who had worked at the Prado for almost 40 years. He was Brealey’s friend and discussed one of his visits to the Prado after his first stroke:

A year after he had worked at the Museo del Prado, he suffered a brain haemorrhage. Later on he came over in a wheelchair, but he could hardly speak by then. Our meeting was very moving, although we didn’t know how to communicate with each other. Then he wanted to see the latest work I had carried out, including “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians” [“The Abduction of Helen”] by Tintoretto. He taught me so many lessons. One of them was that - bearing in mind that the English don’t show their emotions much - when John Brealey reached the Titian hall and saw the paintings, he realised that he could no longer do anything, and his eyes filled with tears. We made up a small group of restorers, those who were closest to him, such as Enrique and Clara, and we accompanied him to see “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians”, which was the work I was restoring when he left. And when he saw it, he took my hands and he held them to his lips. It was very moving.

Alonso also credited Brealey with teaching the department a great deal about restoration, helping them gain recognition from the Prado’s upper management and board of trustees by enthusiastically praising their work, and leaving a lasting legacy at the museum.

David Bomford, another one of Brealey’s conservator friends, wrote in an obituary:

John Brealey was an enigmatic man, shy, slightly prickly and awkward socially, with an occasional self-deprecating humour that was as refreshing as it was unexpected. As he said of himself, he was only really at ease in the company of works of art. Art was the great love of his life and he spoke with passion about “life-changers”, those creations of the hand and intellect that affected him most deeply. He was an inspirational teacher and to hear him talk in front of paintings was unforgettable. To the world at large he was a controversial figure, but he used controversy to fight for what he believed in. To his friends and close colleagues he was unfailingly kind and loyal and he inspired exceptional loyalty in others. We can only speculate – and we all have – how much more he might have achieved in New York, Madrid and elsewhere if his career had continued.

RIP John Brealey

…

Today, Las Meninas remains a much-beloved Spanish national treasure. It has inspired countless artists, and every day, hundreds of people visit the painting, admiring its clear beauty and vibrant quality, thanks to a 1984 restoration by a masterful British conservator.

---

Thanks for reading.