If there is any tale that is notorious in the Bible, it is that of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a tale of death, temptation, circumcision, and bussy. There are many lessons to learn from the scripture which has often been misinterpreted. It forms an integral part of Jewish lore and Christian tradition.

Abraham is Warned

When Abram turned 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said: "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." (Genesis 17:1-3). No more shall his name be Abram - it shall be Abraham. The Lord goes on to explain:

This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. (Genesis 17:10-14).

===================================================

Notes from Holly!

It is this verse that is the basis for infant circumcision, or brit milah, in Judaism. Circumcision is seen as a sign of the covenant between God and the Jewish people, originating from the covenant made between God and Abraham.

===================================================

Following this, Sarah, who was Abraham's wife, fell pregnant with Ishmael. Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, and his son Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.

Not long after, the Lord pays Abraham a visit and declares that Sodom and Gomorrah are wicked and shall be destroyed. Abraham is worried, as he has his nephew Lot living in Sodom. Hence, he begins to bargain with God. He begins by asking if God will spare the cities if 50 righteous men are found. God agrees. He asks about 45 righteous men, then 40, then 30, then 10 and each time the Lord agrees. This shall be important later.

Abraham's intercessory has been debated among theologians. For some, it is a moment that shows Abraham's righteousness. Abraham's first concern was for any righteous people who might reside in Sodom and Gomorrah. He knew that God was just, and he believed it would be unjust for the righteous to perish along with the wicked. For others, the interaction serves as a teaching moment about God's willingness to listen to the concerns of his faithful followers and to engage in a dialogue with them. It demonstrates God's responsiveness to righteous intercession and his consideration of human appeals.

Ultimately, it doesn't make a difference. If God is omniscient, he knew there would not be 10 innocent souls in the cities, so Abraham's bargaining was futile. Sodom and Gomorrah were going to be destroyed.

Angels Visit Lot

Two angels come to Sodom in the form of man. When Lot saw the men he beckoned them to spend the night at his house. The angels say they will sleep in the square, but Lot insists so the angels follow him home where they are served unleavened bread. Before they could sleep, all the men and youths of Sodom surrounded Lot's house. They demand the following: "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them." (Genesis 19:5).

The men both young and old surrounded Lot's house, and it is implied that the entire population of Sodom is present. They do not care about hospitality. They do not care about consent. They only care about bussy. Lot refuses and he makes a shocking offer: "Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Genesis 19:8)

===================================================

Notes from Holly!

So, the topic of Lot offering up his daughters to be r*ped has been debated by theologians. It is accepted by many that the Bible is demonstrating that there are not even 10 righteous men in Sodom - even Lot is depraved. Others claim that it is a matter of cultural norms of the time which put hospitality above all else. For some, this is a feminist issue, and a demonstration of what low of a position women held in society during Biblical times - even guests had a higher position.

===================================================

The men and youths refuse the offer - they want the bussy and will be satisfied by nothing else, not least of all virgin gussy. To protect themselves, the angels produce a blinding light that stops the men and youths from finding the door. The angels then revealed that they have been sent by the Lord to destroy the city and that Lot should flee with his family. Lot warns his sons-in-law but they believe Lot is speaking in jest. The angels say: "Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed." (Genesis 19: 17).

Lot and his family flee to a city named Zoar, but it is not without Lot lingering first. This implies that Lot had lived in Sodom for too long and that he had been infected by sin. The city of sin had become his home, and he had grown attached to it. Hence, the angels seize Lot and his family by the hands and rush them out of the city.

Lot's Wife Gets Salty

God got to destroying Sodom and Gomorroh in a manner that resembles the Flood of Genesis. The difference is that instead of water, the Lord sends down sulfur and fire. Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, but as Lot's family flees, Lot's wife looks back and she becomes a pillar of salt.

Lot and his two daughters were afraid to settle in Zoar so they stayed in the caves nearby. It is there that Lot's daughters secretly decide that they will lie with their father to preserve their lineage. So they get him drunk on wine one night and the firstborn date r*pes him. The next night the other daughter date r*pes him. Thus both became pregnant by their father. The firstborn bore a son named Moab while the younger bore a son named Ben-ammi.

===================================================

Notes from Holly!

It is notable that this situation is a reversal of the previous scenario. Lot wanted to give up his daughters to sexual depravity. Instead, it is his daughters that lead Lot into sexual depravity. Lot gets a taste of his own medicine.

===================================================

So why did Lot's wife turn into a pillar of salt? Some argue that it is another sign of attachment to the city of sin. She was so consumed by Sodom that she had to look back at her home, and she could not be saved. Others say it is a simple matter of disobedience - God gave an instruction, and Lot's wife disobeyed so she was punished. It should be noted that this part of the story parallels that of the tale of original sin. There is a temptation and it is a woman who is unable to resist.

Conclusion

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah serves as a cautionary tale against sexual debauchery and carnal sin. Those who defy God's laws are punished greatly, and it is seen that all characters have both good and bad parts to them. We also learn that God listens to prayer and can be bargained with.

Thanks for reading. Tune in next time when I discuss the case of Mackenzie Shirilla.

I've been binge watching Submarine movies the past week, and watched one movie which was one of my father's favorite, but I've forgotten what it was since I was 13 or 14 long ago.

It's called U-571, and released in 2000, way back when Hollyweird under Harvey Weinstein's Molesting leadership still released spectacular action thrillers, with interesting premises and plots. Our action warmovie of the day involves one Kraut U-boat which manages to get wounded by a destroyer, and while the Germans manage to survive and escape, their Diesel engines got damaged by the depth-charges, and all their mechanics/engineers got burned alive. While most of the crew remained alive, without engineers, the krauts were basically stranded in the middle of the Atlantic, so the captain decides to break protocol and break radio silence and phone home for aid and for another Supply sub to come and repair them.

The movie follows the yanks intercepting the unguarded message and inferring the sub damaged, and making a hasty Special Operation to come and capture this wounded sub, with a hastily disguised Yank sub jury-rigged to look like a kraut on at first glance, so they can come close enough to board the German sub, and capture the all important artefact of the Enigma code-encryption machine!

Very cool plot

HISTORICALLY INACCURATE:

Like many (most) of yank movies released in the 1980s-2000 period, the yanks positively did not give a frick as to whom they would offend lol, the coked up executives of Hollyweird were pretty ideologically neutral from my experience, and had one usually priority, to make money, and in their brain addled minds, no movie could succeed in Burgerland unless yankoids were the main protagonist heroes of the movie.

So basically the big sneed is that the Historical inaccuracy is that Yanks, according to the Bongs, completely erased the lionshare of the contribution the Bongs made to the actual real life events in which the Bongs had captured the most out of a total of 15 Enigma code-encryption machines, and more significantly the accompanied undamaged codebooks throughout the war. In fact out of the total 15 Enigma machines captured, two had been by Canadian ships, and only one by a yank ship, out of the total 15 for the duration of the war, and the yank capturing was of one of the least significant. (Doesn't even include the influence the Polacks had)

So you can see if you are neurodivergent enough to care about History, then this movie stretched the actual yank contribution to the Enigma code-breaking efforts like a slinky down the stairs.

The hilarious part of these types of Hollyweird movies, changing events to cater to dumbass yank audiences, was that they had not intended that they were deliberate propaganda-pieces for the sake of presenting yanks as the all saviours of mankind, but that the coked-up Hollyweird executives were really just that r-slurred and were chasing what they believed was the winning formula for making the most amount of money!

https://screenrant.com/war-movies-experts-criticized-military-mistakes/

"U-571has been criticized by war experts and even former Prime Minister Tony Blair called the film an "affront" to the British sailors who were really responsible for the seizure of the machine (via BBC). Despite this, the film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing and is still a tense and clever movie with some fantastic cinematography."

"U-571 was directed by Jonathan Mostow and told the story of a World War II German submarine boarded by American submariners to capture her Enigma cipher machine. Though U-571 doesn't represent real events, it was called out for its many historical and technical inaccuracies. From the latter category, military experts have pointed out that Kriegsmarine destroyers rarely ventured out into the open Atlantic Ocean (German Destroyers, by Gordon Williamson) and the website Uboat shared various inaccuracies related to U-boats, though Sub Lt. David Balme, who led the boarding party on U-110, called U-571 a "great film" (via BBC News), but added that it wouldn't have been financially viable if it hadn't been "Americanised"."

That's right Bongcucks movies are not financially viable unless Americanised!

BONGS SNEED:

Bongs didn't see it this way though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1ycmux/most_historically_inaccurate_movies/

10 years ago brit redditors still sour about it

Also even the Prime Bong would condemn the movie!

=======

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/781858.stm

=====(from BBC article)

The hit Hollywood film U-571 has been condemned by the prime minister for its rewriting of history.

Tony Blair said that the film - a huge success in the US and number four in the UK box office chart on its opening weekend - was an "affront" to British sailors.

The film portrays the capture of the Enigma coding machine from a Nazi submarine - an event which changed the course of World War II - as an American rather than British, operation.

It was described in the Commons as an "affront" to British sailors killed in the operation. Mr Blair said that he entirely agreed.

The Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, has already said he will raise the issue in Hollywood for inaccurately glossing over the real story. He described the film as a "little galling".

Speaking during Question Time on Wednesday, a Labour MP, Brian Jenkins, said the film, was an "affront to the memories of the British sailors who lost their lives on this action".

Mr Blair responded: "I agree entirely with what you say...we hope that people realise these are people that, in many cases sacrificed their lives in order that this country remained free."

According to U-571, it was the US Navy that recovered the code machine, but the device was really captured by the crew of HMS Bulldog.

They disabled and seized German submarine U-110 to retrieve the device.

FICTIONAL:

At the end of U-571, prior to the credits, it is made clear that the movie is fictional but inspired by real events.

[The end of the movie has a week blurb about some accrediting of of acknowledging Allied sailors like the Bongs, but it still makes the events of the movie appear that Yanks did the Lionshare of the capturing of the Enigma machines and the codebeaking, when the reality was reversed]

Critics have pointed out the film-makers could have made successful movie, which would have been just as enjoyable, by creating some new incident rather than distorting history.

A group of MPs, led by Chorley's Lindsay Hoyle, has already expressed "regret" about the film in a Commons' motion.

They noted: "(That British sailors) risked their lives to board the stricken submarine, facing the danger that it might sink at any time.

"That members of the boarding party were decorated for their heroism in retrieving the encoding device and that King George VI described their actions as perhaps the most important single event in the war at sea.

"And regrets that Hollywood has chosen to distort the truth and detract from the valour of the British sailors concerned by appropriating the story for its own financial gain."

And Mr Smith has said: "I think one of the things we need to make clear to Hollywood is, yes you're in the entertainment business but people see your movies, they're going to come away thinking that's information not just entertainment.

"You've got to make it clear where the dividing lines between these things lie."

=====(END ARTICLE)

What made the Bongs especially sneed was that the events of the movie seems to parrallel events in the capture of U-110, a British accomplishment, which was perhaps the most significant Enigma capture out of the 15 captured during the war,

and instead of creating a fictional event of yanks capturing an Enigma machine like an alternate universe event of a yank sub, this close resemblance of the real life capture of U-110 and its associated Enigma encryption-device really bussy-blasted the Brits.

MORE SNEED OF THE TIME:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/25/u-571-reel-history

"This 2000 film about a US submarine crew's attempt to steal an Enigma machine from a German U-boat was so inaccurate that it was darned by the UK parliament as an affront to the real sailors. And to make matters worse, it stars Jon Bon Jovi"

https://www.deseret.com/2000/6/11/19512108/britons-say-u-571-distorts-history/

====(from article)

There's just one problem. As depicted in the film "U-571," the sailors speak with American accents. And that has aggrieved many in Britain, whose sailors really did capture an Enigma in 1941-- before the United States even entered the war. Since the film opened in London last week, the controversy has filled newspaper columns and resounded in Parliament. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Clinton have been drawn into the fray.

In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Blair said he "agreed entirely" with a lawmaker who denounced the film as an "affront to the memories of the British sailors who lost their lives on this action."

"We hope that people realize these are people that in many cases sacrificed their lives in order that this country remained free," Blair said.

In The Times newspaper, columnist Simon Jenkins decried "the deluge of historical hokum coming out of Hollywood."

The critics point to Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," which excised the role of British and Canadian troops on D-Day. And columnists already have derided a planned U.S. remake of "The Colditz Story" that would depict American POWs escaping from the notorious German prison camp. In fact, not a single American escaped from Colditz. [Lmoa Bongs were still sneeding from Saving Private Ryan ]

But British moviegoers may be voting with their feet: "U-571" has not matched its boffo U.S. success in Britain.

"It has had a limited impact at the box office," said Emma Cochrane, editor of the film magazine Empire.

Universal defends the film as a fictionalized account of the Allied effort to break Nazi communications.

And, in fact, Americans were involved in one seizure of an Enigma machine, near war's end in 1944. But the events depicted in "U-571" most closely resemble those of the 1941 sub capture.

Britain's culture minister, Chris Smith called the film "a little galling" -- and urged American filmmakers to take a more responsible attitude toward history.

=====(end)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hollywood-heroism-under-fire/

====(from CBSnews article)

But director Jonathan Mostow and writers Sam Montgomery and David Ayer deemed that American heroism was more likely to attract American audiences.

The heroic truth, the British say, has been torpedoed in the interest of profit. The rage has even surfaced in parliament.

In the House of Commons, the movie was called "an affront to the memories of the British sailors," a description that Prime Minister Tony Blair says is warranted. There was even a motion deploring the movie.

"If suddenly Iwo Jima was the British Royal Marines raising the flag after a fight with the Japanese, there would be an outcry," says Lindsay Hoyle, a member of Parliament.

But Balme is not bit bitter. Ironically, the controversy over a film about make-believe heroism has brought more attention to the real hero. The film honors his exploits - and he even visited the set.

=====(end)

https://spyscape.com/article/us-code-wars-inside-americas-epic-battle-with-the-enigma

=====(from spyscape)

The US Navy did capture the German submarine U-505 and two Enigma machines on June 4, 1944, though. So what's the fuss all about? SPYSCAPE took a deep dive into the drama behind the scenes.

The pivotal moment came on June 4, 1944, as Germany's U-505 sub cruised off West Africa on the prowl for American and Allied ships. U-505 was a familiar and fearful name but on this day, the dynamics shifted. The German predator found itself in the surprising role of the prey. Under fire by depth charges from destroyer escort Chatelain and two F4F 'Wildcat' aircraft, U-505 surfaced and surrendered.

It was a historic capture. It had been more than a century since any US naval force boarded and captured an enemy vessel at sea. The German crew of 58 were captured, eventually transferred to a PoW camp in Louisiana, and segregated.

THE BRITISH WAR OF WORDS:

The premiere of the movie U-571 in 2000 brought the decades-old war story into the mainstream media: 'Hollywood's Worst Historical Errors', the Daily Mail sneered. 'U-571: You give historical films a bad name,' The Guardian claimed. Even the UK Parliament darned the movie as an affront to the real sailors.

The British media gleefully pointed out the movie's errors, among them that the Allies had several Enigma machines and rotors by 1940 and that HMS Bulldog captured the first naval Enigma decoder from U-110 in the North Atlantic in 1941.

Enigma was deciphered seven months before the US even entered WWII. The 'Yanks', Britain sniffed, seemed to base the movie's 'true story' on Britain's 1941 Operation Primrose involving HMS Bulldog and the triumph of recovering the codebooks.

====(END)

Nobody goes to Kiwi Farms expecting civil, reasonable, level-headed discussion, but wingcuckery of any sort used to be largely mocked on the site. After the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, however, the worst chudtard vermin from /pol/ flooded into Kiwi Farms en masse, and the site today is largely indistinguishable from VNN or Ironmarch. A few !terfs remain, but they are rapidly dwindling, and the thread that you're about to see is a perfect example of why:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/more-than-70-per-cent-of-transgender-prisoners-are-in-for-s*x-offences-or-violent-crimes.192882/

The thread on the Articles & News subforum started off with a TERF posting a link to a Telegraph article about how more than 70% of inmates in the UK are s*x offenders. The thread had absolutely nothing to do with race or abortion or anything other than s, but that didn't stop it from quickly turning into a shit-flinging contest over those subjects. Here are just a few of the highlights.

User Battlefield2142EU replied to the OP with...

Women voted for this. Don't cry about r*pe in women prisons.

...to which OP TheySeeMeRowlin replied with...

Yes, women (who comprise half of the human race) are literally one monolithic hivemind who all support mentally ill men being in women's prisons. Do you neckbeard incels even realize how fricking r-slurred you sound? Have you ever met any woman, outside of college SJW circles, who supported s being in women's prisons? Not even most dyed-in-the-wool leftist women support this shit.

User JamusActimus then brought up an argument that the OP had had in another, unrelated thread regarding so-called racial IQ differences:

Nobody's gender makes them act a certain way. Their culture may encourage them to act a certain way .

It's a culture problem op?

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

Having a severe mental illness tends to make them act a certain way, being lifelong s*x offenders certainly makes them act a certain way, and having a peepee means that they don't belong in women's prisons regardless. Their ethnicity is completely irrelevant.

Try again, Stormstrag.

User JamusActimus:

Why not since you said on the other thread that everything is cultural and that ethnicity and biology plays no role in someone's behavior.

If they are culturaly women then it's fine right?

Your premise that ethnicity has no impact on behavior is proved wrong by your own statements.

-You're saying that gender makes someone act different beyond the cultural aspect.

-So ethnicity should make you act different beyond the cultural aspect because it affects hormones and behavior (some ethnicity have 50% more test than others)

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

If you think that ethnicity and biological s*x are even remotely comparable, then you are even more r-slurred than the usual Apedrew Apelin acolyte.

There are proven scientific differences between male brains and female brains. There are no proven scientific differences between brains of different ethnicities (and no, the "scientists" that I'm sure you'll cite are not even remotely credible). Not to mention, that still has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that male s*x offenders - and, more broadly, anyone with a peepee - poses a very serious danger to female inmates in female prisons.

Go back to Stormfront.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

Aside from the shrieking morons I met in university, there are plenty of far-left r-slur women I grew up with and who I meet at the bars I frequent who will have a meltdown if anyone dares criticize the LGBTQ movement or any aspect of leftist dogma for that matter. You're the sheltered r-slur here who clearly don't get out enough. Not saying all women think this way, met many who don't, but it's pretty frickin obvious that the majority of women are leftist drones. Look at any polling statistic in any western country to see how big of a leftist block you stupid c*nts are

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

Women voted to be r*ped by men in dresses?

User Battlefield2142EU:

Yes. Same way they voted for defunding the police yet b-word about not feeling safe walking home at night.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

They vote for politicians who advocate for ever more increased tolerance toward these freakshows, so yes, aside from the contingent of women who totally agree with it, many do vote for it indirectly.

User FrancineCansMcGee:

Yes, they vote for Democrats.

User Dysnomia:

No. They don't. The problem is that the candidates that many women feel align with their values about health, social welfare ect... tend to be pozzed. Since the repubs blew their load on abortion last election and fricked up there's literally nothing in there for women. Choose the wrong hill to die on and find out. That's why we have a senile old man as president. Not that the other choices were any better.

"Women voted for this" is a cop out shut down tactic that's getting really old. I just pat the poor dear's on their heads and move along. They know not what they say. It's ok though. I still wuv them. 🤗

I didn't vote for that either. I live in the ghetto. We have a pretty strong police presence here. The mayor I voted for wants to increase police presence. No sane person male or female wants to defund the police. Now accountability is a whole other thing. I do not want to live in a police state and they really do go too far in some cases. Police brutality does actually exist. I'm all for anything that reduces over reactions by police. We need more mental health services over all.

You get a sane anti- candidate out there that doesn't drink all the far right Kool Aid and I'll vote for them.

User FrancineCansMcGee:

A JK Rowling equivalent would win a Democratic primary nowhere in America.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

JK Rowling wants every western country full of BIPOCs and Muslims, both of whom r*pe more women than s. The only thing she isn't a complete moron on is s. So she is basically like every leftist politician currently in office except she hates s.

User The Punished Mitch:

If that's the case, why do they consistently vote incorrectly?

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

What would be the incentive for women to vote for Republicans?

Also I'm pretty sure white women are what helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.

User Mac Monster:

Being able to murder an unborn child or getting r*ped by a man in a dress. Doesn't sound like a particularly difficult choice.

User round robin:

Genuinely astounds me how pervasively anti-natalist rhetoric has infected and rotted the average femoid brain to the point that they will consistently vote to destroy their own cultures if they're not allowed to kill their children.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

What is it you object to exactly? The economic stability? The decrease of violent and/or sexual crimes being perpetrated against people in the streets? So you'd rather be able to flush out a baby because you were too r-slurred to use birth control than security, both economic and from hordes of male feminist BIPOCs, hard-working Americans and s?

User The Punished Mitch:

I am aware that women are willing to suffer the mass importation of MS13-style gangbangers, sandBIPOCs and male sexual deviants in all of their spaces in exchange for unrestricted permission to kill children.

So be it.

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

Women are less likely to be r*ped by a man in a dress than by a regular man, but I'm sure some of you think we voted for that, too. Also more women would vote Republican if the party let women have abortions if they were r*ped or their lives were potentially in danger.

User The Punished Mitch:

"We'll vote to stop being BTFO by mentally ill men in all aspects of life provided you allow us to kill children"

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

So are you gonna deny that r*pe happens?

User The Punished Mitch:

Are you going to pretend 90-99% of abortions are anything but elective?

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

No, but you're intentionally dodging my point. Should women have to carry a pregnancy caused by r*pe?

User Higgs Bonbon:

I don't think women should vote for those heckin republichuds, I think they should vote for literally any party that doesn't act in direct opposition to their safety and wellbeing

there's no such thing as a wasted vote

User gata:

I hate that you cute twinks just have to make things about s into a abortion or female voting or gender war discourse. No fricking wonder these freaks and their enablers can get away with disgusting acts since their enemies are busy fighting or sabotaging each other.

User The Punished Mitch:

Why do foids feel the need to obfuscate their lust and desire for unrestricted child murder?

User Cherry Eyed Hamster:

Wow. With points as compelling and thought-provoking as yours I can't fathom why more women don't vote Republican.

User Higgs Bonbon:

A better response would be "no, and the vast majority of people (conservacucks included) think so too, up to the point of exceptions for r*pe being made in states where abortion is otherwise illegal"

then she'll get mad and go express her lust for bears or someshit

User The Punished Mitch:

Im not the one getting blown the frick out by mentally ill men, pooners are welcome to try their luck in male prisons/changing rooms/pottys/sports.

"I'll stop voting to get kicked in the testicles on the daily if you allow me to avoid child support just because I don't want to pay"

"What do you mean enjoy getting kicked in the testicles if that's what you prefer?"

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

lmao yes, you do as a group vote overwhelmingly for politicians that support open borders, which brings in large amounts of men who are much more likely to r*pe, as well as vote for politicians and DAs that advocate to let BIPOCs/hard-working Americans/poos out on bail, who are far more likely to r*pe than any other demographic, solely because "bail is racist" (between the lines: BIPOCs or hard-working Americans or poos should be free from prosecution even for murders or violent r*pes because they're brown).

User macrodegenerate:

I love how this thread became about being angry at women instead of being mad at men who abuse women.

Really all the Democrats did was focus in on what women want and then used that to get into office, so they could scam them out of their culture, money and country. It's really no different from profiting off drug addicts or gooners addicted to only fans. They can't really help it, so what's the point in being mad?

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

Because a clump of cells isn't a child, you r-slurred incel neckbeard. Your side has lost every single time abortion has been put on the ballot - even in ruby-red states like Kansas and Kentucky - yet you continue to hammer this issue to a public that is completely repulsed by your position, just like you do with the Orange Jesus who is now a convicted felon and who will once again lose the presidential election in 2024, just like him and his MAGAts lost in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Reality doesn't matter to you, hence why, when Trump loses again in 2024, you will once again falsely claim that he was somehow cheated by the imaginary boogeyman "Deep State".

P.S. Jesus is a c*nt and I wipe my butt with the Bible. You are a dying breed and you know it. You will die alone and miserable and so will the "traditional Christian family values" that you claim to champion while you engage in all manner of degeneracy, just like the Catholic priests who r*pe little boys while they drink the AIDS-infected blood of Christ. The only time anyone will ever touch you is when you choke on society's peepee as you die. Now choke on it, b-word.

The post above concluded with an image that I highly doubt the admins want me to include here. It's a Mike Diana cartoon depicting a small little boy being impaled on a Satanic-looking (with devil horns) Catholic priest's enormous, ejaculating peepee, with the priest holding a chalice labeled "AIDS INFECTED BLOOD OF CHRIST" and the words "PRIESTS FRICK LITTLE BOYZ!!" at the bottom of the cartoon.

User Iron Jaguar, quoting Cherry Eyed Hamster's "more women would vote Republican if..." post:

That is hilariously untrue. - You may even believe it but it's still untrue. Women will always find some reason not to vote for orderly, stable society.

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

How is that "orderly, stable society" working out in Republican-led states, which consistently lead the country in poverty, crime, homelessness, unemployment, infant mortality, and corruption while consistently ranking last in education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and GDP?

User Abradolfus_Linclerson:

You are an idiot if you think you made an actual point with this supposed 'gotcha.'

You mean those states that were, until relatively recently, all segregated Democrat strongholds? Or the Rust Belt states whose economies were shanked by Bubba Bill 'the Male feminist' Clinton and have never recovered? States that are otherwise Red leaning except for their major shitties, most of which (such as Chiraq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_Chicago or Milwaukee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Milwaukee or Minneapolis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Minneapolis or St. Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_St._Louis) haven't seen a Republican in high office for nearly a CENTURY in some instances? Bringing up Dixie is not the win you think it is, nor are Red states to blame for r-slurs like you voting in soft-on-crime Commies like Chesa fricking Budin, lawless attorneys general like Alvin Bragg, or mayors like Cap'n Crack himself, Marion motherfricking Barry.

How are shitlibs like you so goddarn immune to cause and effect that you keep voting for the same shit and expect it to turn out any differently?

Also, lol at 'there's no statistical difference between populations'. Yes, yes, geographic origin is so meaningless it's impossible to distinguish an aboriginal Australian from a European, an African from an East Asian, an Inuit from an Indian (dot, not feather), and a Polynesian from someone of Middle Eastern descent. We can't tell by looking at skulls whether or not people dead a thousand years were more or less closely related to whoever is currently living in the region now. There are literally no differences between races except on the most superficial level, just like we can't tell shit about who or what a woman is versus who or what a man is. Are you seriously this fricking dense?

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

The southern states were Democrat strongholds in the past because the southern Democrats - the Dixiecrats - were far-right ultraconservatives. And guess what? Those states were equally poor then as well, if not even poorer. The more conservative any state (or country) is, the poorer it is. Every single time. What do all conservative countries - from Iran to Somalia - have in common? They're all impoverished, third-world shitholes. And, if Democrat cities are destroying these red states, then why are blue states the richest in the country by far? Every single one of them, without exception. Not to mention, West Virginia is the most Republican state in the country and also the poorest state in the country - it has no Democrat cities of any sort. But, hey, women can't have abortions there, and that's clearly more important than actually having a functioning society.

Also, when did I ever say that one couldn't distinguish because the physical features of different races? That's not at all what I said. I said that you can't distinguish someone's race by their brain, because all races have the same brains.

User FrancineCansMcGee:

It's generally working out fine because the brunt of all that is born by the urban dwelling democratic minority in those states. Try breaking it all down on the county rather than state level and get back to us.

Also, instead of the whataboutism parade you could just take a swing at explaining why women in democratic primaries still vote for the transgender agenda when THERE IS NOBODY TO WHATABOUTABOUT.

User TheySeeMeRowlin:

The most Republican counties in those states are by far the poorest ones (especially compared to the blue cities, which are always far wealthier). Also, West Virginia has no Democratic counties at all and it is the poorest state in the country along with being the most Republican state in the country.

For the record, I'm not even a Democrat. I'm an independent. But, in spite of his many, many faults, I will certainly vote for Biden over the alternative. So will most people in the center, as you will soon learn.

User Iron Jaguar:

Those States are undoing decades of Democrat damage and working towards rebuilding a functioning society.

Also, the crime, poverty, illiteracy, healthcare and infrastructure issues can be summed up as "BIPOCs and Hard-working Americans", who vote Democrat en bloc. Let's not pretend you don't know that.

User Seventh Star:

Wow, that's actually pretty informative, I didn't know the exact amount of s convicted for such heinous crimes. I hope the dumb BIPOCs at A&N aren't talking about Democrat/Republican bullshit no one asked for in a news article about British prison statistics.

User Otis Mallebrok, quoting Seventh Star's "I hope the dumb BIPOCs at A&N..." post:

Nah, "le women bad" is just a pavlovian reaction for many of the compulsive wankers on eternal love-quests 😀

User FrancineCansMcGee:

poverty, crime, homelessness, unemployment, infant mortality, corruption, education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and GDP?

Democratic primaries allow women to choose to oppose the transgender agenda without supporting Republicans. This does not occur, instead the results of these elections support the transgender agenda and nominate exclusively pro-trans candidates. The buck will not be passed to Republicans for that no matter how much you bite and claw to change the subject to anything else.

User Sicko Hunter, quoting Battlefield2142EU's "Women voted for this" post:

Posts like these are literally just "I hate women and want to reenforce my hate by pretending they are to blame for all shit" No one voted for this. There wasn't some election held on "Should we put mentally ill men in women's prisons? Yes or no" that never happened.

User IAmNotAlpharius:

The problem I have with progressives, as someone who has had the misfortune to live in cities most of my life, is that the more progressive an area is, the shittier it becomes. The vast majority of cities are democrat run and as the democrats have moved farther to the left, the places they rule over have become shittier.

I'd also argue that progressivism is the philosophy of the wealthy and that many people support progressives because they associate it with high social status. Ultimately a lot of progressive policies will tank the cities and countries that embrace them. We are witnessing this right now with San Francisco and Portland. Mark my words. Europe will devolve into decades of ethnic and religious conflict because of their open borders. The vast majority of immigrants are only accelerating Europe's economic decline because they're taking more out of the welfare state than they'll ever contribute to it. It's not going to be just Europeans v Muslims but also English v Poles, Ukrainian v Armenian, etc. It's going to be messy.

The main problem I have with progressivism is that its core tenant is pleasure. Above all else pleasure is celebrated and impeding pleasure is seen as the greatest sin in progressive circles. This is why we will see more progressives push policies in defense of "maps." It's also why you have people supporting contradictory policies such as increased welfare and open borders. Supporting those policies makes them feel morally good even though logically a welfare state isn't possible if anyone can have a claim on it.

Much of the infrastructure and economy in small towns, not just in the south, are bad because small towns have limited political clout. If you're a native living on the reservation or a red neck in the applachians, no one gives a frick about you because your vote is meaningless because you're a minority of a minority. The politician would rather give money and resources to a middle class "refugee" from Venezuela who left because the gibs dried up before acknowledging the sad position their own people are in. To do so would be to admit that the democrats have abandoned the working class and their former constituents in the south,

The cold reality is that the American politician and the urbanites don't care if their fellow Americans have limited infrastructure or economic opportunity. They don't want to spend money on the icky small towns that were ruined by outsourcing. The democrats under Clinton and other "left" wing politicians have done more damage to labor than the republicans have done in a century. Not only did they help gut entire towns and even large cities in order to outsource production to a hostile nation, they never bothered to prop up the void the lost industries left behind. And for what? Profit and pleasure. Is it a surprise that after decades of neglect by "the party of the working man" that they've rallied around Trump?

In regards to the Democrat party specifically they loathe the poor because they're descended from the planter class that viewed itself as minor nobility. They've lost the south for a time but it doesn't change their tactics or their roots. They've always been deeply entrenched in corruption and despotism. And they'd never allow a liberal party to exist because it'd kill their power base and grift. And honestly Lincoln should've strung up the entire southern Democratic Party. It would've saved us a lot of grief down the line.

In terms of r*pe, male feminists should be shot whether they're men in skirts, gay pedos, straight men that are coomers, or female teachers abusing male students. I feel the same way about people who permanently injure others/disfigure them, murderers, and those who commit manslaughter. (Most male feminists are mentally ill men who are a threat to society and should be put down like a rabid pit bull).

I'm not against abortion if women are r*ped, the child would be crippled, or if the mother's life is in danger. However, I do think we should prevent abortions of infants that could survive outside the womb, and that abortion in that stage is no different from murder. IMO we should mirror Europe's stance on abortion with the time frame, make day after pills more common, encourage more condom use, etc. Several woman have died from late stage abortions in my state in which the child could've been surgically removed and adopted. IMO the risks to abortion isn't fully advertised. I've personally known of people who died because they tried to do abortions on their own and another who became infertile because the medical center damaged their womb in the process of the abortion. It's a nuanced issue that our two party system is ruining. The two party system should be abolished imo. They have no incentive to listen to the people and most issues aren't black or white.

In terms of s I feel that a lot of them are abused by the medical system for profit. That they know they will be dependent on them for life and will make a ton of money. I suspect a lot of medical centers also profit significantly from abortions and self termination, so they encourage those as well.

User FrancineCansMcGee:

roe wasn't overturned by referendum and thus it is impossible to blame any group of voters for roe being overturned. My brain can't comprehend any motive other than personal hatred for why anyone wouldn't agree with that.

User Sicko Hunter:

?????????? was not talking about roe v wade. Abortion is based by the way keeps poor people out of the gene pool.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

BIPOC, leftist politicians came out and openly said for the last decade s are so oppressed and need to be able to compete against women in sports and share their locker rooms (which obviously would in turn lead to them being in women's prisons by extension), as well as to allow unlimited male feminist third world trash within our borders, and women/soyboys/non-whites went out and voted for these politicians in droves. Don't tell me progressives and leftists as a whole didn't know what sorts of policies they were voting in favor of. Absolute braindead take

User Sicko Hunter:

wtf I hate women now and think they deserve to get r*ped in prison by s

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

You do you, bro.

User FrancineCansMcGee:

Instead of being hysterical and r-slurred you could just say, "The well meaning votes to support the transgender agenda have had unforeseen negative consequences. The women voters who are the majority of the party who implemented these reforms should take note of the error and use their votes and lobbying power to address the issue in order to protect women and children going forward."

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

Leave it to leftist freaks to equate pointing out the highly accurate voting demographics in favor of these policies with wanting to see women r*ped by s and nigs. If I wanted to see that I wouldn't be so frustrated with how it all turned out, but there's only so much you can do, so becoming apathetic and saying "it's your own fault ya dumb c*nts" is really the best course of action, especially when leftists/centrists act all bewildered that this is occurring and try to rewrite history to avoid or refuse taking any responsibility for what they empirically by any metric voted for.

User Smashed & Slamed:

I think the biggest tell in this entire sperg out is that not one woman said "I didn't vote for this." It's all "Not all women are responsible for this."

If you can't stop acting like a toddler on Kiwi Farms and accept some imaginary responsibility then there is something really wrong with you.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

Yep the stupid twat already admitted she will be voting for Biden again even after he issued executive orders like this the first week he was in office, which clearly set a tone for legislation throughout the country:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-preventing-and-combating-discrimination-on-basis-of-gender-identity-or-sexual-orientation/

Then they wonder why we laugh at them for shooting themselves in the foot while they whine about the very policies they openly admit voting for.

User Sicko Hunter, quoting TheySeeMeRowlin's "literally one monolithic hivemind" post:

You won't win arguing with the r-slurs here. They literally do believe this is the case.

User Chicken Neck Nelly:

You're either a disingenuous cute twink or a stupid cute twink. Take your pick

User Otterly:

It would be nice to have someone to vote for who wasn't simply a slightly different flavour of the same hideous globohomo/asset stripping class who want to impoverish us and strip every right we have. The British public will probably overwhelmingly vote Labour in July which will make us completely go over the edge of Marxist dystopian horror. But can I blame them for kicking out the tories? Not really, they've been in power for 14 years during which time literally millions of thirdworlders have immigrated legally and illegally, and the country has deteriorated at at astonishing pace.

I would like to vote for someone who likes life, and likes my country, and likes the natives who live here. You would think that would be much to ask would you?

User Über:

Women pre dominantly vote for soft on crime parties that support the gay and trans agenda. Had only male votes been counted no liberal or socialist parties would remain in power.

User jertzog:

Threadcow OP is asleep, so I will say that yes all women vote for this. Every last one is lying if they claim otherwise.

User Biggie Smalls' Taint:

We need the Kiwi Party. The platform is TXD: Total X Death.

TRD: Total Male feminist Death, tie male feminists to trucks and drag them through the streets

TDD: Total Diddler Death, a free bullet to the head to anyone who touches a kid.

TTD: Total Death, redundant considering the previous two, but public executions of any and all s.

and to get women to vote for us, TBD: Total Baby Death. Chucking babies into an oven. Fetuses, born kids, toddlers, college-aged kids that won't get a job, bring them in and we'll dunk em in the broiler. We even offer two-for-> one deals where we throw the mom in the hotbox, baby and all. Bring the family, we'll chuck 'em in there, too. Grandma won't be a financial burden once she's golden brown and crispy.

The Kiwi Party: Total BIPOC Death is a given.

User Am I Very Wrong:

women shouldn't be able to vote

User The Punished Mitch, quoting TheySeeMeRowlin's post with the Mike Diana cartoon:

Least unhinged child murder enjoyer

User Am I Very Wrong, quoting the same TheySeeMeRowlin post:

i don't even understand why you get so mad over s. this looks just like the kind of stuff a degenerate coomer from the stinkditch galleries would post.

really the only thing that separate you is that you wish you had a peepee while they have the opposite problem. the projecting is the cherry on top.

keep voting left, they'll do the same

User Spud, quoting TheySeeMeRowlin saying that "There are no proven scientific differences between brains of different ethnicities":

People will say they believe in evolution and then say shit like this. You don't think that the environment that one brain found itself in would adapt differently than another in a completely different environment?

User The Punished Mitch:

It really is one of the most damaging and delusional copes of all time.

User Daddy's Little Kitten:

What the frick is this thread about?

User Peepeepoopoo Witch:

Why do these types of articles always devolve into bitching about women being allowed to vote, pro-life and anti-life politics, which s*x is more awful, and Romish p-dophiles being lumped in with Christians? s are privileged perverts and should be treated as such. The end!

And these are just a few choice highlights from a long thread consisting almost entirely of chudtard shitposting and shit-flinging directed at the very few TERFs in the thread, who learned right away that they were vastly outnumbered by chudcel r-slurs. Alas, such is the state of Kiwi Farms today.

@Aevann, Marseybux for stirring up and documenting rightoid infighting pls. Also, effortpost.

POGOs

One quick bit of introduction first, what is a POGO? Gambling is illegal (with some exceptions) in much of Asia (China, Korea, Japan). A Philipine Offshore Gaming Operator is a company physically located in the Phillippines that meets those gamblers' needs across the internet. Some have huge compounds where their hordes of Chinese workers toil away at computers and phones all day. It's a pretty sketchy business to begin with, but POGOs attract all kinds of other vices. Those compounds supply prostitution, drugs, and obviously gambling to the local Filipino population as well. They branch out from internet gambling to scams against mainland Chinese: selling bullshit cryptocurrency or just a traditional catfishing love scam. And some of them might even violate labor regulations.

Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated

Feb 25 - A Vietnamese man tells police that he escaped from a POGO in the town of Bamban he had been forced to work in. A Malaysian also reports that fricked-up stuff is going on there, like torturing people with electricity.

Bamban, a city of 78,000 in central Luzon. The roofs are that cheap because they're just going to get blown away by a typhoon in 1-2 years anyway.

Mar 13 - The POGO compound ("Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated") is raided by law enforcement led by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC). Everybody shows up:

the Philippine National Police (PNP) Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), Integrity Monitoring Enforcement Group (IMEG), Intelligence Group (IG), Women and Children Protection Center (WCPC), and the [Army's] Northern Luzon Command (NOLCOM)

Notably missing are the local Bamban police and the regional command of the National Police. It's a good thing they brought help because the place is enormous, a 10 hectare (25 acre) compound with 36 buildings, including barracks, villas with secret tunnels, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Evidence of their crimes was all over the place, most obviously the huge number of cell phones used in their scams. There's chaos trying to sort out hundreds of people from different countries.

Around this time a very interesting comment is made on a Youtube video:

Ask the Mayor of that municipality,Shes a friend of the chinese builders of that compound,Shes a chinese also,of course someone would leak their operation,The Mayor and Chief of Police of that town are very close,also ask the Brgy.officials of Annupul,they know who built that placa,the same Chinese group who funded the Mayors campaign

I wonder if that will come up again later.

When I say "compound", this is what I'm talking about.

Mar 16 - The scale of this operation is revealed:

At least 658 foreign and Filipino workers were found... 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese, 54 Vietnamese, 13 Malaysians, two Indonesians, two Rwandans, a Taiwanese, and a Kyrgyz. The PAOCC said at least 280 foreigners from the said list have no documents to legally stay in the country

Just finding a place to keep these people while they were sorted out would be a challenge, but fortunately another similar POGO operation had been raided earlier and had lots of empty buildings to use now.

There's also 38 vehicles parked there with switched license plates. The first arrests are made: 8 foreigners (mostly Chinese) and 1 Filipino.

Joann Manabat, who I'm stealing all my information from, at the compound raid. She randomly speaks English 20% of the time so you can basically tell what's going on.

Mar 26 - The mayor Alice Guo seems to keep popping up in the investigation. A Ford Expedition registered to her was among the vehicles found in the compound. Her name is on an application for "Hongsheng Gaming Technology Incorporated", a company that just happens to be located at the very same compound. By now the Senate has begun investigating what the heck is going on.

Well, isn't she chipper?

Apr 6 - It turns out that 6 of the Chinese found in the compound are wanted back on the mainland for various crimes.

fraud, illegally crossing the national border, running a gambling house, aiding information network criminal activities, and creating disturbances.

Apr 9 - Cops using acetylene torches break into 11 safes found on the property. They still have 16 left to go. It's difficult work as they keep running into unexpected problems. All of the welders in the area were busy "attending a seminar" every angle grinder had vanished.

By now a serious investigation of the local officials in Bamban has begun. Mayor Guo insists she has nothing to hide:

Guo said the allegations are unfounded as the crimes of human trafficking, torture, and illegal detention are intolerable. She said she has been "unfairly persecuted" without real investigation.

Don't worry honey, you'll get a real investigation all right.

Don't you just want to wipe that smile off her face?

Apr 11 - The remaining safes are breached. Not much cash is found but there is a huge number of cell phones and crypto wallets to sift through as well as some of the slaves' documents.

A Malaysian and a Vietnamese, Dylan and Danny, were among the foreign nationals who reported torture and abuse in the facility. Dylan was bought for P300,000 to work for Zun Yuan while Danny escaped from the Baofu compound on February 25.

The beating heart of corruption in Bamban. It doesn't look so scary tbh.

May 7 - Mayor Guo appears before a Senate committee to explain herself. She denies any connection to "Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated" or "Hong Sheng Gaming Technology Incorporated" (the old name of the company). She isn't terribly convincing as there are many financial records tying her to it.

The most interesting part of her testimony has nothing to do with crime or POGOs. Guo was evasive when asked about her business dealings but she was also evasive when asked basic questions about who the heck she is and where she comes from. Through a series of coincidences she just happens to have left no paper trail while growing up. She was born at home and never bothered to get a birth certificate until she was 17. She was homeschooled all the way through high school and never went to college. She was raised by her father on the family hog farm. One day in 2022 she decided to run for mayor, with her campaign funded by the generous contributions of the friends she made while hog farming. A senator remarked on how she was truly a political outsider:

Figuratively you came out of nowhere then you became mayor? That's okay, a refreshing break from our political dynamics.

WTF

So WTF is going on here? Who is Alice Guo? Where did she come from? Why does she have to hide it? Why do Filipinos care so much about this case in the first place?

Guo is a Chinese name. There have been Filipinos of Chinese descent going back centuries, at least to the time of the Manila Galleons. There are something like a million Chinese Filipinos today and a large part of the population has some Chinese blood. They excelled in business and today are among the most prominent families, even being elected President. For the most part we're not talking about these people today, although they're probably catching some heat from this too.

Notice she's going to be the first "lady mayor" of Bamban. I guess they have "it's her turn" over there too.

We're talking about a very different group of people, the ones who have just arrived during the Duterte presidency (2016-2022). Under Duterte's corrupt China-friendly rule, visas were sold to Chinese illegal immigrants and they flooded in to work in the POGOs that were sprouting up by the hundreds. These brought with them unruly new neighbors as well as every kind of vice. They were also obviously used for Chinese intelligence operations and deeper penetration of the legitimate economy. Filipinos are tired of having a bunch of lowlife foreign criminals coming and taking over their country. At the same time they are outraged at another more traditional kind of Chinese invasion, the military occupation of their territory. With this much hostility to mainland China, the public is curious to know how she suddenly appeared in their country and who she really works for.

Will they get their answers? Can Alice Guo do anything to make herself even more hated? Who knows? I've only gotten to May so far and the investigation is still going irl. I'll try to eventually catch up to now so that we can watch events unfold in real time.

Hello, this is apprentice admin @The10thMan again.

Pride Month has officially come to an end, and I'm here to update you on the results and status of the three events outlined in the original events post.

rDrama Pride Month Events (now concluded)

(1) Drag queen names and avatars:

The following individuals submitted full Pride/Drag themed names AND avatars (in no particular order):

01 @RWBYGayPride
02 @Elana_SUSk
03 @Straggocide
04 @gigakitty
05 @Guzzy
06 @Cdace
07 @rainbow-reina
08 @GayRayniumDonGER
09 @Pridevis-Kong
10 @Featherina_Fabulousa
11 @HomosexuaI
12 @Joe_Manchin
13 @Brony
14 @fartnigga
15 @Ms-Cunty-Ana-Tay
16 @Tax
17 @Luna_C_Pibbles
18 @IanMurcock
19 @NanalnyOfBussorussia
20 @FreedomforIsrael
21 @tara_fujoshi_dickhoff
22 @dramaqueen
23 @dramapus
24 @MarshaBeeJohnson
25 @The_Homocracy
26 @ConchShell
27 @MoniqueMystique
28 @FlyingButchdress
29 @_wo_ManBearFridge
30 @Eleganza
31 @Queer

The following two individuals submitted Pride/Drag themed names, but never replied back when I told them they needed to modify their avatar as well.

32 @AmericanShippingCompany
33 @HarrietTugsmen

I have decided to include them in the roll, but if either of them win, they will only get a consolation prize and then I will re-roll to award the main prize.

I will be doing #roll33 in a reply to this post to determine the winner from the numbered list above.

The winner will have 2 weeks to choose their reward of either an rDrama Pride award (retail value $2000) or a $100 gift card to a place of their choosing.

(2) Take an "rdrama.net" sign to a public Pride event

Well, obviously this event was a big ask given that most of the people here are so terminally-online that the Grass award can function as a month ban. I had still hoped that a $100 bribe might be enough to coax a handful out of the shadows.

THE SUBMISSION PERIOD IS NOW CLOSED

There were two entries submitted before the deadline:

Marsey's Out at Pride by @HomosexuaI

And

My extremely low effort submission for the Pride sign bounty by @Ms-Cunty-Ana-Tay

I don't think I need a poll to determine that @HomosexuaI made the more significant effort, therefore I declare them the winner. Since they already have a Pride award (truly a mystery how), they will be able to choose either 550K Marseybux (the max discount equivalent cost) or a $100 gift card to a place of their choosing.

@Ms-Cunty-Ana-Tay will receive a Checkmark award for 2nd place.

(3) Bully straights and hetero content

The !gaystapo tag certainly saw a lot of application interest and a fair amount of use. I would especially like to commend the top two lieutenants, who between them curtailed over 20 incidents of blatant heterosexuality:

@FreedomforIsrael and @GayRayniumDonGER

The question now becomes, what to do with the ping group? I offer a poll to allow everyone to decide:

If it should only be used during Pride month, choose the first option
If it should available year-round to point and laugh at the straggots, choose the second

POLL NOW CLOSED (13-32)

The group will be opened up for applications !pinggrouplovers

Closing Thoughts

This event was a bit of an experiment. While some "other sites" have people willing to tattoo their allegiances, it's clear that expectations for rDrama must be, uh, significantly more subdued. Future events will probably need to focus on things that can be accomplished while remaining seated.

Thank you to everyone who did participate in some fashion.

PREVIOUS

BEGINNING

As I start my yearlong overseer shift, I reread the old chronicles once more. Our fortress has flourished, mostly, though the masons have cut many coffins as well. We have grown so much since I last served. Still we can only endure, not repel, the sieges of the undead, but last year we reached the precious Adamantine, and we must exploit it. We must delve deeply and greedily, where treasures and fiends sleep in the stone. The danger and distance mean mining this wondrous substance inefficient, and here I hope to improve our industriousness.

As for myself, I am hale and strong. I have fought for our fortress, and I have been made Hammerer, dispenser of final and fatal justice. In all the hustle and bustle of our fortress' great expansion, no dungeon to deliver justice has yet been built. That can be an initial goal.

2 Granite

I have ordered the chains and cages made. Settling into my role as overseer, I find the office of Sheriff has passed into obsolescence because of our growth, and I must consider who to appoint as Captain of the Guard. My task is only to perform executions, and the Captain must apprehend wrongdoers and deliver them for punishment.

I have ordered a few more pockets of Adamantine mined, and set @StarSix , captain of the Cudgel, to stand watch over the Adamant veins for now.

3 Granite

@60horsesinmyherd has ordered me not to export any of our wondrous new battle axes. A wise order, if unnecessary.

Going over the old journals I saw dreams of the fabled pump stack, the mighty shaft to bring magma within easy reach. It would also be an ultimate solution if even Adamantine-armed and -armored dwarves are not enough to take on the dark hunters. I think we can build this, but I expect construction to outlast my year as overseer. For now I have ordered digging of the body of the shaft, well over a hundred levels.

Starting a pump stack shaft

8 Granite

We found an enormous cavern! For later in the year I had considered exploratory mining to find such, but the pump shaft breached it. There is fertile soil, and many spiders. A spot of good luck - with a little shoring up of the cavern walls our pump shaft can continue straight on its current path down.

13 Granite

The adamantine miners unearthed another ancient evil. A fiend of vomit. @Cream_a_da_crop of the Cudgel is on guard nearby and rushes to aid, but the thing is already on the miners. @EskomSePoesOfficial dodges a cloud of boiling vomit while @60horsesinmyherd strikes a pick blow - and the fiend dissipates into a puddle of vile regurgitation. Perhaps it was too foul to have any formidable substance.

17th Granite

Another treasure in the depths!

When we had to rearrange the Adamantine access in order to mine it, miner @Paragon decided to sleep down there instead of wait a few hours for a stair to be carved. Now @Paragon is upset about their decision. They can complain to the Mayor, not me.

22 Granite

Migrants arrived. We are now 118. Thankfully there are plenty of bedrooms from the foresight of previous overseers.

24 Granite

That wasn't all the migrants. 130! So far.

25 Granite

Our hunter @uwu has gone into the caverns to hunt something called an Elk Bird and chased it upwards. Luckily it doesn't seem to be particularly ferocious. I admire the audacity, but I need to finish re-sealing the cavern lest something more dangerous arrive.

6 Slate

I've been told these Elk Bird hides will fetch an especially high price from the trader later on.

12 Slate

With the pump shaft sealed off from the cavern again, I've ordered the start of a separate stairwell for cavern access.

18 Slate

Again we have unearthed evil near the Adamantine veins. A phantom of fire, named Bisekmomuz.

Annoyed by her own smoke

19 Slate

Grim tidings. The thing Bisekmomuz killed the miner @Paragon and the stationed Cudgel member @frick . Dwarven courage and steel could not fight fire. The flames left nothing to bury. The bridge is raised. We are cut off from the Adamantine, as well as two treasures. Bisekmomuz lurks.

20 Slate

I have appointed @sirpingsalot and Ducim as replacement miners.

3 Felsite

@frick and @Paragon are memorialized on slabs.

A large rat scurried into the fortress from somewhere - I took the privilege of killing it myself.

5 Felsite

There is water in the deeps - the miners working on the cavern access passage must work around damp stone.

6 Felsite

I saw a snake, an adder, and felt compelled to attack it. It fled before my onslaught.

9 Felsite

@IslamWasWrongAboutGays is taken by a mood and compelled to craft!

11 Felsite

The Dungeon is complete! To have a fully functional justice system, I have appointed Ral Regshadmal as Captain of the Guard. I chose her for her weakness - Let killing wrongdoers be reserved for me.

14 Felsite

All the raw Adamantine taken before the coming of Bisekmomuz has been processed. It was a slow process.

17 Felsite

@IslamWasWrongAboutGays has created a legendary sheep bone crossbow, but hoarded it to themselves. If that is how it will be, then have hunting duty assignment to make use of it.

2 Hematite

I hear the outcry - SNATCHER! Protect the children - three goblin kidnappers have come. The Cudgel has the kill order.

4 Hematite

The goblins fled before our fighters, never getting close to any children. Two got away, but @StarSix caught the last one with just one blow, our fortress' first with an adamantine weapon.

9 Hematite

A human caravan is arriving for trade.

16 Hematite

The human traders wanted to sell us a scroll titled "Against the Dwarf". I considered slaughtering them all for this insult, but decided we don't need the trouble it might bring. Instead I just traded, though they didn't have much of interest - some exotic drinks and bins of cloth. I also bought the offending scroll to learn what lies they are spreading.

To my surprise, it is written by a self-hating dwarf. A dwarf writing in the name of "labor", writing about their own previous writing, depressing ideas about "Mountain Halls for Everyone." I think I have heard of this nonsense before - it's called communism - but at least I don't think the humans have anything against us.

17 Hematite

@60horsesinmyherd is re-elected Mayor and once again bans me from selling our axes.

18 Hematite

The pump stack shaft has breached a second cavern! This one is full of water and mushrooms. The shaft must route around this one.

4 Malachite

The Livid Guild of Rangers has petitioned for a guildhall, and I will comply with their wishes.

15 Malachite

A few more migrants.

18 Malachite

We now have 4 Adamantine axes. To replace the late @frick I have given one to @_wo_ManBearFridge and appointed them to the Cudgel.

4 Galena

The Elk Birds tend to come upwards into the fort when the cavern is open, but they are more annoyance than danger. One of our dogs decided on its own to take a bird down.

Get 'em!

5 Galena

Ordered 100 iron pipe sections and enormous corkscrews for the future pumps. We'll need a bit more than that, but it's a start. Ordered more iron smelted, too.

21 Galena

The Livid Guild Hall is completed, with a fine legendary scepter on display for the admiration of the Rangers.

All this time, Bisekmomuz waits motionlessly

1 Limestone

THE DEAD WALK! Again under siege. We're used to it.

Once again!

4 Limestone

Everyone is inside. There are 36 of them, with several dark hunters. I don't think it's time to try to take them on directly yet.

There's moss growing on our dirt floor upper levels. Spores must have spread from the caverns. Larger fungus is even beginning to grow in a few places. We can work on laying down an actual floor while we're stuck inside.

Filthy

8 Limestone

As the besiegers approach it becomes clear that there are living humans and disgustingly, even living dwarves, fighting alongside the shambling undead. Sadly, they kill a few stray cats outside the walls.

20 Limestone

The siege force waits outside our "backdoor". I have ordered the chaining of a beast for bait to lure them in to the KOMPAKTOR for KOMPAKTION.

23 Limestone

@CourtneyGears is taken by a fey mood. I can only hope there's no need for anything from the outside.

25 Limestone

@FBIshill , the dwarf we all call "Carp", has fallen into a severe depression. It's not entirely clear why - some unspecified trauma from last year.

6 Sandstone

No one wanted to chain up a hen or dog as bait - it turned out they considered my order to hide inside more important. I told them to consider the KOMPAKTOR "inside" for these purposes. We were able to smash a few invaders - the timing of the smashing is tricky, and we actually accidentally caught one enemy with the outer gate.

@CourtneyGears was able to find everything they needed and start work - I don't have to worry about them going insane.

10 Sandstone

They created a beautiful mechanism, which I have paired with the one already on display in our gathering hall. This one is more splendid; it actually portrays the history of our people.

13 Sandstone

Managed to draw in five foes, including a dark hunter, for KOMPAKTION.

16 Sandstone

I received notice two prophets were attempting to visit our besieged fortress, in a display of exceedingly poor foresight.

17 Sandstone

Mayor @60horsesinmyherd has demanded the construction of 3 battle axes - again putting me at ease by just asking for what I am already doing!

21 Sandstone

The "leader" necromancer Imbo Pebuer is visiting the area. They don't seem immediately hostile, but it is foreboding. Rumors say Imbo has been associated with many places, peoples, and faiths over the years - why are they here now, at our place?

27 Sandstone

Terrifying!

A horrible beast has arrived in the cavern! The Cudgel rushes to the defense.

28 Sandstone

The new recruit @_wo_ManBearFridge , barely trained with their axe, and the Axelord @tempest are first to reach the beast. They meet it in the cavern access stairway. It badly wounds a pet cat, but then they are on it with their axes. Half their strokes sever parts of the beast - one foot, the stinger, another foot, and then @_wo_ManBearFridge removes its head. The beast landed no hits on the dwarves. A great victory!

2 Timber

7 of the siege force, including a dark hunter, submitted for KOMPAKTION this time. Only one dark hunter left.

3 Timber

Depressed dwarf Carp is throwing a tantrum! Embarrassing. Carp assaulted several dwarves and domestic fowl before going to the Mayor for a crying session.

Somehow a human zombie made into our fort. I was the one to engage it, and did so quite handily. I chopped off one hand, then the arm, both legs, and finally chopped the body in two. Cleft in twain, as they say. More troubling than the fight is that we don't know how it made it in.

9 Timber

It is finally time for our justice system to act. Several dwarves have filed charges regarding Carp's tantruming. I have ordered Captain Ral to interrogate Carp for thoroughness, though the guilt is clear.

Good citizens report the misdeeds

14 Timber

Carp readily and foolishly confessed to the tantrum.

Convicted. 19 days in prison, drinking from a bucket of WATER.

Cat visits are allowed

19 Timber

The Elk Birds that came up from the cavern continue to annoy working dwarves. The hunters don't always persevere enough to kill them, and they seem to heal quickly, so I put the Cudgel on them.

25 Timber

The annoying Elk Birds are all dead, getting butchered and tanned.

27 Timber

Very deep, not many levels above the magma, the pump stack shaft has breached a third cavern! We'll have to construct the body of the shaft ourselves.

Level -92

28 Timber

Carp is throwing a tantrum even while imprisoned. Pathetic.

1 Moonstone

More foolish foreign guests tried to reach our besieged fortress and succumbed to the undead hordes, but it seems like they destroyed two zombies first.

The undead have not gone for the KOMPAKTOR trap recently.

3 Moonstone

Better-armed or skilled foreign guests have actually killed or driven off the last dark hunter! One live enemy dwarf and nine assorted shambling corpses remain.

5 Moonstone

Four enemies entered the trap. The bait dog was doomed in any case, but their blows essentially exploded its jaw before the KOMPAKTOR came down on everyone.

Tooth explosion

The Cudgel sallied forth and tore apart the remainder without injury.

Victory!

The siege is lifted once again!

17 Moonstone

There have been three babies born in the past few weeks!

18 Moonstone

The Mayor has prohibited the export of figurines. Fair enough, if hard to understand.

23 Moonstone

A strange creature called a Gorlak came up from the caverns. One of our dogs didn't like it very much and killed it.

24 Moonstone

Carp, out of prison, throws a third tantrum and hits a cat.

5 Opal

Twelve witnesses reported Carp's criminal attack on the cat, and Carp's own confession upon interrogation makes thirteen.

I have ordered the stone of the prison to be engraved, in the hopes that greater exposure to our illustrious culture will have a salutary effect on Carp and any other future prisoners.

11 Opal

Sentencing decisions are not in my hands - instead of prison, this time Carp is sentenced to a beating from Captain Ral.

Ral leaving Carp's room after delivering the punishment.

I selected a physically weak Captain of the Guard for good reason - there was only a small blood splatter and one broken bone after Ral was done.

The results of the beating

12 Opal

Peaceful, for once

Carp reports to the hospital to heal after justice. Podiatric surgery is required. Even in the hospital bed, Carp throws a tantrum - at least tantrums in hospital or prison seem harmless.

The initial order of 10 Adamantine axes is complete. There are a few Adamantine wafers and spools of thread left - getting more of the raw stuff seems quite a challenge with Bisekmomuz waiting ever-patiently. Over the year the Cudgel has switched over to Adamantine battleaxes, those more used to spears training up in the new weapon.

13 Opal

The baby boom has continued. Our population now numbers 141.

17 Opal

Id Nomalisen the Prophet, who stupidly visited us during the siege, has risen as a ghost. Somehow it's our duty to memorialize them or be haunted.

22 Opal

Even more migrants have arrived. We are over 150 now.

28 Opal

Momuz the Farmer stole the legendary scepter "Ethbeshtaron" from the Livid Guild Hall. Momuz was spotted by @MerrySwishmas and will be interrogated. Momuz seemed to consider fleeing the area but thought better of it as Captain Ral approached.

4 Obsidian

A human named Kuda wants to reside in the fort "for the purpose of eradicating monsters". A human in a dwarf fortress is rather irregular, but I can't argue with the goal here, and have accepted them.

5 Obsidian

Momuz gave up nothing in the interrogation. We can still convict them. One month in prison, and in the cage, not on the chain. The scepter, last seen in Momuz' possession, is nowhere to be seen. There are rumors a visiting necromancer left with it. Did they bewitch Momuz? Perhaps when it seemed Momuz was fleeing they were handing off or hiding the scepter. I put some finely crafted but obsolete steel battleaxes on display in the Livid Guild Hall to satisfy their need for a suitable hall.

6 Obsidian

Yet again, Carp throws a tantrum, knocking over a lever and statue, and destroying the plump helmet field.

8 Obsidian

66 witnesses reported Carp this time. Back to prison!

Carp and Momuz locked up

For further edification of the prisoners, I later placed a legendary cage on display, so they can look at it and think about how much nicer it is than their own cage or chain.

25 Obsidian

Another monster of vomit, coming from the third cavern this time.

27 Obsidian

That was quick

And with the defeat of this forgotten beast of vomit, my yearlong shift comes to an end, and I hand the fortress over to @StarSix.

• Found three caverns.

• There is a cavern access shaft to the first cavern w/ drawbridge to secure. This first cavern has cave spider webs, of which a bunch have been gathered I believe, and muddy floors good for farming.

• The second cavern is sealed off.

• The third cavern is open to the pump stack shaft.

• Drawbridge to secure the pump stack shaft is being constructed - will need its lever!

• The body of a pump stack shaft is dug to the third cavern, about ten levels above the magma. Probably makes the most sense to just construct the shaft through the cavern. About half the doors are emplaced. Pipes and corkscrews are being constructed. It remains to dig the channels between levels and place the pumps.

• We are cut off from the known Adamantine by the Fire Phantom Bisekmomuz. I don't know if it's a thing we can fight. I don't even know if magma would kill it.

• We have 10 Adamantine axes, 7 in the hands of the Cudgel.

• Carp is pretty continually tantruming. All I saw was the vague "trauma" from the past year. I don't know if continual punishment is the best for it but since my dwarf was made hammerer I went with a justice focus.

• Fort operating smoothly overall. Iron production seems a bit jammed up and might need workshop settings adjusted?

Players, in order of succession:

@60horsesinmyherd

@Cream_a_da_crop

@s_a_n_t_b

@StarSix

@searcher

@BFBugleberry

@Rankine_911

@Yasharn

@Ninjjer

Hey besties!!!

I'm the bloke that wrote this.

https://rdrama.net/h/pol/post/278965/the-state-of-the-race-whos

In the comments, I talk to a guy about the debates, and make a prediction. I wonder what I say?

I think the debates will be a Biden win, honestly. And going by the way rightoid media personalities have been pushing "Biden will be on drugs during the debates!!!", they think so as well. But we could all be wrong, Biden is really old after all.

Biden's performance can be summed as

The kindest thing I've seen about his performance is "Well, the debates don't matter." Is that the case Rdrama.net? Well, no. For this write-up, I'll compare the first debates, the second debates and sixth debates, which were considered to have the biggest impacts on the races, and how they relate to Biden's performance.

Tl;Dr

1960 US Debates

Richard Nixon () v John Kennedy ()

These debates are famous. The story is that Nixon looked like shit, Kennedy looked great, and so Kennedy won. This is only half of the story - America has elected uggos to office before. Politics is basically Hollywood for ugly people - were the American people really so shallow they voted for the Hotty over the Notty?

The campaign was built on a simple question - experience, with Vice-President Nixon, or change, with Senator Kennedy. Kennedy's campaign had been that Eisenhower as President had made the country stagnate. As President, he was going to advance civil rights, expand social security with medicare and get far more bombs so they could bomb the shit out of the Commies . Nixon promised to not screw up the good thing they had with Eisenhower, who was the most popular President until 9/11 era Bush .

Nixon looking like a corpse on TV while Kennedy was tanned and exuberant gave a lot of credit to the idea that America needed change, that Nixon was stagnation. With how insanely close 1960 really was, it's obvious this screw up was why Nixon lost the election. If he was able to look more secure on TV, then he would win. Instead, he became the visual argument for why Kennedy was right.

1976 US Debates

Gerald Ford () v Jimmy Carter () ((the joke is that Jimmy is a peanut farmer))

The battle of the nice guys is known for having the best ever losing campaign, when Ford managed to lose by just one state only 2 years after pardoning Nixon . If Ohio was 1% different, Ford would have been a two term president.

After roughly 15 years of lies from the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administration, America wanted change. Jimmy Carter, an outsider disliked by the mainstream Democrats, was able to ride the wave of change by positioning himself as a humble Bapist that just loved God and America and would never tell a lie . By contrast, Ford had been in Congress for about 20 years, was popular inside the party, and managed to barely beat Republican outsider Ronald Reagan . He was viewed at best as an r-slur that pardoned a criminal, at worst as another criminal.

Ford managed to overcome this however. He accepted the facts of the race, America loves newcomer Jimmy Carter, and adapted to them. Carter is an outsider - but can he handle the economy? The Cold War? Coupled with Ford just being a really nice, friendly guy, and he managed to flip the race on it's head by accepting the facts and changing the perspective on them.

The debates would end this, when he said repeatedly that the Soviet Union doesn't dominate East Europe.

It's clear that he's trying the same stuff as "experienced vs outsider" stuff by flipping the narrative and making Jimmy Carter sound weak on defence. But he just sounds like a fricking idiot, and ruined his own prior messaging. He would go on to admit his mistake, but it wasn't enough. Carter would narrowly win, despite his own countless mistakes.

1988 US Debates

George Bush () v Michael Dukakis ()

When the campaign started, Bush was going to lose. Governor Dukakis was a popular moderate liberal with one of the best states in the Union while Vice-President Bush was the dweeb tied to Reagan's various criminal scandals, like Iran-Contra . Bush was able to close the gap with one of the most brutally effective negative campaigns of all time, built on two key issues - Dukakis is soft on crime (America under Reagan had seen crime raise all over the nation, but lowest in Massachusetts) and Dukakis is soft on defence (Iran-Contra lol). If you've ever seen the Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob runs for Mayor, it's genuinely barely a parody.

Dukakis misread the situation, and chose not to respond. Rather then make him look like the bigger man, he just made it seem like Bush was correct. Come the debate, and there's only one moment people are talking about:

: Governor Dukakis, if Kitty Dukakis were r*ped and murdered, would you favour an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

: No I don't Bernard, and I think you know I've opposed the death penalty nearly all of my life. I don't believe it works as deterrent...

This really happened btw

The question was clearly, obviously inappropriate. And rather then say "Uh Mr. Shaw I'm really angry at what you're saying about my wife, there are better ways to discuss the issues" or whatever, he treated the question like it was fair and reasonable. If he wasn't gonna kick up a fuss, why should the public? So they treated the question like it was fair, and Dukakis' utter flop answer ("No I love murdering male feminists ") haunted him. There were other issues, but to the public he was the "soft on crime guy." Come the election, Bush wins in the last 400+ EV landslide.

Intermission

Did you know John Kerry is widely considered to have beaten George Bush in the debates? Or that Romney beat Obama in 2012? In 1984, during the first debates, Reagan's performance against Mondale is honestly comparable to Biden's performance last night. The idea that the debates don't matter does have some truth to it. The truth is, debates are just one part of the campaign. Everything, from the posters to the speeches to the badges, go into making a campaign. Debates aren't one massive part of it - they're just another cog in the electioneering machine. If a debate goes poorly, like in 2004, that doesn't matter. Bush wasn't running on being an egghead, he was running on being the commander, yee-haw! Reagan wasn't running on being the intellectual with the perfect facts and figures, he was running on keeping the government out of your life. The fact they preformed poorly doesn't matter, since the message wasn't really affected.

2024 Debates

Trump () v Biden ()

If you'll recall my write-up, I discussed the biggest issues these uniquely unpopular figures face. Trump is a loudmouth butthole and criminal, Biden is a senile r-slur. These debates couldn't have gone much better for Trump. He made some gaffes - some of his question dodging was kinda pathetic, outright bragging about repealing Roe V Wade will be used in some ads. But the formats of the debate were built, by the Biden team!!!!!, to cover Trump's worst traits. The 2016 and 2020 debates were both massive flops for Trump, since his obnoxious personality was on full display. With the mics being muted and the answer time limits being adhered to strictly, Trump couldn't be so annoying. Biden, by contrast, could barely fricking speak. He sounded like he was going to die in a week and could barely speak straight. 66% of undecided voters think Biden will die before 2028 (which yeah probably). When Biden can barely fricking speak, everything the public hates about Biden is made clearer than crystal.

Already, Trump is 2% ahead - basically undoing the conviction. 2% may not sound like much, but what can Biden do to fix it? Trump's convictions are hardly a secret. He's not really hidden his affairs. The only thing I can see stopping a Trump victory is if Trump is outright jailed, which polls have reported roughly halving his support base. With how obnoxious he acted in court, and were he a normal defendant, I would say that's likely. However, the Judge has made comments about not wanting to divide the country - this to me implies a fine, rather than behind bars.

Of course, anything can happen. There's always a good old fashioned October Surprise. But things are looking great for Dementia Daddy (R) - at this rate, he might even win the popular vote.

Greetings Dramatards, how you chodes are doing. I'm sick as a dog, and drowning in my own phlegm

SUMMARY: Last time I regaled some of you chodes of the r-sluration of Safrican sports, and how not only are we segregated by race and economic class in the modern Democratic Republic, but for the duration of the NP regime, the situation was such that ENTIRE SPORTS THEMSELVES were segregated by law and culture due to the rule of the Apartheid government.

So that Rugby and Cricket were primarily "White" sports, with soccer relegated as the sport played by the country's inferiors due to the lack of interest by the Boers/Bongs from the period of 1940s-1993, depending on which historian is doing the measurement. Black peeps were banned from partaking in Rugby clubs and provincial/national teams, and were often prohibited by law from entering gyms/locker-facilities declared for exclusive use by whites.

This didn't mean that no one single white ever played soccer or enjoyed it, or that no one black/coloured person enjoyed/supported/played rugby, but that due to the near totalitarian strictness in which the NP regime enforced its cultural and race laws upon the South African population, these endeavors were relegated to local private clubs.

Even though whites who deigned to play soccer had no actual laws acting against them to playing soccer, compared to their black peers forbidden to compete in Rugby, they were strongly peer-pressured into avoiding Soccer due to the strength of cultural norms - where soccer was gradually associated as a lower form of sport, due to its association with black/coloured peeps.

B.E.E. IN PREVIOULY WHITE SPORTS:

Since 1993, and the onset of the Mandela Administration, a strong BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) government mandated initiative had been forever present in all aspects of South African political and civilian life. The idea of BEE was to enforce the economic upliftment of black peeps, which was feared would be excluded by their white wealthy counterparts due to discrimination even in a free society, and to enforce corporations, businesses, clubs, and significantly for our story - sport teams to have a minimum quota of Previously Disadvantaged Demographics, basically anyone screwed over by Apartheid, usually black peeps.

Like all lofty intentions, there was benevolence behind the BEE initiative, and like all roads leading to heck, was paved with compassion. But like all the Longposts covering the covering the corruption of the ANC, I think you guys can imagine the drama which would follow here.

Because of the nationwide and systemic discrimination against blacks, the sporting facilities like fields, equipment and gyms, were by order of magnitude lacking behind that of traditional White schools, and the grassroots capacity of Black/coloured schools to generate a talentpool of Rugby players was finite.

The fact was that to continuously generate a World-Class tier Rugby/Sports team, a nation state must have a strong foundational set of institutions in the form of: schools to clubs to Unions (which regulate and govern the sport) - and thus create a grassroots pipeline from the youngest under-ten boys, to the most veteran Springbok

MANDELA AND RUGBY'S RISING POPULARITY AMONGST NON-WHITES:

Thus what was immediately feared by Rugby nuts in SA, when the BEE gov initiative was announced by the Mandela admin, was that the government would force the National teams of the Springboks and Proteas to accept mediocre black/coloured players to meet a base quota, irrespective of their performances, and thus drag the team down, as every Rugby team is only ever as strong as their weakest link

And yes this was stated openly on Afrikaans and English radios way back in 1995-2000, and heavy resistance would be placed between the SA rugby union and the ANC, especially after Mandela retired in 1997/8.

It was especially relevant after the 1995 glorious Springbok rugby victory, which brought the glory of the Springboks into the attention of ALL south africans, including blacks/coloureds, which is noteworthy, because [1] TVs were becoming popular and cheap enough to mass import into RSA (since there were no Anti-Apartheid sanctions anymore) so that even poor everyman could afford cheap models, and [2] no media blackout censorship meant that people were free to watch whatever they desired.

And thus for the 1st time, many black/coloureds/indians desired the glory of SA provincial/national rugby now that it was legally open to them, and that they could witness International Rugby in all its glory in 1995!

https://www.history.com/news/nelson-mandela-1995-rugby-world-cup-south-african-unity

Now while there was a lot of positive feeling and roses and kittens from the 1995 SA World cup victory, it would also leave a lot of negative emotion and resentment from coloureds and blacks when they saw how the newly elected black president would greet a 100% white team.

=====(from article)

Truth, Reconciliation and Rugby:

In 1995, five years after walking out of prison and one year after being elected the nation's first Black president, Mandela formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate apartheid-related crimes. The hope of the commission was that full disclosure of the truth about the era's atrocities would lead to healing in the racially divided nation.

Black South Africans wanted to destroy any symbols of the apartheid regime. High on the list: the Springbok, which had been the rugby team's mascot—and the sport's emblem of apartheid's National Party—since 1906. After the first free elections in 1994, all South African national teams had adopted a protea, the country's national flower, as their emblem—except the rugby team. In a country where rugby was the great national pastime, the Springbok emblem with its green and gold colors wasn't something many white South Africans were willing to give up.

=====(end quote)

Oh yes, in the early years of the fledgling Democracy, many ANC radicals wanted to go so far as to completely ABOLISH the entire Springbok team, or at least their emblems. This is understandable when you know that the NP regime utilized the Springbok team as part of their multi-decade propaganda campaign regarding white-supremacy in Southern Africa, and their sole right of rule.

It is because of this, why many non-safricans don't quite comprehend the monumental significance this act was on behalf of Mandela in 1995.

=====(from article)

Black Groups Criticize Mandela:

Mandela's conciliatory gestures to a harshly racist apartheid regime didn't sit well with Black South Africans still dealing with that regime's legacy of oppression and violence.

After his 1994 election, Mandela came under fire from militant Black groups who believed his ruling party, the African National Congress, was too conciliatory to the former apartheid regime. One of his most vocal critics was his estranged wife, Winnie Mandela, who believed he focused more on appeasing whites than on ensuring rights for Black South Africans.

To many Black South Africans, the Springboks continue to represent a brutal apartheid regime. The team had just one Black player in the 1995 matches and had only six in 2019 when it won the World Cup over England with its first Black captain, Siya Kolisi. "Just as Mandela's gesture in 1995 was hailed as a metaphor for racial reconciliation in the nation, so rugby's failure to transform is seen as a metaphor for disillusionment among Black people who gained political but not economic freedom," wrote journ*list David Smith in a 2015 Guardian column.

Still, Mandela's efforts to use rugby to bring together a new nation struggling to heal its old wounds became one of his signal achievements as president of South Africa—and a sign of what could be done for good through the power of sport. In 2000 at the Laureus World Sports Awards, Mandela said, "Sports has the power to change the world. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair."

=====(end article)

FEAR OF B.E.E. QUOTAS IN RUGBY:

While Mandela at the time focused his BEE efforts on a mostly purely economic frame, after his retirement in 1998, the ANC which included many members who thought Mandela was way too soft on the whites with his reconciliation efforts, they desired to either gut the Springbok team, or endeavor to make it far more black.

Thus by 1999-2000, the Sauron's gaze of BEE was placed firmly upon the racial makeup of the Springboks, and many ANC populists would utilize the white legacy of the Springboks, which by the year 2000, was pretty much still a white majority organization, and it became a flashpoint for many black peeps as a microcosmic example of how little had changed economically for many black people, even 7 years post Democratization.

Combined with the fact that many coloureds and black peeps who didn't want to abolish the Springboks, but actually wanted to JOIN them and share in their prestige and sporting glory - there was now ever growing and mounting pressure for the SA Rugby Union, to appease a rapid introduction of non-whites into the team.

The problem was, was that the talentpool by 1999, for black and coloureds in SA was very very lacking, with both the combination of soccer stealing all of the top-tier black/coloured atheletes, and the still mediocre facilities and fields available for black-majority schools, there wasn't even any sufficient amount of referees for black schools to regulate or coach or hold matches for Rugby properly!!

Thus even if they wanted to, the SA Rugby Union, did not have the available talenpools, on a national scale, to recruit or train or lay the groundworks for, for International Springbok grade Rugby black players.

The ideal starting point for most of the historic white International Springbok Rugby players had usually began at the young tender age of 13, where the groundworks of hand-to-ball coordination and athletic instincts of the sport was developed at the most malleable period of the young athlete's growing period. With only about 8 years since full Democratization, the grassroots timeframe, even for top tier schools, with impressive support and facilities, was lacking to generate this black talentpool.

BEE VERSUS RSA RUGBY UNIONS:

Thus a massive multi-decade drama would escalate between the ANC and black peeps, and the SA Rugby Union and white Rugby supporters, with the crux of the matter being the competency of any enforced Black/Coloured Springbok members.

Many black peeps denounced the racist mayos attempt to gatekeep the glory of the Springboks against the black masses. Many whites were firm of the belief that most non-white Springboks were diversity-hires, whom were not qualified above even club or provincial grade rugby, let alone international standards.

Many black peeps could not understand the notion that while the Apartheid era institutions were discriminatory against OUTRACE, they were still meritorious for the INRACE, meaning that the top qualified whites in that area were accepted generally.

In contrast, for sincere Rugby Union Directors and organizers, to try and explain the complexity of the problem of attaining Springbok/International grade rugby players from the then currently finite black/coloured talentpools was a daunting task in such a short time. As national rugby players literally took decades to "Kweek" (grow/cook). The lame-sounding excuses of that there needs to be foundational facility support with grassroots growth in the black local rugby scene, from the bottom up , sounded like feeble excuses by racist mayos to keep the sport clear of non-whites.

DIFFICULT AND LONG ROADS:

Still, despite all the race flame wars time marched on and new blood came into being. The most famous coloured Rugby player Bryan Habana, would make his debut in 2003, in clubs, and would be earmarked by the SA Rugby Union for a fasttrack to the Springboks, where he basically showered himself with Glory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Habana

Bryan is considered to be the best Backliner in SA Rugby history, and perhaps even the earth entire. He would become a household name, to the extent where even peeps who couldn't name a single sportsplayer in any sport, could at least name him.

I add his long history from Highschool (earliest shining from 2003) to eventual magnetic glory for Springboks in the mid-2000s just to showcase how even for the fricking best Backliner South Africa has ever produced, it literally took a fricking decade to train and prepare a dude who was fricking genetically destined to be a magnificent Rugby player, to become International grade good.

Many black peeps, understandably, just genuinely didn't believe that it would take time, for as much as 10 years, to cultivate a powerful coloured/black talentpool, to achieve players of the caliber of Bryan.

The astonishing thing was that the SA Rugby Union, WAS ACTUALLY COMPLYING with BEE in the mid-2000s to the highest degree that they could lol They legit were doing all that they could to scout out black/coloured/indian talent, to give sports-grants for universities, to hire and personally train outstanding athletes, and to fasttrack potential future Springbok athletes.

But as any of you guys who actually did any sport in school and aren't just f@ggot redditors who think Biological male transwomen don't have a critical advantage in female sports, for those of you can realize the monumental undertaking it requires to establish a talentpool where there had previously existed none.

And so black politicians would get pissed at the SA Rugby Unions, even as the fricking Unions were doing what they were asking, as fast as they could!!!

QUOTA REPUTATIONS:

Because of this, there was always the steryiotype that coloured/black players on provincial or local or national stages, were diversity-hires, because the ANC would politically enforce BEE, against the protestations of Team organizers and coaches that they weren't ready yet, or unqualified, while conversely the Black politicians were convinced mayo team organizers were bullshittting them.

Eventually by 2010s other areas of SuperSport would hire non-whites in other roles as well, like commentators and referees and TV presenters and so on.

Every 2nd year there on there would be an inevitable drama flashpoint in SA, about how Rugby/Cricket still doesn't have enough black players, and how the national sport teams of Proteas and Springboks are still emblematic of this racial inequality within SA.

SUPERSPORT WILLEMSE RACISM OUTBURST 2018:

So with this background in mind, maybe you dramatards can understand the context of the following event - in that non-white peeps tend to have a tender spot regarding the view of their qualifications in the eyes of their white peers. With many coloured peeps especially being sensitive regarding the issue of their deserving their post, as coloured men like Bryan Habana had demonstrated beyond all doubts.

Basically Willemse, the coloured Rugby commentator and Co-host, and ex-Rugby player, would lose his shit live on TV, and walk out of the post-match commentary session (the most boring part of any sport ),

because he felt that he had been miffed/mocked by his white co-hosts, for his perceived lack of actual Rugby knowledge - aka they laughed at him when he made a fool of himself regarding a technicality, and he attributed it to racism

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/sport/rugby/2018-05-22-ashwin-willemses-unhappiness-is-not-about-racism-says-supersport/

VERY PROFOUND

====(from businesslive article)

Ashwin Willemse‚ the main character in a crisis at SuperSport after he staged a walkout on air over dissatisfaction with his co-presenters‚ has said the issue is "very profound".

He directed pointed comments at fellow former Springboks Naas Botha and Nick Mallett‚ as he walked off set following the Lions versus Brumbies match on Saturday. Willemse‚ a former Springbok wing who played 19 Tests and was a member of the 2007 World Cup-winning squad‚ claimed he "can't work with people who undermine other people".

In a stunning monologue following a commercial break after the match‚ Willemse let fly at co-presenters Mallett and Botha. "I've been in the game for a long time like most of us here‚" Willemse said. "As a player‚ I've been called a quota for a long time and I've worked very hard to earn the respect I have now. "I'm not going to sit here and be patronised by these two individuals (Mallett and Botha) who played their rugby during the apartheid era‚ a segregated era."

====(end quote)

https://www.graaffreinetadvertiser.com/News/Article/National-News/sahrc-to-investigate-racism-at-supersport-in-wake-of-willemse-saga-201812120211

A metric shitload of dramarama would follow on Safrican twatter about this bizarre turn of events.

Black peeps were ready to the mayos. Coloureds aired their frustration that they weren't taken seriously by their white peers, and often attributed their posts as quotas (which they often were lmoa). Indians made money selling wingcuck shirts regarding this incident Mayos pointed out that in the specific incident in where Willemse was mocked, he did genuine say something r-slurred.... The whole rainbow nation was in upheaval! (on twatter)

Things got so bad, that the fricking SAHRC (South African Human Rights Commission) were directed to fricking investigate the SuperSport channel! (the channel network which holds monopoly over most sports in SA) VERY EXCITING TIME TO BE READING NEWS PAPERS

=====(from graaffreinetadvertiser article)

NATIONAL NEWS - SuperSport won't be let off the hook just yet for the Ashwin Willemse saga.

According to TimesLive, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) will be investigating the circumstances surrounding the former Springbok winger's sensational walkout during a live rugby broadcast in May after he alleged on-air that he was being undermined by fellow pundits Nick Mallett and Naas Botha. [the two famous mayo commenters]

The inquiry will be public.

SuperSport were criticised for their own independent investigation into the matter by advocate Vincent Maleka, who admitted that his final report was flawed because Willemse chose not to provide input.

Maleka did, however, clear Mallett and Botha of racism and recommended that the matter be referred to the SAHRC.

=====(end quote)

As per usual in the South African manner, the circumstances of the slight was made to be in order of magnitudes more controversial than it actually warranted, basically SA wingcucks made an entire range of mountains out of a mole hill. Blowing things out of metric proportion is truly the south african way!

https://www.news24.com/sport/exclusive-why-supersport-said-the-willemse-incident-wasnt-racist-20180524

=====(from news24 article)

Willemse's on-air comments that he would no longer be "patronised by two individuals who played in an apartheid/segregated era" has led to a nationwide debate about how black people are treated in the workplace.

The reasons why SuperSport CEO Gideon Khobane [A BLACK GUY LMOA ] and MultiChoice CEO Calvo Mawela [ANOTHER BLACK GUY BATTING FOR THE WHITOIDS DOUBLE -LMOA ] announced after the meeting that race did not play a role in the incident can now for the first time be revealed.

According to Sport24's sources, this was the chronology of events that led to Willemse's dramatic walkout:

[blablabbla some boring shit follows proving there was no networking attempt was deliberate in making the coloured guy look stupid. Trust me dramatards the actual event doesn't matter jackshit - it's safricans reaction to it which makes this ]

======(end)

Willemse continued to make a fool of himself and would subsequently torpedo his career, as pretty much no one would want to work in the TV industry with such an unstable fool.

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-12-14-watch--i-was-at-breaking-point-ashwin-willemse/

I was at 'breaking point'

You guys will notice if you read into this insanity, that though Nick Mallett and Naas Botha could be argued to have acted disrespectfully and maybe unprofessionally towards Willemse in his expertise blunder, there was no indication that they had done so for racism reasons!

And him going full nuclear and scrorched earth against his former colleagues of almost a decade was so wildly inappropriate and disproportionate to the crime for which he was accusing them of!!

Many of Willemse's detractors would accuse him of having acute (and I quote ) "American victim mentality" on the radio

Regardless his actions would pretty much poison the well for the next 5 years straight.

SAHRC DROPS PROBE INTO WILLEMSE INCIDENT!

Willemse would pretty much make himself a great deal of enemies, including from his former teammates, colleagues and coaches as he kept digging his heels deeper and deeper, and doubled down on not just accusing his two co-commenters, but stating that the entire SuperSport network, and Rugby Union administration was rotten to the core and still systemically racist,

which regardless of whether it was true, was spitting into the faces of many many white Union directors and coaches, whom had moved mountains to create a grassroots initiative to enable coloureds like Willemse to be able to train and qualify as national or provincial grade Rugby players.

It was like a slap to the face, that he was basically repeating ANC mantra, that the SA Rugby Union, despite the organization's immense multi-decade efforts to actually acquiesce the BEE demands of the ANC, and integrate coloured and black players into the nationwide training process,

to THEN come and state on national news, that the Rugby Union was still just as racist as the NP regime was 30 years earlier! Holy smokes what a betrayal and slap to the face lmoa.

Which is how many white Rugby players/trainers/organizers felt after his remarks

But the final nail into this coffin, was when the fricking SAHRC themselves publicaly declared they found no evidence of racism.

https://www.sahrc.org.za/index.php/sahrc-media/news/item/3649-sahrc-must-explain-why-it-dropped-willemse-racism-probe

GET A LOAD OF THIS GUY!

====(from sahr exerpt)

"The Commission closed the investigation due to nonresponse from Mr Wilemse." Asked whether or not the SAHRC would reopen the case, he added: "The Commission would have to consider the circumstances. The Commission could reopen the investigation if Mr Willemse responds to the Commission's correspondence." Human rights activist and researcher Nkosikhulule Nyembezi said the SAHRC should have investigated why the complainant was not responding. "Has he been threatened? "Is he traumatised?"

It would be strange for the Commission to say they just closed a case because the person was not responsive. They have the power to seek responses from people against whom there are complaints. The issue is that we don't know why the complainant is unresponsive. They need to make us understand and learn the circumstances which the complainant has to navigate to get jus tice.

====(end)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So basically what happened: after his blood had cooled, and he began to realize what an r-slur he had made of himself, and that not only had be burned every single bridge he ever built after 15 years in the Rugby industry, not only for his outburst and racism accusations against his former friends and colleagues,

but that this motherlover actually encouraged the involvement of the fricking SAHRC, which has a lot of fricking political power in the country,

But more significantly, he began to realize that SuperSport (the network) had a fricking ironclad case with timestamps and documents to demonstrate his tantrum would not be easily connected to racism as he had claimed running his mouth off in Twitter and the SA tabloid media.

So he had basically kept his mouth shut since, as he probably realize he had permanently torpedoed his career.

https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/sahrc-must-explain-why-it-dropped-willemse-racism-probe-e4231af5-68bc-4580-96e6-e9c1a46ef45a

Even the rest of the usually anti-white mainstream media couldn't cajole a response out of the SAHRC, if the primary witness was gonna be a no-show, and the of this incident would assblast a lot of anti-mayo wingcucks for months to come.

https://mg.co.za/article/2018-06-19-no-racism-in-willemse-walk-out-says-supersport/

Anyways that's pretty much all there is to this event, and has been memoryholed since. I think this specific event also demonstrates how difficult it is/was for Rugby Union Directors to communicate against ANC directives to immediately apply BEE in all national sporting events, regardless if the said quota players are qualified or ready.

The sensitivity of this issue is constantly ongoing, but in the very least, some form of equilibrium has been reached. After all it was only last year, where the Springboks, lead by a black captain once again covered themselves with glory by winning the world cup. (and by cucking those filthy Frogs tooooo!)

Anyways, GOODNIGHT!

Any game where you can make galaxy-conquering peepee monsters is a good game.

— @Saint_Nicholas

And that title really isn't exaggerating. Spore is nothing short of a life simulation god game that, in a complete playthrough, charts the development of a player created species across billions of years. The game begins with the evolution of literal zooplankton on your planet and "ends" with the establishment of a galactic spacefaring empire stretching across the Milky Way. Sure, it didn't live up to its incredible hype in the eyes of many players. Sure, the game itself is fundamentally just a collection of mini games tied together by the editor system. Sure, it more or less led to the end of Maxis as an independent entity that made anything besides Sims expansion packs

Even so, you can't deny the sheer ambition behind it all

"The first time I talked to [Will Wright] he said he wanted this to be a game about Drake's equation. The improbability of our universe. He wanted players to go through all these deep failures so they'd appreciate how incredible it is that we are here. He came off that quickly though, but it was clear how massive he wanted it to be early on."

— Lead Designer Chris Trottier

Spore was intended to be the ultimate simulation game and the culmination of creator Will Wright's long career in the genre. Originally conceived as "SimEverything" back in the 90's, Spore was meant to be Wright's dream game and was funded with high hopes from EA. After all, Wright's previous game The Sims had become the highest selling computer game of all time by then The game was also imagined as a groundbreaking step in the fields of user generated content and procedural generation, the former to allow potentially infinite replayability and the latter to make sure all that player creativity could actually function in the game.

I'll try to impart the game's sense of scale upon rDrama in the next section.

So what is Spore?

Spore is like baby's first...game. A shitty bullet-heck/WOW clone/RTS/and Civ game, all in one. Wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle. A scope too ambitious for its time. A worthy attempt to be sure, but a great game? No.

Being able to share your creations by sharing the PNG was pretty nifty though.

— @GovernorOfNewYork and @ResneedingSyndrome

As a game Spore is divided into five stages each with its own style of gameplay and editors. A normal long game will go through the five stages in order, but you can also choose any stage independently and either go from there or not. The editors are used to create, well, just about everything you'll end up seeing in the game. The only things you won't be making are plants and other cells (and these actually exist in the code and can still be used to some extent) The editors can also be accessed from the main menu if you just feel like creating something.

All user created content is further shared through the Sporepedia. It both categorizes and allows you to browse anything made by other players while also auto-downloading user creations in the background as long as you remain connected to the internet.

Stages

gameplay is complete shit but i liked making a species that was forced to grab and hold its own butt in front of its face with their nose in the taint.

— @BurdTurgler

Each of the five stages is like a microcosm of a distinct game genre. Cell stage is like those games where you play as a fish and eat smaller fish while avoiding bigger ones Creature stage is like a simple rpg Tribal stage has rts elements Civ stage is not unlike the Civilization games Finally space stage is the god game where you can travel across the entire Galaxy What ties these activities together is the editor system and the evolutionary line you yourself create and develop. In a long playthrough the game will keep track of how you finish each stage and assign your spacefaring empire an archetype.

The Cell game is meant to be an introduction to the game of Spore and to life itself… We wanted to give the player a familiar game setting — 2D, 360-degree scroller — in which to introduce the basic concepts of Spore gameplay, most notably the process of zooming up in scale and using the creators.

— Will Wright

Cell

The first and simplest stage, though funnily it's by far the longest in-universe. This is a top down arcadey game where you make your little guy swim around and eat food without getting eaten. The game starts with your premade "cell" emerging from a comet in a simplified depiction of the panspermia theory. From there you focus on eating meat or plants or both while gaining dna points that allow you to add more complex parts to your evolutionary line. As things progress your guy will go from plankton to fish sized and the stage ends with migration to life on land.

Spore was originally going to start the player off with an atomic stage in which you would put different molecules together to create self-replicating amino acids and other such organic molecules. It would have played kinda like Tetris. It was cut because the devs thought it was "too small in scale and too hard to emphasize with". In general many of the more "geeky" ideas from early Spore were cut in favor of making the game more cute and easier for the average player to connect to. This also explains why the cells look more like critters than amoebas. Granted, you do eventually become as big as an animal.

There was also going to be an "aquatic" stage in which the player controlled a larger fish creature before living on land. There were even early ideas to let the player stay in water and potentially build entire civilizations in the ocean.

The idea was cut because the devs didn't like the idea of going from three dimensional navigation underwater to two dimensional navigation on terrain. A major idea for Spore was to have each stage be more complex than the last, and it was felt the aquatic stage sort of messed that up.

Cell stage is very linear and since you meet the same Maxis made cells every playthrough there isn't anything new to see or do beyond adding fishy parts to your colored blob The following stage increases user generated content a million fold.

Early in development it became obvious to me that the creature game was going to be the star of the show in many ways — it integrates the strongest creator, and it lets you get close to your creations as well as have the opportunity to meet an endless stream of other player's creations up close and personal.

— Designer Alex Hutchinson

Creature

Here you guide your creation from the time it first develops legs (or not ) and across the millions of years until your planet's equivalent of the Paleolithic. Along the way you either hunt other creatures to extinction or befriend them or both until your lineage is king of the food chain. The stage ends when your brain becomes large enough to use cowtools and start fires

Arguably what Spore is best remembered for, the creature stage finally gives you the full critter editor. In this stage the game also propagates your save file with user creations taken from the online Sporepedia. This process is automatic but you can also manually search and download any particular creations. In theory no two creature games should ever have the exact same planetary populations.

The coolest piece of tech that was in all of Spore was the procedural animation system. That was the system driving the character animation in the editors. It's what let you build a fully-rigged creature that had nine legs touching the ground and they would all walk naturally.

— Software Engineer Dan Moskowitz

The creature editor is full of different parts (mostly) inspired by different examples of life on Earth. What really makes it though is a unique procedural generation system that allows the game to try and realistically render the movement of any abomination you make, no matter what it ends up shaped like. Your mileage may vary of course, but it's an incredibly interesting system whether you're evolving your creature generation by generation in the stage or just making something from scratch.

Spore allows skilled players to create a variety of complex designs:

Of course there will also be shitposts:

But hey, what are you going to do?

Hopefully in tribe game, what we walk away with is not only a play experience that has interesting rules, interesting mechanics, and interesting objectives in terms of how you unify the tribes, but also a feeling that this creature that I have evolved now looks advanced and intelligent… It's not only about being functional and compelling gameplay-wise; at the end of the day, it also needs to be fun to watch.

— Producer Matt Powers

Tribal

At this point the game develops strategic elements and you no longer control an individual. Many players took issue with this and these concerns were addressed in the later Galactic Adventures expansion pack.

In this stage you guide your increasingly advanced critters through a Hunter-gatherer existence and into the age of city building. Your creatures can no longer evolve and change their physiology but it's now possible to outfit them. Subsequent stages add even more outfitting options.

Tribal stage is real time strategy and plays kinda like Populous. You're required to find enough food to both feed your tribe and to employ it as currency when upgrading your encampment and available technology. At all times you stand in competition with other tribes and you must either eradicate them or ally with them or both until your species truly dominates the world. (Spore notably depicts a scenario in which multiple sapient beings evolve on the same world, though it's also possible for your species to be in competition with its earlier ancestors a la Homo Sapiens vs Homo Erectus)

Many players find tribal to be the most difficult stage though it does have its fans. Admittedly the changes between Cell/Creature and Tribal demonstrate one of the game's main criticisms. It shifts rather randomly between gameplay styles.

We wanted to make a simple strategy game, which can sometimes sound like an oxymoron — simple enough that it wasn't going to put off casual players but complex enough that actual g*mers would still find it interesting.

— Alex Hutchinson

Civilization

Originally there was going to be a city stage in which players managed their growing settlements not unlike SimCity.

It was cut early in development and so this stage plays like a simplified version of Sid Meier's Civilization though it notably jumps immediately into the age of motorized vehicles. You start with one city and all other cities emerge as independent nations. Your ultimate goal is to seize every city and unite your planet one way or the other. In the meantime you make money by taking control of spice geysers (Dune reference ) There are a finite amount of these and of course you don't want other nations making more money than you.

Civ stage drastically increases the available editors. The building editors allow four different building types: city hall, factory, entertainment, and house. There's simplified SimCity gameplay involved with creating the ideal city, but the actual editors allow you to make the buildings look however you want them to look. The vehicle editor allows you to create land, sea, and air vehicles that are in turn divided into three classes of military, religious, and economic. Parts used alter a vehicle's stats but there is still great aesthetic freedom available.

Also included is an expanded outfit editor and even a musical city anthem editor

Your win goal is aggressive by nature so Civ stage expects you to get the ball rolling. Friendly herbivore behavior is replaced with religious conversion Adaptable middle of the road gameplay becomes an economic playstyle in which you purchase cities out from under other nations Carnivore force simply becomes military conquest The AI here is genuinely against you and rival great powers will soon emerge as smaller nations get absorbed into their neighbors. Towards the end of the game you may see a Cold War showdown in which all other nations are conquered by your rival who then forces a world war upon you. Alternatively if you're friendly with the other main power they will automatically offer to merge their nation with yours. Either way the stage eventually railroads you into globohomo, an effective if simple gameplay/story integration that shows globalization as the endpoint of history

You can also nuke everyone

Civilization stage was originally going to lead into a terraforming stage where you would go into space but be limited to just your solar system. You would learn to found colonies and terraform planets to make them habitable before finally inventing an FTL drive. This stage was depicted in the 2005 demo though it was eventually just merged into the tutorial of the next stage.

The space stage is a giant sandbox, interwoven with a light RPG, and it's HUGE. You start off on your home planet that you've been playing on possibly since cell game. You're given a space ship that you create and control. The ship is your avatar and will carry you across the stars, taking you on countless adventures.

— Producer Kip Katsarelis

Space

The final stage begins with your species launching a starship, the same ship you'll play as for the rest of the game. Space stage never truly ends and ultimately evolves into a god game sandbox. It's essentially the other half of Spore and abandons previous paradigms — the strategy aspects disappear but you don't go back to being a creature either. (Not until Galactic Adventures anyway)

The beginning is a grind in which you expand your interstellar empire while acquiring new technology and making money through spice trading But unlike before you have to do everything yourself with the single spaceship. It's like if the Enterprise from Star Trek had to build the entire Federation by itself and all this happened in the course of one tv show. Along the way you'll make first contact with alien civilizations though the diplomacy here is a little r-slurred. It won't be long before you're vastly superior to any other empire anyway.

Space also serves as the culmination of the game's archetype system. Spore keeps track of how you won the previous stages and assigns red, green, and blue cards based on your playstyle.

Cell: Red for carnivore, green for herbivore, blue for omnivore

Creature: Red for wiping out other species, green for socializing with them, blue for an equal amount of both

Tribal: Red for wiping out other tribes, green for allying with them, blue for an equal amount of both

Civilization: Red for military conquest, green for religious conversion, blue for economic expansion

The cards can be mixed and matched throughout the game and you can enter space with less than four if you start at a later stage. Whatever combination you have determines the "philosophy" of your spacefaring empire.

In practice this system doesn't change much but it's an interesting concept. The idea is that your species' long history all comes together to determine what kind of sci-fi archetype you become.

Space stage is very open ended and doesn't offer a win condition. You're initially given tutorial quests and are eventually encouraged to explore the center of the galaxy by either destroying, allying with, or just outright avoiding the scripted Grox Empire. Otherwise it's a true sandbox.

The Grox look like this (artistic interpretation)

The random generated worlds [of No Man's Sky] wear off quick once you realize it's the same archetypes with different looks. It's like Spore space age, if you were crash landing on every planet instead of being a literal god.

— @Dramagon

Space comes into its own once you unlock all the cowtools and get into the god game. From this point you're capable of doing whatever you want and can bring all editors into gameplay. The creature editor can be used to fill out the ecosystems of terraformed planets. Colonies can have all their vehicles and buildings personalized as you see fit. Heck you can take the time to give every last colony its own anthem. Planets themselves can be sculpted and recolored, and there are tens of thousands of them in the galaxy.

And all the while your Sporepedia will be downloading creations off the internet to pollinate the planets, ecosystems, and civilizations you discover. Space stage serves as a way to use every editor available and actually see the creations come to life on their own within the galactic sandbox.

I'd argue Spore shares conceptual dna with several later games like No Man's Sky, Starfield, and Stellaris. The genres vary, but these are all exploration focused space games that rely on procedural generation to simulate a sense of discovery. In theory these games all offer infinite content.

Of course Spore also suffers from the same weaknesses as the others. Sure the planets and critters change, but you will eventually reach a point where there isn't anything new to do. The procgen subgenre can be wide but very flat.

Some players love space stage while for others it demonstrates Spore's weaknesses. For what's it's worth, the sheer scale of it all is undeniably impressive, and those who did like Spore would also become fans of the aforementioned titles.

Editors and the Sporepedia

think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the 'phenotypes' of the animal, which represent a few uploaded and downloaded freely and quickly from the Sporepedia online server. This allows users to asynchronously upload their creations and download other players' content, which enriches the experience of the game as more of its players progress in the game.

— Will Wright

The system that unifies the game and proliferates user content is the Sporepedia. In a game it tracks all content that appears in your save, allowing you to investigate, see the content creators, or ban something from appearing again. From the main menu it can also be used to browse and manually download creations and browse user profiles. Users can also create "sporecasts" that fans can subscribe to so their game downloads creations they've curated by theme.

To make all this possible, the Spore devs developed a new method of 3D model "compression" that allows all the data necessary for the game to load a creation into an editor to exist entirely within a png file no more than about 25kb or so. The Sporepedia arranges creations like a deck of cards with each card containing these pngs. Loaded normally, they look and handle just like basic graphic files. Yet those same files also generate content when used inside the game. To quote a gamefaqs page on the technical details

With a couple of simple DOS commands you can store any file under a header of any other kind of file so that it cane behave as both kinds of files. For example, you can make a .jpg file and actually store an entire program in it. So that when you look at it with an image viewer you just see the jpg part, but when you open it with another application you can see the entire program.

Let's look at how a spore creature is stored. Lets say you add an arm to a creature. Of course you need to know what kind of arm/leg it is. A simple arm just needs an 2 coordinate system telling it where it fits on the body, and I think an extra identification for the vertebrae it's attached to. Then it just needs 2 vectors to store the direction of both the upper and lower arm parts. Then it needs one additional value for each joint to indicate the 'fattness' of it. That's just 9 values it needs to save! And of course it also needs an identification value, making it 10.

Now look at a simple hand/foot part. Each creature has a limited amount of points where you can put a hand/foot, so that's probably 1 variable. It has 3 rotation points, and iirc hands/feet only have two morphing sliders, and an extra 'size' variable. That's only 9 variables, if you include identification.

Extra body parts are combination of these two methods. part id from the editor, part number on the creature, 3 rotation axes, a size, and 2 morphing sliders, vertebrae number or number of the part it's placed on, and location on the body or bodypart or whatever it's placed on. That's about 11 variables.

With conventional methods you would have to store millions of vectors just to save a model. One hand alone would take up more than 25kb. The only problem with this system is that you are limited by the prefab parts that the game offers you and that it doesn't offer you the complete freedom a regular game 3d artist would have to make models. But one look at the sporepedia will tell you that this 'limit' is far beyond what most people will ever need!

It's pretty impressive kinda like those illusion porn games cards but used for a more noble purpose

The editors are technical marvels in their own right, the creature editor in particular. While the editors for buildings and vehicles amount to sticking shapes together, the creature editor is based around attaching parts to a base vertebrae structure that forms the core of your creature. While it's a more limiting system, the trade off is that the game is equipped to render anything you can come up within its own physics engine complete with the system's best attempt at realistic animations for your creature; running, walking, idle, in combat, doing a mating dance, so on so forth.

s tier game

— @Patsy

The main design challenge of the creature editor was making something simple enough that people with no 3D modeling experience could quickly pick up and use that would also allow enough creative freedom to create millions upon millions of unique designs. The main solution was to base the system around metaballs and rigblocks.

The metaballs are 3D balls used for the main body and limbs of creatures. A standard 3D model has a mesh and is defined by a bunch of points in 3D space, connected by edges. In contrast the metaballs are what is called an “implicit surface” and are defined by a mathematical function, rather than points in space. The basic idea is that each metaball has a function associated with it that defines the surface of the metaball. When the metaball is alone this surface looks like a sphere, but when two metaballs get close, their functions get added together, which is why their two surfaces get merged into one.

As you stretch the limbs or spine of a creation, more metaballs get added to ensure a smooth, continuous surface. You can also shrink or grow individual metaballs to make parts of the creature fatter or thinner. Each limb part in Spore comes with a starting number but these can be deleted or more can effortlessly be added, so there's quite a bit of freedom in shaping your creature even when using defined parts.

Meanwhile, the more complicated pieces – hands, mouths, spikes, etc, were created using rigblocks. A rigblock is an individual, hand-crafted body-part that can be snapped onto your creature. Each rigblock has several degrees of freedom that let them be scaled, stretched, and transformed in pre-defined ways.

By combining these two systems, Spore struck a good balance of open-ended player creativity and pre-made artistic assets. The system also guarantees any created creature is compatible with the game's animation system and as mentioned above allows creatures to be stored using a much smaller amount of data than a traditional 3D model.

Conventional animation for the creatures was impossible since your creatures obviously don't exist until you create them. The game handles this entirely through procedural generation. Any given animation is broken into channels, example in a dancing animation one for arms and one for legs. The channels are also broken into queries for different sets of body points, example a creature with multiple pairs of arms. Maybe only the front pair will behave in a certain way, and only the highest pair will behave in a certain other way. Exactly how the animation system sets up is in reaction to the creature editor, example all legs may be animated in the same way if similar in length but some won't be synced if radically longer or shorter. There are also different potential animations that may be done based on variables, example a creature with arms and hands will use them to pick up an item on the ground but a creature without will use its mouth instead. A secondary animation system renders how other body parts not involved with movement will react, i.e. a tail wagging or extremities jiggling. Finally there's a special system for determining a creature's walking gait to ensure it's as "believable" as possible.

The editors for everything else perhaps aren't as technically impressive, these creations aren't subjected to in game physics and don't involve much procedural generation. They're still remarkable for the creativity one can get away with. Consider that the 2008 presidential candidates were all created in the spaceship editor as part of a promotion.

The History of Spore

When I first saw the design document, back in 2003, I was like ‘good luck with that.' Part of the game was like Pac-Man, part of it was like Diablo, another part was like SimCity. I just thought that there was no way that this game was ever going to come out.

— Designer Guillaume Pierre

Though he's maybe not as well known these days compared to the noughties, in part because Spore was his last big game, it's important to know that Spore was massively hyped by simulation neurodivergents prior to release because it was billed as the ultimate game of veteran game designer Will Wright, founder of Maxis and the original creator of SimCity and The Sims.

Will Wright and Maxis

Will Wright is one of those old timey devs from those ancient days when individuals could release a hit game and effectively codify an entire genre. Originally inspired by board games back in the 80's, Wright set himself apart from other game devs by making games for the newer Commodore 64 rather than for Apple computers. His first game was ‘84's Raid on Bungeling Bay. Wright found he had more fun making maps for the game then actually playing it and wondered if he could build another game off the concept.

This next game, 1989's SimCity, would go down as a best selling classic and a codifier for the city simulation genre as we know it. The game and the series it spawned are still beloved and yearned for by neurodivergents everywhere. SimCity originally grew from Wright's love of map design and urban planning. You'll notice a recurring theme where many of Will Wright's games were inspired and designed around personal passions. It's a far cry from modern trend chasing design

Indeed, SimCity wasn't initially considered to be a game at the time. Wright's love of level editors resulted him in designing such systems for their own sake with no game concept attached. He was also fascinated with developing and modeling cities as well as System Dynamics as developed by Jay Wright Forrester. Though Wright did eventually build a program that combined all these inspirations into the famous city simulation system we all know by now, none of his potential publishers thought it even counted as vidya. In an era where simple arcade games were still going strong, SimCity had no obvious win/loss condition nor belonged to any existing genre. The game was completed in ‘85 but couldn't be published for another four years.

In 1986 Wright met with Jeff Braun in what he called "the world's most important pizza party" and together the two founded Maxis, a studio that could finally get SimCity published and widely released. As the super s among us know, the game was a massive hit and is essentially the archetype for the countless city builders that have come since.

Maxis grew over the years and Wright was soon established as the pioneer of 90's simulation. He went on to develop several other games based on whatever he felt like doing at the moment; SimEarth inspired by Gaia Theory, SimAnt inspired by The Ants, SimLife based on simulating evolution and the development of ecosystems (kinda like the creature part of Spore in concept), and SimCity 2000 which expanded SimCity's concept further. Maps from that game could also be ported into SimCopter, a flight simulation game, and Streets of SimCity, a racing game that also served as Maxis' last independent title before being acquired by EA.

Wright's next major game is funny — it may be seen as EA's infamous cash cow nowadays, but the original game was still born from Wright's personal passions same as the others. And while the series is currently famous for foid fans it was still the brainchild of very moid-like simulation

After losing his house in the Oakland firestorm of 1991 Wright came up with the idea of turning the experience of (re)building one's life into a game. The game evolved into a virtual dollhouse, like SimCity but smaller, and was directly inspired by Wright's building and furnishing of his new home. The game was originally conceived of as an architectural design game called Home Tactics, though Wright's idea changed when someone suggested the home should be rated on the quality-of-life experience by virtual homeowners. This led to the social aspects of the game — your Sim wasn't just building a home but would then live a life out of it while developing relationships with other Sims.

Maxis didn't think the idea could succeed as a game, so Wright actually got EA itself to publish the game directly. (EA had acquired Maxis in 1997) The game released to acclaim and surpassed Myst as the best selling computer game of the time. Really, the rest is history for this particular franchise and its innumerable money grabs expansions.

The incredible financial success of The Sims and its sequels made EA very favorable towards financing Wright's next idea for a game. At the time, the project was known as "SimEverything".

Spore's Development

Working on Spore was wonderful. A lot of industry nowadays is making sequels to previous games, so you take an existing game and just add plus one to it. Spore was so different that there wasn't a lot of models that we had for it. Will had this Powers of Ten vision from starting from a cell and zooming all the out to a galaxy level. It was really like ‘what?' It wasn't like any game before it, so the whole team was super excited about it.

— Designer Stone Librande

According to Wright, the conceptual inspiration for Spore was Drake's Equation — which deals with the possibility of intelligent life in the Milky Way (and is even referenced directly by the game) — and Powers of Ten — a film that shows the scale of things from the entire observable universe to subatomic particles. Wright was fascinated with the idea of a creator system that could easily be used by children as a fun educational tool that would also inspire them into various fields of science. He didn't want a game where people felt like a Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins, but rather a creation oriented one where the player felt like George Lucas or Tolkien.

I want this to be more on the motivational side than the education side. I really want to spark people's interest in these subjects. People still tell me they went into, you know, civil engineering because of SimCity. It wasn't that SimCity taught them how to build a city, but it got them interested in how fascinating the subject is. That motivation is far more powerful than just trying to pour facts into their head. So, if nothing else I'd like people to come out, sit back, look up at the stars and think a little bit deeper about what a galaxy is.

— Will Wright

The earliest work on Spore began back in 2000. Development originally focused around prototypes for concepts Wright was interested in. Indeed, these earliest years weren't really based on game development at all. Wright wanted to see what he could do and model and get away with, and many of these early prototypes featured systems that didn't make it into the final game at all.

Will's a huge astronomy buff and the rest of the team had some of the most diverse set of outside interest that I had ever seen in a games team. People didn't just play video games for their hobbies and work. We had people into biology and physics, we had an ex-nurse -- people just came in with a wad of ideas and since this was a game about everything, everything was in scope. So we had a lot of different prototypes floating around including a very sophisticated particle simulation of oceans to Drake's equation about how life propagates across galaxies. There was just a lot of stuff like that. The gameplay was always the tricky part. You can have a lot of independently interesting situations but you need to tie them together.

— Artist Kate Compton

The earliest version of Spore was inspired by SETI and was based around an explorable galaxy. You could say the space stage came first.

The earliest evolution of it had to do with the SETI Project. The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore. As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy. And then on procedurally generated creatures. Could we actually generate creatures through evolution so there was a vast variety of creatures rather than just the 20 or 30 fixed things that games typically include.

— Will Wright

To make this possible Wright wanted to push the boundaries of how procedural generation could be used in games. While more common now this technology had never been used so extensively in a video game before. Yet without it the scope of Spore would have been impossible.

I played a lot of space and strategy games, but one thing that always disappointed me in space games was that you're presented with a galaxy with maybe 100 worlds. It was never vast like a real galaxy. Even the Spore galaxy is a tiny percentage of a real galaxy, but you get the sense it's immense, with countless worlds to explore. And I'd never seen an evolutionary game where, again, there was a vast set of possible creatures you could come across and that could convey the diversity of real biology. So we started thinking about procedural solutions. Very early on we wanted to give players a really cool design editor so they could design a wide variety of creatures. A lot of our early prototypes explored whether we could do procedurally generated animations and textures and could we build an editor that was easy to use?

We researched what little had been done in computer science around things like procedural animation, which was mainly around humanoids, procedurally generating human animations. But almost nobody was generating animations where you didn't know what the shape of the creature was. We had to basically invent our own kind of computer science for that.

Many prototypes were made in the early years just to see how an idea might play out and be used in the game. Apparently Maxis made between 30 and 40 prototypes, many programmed by individuals who were given leeway to work on whatever they wanted. Spore's design team was given incredible initial freedom to just work on whatever.

Early Spore prototypes and design concepts focused on simulating the movement and evolution of alien creatures, fluids, the birth of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and the spread of intelligent and non-intelligent life in media as small as a bread crumb, and as large as a galaxy. There was a galactic potter's wheel, where you could try your hand at forming a stable spiral armed galaxy. A blind watchmaker interface allowed you to guide the evolution of novel life forms. You could sculpt huge piles of gas into stars that were just right for life.

— Designer Chaim Gingold

It's worth noting that many of these prototypes are still available on Spore's website if you wanted to mess around with them.

It took a while for the Spore team to decide on what kind of game Spore would actually be. Eventually it worked out players would progress through the various stages sequentially and experience the editors accordingly. Each stage had different design teams though and it wasn't easy to bring everything together into one product.

Of course, this isn't quite the Spore everyone knows. There are two explanations for this, one is philosophical, and the other commercial. First, the commercial explanation. The Sims, Will's previous game (The Sims Online was in production during Spore's initial concept development), was one of the best selling games ever, and one of the most lucrative franchises in Electronic Art's stable. The Sims was popular precisely because of how easily people could connect to it: you played with human beings living in suburban doll houses. Spore, by contrast, looked like it would become an awe inspiring existential crisis in a box, a toy universe so vast that it would take your breath away, not to mention your sense of self, time, and space. An acid trip on a compact disc, guaranteed to explode your brain, much like Kubrik's film 2001: A Space Odyssey had blown a much younger Will Wright's mind. Who was the target audience for Spore? Was it bigger than the market for SimEarth and SimLife? What changes would we have to make to appeal to players of The Sims?

The second, philosophical explanation, was also the design challenge: What would players identify and empathize with in Spore? Where were their characters? What would players do? Would anyone want to play a complicated game/art/science experiment? The entire universe is a vast, very heavy thing, and it wasn't clear that people would be able to pick it up, and if they did, that it wouldn't burn a hole through their hand, or head, for that matter.

— Chaim Gingold

Inevitably Spore's different stages simply ended up drawing from existing games i.e. Pac-Man for Cell or Sid Meier's Civilization for Civilization. Soren Johnson from 2007's Civilization IV was even brought in to help with the Civ stage. Though this system is often criticized these days as a bunch of mini-games stuck together, the devs weren't sure how else to make Spore into an actual video game rather than just a series of different creators and random game mechanics created from prototypes.

We had a really strong vision, but we didn't have strong game design behind the vision. Like what is the player actually doing from a g*mer point of view. If you take a look at the creature editor outside of the rest of the game, it's just wonderful, it makes you smile. Even today it's such a fun toy and it's easy to see why it's compelling. But once you start think about game systems like what the goal is, how will we make them feel like they're leveling up, what's the skill progression, and things that are traditionally associated with games. A lot of that was just missing.

— Stone Librande

Wright himself described it as the difference between a game and a toy. The editors and potential player creativity represent the "toy" of Spore — something you just play around with. Games however require set goals and pass/fail conditions, and so the various disjoined mini-games are what makes it so the various editors and the content pollination system of the Sporepedia actually have a video game to be part of. In the end, this divide could be seen in Spore's reception. A lot of people complain that Spore's gameplay is simple and repetitive, and they're not necessarily wrong.

In contrast, the people who don't mind just messing around with the editors usually have a higher opinion of the game and continue to be fans of Spore even today.

There was also a now infamous divide in the Spore team between those who wanted scientific accuracy and realism and those who wanted cute and cartoony designs. The final game tried to strike a compromise between the two that not all players — especially the ones that had seen the 2005 demo shown further below — were fans of. Apparently there were two main reasons why Spore wasn't quite as "scientific" as originally envisioned.

Part of it was technical limitations. Impressive as the procgen animation system could be, it wasn't perfect enough to handle realistic movement. Creatures tend to bounce around and jiggle as they move, and it was felt that the effect was less jarring with simpler, cartoony creatures. One of the designers felt it would be uncanny — if Spore's animation system was applied to a realistic tiger for example, you'd feel like you could hear the creatures tendons tearing and joints popping as it moved. The animation limitations were thought comedic on simpler creatures but disturbing and immersion breaking with more details in the equation.

There was also a push to have Spore's development mirror how The Sims had been made. Wright's original idea for a detailed and neurospicy house builder was made more social and foid-brained under advice from the other developers and designers. This included Chris Trottier who was also present as a designer for Spore. The end result was a best selling game. Wright was encouraged to do the same with Spore so that the game wasn't too "geeky" and would reach a wide audience. In other words The Sims spelled the end of Maxis' neurodivergent simulation career and Spore's development solidified that decision.

The animators were also fond of the cartoony style since it led to less creature parts for their animation system to have to keep track of. It was said Spore's development reached a point where many of the programmers were brainstorming for more but all the animators and art designers started begging for less. Many of the scientific ideas tested in the aforementioned prototypes had to be dropped lest the game might've never been completed.

EA certainly encouraged the cute and cartoony "wide appeal" of the final product because they wanted another cash cow franchise more than anything. Indeed, EA seemed to see Spore as a second The Sims and treated it as such. I'll detail more on this later in the post.

Spore was first revealed and demonstrated at the 2005 Games Developers Conference with a now legendary demo. Dunno how many dramatards will actually watch that whole video above, but just skimming through it shows off the growing scale of the game as well as the differences in art style between early development and the final product. The reaction also shows how fascinated people were with the idea. Notice how the crowd goes wild when the ship zooms out into the solar system and then again when it zooms out into the star cluster

Years later and to this day some fans unhappy with the finished game would pine for the 2005 version of Spore, but it should be noted this demo isn't a completed game. It was made from spliced footage of different prototypes that didn't connect to each other yet

Spore was officially unveiled at E3 2005. A more detailed look was presented at E3 2006, and E3 2007 featured yet another showing with a closer appearance to the final game. While the game's content pollination system was a thing from very early on, RL developments in these later years led to a redesign to make it more like "Web 2.0" social media. Wright was inspired by things like Facebook and Twitter that had come out in the meantime and wanted the Sporepedia to also have a community sharing aspect to it.

By July 2007, the game was a complete, fully featured alpha build undergoing closed play testing. It was originally meant to release that year but was ultimately delayed several times into 2008. Wired News even once gave Spore second place in an annual list of vaporware games (first place went to Duke Nukem Forever ) It's funny because even if we start Spore's development at year 2000 it's not that severe compared to modern game development cycles

The Spore Creature Creator debuted in early 2008, released by itself as a demo of sorts for the game

At the 2008 DICE Summit, Electronic Arts CEO John Ricitiello stated, "It's probably the greatest creative risk maybe going on in the game industry today...I believe it's going to be one of the greatest franchises in our industry and will rival World of Warcraft or The Sims or Rock Band. It's going to be right up there."

Release and Reception

Spore is overhated. I didn't follow the hype but it's a cute game.

— @lain

Spore was released to generally positive reception, though as you can tell from some of the rDrama quotes not all of the hypists were left satisfied. Spore's initial reception can be divided between the typical 7/10 — IGN journo opinions and the reaction of the simulation ‘tists that had been following the game since 2005. Contemporary g*mer opinions on Spore can also be divided between those who feel it couldn't live up to its concept and those who appreciate the game for what it is.

Spore received initial acclaim from gaming publications. (And these guys were slightly more prestigious in 2008 compared to today) However it was controversial for the DRM it launched with, SecuROM. This system was announced after the originally planned system met opposition from the public, as it would have required authentication every ten days. Additionally, EA released the game under a policy by which the product key of an individual copy of the game would only be authenticated on up to three computers; however, some users ran afoul of the limitations as the software would consider even a slight change of hardware to constitute a different computer, resulting in all authorizations being used up by those who often upgrade their computer. In response to customer complaints, this limit was raised to five computers.

Digital versions of the game sold on platforms like Steam and Origin would eventually do away with this.

Spore sold over two million copies within three weeks of its release, and while I haven't seen any updated sales figures since, it did remain on best selling PC games lists for some time.

the video game

I watched that Spore GDC demo so many times

— @cabalist

But Spore didn't resonate with the hardcore simulation fanbase. Many disliked the cute Sims esque influences and the actual gameplay was felt to be shallow and repetitive. Spore was perhaps one of the first to develop a still all too common issue — wide as an ocean, but deep as a puddle

Still, the game did have its fans. I feel like people were more likely to enjoy it if they didn't follow the hype as much and/or if the editors by themselves were enough content to satisfy them.

The Spore Franchise

The expression I'd like to use is that it's kind of like a dandelion or the City of Atlantis. Atlantis has all the greatest scientist in the world, mythologically speaking, building pyramids, lasers, or alien technology. It sinks and everyone leaves on boats and each boat heads to a different continent where they continue to build. I think that's what happened with Spore and why it was important that Spore stopped and that everyone went all over the place. We've got Maxoids from Spore working on Oculus, Tilt Brush, Riot, Valve, on dozens of indie projects. There are some of us teaching, like the dandelion can't make more dandelions until it scatters its seeds to the wind. That happened with Spore.

— Kate Compton

EA had high hopes for Spore and for some reason got it in their heads that it would grow into a massive multimedia franchise brand. Spore's release was followed by a number of spin-offs that really had nothing to do with the simulation genre or the fanbase actually buying the game. They were particularly interested in marketing towards kids, maybe because of that cute aesthetic they'd ultimately gone with. It could be that the financial success of the Sims inspired all this since that's obviously grown into a huge franchise, but then again EA tried to milk Spore even harder than that. To my knowledge they never randomly made a Sims platformer, nor were there ever plans for a Sims movie.

And yes, there were initial plans for a Spore movie of… some kind. It would have been produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox.

Spore was also supposed to come to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The achievement hunter in me wishes that actually happened lmao

Spin Offs

Spore's release was followed by a number of other games only tangentially related to the original. Origins was a phone app with a simpler version of the cell stage and nothing else.

Spore Creatures was the first of two Nintendo DS games intended for It's sort of like the creature stage mixed with Nintendogs and features a creature the player can alter in order to complete quests and fight bad guys. While the online Sporepedia of the PC game doesn't exist here, this game is notable among DS titles in featuring a multiplayer that didn't require Nintendo's weird friend codes system

Spore Hero Arena was the second and focused more on action and combat. It was probably developed in conjunction with the following game. It's divided into missions featuring a variety of battle modes and also features a multiplayer component.

Spore Hero is an action adventure platformer with the gimmick that you get to make your protagonist. The game plays like a bog standard example of its genre and is unfortunately linear despite featuring the creature creator — for example you unlock certain parts that need to be put on your creature to progress through obstacles, regardless of whether you want them or not. The game also suffers from having to use the friggin Wii Remote to navigate an interface meant for mouse and keyboard.

I actually played this game and I remember I made a scorpion thing, not because I really wanted to, but because it sort of… ended up that way

Darkspore is extra weird because it's a Diablo like game that has very little in common with Spore but was made by Maxis. It also came out in 2011 at the very tail end of the "brand's" relevance.

Darkspore has you controlling preset heroes with the customization now being that you collect upgrades for them. The editors are actually built from the same engine as Spore and there is a mod that adds Darkspore parts to the main game. There's no real interactivity between the two however. The game also required a constant connection to the server to even play single player.

Which means the game became unplayable when the servers shut down in 2016.

This was the first game Maxis made after Will Wright left and, well, they don't make anything besides The Sims content anymore. Honestly I wonder why this wasn't its own separate IP.

There's also a lot of miscellaneous Spore content that's hard to keep track of.

Galactic Adventures

am i misremembering or did someone make schindlers list in spore galactic adventures?

spore galactic adventures had a giga neurodivergent modding/fancontent community so i believe it

— @Molnet and @drama_enthusiast

Spore received only three pieces of post launch content, with Galactic Adventures being the only true expansion pack.

Creepy and Cute was simply a parts back for the creature editor. Pretty neat but nothing major.

The Spore Bots Part Pack was interesting because it was part of a promotion with Dr Pepper — you received the code for the content under the caps of specially marked Dr Pepper bottles The pack was controversial because not everyone wanted to buy soda, plus it was exclusive to the US, plus it was found that the pack literally was Patch 1.06 so you weren't getting that content at all without the code lmao

The parts were eventually made into a patch anyone can download.

The one true expansion Spore did receive was actually amazing and did a lot to improve the game and address complaints. Released in 2009 and under development since Spore's launch, Galactic Adventures was made in response to criticisms of Spore's shallow gameplay and space stage and in response offers the following,

— A common complaint of space stage was that you could never get out of your vehicle and explore planets on foot. Though it's only within the context of adventures, GA gives you control of a playable captain and lets you visit player made levels and worlds. In doing so it restores the ability to control an individual beyond creature stage. It also adds a full planet editor beyond the sculpting cowtools available to players.

— Space stage was also criticized for getting old after a while. GA adds adventures to experience and an rpg system for ranking up your captain. Upgrading your character not only improves your adventure experience but also unlocks archetype rewards plus currency that improves the rest of your empire. Space really becomes two stages in one.

— GA just gives you more to do in general. Adventures can also be played from the main menu and the Sporepedia means you should never run out of new ones to play. Adventures are made in a new editor that also retroactively increases the importance of previous editors. All of this can be accessed independently of space stage too if you don't feel like playing a long campaign.

Galactic Adventures was an idea that we came up with when we were looking at all the content that was getting created in Spore and really looking back and giving players more opportunities to use that content. As of tonight, I think we're up to over 67 million pieces of content. So the idea that came is how do we give players' stuff meaningful creativity with that content? Yes, it is part level editor, so any content that you find in the Spore universe, you can use in your own missions and adventures. Plus, any of those missions that you create or the community creates are available for Space game, so we're giving you a new powerful editor plus a whole bunch of additional gameplay in space. The new missions kick in about master batch two, so about an hour into Space game, you're going to start to get these "beam down to the planet" adventures, which are completely new.

— Producer Morgan Roarty

It's hard to articulate the kind of freedom GA gives you since it basically turns Spore itself into a video game maker and is surprisingly complex despite the editor limitations. Adventures are playable missions/miniature games created by users and they can really be anything so long as the engine can handle it. You can fill an adventure with standard Spore content like fighting or socializing, or have microcosms or other genres; platformers, action adventures, simple strategy. Some adventures are made like interactive Sporecasts where the player shows off their content such that others can take their captains and interact with it all. The editor allows you to set AI behavior for npcs and give unusual properties to anything in the game — example you could insert music files and have items play those songs when interacted with. In the vein of a dedicated game creator like RPGMaker, people have done a lot with Galactic Adventures and the community remains alive today.

Adventures also have a social aspect to them. User created ones aren't just able to be downloaded, but can be freely edited too. You could take someone's adventure and add your own content to it or just remove something you didn't like about it You can also "reverse engineer" more complex ones to learn some tips for you own. Some are memetic like "Add Your Captain" missions where one simply edits in their own protagonist like signing a card and then reuploads for the next guy. The Maxis adventures don't just provide out of the box content. They're set up to be easily edited as tutorials of sorts for how different kinds of adventures are made. Maxis also encouraged Sporecasts subscriptions by making semi-hidden adventures of theirs only available in that way.

Some of the later Maxis adventures were made in partnership with the Adult Swim Robot Chicken writers. No, really

I think this is a very interesting solution to what seemed to be Spore's biggest criticism, the gameplay. The creation part of it was the most fun to me and Maxis seemed to realize this and decided to allow users to create the gameplay. So far, it appears extremely deep and allows for an enormous amount of customization to almost any aspect you can imagine. I really like the fact that I have the choice of either spending the time to create a game myself or I can dive straight in and play games other people have created.

— From a Galactic Adventures demonstration at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Galactic Adventures makes me sad in retrospect The expansion was a massive step in the right direction and gave new life to Spore while fixing many of the issues people had with the original product. If more expansions like GA had followed, the game could have had a contemporary turn around not unlike No Man's Sky.

Alas, that kind of business model just wasn't a thing at the time. EA was eager for Sims money and it wasn't going to fund major free updates. Back then expansion packs sold separately, often as physical media one would drive to a game store to buy and an expansion's financial success was measured in number of copies sold. Imagine trying to explain to 2008 era EA devs that a game like NMS, despite being disappointing at launch, eventually became huge and financially successful thanks to free content that incentivized people to go buy/keep playing the original even years later.

Maybe Spore really was ahead of its time.

We're now at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will - they have their hands on the steering wheel too. We're listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we're looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we're going to go in other directions with Spore.

Part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it's more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game - and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack - and we're also taking output from the cowtools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences.

— Will Wright

Wright left Maxis in 2009, but for a small moment he was working on post-launch Spore and giving attention to the weaker parts of the game. Who knows what we could have gotten if more expansion packs had followed

In Retrospect

About fifteen years have passed since Spore's release, and while the game was disappointing to many and received little post launch support, it also has its fair share of fans and remains played if niche to this day. In particular, younger players who didn't know about the game before 2008 and who went in with no expectations tend to have a higher opinion of Spore. There are also plenty of people who love the editors and don't mind coming back to them. Spore retains a dedicated fanbase to this day so the content creation and sharing experience is still strong.

Though it's not easy to login to on steam, the Sporepedia still works and can still be accessed with some know how. You can also manually upload and download creations from the Spore website.

For what it's worth, the creature creator demo remains available as a free download for any dramanauts who want to try it out.

This effortpost is dedicated to its patron, @lain

Reading Rdrama, it's become pretty clear that this dump is a rightoid circlejerk that's blind to what's actually happening in America, and I want to just spread the knowledge .

The first thing to handle: Am I biased? No - I'm a European () that's neurodivergentally into American Presidential Politics, especially the Cold War era (Franklin Roosevelt to H.W Bush), and I'd wager I know more about every era then most Americans here. Not saying that to brag, it's just autism.

So the next thing to handle - the state of the race. Which Dementia Daddy is winning? It started of with Trump fricking destroying Slumbering Joseph, who has been facing declining approval ratings ever since the fall of Kabul ( America hates to see an anti-war president). This is despite the fact that America does not like Trump. This is simply a fact, Americans have never liked Trump. He didn't win the popular vote against Hillary Clinton, herself massively unpopular, or Joe Biden.

Let's compare starting approvals. Gallup gives W. Bush 57% approval at the start of his term, which skyrockets to 91% by 9/11 and ends at 28% when he leaves office. Obama starts with 68%, getting a lowest approval rating of 42%. Even Sleepy Joe started with 55%. Donald Trump ? He started with 45% approval. That would peak at 49%, and would average at 41%. Please, I implore you to forget that you're a rightoid and accept a basic fact - Trump is not personally liked by Americans. They think he's a loudmouth butthole who's attitude is unfit for office, and during his term 59% of the public didn't like him. So, a Sleepy Joe sweep, right?

Biden started popular enough. He was basically an Obama third term, and Obama was massively popular. He was very old, the pic above is a newspaper reporting Nixon being re-elected while Biden unseats an incumbent, which was a concern, but people generally liked him.

That would change fairly swiftly. Inflation from the Covid spending , under Trump lmao, caught up with America and inflation became rampant. Joe Biden had been elected on a promise of being a boring cracker who could let people forget about politics for a while, an elder statesman who would handle everything. He was already being blamed for the economy, but then there was the pull-out. Despite it being awesome, America finally stops wasting money on that shithole, Americans were horrified by the images it produced. His approval ratings sank like a rock and disapproval ratings soared.

The "Joe Biden is too old to lead" stuff went from a Republican talking point to basically accepted fact. The public was promised a boring statesman they could forget about it, and they're seeing global chaos and inflation - which has gotten back to decent rates, but since the only way prices will go down is through a recession, no one thinks it has. I mean yeah you have dipshit shooters like Will Stancil, but that's about it. So, Drumpf sweep right?

Yes and no. Despite Biden's massive unpopularity, the Red Wave promised for 2022 was barely a red drizzle - the Trump Republicans were so massively unpopular, the Democrats managed to narrowly expand a Senate majority, unseated 3 incumbent governors and Republicans only got 9 seats from the 435 seats up for election in 2022. The public hated Joe Biden, but the Democrats weren't unpopular. However, that doesn't change the fact that Joe Biden is unpopular.

Turns out deplatforming works, hooray! With Trump, he became less of a man and more of an idea. Yeah, Trump was an butthole - but prices were low and the world was at peace. (Incidentally, ask anyone who thinks this how exactly Trump will do this again and watch them not answer you.) America has always loved it's Dirty Harrys and Dr. Houses - take no shit buttholes who get results. Trump, away from the spotlight and with Biden viewed with contempt, was poised to crush Biden. That was until;

Some rightoids have tried to spin this, arguing the public doesn't care that Trump paid hush money to his mistress. They're on the right line of thinking, but they're overestimating the public's knowledge. They don't know what Trump did, and they don't care. Trump went from butthole they don't like to Convicted Criminal(tm) - a massive step up. They have faith in the institutions, they think whatever the verdict is, it's fair, and while they could hold their nose to vote for the butthole that made prices low, they can't do it for a Convicted Criminal(tm).

Biden's popularity hasn't change. They still think he's a senile idiot that shouldn't be in office - but he's not a Convicted Criminal(tm). For contrast, NeoCon-Nikki Haley has pulled anything from 4% to 13% over Joe Biden. While the highest results were obvious bullshit, the pattern is there. If Biden didn't have to run against Trump, he would get his butt paddled.

So, two massively unpopular old men are running against each other. One is a criminal nobody has ever liked, the other is a senile r-slur. Who wins?

Frick knows mate. Trump leads in some key swing states, like Arizona and Michigan, but his sheer unpopularity following the conviction has led to these being narrow leads. Worse still, the Biden Campaign has about $100 million more then the Trump Campaign, so some targeted ads could ruin Trump. If I had to goomble, and I do , I would put money on Biden winning. The warchest advantage will be the difference maker, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trump won.

Personally, I'm rooting for Biden winning while losing the popular vote . I think the Rightoid outrage after 2016 would be funny.

Thanks for reading my longpost I promise there's no agenda

All life originated in the chaos of the Hadean era over 4 billion years ago. From the earliest days, the key and only goal of life was to reproduce. As individuals, as populations and as species. This ensures the continuance of life itself as a heterogenous panoply of all living things. As a fact, all living things exist not only in and of themselves and for themselves, but also has instances of the general trend of life. Just as a giant assembly of cells make up an individual living being, so too all living beings make up life.

Saurian or salesman, we are but facets
of a single shining diamond.

Now it's true that quite likely life exists and has arisen on many different planets throughout our infinite (or at least extremely vast) universe. And perhaps throughout other universes in that infinite set of all possible phenomena that we call the multiverse, or some metapantheists call divinity. So the question may arise why we should privilege earth's life - the life that arose on this planet, or perhaps, gestated here, having been brought from some other locale - over the infinite forms of life that likely exist throughout the cosmos. To which an easy rebuttal is given; namely, that we have concrete knowledge only of our own existence. These supposed external forms of life do not impact or play a role in our calculations until they are confirmed. Furthermore, even if foreign life were found it still remains the case that our life strain is unique and has developed in a different fashion from that of the rest of the universe. Just as multiple cowtools are useful in the toolbox and multiple ingredients make a more delicious cake so too our life would have its use to the universal set of living beings even if other forms of life exist, perhaps even more more advanced than ours.

The interplay between male and female enriches life;
The meeting of the two gives it meaning.
In fornication, we engage in creation;
We become as gods.

Most ideologies, ethics and systems of moral thought today are based on entirely faulty foundations. Humanism and its doctrines of equality and materialistic hedonism form the court religion of all societies not actively theistic or despotic on this planet; in fact all are ascientific, even antiscientific, theories. They go against all schools of higher knowledge, and even the foundations of group organization, which demands strict hierarchy and obediance of the part to the whole as a prerequisite to further development. All ideologies prevalent today are at the end of the day useless for anything more than consuming the emotions of those that believe in them to replicate themselves further. In fact, they are worse than useless, because in their idealistic endeavors they create negative situations that end up harming the actual goals of us as humans and as living things: namely, to reproduce our species and form of life, to have it exist for as long as possible, in as many forms as possible, in as many places as possible, consuming as few resources as possible, so that our existence may continue for yet longer.

Fish are known to be a form of life.

We must become as the lich of human mythology, which abandons its softness and material connections to survive eternally, wielding unimaginable power, subduing all before it. In fact all wise men, and some women, of history agree that the first and greatest struggle is with the self. One who is enslaved to his own desires is not free no matter his status in life. Similarly the struggle of humanity is not against an alien entity or material consideration but with that within itself which keeps it weak: its emotions and ideologies.

Learn and study, ancient being.
Save us as you saved yourself.

We live in an era of societal collapse, profound malaise, a time when the yin has overpowered the yang, kali yuga, late-stage capitalism, ragnarok, the christian's end of days, the liberal's end of history, the birth pangs of moshiach, the climate apocalypse, akhir al zaman, an age where all agree that things are profoundly fricked up. May G-d grant that we triumph over these destructive ideologies and moral systems, like a strong body purges a cold, and not be overwhelmed with them, like a chronic suffferer, wracked by disease after disease til his constitution is overwhelmed and utterly crushed and his existance dissipates into nothingness, dust and rotting meat for worms.

Will you heal her? Or would you
let her die and be forgotten?

Actually this worm recapitulates the fact that humans are the only way all species - from worms and plants to the higher orders which feed us and provide a portion of our awe and entertainment - will survive beyond the natural lifespan of this earth. Therefore, a vegan or an ethicist who proclaims the value of animal life over or alongside that of human life does not realize that 99.9% of all species ever living have - and in fact 100% species will - go extinct unless we get them off this sphere, and then perhaps they have a chance to survive, at our whim and grace. For it is a scientific certainty that this earth and all on it will end very soon (on the timescale of the planet itself and life on it). The fact that - a short few dozen million years before its end, or at least inhospitability to higher life - a species arose capable of leaving Earth and taking with us some traces and fruits of Earth's existence, can be regarded as nothing less than the highest Mercy that can be granted any body hurtling through space. An infinitesimality of infinitesimals; the winning of an impossible cosmic lottery.

This banana will perish
ignomiously but for
the hand of Man.

Eugenics, hierarchies, bayesian pragmatism, record keeping, analysis and collection, focused science etc. will be key elements of any succesful human society (where success is defined as furthering the goal of our species to survive and thrive). That given, it cannot be said that any previous society - even with those putative features implemented - ever truly reached (or came close) to the level of integration into reality, with reality as its primary and only benchmark of success, that would be required to truthfully catapult our species off its nest and into the wide fields of the stars. No blustering nazi or foppish californian abortionist can claim they pioneered the true path, not least because their movements died out, to be replaced with new ones even more tenuously connected to reality. A nazi was, and remains, a fool.

C'est fini. Ponder and reach
your own conclusions.

BACKGROUND TO RACE IN MODERN SOUTH AFRICAN SPORTS:

Greetings Dramatards

Sport in South Africa has always been very weird, and for the past 30 years was difficult to describe to foreigners. What I mean by this, is that just like the entire society of modern democratic South Africa, race and racism has played a profound effect upon how peeps here view and interact with the Big 3 Sports - namely the most popular sports by far in South Africa, and Southern Africa in general.

The Big Three, in order of significant popularity, are Soccer, Rugby and Cricket. Yet all three have displayed very weird interactions with race and racism in South Africa, especially when compared to Burgerland whom could be argued is amongst RSA and Brasilia, the most racially diverse countries on earth, and perhaps even in recorded history so far.

In Burgerland, even in their version of Segregation, black peeps especially would suffer similar discriminations as their South African counterparts in sports, yet Apartheid as a system, compared to Amerikan Segregation was a far far more extreme version of systemic society wide racial segregation. In Burgerland black athletes would be allowed to compete in amerikan sports like NBA and yank Baseball.

From as much as 100 years ago, from between 1920s to 1960s, black yanks would gradually and systemically be included, and play progressively more and more prominent roles as athletes, as yank society dramatically liberalized within the span of just a century. And more significantly, compared to south africa, they would gradually integrate and play with their white peers and fellow white athletes as comrades in sports, for yanks the notion of meritocracy and glory within arena of National Sports would literally overrule their racism lol

But that is not how things were done during the rule of the Union of South Africa, the arbiters of Apartheid. For whatever autism took hold of their senses, the Afrikaners and Bongs in charge of Southern Africa would develop the culture of not just segregating races into different arenas and sections based on race, but to ACTUALLY SEGREGATE RACES INTO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPORTS!

So wtf do I mean by that. During the period of High Apartheid, between 1950-1993, the premier sports for the most powerful ethnic faction (Boers) would come to be Rugby and Cricket, with Rugby taking the crown, in terms of the most glorious sport for the highest level of athlete to participate in - much in the same way in which American Football is the dominant sport in which Burgerland's top tier athletes seek to find prestige in,

which is ironic because america basically syphons of its top cream athletes to play in sports like NBA and Yank-Football, which ONLY americans care about! Instead of Rugby or Cricket, which are very similar sports, and soak up similarly skilled and body-typed athletes into their ranks, and are internationally and globally the most popular sports. So the poor yank leftover athletes who do actually compete in International Cricket/Rugby tournaments, while they certainly aren't terrible athletes, they are also not International Top Tier mega sports stars and get thrashed usually, while all burgerland's mega athletes are soaked up in crappy discount rugby and discount cricket (What a fokken waste yanks, but that's another story)

Now what happened in SA was that because of the Boer obsession with Rugby and Cricket, and in conjunction with their increasingly draconian race-segregations laws (starting in 1950s, depending on which Verwoerd would enact the 1st Apartheid laws), the Sports like Rugby and Soccer would become almost entirely racially segregated - both in law and in custom and culture over the 5 decades in which the NP dominated the Union of South Africa.

What I mean by this, is that because Boers/Afrikaners/SA-Bongs mostly cared about Rugby and Cricket, they would basically discount Soccer as a lesser sport, a sport for Bleks. Over time, Rugby became to be associated with whites, and Soccer with Blacks. Many black peeps did desire to play Rugby, both casually and competitively, but was obviously barred from playing so in Town Clubs, or Provincial/National teams, in a similar vein as Blanke/White Only beaches where black and coloured people were barred from. The same with Cricket.

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-history-rugby-south-africa

The long story short was that over time, black athletes who desired to excel in anything they wanted to put their minds and bodies to, had only Soccer available as an outlet for athletic excellence. And as the years passed into decades, Soccer would become culturally more african than european by the eyes of both black and white south africans. As black peeps had neither the capacity to compete in National Rugby, or even spectate in their matches.

This is all the more tragic, in that during the early half of the century of 1900-1950s, showcased that many South Africans had great reverence to the sport of Rugby, and even back then wished to be part of the Union of South Africa, as equal citizens and fellow teammates to their white counterparts, yet the extremism of Afrikaners would spurn this affection by the time the 1950s arrived.

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-history-rugby-south-africa

=====(from article)

In 1906-1907 South Africa fielded its first national rugby team on a tour of the British Isles. The all-White team was composed of Afrikaners and British colonial South Africans. The tour helped erase ill-will that had existed between the two groups since the bloody Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. The English media referred to the team as the Springboks - an anglicized version of the team's self entitled Afrikaans nickname, the Springbokken.

Participation in rugby was not limited to White South Africans for long. By the late nineteenth century some Blacks had adopted rugby as an element of their identity. In 1896 a celebration was held in honour of H.C. Msikinya for his acceptance into Wilberforce University. At the party Msikinya listed his membership in the Rovers Rugby Football club amongst his various social accomplishments.

=====

Oh yes, the grand tragedy is that Boers in the 1900s were ironically MORE tolerant of their black peers and countrymen, than what would follow in the wave of reactionary extremism in the period of the late 1940s -1993, in a collective action of self-actualization which self destructed into a notion of racial supremacy and domination in Southern Africa A complete inverse of the rapid liberalization of the Western Democracies, which changed from colonial cultural chauvinism to liberal collective freedom.

=====(from article)

Soon after White South Africans formed rugby's first official governing bodies Black South Africans followed suit. In 1889 the Whites-only South African Rugby Board was founded. Eight years later the South African Coloured Rugby Football Board was founded to organize and oversee club matches between Black South Africans at the regional level.

Rugby played an important role in weakening the divisions between various Black religious groups in the Cape. Matches drew women, men and children from different religious backgrounds as spectators. Community members collaborated with one another and raised money for their respective clubs through activities such as dances. Matches also engendered a sense of mutual respect amongst players for the toughness and bravery of their opponents, even though club membership was strictly divided along religious lines.

From the outset rugby brought South Africans together. Just half a decade after the British had thrown Afrikaners into concentration camps - during the Anglo-Boer War - the two groups played alongside one another under the Springbok banner. The sport also facilitated social interaction amongst the various religious groups of the country's Black inhabitants. Early on rugby demonstrated a capacity to heal wounds and establish commonalities amongst South Africans.

=====(end quote)

1976 REFORMS:

Even as early as the 1970s, South Africa had become a Pariah state and was facing international pressure from overseas to cease Apartheid rule. The New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks faced pressure from citizens to not tour and play in SA that year. And though no actual impactful sanctions against SA had begone in this time, a lot of International groups decried South Africa, and would denounce the Springbok Rugby team, from barring Black people from participating in National and International tournaments.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/history/300898203/why-1976-all-blacks-prop-bill-bush-felt-racially-targeted-by-south-african-rivals-and-refs

Remarkably the NP regime had caved into international pressure at this time, in order to not have the South African Rugby team banned from International competition! That was how important Rugby was to Boers! They were willing to suspend some of their segregation laws, in order to appease international Liberal pressures, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but simply so that the International Rugby Union would not bar them from competing internationally!!!

Of course, by this time the damage had been done, the culture of sport slitting apart had been entrenched for over 25 years, and black peeps had associated soccer with their culture, and Rugby as a white man's sport. This is not to say that there were NO black athletes taking advantage of the 1976 reforms to take part into Rugby, now that segregation laws in competing had been lifted, many black peeps enjoyed rugby,

But they were negligible in number, and the tide of culture made even trying to integrate with their white peers, whom were often obviously racist, a monumental cultural barrier

Even worse, was that there were few facilities available for training to become proficient Rugby players as black athletes in the 1st place

"However at times rugby's unifying capacity was ignored and South Africans chose instead to use the sport as an instrument of oppression. During much of the twentieth century rugby in South Africa was hi-jacked and the sport's healing powers were forgotten. Racist ideology and legislation prevented White and Black South Africans from playing the game together until 1976, when the apartheid regime took its reluctant first steps toward sporting reform. Even after the reforms of 1976 Black South Africans faced unofficial barriers to sporting equality such as limited access to training facilities and inadequate nutrition."

SPRINKBOKS AND RUGBY BECAME WHITE:

Similar to Hitler and his buddies in the 1936 Olympics, Rugby and the Springboks became this weird symbol of Boer racial dominance and a demonstration that Afrikaners were the premier race who deserved rulership and had the God-given right to dominate all peoples of Southern Africa, in a weird paternal racism, they believed they had to "take care" of black peeps in SA because they were to unevolved to govern themselves.

I'm not joking this was the dominant ideology for both Afrikaner politicians and laymen. And weirdly enough! They justified this as their holy duty and believed they were endorsed by God, after all if God didn't disapprove, then he certainly made no holy miracle actions to stop Apartheid, and thus the Boers were morally correct. Not joking.

END OF SEPARATION AND 1995 RUGBY WORLD CUP VICTORY:

I go on this long tangent to make dramatards and foreigners comprehend just how systemically and culturally the sports of Cricket, and especially Soccer and Rugby had been separated over half a century.

In 1995 Madiba Mandela would make perhaps his most infamously praised publicity stunt, which would garner him great respect, love and adoration from many whites in SA. He understood the neurodivergent reverence which SA mayos placed upon the sport of Rugby, and knew he could win the favor of many of them, by placing equal respect as a none-white onto "their" sport in SA.

1995 was considered the most powerful Springbok team by Rugby-autismos, and if you even gave half a shit about the sport, then 1995 was a great time to be a Safrican rugby fan. The crowning moment of the glorious victory in the finals saw Mandela personally presenting his fellow white countrymen with the victory cup, which at the time was a powerful symbol for liberals and reconciliation, especially as many black peeps, whom were now the top dog ethnicity, disregarded Rugby as purely a mayo sport and only venerated Soccer. But since mandela was charismatic and very public-image savvy he took the opportunity to empower his message of reconciliation for the divided nation, and some other sappy shit

And at that moment in time, was thought to be a very hopeful moment in South Africa's history, which of course we in hindsight tragically know would be pissed on by the corruption following the Mandela admin afterwards

POST-1993 RACIAL INTEGRATION:

https://globalsportmatters.com/culture/2019/04/16/south-africas-sports-lack-progress-in-the-post-apartheid-era/

Now with this history in mind, it needs to be understood that, in the following 30 years there would be perpetual between black and white south africans regarding the status of racial integration in Sports like Soccer and rugby.

For Soccer, South Africans would already be screwed, and many and 9Gag starggots and Stromfront fools would continue to compare the astonishing difference between the performance of the white dominated South African Rugby team, the Springboks , the SA Cricket team, the Proteas , and the national Soccer team, Bafana Bafana (which translates as slang for "The Boys" in zulu).

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/what-is-bafana-bafana-and-how-does-it-get-its-name/articleshow/5935771.cms

To put things simply, the Bafana Bafana team fricking sucks. Their performance locally and internationally has been up and down, but ultimately have graduated to fricking standards lower than shark shit shade at the bottom of the sea abyss. Many safrican racistoids point to this as proof of the racial inferiority of black peeps in terms of governance and athleticism. Many ANC and Bafana Bafana wingcucks sneed and cope that the national team isn't a garbage pile, and thus no internal reflection is ever imported to the management of this floundering national team.

https://www.news24.com/sport/bafana-bafana-the-squandered-2010-inheritance-20200611

Including Safrica getting r*ped on home turf back in the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

"Bafana have not been part of a FIFA World Cup tournament since 2010."

It's important to not that this is not due to a lack of individual talent of black peeps in south africa in general, often the irony is clear when local soccer clubs outperform the poor performance of Bafana Bafana. The reason is corruption to the same magnitude and type of which the ANC had infested the rest of the country's public infrastructures.

Nepotism and r-sluration often play a great deal in which black players get positions within the Bafana Bafana team, and subsequently, despite having a population talent pool outnumbering their white counterparts by a factor of 10:1 the national team has over 3 decades FAILED to fricking put the best South Africans into the positions they deserved, not even the best BLACK soccer athletes in the fricking country would obtain their spots, and this was compounded by the fact that the top trainers and instructors were equally nepostistically inept and moronic compared to their cricket and rugby counterparts.

Many black soccer athletes literally frick off overseas and earn money in foreign countries when they are never picked in top spots!!

The worst part is that this is not an unfixable problem, and is in magnitude a much lesser challenge that the corruption of the country by the ANC, just one cycle could purge all the morons and deadbeats, and make an excellent black South African national soccer team !!

The issue for black safricans is an inability to galvanize in mass numbers an purge the entire corrupt institution of SAFA (South African Football Association) which is as corrupt to the core as the rest of ANC related public enterprises, with the often political overlap of ANC pollitcal power bases fighting for control of this popular institution and its monopoly of handling soccer related affairs on a national and provincial level in the country - and I've made enough autismo longposts for you Dramatards to have a general idea as to the corruption and incompetency which that entails.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHITE AND BLACK SPORT ORGANIZATION SUPPORT:

But the most significant reason for this discrepancy between between the these "white" and "black" sports of soccer and Rugby is precisely BECAUSE they are seen as traditionally as white and black sports culturally. And that has influenced pretty much all of SAFA's development from its foundation since 1991, with it being substantially younger than its Rugby/Cricket equivalents.

Because basically the National Rugby Union of SA had existed for pretty much a century longer than SAFA, they have had a pretty substantial unequal time to develop intergenerational knowledge and expertise on how to run Sporting events, and how to support the training of Rugby youths replacements from the smallest local school coaching program, to the highest levels of provincial and international training regimes and coaching strategizing

Combined with the fact that during the Apartheid years from 1950s to 1993, black peeps were unable to organize soccer events or governing-bodies to the same level as their white peers, because BOSS (those scary Saffer version of CIA douchebags) kept shutting down national black organizations out of paranoia, even benign non-political organizations such for shit like sport/soccer, black peeps did in fact start with a major disadvantage compared to their white countrymen, with regards to accumulating the greatest talentpool for soccer athletes from schools to clubs, even if they in ethnic population numbers outnumbered their white peers by a factor of 5-10.

https://globalsportmatters.com/culture/2019/04/16/south-africas-sports-lack-progress-in-the-post-apartheid-era/

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/sport/soccer/bafana-bafana/bafana-bafana-lack-of-support-in-contrast-to-springboks-backing/

Additionally, it must be acknowledged that the sporting facilities, like even the basic foundational infrastructure, like HighSchool playing fields or gym, or locker room facilities between teh average black and white schools could be pretty vast, with prestigious traditionally white schools (even if by modern day 2024 they can even be populationwise less than 15% white pupils) still fricking dominate in the local safrican Highschool Rugby scene. Notice how many afrikaneroid names they haz

https://saschoolsports.co.za/school-rugby-rankings-5/

In Burgerland you have Soccer-moms/parents, and in safrica we have Rugby-parents with slapfights erupting between r-slurred parents who take the child sport of School-rugby MORE seriously than that of their under-10 year olds, and get into frequent fricking fights with the local ref lmoa.

So you guys can see how there is valid reason for "black" sports like soccer in SA to have had a traditional disadvantage compared to Mayo sports, and how irritated black peeps can be when the this dismal comparison in performance is underlined between Soccer and Rugby by noooooticers and even regular safrican countrymen who lament this shit performance of Bafana Bafana, compared to the Springboks, even when black south africans are the ones to make note of this utterly dismal comparison.

https://lovetovisitsouthafrica.com/south-african-sports-culture-springbok-vs-bafana/

Even fricking Trevor Noah comparedd the shittiness of Banana Banana with Springboks in one of his stand up specials. (recommended actually very funni )

He makes a joke that it's a national catastrophe when Springboks play dismally

Whereas if Banana Bafana plays like butt/eish and drops the ball lower than shark shit shade at the bottom of the oceanic abyss, nobody cares, not even fricking black soccer fans

So it's not just racist chuds making these dismal comparisons.

HOWEVER, only racial wingcucks and fools have so far been willing to excuse the dismal performance of Bafana Bafana over the past 3 decades, especially since it has been 3 decades, a whole generation! With all of the governmental affirmative action of an entire nation backing the system, the excuses of historic discrimination begins to feel hollow to non-biased peeps witnessing these depraved poor performances by our national soccer athletes.

Especially since many soccer fans are of the opinion, that Bafana Bafana is actually fricking WORSE in 2024, than in even 2010 (during the SA world cup hosting), and many give the argument that fricking modern Bafana Bafana, and even provincial Soccer sport exceptionalism is worse than the 1991-2000 period!!! what the fok

The argument is that just like ANC-tier corruption, in the earliest stages of the fledgling democracy of SA, the initial SAFA (South African Football Association) was more meritocratic and uncorrupt, whereas LateStageCorruption has thoroughly hollowed out the fricking organization's capacity to deliver progress and results, especially compared to it's Rugby counterpart which has produced global rugby champions as recently as fricking last year in 2023.

https://sportsbrief.com/football/24590-embarrassing-difference-attendance-bafana-bafana-springbok-matches-starts-heated-debate/

And now amount of sleazy and pathetic BEE astroturfing by the ANC dominated gov has been able to enable the grassroots supports which the Springboks has enjoyed by all of the races in SA lol

https://www.news24.com/sport/soccer/afcon/the-many-faces-of-bafana-bafana-our-problem-is-not-technical-but-it-is-rather-a-mental-one-20240122

And whooooo boi is the calling out of that Mental Problem in national soccer leadership a massive controversial nuke in SA society and a massive spicy minefield for South Africa race relations!!!

You see there is something I must explain to you guys about Safrican black peeps

BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN VERSION OF BALKANS "INAT":

There is a specific mentality found within many many many many Safrican black peeps which are absurdly unique in its negative ramifications for society and worse for blacks peeps themselves than for white peeps - it is the ultimate expression of cutting your nose to spite your face that you will ever encounter in any demographic you can name on this earth, especially since other black peeps of Sub-Saharen africa or Southern-Africa in general DO NOT exhibit this form of insanity. Not Namibians, or Nigerians or congolese or zimbabweans.

I simply do not know how the frick to describe this mentality for foreigners without sounding like a massive massive MASSIVE racist, or you guys know, like an even more of a chudlord racist which I have become to be known here as the premier mayo safrican racist (against micks ) on this Godforsaken site. I had no frame or reference or example to make outlanders understand what the frick I was talking about.

That was until I watched a Youtube video from LivingIronicallyInEurope a few weeks, a Serboid Balkanoid, who's content I think is very similar in style to the Longposting crap I spam on rDrama.net, in that he talks frankly about the shortcomings of his host nation and the Balkans in general with sincerity.

The specific video this strag talked about, was "what constituted the Balkans", or which countries counts as being part of the Balkans, a historically famously unstable region fraught with conflict. He makes the thesis that the Balkans are more a coherent cultural description than a geographic one, especially since after so many heated online debates on which countries in the regions exactly belongs to to the Balkans.

He makes the case that what unifies the consensus of which countries belongs to the historic Balkans are the shared suffering which the Europeans living there had, subjugated underneath the powerful Ottoman Turks for hundreds of years. The poor frickers in the Balkans are pretty much the only Eurocucks fully colonized by a non-native, non-white race and culture, and it's clear how this has affected their cultural psyche and intergenerational "Samelewing" or societal cohesive glue, and how much this makes Balkanoids differ from Western eurocucks

As a way to screw over their Turkic overlords, the Balkanoids would develop the cultural practice of "Inat" which can maybe be translated as "stubborn-spitefulness" or petty efforts of resistance. The most striking example of Inat was when the Balkanoids would deliberately cause littering and pollution upon their very own streets, to spite and screw over their Ottoman overlords, as the Ottomans were responsible for the administration of their new conquered Balkan backwaters, and consequently the upkeep and cleaning of public streets. Thus literally forcing the Turkroach administrators to clean after them.

This was not too dissimilar to Black south africans deliberately causing pollution and littering in places like Soweto during Apartheid as a form of protest, forcing the NP regime to come clean this shit up afterwards A very successful form of cucking your oppressors

HOWEVER, the issue is that that this initially protesting form of behaviour has since formed as part of a since runaway culture, a culture long since having forgotten the origin of the reason for pollution to begin with, and now this fricking culture cancer has been normalized. This stands for both Balkanoids and many black safricans I think

BLACK SAFRICAN CONTRARIANISM WHEN MAYOS OFFER HELP WITH BAFANA BAFANA INEPTITUDE:

Many times mayo ex-directors or leaders of Rugby Unions or coaches of Rugby and Cricket teams of SA would attempt to offer their administrative experience or advice for SAFA, only to be spurned and hackled by the peeps running this flaming wreck. And like usual for safrican drama, there's a racial undertone to this rejection.

https://www.dfa.co.za/sport/springboks-and-proteas-are-inspiring-bafana-bafana-says-percy-tau-58b9f299-77c4-4118-8ed5-13ff3948a177/

Sometimes actual individual Bafana players themselves even try to make contact with Rugby Union leadership, only to receive backlash from their own black fanbase.

Other times they receive support for actually voicing and acknowledging that there' a structural problem with national sport in SA soccer.

https://www.goal.com/en-za/news/broos-challenges-bafana-bafana-to-emulate-springboks-we-have-a-lot-to-learn-about-them/blt41af198d653420ed

Other times yet still, it is considered a direct attack on black people who govern Bafana Bafana, when white coaches pretty directly insinuates (regardless if it's true lol) that they think the soccer team is trash in comparison to their Rugby peers.

https://www.idiskitimes.co.za/africa-cup-of-nations/broos-bafana-squad-must-learn-from-springboks/

If you just read these sanitized, political correct articles, you would as a foreigner come to the conclusion that these exchanges on media are done with civility and reciprocated respect, when in reality it is nothing of the sort lmoa

=================

What ends up happening is that when some filthy mayo coach has the balls to offer advice or even his administrative services free of charge to transform the SAFA organization back into shape, they are immediately met with vitriol and resistance, and flaming on black safrican twitter.

Even star players like Percy Tau would suffer rebuke from his own racially wingcucked fans, for daring to suggest to emulate the "white" run sport of the Rugby Unions, and in order to regain public favor from their black peers sometimes have to fricking go as far as to utterly reject anything suggested by the historically oppressive Boers, EVEN if it would be detrimental to do so for themselves! EVEN if they themselves had the idea or notion to steer in that direction in the 1st place. To be contrarian to the white oppressors had become such manner of Inat or spiteful-stubbornness that it overwhelmes the original problem of SAFA's corruption to begin with.

And thus the corruption of SAFA goes unaddressed.

A similar example is when many Free State province white Chemical-Engineers would retire in almost every municipality in the country, and offer their black replacements in the period 0f 2005-2010, to personally train them and show them the ropes, and tell them important shit like the chemical compositions which Sewage Refinaries had to have with regards to chlorophyll to volume rations, because just throwing chlorophyll into the fricking sewage in conjunction with other chemical compounds would decisively not held in processing the sewage back into drinking water. AND THEY WERE ALWAYS REJECTED

All because it had come from white men. And it wasn't always just purely altruistic either, you drink the same tapwater regardless of your race, so there was logical reason for offfering your expertise.

And thus every EVERY single Free State municipality does not have potable water, when 30 years ago all of them did.

And I get it, to spite douchebags who fricked you over, and now seems to demean you must be humiliating, but this level of Inat is the ultimate expression of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Also @Aevann plz pin otherwise i will be anally r*ped by a rampaging horde of marauding Micks

I am a sucker for LEGO games, and once I heard that Hill Climb Adventure was getting a LEGO spin-off I was intrigued. I only played the first one and while it was fun, it didn't have a ton of depth. So I was pleased to find that this game actually has depth and a lot of content. One of the main midgame roadblocks is building new cars, so I thought I'd make a tier list talking about which ones players should prioritze. I have all but 2 cars, and so I feel comfortable breaking the ones I own down:

S Tier

Ace is far and away the best car in the game, in a game where the main hurdles are steep inclines and maining balance, a car that's great at both is a must build. Ace has amazing downforce that makes it easier to control than many other cars, and the speed helps it complete maps better than many other cars. It's only real weakness is that it's bad at getting air time, but that's solved with the other S tier.

Old School is really good for how early you can get it if you're smart. It was the 3rd car I unlocked, and it helped me unlock a bunch more cars that weren't as good. It is super lightweight, making it ideal for reaching high parts of a map. Once it picks up speed, it also goes extremely quick. This car also has the ability to go through roadblocks, but tbh that isn't a big deal and only makes the other car with this ability worthless. It does have one major weakness involving the fact it has poor grip and is thus bad at inclines if the car isn't already moving fast, but the Ace can do that.

A Tier

Hill Climber MK 2 is a fine car, and for being the starter one is pretty solid. As with any starter vehicle in a game like this, it does a bit of everything, and is a solid fallback if you don't have a lot of the specialist cars.

Race Car is a perfectly fine car, but it's actually harder to unlock than the Ace and is not quite as good in nearly every way. It is faster, but I find that isn't very useful.

B Tier

Bus is better than you might initially think, as it has good speed, control, and fuel. However the wheels being far from the sides of the car makes it a bit hard to control and I often find myself running over the passengers at the worst times.

C Tier

Cave Crawler is not a good car, it's slow and hard to control. However it has an exclusive gear item that is required for unlocking everything, so it can't be lower than C tier.

D Tier

Buggy has only one redeeming feature, it is unlocked early. Thus it has some use in the early game and is used in a decent number of side quests. However the car is really bad, with terrible controls and cannot stay grounded. The car is pretty much a new player trap, and should be dropped as soon as a better car is built.

F Tier

Hill Climber MK 1 is a funny concept, but it's worse than the Old School in every way, it's harder to control and has trouble staying grounded. I wish this car at least had some redeeming qualities, but it really doesn't. Even the ability to go through roadblocks is also given to Old School.

Monster is far and away the worst car in the game. It's slow, big, weak, and hard to control. It has literally no redeeming qualities. It is also one of the last cars you unlock, making it even worse. I can't think of a single good reason it's even in the game.

Law Rider and Hill Climber MK 3 are not included, as I haven't built those yet, my best guess is they are middle of the pack in terms of quality. !g*mers

Introduction

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. It is not known whether he is cricimcised or not. According to biographer Peter Whitmer, there was “a sort of indescribable charisma that Hunter exuded from an early age”, and his peers recognised the “unique sense of humour” that would come to characterise his writing. As a youth, Thompson was very interested in sports, and he played baseball while he attended I.N. Bloom Elementary School. During 1948 and 1949, he wrote and distributed a sports journ*lism newspaper for his neighbourhood, and it served as an outlet for both his love of writing and his love of sports. At the time, Thompson was only eleven, and his writing was “linear and to the point, but that would change as he gained more experience. When he was fourteen, his father, Jack Thompson, died from a rare neurological disorder known as myasthenia gravis. Jack's death had a profound impact on Thompson, and some believe that it is the reason why he “left behind the dream of becoming an athlete”.

Thompson's foray into experimenting with intoxicating substances began in high school when he started drinking alcohol. During this time, he also turned into a delinquent, and his stunts initially involved setting fire “to a small eatery where students went for lunch”, but they soon grew more violent and came to include:

>pouring sulphur across the top lockers at the Collegiate Girls School, and lighting it;

>appearing at the Athenaeum Christmas dance with an entire department of stolen festive lighting; flooding the first floor of the high school with three inches of water during an assembly;

>dumping a truckload of pumpkins at the entrance to the Brown Hotel,

>or chasing the history teacher, Mr. Gearhart, around the classroom, threatening to hang him out the window by his ankles.

Thompson's alcohol-fuelled antics eventually caught up to him, however, and he frequently found himself in trouble with the law during his senior years of high school, culminating in him spending sixty days in jail after being charged as an accessory to robbery. After spending some time in the Air Force, he settled in New York where his passion for literature grew. As Whitmer notes, Thompson would spend hours “reading and outlining The Great Gatsby”, just so he could understand its inner workings. The text was highly influential on Thompson, who would go on to write his own drug-fuelled version of the pursuit of the American Dream.

Thompson the Writer

Thompson's professional writing career started in 1959 when he began working as a journ*list for Daily Record, a newspaper in Middletown, New York. His time there was brief, however, and he soon relocated to South America, where he failed to find a scoop and advance his journ*lism because, as he discovered, “in Brazil, it is more than who you know: it is who you are related to, and how much money you can give to the cause”. In typical Thompson fashion, he entangled himself in legal issues after he was found with a .357 Magnum, and “it then took real diplomatic intervention to extract him from jail”. He returned to the USA in 1963, where he settled in San Francisco.

His return to the USA coincided with the crescendo of the hippie movement, and Thompson had a first-row seat to see it all unfold. He shared some of the ideals of the hippies, as he was anti-establishment, and was a “gourmand of psychedelics”, but he did not always have a high opinion of hippies, especially those of Haight-Ashbury whom he accused of being “lazy, apolitical, unmotivated by money, and totally lacking aggressiveness”, descriptions which they would have likely not contested. He crossed paths with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters but “his rancid attitude towards the unmotivated hippies, didn't allow him to fit naturally with the peace-loving pranksters for more than a few long drug-sodden weekend blasts”. Thompson voices his criticisms of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in Fear and Loathing, casting derision on their carefree philosophy. After a bad experience, the protagonist thinks of the hippie mantra “tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible”, and concludes that it is all “bad gibberish; not even Kesey can help me now”.

Thompson began building his reputation as an eccentric journ*list, and he developed a unique method that involved him using an audio recorder as the basis of the writing and using drugs when witnessing the events that he was reporting. He grew comfortable with what Whitmer terms “confabulation”, meaning he would “glean a few facts from his friends, splice it with his inimitable style, and phone in an article, all the while recovering from a terminal hangover”.

Thompson the Character

To some degree, it could be argued that the public persona of Hunter S. Thompson is a fictitious creation. Even if one accepts this argument, it should not be forgotten that the same could be argued of any public figure who is conscious that they are being watched and judged. Merely knowing one is being observed adds a performative element to one's actions. Throughout Thompson's antics, there is a sense that he is keenly aware of his public persona, as seen in his 2003 interview with Conan O'Brien which he does while drinking liquor, smoking, and shooting with rifles at his own books.

Thompson's self-awareness should not fool one into thinking there are no genuine aspects to the writer's legend. Although his criminal history before Fear and Loathing has been discussed, it should be noted that even with his newfound fame, he continued to get into trouble with the law, including in 1987 when he fired a shotgun at a golf ball on the Aspen Municipal Golf Course. His disdain for those in power is also displayed through the scathing articles he continued to write about politicians, including Clarence Thomas. This lifelong record of criminality suggests that his oppositional stance toward authority and his devil-may-care attitude are integral parts of Thompson that would have existed regardless of whether he became a bestseller and public figure or not.

The one aspect of Thompson that is certainly not made up is his copious drug use which eventually caught up to him. In his later years, his health deteriorated so badly that his physician told him: “You are dead. And you have been for two years!”. He died in 2005, at age 67, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It has been speculated that his copious drug use likely contributed to the depression that led to his suicide. The paradoxical legacy he leaves behind, as Whitmer summarises, is that of a “hillbilly high-school dropout with a half-dozen bestselling books to his name”.

Conclusion

There is not much more to be said. The man is a legend. I'm not going to cut myself today because I distracted myself with writing, although I can't stop thinking about sliding that razor on my skin. Tune in next time when I discuss Sodom and Gomorrah.

Great drama out of Poland as an upstart indie game developer apparently forces his all female staff to go in the sauna naked with him. It's so important to him that he has HR list it as a requirement on job listings:

But what was that sauna requirement even for? We know it's a game dev studio, so they must've been making a game, right? Some kind of tycoon/business sim type thing where you run a sauna?

Thanks to the outraged redditors at /r/g*mernews, we can pick up from the barrage of unfunny puns and other reddit tier shit that the studio was working on

a new groundbreaking game: mix of Life is Strange (Narrative ), Final Fantasy (story, characters ), Heart of Darkness (adventure levels with dog ), The Turyst (exploration and questing) and THPS2 (tricks and specials).” The “Main character will be a saunamaster and will be in charge of performing in various saunas (smells, music, choreography, everything)”

So they were working on absolute kino. As is usually the case some foid just had to ruin it for everyone

In a now viral LinkedIn exchange, Spectrum Studio creative director Jacek Piórkowski approached narrative designer and writer Aleksandra Wolna about working for his studio. Wolna replied to state Piórkowski had previously approached her about a job, and she had declined as it required her to agree to mandatory and reportedly naked sauna sessions.

On a separate LinkedIn thread, Piórkowski said this mandate "is not about getting naked", but rather experiencing different kinds of saunas. The developer said the "wetness" level inside certain saunas can get very high, and if someone was using a towel it "may result with fungal infection", which is why there are times participants are recommended to go in nude.

"You had a lot of time to prove me wrong. To write [a] scene in [a] sauna without being in sauna... Instead, we are wasting time on social media," Piorkowski replied. "My Narrative girls ?? had to go to [the] sauna with me to come up with [an] amazing script for proof of concept... Technically, it's possible to do it without it, but I absolutely adore the fact that they could use their sauna experience to write awesome scenes.

It's impossible to write fiction without actually doing the thing it describes so his explanations make perfect sense. Libtard woman owned

As the drama brew around him he quickly cucked out:

Piórkowski has now released a full statement regarding Spectrum Studio's sauna mandate. In a video shared on the studio's LinkedIn page, he apologised to Wolna. "I didn't intend to embarrass, hurt, offend, or show disrespect towards Ms Wolna. My choice of words was bad. I didn't state my intentions clearly. I didn't explain why taking a sauna is so important and practically essential for me," he said (thank you to Magdalena Kluj for translating).

"I wasn't expecting that it would be received as pretentious and cause negative connotations." He noted his use of "narrative girls" was wrong, and meant only to convey the narrative team at that time was all female.

Piórkowski further spoke of how "passionate" he is about the sauna experience. "In recruiting, I took an iron rule about talking saunas and people's openness to this experience," he stated. "I am looking for people equally passionate about the culture of taking saunas and open to experiences that are part of that culture. I believe that personal experience of a subject helps with understanding the sauna culture."

Piórkowski continued: "I agree that the words I chose could be perceived that it was encouraging to take a sauna session with the company boss; it was not my intention. I proposed and am still proposing candidates to [experience] the sauna session female only and male only, as long it reflects the real sauna experience."

Full video is on https://www.linkedin.com/company/spectrum-studios-games/; I'm a shut in NEET loser and have no need for a Linkedin account so I won't repost it cause I can't see it

Other redditors were being typical reddit smug and dismissive to each other over this

-2 | What I wanna know, is what if one of them said "nah. Not going in the sauna, email me the details." If they were then reprimanded, okay, I can understand the outrage. But can you weaklings stop just enduring uncomfortable scenarios and then rushing to social media to complain about them? Tell people no for fricks sake.

Do you know what the word mandatory means?

Yeah it's a word that spineless people cower at, because they couldn't imagine themselves just telling their boss "no."

"Heya boss, I understand this is mandatory, but I'm not comfortable in a sauna setting. I'm sure you can forward me the details from it and I can give feedback where appropriate."

Just... grow up.

Just risk losing your job in a shitty low paying branch of a industry in a hiring crisis because your boss is a weird butt neighbor. Sure

No, no. The person setting up mandatory Sauna meetings is in the wrong here not the person maybe or maybe not standing up against it. It should never be needed to stand up to a mandatory Sauna meeting because Sauna meetings aren't appropiate.

Yeah yeah... except the real world is filled with moronic, overstepping bosses that will pull all sorts of nonsense bullshit. And they get away with it so often, because their employees have no spine, and freak the frick out over the smallest confrontation.

Being an expat in Finland, I don't see how this is weird. Simply a cultural thing here.

This is not normal in Poland at all. A job requirement for a woman to be naked in a sauna with her boss is nothing short of sexual assault

Polacks are backward prudish imbeciles who cannot appreciate the culture of sitting in a hot room with your peepee and balls out

-13 | It's a cultural thing. Nothing weird about it.

Headline writer had the perfect opportunity to say the studio was "in hot water", and I am a little disappointed that they didn't take it.

Except saunas are steam not hot water

You sure it's not smoke?

34 | Isn't steam just very hot water though...

-14 | It's the gasious form of water

This redditor is already mad at the people he imagines he will disagree with once they say the wrong things:

Watch as some "anti-woke" grifter picks up this story and attempts to somehow defend this as a normal behavior, either by saying that the women fully consented to it or even going on about "double-standards" and that nobody would bat an eye if it was a female director requesting the same of her male employees.

This redditor and others like him immediately conjure a conspiracy straight out of pornhub:

215 | Nah, this is freak-butt behavior. I would have that sauna checked for hidden cameras immediately, no way is this not just a ploy to film naked women.

Oh yeah there's a hidden camera in there 200%.

This redditor has the kind of faith in people from the tech world that I can't offer after the whole SBF s*x cult thing

Yeah, while the message does have a whole neckbeardy setup to it, it's also written in a tone that comes across as both non-ironic and straight enough that i can sincerely believe that this guy has just some really, really, really terrible common sense and doesn't realize he comes across as a new-age esque "visionary" with more quirks than skills going to him and as a creep, abuser-in-the-making at worst.

It wouldn't be reddit if it didn't have a bunch of self-hating mayo Americans coughing it up to being the r-slurred burger brain being unable to comprehend the sophisticated European mind Courtesy of /r/LinusTechTips:

lol Americans and their fear of bodies. This is normal in half or Europe

I'm not defending “mandatory” or “require”, and I know the industry is pretty gross when men don't stand up for women in the workplace, but:

“We're doing a game about Sauna Sessions. I don't want to waste my time to explain what's the difference between Ruska Bania or Dry Sauna. You have to feel it.” He then offered to “even organize female only event”.

It would be interesting to see what the rest of the talking points were from someone who isn't a games journ*list.

Edit: “Piorkowski wrote in another post that they are able to organize female-only events, which they already did.” - it is interesting that the original article seems to suggest it was offered after the fact, but this article says they already did female-only events. Curious that was left out, but TechSpot isn't typically a “mecha of accuracy”, so we'll see.

It would be interesting to see what the rest of the talking points were from someone who isn't a games journ*list.

I'm sorry if this is harsh, but frick this shit you said specifically. I know you said "I'm not defending" but it doesn't matter what his reasoning is. Mandatory nudity at a workplace is fricking disgusting from every single angle. You shouldn't need to see anything else.

This is the biggest “America is the only country” statement I've ever heard an American say. I doubt this would have made the news in their country, especially after the article said: “He then offered to “even organize female only event”.”

Yeah molesting women in the workforce is so common in Poland we report it between the price of barley and delays of the TLK. Also believing the obvious copout

“Mandatory nudity at a workplace is fricking disgusting from every single angle.”

I don't recall reading in the article that nudity was mandatory. Can you find that for me? Unless you're just trolling? Which is unhelpful. Since you weren't there your anger seems biased and inaccurate.

The second screenshot of his posts in the article is devoted to him arguing why you have to be naked.

Please actually read the screenshot though. It doesn't mandate nudity. It outlines why nudity is preferred in different types of saunas.

Splitting hairs a bit. It's a mandatory trip to a sauna that he then argues greatly that you should be naked for. It's still a boss telling an employee that they definitely have to go to a sauna that they are expected to be naked in.

Which is why I specifically used the words “It would be interesting to see what the rest of the talking points were from someone who isn't a games journ*list.”

You are assuming from a photo, someone's intent. Using words they didn't use. That's a reach I can't make.

This slapfight continues but it's so read it here

In another comment chain we've got (a slapfight about the belittling of women through the usage of the word "girls" )[https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1djxw2m/game_dev_requiring_mandatory_sauna_sessions_with/l9f1jjr/?context=8].

Why does he call his writing team his “narrative girls”

Strong chance they write narratives and are all girls.

Girls as in underage? Because otherwise they would be called women… also, why the frick all the people hired to write narratives are women?? If that's not the case, then only women who were hired to write the narratives were invited to go to the sauna with this creep?

Is it me or are people actually trying to defend this peepeehead?

Yeah frick this guy for giving too many women jobs

When I hang out with the boys, I'm also referring to men.

What? Are you referring to your work colleagues as boys?

That's actually not all that uncommon, yes.

People are purposefully missing the point of an employer referring to women employees as “girls” as a way to infantilise them. People also don't understand the affects of infantilisation of women in society, which leads to behaviours such as the one described in the title of this post. And we wonder why this behaviour is so prevalent :) just look at the downmarseys I received. In my comment you replied to, I was trying to understand what the other person even tried to say, ie, are they saying they often “hang out with their work colleagues while referring to them as boys”? Is he the employer? Does he have any power over these men? Nope. Its relevance to this conversation is little but it is done to normalise calling adult women as girls because it's easier to assert control over women this way. :)

Watch me get downmarseys and a stream of irrelevant comments.

The smileys is what really got me with this one

You're getting down voted because you're refusing to acknowledge that there are some cultures that are different from your own. I to come from a culture where men and women (adults)refer to themselves and others as boys/girls.

If I tell you that this is infantilising and it leads to behaviour such as this one, your reply is saying “but that's normal in those cultures”? All my other questions also get ignored because of course they would be, because no one has any answers to them.

There is also a thread over on /r/LinkedInLunatics but it has no drama, only some dramatard trying to bait but getting nothing but downmarseys

Finishing up going back to the game developer lady in question, if you look at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aleksandra-wolna-6736a1227_gamedev-activity-7181246336204226560-0C_G she's just lost her job and is probably fishing for attention to get some eyeballs on her resume. Apparently she was never even his employee, she just got him to pay for some writing course and he tried to get her entangled with the weird final fantasy sauna gooner shit. Gotta get that bag somehow I guess

A man named Joseph Neibich sued Reddit for defamation with intent to unmask 50 anonymous /r/Screenwriting members, but, unsurprisingly, he failed. He then tried to have this case sealed, but, once again, he was denied. So, now, he has actually hired people to create positive posts about how totally amazing he is in order to manipulate algorithms about his case and his /r/Screenwriting harassment on search engines.

Below is the original drama from 2021:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/l5cbbs/rscreenwriting_under_fire_as_a_screenplay_contest/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/mkfuuz/fyi_these_screenwriting_contests_operated_by_a/

Screenwriters flagged a group of scam contests that exploited aspiring writers by race, gender, sexuality, religion, and/or location for $50+ per entry and then posted warnings on /r/Screenwriting. The contest manager, a fledgling middle-aged screenwriter from Arizona, threatened to sue Reddit if the original posts weren't removed. The moderators stood their ground and case 20STCV10291 was filed in an LA Circuit Court. Over the course of 2 years, that contest manager harassed /r/screenwriting members, both on social media and by calling them personally once he learned their true identities that had been hidden behind the JOHN/JANE DOE ones.

The case lagged on until the contest manager and other parties settled out of court, and it was dismissed in 2021. The contest manager hired online reputation services to remove any mention of his name in case 20STCV10291 from the internet. For example: Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx v. Reddit Inc - Trellis Law or Santa Clara Law's Digital Commons.

Long after Reddit was dismissed in this legal case, the contest manager continued to harass one of /r/Screenwriting's moderators, who then posted the following warning:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/ntxqul/important_if_you_have_been_harassed_by_joseph/

Nobody really cared about this lawsuit anymore. That is, until 2023, when Reddit admins posted Reddit's Defense of Section 230 to the Supreme Court, which actually referenced the original /r/SubredditDrama post linked above.

TL;DR: The Supreme Court is hearing for the first time a case regarding Section 230, a decades-old internet law that provides important legal protections for anyone who moderates, votes on, or deals with other people's content online.

Now, this embarrassing old legal case - 20STCV10291 Neibich v. Reddit - would actually be referenced by the largest court in the United States.

To update /r/Screenwriting about the Reddit Amicus Brief, moderator /u/wemustburncarthage posted the thread /r/Screenwriting mentioned in the Reddit Amicus Brief to SCOTUS. She mentioned some context about the contest manager's ongoing behavior:

He has stalked, harassed and defamed many of us for calling out his fraud, and while some of us were lucky to receive pro bono legal representation (me included, thanks to the support mentioned in this brief) not all of us had that option, and were put to unjust expense.

A lot of us are still recipients of his obnoxious attention seeking behaviour, hedged under the guise of his delusional belief in his own importance as an industry player. He's not an industry player. He's a citation in a landmark US Supreme Court case, forever enshrined in that legal history, defined in precisely the character he deserves.

Later in 2023, the contest manager decides to file a Request to Seal Records in order to completely hide his case from the public. While that's going on, something weird begins to happen on Reddit...

The username /u/JeffreyJosephNeibich was registered on Reddit and is quickly suspended before he can post anything (because any user name with josephneibich in it is automatically suspended).

/u/JeffreyJosNeibich (now suspended) then pops up instead and begins to spam their user page with random positive facts about the contest manager (all of these have now been deleted, of course):

His love for animals:

Love helping animals get adopted with my hubby Jeffrey Joseph Neibich

Hiking trips with his fictitious wife, "Hillary":

Hillary L Neibich is camping with Jeffrey Joseph Neibich at HorseShoe Bend

And, of course, helping the homeless:

Joseph Neibich took his only day off last week to help a homeless woman find housing.

(The only comment on the post about was from him, and it simply said "Yea." This dude genuinely thought that confirming a post that he himself made would lend it credibility. I also love that he imagines that he's a great script writer, yet that's the best fake story that he could invent to venerate himself. It legitimately reads like North Korean propaganda for Kim Jong-Un.)

Once the contest manager's request to seal all records was denied by the LA Court, a new subreddit popped up in the hopes of overshadowing negative search results from Google:

/r/JosephNeibich (now set to private) - "All about the life and works of Joseph Neibich"

Posts were made on the subreddit such as:

Life and Work of Joseph Neibich

Joseph Neibich's journey in the film industry is a story of passion, creativity, and hard work. From his early days in marketing at...

Biography of Joseph Neibich:

Joseph started his career in film in 1997, when he moved to Los Angeles and began working in marketing at Paramount Pictures. This experience...

Joseph Neibich Charity Works

...and so forth.

Try it for yourself by searching for "reddit neibich" on Google. Instead of information about the previously mentioned case, you're instead greeted with results about how wonderful and amazing this heroic human being is.

The posts on /r/JosephNeibich came with totally legitimate comments from completely real Redditors such as...

/u/Fresh-Ad8642 (now suspended):

I like it I like it

I like

I like

I like it

/u/Sweet_Peet_Scotch (now suspended):

So great and powerful

So great and powerful

So great and powerful

/u/Intelligent-Love6969 (now suspended):

Silly love

/u/Street-Ad-6308:

Joseph Neibich is great consumer advocate! I love it.

And some other totally earnest new Reddit accounts who just happened to only post about Joseph Neibich:

/u/Academic-CatLover (now suspended)

/u/SeaworthyDiver676

/u/DesignerMortgage9799

/u/TinyWarrior4Love

In other words, a Redditor has been hired by Joseph Neibich to post on /r/JosephNeibich in order to make Joseph Neibich look better on Google search results. Right before that user began posting about Neibich, however, they only concentrated on OnlyFans updates.

A parody subreddit, /r/JosephNeib-word (get it? ), has also been set up.

Will it work? Or will Joseph Neibich go back to his old ways where he is emailing moderators threatening legal action? Whatever happens, we know one thing: it will be far more entertaining than any script that Neibich could ever write.

Gay Sissy Hypno Porn Addiction & The Black New World Order

SVTZX is a user from Israel who used to be active on the Worlds most Prolific Dating-site for Trans-identifying Virgins (often shortened by the acronym WPDtv) around half a year ago, frequently appearing in the site's chat to "talk" with other users, most often just by sharing his love for BWO (the Black World Order) fetish porn by spamming gifs and videos of black men waving their third leg at the screen, which was extremely annoying to everyone else who were actually trying to use the chat as a chill space to hang out and talk, and most importantly, not have their eyes molested by musty, veiny, thick b-black... c-peepee 🤤. The Black World Order for those who aren't familiar with chronic porn addiction is the idea that black men are superior to other humans (based) and shall be worshipped by all (BASED), with white women and effeminate white males serving essentially as their lifelong s*x slaves (BASED!!!) forced to obey their every bidding (BASED!!!). A regular google search of this users @ will bring up their activity on other platforms doing the exact same thing, most notably his twitter where he (or they/xe) would spam repost sissy hypnosis. Sissy hypnosis, again for those who arent chronic gooners, is a genre of porn where the watcher is encouraged to basically lobotomise themselves and just submit to whatever the video wants them to, that mainly being transforming themselves into feminine little twinks or encouraging the viewer to do a gender transition by undergoing estrogenic hormone replacement therapy. What do the letters SVTZX in his username stand for you may ask? I have no clue but my best guess would probably be something like Sweaty Virgin Tranny Zionist with an Xvideos-addiction.

Here he can be seen being downmarseyd in reddit sissy and Osu! discussion boards, bragging about making women uncomfortable. And there's also some boring FBI-related groomercord messages but I don't understand cause it's in Chinese or smth idk.

Here is a 30+ year old woman receiving her very first message ever from this user with no prior interactions. Is this W rizz? (User is in present day 18+ years old)

I'm A Hacker Bro

The second most annoying thing about our queer little israelite was his cringe obsession with being perceived as this genius hacker master who could do anything he wanted on computers, which on a website as modular as this one, whose code is developed by essentially just a single capybara, got very annoying very fast. Here he is purposefully changing the colour of his name while still in chat, which in a previous version of the site was an exploit that would update your name in the sidebar of active users in the chat by adding a new one, clogging it up and forcing you to scroll to see who was actually there to just chat.

Here he is ripping my entire CSS by just right-clicking on my profile and pasting it into his own, practically impersonating me since he now had my giant butt name displayed on the top of his profile. I even told him I could make something for him if he just gave me directions or he could ask someone else for help, but before he even described what he wanted, his neurodivergent impatient butt just stole the whole thing. Thanks to Vaporeon for making me such a sexy CSS that was literally irresistible to others <3.

Another thing he would do is always pestering admins by digging through the site code and critiquing shit he clearly knew nothing about, and thinking he was so smart for looking at the repository so he could "leak" content, such as Marseys, that were coming in future updates. Like wow bro you got access to their open source code you are such an epic h4ck3r haha 1337 amirite? It's like opening the inspect panel to impress your local r-slur into thinking you are stealing their credit card info through their pornhub account or something. The only things he is confirmed to have actually hacked are Roblox and Osu! which isn't really hacking anyways, just installing a script someone else already made. He bragged about doing this on reddit but I didn't take screenshots of all of it and I'm too tired to go do it now. And also wow, copying code someone else already made? I'm having Deja vu here. Imagine hacking in Roblox too lmao. And yes, this guy plays Osu!, a game notorious for having creeps and p-dophiles in it's community (Foreshadowing for next chapter lol), and even this community manages to hate him.

Sending Porn to a 12 Year Old and Touching Animals

This israelites personal October 7th attack would come in the form of him sending his degenerate black world order sissy hypnosis porn to a minor, getting him banned. Not only would he send this degenerate shit to someone he knew was a minor, but would also defend it as being funny, and also blaming the victim in the situation, who mind you, was only 12 years old. You know you are doing some freaky shit when user Vivid here (who was also banned for grooming I think? idk its a long story so don't quote me on that... actually don't quote me on anything) is the voice of reason.

He would also admit by himself to touching animals inappropriately.

Unban Me Please & Present Day

Obviously sending porn to a 12 year old got him the ban he deserved, but he certainly didn't agree with that. He started off by sending coin donations to admins with messages attached asking for unbans, and also for whatever reason to, me. I am not an admin, I don't have the power to unban him so I'm not sure why he would do this, but let me make it clear SVTZX, if you are reading this; Why the frick would I ever help you? If you were drowning, I would throw you a fricking barbell. Go away you silly little gooner.

When this didn't work, he tried to buy his way back in with bitcoin, almost getting scammed by another user posing as an admin over groomercord. I'm not sure what the Jewish life has taught him, but bitcoin and dollars won't bribe anyone 'round these parts buddy, only cold hard marseybucks .

After almost getting scammed didn't work, he took to twitter and used the same account he uses for retweeting black new world order sissyfication porn to spam the rDrama twitter account with unban requests

Failing to get unbanned through using his gooning account to spam the admins, he quite recently went back to sending coin donations with messages attached asking to get unbanned just a few days ago, which is what inspired me to make this post cause ppl were asking who he was. (He did this cause the transaction log still displays transfers from shadowbanned accounts, or at least it used to, not sure how it works now). Here he can be seen being told to piss off by site admin G-tix, but having a look in his social credit log will prove that he did not in fact piss off, making this story a still ongoing one up till this day.

Sorry for the kinda neurodivergent way this whole post is written. It was originally pooblished for a different audience long ago but got taken down ;( so every instance referring to "present day" and such is gonna be a bit longer ago, but either way I hope you guys appreciated this pride month femboy friday special. Thank you for reading

For legal/rule-compliance reasons: This post is purely for comedic/educational purposes only and (even though this user sent sissy hypno to a minor and molested animals) does not condone any harassment of the people mentioned. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. None of the information included is personally identifiable and all of it was and remains publically available online.

Is gooning based or cringe? What does SVTZX stand for? Not sure what moral there is to this story but lmk what u guys think about all this in the comments.

!transphobes !coomers !chuds

I would like to believe that if you bothered to read all this you've learned something that you can apply to the rest of the world. Because the whole world is fricked up in the same ways that Lebanon is. It's just way worse there. A few things I've learned in my time researching the subject:

One of the first things you'll hear in any mayo midwit's account of what's going on in the Middle East is that all the conflicts are due to "ancient hatreds". Everything would be solved if these barbarian savages would just give up their grudges they've been holding on to since medieval times. That would be a very convenient way to explain everything and make us feel good about ourselves because we're too civilized to have ancient hatreds. The problem is, it doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. How was every faction allied with practically every other faction at some point in those 15 years if they can't let go of their hatred? By the end, even the Lebanese Forces and Palestinians who had started the war in the first place were allies. Walid Joumblatt worked for the guy who killed his father for decades. If anything, the Lebanese are notable for how forgiving they are. When they fight each other it's because that makes sense to them in the immediate situation. People in Lebanon have always had many good reasons in the present to fight each other without needing any ancient hatreds.

Kamal Joumblatt with his sister, Linda al-Atrash. Bashir Gemayel found out which Christian thugs killed her and offered him their names. He was like "nah, forget about it ".

Unfortunately, while most people feel compelled to participate in violence by the situation they're stuck in, some just like the violence. No matter how perfect your society is, you're going to have a certain number of sociopaths who just have no interest in the good of the community. They'll do anything they can to get ahead. That's why it's important for society to figure out how to control them. We have to make sure that killing and stealing isn't worth it. In Lebanon, the government institutions that normally keep evil people in line fell apart. When society is broken up into a bunch of little 500-man militias, it's extremely difficult to hold criminals accountable. There were dozens of cease-fires in the Lebanese Civil War and all but the last one broke down. Usually it was because some low-ranking guy wanted the war to continue so he started shooting.

When you don't keep your people under control, this is what happens.

The breakdown of public order is most obvious in kidnappings and assassinations, the two things Lebanon was most famous for. It began at the start of the war when checkpoints were set up and people were caught on the wrong side of the lines from home. Why not shake them down a little? But without law enforcement it quickly became obvious that you just grab someone and demand a ransom. If they kidnapped one of your people, often the best solution was to kidnap one of theirs to swap. It spirals out of control very fast. Likewise, it didn't take long for the militias to realize that during the many cease-fires that made up most of the 15 years, you could just drive into your enemy's neighborhood and shoot him at his front door. As security got better you needed to [put a bomb on his car](https://, and when they kept all their cars in garages you had to put a huge bomb in the trunk of another car and detonate it as he drove by. Investigating these bombings during a civil war was impossible (and isn't much easier in our time so the only way to respond was to guess which militia was responsible and bomb them. We'll never know how many times a third party assassinated someone to push two rival groups into war.

TWA Flight 847, June 1985. Eventually simple kidnapping isn't enough. If you've got dozens of prisoners held by your enemies, hijack an airplane and grab dozens of hostages to trade for them.

My main conclusion is that nobody has fixed Lebanon yet because it's really really hard to. If there was an easy solution someone would have figured it out by now. Everyone knows that to make any fundamental change the system that pits the sects against each other must be broken. Many people with good intentions have tried. All of them failed. Most of them were killed. We can't expect to see anyone succeed in our generation. But maybe the Lebanese of today can go part of the way, rooting out corruption and building ties across sectarian lines. Their children could be the ones who finally break out of the cycle.

Sep 9, 1982. The US Marines' mission had been a complete success, escorting the Palestinian troops to their evacuation ships. The 15 day assignment had been carried out without bloodshed. They would be back 20 days later on an open-ended mission that was not accomplished.

So what can we do from the outside to help? The Americans came with good intentions but that wasn't enough. The Israelis came with overwhelming force and that wasn't enough. In the end it was the Syrians who finally imposed their ending on the civil war. They had what the other powers lacked: the willingness to get their hands dirty. I don't just mean violence (although that is one part of it), I mean being willing to spend money and energy, to kill whoever is in the way, to send your own people to their deaths. And you have to be willing to do that year after year, however long it takes. The Syrians had that because Lebanon had to function in order for Syria to function. Despite being a small, poor, backward country, Syria managed to outlast all its rivals because Lebanon was that important to them.

Syrian troops enter Beirut, November 1976. They came to help at first. By the end of the war they had fought the Palestinians, Christians, Israelis, and occasionally their supposed allies.

So to answer the question, the first thing we need to do before we try to help is to ask ourselves what kind of commitment we're willing to make. For almost all of us, Lebanon is just a little country far away that doesn't have the slightest impact on our lives. We're just not going to sacrifice as much to impose our will there as Syria or Israel or the main regional powers. We've got to be realistic and only get involved if we've got the patience to keep up that level of involvement for years. Sending in the Marines now might solve a short-term crisis, but it's not going to get to the root of Lebanon's problems because they can't stay there long enough.

The ruins of the US Marine barracks, Oct 23, 1983. An expertly-driven suicide truck bomb leveled the building, kill 241 men. The same day a similar attack against the French killed 58.

At this point, we can probably do the most good by going after money laundering. The corrupt elite have drained enormous amounts of money from Lebanon and stashed it in Europe. If we cut that flow they won't keep getting richer and more powerful. If we find the money they've already laundered and seize it, we cut their balls off and get the cash to fund reconstruction at the same time. When corruption isn't so obscene we can make cautious investments in rebuilding infrastructure, especially targeting projects that force the different sects to cooperate to benefit from it. We can train and equip a Lebanese Army capable of maintaining order and also deterring the aggression of Syria and Israel. Whatever we do, we need to know what our limit is and not get sucked into trying to do more. Maybe with that help, the Lebanese can save themselves.

Nobody is more Lebanese than the Joumblatt clan. They could not have grown out of any other environment, and perhaps Lebanon as we know it wouldn't exist without them. Before I can explain who these people are, first I have to explain what a Druze is.

Don't worry, I'll be quick. Little can be known for certain about the Druze religion so I can't take too long anyway. It is highly secretive, passed down through the generations to select initiates so even most Druze don't fully know what it's about. At various times they have pretended to be Christian or Muslim to escape persecution which muddies the waters even more. Their most famous belief known by outsiders is reincarnation. They believe that their souls will be reborn in Druze of the next generation and so on. Like so many other ethnoreligious groups in the Middle East, they do not intermarry with outsiders so they have remained distinct for a thousand years or more. Their origins are debated and that's a story for another time.

The Druze were already here when the Crusaders arrived and built Beaufort castle overlooking their lands.

The Druze mostly settled in the Jabal Druze region of modern Syria and the southern part of Mount Lebanon, where they were mixed with Christians. They were ruled by a few dominant families. The Joumblatts are believed to have migrated from Kurdistan in the 1600s and somehow become one of them. Since then they have competed with other clans like the Arslans and Shehabs, but by the mid 20th Century at least they have been undisputed kings of the Druze more or less. They also had power as feudal landowners like those who ruled over the other sects. Their control of the Druze people and territory is so complete that when another faction leader said "Walid Joumblatt could move to Brazil tomorrow and he would still be leader of the Druze" he was not exaggerating.

Mukhtara Palace, far up in the heights of the Chouf, the ancestral home of the Joumblatts.

1975

This very medieval community adapted well to modern times. Kamal Joumblatt emerged as one of the most powerful political figures in Lebanon when it gained independence. He founded what is called the Progressive Socialist Party, but it is not really a political party, just a front for the Druze so they can engage in modern parliamentary politics. His abilities were recognized in the nation as a whole, and as civil war approached he became leader of the Lebanese National Movement, an alliance of groups that were Muslim or leftist opposing the Christian-only Lebanese Forces alliance on the other side. They demanded that the Christian elites give up their stranglehold on power and give equality to Muslims. The LNM's military forces, including a fairly disciplined Druze militia, were not that impressive but politically it represented the Sunnis, Druze, and many Shi'a and Christians as well. This broad base of domestic support let him rely on the Palestinians to provide most of the firepower backing him up.

Kamal's daughter Linda el-Atrash lived in East Beirut. A few of Chamoun's goons didn't want non-Christians living there so they murdered her.

The LNM was also supported to some extent by Syria. Hafez Assad, himself a leftist Muslim revolutionary in his younger days, sympathized with them and wanted to see them carve away some power from the Christians. He imported weapons from the Soviet bloc and then passed them on to the groups in the LNM and the Palestinians. But Assad and Joumblatt did not see eye to eye on everything. Joumblatt wanted to break the back of the Maronite elite that had dominated Lebanon since the French occupation and make sure it never could rise again. Assad only wanted to weaken them, not to win a total victory. He tried to explain that in a country like Lebanon you could not win through brute military force, no matter how strong.

1980

Kamal Joumblatt was dead. He came so close to victory that he refused to compromise. Finally, with East Beirut in danger of being surrounded, the Syrians invaded to stop him and took over most of the country. In 1977 his car was ambushed on a narrow mountain road in his native Chouf region and he was gunned down. There have been many suggestions thrown out of who pulled the trigger and what exactly their motive was, but we can assume that Assad approved of the hit because Joumblatt basically was not being a team player.

Walid Joumblatt, 1978.

His son Walid succeeded him. Walid has been described as "eccentric". He was a young playboy who enjoyed the status that his father's position had given him but hardly seemed capable of filling his shoes. But he was more shrewd than he was given credit for. As soon as his formal mourning period had ended, he immediately went to Damascus to show his fealty to the man who had just killed his father. As long as Assad was the most powerful man in Lebanon, Joumblatt would be on his side.

In his later days he looked a lot like Radnor, the mentat of House Harkonnen in Dune 2.

1985

Joumblatt had gotten through the Israeli invasion practically unscathed. Recognizing that overnight the Israelis had become the dominant power, he reached out to them through the Druze community in Israel and offered free passage through his strategically vital territory. But now they were evacuating troops from his homeland, the Chouf. The Lebanese Forces were coming to massacre the Druze population until they fled, leaving the district to the Christians alone. Walid sent his own troops to reverse this process.

As soon as the Israelis pulled out of the Chouf, fighting broke out.

Joumblatt was a big player in Beirut as well. With a loyal militia and control of strategic heights overlooking the city, he proved a useful ally to the bigger factions. When the US-backed government collapsed, the PSP rushed into West Beirut along with Amal and Syria's other allies. As Amal began the War of the Camps against Fatah, these allies began to pursue their own ends in a bewildering series of betrayals and surprise attacks. Joumblatt did not rely as much on Syria as Amal did. He managed to maintain good relations with many of Syria's enemies, including Fatah, and even distant powers like the Soviet Union. This gave him some wiggle room when dealing with Assad.

The Druze tore down a Lebanese flag in Beirut and replaced it with theirs, provoking a war with Amal. West Beirut was devastated yet again. I'm not sure anybody knew what the heck they were fighting for in this one.

1990

The chaotic battles over West Beirut were now calming down as General Aoun emerged as a real threat to the entire system the militias operated in. One of his key aims early on was take control of or blockade the many small ports controlled by militias. Most of their income came from smuggling through these, and the Druze were no exception. Joumblatt now joined with the other faction leaders and Syria to face this new threat.

Jounieh in better times. This was one of the small ports used by the militias, in this case the Lebanese Forces.

The Druze did well in the Taif negotiations. The Christians, Sunnis, and Shi'a took the three most important offices in the government, but Joumblatt ended up in a position to steer large amounts of graft to the Druze and his cronies in the form of jobs and government investments. In a country where power is exerted through patronage not violence, Joumblatt was in his element.

Walid made it to the end of the war without being assassinated but there were attempts, like this one in 1982 that nearly killed him.

Epilogue

Joumblatt had a great deal of power in the new Syrian-dominated government. He was able to stretch his tentacles into bureaucracies, businesses, and real estate far from his mountain stronghold. In what can only be called a sick joke, he was made Minister for Refugees even though he had made many of them refugees in the first place by ethnically cleansing Christians from the Chouf.

If Kamal Joumblatt died because he was too rigid in his beliefs, Walid has survived because he's the ultimate pragmatist. No ordinary person could ever hope to follow all the machinations of the warlords-turned-politicans in dark smoke-filled rooms, but you could be pretty sure that whatever side he was on was winning. Partly this was because of the political and economic power he wielded, but it was mostly just because he always flipped to whatever side was stronger. He can swing back and forth like a pendulum in a matter of weeks.

Meeting with Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah during one of the many periods when he was temporarily Walid's bestie.

Joumblatt made one big gamble after the war, one which committed him to a certain path he couldn't back out of. In 2005, the Cedar Revolution broke out and Syria finally pulled its troops out of Lebanon. He believed that this was part of a great upheaval across the region, with the US invasion of Iraq and the growing assertiveness of its Gulf allies. In an uncharacteristic mistake, he drank the neocons' koolaid. He switched over to the anti-Syrian side and vocally denounced the Assad regime. Now, after 28 years, most of them spent allied with Syria, he suddenly was angry over his father's murder. But he had miscalculated. Far from spreading American influence across the region, the superpower was so tied up in Iraq that it lost power throughout the region, with Iran filling in part of the void. The next year Israel blundered its way into a major war with Hezbollah that it was not prepared for and suffered a humiliating defeat. In 2008 Joumblatt made a bold attempt to seize the fiber optic network that Hezbollah used to communicate with its troops. He didn't have the force to back it up. Hezbollah hardly even needed to fight as its allies trounced the PSP and Sunni militias in a few days. Later on the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War seemed to offer opportunities but in the end the alliance of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran remains in a dominant position over Lebanon.

Joumblatt with Bashar al-Assad, 2010. You didn't think they'd stay mad, did you? They reconciled somewhat when it was clear that Hezbollah couldn't be defeated.

Joumblatt has now retired to smoke hashish and shitpost on Twitter from his mountain stronghold. There are different ways you could judge him. His scheming and backstabbing only made the civil war worse for the nation and his corruption in peacetime has kept it impoverished. But if you judge him as the leader of the Druze, it's hard to say anyone could have done better. He guided his tiny sect of a few hundred thousand people surrounded by dangerous enemies on all sides through a generation of war and crisis. In the end they were exactly where they started, still living in their ancestral homeland. Many other factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War can only wish they had broken even.

Walid and Oscar.

Let me introduce the only distinction among the Palestinians that matters to you: Fatah vs. everyone else.

Fatah was founded by Palestinian exiles in 1959. At first it was just a pawn of the Egyptians, but when Egypt suffered the shocking humiliation of the Six Day War, it was able to wiggle its way out. With the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza many more Palestinians fled to refugee camps in the other Arab countries. Fatah managed to steal the credit for a Jordanian victory and the legend of the Palestinian fedayeen was born. It became a relatively independent organization. Of course it relied on donors from the Gulf States and Soviet bloc aid but it had enough patrons that it didn't fall into the control of any one of them. Fatah's leader Yasser Arafat tried to speak for the movement as a whole, but he could do little to restrain the other groups.

The Arabs had assumed that always assumed that Egypt would eventually roll up its sleeves and wipe out Israel once and for all. With the Egyptians humbled, there was desperate need of a new symbol of resistance.

Many Palestinians fled to refugee camps in Lebanon during the Nakba. As time passed and there was no hope of returning home in sight, the refugee camps became densely-packed slums. They were fortified and networks of secret tunnels were dug underneath, neccessary precautions since the Israelis bombed them ocasionally. All of the Palestinian groups I'm going to write about here were born in this environment: awful living conditions, no honest jobs, constant harrassment by the Israelis and the police of whatever country they were in. Many Palestinians would do just about anything for a job to feed their family, and if you weren't hired to work in the Gulf States then joining a militia was pretty much all you could do.

Nasser loved watching Esther Williams swim around. He had American diplomats bring him the reel when a new one came out. Maybe he should have been paying more attention to his air force, am I right!

Besides Fatah there was an alphabet soup of other Palestinian militias that claimed to be socialist revolutionaries, many of them doing the bidding of a certain foreign state: PFLP (Syria), PFLP-GC (Syria), as-Saiqa (Syria), Fatah Intifada (Syria), PLA (Syria) DFLP (Soviet Union), PCP (Soviet Union), ALF (Iraq), Abu Nidal's gang (Syria then Libya then Iraq). Most were splinter groups of the PFLP or Fatah that began when one subordinate commander decided he didn't like taking orders. Their foreign patrons gave them enough money to hire soldiers so they had an importance far greater than their support among the population.

PFLP fedayeen, 1969. These guys are supposed to replace Egypt?

These groups were responsible for most of the spectacular terrorist attacks seen in the West. Any time Arafat tried to negotiate, one of them would do an attack to embarrass him. (Fatah did do terrorism as well, including some of the worst cases.)

Hijacker Leila Khaled. She raised a lot of eyebrows in the West but nothing she did brought her people any closer to freedom.

1975

After being driven from Jordan in 1970 for trying to take over the country, the Palestinian leaders took up residence in Lebanon. This obviously caused a lot of consternation among Lebanese and Arafat had a hard enough time just trying to get the different groups to stop shooting each other in the refugee camp. He knew that this was their last chance. If they were driven from Lebanon they would have nowhere to turn. Arafat tried to keep the situation from completely spiraling out of control, but the other factions would not stop provoking the natives. The location of the camps around Beirut made it virtually impossible to avoid trouble, as they had to go through densely populated parts of the city to travel between them. Arafat's money, prestige, and relatively strong and cohesive military force gave him great influence in Lebanon's politics as well as Palestine's but there was no way to tamp down the lid forever.

Speaking of terrorism, Day of the Jackal came out a couple years earlier. A journo found a copy of the original Fredrick Forsyth novel in what he believed to be the luggage of a notorious Palestinian terrorist. This is where the nickname Carlos the Jackal comes from. Great movie btw.

Arafat commanded the respect of the bulk of the population in the refugee camps. There were three around Beirut and one just outside of each major city. Fatah had a large force of militia with little or no training, but it also had an elite force of men who were trained up to the standards of real soldiers. Some had been trained in the Jordanian Army before 1970 or the Soviet bloc. This little army would amount to very little in a big conventional war, but there were few men in the warring Lebanese factions who were on their level.

The Hotels War pitted local Sunnis, Lebanese Army defectors, and Palestinians against the Lebanese Forces.

The radical groups had their own militias but they were poorly trained and disciplined. They hired anyone they could, even many Arabs from other countries. In a war they might be expected to defend their own neighborhoods but not much more. Airline passengers were the only target they could outfight. They were especially resentful of Fatah at this time because Arafat had just begun opening up the idea of negotiations with Israel.

1980

It was the height of power of the Palestinian refugees. The 1975-1976 war had been hard on the Palestinians, with the entire Tal el-Zaatar refugee camp razed. They were now tightly intwined with the local Sunnis and their miltia Mourabitoun. But while Arafat hadn't managed to keep the peace, he at least kept the Syrians from taking complete control. They stayed out of a large area in the south of the country, including the border. Lebanon's army had disintegrated and couldn't stop them. So the Palestinians took over this area, soon known as Fatahland. They now had direct access to the border. Their artillery shelled Israeli towns sporadically, trying not to be caught in the enemy airstrikes that often followed. Enterprising terrorists also discovered a new way to attack. They could get around the border on inflatable boats, land on the beach, and find some Israeli target to attack. Of course it was always a bus or a school, but hey, at this phase of the revolution you can't expect us to take on soldiers.

The Soviet 130mm gun. Designed for long range, it can hit targets 27.5km away. This gave its operators plenty of room to hide the massive gun in.

1985

The Palestinian refugees were now virtually powerless in Lebanon. When they surrendered Beirut, they were scattered into distant exile in several Arab countries. The leaders were settled in Tunis, 2000km away from the enemy. To add insult to injury, the Israeli commandos occasionally made it that entire distance to pop up in Tunis and kill one of them. Fatah and its supporters had always imagined that it would build itself up until someday it could fight Israel in a final war of liberation, but now it was clear that trying to attack Israel from the outside was a dead end. From now on, the Palestinian cause would be taken up in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

An attempt was made to capture Tripoli and use it as a base to bring Fatah back to Lebanon. Rather than side with Arab nationalists and Communists like he had in the past, their allies now were Islamic fundamentalists, a sign of how the old causes were dying out in favor of the new jihad. They were opposed by Syrian troops as well as several thousand Palestinians who had defected over the years to support Syria instead. The battle was over quickly and Arafat sent back into exile in a farcical repeat of the evacuation from Beirut.

1990

Some Palestinians loyal to Arafat still remained in Lebanon and they were still taking part in fighting. Now they were only helping the stronger forces like Hezbollah. They were able to hold onto their refugee camps for now, but they were no longer an independent player in Lebanon. All of the Palestinian movement's attention and energy was now focused on the occupied territories. The fantasy of fedayeen coming from the refugee camps to liberate the country was over. Arafat still commanded enough respect that he could represent the Palestinians in the new peace process that was developing.

The crew of the Enterprise was in some pretty serious trouble too! Part I of "Best of Both Worlds", the Borg invasion of Earth, aired in 1990.

Epilogue

In 2007 a splinter group of a splinter group of Fatah in the Naher al-Barid refugee camp outside Tripoli declared their allegiance to al-Qaeda. They beheaded several soldiers in a cowardly sneak attack. Since the army is the only institution in the country that unites all sects, this pissed off everyone. The camp was eventually flattened by artillery and bulldozers after a brutal siege, just like during the Civil War. I guess it was kids trying too hard to be cool like their dads.

Ain el-Hilweh outside Sidon remains. If you want to experience Escape From New York in real life, this is as close as you're going to get. Lebanese police and security forces are not allowed in. The local population settles everything themselves. This often means gang-style shootings but can escalate quite a bit. Stray RPGs have been known to land in Sidon. These days the battles are between Fatah and Islamists. Now they're fighting over buildings, not countries.

This one was pretty good too. I mean it's not like a classic or something but it's enjoyable.

Sam, 26

Michael, 28

Rio Grande Valley

Personal Life/Career:

• Recently married, April 6th this year

  • Engaged for 4 months

  • Dating for 4 years

  • Never talked about finances before getting married?

• Assistant Manager (Her) timestamp

  • 2'100 a month roughly

• Truck Driver (Him) timestamp

  • 2'400 a month

• She is currently in school? timestamp

  • Studying Social Work? Doing a Masters

  • She has student loans but I did not catch what they were

Financials:

• Combined finances less than a month ago, she added him to her account

• "Different opinions" on spending timestamp

  • She says she's more frugal, he likes spending on electronics and vehicles

  • He Upgraded to new iPhone, FOMOS into newest thing

• How do their financial conversations go? timestamp

  • She says she wants to pay off debt quickly, "to zero as fast as possible" even if it's 0% apr

  • "He sees zero apr and he's like oh, we don't gotta pay anything at all"

• They have zero in their savings (paid off some cards recently)

• She paid off a few things that were at 0 instead of another 0 that was about just hit the interest period timestamp

  • "To be fair he signed up on a property without me knowing"

  • 120'000 property? He told her he was going to look and he ended up buying it on sight? "Owner to Owner financing"

    • Before marriage

    • Paid 117'000 with financing?

    • Applying to refinance "soon" timestamp

      • Currently at 12% over 30 years

      • they want a lower monthly and fewer years

  • Specifics timestamp

    • 6'000

    • There's another 6'000 that went to paying the parents?

      • Paying back parents for wedding?

• Built a 860 sq ft "frame house" on the property timestamp

  • Property is 3 acres

  • Building the house cost $37'000

• Score timestamp

  • He says - 8

  • She say - 4

• Credit Card 1 (Wells Fargo) ($4'120) tiemstamp

  • $42 minimum payment

  • 0% interest until October

  • 92 in new purchases

  • CC was opened because she wanted to start a business timestamp

    • Coffee cart selling expresso drinks outside markets

    • "Got busy" so she couldn't keep doing this, sold all equipment - didn't make money? timestamp

      • Awkward laugh when asked what she got from the sale? Got 2500 back?

      • Spent 10'000 on this?

      • Got a job because this wasn't working well?

• Credit Card 2 (4'028) timestamp

  • Interest about to start accruing

  • Paid 5'000 - claims she doesn't remember where she got this

    • Balance was 9'000

    • After getting pressed, says it was from a 20'000 personal loan

  • 92 in new purchases

• Personal Loan (21'749) timestamp

  • 21% interest

  • Gets pressed hard on why she traded 5'000 at 0% for a 21%

  • more info timestamp

    • In her name

    • They didn't know it was $21'749

    • Weren't able to make any minimum payments because of his motorcycle? timestamp

      • He doesn't even use it and now it's busted - front shock went out and it would be a 2'000 repair bill

  • Paid off the bike with this timestamp

    • 227 a month

    • 7'000 balance on it

    • 7% interest rate

    • Bike's used value is around $9'000

• She remembers why she paid off his credit cards timestamp

  • She did not like the monthly minimum payments?

  • "I don't know what I'm doing"

• Credit Card 3 (Lowe's) timestamp

  • Paid off, one of the things in that personal loan

  • Would have been interest free for another couple months?

  • Ate a late fee at some point

  • Was 2'000

  • Paid for a washer/dryer on here? timestmap

    • 0% financing at Lowe's

    • Her dad had given money for washer/dryer, he used it for the wedding and 0%'d the washer/dryer. She did not know about this and thought they were paid for in cash?

      • Her parents are divorced

• Credit Card 4 (Discover) ($10'656) timestamp

  • To build the house - he clarifies that it was finishing the interior of the house

  • "Because we didn't have the money for it"

  • He has never watched the show before - she has

  • Roughly 3000 a year in interest accruing on this?

• Credit Card 5 (City Simplicity) ($5'909) timestamp

  • His, she paid this one off as part of the personal loan

    • actually this was with the wedding gifts? 6'000 in wedding gifts? actually the wedding gifts and some savings?

    • Actually it was a different much smaller card she paid off

  • 0% interest

    • He thinks this ends by August

    • Actually it ended 3 weeks ago

  • $59 minimum payment

  • 29%

• Credit Card 6 (Home Depot)

  • Paid off

• Credit Card 7 (Capital One Savior One) (Paid off) timestamp

  • A bunch of Amazon purchases on this one - for the wedding?

    • Lights, table covers, etc?

• Credit scores -

  • His is 630

  • Her's is 695 (last she checked)

• "How did she convince you to come on this show?" timestmap

  • He didn't want to come on

  • He didn't watch the "on-boarding video" because "she didn't tell him about it"

  • they try to justify their financial opinions timestmap

• Purchased a water slide timestamp

  • He is trying to make money with this by renting it out?

  • $1'600 total

  • Hasn't been able to rent it yet?

• Bought some pc fans timestamp

  • He's been playing Helldivers 2

• Attempts to convince them not to be r-slurred timestamp

• He has 3 vehicles timestamp

  • 1 at his house

  • 1 at parent's garage

  • 1 his dad uses

• Checking Account ($31) timestamp

  • Disastrous amount of eating out

  • It's like they think credit cards are literally free money

  • 453 just on going out to eat

  • Phone bill is $185 (they both owe on their phones)

• An attempt to explain how interest works timestamp

• Budget time timestamp

Godot is a shitty FOSS game engine. The core developers run it very much like a cult or MLM scheme, in the sense that the only people allowed to contribute significantly are "trusted" insiders recruited through various community channels. These channels (reddit, groomercord, mastodon, forums, etc) are in turn universally controlled and jannied by the insider cabal, who traditionally use the official "code of conduct" to ostracise wrongthinkers.

The most important factor for a contributor is being a team player aka kowtowing to project leadership, which causes many talented yet stubborn coders to bounce off, an important and some would say decisive factor in why Godot is still a piece of shit after over a decade in development - since the core team isnt particularly talented but also present themselves as infallible, knowledgeable outsiders generally arent welcomed.

Occasionally ordinary community members (generally children who are tricked by Godot evangelism into believing they will be able to make their first game with it) sneed hard enough to temporarily break through the officially imposed censorship due to some particularly egregious event. The most recent sneedfest was caused by a core team member being exiled due to his disagreements with an "obnoxiously queer" new communications manager.

There has always been a tension between the Godot team's burning desire to appear like a corporate bigboy industry player via DEI virtue signalling, and the community at large being confused by wokescoldery given the supposedly democratic/noncorporate structure of a FOSS project. This was so egregious on the groomercord server due to a particularly psychotic mod that it's become kind of lore in the other godot online spaces.

Pride month of course must be celebrated by all good corporate citizens, and Godot (FOSS) is no exception. The message has been transmitted through all official channels - without delay on June 1st the legendarily shitty Godot logo is repainted in rainbow.

Unfortunately some folx aren't feeling represented

And others have questions, which "triggers" (xer words) the community manager to go on a blocking spree in order to cut off discussion - this proves to have unintended consequences, which we will get to in a moment.

LGBT developers are encouraged to publically state the sexual/gender orientation of themselves and or their game contents.

Predictably, chuds can't behave, which makes it necessary for the Godot jannies to bring up the dreaded "code of conduct"

This was originally tweeted by Godot Foundation Twitter, and then retweeted by Godot Engine twitter. They are the same people, I'm fairly sure the same community manager runs both. Kind of weird. A fan replies with this take:

>This is what companies should be doing during pride month, showing the consumers their stance on the topic and how they want to help support people. Instead we have companies who just make their pfp rainbow and call it a day.

This is what companies (Godot is allegedly a community driven nonprofit) should be doing during pride month - fighting with and blocking their end users for wrongthink. No argument on my end

So, pride month marches on, it's now the 7th. The Godot team posts free Pride "splash screens" (the first screen a user sees when they run the game) to replace the usual "made with Godot" one, and this is a step too far for one chuddy contributor

JustinB isnt some twitter rando, he has put in massive amounts of work trying to fix Godots tragically broken 3d import functionality (it still sucks). In any other FOSS project he would be a core contributor, but he is too much of an independent thinker to be accepted into the inner sanctum.

>people have this assumption that because I am anti woke and anti idiot and I hate people who are always the victim..that I am racist and I hate gay people(or the like)...it's simply not true...I hate the whole gay pride month nonsense because it divides people

No matter that he's extremely valuable to the project and one of the very few Godot devs capable of making a functional 3d game, this crime against LGBT causes him to be blocked demonized as a bigot! It would be a shame if the experience put him off contributing to the project..

He's been slapfighting over this for days, i can't even begin to screenshot it

https://x.com/justinb75631302/with_replies

The Sneed shows no signs of abating, so Godot's cult leader is forced to put his foot down

>This is not about spreading a woke agenda or convincing anyone to change their beliefs. I myself are quite a conservative person and don't agree with the most leftists and rightist out there.

>This is about keep your views to yourself and treat others as equals.

This is about keeping your views on gender and sexuality to yourself

Also note the "third worlder harassment" part, Juan is cis but he has a powerful drive to play the victim so he has to throw that in there just to include himself (he's Argentinian or something).

JustinB arrives to splapfight the top dog, he's definitely still mad about being blocked

What about autism awareness? Won't anyone think of the neurodivergents caught in the crossfire during pride.month?

Pigdev also isnt a rando, he's an extremely talented Godot tutorial creator. Godot userbase is 99% kids following tutorials, so the core team knows they can't piss off someone like Pig, so he gets a Foundation bigshot sucking him off in reply

Meanwhile, on reddit, the community is noticing and one angry user posts but fortunately Godot reddit is controlled by insiders so the thread is quietly deleted.

But not before some choice sneed. Some Godot redditors lick the boot

>One of the primary roles of a community manager is to keep unsavory individuals away from the rest -that includes blocks and bans across all socials.

>The hidden comments on X seem in the main to be nipping nasty in the bud. Your example is one, with a position and phrasing that is often used to prime a disingenuous digital shouting fest and hate speech.

Being annoyed by being wokescolded is h8 speech

Ok this is good sneed here

Mmm that's the stuff

I caught some bad vibes from the chuds on the last one. Some of you don't understand the concept that the bad guy has his own perspective which is worth knowing even if we don't agree with it. Here's Israel's turn. I can't promise a happy ending because there wasn't one, but these are the events that mattered to them.

Part of a series:

• The Syrian Perspective

• Christian Militias

• Shi'a Muslims

Israel, like Syria, does not have the luxury of simply ignoring Lebanon. For most of its history somebody has been there shooting at them or trying to

shoot at them. Egypt and Jordan had learned Israel's enormous superiority in high-intensity mobile warfare and made peace. Israelis hoped to one day do the same with Lebanon. Once all the neighboring Arab were persuaded to give up, the wars would finally be over.

1975

Hollywood was in the middle of its disaster movie craze just as the Middle East was in the middle of its hijacking craze. (Don't watch these movies. They're dumber than Transformers.)

Israel never had good relations with Lebanon, but at least it wasn't a base for constant raids like Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. That changed in the late 1960s when Palestinians from the refugee camps began going to the border and attacking Israel. The Lebanese army tried to stop them but were not always successful. The problem grew far worse in 1970 when the Palestinian leaders were driven out of Jordan and made Beirut their headquarters. From there they hijacked airliners, attacked Israelis in Europe, and dramatically increased raiding across the border. They killed civilians on buses, in their homes, or even at school. The Palestinians didn't kill many Israeli soldiers but somehow always managed to kill a lot of children. Most of these attacks were done by fringe far-left groups but Arafat and his "moderate" faction Fatah participated as well.

Terrorists were able to board in Beirut, go anywhere in the world, hijack a plane, and bring it to the Middle East.

Obviously this had to be stopped. The Israelis didn't want a full scale war in Lebanon but they had to do something. As early as 1968 they began carrying out commando raids to pressure the Lebanese into getting the Palestinians under control. But by 1975 it was clear that the Lebanese state couldn't rein them in if it tried. The commando raids now were turned to directly strike the Palestinians themselves. A raid against Fatah in Beirut succeeded in assassinating the targets but ended up being counterproductive. The Palestinians pointed out that the army was unable or unwilling to protect them so they needed they needed arms to protect themselves. Many Lebanese agreed with them. This was one of the major triggers leading up to the outbreak of the civil war.

At this point it wasn't enough just to stop terrorism. As civil war loomed, there was a real danger that the Palestinians would win and take over the whole country. With their own international airport, seaport, and complete access to the border they could dramatically increase their terrorist activities. Beyond their own strategic interests, many Israelis saw the similarity of the Lebanese Christians' plight to their own. They were an island in a sea of hostile Muslim powers that would love to drive them into the sea. During a previous crisis in 1958 Israel had provided weapons to then President Chamoun to stop the Syrians from taking over. Now they were in contact with his son Dany Chamoun about possibly doing the same again.

1980

Blondie's "Call Me". Hafez el-Assad probably hummed this to himself when he was putting military pressure on one of the Lebanese factions and waiting for them to call and ask for a truce.

The Christian militias didn't take up the Israeli offer as their situation was so desperate that they called for a Syrian invasion instead. But they had quickly tired of the Syrian occupation and went back to the Israelis for support. The Israelis provided guns, tanks, ammunition, and even uniforms. The year 1980 was relatively quiet in most of the country but there was a tense standoff between the Lebanese Forces, Palestinians, and Syrians.

The SA-6 SAM system. It was deadly to Israeli planes in the 1973 war and and they did not want to repeat that experience. Through the Americans a convoluted set of rules were agreed to. The Syrians could move their SAMs into certain places in the Bekaa Valley, but only if they didn't camoflauge them, and so on. Of course both sides ended up breaking these rules as soon as tensions rose.

At the border it was anything but quiet. The Palestinians were shelling Israeli towns with heavy artillery and rockets. Eventually they were able to negotiate a cease-fire through the Americans, the first time that Israel had made any kind of deal with the Palestinians. But it was only a matter of time before they would start shooting again and send more terrorists by boat to hijack more school buses. No matter how many bombs they dropped or houses they destroyed, the enemy would not stop. Something had to be done to push them back away from the border. In 1978 they had sent in a large force to sweep across the border all the way up to the Litani River but it failed to catch many Palestinians, who retreated before the overwhelming power of the IDF but moved right back into place as soon as they left.

Remains of the bus hijacked in the Coastal Road massacre, where 38 civilians were killed, including 13 children.

Temporarily supressing the violence was not good enough. A permanent solution was needed, one that would keep enemies away from the border for good. Some Lebanese army units in the south defected and became the nucleus of the South Lebanon Army. This was a force under Israeli control whose mission was to block the Palestinians from getting to the border. But the border was too long for a few thousand men to patrol and few Lebanese wanted to join it. Those who did were often motivated by the $300/month salary and couldn't be relied on. The SLA was a step forward, but the bizarre little ministate of 180,000 people they created in the IDF-occupied "security zone" could never sustain a large fighting force or be recognized as legitimate by the rest of Lebanon.

The extent of the security zone. On the coast you can see Sidon to the North and Tyre to the south.

Some Israelis saw an opportunity to go much further than the SLA. At first they had sent weapons to all the Christian militias through Dany Chamoun and his NLP, but soon they got directly in touch with the Lebanese Forces. Their leader, Bashir Gemayel, was charismatic, ambitious, and Maronite, all qualities that were needed to become President of Lebanon. He had just defeated and absorbed Chamoun's forces leaving no Christian rivals. Maybe he could unite the whole country? Then he could sign a peace treaty with Israel and drive out the Palestinians.

Shermans used by the SLA. With upgrades, the old WW2 tank was still effective against the poorly-equipped troops they usually fought against.

1985

Bashir Gemayel was dead. He had managed to get elected with the help of the Israeli invasion but he refused to sign the peace treaty. It didn't matter. The Syrians had him blown up anyway. He didn't even live long enough to be inaugurated. There was nobody else who could take his place, so there was no purpose to having Israeli troops occupy half the country. Their project to install a friendly government in Beirut had been a complete fiasco. The prime minister resigned and the defense minister Ariel Sharon was fired and disgraced. (There were no consequences for the Lebanese involved. Their leader was made a cabinet minister like nothing had happened.) Now in 1985 the IDF was in the process of pulling their troops back from near Beirut to the security zone.

IDF Headquarters in Tyre after being hit by a suicide car bomb, killing 75 Israelis and several prisoners, 1982. They were dangerously exposed to this kind of attack as long as they occupied such a large and densely populated are.

They could at least be glad that they achieved their first objective, to drive the PLO out of Lebanon. The refugee camps were still there and still full of desperately impoverished Palestinian civilians, but the soldiers and terrorists were gone. Arafat had not just been pushed back from the border. He had been pushed back 2,000km to exile in Tunis. In the process the invaders had devastated half the country and killed tens of thousands. They left behind them new enemies. Amal was now actively fighting against them and Hezbollah came into existence in large part due to the invasion. These forces were not as dangerous as the Palestinians had been, but now it was necessary to keep IDF troops in the security zone permanently to keep them away from the border.

It might be boring out there, but at least you have your walkman.

1990

At the end of the Lebanese Civil War, it was the Syrians who dominated Lebanon. For Israel this was much worse than a friendly Lebanese government but at least it was better than the Palestinians taking over. The security zone would have to stay in place indefinitely until some big change happened in Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah, but the Israelis understood now that that big change wasn't going to be them. For the time being, it wasn't that bad. They had chosen easily defended positions to include in the security zone so it was much better than fighting on their own border. And these Hezbollah guys really didn't know how to fight.

Beaufort Castle. A lot of Israelis guarded this place over the years. Its view was just as important in modern warfare as it was to the Crusaders.

Occupation duty was dull and unpleasant. It cost money and diverted troops away from training and more important fronts like the West Bank and Gaza. As long as it continued no Lebanese would negotiate with them. But it was effective in drastically reducing the shelling hitting villages inside Israel. It seemed like it might go on forever.

The view looking down from Beaufort castle.

Epilogue

The situation quickly changed in the late 1990s. Hezbollah learned over the years, going from a bunch of angry hillbillies yelling "Allahu Akbar!" on top of a hill to a well-organized, trained, and experienced fighting force. They had become better at fighting this kind of low-level war of attrition than the Israelis. In theory Israel could just launch a massive attack and change it back into the kind of high-intensity war they were good at. This was tried in 1993 and 1996, but domestic politics and diplomacy wouldn't let them go far and they accomplished little. Eventually those troops would have to go home someday anyway.

The TOW antitank missile. Iran gave Hezbollah ones that had been first delivered to it through Israel in Iran Contra. Nobody could complain about it without reopening that can of worms.

By the late 1990s the tide was turning fast. Israeli tanks, once so formidable to the guerrilla fighters, became easy targets when they got guided antitank missiles. The SLA and its intelligence network was collapsing. Two incidents in particular made the public wonder if it was all worth it. In 1997 two helicopters collided killing 73 men. Even more disturbing, an elite special operations unit was lured into an ambush and 12 of 16 killed. Clearly Hezbollah had better intelligence and knew how to use it.

Hezbollah intercepted unencrypted transmissions from the drone, allowing them to watch the Israelis in real time through their own camera.

In 2000 the IDF began withdrawing. With the situation crumbling around them, they retreated back into Israel. The SLA disintegrated with troops and their families rushing to the border to for asylum. It wouldn't be the last time there was fighting on this border but at least on this day all of Lebanon was finally at peace for the first time in 25 years.

Still one of my favorite pieces of drama I witnessed, a months-long spergout that involved forum espionage, leftist infighting, chuddery, and tons of funny paranoia. I posted about it as it was happening on the old place but I figure I'll do a better write-up here.

Background

Once upon a time there was a gayming website called Gaming Age, with their forum called the Gaming Age Forum, commonly abbreviated as GAF. Eventually Gaming Age went under, but the top two jannies (Evillore and Bishoptl) were able to move their community to a new forum, appropriately called NeoGAF. It had a reputation for aggressive jannying which wasn't entirely unfounded but overall it was a pretty cool and chill place to talk vidya, and imo probably the most fun forum of the aughts. Cracks started to show in 2013 with the most important war of our lifetimes, G*merGate. Still, things were mostly fine as long as you avoided the dedicated containment thread. Trump winning in 2016 brought the place to its knees with libs screaming for the jannies to clamp down on rightoids, jannies mass-banning anyone they suspect of liking Orange Man, everyone screaming for Evillore's head since he wasn't as left as people think, and overall an implosion imminent. A Japanese American poweruser called Cerium saw the writing on the wall and built a clone. Within a year Evillore got #metoo'd, causing an exodus to Cerium's new ResetEra (geddit? Neo -> Reset, Age -> Era). Cerium was much more of an absentee leader than Evillore was and didn't interact much beyond technical issues before selling the site, which had the benefit of avoiding a “the owner is an evil chud” controversy but indirectly lead to an “inmates running the asylum" environment for a couple years until he promoted an unpaid janny (B-dubz) to paid janny to manage in his stead.

NeoGAF founders Tyler Malka (Evillore) and Tim Lewenson (Bishoptl). Evillore never worked in gaming besides running the forum but Bish is a genuine industry figure since the '90s who worked on stuff like Turok, Dawn of War, Apex Legends, and is currently an EA exec

Like how every Reddit clone is founded because Reddit is too leftoid and so gets plagued by insufferable rightoids, ResetEra was ultimately founded because NeoGAF was too rightoid and as such is plagued by insufferable leftoids, resulting in constant infighting and drama. One such instance lead to the banning of poweruser KetKat, the unofficial leader of ResetEra's many s (henceforth known as TransEra after the groomercord they operated out of) and the one who ran the TransEra groomercord. Ketkat basically never did anything at all but stir up shit and harass the jannies but every attempt to ban led to huge drama and eventually weeping jannies rolling over and showing their bellies and begging for mercy that never came, until finally after four or five "perma-bans" one finally stuck. This becomes important later.

Initial Drama

One day TransEra decided that the upcoming video game CyberPunk 2077 was a transphobic Nazi game because an ad shows an in-game ad featuring a peepee girl. Unusually, this was enough of a stretch that nobody else on the Internet (including the other really woke sites) shared the same view. For some reason this controversy was entirely confined to ResetEra, which nobody found suspicious.

TransEra demands that all discussion regarding Cyberpunk be banned and that the United States government sanction Poland for allowing this game to be made within their borders. The jannies of course don't want to ban talking about what may be the biggest game of the year (this was still when Era had pretentions of being a gaming forum, years later they would cave and ban Harry Potter) while all the other users were just adding the s to their block lists. The latter just makes the s angrier of course.

The jannies eventually take action by making and sticking a containment thread. It's not super dramatic but it's a good overview of where they're directing their ire at a given moment, and to watch them seethe. That page I linked features:

• People whining about how the game has trans actors and why aren't they protesting?

• A in an arranged marriage saying something about being an "angel's advocate"

• Someone realizing that there are literally zero FtM s on the forum, they are all men in dresses

• A guy saying it's pathetic to talk about video games on a video game forum

The sole basis of the transphobia accusations was this pre-release screenshot

The jannies next decide that they'll allow discussion but ban it on Trans Remembrance Day or whatever, which would be the week the game came out. The company proceeded to undercut them by delaying the game past that. Searching for some other way to virtue signal the jannies create an "Official Megathread" for the game and immediately lock it with a message about respecting trans rights or something, which of course nobody sees because nobody can post in it and so it falls off the front page. Somebody else creates a Spoiler Thread which the jannies initially allow until it gets so clogged up with s seething that they lock it. The s start to realize that they aren't getting the attention they want.

Nazi Infiltrators

Having been put on everybody's block list, TransEra realizes the only way to get people to notice them again is to have one of their own make the Cyberpunk 2077 Official Thread (OT). As the jannies have declared that the OT will be the only allowed thread on the game besides the transphobia sticky, this will allow the s to monopolize discussion on the game and force people to unblock the OP if they want the thread to be visible. The problem is that you have to reserve the right to make the OT in advance (months in advance in the case of major AAA releases), and the current OT guy is a fellow named Black Chamber who is not trans, is quite excited (maybe unhealthily so) about the game, and still thinks ResetERA is primarily a gaming forum and not a progressive hugbox.

So TransEra sets to wrestling the thread away from him. They accuse him of being a paid astroturfer and other various things until a prominent named Kyuuji leaks a four-month old PM from him (which can't be seen anymore but it was apparently mildly dismissive). Normally leaking PMs is a bannable offense but when a janny points this out he is demodded and temp banned for using the wrong pronouns to describe Kyuuji.

ResetERA founder Isamu Fukui (Cerium). He made hundreds of thousands off of Era every year and cashed out for a cool $4.5 million in 2021, which was controversial since he never did anything to manage the website, and NeoGAF owner Evillore had famously claimed to have turned down a similar amount to sell GAF

The jannies eventually declare that Black Chamber will be allowed to make the OT (in all likelihood he's finished it by now) in exchange for being banned for a month afterwards and there being a post about transphobia stickied to the top of every page. This doesn't appease TransEra because of course the point is to make the OT themselves to force people to engage with them. Tensions rise as people who just want to talk about video games start to rise up.

Users desperately try to figure out what the required opinion is

The s finally find Black Chamber's Achilles heel: he doesn't like The Last of Us, which is very much a sacred cow on Era. His fate is sealed when somebody digs through his Twitter and finds a two-year old post suggesting he's a Republican which is literally a bannable offense. Black Chamber is perma-banned and the jannies encourage users to doxx suspected Republicans, going further in a later post where they say janny duties will now include going through users' social media (which is very much in their power because they require your real name on account creation). They also lock every thread about the game except the trans containment thread. Alas this is a pyrrhic victory for TransEra as rather than give them the OT the jannies say they'll just make it themselves.

Black Chamber melts down on Twitter over his ban and goes back to NeoGAF. This leads users to suspect that he was a neo-nazi infiltrator sent by Evillore to destroy ResetEra from the inside. Some writes a 7000 word melt down.

Image unrelated

Janny Infighting

Cuberpunk 2077 finally comes out and TransEra, high on victoriously chasing out a chud, celebrate by playing it despite it being literal genocide. But in a community this dramatic any peace is temporary. The first sign that things are going to explode is that AndroidSophia, the site's highest-ranking janny who was brought on specifically as a concession to TransEra during a prior spergout, has lost her janny tag. Normally TransEra would be up in arms about this, but now they're suspiciously silent, making it clear that they're behind her demopping.

Meanwhile, on the Secret Resetera Groomercord Server where the mods and powerusers hang out, a janny named Poodlestrike gets in a fight with a trans user and bans them on the main forum. One of the banned 's friends throws a fit on Era and is perma banned for "Does not want to be here." TransEra begins throwing a fit and pooping up the front page whining about the jannies and leaking DMs. Small collection of cryposts here.

Rather than apologize Poodlestrike fights back, confirming that the reason AndroidSophia no longer had her mop was because she was bullied by TransEra during groomercord conference (called Summits, ERA regularly has them when a minority group - be they Asians or PC g*mers - is aggrieved) between the jannies and TransEra and resigned "in tears." Proving that they're real women TransEra refuses all accountability - "This is freaking gaslamping!" "Maybe we'll stop telling you to go frick yourself if you stop being a transphobic b-word!" AndroidSophia herself shows up and confirms the accusations, and also says that she literally almost died writing about Cyberpunk because it's so transphobic.

Jannies and s proceed to scream at each other,, calling each other lyers and "rat-frick cowards." BIPOCs get mad that mayos are appropriating their oppression.

Alright, the safe word is ‘janny brutality'

Surprise Twist!

The drama reaches its climax when furry biofoid janny Nepenthe who was in the groomercord conference writes a 5000 word screed, helpfully documented here. She also posts this screenshot of the very first of the list of demands TransEra was making:

Do you remember way back at the beginning when I mentioned the jannies having banned poweruser and unofficial Top , KetKat, a year before? It turns out the entire Cyberpunk-transphobia debacle was some ridiculous groomercord gayops by KetKat to force the jannies to come to the table and relitigate her permaban. Nobody actually thought Cyberpunk was transphobic, the whole thing was a coup attempt cooked up by a conspiracy in a smoky chatroom who knew the mods wouldn't give in to banning the game and so a stink could be raised. Even better, KetKat already had an alt (Hexe, which the jannies knew about and turned a blind eye too) which she used on the site, this absolute dramaqueen decided that orchestrating six months of screeching was preferable to going under a different username.

KatKat shows up on her alt and writes a 3000 word rant about how she totally didn't want to come back anyways, and is immediately banned as Nepenthe reveals that she's suddenly non-binary, which makes her a double minority since she's also black. Some s show up and try to resist but it is too late, the war is lost and anybody who complains get sniped.

The who wrote the 7000 word essay earlier outdoes himself by writing another 5000 words and then quoting two other 5000 word posts in full at the end. He doxxes himself, gets permabanned for pinging, then cries to the mods and has his account wiped.

Epilogue

Although they ban any s who act up too much, the jannies ultimately fail to take any lasting measures (like banning everyone on the TransEra groomercord, in particular power user Kyuuji who was pretty much acting as a front for Ketket) despite otherwise being extremely quick to pull the "Banned for engaging in bad faith" card on anybody else. Pooping up and making a mockery out of the site in an effort to blackmail the staff apparently isn't bad faith enough. The result is that even though TransEra didn't succeed in their goals, they got confirmation that they can cause as much chaos as they like as long as they don't directly insult the staff or the forum.

So when Hogwarts Legacy rolled around and TransEra started to act up the jannies immediately caved and banned any mention of the game to avoid a repeat, to the point where when the game sold well people couldn't post weekly sales charts without editing the name out. Another win for trans rights!

The game that shall not be named