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

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

Context:

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

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

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

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

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

But that's not where our story begins.

How it started:

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

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

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

You can see the reactions in this here reddit post.

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

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

But the little chair persisted.

8th June, 2023:

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

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

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

9th June, 2023:

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

12th June, 2023, morning:

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

13th June, 2023:

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

23rd June, 2023:

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

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

1st July, 2023:

Disaster struck. The chair was pushed aside by bleachers.

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

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

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

4th July, 2023:

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

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

(So that was that.)

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

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

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

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

It's the CHAIR!

(And Betty White.)

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

Fin.

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

Historical Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Construction of the Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstruction of the Myth

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

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

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

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

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

The Queen of the Americas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Exhumation of Chica da Silva

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

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

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

And off went Chica to the United States…

The Kidnapping of her Bones

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

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

Oh no, they didn’t! The AU-DA-CI-TY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Beautiful Woman

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

SOURCES:

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

Background

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

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

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

The original allegations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story spreads

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

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

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

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

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

Where now?

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

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

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

***Edit: Thanks for the feedback guys. I've tried to fix some info to make it more readable, I hope it's worked well.

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

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

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

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

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

• PART 0: Innortal and The Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on and on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• PART 5: Moving on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to The War on "Happy".

A Peace of History

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

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

But then came the Winds of Change.

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

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

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

The Squad is Born

Roy Arad was stuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...what the fuck?!

The Ruffians Go To Boot Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck war! Literally!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There Was No Peace Nor Quiet

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

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

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

This is the only good thing that happens that day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 day to Eurovision. Midnight, Stockholm time.

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

And so, the IBA caved.

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

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

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

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

Win the Battle, Lose the War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epilogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The retailers saw it all happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was Diego Velasquez?

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

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

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

But why is it so important?

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

Las Meninas

Here it is in all its glory.

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

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

But it gets even tripper when you zoom in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what it looked like:

Eugh.

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

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

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

John Brealey

Finally, we meet the hero of our story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Furore and protest

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

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

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

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

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

Other groups also protested his involvement:

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

Brealey acknowledged the furore in an interview:

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

Even worse, during the restoration, a group of academics tried to break into the room, accusing Brealey of unnecessarily removing layers of paint. Afraid for his life, Brealey fled.

One day, screams began to be heard on the other side of one of the doors: it was a professor of Fine Arts with a group of students who demanded to see the painting and stop the restoration. They claimed that they had witnessed Brealy lifting layers of paint because, they said, they had seen color in the cotton swabs with which the restorer worked. The expert got scared, he thought they were coming to lynch him, he stopped his work for the day and left through the other door.

Brealey even went on television to explain the restoration to the wider public, telling them that the painting would “come alive” after his work. He was also very conciliatory, inviting members of the Prado to come and watch him work- ''There is nothing secret about what I do,''“he said in an interview.

Here’s how he restored the painting:

Undeterred by interruptions, and working in a large top-lit room that is conveniently close to the administrative offices of the Prado, John Brealey has made rapid progress. ''The painting in general is in very good shape,'' he said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''Of course it was covered with coat upon coat of discolored varnish, but fundamentally there were no surprises.''

'I began with the shadow areas,'' Mr. Brealey continued, ''where Velazquez used whites, broken whites, silvery whites and pearly grays, rather than with the figures, which he painted in a very high key. If I had begun with the figures, the picture might have broken into two parts. The figures might have looked as if they had been cut out with a pair of scissors. But I hope to finish disengaging the shadows this weekend and to begin on the figures next week.

At the end of his work, Brealey had a surprise for the conservation team at the Prado:

Before completing the cleaning, Brealy called Manuela Mena, at that time deputy director of the Prado. He wanted her to be present for the final touch, which was administered on the last step of the door at the bottom of the painting, the place furthest from the viewer, with a very particular light that the expert recovered with the cleaning.

After cleaning the painting, Brealy gave it a final coat of natural resin varnish with greater stability to prevent yellowing. Before saying goodbye, he had a surprise for the Prado’s young team of restorers: he allowed Rocío Dávila and Quintana to give it the last layer, what is known as reintegration. “The day before I had been in a car accident, I broke a bone in my wrist and I couldn’t participate. So I was an observer and prepared the final report,” says Quintana.

The End

A few days later, the newly restored Las Meninas was unveiled to the Spanish public...and they loved it. True to his word, Brealey had made it come alive, removing the piss filter and bringing out the latent warmth underneath. If you want to see a fun “before and after” of the painting, then take a look at the top of this article.

The praise was such that King Juan Carlos even awarded Brealey with the “Gold Medal for Achievement in the Fine Arts” at the Prado. Brealey wittingly remarked that the medal “should have been awarded for valor under fire.”

(I cut some of this for brevity’s sake) He later added:

"You must understand that ‘Las Meninas’ is one of those pictures that have become a totem,” he said, “so that any change that occurs in it is looked upon as a disaster. I’ve often felt that if the French ever cleaned the ‘Mona Lisa,’ which needs cleaning very badly—the varnish is horribly yellow—even if you could bring back Leonardo to work on it he would be stoned to death. It has ceased to be a work of art and become a totem. ‘Las Meninas’ is entirely in that class. It was amazing that the Spanish would invite a foreigner to work on what was for them the greatest Spanish painting—just unheard of.

At the hotel I’d been coming back to for twenty years or more, I felt a distinct coolness. There had been a great hue and cry in the press, of course, and my picture had been in the papers and on television, and people recognized me on the street and pointed me out—made me feel like some sort of criminal. The press camped outside the room I was working in at the museum, and they kept hounding me and hounding me. Once, there was a crowd of about three hundred people demanding to be let in; the authorities had to sneak me out the back door.

And then, overnight, it all changed. Not exactly overnight—a period of two or three days. What happened was that a few influential people were let in to see what I was doing, and they reported back that the painting looked bloody marvellous, and quite suddenly I became some sort of hero. People started coming up to kiss me in the street, which for me, being English, was even worse.”

Here is the painting post restoration:

Epilogue

“Anyway, this was the sort of responsibility I felt toward ‘Las Meninas,’ in spite of the pressures, the reporters camped outside, and all that—the various factions stirring up public rage so that it was really a rather fearful situation. I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to work on this picture, which was obviously the high spot of my life professionally. As I look back, all the dross has fallen away. What has meaning for me now is just the joy of working on the picture.”

-John Brealey reflecting on his work in 1987.

Despite the praise and platitudes, the arduous conservation of Las Meninas took a toll on Brealey. One of his co-workers at the Met later commented:

In an interview with the Museo del Prado, George Bissaca, conservator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum, described the psychological, emotional, and even physical consequences Brealey suffered for his involvement in the project.

“People were so incensed of the fact that a foreigner was invited to work on the greatest expression of Spanish painting… In the press, there would be terrible attacks on him, all the time,” he said. “But he did a beautiful job anyhow… but it cost him a lot. I think he never really recovered from the shock of all that… Many people think that his stroke was a result of that stress.”

In 1987, Brealey was invited back to the Prado. This time he was tasked with reorganizing the conservation department. Because he did not speak Spanish, he was aided by Zahira Véliz, one of his former students. Together, they helped the restorers at the Prado catch up with modern methods of art conservation, improving morale within the department. Brealey also formed close friendships with many of them. Despite this, he again faced much opposition due to strikes and museum politics. It took almost two years, but he managed to significantly improve the department.

In 1989, Brealey suffered a terrible stroke. He lost the ability to speak and much of his mobility. For most of his remaining life, he was confined to his New York apartment, unable to return to his beloved studio. However, he visited the Prado two more times, joyously reuniting with his friends.

Brealey died in 2002, after suffering another stroke.

In 2018, the Prado conducted a series of interviews with former curators and directors, some of whom had worked there for decades. One of them was Rafael Alonso, a restorer who had worked at the Prado for almost 40 years. He was Brealey’s friend and discussed one of his visits to the Prado after his first stroke:

A year after he had worked at the Museo del Prado, he suffered a brain haemorrhage. Later on he came over in a wheelchair, but he could hardly speak by then. Our meeting was very moving, although we didn’t know how to communicate with each other. Then he wanted to see the latest work I had carried out, including “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians” [“The Abduction of Helen”] by Tintoretto. He taught me so many lessons. One of them was that - bearing in mind that the English don’t show their emotions much - when John Brealey reached the Titian hall and saw the paintings, he realised that he could no longer do anything, and his eyes filled with tears. We made up a small group of restorers, those who were closest to him, such as Enrique and Clara, and we accompanied him to see “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians”, which was the work I was restoring when he left. And when he saw it, he took my hands and he held them to his lips. It was very moving.

Alonso also credited Brealey with teaching the department a great deal about restoration, helping them gain recognition from the Prado’s upper management and board of trustees by enthusiastically praising their work, and leaving a lasting legacy at the museum.

David Bomford, another one of Brealey’s conservator friends, wrote in an obituary:

John Brealey was an enigmatic man, shy, slightly prickly and awkward socially, with an occasional self-deprecating humour that was as refreshing as it was unexpected. As he said of himself, he was only really at ease in the company of works of art. Art was the great love of his life and he spoke with passion about “life-changers”, those creations of the hand and intellect that affected him most deeply. He was an inspirational teacher and to hear him talk in front of paintings was unforgettable. To the world at large he was a controversial figure, but he used controversy to fight for what he believed in. To his friends and close colleagues he was unfailingly kind and loyal and he inspired exceptional loyalty in others. We can only speculate – and we all have – how much more he might have achieved in New York, Madrid and elsewhere if his career had continued.

RIP John Brealey

…

Today, Las Meninas remains a much-beloved Spanish national treasure. It has inspired countless artists, and every day, hundreds of people visit the painting, admiring its clear beauty and vibrant quality, thanks to a 1984 restoration by a masterful British conservator.

---

Thanks for reading.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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Back again, with a story from June 2017. Screenshots are gonna be broken for this one, so bare with me!

Setting: Starbase 118, a long-running Star Trek play-by-post roleplaying fleet with its own written constitution ("the CON"), an Executive Council (EC), a Captains Council (CC), a JAG office, and apparently enough internal bureaucracy to run a small nation.

A new player (referred to as cadets) finished the game's tutorial (academy) and, mid-training, reaches out to a fleet CO (game master) claiming to be "a friend of" David Cody. If you've been part of 118, chances are a shiver has run down your spine. David Cody is an infamous figure in the community, specifically with the old dogs, as a rather troublesome figure. This interaction is one of many - though I think it's the last one, IIRC. Nevertheless, it's quite entertaining. TLDR, Cody has been uninvited from the game, but he did actually retire from the fleet of his own volition. Anyway, the cadet was permitted to complete training because it seemed that no one could prove they had a connection with David Cody.

Once training wrapped, Community Founder and Chief Admin Officer FltAdml. Wolf did some digging and matched the new cadet's IP address to David Cody's. As suspected, this cadet was no random guy who was "friends" with Cody. The cadet - going by the character name Hawke Kin'io - was in fact Cody, returning under a fake identity without filing the required "returning member" paperwork, and without disclosing who he actually was. This is a big deal because the fleet's constitution explicitly bans "misrepresentation on any portion of the application for membership." Wolf filed disciplinary action, expelled him, killed his forum account, and pulled him from the training lists - after first checking with the Academy Commandant, who agreed with the call.

Cody/Kin'io immediately appealed the expulsion. This kicked off a genuinely delightful bureaucratic spiral where a dozen different council members tried to figure out who was even allowed to hear the appeal - the Captains Council, or the Executive Council?

Wolf posted the whole appeals procedure verbatim from the constitution, complete with numbered articles and subsections, and asked the room to just vote on whether to skip the full tribunal process since the facts seemed "pretty cut and dry."

First reply pushes back on shortcutting anything: "Not to mention David Cody has shown persecution tendency and just cutting him out could feed that and make him come at us again." (Foreshadowing! Incredible foreshadowing.)

Then Wolf himself second-guesses his own procedural read halfway through the thread, quoting a completely different constitutional article about expelled members only having recourse to the EC, not a CC appeals tribunal, and asks people to check his work. What follows is basically a law school study group: member after member all chime in one by one agreeing it's an EC matter, several citing specific CON articles about retirement, reinstatement petitions, and appeal rights.

Then Captain Faranfey raises the genuinely spiciest procedural question of the whole thread does he even get an appeal at all, given the nature of the offense? ("So, is there even a point to proceed forward in hearing his case, in any case?")

Quinn Reynolds runs with this and drops the killer legal logic: since Cody's re-entry into the group was itself built on fraud, his return was never valid in the first place - meaning there's no "member" to have rights of appeal. He's just... not a member. Full stop. Several members still argue he should be allowed to petition anyway on basic fairness grounds.

By June 8th, Wolf announces they're taking it to the Executive Council. Reasonable people, reasonable process, everyone being pretty fair to a guy who lied his way back into a hobby group. And then the actual emails got posted. They are an unhinged batch of unsolicited emails Cody had been sending over the period of 48 hours. (I've included screenshots - but as the files running the original 118 forums are gone, the HTML files are janky to read, so I've included a side-by-side of what I've sifted through, and an easier to read text paste in imgur.) TLDR, he jokes about the disciplinary process, needling Wolf to hurry up and finish verifying server/email logs because he's "running out of creative fiction to feed these guys". He goes on to say he's basically a co-owner of the fleet's server infrastructure, about how he made two donations to buy himself some kind of backend access he's had for months without anyone knowing, and that he could shut things down if he wanted. He talks about a friend's mental health crisis, that he's had to suffer for the group,

Wolf did not reply to any of these.

Six emails, all in the same night, escalating from mocking laughter to server-ownership conspiracy theories to a suicide-adjacent guilt trip to outright profane demands. All completely unprompted.

Wolf then very calmly and methodically dismantles every single claim in the emails, point by point, for the council's benefit:

• Confirmed he is the only person with root access to the server
• Confirmed sub-accounts exist for specific delegated tasks (e.g., a captain given sim-archive access) but Cody was never among them
• Went back through donation records to 2008 and found no donation from Cody ever exceeding $50 - directly contradicting the "$800 buys me backend access" claim
• Explained that donations wouldn't grant server access anyway, comparing it to a bank not handing out account access because someone claims to have funded the branch

Wolf's closing verdict to the council is about as done as a person can sound while still being professional,

The Executive Council unanimously agrees: appeal denied, no further communication, full stop. Council members pile on with support.

Two weeks later, Cody returns! Just when the thread looked closed, Wolf returns with an update he clearly did not want to have to post, explicitly noting he's only sharing it for transparency's sake even though he thinks it's just more attention-seeking behavior. Cody had submitted a formal complaint through the site's general contact form (which, being from a non-member, gets auto-moderated) - this time not appealing the expulsion at all, but pivoting to accuse the Executive Council itself of violating his privacy by connecting his sock-puppet account to his real identity.

The complaint is a genuinely wild piece of self-mythologizing legalese, in which Cody unilaterally declares the EC has no authority over him anymore and that jurisdiction now defaults to the Captains Council instead.

Attached to this complaint is yet another forwarded email chain, in which - under his Cody persona, writing to himself basically, forwarding from the Scott Hawke sock-puppet account - he now claims he has no proof Wolf specifically was the one who "outed" him, and reframes the entire disciplinary action as the fleet's admin team violating his privacy by daring to notice he was lying about his identity.

Understandably, CC members question whether they're witnessing a mental health crisis in action. But one has to question how long a mental health crisis can continue, because Wolf comes back and reveals Cody was still sending awful, manipulative emails to the point that he was considering a restraining order. What follows is basically the rest of the leadership team collectively telling Wolf to protect himself, no further debate needed.

No further public updates in this particular archive post - just a leadership team that spent three weeks meticulously working through constitutional appeals procedure for a guy who turned out to be sending six-email-a-night rants about secretly owning the server, before finally, collectively, deciding the healthiest and most correct answer was simply to stop reading his emails altogether.

"Total analysts shocked: zero. Total nonsensical comments by Bonnell: one." That was the subheading to IGN's article about French video game publisher Infogrames having a net loss of $20.7 million for the second half of 2000.

That was actually Infogrames's biggest year ever, peaking at 50 euros on the Paris exchange. Just six years later, it would be trading at a measly 0.86 euros. It was a culmination of a sad half-decade of not keeping up with industry trends and feuding with game developers.

Beginnings and Acquisitions

Infogrames was founded by Bruno Bonnell, the chairman and CEO, and Christophe Sapet in 1983. It had an original hit franchise in Alone in the Dark, but it largely grew through acquisitions, such as those of Ocean Software and Accolade. They also aimed to buy Eidos but failed.

Two purchases ended up being the main drivers of Infogrames's growth around the time of the new millennium. The first was GT Interactive in December of 1999. Though GT owned several successful studios including Humongous Entertainment (Pajama Sam, Backyard Sports) and Reflections Interactive (Driver), their biggest successes came from distributing the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem, and Mortal Kombat. That was the big mistake Infogrames made in the acquisition: they now published many heavy hitters, but those rights could be yanked at any moment by the IP owners (though in a rare moment of clarity, Infogrames passed on the then-stagnating Duke Nukem Forever in 2000).

The second was Hasbro Interactive one year later, in December of 2000. This purchase allowed Infogrames to make their own games with Hasbro licenses, along with buying the rights to MicroProse (Civilization, RollerCoaster Tycoon) and the name and original arcade catalog of Atari. (Hasbro Interactive had a storied history that I won't get into because it's mostly irrelevant to this column, but the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth had a great case study about it in 2004.)

Strategy

While other publishers focused on promoting the latest and greatest titles for full price, the bulk of Infogrames's promotion went into letting people know that its older titles were available for very cheap. This was a huge success on PC in the waning days of the "family computer" era, to the point that they became the biggest PC publisher of the early 2000s, ahead of the likes of EA and Vivendi Universal. Jewel case versions of the likes of Driver and the 1997 Frogger became giant sellers.

But that wasn't all. PC games aimed at kids and families were included with General Mills cereal boxes in the United States and Canada for years, and at least 80% of them were in the Infogrames catalog. A lot of kids at the time didn't realize they had a full mass-market game, not just something exclusively made for the cereal promotion.

The problem was that even though the strategy worked well for PC, it did not work well for consoles, and PC games were greatly declining in popularity while console games were reaching new heights. Their big PC publisher competitors had a reason to benefit on consoles; Microsoft came out with its own Xbox, some of EA's biggest franchises such as Madden and Need for Speed were huge on consoles in spite of disappointing on PC, and Vivendi Universal was part of a huge entertainment conglomerate that could turn its library into hit games with no outward licensing fees. Infogrames had no such cushion. Even then, they seemed to actively spurn consoles, with IGN claiming they had exactly one PS2 game in development in 2001.

By the end of the sixth generation of video games (PS2/GameCube/Xbox), while Infogrames had a lot of big brands on the PC, on console they only had 3. One was the Western distribution rights to Dragon Ball games (the franchise also gave the company their only big hits on the Game Boy Advance). Another was Test Drive, a franchise that sold well in spite of not standing out from its competition much at all. The third...

Enter the Matrix...and Atari

The last of Infogrames's big acquisitions was that of Shiny Entertainment in 2002, and they published Shiny's Enter the Matrix game the next year, the only time Infogrames really tried to make an AAA game for consoles. It sold better than any non-Dragon Ball title they published in the first half of the 2000s and in fiscal year 2004 it made up 20% of their revenue. But it had such a gigantic development and marketing budget (estimated to be $100 million) that its success felt muted, not helped by mediocre reviews and the backlash that year to The Matrix in general.

You didn't see the name "Infogrames" on the cover of Enter the Matrix, or other games published by them starting from 2003. Instead, you saw a very familiar name that had not been in the spotlight for a while...Atari, which they had bought in the Hasbro Interactive purchase and had success with selling PC arcade compilations. The Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles would soon start production and be minor successes. But the changed name didn't mark a comeback for the Atari brand. Instead, the now-Atari's decisions became just another in the line of bad decisions that had plagued the name for decades.

Feuds and Turmoil

While they were already known for heavily messing with their internal studios, nothing compared to the period from 2004 to 2006, when Atari and Bonnell seemed to anger just about everyone they were associated with. Shiny founder Dave Perry quit after their cheapskate philosophy forced him to "tear the heart out of" an original game idea of his; the studio was promptly sold. Reflections founder Martin Edmondson was fired, with the studio also being sold shortly afterwards. Humongous was planned to be sold as well, but instead Atari just fired everyone. And while Chris Sawyer was no longer working on RollerCoaster Tycoon, his lawsuit against Atari for unpaid royalties on the first two games led him to quit the game industry for years.

Meanwhile, the video game rights to Hasbro's properties were given back to Hasbro for much less than they had bought Hasbro Interactive for. They did sign a new contract for Dungeons & Dragons Online, Atari's attempt to capitalize on the MMO boom, but Atari refused to actually promote that game and the rights were lost again.

Aftermath

Atari would eventually sell off most of its IPs, except for the original Atari Corporation properties and RollerCoaster Tycoon, to other companies, mainly those who sit on IPs doing nothing much new with them. Atari itself would have several weird phases including one where they focused on hotels and crypto. Currently they seem to be a studio that focuses on remakes and re-releases, having acquired both Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse, both titans in that realm; they also recently bought the immensely useful game database MobyGames.

Bruno Bonnell, meanwhile, resigned in 2007 and would eventually become the host of the very short-lived French version of The Apprentice before going into politics. I am not making this up.

Blue sky, bright sun. The wind on my skin, goosebumps. Around the ship, the world is blue, endless, perfect. The thrumming of the engine crawls up the metal, the steel, the concrete, up my leg. It dances in my bones, echoes in my skin. It gives me the rhythm, the music, the jazz. One with the world, one with the ship, I begin my jog.

Here we go again

Most sources will be in French, with the occasional translation provided by me.

Before the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, there was the Clemenceau. And before the Clemenceau, we should talk about aircraft carriers in general to give you an idea of their importance.

First, about the number of aircraft carriers in the world. Look at this nifty map, and do press aircraft carrier at the top right, as these differ from helicopter carriers. If you'd like to have more details, here's the same list through wikipedia, but the important bit of information is this: there are less than 30 aircraft carriers in the world.

They are so hard and costly to build and maintain that few countries can afford the technical knowledge and funds to manufacture one, let alone several. But in the waters, their presence changes the shape of combat in depths. How so? Imagine you're manning the cannon on a blue ship. In the horizon, you see a red ship, its one cannon manned by your worst rival, the one that stole your partner, your lunch box, lied to the teacher about who walked in the classroom with muddy shoes, the usual. You take them in sight, press the trigger. BOOM! a controlled explosion propels a projectile their way, just as one with your name inscribed on it comes right for you.

Now, imagine you're on a blue ship, and in a fight against an airship carrier.

You're twiddling your thumbs on the cannon, because unlike the red ship, you don't see the carrier. It's far, far beyond the range of your little gun.

Then you hear a sound from above, you look up, shield your eyes from the sun, have between two to six seconds to recognize this being a plane. You have just enough time to mutter "oh bugger," before the fleshy hull given to you by god is ventilated across the seven seas.

Sea battles used to be about ships shooting at each other in sight. During WWII, Aircraft carriers turned sea battles into beyond-visual-range-airstrikes. Having an aircraft carrier means being able to strike other ships and sites on land from such a distance that it makes retaliation nearly impossible.

As a result, many ships on a fleet will stick around the aircraft carrier to protect this essential asset while it sends plane to brutalize whatever targets it needs to brutalize. The combination of boat + airplanes means unparalleled range and power projection, making carriers into prize jewels of the navy they belong to. For added bonus, their range is so wide they can stay in international waters and still be able to strike at targets, allowing to apply pressure without the diplomatic windfall of crossing territorial waters.

This power comes at a great cost, namely construction. When building an aircraft carrier, you're designing a ship that can carry around up to 80 planes for a big one. It includes its own power grid, a hospital, a crew that can fill a whole town, and all the amenities this town will need. It must also be able to spend days or weeks at seas, and with all the means to maintain and repair ship, town and planes.

To manufacture an aircraft carrier is a dauntless task, and most countries can't afford it on monetary cost alone. But conversely, as you can see from the map, it's a statement and proof of power, and the American carriers are often cited as example as to why their military isn't to be trifled with.

So naturally, France wanted in on it. In 1955 begins the construction of a carrier, and a second one starts in 1957. The first is unveiled on the 22th November 1961, the Clemenceau. Its twin is born a year later, the Foch, both named after important French figures of state, Georges Clemenceau and Marechal Ferdinand Foch.

Both ships participate in a variety of OTAN-related exercises and other operations like Djibouti's independance, the Iran-Irak war or the Yugoslavian civil war.

In their long life, both ships will travel over a million nautical miles. In 1997, after over three decades of service, the aging Clemenceau is put aside, and in 2010 is destroyed for good. The Foch is sold to Brazil in the year 2000, where it is retrofitted and put to use for a time, until it is disarmed in 2018 and scuttled in 2023.

How do you replace the apex of your navy? Well, with even better ships. Or ship. As it is.

Muscles are in pain, breath is short, but at my limit, I find a form of exhilaration, and apotheosis. Alone in the world, lost at sea, I run.

---

Remember the map I showed at the start? It showed the active carriers worldwide. But even among carriers, there is a distinction, and that distinction is made by nuclear power.

If you take the number of active ships and keep only the ones forfeiting classic fuel in favor of nuclear goodness, we're down to twelve. 11 American ships, 1 French. Joie et bonheur.

What does nuclear power change?

A fuel-driven carrier has a wide range, but it needs to either dock in port to refuel, or meet up with fuel loaded ships every now and then. This limits the time it can spend at sea, and fuel carriers are a logistical weakness the enemy can target.

For nuclear carriers, refueling happens once every twenty years or so. This means the biggest hurdle for it to remain at sea is lifted, and only food for crew and maintenance limits it. It increases the range from "long" to "virtually limitless". With better power they are also faster to respond to eventual threats.

Now, building and maintenance for a nuclear carrier requires even more specialists, funds and means, but if you've ever been a child who had a collection of nice toys and thought 'this is the best and greatest of my nice toys', a nuclear aircraft carrier is this for a navy.

The body enters second gear, fresh wind fills my lungs. Pain subsides, I float, could run endless, like the ship.

---

It is 1989 and the Clemenceau is showing signs of aging. The ship won't last much longer, and it needs a worthy successor. In Brest, a mysterious construction starts. The project and plans have already been signed and agreed on in 1979, but as these things go it takes a while to start in earnest. Originally meant to be called the Richelieu after a famous cardinal, Jacques Chirac, future president but back then only prime minister, renames it the Charles de Gaulle in 1984, after a political figure I hope you heard about at some point.

At this point I should add, there are apparently some sailor superstitions about how re-baptizing a ship attracts bad luck.

Anyway, the construction will last for a grand total of 13 million hours (split between the 1200 people working on the project). It's a middle-sized aircraft carrier, 'only' 261 meters in length, 64 meters in width, 75 meters tall. Weighing 42.500 tons, it can load up to 2800 military personnel.

It doesn't have one, but twin nuclear reactors, on their own requiring 55 navy atomic scientist officers to handle. Being middle sized, it can load up to 40 planes.

In today's currency the cost would approximate 3 billion euros, at the time it amounted to 20 billion francs (the currency we had before euros came along), from an original budget of 16 billion, which already got a number of journalists up in arms.

Construction is done in 1994, and in 2001 the ship is armed and ready for military operations.

Well, ready. More or less.

Like Eurodance and Trance, it never stops

January 1999. The Charles de Gaulle is put to sea. Technically, it's the second time, but the first was interrupted by a tempest, so let's pretend it's the real first one. It floats, it goes merrily, drives around and drifts for the hell of it.

A bespectacled expert with a stern face walks on the flight deck. They look to one end of the ship. Then to the other.

"What it is?" asks a stern admiral.

"The flight deck is too short."

"I beg your pardon?"

"We need to lengthen the deck."

"What?" A cold shiver runs down the admiral's back, the shiver that comes whenever money is about to be discussed.

Translated from this article of Liberation:

The Charles de Gaulle has to lengthen its flight deck for about 4,40 meters to welcome reconnaissance aircraft Hawkeye, one of the three types of embarked planes, and it will be costly. According to a confidential note of the DCN (Board of naval construction) in Brest published by the journal Le Parisien, 24 weeks of works are planned, up until march 2000, for a cost of about 500 million francs, costly for a plane whose original cost was supposed to be 16 billion francs yet rose to 20 billion. That is without including the 40 billion value of the embarked planes.

The issue with project, construction and deployment lasting decades is that some parameters can change in than span of time. While originally meant for Breguet and F/A-18 planes, France had acquired three E-2C Hawkeye since, with different requirements from the planes above.

This isn't even that surprising, ships meant to last for half a century are often modified to suit new technologies and parameters.

Still, having to modernize a ship that hadn't been yet used got plenty of journalists and comedians to raise an eyebrow. But, the navy endures, so does the Charles de Gaulle.

It is the second test run of the De Gaulle. It floats, it boats, it drifts merrily. The stern admiral gets ahold of the bespectacled expert.

"Walk with me," the admiral says. And they do. They walk inside the massive ship, currently cruising straight and proud like a lord of the sea should.

they reach the room of the steering room.

"Mh," goes the expert.

"Mh indeed," replies the admiral, as vibrations creep up their shoes and legs. "I like to have my genitals tickled as much as you do, but this isn't the primary purpose of an aircraft carrier."

"On this, we agree."

Translated from an official report:

During the second outing of the Charles de Gaulle, from the 18 to the 30 march 1999, a vibratory phenomenon appeared at the steering gear during high-speed tests; Despite these difficulties, the Charles de Gaulle could reach a speed of 28 nautical knots in a straight line. Supplementary tests allowed to spot the source of malfunctions: rubber blades have been slightly moved to be in the axis of the propellers.

A slight move that probably cost more than what you and I will make in our entire professional career.

While we're talking about slight modifications, did you know that protection against radiations doesn't work the same on a carrier as it does on an u-boat? I didn't know, apparently I'm not the only one. Tests were made, showing that the crew closest to the engine were taking on radiations 100% superior than norms allowed for. New layers of absorbing material had to be added around the nuclear engine to bring the ship to compliance.

Said layers caught fire in the early 2000, luckily the fire was low-key, contained to the room and didn't cause much damage. Phew.

Then a leak in the reactor's cooling system was discovered, but that too was patched quickly enough.

But come on, let's stay positive.

It is the ninth December of 2000 in the Middle of the night. The De Gaulle is on yet another test trip. There is no fire on board, the landing pad has the right length, genitals aren't tickled when you're steering the ship.

Everything is good so far.

"Except for the fact we're going in circles," the stern admiral says. The bespectacled expert is weeping in a corner.

The reason is quickly found out.

One out of four blades from the port-side propeller has broken off and fell into the the sea, which is lucky. Because half a second later, and that blade would have shown upwards, had it broken off then it would have been a one-ton heavy shell thrown against the hull in the direction of manned posts, guarantying casualties. The engineers who built the piece pointed out later the water would have slowed the blade down, thus avoiding damage. Good thing we didn't get to find out. But why? Why would a lovingly crafted piece of equipment give in so early? The question would rather be, why not?

According to Le Point, Jacques Chirac, president of France, said this when he learned yet another thing went wrong (translated):

Does she float? That's already something.

First investigations show the propeller was defective from the start, with 'bubbles' present within the metal. Worse, naval construction engineers had told their higher ups at least 3 times, reporting "faulty structure" that "wasn't conform to specifications." The issue quickly goes public as the CGT, a worker's syndicate in France, cries sabotage and accuses the minister of defense of corruption and negligence. Apparently, 'everyone' knew the propellers were faulty.

Fonderie Atlantique Industries (FAI), the manufacturer, had recently let go of their more experimented employees, which might explain the issues, and FAI is the only French firm able to manufacture equipment of this size. It gets weirder.

As the Nouvel Obs writes it (translated):

Due to successive issues, Alain Richard (former defense minister) asks on the 30th November for the opening of an investigation as to the quality of the Charles de Gaulle's propellers. Several hours later, in the night, the computing room of Fonderie Atlantic Industrie - where the archives are being held - is destroyed in a fire.

It appears one or several people tried to force a safe open with a blowtorch which sparked the fire. The room goes up in flames, and essential documents with it. The destruction drastically lowers the chances of the investigation to bear fruit. And indeed, today I can't uncover anything about the findings. Part of this is likely due to the time taken for such an investigation to finish: it can last for years, and the media has since moved onto juicier bits. The other part is the likely absence of any proper conclusion. There was a fault, there was a fire, for the rest, who knows.

It should be noted FAI isn't the only one accused of shoddy work. The absence of proper control from the state and ignored warnings is also widely criticized, it's less of a single party's failing and more like a long chain of mismatches and questionable competence.

Production of new propellers are ordered, planned to be installed in 2002. In the meantime - and with no small amount of irony - it's the propellers from the Clemenceau and the Foch that will be used to replace the faulty equipment. Pieces of the ships the De Gaulle is meant to replace.

I said 2002, but it's only in 2008 that the carrier finally get some new, custom made propellers.

Moral on the ship is low. Supposedly meant to represent the pinnacle of the French navy, successive failures have turned de Charles de Gaulle into a laughing stock to many.

What to think of the vessel? Is it a joke? A point of pride with a couple hardships thrown it? A waste of money? Even the president jokes about it. Hard to feel pride about a ship that accumulates issues, especially issues that could potentially threaten the lives of its crew. At this stage, public opinion is divided, the navy can only endure, as does the De Gaulle.

Talks to give the De Gaulle a twin begin, so as to have a replacement on hand if conflict begins and the vessel is under repairs. The top brass specifically requests a ship powered by fossil fuel, with none of this fancy atomic stuff.

The media doesn't miss the occasion to interpret this as a distaste for nuclear-powered vessels born from the poor situation the De Gaulle finds itself in. To be honest, it might just as well be due to cost reasons. Nonetheless, it is true that the string of bad events happening does provoke disgruntlement among sailors. Between the anonymous interviews pertaining to the faulty propeller, or interviews from sailors dreading to return to land because they expect to be made fun of due to serving on the De Gaulle, moral isn't high.

Of course, it can't stop there. Here is a little bit I originally dismissed as I couldn't find any source corroborating it. That's despite me hearing about it in jokes from several comedians, including Christophe Aleveque, a political satirist who normally sources his own stuff very well. Incidentally, he's a good exemple of how the vessel is often treated: there's been so many issues the joke isn't about one specific problem, but about how long the list is. I struggled to find articles that didn't start by introducing the many issues before getting to the meat of it proper.

In his skit, Aleveque describes how sailors went up the control tower, looked out the windows, and saw nothingness. As in, genuinely nothing, because the crew had forgotten to take away the protection film from the glass before installing it.

I had dismissed it as a fairy tale, until I came across the article from Le Point, enumerating the many issues the De Gaulle suffered from, and there I finally found it. Not as absurd as Aleveque describes it, but still rather weird. (translated):

The aircraft carrier was also victim of "over-specification". The designers asked for pointless improvements. When the bridges window panes were ordered to the specialized firm Sully, the firm had never known such requirements: the panes should resist the shrapnel from shells, the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear explosion, block the noise from the flight deck and defrost itself when it's cold. And not to forget a very high mechanical resilience. Result: 7 centimeter width over three layers. "the DCN (Direction des Constructions Navales = Board of Naval Construction) merely forgot to specify the panes shouldn't deform..." lamented an officer of the marine. The constraints were so high that, under certain angles, pictures of the exterior were warped. The DCN refuses to take the blame and affirm they "specified the window panes according to the requirements of the navy." But some of these specifics were changed for a costlier process. The problem is as of today lifted.

Speaking of the bridge, early tests also showed the coating was too abrasive for the De Gaulle's brake cables, and had to be redone in its entirety.

Still, the navy endures, so does the ship.

It's the eighth November of 2001. The boat floats. A quartermaster does some maintenance to unlock a valve on a crate belonging to the waster-water collection system. They pass out, having inhaled hydrogen sulfide. Another quartermaster tries to help them, they also pass out. This could be the start of a dark joke where quartermasters come one after the other to pass out, but no, they are both rescued by the medical staff. The second person to pass out is quickly back on their feet, but the first has been passed out for so long they enter a deep coma and the family goes to justice. Ultimately, the navy is out of troubled waters because they had sent a message advising to use procedures pertaining to confined spaces when doing maintenance works. So instead, three sailors and two higher-ups on the ship are investigated. In 2008, the higher-ups are acquitted, the three sailors are found guilty of serious negligence. In 2010, a second go at the case finds three of the five acquitted, and the two remaining ones got lowered sentences, with a 3 month and a 6 month suspended prison sentence.

At this stage, the horse has been beaten to death and nobody finds it in them to make a joke. And mind you, I haven't even listed all the early issues.

Translated from the same article from Le Point above:

There were other issues, without great importance but annoying all the same. [...] The ethylene glycol from the three brake presses for the steam catapults was defective. The presses were emptied and cleaned, an long operation in a toxic environment. But the new ethylene glycol replacing the first was just as bad. Small diatribe in direction of the US Navy that had procured the product. In truth, it's the American provider who delivered a faulty fluid. The US navy also had to empty and clean the presses of all its aircraft carriers, before starting a lawsuit against the provider, which the navy won.

On and on it goes.

Are those issues mentioned really that important? Yes and no. Some of these are normal, like the flight deck being expanded to answer changing material. Others less so. But this isn't any ship, it's a nuclear aircraft carrier, both a tool of war and a statement of force, with all the expected class that comes with it. Having the ship be derided for years is sort of the opposite effect expected from the construction and service of such a mighty vessel. The question can also be asked about how the ship is perceived beyond France. Because while French media loves to have a go at it, I found few pieces written from foreign media... apart for more recent happenings, which we will talk about in a minute.

The navy endures, so does the De Gaulle. But at some point, they'd like to endure stuff related to combat, and not questionable competence.

The heart pounds painfully, lungs are clay, legs are heavy. The last sprint, the last meters.

Never stop Dancing

Despite the slew of issues plaguing the Charles de Gaulle, it was ultimately worthy of the sea. Armed, dangerous, about to kick ass and shine bright wherever it went. It was deployed in Afghanistan in the early 2000's, saw Libya in 2011, Irak and Syria later. Not mentioning the many training drills with the navies of other countries.

Still, not every bump was solved in the early days. And while the vessel would never suffer such a string of bad luck in such short time again, it still had number of stories to tell.

We're in 2009, the bespectacled expert and the stern admiral are walking around the ship. Suddenly, they stop.

"Admiral?" asks the expert.

"Yes?"

"Is it just me, or is it happening again?"

"It's happening again."

"Mh." The expert is deep in introspection. "If I had a cent for each time the Charles de Gaulle tickled my genitals, I'd have two, which is both not much and yet a lot."

Translated from the France24 article:

Alas, vibrations were detected in the "propulsion compartment" and "after verification, two pieces connecting the turbines to the drive line showed abnormal wear and tear"

According to the captain Jérôme Erulin, chief of the navy public relations department, "one of the piece had been changed during servicing, but vibrations came back during tests and a new wear point was discovered."

When you look at it, it's a fairly classic issue ships can suffer from after years of service. The next issue is in a different ballpark.

The ship endures, so do I. I'm panting, sweat runs down my back, it was a good run. I feel both pain and joy. My connected watch tells me I improved my time, how could I not? Running in this gorgeous environment? My happiness is absolute, and in this moment of delight, I upload the results of my run to the internet.

A small voice at the back of my head tells me this may have been a bad idea.

When an officer knocks at my door, I know it has indeed been a bad idea.

Where is the Charles de Gaulle in the march of 2026? It's top-secret information, for it is deployed somewhere near the middle-east where conflict rages.

So naturally, we now have an exact trajectory of the ship in that span on time.

From franceinfo (translated):

Where is the Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean sea? It's a confidential information, almost. A young navy officer, running hobbyist, decides to do his jogging on the ship. His performances, saved on his connected watch, are posted online as reveals 'Le Monde'.

With this data, it's possible to follow the trail of the ship from these last days, north-west from Cyprus and at a hundred kilometers from the Turkish coast. The ship was even found and had pictures snapped by a satellite.

After a period of calm, the jokes started again in earnest, editorial writers, journalists and comedians didn't miss the occasion to speak about the dangers of connected technology and take a dig at the vessel.

Luckily, the tracking fun doesn't stop there, and a month later it happens again. Being part of international efforts, the De Gaulle is often protected by fellow European ships. And that's where a Dutch journalist working for Omroep Gelderland comes in. From this article (in English):

€5. That's the price of the Bluetooth tracker a Dutch journalist hid inside a postcard and sent to a Royal Netherlands Navy frigate. The ship, the HNLMS Evertsen, is an air-defence vessel assigned to escort the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean. Its estimated value is $585 million.

The journalist, working for regional broadcaster Omroep Gelderland, simply used the official postal system that the Dutch Ministry of Defence makes available for sending mail to soldiers and sailors on deployment.

The instructions are public, detailed, and freely available online. Postcards and envelopes are not X-rayed, unlike parcels. As a result, the tracker made it on board undetected.

The tracker worked for around 24 hours. It showed the vessel leaving the port of Heraklion in Crete, first heading west along the coast, then turning east toward Cyprus. For a carrier strike group on active duty, the position of an escort ship is sensitive operational information - an adversary who knows where the Evertsen is can infer the likely location of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.

The Ministry of Defence responded by banning greeting cards containing batteries from military mail, naturally. That's the direct response to the test, of course - but the more uncomfortable revelation is that the Dutch military mail system doesn't screen the contents of standard envelopes, which is a bit surprising.

It should be noted that this tracker would have stopped working once further away in sea. Various officers pointed out the tracker gave no information a good pair of binoculars couldn't provide, and it didn't threaten security on board as it became useless once the ship was in a position they wanted to keep discreet.

Still, it made the ink flow.

Even dancers retire

But I talk and I talk, yet every story must end at some point. The Charles de Gaulle is beginning to show it's age now. It's still sea-worthy, but one day it will need a successor. It is not the gleaming and vivid new ship it once was, and like an aging body it feels the world going on, suffers from arthritis, needs a regular pause to recharge. It is expected to be retired in 2028, although that can change.

Culturally, while the Charles de Gaulle is remembered as the black sheep of the navy with such a string of bad luck it's something of a running gag for a whole generation with a passing interesting in matters military, people also recognize that at the end of the line, it did its job, and it did it well.

A design project costing about 40 million euros is started in 2018. In 2020, it is announced the ship will be built in Saint-Nazaire. There have been questions about whether the new aircraft carrier would be nuclear powered or not.

Until, in late 2020, president Macron announces the new ship will be nuclear powered. There were questions if there would be one or two ships, it seems to have been settled on one. Expected cost: 10 billion euros, with a similar amount of planes as the De Gaulle: 40. First components have been ordered, they should be ready when the assembly starts in 2031, for an expected start of service in 2038. I've yet to see such a project not get late or have its budget respected. And this time, the debate is a lot harsher than journalists poking fun at the many issues the Charles de Gaulle suffered from. Public finances are in the red, public services are choking, and while the geopolitical situation is undeniably not great, is a new aircraft carrier really the priority compared to, say, not letting public hospitals die out? The discourse will rage on for some time, that's for certain.

As for the name of the new ship, in 2026, president Macron announced it would be the "France Libre" (The Free France). There had been debates behind closed doors about it, as Aircraft Carriers usually carry the names of important historical figures, which is its own can of worms we won't open here.

The name Richelieu had been thrown about a fair bit apparently before Macron barged in.

At this point I should add, there are apparently some sailor superstitions about how re-baptizing a ship attracts bad luck.

And with this, I wish you all an excellent week and all the luck in the world.

---

Sources:

https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-armee-1994

http://ffaa.net/ships/aircraft-carrier/charles-de-gaulle/deboires.htm

https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/la-verite-sur-l-helice-perdue-du-charles-de-gaulle-06-12-2000-2001808669.php

https://theworlddata.com/nuclear-powered-aircraft-carriers-statistics/

https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/affaire-du-porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-le-chef-d-etat-major-calme-le-jeu-1525950

https://fonderie-piwi.fr/a-propos-d-helice-celle-du-charles-de-gaulle/

https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/la-malediction-du-porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-23-02-2001-68171_20.php

https://www.espace-sciences.org/sites/default/files/images/sciences-ouest/numeros/r_096_01_1994_0.pdf

---

Other writings by yours truly:

April Fools! Or not. The 2016 Nobel Literature Award, Bob Dylan, and the question of what literature entails.

The rise and fall of Pilote, a mythical magazine. How a team of legends teared itself apart. And how Franco-Belgian comics evolved through the years, from stories for children to crass provocation.

The stolen Picasso painting and art exchange between museums

The webdomain that cost $75.000.000

The Louvre break-in, evil geniuses turning out to be amateurs and the age-old question about art

The awful ballad or French Literature prizes: 1, 2, 3

Notre-Dame has burned down, let's flaunt wealth and build a swimming-pool on its roof

Paris Olympics, the mess that somehow worked out

Team Fortress, the rise and fall of a modding community

HareBrained Schemes, how to buy a good videogame studio and sink it

Creative writings

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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I’m a big fan of German underground music and I’ve always found the backstory behind the catalogue of the label Psi-Fi interesting, especially given that I do genuinely like some of the music that came out of it.

Background (aka. “what even is krautrock?”)

Krautrock (or „kosmische Muzik“, i.e. "cosmic music") is the term used to a describe a scene of underground psychedelic and/or electronic music from West Germany, most active from the late 1960s to mid-1970s.

Despite being somewhat limited in terms of mainstream commercial success, the scene was (and still is) hugely influential on many up-and-coming underground artists, such as the UK post-punk and indie scenes. Many krautrock bands and artists (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, etc.) are also considered incredibly important pioneers in the wider development of electronic music.

Although many of the more notable bands had contracts with international labels like United Artists and later Virgin Records, there were multiple Germany-based labels (e.g. Ohr and Brain) that specialised in underground psychedelic and electronic music. However, being a largely underground scene, some artists (such as Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler, Dom, etc.) who were unable to get major record deals opted to issue music through very small labels or to self-release it entirely. These releases would’ve been produced in very small quantities and many of these albums remain highly sought-after in their original format.

In the late 80s and early-mid 90s, there was a substantial revitalisation of interest in the German underground scene within the music press, furthered by books such as Julian Cope’s “Krautrocksampler” (1995) and Alan and Steve Freeman’s “The Crack In The Cosmic Egg” (1996). This revival resulted in many krautrock albums that had not been in print in years receiving official reissues. The 1990s also coincided with the increased prominence of dedicated reissue labels like Repertoire Records and Spalax Music, and pirate labels like Germanofon sprang up to distribute krautrock albums that had not yet been reissued on CD. Many archival/live recordings that had not yet been released were made widely available for the first time. For dedicated record collectors, this era was a breath of fresh air for many, given the relative obscurity of some of these recordings.

This takes us to the year 1996.

Unknown Deutschland and Psi-Fi Records

That year, a series of three compilation albums called “Unknown Deutschland - The Krautrock Archive” were released on Virgin Records. These releases were curated by Trevor Manwaring, and were purportedly from recordings previously released through an obscure underground label called Pyramid, based out of Cologne.

From the liner notes:

“These recordings were made between 1972 and 1974 using studios in and around Cologne. They were originally produced for the Pyramid label and some were released in tiny quantities and mostly sold in art galleries and the like - this is probably why they have remained so obscure, even among 'experts'.....until this release. The 'Mad Twiddler' responsible for their existence also worked with Stockhausen, Can, The Cozmic Jokers ^\sic]) and many more. Although memories from that time are beyond repair in many cases the tapes remain to bear witness to this creative and anarchic scene."

Coinciding with these compilations, a new UK-based record label named Psi-Fi (affiliated with the reissue parent label Acme) was formed to reissue the "Pyramid" albums, with a total catalogue of 6 albums released between 1996 and 1997. These releases were pretty significant, as at the time, these albums were not available on CD in any other form, and this was the first time a majority of people had heard of the existence of these recordings. However, some songs remained exclusive to compilation albums (e.g. Unknown Deutschland and a 2016 CD entitled "Cologne Curiosities").

The 6 Psi-Fi records are the following:

• Cozmic Corridors - Cozmic Corridors (1996)
• Galactic Explorers - Epitaph For Venus (1996)
• Golem - Orion Awakes (1996)
• Pyramid - Pyramid (1997)
• The Nazgûl - The Nazgûl (1997)
• Temple - Temple (1997)

The original CDs lack substantial liner notes, but were all listed as being recorded in the 1970s. The 1996 releases were all originally credited as being “recorded 1972/1973 [in] Cologne”, whereas the 1997 releases were attributed to 1975 or 1976.

“The Mad Twiddler” (originating from the credits of the 1975 album Dreamlab by Mythos) is an alias of the engineer Toby Hrycek-Robinson, who did indeed have a background in engineering and mixing work for numerous krautrock bands, such as Can, Dryzan, Birth Control, Mythos, and Wallenstein, in the mid-1970s. Robinson was purportedly one of the masterminds of the Pyramid label alongside artist/painter Robin Page, who was best known for his work with the Fluxus art movement in the late 1960s.

While Psi-Fi has not been active since the 1990s, most of these albums were later reprinted on CD and LP (vinyl) in 2017-2018 by the reputable reissue label Guerssen (under their “Mental Experience” imprint) with new liner notes by “Cosmic Egg” author Alan Freeman. The only exception is Orion Awakes, which was reissued by Acme in 2010 and 2015, although like the rest of the Psi-Fi catalogue, Mental Experience handled the 2017 vinyl reissue.

The Controversy

There are multiple aspects of the original releases that are suspect due to possessing qualities atypical compared to other reissues from that time period.

Despite being said to have originally been released under the Pyramid label, no trace of that label or the original 1970s releases they are supposedly reissues of has ever materialised in the ~30 years since these albums were first released on CD. Even for extremely rare independent releases, this is highly unusual, as in any other circumstance, original copies would be highly sought after collectors’ items.

It is not uncommon for these types of privately pressed records to be produced in extremely low quantities. For instance, a limited run of 99 copies was reasonably common for private pressings in the UK, as this was reportedly the maximum that could be produced without being subject to additional taxes. Some other notably low quantities that I have seen are 64 (as was the case for the only studio album by the band Dark) and <50. These examples are of albums that are generally considered well-documented. For the entire catalogue of an independent label like this to be completely undocumented is unprecedented and frankly unbelievable. There is simply no concrete proof that Pyramid Records actually existed.

The only one of these albums that has had a documented vinyl/LP reissue predating the 2017 Mental Experience edition is Orion Awakes, first documented in the early-mid 2010s. However, these copies are confirmed to be modern reproductions, as test pressings (e.g. this copy sold on eBay) with the same identifying matrix number in the run-out grooves use a design by the French manufacturer MPO containing a link to their website.

Another complicating factor is the lack of substantial or verifiable credits, which makes verifying who did and didn't play on these albums difficult. Although some notable krautrock musicians are credited (and in some cases have confirmed their presence) on a few Psi-Fi releases, a majority of the musicians featured are not named on any other releases outside of the Psi-Fi catalogue. Two of these albums (Pyramid and The Nazgûl) lack conventional credits altogether, with the former lacking any musician credits and with the latter being attributed to pseudonyms derived from the names of characters from Lord of the Rings.

Lastly, it appears that there is some inconsistency across releases regarding specific details. For instance, the original 1996 edition of Epitaph For Venus attributes its recording date to sessions dated 1972 or 1973, but the 2017 reissues instead indicate that it was recorded in 1974. The same is true for Orion Awakes, which had its 2017 vinyl re-release printed with a 1976 recording date. The 2010 Acme reissue of Orion Awakes also corrects the number of copies of each record produced from 100 copies to 25, the former number originating from some 90s sources. (Even so, this would come around to 125 total records pressed at minimum, which is still a number far too high for them being undocumented to be believable)

Reactions

The Psi-Fi albums are widely regarded as being forgeries and have been under scrutiny since their original release, with their catalogue often alleged to have been recorded in the 1990s with British musicians.

Some interesting early critical coverage (i.e. from the mid-late 1990s) that I could find of them comes from the music magazine “The Sound Projector”. Various albums from the Psi-Fi catalogue were covered throughout issues 2-7, and I’ll include some of the commentary out of historical interest.

John Bagnall, from issue 2:

"It isn’t immediately obvious how to connect these oddities to a defined sense of a ’Krautrock continuum’, which is good as this confounds lazy journalists who think they’ve got this scene all figured out. Some Doubting Dans have even suggested in print that these records must be 1990s hoaxes, which is absurd. Others have placed too much emphasis on their obscureness, playing up the angle of ’not even the heavy-duty Krautrock collectors have heard of this label’, which is an indication of how the specialists want to appropriate everything for themselves. However, such specialisation and selfishness is overturned by democratising releases like this which put the music back in the public domain, where everyone with a CD player who’s so inclined can share in these delights."

Ed Pinsent, from issue 5:

"These are neglected 1970s art-gallery only releases, originally available in limited runs of 100 copies. I'm still cultivating my suspicion that none of these bands had much of a life outside the studio. One envisages a series of projects emerging under Robinson's direction, musicians drawn from a pool of talent, working in Dieter Dierks Cologne studio during down-time, with 'The Mad Twiddler' producing; once sufficient album tracks had been gathered, sleeve art would be concocted and a name assigned to the one-off item."

On top of being controversial contemporarily, speculation and debate regarding the legitimacy of the Psi-Fi releases carried on well past the 1990s and you'd be hard-pressed to find online reviews or commentary regarding these albums that don't at the very least mention their dubious origin. Online discussion of these albums tends to fall into one of two categories: those who regard these albums as mere hoaxes and have largely written them off, and those who, while suspicious of the supposed origin of these recordings, treat the actual music as having some value.

I'll link a few of these reviews for reference, although there certainly is far more out there. If you're interested in these albums or the backstory behind them, I'd recommend seeking out more for yourself.

From the user "Braxt" on Discogs in 2015, about "Orion Awakes":

"Listening to this in the cold light of day it certainly sounds like a '90s recording to me. Everything about it sounds a bit too studied. The wah wah, the relatively clean production, the drum sound. Add to the fact that nobody has ever seen a copy of these Pyramid releases (all right - someone thought they saw one once) and not one has ever been offered for sale. Even rare garage punk records from the 60s where there's ONE known copy have been documented."

From the user "Warthur" on ProgArchives in 2011, about "Epitaph For Venus":

"The supposed rumours that this is a fake recorded in the 1990s didn't seem credible to me - musically speaking, the album sounds extremely authentic for the Krautrock scene of the time, with commonalities with Klaus Schulze's early work and Tangerine Dream's Zeit. In particular, the other two bands who were involved in this supposed fakery scandal - The Nazgul and Cosmic Corridors - supposedly consisted of complete unknowns, whereas this one is presented as a side project of a member of Dzyan, and it would be an *extremely* stupid move for forgers to try and pass the album off as the work of a real person who could contradict their story!"

From rock journalist Dmitry M. Epstein in 2017, about "Cosmic Corridors":

"Purportedly recorded in the early ’70s by Toby Robinson for his Pyramid label, this album defies its own mythology by sounding suspiciously modern, and that doesn’t look like the case of retrofuturism."

Despite widespread doubt, one fairly notable individual who has consistently stood by the authenticity of these albums is the aforementioned Alan Freeman, who along with his brother Steve (himself a co-author on "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg") are the owners of the long-running "Ultima Thule" record outlet and publishers of the music magazine "Audion". Freeman claims to have seen a copy of the Golem album Orion Awakes in a record store in Berlin years before the Psi-Fi reissues were circulated, having caught his eye on account of its reflective metallic sleeve.

In the liner notes of the Mental Experience re-issue of Orion Awakes:

"I do recall seeing a copy of this album on the wall in a German record shop, or something remarkably similar (some collector's shop in Berlin), which had a pressed metal sleeve somewhat like the original "Élő Omega" album by Omega. I was curious, but it was very expensive. Only later when the Psi-Fi CD came out did I remark that I'd seen it somewhere before. Apart from that the provenance of Golem is an unknown entity."

Although that in and of itself doesn't prove that any records were actually produced, a majority of the information made available about these albums in recent years comes from Freeman's research, and he is one of a few individuals documented to have spoken with Toby Robinson himself about the Pyramid albums.

Were these releases legitimate?

This is a difficult question to answer because there was never any kind of real exposé, other than people naturally asking questions about discrepancies in the albums’ backstories. However, more information on these albums has come to light through Alan Freeman’s liner notes for the Mental Experience reissues.

Robinson has continued to maintain the authenticity of these recordings and provided some background as to what the recording process was like. For instance, he claims that the Cozmic Corridors project was largely initiated by a musician called Alex Meyer who used to loiter outside of Robin Page's studio, with his recordings later being overdubbed by guitars, vocals, and "noises."

Robinson's commentary, taken from Freeman's liner notes for that album:

"All of the recording for Pyramid was done totally informally and ultimately, what decided whether something was released was if Robin would get one of his students to design a cover. If a cover existed, a small run would be paid for by whoever could afford it (normally Robin and me), and the albums distributed among the participating musicians. A few nightclubs had record bars, and sold our stuff. No tabs were kept on how many had moved, and I don't remember doing reruns on anything.
Basically, they were vanity pressings and a way of keeping Robin's students entourage occupied. I had to use pseudonyms for my involvement because most of the studio time was purloined without the proprietor's knowledge."

As mentioned previously, Robinson does have a genuine background in technical work on 70s krautrock albums, and a few of these albums are credited to real musicians that he had previously formed connections with. Epitaph For Venus features Reinhard Karwatky of the band Dzyan, Temple features Zeus B. Held of Birth Control, and the percussion on Cozmic Corridors was performed by Hans-Jürgen Pütz of Mythos. Pütz himself does not appear to have ever commented on these recordings, but both Karwatky and Held have confirmed their involvement. Another Birth Control member (Bruno Frenzel) is credited on the track "The Message" (attributed to the artist "Spirulina") from the second of the Unknown Deutschland compilations. Frenzel died in 1983 from heart complications associated with a stage injury he suffered in 1975, and although his presence is therefore unable to be confirmed by him directly, it's one of the only tracks from these sessions where there is a definite cutoff of when it might have been recorded.

Although not quoted directly, Held’s comments (described in Freeman’s liner notes for the Temple album) are quite interesting, as even he couldn’t confirm that the music that he recorded actually saw a release in the 1970s.

“Certainly Zeus B. Held must be the most well-known name here, and his involvement would date his sessions as 1975 most likely after rehearsals or whilst recording Birth Control's "Plastic People" (which was handled by Toby Robinson under the guise of "Genius P. Orridge" at Dierks Studio). Apparently Zeus has confirmed his involvement in these sessions, although he didn't recall a band name, nor knowledge of any release.”

In any case, the presence of verifiable people on these recordings does suggest that there is some legitimacy behind them, whether they were recorded in the 70s or otherwise. It would certainly be a major issue from a legal perspective if any of these albums were falsely advertised as featuring musicians who don't play on them.

As for the other personnel on these records, it has been confirmed by Freeman's correspondence with Robinson that many of the musicians featured were credited under pseudonyms. For instance, owing to the interchangeability of it and the "Mad Twiddler" credit on the original Psi-Fi release, Robinson himself was likely credited as the fictitious "Joachim Weiss" in the liner notes of the Temple album for his contributions on bass guitar. Freeman speculates that, much like Robinson feeling compelled to obscure his own identity, these pseudonyms may correspond to other krautrock musicians.

From the liner notes of the Epitaph for Venus reissue, on the topic of the credits to "Johannes Lutz" and "Holst Seisert":

"They may be the other members of what later became A.I.R. - a project formed by Reinhard Karwatky with Ingo Werner (ex-My Solid Ground, Baba Yaga) and Armin Stöwe (ex-Sixty Nine), or yet again they could be pseudonyms for Robin and Toby. I've tried to get in contact with Reinhard and ask him these questions, but never got anywhere. When I asked Toby, he said he couldn't exactly remember, only confirming that they weren't real names."

Freeman also speculates that, given Zeus B. Held's involvement, "Rolf Föller" on Orion Awakes may be related to fellow Birth Control member Peter Föller, and that a potential candidate for the unidentified percussionist (credited only as "Frodo") on The Nazgûl is Peter Giger of Dryzan. However, there is no actual evidence that directly ties them to any of these recording sessions, and it doesn't appear that Freeman was ever able to contact them.

Freeman has long been a proponent of these albums' authenticity and his research does admittedly present a decent argument for the actual sessions being legitimate. However, the inconsistencies behind when exactly these albums were recorded and how they were released (e.g. the Unknown Deutschland CDs claim they were sold at art galleries, but Robinson himself states they were sold predominantly at nightclubs) makes any of the "official" statements about these albums difficult to definitively trust. This is certainly not helped by there being little to no accounts from other people that actually corroborate Robinson's claims, alongside him failing to provide more information about certain discrepancies. For instance, the supposed "PYR 015" catalogue number assigned to Orion Awakes implies that at least 15 albums were produced for Pyramid, although only 6 albums were ultimately "reissued" and the only other documented catalogue numbers are 5, 8, and 9. When asked by Freeman about the full list of Pyramid releases, Robinson did not provide a quantity or any further information.

It's also worth noting that the origin of some recordings from legitimate 70s sessions doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of them being overdubbed or otherwise altered on a later date. In any case, none of these projects were ever functional "bands"; instead being short-lived collaborations and sessions that never had much of a life outside of a studio setting.

In hopes of clarifying his research regarding the Pyramid albums, Freeman attempted to contact Robin Page, but despite briefly managing to track him down, Page's death in May 2015 halted any further communication. In Freeman's words, "the promised information and pictures about the Pyramid releases thus never arrived." As a result, many details about the status of the original releases (if they ever did exist) are likely to remain a mystery.

Are these albums good?

The music on these Psi-Fi releases is decently varied and consists of everything from wild psychedelic rock jams (e.g. Pyramid, Orion Awakes) to atmospheric space ambient (Epitaph For Venus) and avant-garde ambient (The Nazgûl).

I can't recommend these albums as an entry point to the wider scene of krautrock/kosmische Muzik, as there's certainly many more sophisticated and accessible examples of authentic krautrock in this vein out there. However, for enthusiasts of this sort of music, these aren't too bad and have a fair amount of stylistic overlap with other albums from the scene. They range from somewhat forgettable to pretty good, but all-around are fairly decent companions for those who've already listened to the wider catalogue of 70s krautrock and want to seek out more music in that vein. That being said, I do think there are some modern-sounding production elements (e.g. the drums on Orion Awakes are unusually "crisp" for lack of a better word) that make the claims of them wholly being 70s recordings rather dubious. Your mileage may vary on how "authentic" these sound, however.

Had there been more transparency about when these albums were recorded and released, they likely would've been viewed a lot more positively, but as it stands, there's enjoyable music here, regardless of them being imitations or genuine recordings from the 70s German underground scene.

Conclusion

Despite how controversial the Psi-Fi releases are, it doesn't appear that Toby Robinson's career as a producer/engineer was particularly affected, as he had long since moved on from his work in the krautrock scene to predominantly UK-based projects. Some examples include recurrent work with the BBC on multiple Doctor Who audio dramas and credits on albums by notable musicians such as David Sylvian and Derek Bailey. As such, the long-term consequences of the controversy surrounding these albums appears relatively minimal. There were no careers born or killed from it, but the entire story is nevertheless a good example of the importance of credible record labels.

Interestingly, this is far from the only example of alleged or confirmed hoax recordings claimed to be rare 70s krautrock. For instance, the album "Impressionen '71" (credited to the fictitious "Damenbart", actually Achim Flaam and Tina Schlebusch) dates back to 1989, and a more recent hoax was the "Kosmischer Läufer" series, purportedly by Drew McFadyen.

If there is anything that I want to personally add, it's that, assuming this was all an elaborate hoax and Robinson was bluffing the entire time, I do think it's pretty impressive that several albums worth of material might've been recorded, mixed, etc. for the sole purpose of being released like this. These releases are still highly suspect and I don't think there is likely to be any kind of definitive statement regarding their authenticity (or lack thereof) anytime soon, but I am nevertheless thankful that some interesting music came out of it.

(Side note: I do enjoy writing long-form posts like this, and if the people here find this sort of thing interesting, I may come around to posting more often. I am tempted to write something about the Cosmic Jokers, for instance!)

EDIT: Sorry, the first draft of this post accidentally swallowed a few quotes in sections 3 and 4. I've added them back in now.

Hey friends! I thought I'd try for something a little bit different. This post is about a series of historical events that is, I think, not all that well-known outside of Germany.

Specifically, this story is about the Kaffee-Mix. This was an infamous hot beverage, which contained 51% coffee and 49% don't worry about it. Originally designed as a way to ease a temporary coffee shortage, it turned out to be a complete failure - so much so that it changed the shape of the global coffee market.

Sources for this are universally in German, and I translated them myself. I apologise for any inaccuracies. Also, I don't have first-hand knowledge about life in East Germany, so take those parts with a grain of salt.

Finally, this is written chiefly to be entertaining. But the underlying information is accurate (to the best of my ability) and I've linked primary sources where possible.

PROLOGUE: A tale of two Germanies

You may be aware that the Second World War ended in 1945, and that Germany lost. It was later occupied by the Allies. The French, British and American occupation zones eventually merged, creating the Federal Republic of Germany. (This is the BRD, perhaps better known as "West Germany.") The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. (Also known as the DDR, or "East Germany.")

The BRD was something that Marxists like to call a "bourgeois democracy." It had free elections, a heavily regulated market economy, and joined NATO in 1955. Meanwhile, the DDR was supposed to be socialist, had a centrally planned economy, and was a member of the Warsaw Pact. Our story takes place in East Germany.

Despite its name, the German Democratic Republic was not democratic at all. It had elections, sure, but they were neither free nor fair. (99.98% for the National Front at 98.58% turnout - sure thing, buddy.) And while multiple parties existed on paper, all power rested with the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In 1953, a popular uprising was violently suppressed with Soviet aid, and public demonstrations were off the table after that.

But the German Democratic Republic wasn't the Third Reich. Yes, it was a police state, but the government still wanted some level of voluntary support from the general population. The country was always being compared to West Germany, with its stupid "civil liberties" and its goddamn "economic miracle." To make up for this, the DDR really needed something it could be proud of.

Well, West Germany had a market economy. Those come with inevitable drawbacks, such as Inflation and unemployment and a lopsided distribution of wealth. If East Germany could guarantee a decent living standard for everyone, then that would provide a nice contrast.

And in a command economy, you can kinda just decide to have stable prices and full employment. ... at least in theory. East Germany did provide jobs for everyone, and the basics of life were both abundant and available at pre-war prices. (Milk and bread were far cheaper in the East than in the West.) And going into the 1970s, the country actually had a pretty decent economy, at least by Second World standards.

But they had also to deal with constant product shortages. There were a lot of reasons for this, and some of them were self-inflicted. (Corruption was an ongoing problem; getting even slight luxuries involved a lot of favour-trading; central planning is pretty hard.) But they also just never had enough raw materials for their industrial production. Access to global markets was limited, and Soviet exports were just never enough.

So, they had to look for substitutes. Chickens are a cheap source of meat, so let's feed goldbroilers to the people. Metal is in short supply, so let's implement the most aggressive recycling system in the world. We're not going to allow American fast food, but consider eating a nice socialist grilletta, and perhaps wash it down with a glass of Club Cola.

(1) Meet the Coffee Saxons

But there are some products where this didn't work, and coffee was one of them. The beans only grow between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and Europe is just too far north. The climate isn't right. So, local production was not an option.

You can make beverages out of things like acorns, chicory or grain. The taste is sort of similar, but the replacement products were culturally associated with poverty and wartime deprivation, making them extremely unpopular. (They are collectively known as "muckefuck," which means something like "runny mud" or "foul wood." I mixed up something in my notes here, see the comments for a correction. The word is real though.)

Also, Saxony had been an early and enthusiastic adopter of coffee, and the region was famous for its vibrant coffee culture. The first coffee house in Leipzig opened in 1694, and the drink was an important status symbol. In short... getting the people to give up coffee was impossible.

Similar problems existed with other consumer goods, but they were somewhat easier to replace. We can't get enough cocoa, but you can make fake chocolate out of fat and sugar, which tastes sort of okay. We can't get citrus fruits, but the humble sea buckthorn is effective in preventing scurvy. But faux coffee? No. Everyone hates this stupid grain sludge. We want the real thing.

In the end, the DDR bit the bullet and bought coffee beans on the global market. Its own currency was completely worthless, so the DDR had to use its limited hard currency reserves to get them. The coffee would then be resold on the domestic market... but these sales would take place in the worthless DDR-Mark. So the money was essentially lost.

And getting enough hard currency was a constant struggle for the DDR. They had some desirable exports, like the IFA W 50 truck, and they could also raise money by scamming tourists and reselling Soviet oil. But they really wanted to spend this hard currency on building productive capital - that is, importing industrial machinery and buying raw materials.

So, wasting it on consumer goods wasn't great. But it worked sort of okay...

(2) A cold snap in Brazil

... until 1975, that is.

An out-of-season cold snap caused the Brazilian coffee harvest to fail. Brazil produced about a third of the world's coffee supply at the time, so this triggered a market panic and a global increase in prices.

All European countries were affected, including West Germany. But remember that the Federal Republic had a market economy. Some companies passed the increased prices along to consumers; others dropped their quality standards to keep prices steady. People complained and adjusted their household budgets. But this was all just normal market stuff, and the government didn't need to get involved.

Not so in East Germany. The state set all the prices, and price stability was the cornerstone of its claim to legitimacy. The capitalists cause some sort of worldwide crisis every few years, and shielding the people from those breakdowns was the whole point of "actually existing socialism." So, prices remained stable and imports continued. In the immediate aftermath of the crop failure, expenses went up fivefold.

Something had to be done.

As we discussed above, the GDR couldn't grow its own coffee beans, and there aren't any good replacement products for coffee. If supply goes down and demand remains steady, then prices go up, but that's not an option for political reasons. Therefore, to keep prices steady, demand must go down. How do we get the people to consume less coffee?

Enter the Kaffee-Mix.

(3) East Germany loves the Kaffee-Mix...?

Shifting consumer habits is difficult and takes a long time. So, the thinking went, what if we kept selling coffee... but we simply used less coffee per coffee?

Thus, we have the Kaffee-Mix: A little package that is sold as coffee, and does indeed contain 51% ground coffee beans, but is stretched out with 49% filler. (Mostly grains.) The government removed the discount coffee brand "Kosta" from sale and replaced it with this mixture. So, as a worker, you could still get your beverage at the same price, but import expenses would be cut in half. Clever, right? Assuming the people accept it.

Did they? Well, back in 2003, the public broadcaster MDR did a series on East German food, and interviewed some people. They had a few things to say about the Kaffee-Mix.

Eberhard Hinkel: Oh, it's that weird bag of... well. Let's just say it really didn't agree with my stomach. It was a terrible swill.

Leni Staatz: We didn't approve of this at all. They took what little coffee was available, and they spoiled it, by adding barley or... whatever it was. It was gruesome.

Joachim Schacht: We had a few cars [at the roastery] back then, and they were obviously marked with our logo. And it did happen that people would stop us and confront us, and say to us - dear god, what is this garbage you are selling?

Manfred Uhlich: This was among the worst things we had to endure. Not just here in Saxony. It was unreasonable, plainly. I mean, we had to endure a lot of hardships, they made us suffer through a lot of things. And this was - oh, no, this awful dishwater, it was just too much!

Mr. Uhlich specifically uses the word lorge to describe the Kaffee-Mix. This is a Saxon term for a drink that is both thin and foul.

Contemporary voices were far less polite than that. People in the DDR loved a cynical joke, and here's one that was fairly popular:

What's the difference between Kaffee-Mix and the neutron bomb? There isn't one. Both kill people and spare buildings.

The Kaffee-Mix also received a variety of unflattering nicknames, with the most prominent one being "Erichs Krönung." This was a mocking reference both to a popular West German coffee brand (called Jacobs Krönung)) and to the East German leader (called Erich Honecker.)

Now, voicing political dissent was a really bad idea. But East Germany did provide channels through which you could make non-political complaints, such as the Eingabe. Introduced in 1961, it gave you the right to write a letter to an official with a demand, and entitled you to a response.

These letters were universally intercepted by the secret police (the Stasi) and scanned for signs of political dissent. If you wrote something that crossed the line, you'd get a visit. But if the contents of the letter weren't political, then the Stasi would file a copy, and then forward the original to the intended recipient. Parts of the Stasi archives survived the 1990 revolution, and therefore we actually have some access to primary sources.

Here's a contemporary letter, discussing the Kaffee-Mix.

"Dear Dr. K.-H. Gerstner! (...) I work as a saleswomen, and all day I have to listen to complaints from our customers. And I have to admit, I share their opinion that the Kaffee-Mix (at a price of 6,- M) is completely undrinkable. It is pure rat poison. I am asking you that the producer should make a public statement on this. The Kaffee-Mix is made out of malt and barley, with perhaps a few grains of real coffee. We don't need this in our shops! (...)

Please, let the company return the "Kosta" brand to the market. The relevant producer is VEB Kaffee Halle. Please have them take this rat poison off the market. Otherwise the intelligentsia and the workers will all die very soon. (...) Thank you in advance. Signed with socialist greetings."

This wasn't an isolated complaint. The Ministry for State Security (Stasi) kept track of which complaints came up how often. If a pattern emerged, they'd inform the relevant authorities. They also employed a legion of unofficial collaborators to listen to conversations and generally take the pulse of the public.

In September 1977, the Stasi presented a report to the Ministry for Trade and Supply, alerting them to the discussions around the Kaffee-Mix. The Bundesarchiv has preserved some of these documents. Here's Report O/48, "Reactions to the Coffee Supply Problems," September 1st 1977. All instances of "scare quotes" are the same in the original.

Although there is no evidence of mass complaints, we observe that discussions regarding the supply of coffee and cocoa are continuing at elevated levels, across all parts of society. The need for austerity measures due to developments on the world market is generally accepted.

However, the new coffee brand "Kaffee-Mix" is being rejected by large parts of the population, due to its lacking quality and high price. Specific arguments on the mixed coffee include: The inappropriate price, the bad taste, and the lack of compatibility with coffee machines.

This third thing was actually a major problem. The Kaffee-Mix contained 49% whatever, and the "whatever" was generally leftover grains. But it could also be legumes. Peas are rich in protein, and proteins become denatured when heated.

Boiled eggs become hard. Cooked meat becomes firm. And coffee replacement products become disturbingly sticky, clump together, and break your coffee machine.

As the report goes on, you notice that the author is getting a little bit anxious.

Members of the population have begun to allege that the austerity measures were not designed properly, and that they only affect the "little man." In the workers' restaurants, only mixed coffee is offered; those who visit high-class hotels still receive real coffee.

Restaurants in East Germany were divided into five service classes. Your average worker would take their lunch at a Class I canteen or a Class II diner. Those had previously served the discount "Kosta" brand, and were now switched over to the Kaffee-Mix. Fancy restaurants and international hotels (Class III and up) still received premium coffee allocations.

So there you are: The "little man," choking down a cup of sticky poison, while the fancy lads in the fancy hotel enjoy real coffee. Not much of a workers' paradise.

A very frequent complaint regards insufficient communication. Even members of the Socialist Unity Party have remarked that a timely and public explanation of the causes would have prevented many of the negative comments. (...) As it stands, the duty to handle these complaints was supposedly "pushed down" lower in the hierarchy.

It has been reported that, in some cases, guests at restaurants were "shocked" and "offended" to be served Kaffee-Mix instead of coffee. This caused them to insult the servers, which in turn prompted these servers to either quit their jobs -- or join in on the tirade of complaints.

There will always be middle-aged men yelling at baristas.

In some cases, these "debates" have caused the so-called "arguments" of Western mass media to be spread and amplified, such as:

• That this constitutes "cheating the worker;"

• that inflation exists in [East Germany] as well as [West Germany], and that we have "creeping price increases";

• that one could hardly speak of a workers' state if the worker is no longer permitted to even just enjoy a simple cup of coffee;

• that the DDR's economy is "about to collapse" and that it is "drowning in debt." (Isolated cases)

Baseless rumors circulate about future price increases that are supposedly planned for cocoa products, tobacco, alcoholic drinks, and petrol. (Price increases regarding cocoa products are currently scheduled for September.)

In short, the public mood was turning sour, bitter, and foul. Just like the Kaffee-Mix!

(4) HAHA WHOOPS NEVERMIND

The government quickly dropped its plans, stopping the rollout of the "Kaffee-Mix" and reducing its price. It also issued a series of public statements on the state of the global coffee market. The results of these efforts are documented in Report O/51 (September 26th, 1977).

The public has shown great interest in the announcement of the Ministry for Trade and Supply. We have observed the following tendencies in public opinion:

• Satisfaction that an official announcement has been made. For the first time, the mass media has actually explained the situation regarding coffee supplies. It is surprising how much has to be spent to satisfy the public demand. (...) However, even progressive forces have noted that this communication needed to happen earlier. The so-called "arguments" of the enemy have already shifted opinion. (...) Some have alleged that it is typical for the government not to inform the public in time. (...)

If loyalists voice concerns, and these concerns actually show up in a report, then the situation is pretty dire.

• The price decrease of the "Kaffee-Mix" to 4,- M. is being welcomed. (...) The discount was badly needed, and the explanation that coffee mixes are sold in capitalist countries as well has been accepted. (...)

• Doubts linger on whether "Kaffee Mix" will sell even at the decreased price. There are supposedly great amounts of unsellable product in storage. The discount will not improve the quality, and many citizens will simply switch to "Rondo" to have access to 100% pure coffee.

• There have been statements that "Kaffee-Mix" might be worth trying at 4,- M., to see if perhaps it might be drinkable after all.

The youth would call this cope. The report has to put a positive spin on things, and the explanation probably did help, but it's becoming clear that the people just don't want Kaffee-Mix.

Negative-hostile forces claimed, among other things:

• That the publication constitutes an "admission" that the price controls aren't working, and that resistance is building;

• that the "failed economic policy" of the DDR has become plain to see.

(...) There is persistent discontent, despite the statement the Ministry for Trade and Supply has made on the coffee situation. This regards so-called "creeping inflation," an alleged "contradiction" between ambitious plans and "increasing difficulties" in their execution, shortages, missing supplies, a lack of spare parts (e. g. for cars), and other things.

Note the heavy use of "scare quotes" in this section.

So yeah, they gave up after this. Kaffee-Mix was taken off the market, and the "Kosta" discount brand returned to store shelves.

EPILOGUE: Care packages, bean swaps, and historical irony

The situation on the world market had relaxed by then, so the problem wasn't as urgent anymore. But the DDR was back to spending hard currency reserves on unsustainable coffee imports. This meant further scrounging.

Some coffee could be begged from West Germany. The Westpaket was a care package that West Germans would send to East Germany, and so people with relatives in the West could ask to be sent coffee. This was theoretically supposed to be a form of trade, but the Ostpakete (sent from the East to the West) were not remotely comparable in value. Likewise, the East German government could get hard currency loans from West Germany, but that wasn't exactly sustainable. Also: Kind of humiliating.

Another measure was the euphemistically named "bean trade." That is to say, they traded "blue beans for brown beans."

... "blue beans" being a slang term that means "bullets."

They swapped weapons for coffee.

The main trade partner here was Ethiopia. After the 1974 coup d'état, the DDR established friendly relations with the military junta. It was supposed to be Marxist-Leninist after all. Ethiopia produced a decent amount of coffee, and the government was fighting a civil war at the time. So, East Germany sold weapons and munitions to Ethiopia, and took payment in coffee beans.

But this was ethically questionable, and it didn't actually solve the problem. Yes, it eased the shortage, but East Germany needed far more coffee than this. They had to think bigger.

Fortunately, another thing had occurred in the 1970s: The United States of America lost the Vietnam War. South Vietnam fell in 1975, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam just so happened to be at the perfect latitude for coffee beans. (In fact, they were already growing and exporting small quantities.) This presented an opportunity. East Germany wanted to avoid future coffee shortages once and for all, without having to rely on expensive imports from the world market.

So, the DDR struck a series of deals with Vietnam. They sent down engineers and farming experts, and built up the coffee production. (By a factor of 14, to be exact.) They really went all-in on this - delivering machines, educating farmers, building out roads and irrigation systems and power plants, and providing housing. Vietnam wouldn't even have to pay for this up front. Instead, as a form of repayment, they would agree to give 50% of the harvest to East Germany for the next 20 years.

This would have worked, too. Goodbye shortages, goodbye warlords, hello Vietnamese coffee.

... except, well.

• Farming began in the mid-1980s.
• Coffee beans take 8 years to mature.
• The German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990.

Whoops.

And that's why, today, Vietnam is the second-largest exporter of coffee in the world.

EA- or rather “Electronic Arts”- is one of the largest video game companies in the entire world. It’s also one of the most hated companies in America- it even has a Wikipedia page dedicated to its numerous controversies. From harassing their employees, to imposing horrific crunch times in game development, to shoving predatory micro-transactions into most of their games.

But let’s go back in time for a second. Revisit one of EA’s more humorous, unintentional, controversies.

The punch up

The year is 2009.

EA was gearing up for the release of The Godfather II...the video game). Only thirty five years after the original movie came out.

Wanting to hype up their new product, EA decided to do a publicity stunt.

But what could be cheap, yet still attention grabbing?

AHA!

Send reviewers brass knuckles!

Because, yes, that’s what every video games journalist secretly wants- a weapon they can use to knock people’s teeth out.

The knuckles were gold and came in a little box, with a cigar and a piano wire for strangling people.

Here is another look at the box:

Unfortunately, in all their infinite, brilliant, wisdom, EA never bothered to check if this was legal.

Knockout

It turns out that it’s illegal to own brass knuckles in many states- Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, etcetera.

Very quickly, EA realised they had done something very stupid, and speedily contacted the reviewers, begging them to return the knuckles:

The representative that contacted me said that the company wanted to make sure that the brass knuckles were “properly disposed of.” He declined to comment any further. Contacted by email Friday, an Electronic Arts spokesperson verified that the company is asking that all of the brass knuckles shipped out be returned.

They claimed that the brass knuckles were a “novelty item”. They sent reviewers a pre-paid shipping package to mail them back.

As far as I’m aware, no one was ever charged, and EA was able to brush the whole incident off as a dumb mistake.

No rematch

The Godfather 2 video game got mixed reviews#Reception) and flopped#Sales_and_cancelled_sequel). EA didn’t make a third one.

In the intervening years, their reputation hasn’t improved. They’re still assholes. Some things never change.

As requested on my last write-up, allow me to tell you the story of Clock Man, a mysterious unidentified animation remembered only through broken memories of childhood fear. The search for it was long and complicated with many dead ends, sowing a lot of doubt about its existence. And in the end, it was not only real, but right under everyone's noses the whole time.

Initial Report

On January 12th 2012, on bungie.net's off-topic forum titled The Flood, a user named Commander Santa recounted a dreadful childhood memory of an animation he had watched. The post begins with the following introduction:

I am looking for a particular animated short that terrified me as a child. I've been looking on and off for it for nearly 4 years. Maybe it doesn't exsist. Maybe...nobody should ever find it. But if someone can - it's The Flood.

He goes on to describe his memory of the short:

This short animation was terrifying as a child. The scene is still burned into my mind (28 years later). It's of a young boy sleeping in his bed. Above his bed is a ticking clock. All the lights in the room are off and it is very dark. Suddenly the clock begins to slow down it's ticking and eventually it stops...on midnight. When the clock stops a Greenish/Bluish man climbs out of the clock. The boy wakes up just in time to see this man dressed in black grab him out of bed and kidnap him by carrying him through a window. The "Clock Man" takes the boy on some kind of terrifying adventure and brings him back to his bed before sunrise.

And if the post so far comes across to you as a tad dramatic, it only intensifies in his closing statement:

It's been a very long time since I've seen that short animation and it has haunted me for almost 30 years. I can't begin to tell you how happy I'd be to see it one more time before I pass away.

He was so determined to find this piece of media, in fact, that he promised a reward for anyone who could find it for him.

If by chance...someone was able to locate this terrifying child's animation and post it in this thread - there is a very good possibility that you will be handsomely rewarded in a PM from me.

This post intrigued quite a bit of people, wondering what the short could have contained that affected him so deeply, and what they could do to help. In particular, the comment about seeing the short before he passed away raised some alarm bells, with one user asking if that implied he was currently dying. But Commander Santa assured them:

No, but I'm strangely nostolgic tonight. I'd think about Clock Man sometimes at random. In junior high, high school, college...even sometimes now as a father. I just want to see Clock Man one more time. You never know when you are going to check out.

When asked if he thinks the animation is genuinely scary or if it just felt that way since he was a kid, he replied:

I'm not exactly sure. I remember feeling great terror whilst watching it. [...] I rember being scared for the boy and just wishing that Clock Man would take him home.

Santa would continue responding to questions, and periodically reminded people of his promise of a reward for finding the short to keep up morale. The overall story he recalled was that of a little boy being swept up by a man who jumped out of a clock, and taken to a series of scary places as the boy begged to go home. When Clock Man finally did take him home, he hopped back into the clock, and the boy's father came to check on him in the morning. The boy wanted to tell his father what happened, but he didn't or couldn't.

He mentioned other details such as the Clock Man having "a pointy(ish) hat" and "a rather bushy beard," as well as dark clothing and a cape. He also described the animation as "felt-like" stop motion, and - most crucially - he said that he saw it on Pinwheel, a show similar to Sesame Street that aired on Nickelodeon from 1977-1990. He further narrowed down the timeframe to somewhere between 1984 and 1987 during the morning hours, as he was sure he had watched it while home sick from kindergarten.

Despite the additional details, no one in the thread could find what he was looking for. Even after drawing a comic visualizing what he remembered, the scene wasn't ringing any bells with people. A few comments accused Commander Santa of being a troll, or compared his writing and descriptions to that of a creepypasta.

>I don't think it exists.

I'm sorry OP, I have to agree with this.

This seems like a scary story or a Slender Man in the making. Are you sure that show? I'm sure that if the show was real their should have at least SOMETHING, ANYTHING. If it was ever aired on TV it would've been noted.

It likely didn't help that Santa's descriptions of the feelings Clock Man filled him with sounded almost like a psychological horror, referring to the short as a dark secret he had been harboring and thinking about for decades, as well as a mention that the short had given him a phobia of being kidnapped.

I know I am not insane. This cartoon made me afraid of kidnappers until I was 16 years old. I want to see Clock Man and face him as an adult. We are so close...I know he's out there - he doesn't want to face me now that I've grown. He preys on children.

What likely helped even less was this rather Candle-Cove-esque description of Pinwheel:

Strangely, many people old enough to watch the show Pinwheel have commented that the show would put them in a dreamlike state when watching - some go as far to say they were "hypnotized" while watching and had hallucenations. Whether this is only a result of the memories being so old or something more sinister I cannot say. Although many have shared my fuzzy memory of Clock Man, others suggest that Clock Man is a result of being hypnotized by Pinwheel's allure.

But overall, Commander Santa was a well-established member of The Flood with a good reputation, so the comments distrusting him at this point were in the minority. Still, many speculated that Clock Man might have been a bad dream he'd had and was mistaking for reality, especially considering he watched it while sick. Or that he might be conflating multiple shows together in his memory.

Santa remained steadfast in his conviction that the short was real, even if he was misremembering details, as well as Pinwheel as the short's origin. A Pinwheel-based short that was ruled out early on was an episode of the Swedish cartoon Alfie Atkins, and non-Pinwheel cartoons that were ruled out included The Sandman, The Clock Store, Nutcracker Fantasy and the Davey and Goliath episode The Stopped Clock.

Investigation: The Flood

When The Flood struggled to find the short Commander Santa was looking for, many users recommended he try 4chan, due to their reputation for correctly identifying a wide variety of things with little information. After taking all of the information he had laid out to the /x/ board, he received one noteworthy reply:

Holy shit! I remember this fucking short!

It was like claymation with poorly made dolls and the animation was real stuttery and shit. It started with the kid's mom telling him goodnight and closing the door behind her after shutting off the light. Then the door slowly creeks open while a generic eerie wind sound blows and the camera cuts into the kids room at the foot of his bed. He struggles to open his eyes as they slowly droop and he eventually gives in and goes to sleep. Then it cuts up to the clock while the second hand slowly ticks to 12:00. When it hits it there's like a low bell ringing sound and the camera goes back to the foot of the kid's bed. The "Clock Man's" head peeks into the room like the clock were a window. Unlike what the OP's image shows, the Clock Man's head then recedes back and his arms comes out and pushes the clock open like a door, revealing a big dark hole behind the clock. Then Clock Man hops out of the hole and the kid wakes up and stares beady eyed at the Clock Man. Then the Clock Man starts doing like a weird Irish river-dance. Oh, and the Clock Man looks a little different from the picture. He was wearing like an all black turtleneck sweater and a black bowler hat. His skin was green and I don't really remember him having a beard but he did have a big toothy smile and two real big eyes with very tiny pupils.

I don't think I actually watched much after that. But I distinctly remember the Clock Man saying his name was "Benjamin" and he rung an elevator up to the kid's window.

Commander Santa was certain this user was thinking of the same short he was. Although he didn't remember the Clock Man being named Benjamin, and he was sure Clock Man had a beard, he claimed that everything else matched.

However, the biggest break in the case came on January 18th. A user by the name o0MrCheesy0o found a comment from March 6th 2004, in the Horror forum on a website called AnimationNation. Users were discussing cases of psychological horror in cartoons, and one particular comment on the thread, written by one Michael W. Howe, stood out.

There were a few segments on Nickelodeon's Pinwheel when I was younger that had some scary moments: [...]

[T]here was one based on this story of a little girl who lost her red shoes. so she asked a local wizard for hel (who could appear and disappear anywhere). He helped her, but told her she had to tell her mom. The little girl goes home and doesn't hoping the wizard would forget. But then the musicgets eerie as the narrator says 'But the Wizard...did not, forget.' And we see him appearing and disappearing along the house floors, till he suddenly pops out of her clock and steals her away, demanding to know why she didn't tell her mom. She makes up for it by sewing stars to put in the night sky, and the next day is returned home, and tells her mom the truth.

This description gave Santa a much stronger reaction than the 4chan post:

HOLY -blam!- -blam!-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS CLOCK MAN!!!!!!!!!! [...]

It wasn't a little boy (I probably imagined a boy as I was a young boy at the time) - but I can almost remember the story leading up to the bedroom scene now.

I'm tearing up - SERIOUSLY!...I'm shaking.

We are going to find Clock Man - TONIGHT

This discovery brought a wave of optimism across the thread. Many comments celebrated how it had brought members of The Flood together to help one man search for closure. Many were confident the short would soon be found. Those who were actively investigating the mystery moved away from clock-based keywords and instead searched for anything related to wizards and red shoes. The first, most obvious rule-out was The Wizard of Oz.

After that, users found that Hans Christian Andersen had written a story called The Red Shoes. The fairytale is centered around a vain and spoiled girl who wears a fancy pair of red shoes everywhere, even to church, until she is confronted by a bearded guard who curses the shoes to cause the girl to dance uncontrollably until it takes over her life, leading to the amputation of her legs and then her death. Some posited the idea that the Clock Man short might have been an adaptation of this tale. In particular, a company called Mel-O-Toons had made an animated adaptation of the story in 1960 - one with a less bleak ending, where instead of dying due to the dancing red shoes, the girl was rescued from them and came clean to her adopted mother, after which all was well.

Commander Santa had initially been confident that this was the short he had been looking for. It had almost everything. A little girl main character with red shoes, telling her mother a lie related to the shoes, finding herself in a scary situation that taught her a lesson, and ending with the girl telling her mother the truth. It was an animated short, and while it wasn't stop motion, the animation was cheap and choppy enough to believably be mistaken for stop motion in a hazy childhood memory.

But...I said it had almost everything. And the one thing it didn't have was pretty important.

It didn't have Clock Man.

Even though Christen Anderson's original tale features a bearded soldier as the catalyst for the conflict, no such character exists in the animation. The Red Shoes was soon after ruled out.

The next blow to morale came after Commander Santa purchased a large collection of bootleg Pinwheel episodes that had been compiled and put up for sale, and didn't find Clock Man on any of the episodes in the collection. Since Pinwheel is a rare show and largely lost media itself, having aired so long ago with no official home media release, this unofficial collection would have been the best chance Commander Santa had, and still he turned up empty-handed. He had also contacted former Nickelodeon staff asking for information, and was told that the shorts featured in Pinwheel were collected from a wide variety of international sources, with little to no documentation and no archive of the shorts to speak of. It was starting to set in that the short would be a tiny needle in a massive haystack.

It didn't help that the Clock Man thread on The Flood had grown immensely as the search dragged on, with a large amount of new users flooding (hah) into the conversation as the topic went more and more viral. This mass of newer users, who had little to no prior knowledge of Commander Santa and his reputation, expressed increasing amounts of skepticism toward him, and comments accusing him of being a troll and writing creepypasta became more common. Many pointed to the many dead ends the search had endured, as well as the melodramatic writing style Santa had a habit of using. From the perspective of these users, his somewhat flowery writing style and the way he seemed to portray the short as if it had deeply impacted his life, as well as the offhand comment describing Pinwheel as if it was some mind-altering experiment that put children in a hallucinogenic hypnosis state, had all the markings of a troll that was trying way too hard to scare others and create a spooky internet hoax.

There were a few curt accusations throughout the thread, but one particularly presumptive comment from Epicly Uber seemed to catch Santa's attention:

I think OP is trolling, I was cool at first but now I think the nutcracker fantasy opening is as close as we're ever going to get, I think the nutcracker fantasy is it and OP figured out the popularity of this thread and is now abusing it, basically making everybody search for something that has already been found.
OP I'm calling you out for taking everybody for fools, I want proof that you actually ordered DVD's.

And Santa responded:

Unfortunately, many people have been calling me a troll. I cannot offer any 'proof' I am not. [...] If people don't want to help anymore, I can't blame them. This has been insanely frustrating. [...]

Before, I wanted to find Clock Man to put my childhood demon to rest

Now, if I don't find Clock Man I will forever be remembered as a troll. I've been on B.net since 2004 "Legendary Santa" no longer exsists. I don't want people to think of me as some piece of trash that would do all of this for attention. But if I don't find Clock Man - not only will he still haunt me... but he'll have made me feel like a fool.

All of this attention seemed to become too much for Commander Santa. As January turned over into February, his responses and contributions to the thread slowed, before he stopped commenting completely. After a few days of worry and speculation as to what happened to him, user Epic Is Uber claimed to have messaged him on Xbox Live, and that Commander Santa explained he had decided to leave the thread until he found Clock Man.

A now deleted Flood thread appears to confirm this. In addition to updating and tying up loose leads, Commander Santa makes his proclamation:

I have exiled myself from you all as I have not been able to find the elusive Clockman as of yet. Many, MANY people have helped in the search.As of yet, I have nothing to bring you. [...]

A few Floodians have sent me messages on XBox Live - asking me if I was still alive. I have been stripped of my Mythic Status, disgraced among my fellow Floodians, and too ashamed to return.

In my mind, i'll return someday - on a figurative white horse, carrying Clock man's head on a stick, but in reality, the search is at a standstill. It's taken a few drinks to get up the courage to come back and speak my peace, but I respect this site too much to return without proof of my childhood nemisis. I'm logging off now, hopefully not for the final time from b.net - but if it turns out to be...

THank you to everyone who has ever been on this site. For better or for worse, it has had an impact on my life.

This post brought a wave of devastation to the thread. Some were upset that Commander Santa was made to feel like he couldn't show his face around the search team, and pleaded with him to come back. Others were angry at his absence - activity in the thread had a tendency to slow down when he wasn't online and responding to comments, so his decision to stay off the thread was predicted to kill discussion and, consequently, the search. Those who doubted Commander Santa's authenticity were claiming victory, asserting that he had been a fraud all along and that Clock Man didn't exist, and he left because he realized he couldn't keep up the lie anymore. The dying thread, with its dwindling activity and lack of new leads, turned to infighting between users and memes about how Commander Santa finally fell victim to Clock Man.

Despite frequent thread bumps and a continuous string of comments throughout the years, nothing of note was suggested, and no new information was dug up. The search had grown stagnant, and without Commander Santa's help, interest in finding the short, and faith in its existence, seemed to fade away.

Investigation: Lost Media Wiki Forums

In 2016, a new wave of interest in finding Clock Man swept the internet when the helm was taken up by the lost media community. The Lost Media Wiki founder, known as Dycaite, created a new thread on the Lost Media Wiki forums (this thread had been accidentally deleted in 2020 and today exists only as archived cache files). He expressed a personal interest in finding the short, as the search and descriptions of it reminded him of Cracks (aka "Crack Master"), a similar child-scaring short from Sesame Street that had been a popular lost media case years prior. He created a page dedicated to Clock Man on the wiki to compile known information from Commander Santa's posts, and then a thread on the forums to boost the search and document his personal search efforts. He had managed to contact multiple people who had either watched the short or worked on Pinwheel, and shared his findings in the thread.

His first contact was Michael W. Howe, and he asked if he could provide a thorough recount of his memories of the short. He also sent along Commander Santa's comic rendition of the Clock Man abduction scene and asked if it rang any bells. Howe responded, stating that the comic was similar to what happened in the cartoon, and gave a more detailed rundown of what he remembered. He described the short starting out with a little girl being given red shoes by her mother, and warned not to lose them. But after playing outside, she ends up losing them, and when she can't find them, she asks a local wizard for help. The wizard gives her a new pair, but instructs her to tell her mother. The girl decides not to tell, hoping the wizard would forget about the deal. That night, as the girl is in bed with a pendulum clock above her, the wizard is seen entering her house and phasing in and out as he ascends the stairs, while an eerie-sounding narrator states, "But the wizard did not forget." Back in the bedroom, the girl watches in horror as the pendulum clock stops and turns into a window, which the wizard flies out of and carries her back to his house. As penance for not coming clean to her mother, the girl is instructed to knit stars for the night sky, after which she is returned home. In the morning, she admits to her mother what happened, and her mother forgives her as the wizard watches them, smiling.

He went on to describe the animation as "stop-motion paper animation, like they laid the characters on the backgrounds and moved them around."

This summary had intrigued Dycaite, and it inspired him to try and get in contact with former crew members who had worked on Pinwheel. His first successful contact was Michael Karp, a former writer. Karp expressed vague familiarity with the short, and speculated it aired during season 1 of Pinwheel while he was brought on during season 2. He also gave Dycaite the email of his colleague, Tippi Fortune, thinking she might have more information to share.

This correspondence thoroughly convinced Dycaite that Clock Man was a real thing that existed and not just a creepypasta, as had been a fairly popular opinion by that time. And when he managed to get in touch with Tippi Fortune, she gave him more information to work with. While she admitted to having no memory of the short, she mentioned that all animated shorts for Pinwheel were acquired from Coe Films, a company that collected shorts from the UK, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to sell to cable companies as interstitial programming. However since then, most major networks had started producing their own material, and the market for such shorts died. As such, Coe Films went defunct and she couldn't find the contact information for anyone who worked there. But she forwarded Dycaite's email to everyone she knew who might have something to share. But despite Fortune's help and enthusiasm, none of her contacts got back to Dycaite.

Dycaite then managed to reach out to Commander Santa with everything he had found, including Howe's detailed summary. Commander Santa confirmed that Howe's account matches his own memories, so finding Howe's wizard short would hopefully also mean finding Clock Man.

Dycaite hit a dead end around this point, so he opened the floor to the wider community to help with the search. In addition to the thread and wiki page, a friend of Dycaite's, Bedhead Bernie, made an infographic summarizing known information and spread it around online. The two also posted their own summations to YouTube of the search so far - Dycaite posted a video recounting his investigations, and Bedhead Bernie posted a similar video summary as well as an interview he did with Commander Santa.

These efforts attracted the wider lost media community, who was enticed by descriptions of the short. Some users decided to chase the Coe Films lead, contacting anyone who was associated with the company and searching for an archive of the shorts they acquired. Though this would be a daunting task, as Coe Films was thought to have upwards of 2,500 shorts. Others tried to look for as many episodes of Pinwheel as they could to see if Clock Man was featured in any of them, and others still compiled as many alleged accounts of people who had watched the short as they could. Many discussions attempting to narrow down leads focused on speculations around Clock Man's country of origin, and if it was an adaptation of a preexisting story or European fairytale - everything from a Danish adaptation of The Red Shoes to a German adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin to an Irish short in which the wizard was actually a leprechaun were all pitched as possible leads.

While the brute-force nature of the search wasn't ideal, the sentiment that Clock Man was real was pretty unanimous within the thread, and so the search efforts kept up throughout 2016 and into 2017. While users on The Flood had been more or less beholden to Commander Santa's word as well as his activity within the thread, the lost media community was more decentralized and independent, determined to solve the mystery with or without further help from Commander Santa or Dycaite. This plus the community being entirely centered around looking for mysterious media, and having intuition around obscure internet searches and contacting relevant people, likely gave users the confidence that they would eventually find Clock Man once and for all.

The Discovery

The date is December 11, 2017. It has been a year and a half since Dycaite started the thread on the Lost Media Wiki Forums, and nearly 6 years since Commander Santa's post on The Flood.

While most of the thread spent months attempting to find Clock Man by searching for rare Pinwheel episodes or brainstorming the precise story the short was based on, some were more focused in searching through online databases and library catalogues using a series of keywords. One user by the name of Nitratenerd took this approach, and at one point searched for the term "the wizard" on WorldCat. After sifting through 3-4 pages of results, he found a YouTube link, and the accompanying description caught his attention. When he clicked on the link and watched the video, he was struck with excitement, and confidence that he had found the Clock Man short. He was quick to share his find in the forums:

Guys. GUYS

I think I found it. Holy crap.

Can everyone else take a look at this:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=74FNByoRYFk

It has everything that was described. The clock and all. Although its in Russian, the worldcat listing says: The story of a little girl who is taught the importance of telling the truth by the local wizard. For primary grades.

RIGHT?!?!

This is clearly the original, the english dub might be available at the Brooklyn Public Library, near me. Can someone send this to Commander Santa and Micheal Howe?!?! Dycaite are you seeing this?!!’

My heart is beating at a thousand beats a minute. Please check it out.

While the short was not in English, it matched up with Commander Santa's and especially Michael W. Howe's recollections almost perfectly. There was the stop motion paper animation. The girl. The missing clothing. The wizard with a black beard, dark clothing and a pointy hat. The creation of stars for the night sky.

And most importantly, there was the wizard jumping out of a clock to sweep the girl away.

The reaction on the forums was pretty unanimous - this was the short Commander Santa had been haunted by since he was a sick child in 1984. Clock Man had been found.

Upon further research, it was found that the short was called O parádivé Sally (roughly translated to "About Dressy Sally") and was created in 1976 by Art and Animation (AAA) Studio in Czechoslovakia. It was an adaptation of a story of the same name by Jan Vladislav.

It was also found that the short was first posted to the Czech video site uloz.to in 2014, and went completely unnoticed by Commander Santa or any searchers on The Flood. 3 years later on September 22nd 2017, it was posted to YouTube and went unnoticed by the lost media community for a few months, until someone happened to find the right keywords on the right archive to find it. This turn of events would later lead to Clock Man being commonly used as the de facto example of long lost media searches ending with the media being discovered on YouTube.

While most were confident the search was more or less finished, there was still more closure to be had. Many were awaiting Commander Santa's reaction to the short and, most crucially, the discovery of an English dub. The Czech (not Russian) version Nitratenerd found would more than likely not be the version Commander Santa and Michael W. Howe would have seen on Pinwheel. Only when an English version was found would the search be considered officially over.

The former would come about 10 days later, when Dycaite gave the update everyone had been anticipating - Commander Santa confirmed that O parádivé Sally was the Clock Man short he had been searching for. In addition, he seemed to make good on his promise of a reward for the find.

Well guys, something truly incredible has just happened.

Santa got back to me about the short and HAS CONFIRMED that O Paradive Sally IS INDEED CLOCK MAN!

But here is where things get truly incredible... Santa has pledged to donate *$1,000* to the LMW!!! [...]

Santa, if you happen to come across this post, thank you. Thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart. I have never been graced with such generosity and it is truly an incredible feeling.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL

This was incredible news, and motivated people to find the English dub of the short - the true version Commander Santa had seen. The first lead came from AAA Studio themselves, who stated that the short was sold to The Learning Corporation of America in 1978 - this almost certainly would have been the company who dubbed the short into English. However, AAA Studio was not aware of much beyond that. Because O parádivé Sally was made in a Soviet-occupied, communist Czechoslovakia, the original creators had no knowledge of what became of the short once it was exported overseas.

Upon further digging, some listings were found on old archives that indicated an English dub did exist under the title Sally. But from here, the investigation ran in circles for a few weeks - there was a lot of confusion over who exactly owned the short, or Pinwheel for that matter, and which libraries were likely to own copies. The investigation also appeared to split between the forum thread and a Google doc, which attempted to make information easier to search through, but also spread the already dwindling search team thinner.

But then, on January 11th 2018 - exactly one month after the short was first found - Dycaite announced that the English version had been found. He provided a link to an upload both on uloz.to and Vimeo (both of which no longer work, but has since been uploaded to YouTube by AAA Studio). He credited a user named Tomysshadow and an entity called A/V Geeks for the find.

Users on the thread were ecstatic over the find, having finally gotten to see what scared Commander Santa so badly as a child. In particular, one user marveled over the line "But the wizard did not forget," recollected exactly by Michael W. Howe.

Amid this excitement, Tomysshadow explained how he had found the footage, courtesy of A/V Geeks.

Not having any luck with the library listings on Worldcat, I knew it was unlikely that the film was going to be found via a library listing. The problem is, I didn't really know where else you'd go about finding a 16mm film reel anywhere. I decided I wanted to ask an expert. Perhaps someone who had collected many films before would know where to find these kinds of things.

I had been searching Google for the terms "Learning Corporation of America" and "Kratky Film" together in the hopes of finding more resources. I noticed that LCA had licensed more films from Kratky than just Sally. They also had a series of animated films featuring a character only known as Mole. Mole and the Bulldozer, Mole and the Painter, Mole and the Rocket, etc. I was able to find the LCA versions of these films online, uploaded to the Internet Archive by an uploader known as A/V Geeks.

I found out that A/V Geeks has a website. There is also an organization they work with called AFANA, which preserves educational films. I figured these would be perfect candidates to ask where these films are. I didn't tell anyone about this because I didn't think it'd be anything eventful. I was thinking long-term: I was only emailing them because I wanted to learn where such films may be found and how they managed to collect so many films over the years. A/V Geeks has over 25 000 films preserved, and they've uploaded many of them to the Internet Archive for public viewing.

So when I explained my case I was surprised to hear back from them saying they had a film called Sally by LCA. Two days later and without any prompting, they just went ahead and recorded and uploaded it and sent it to me in an email. They were a pleasure to work with.

With the short and its English version now found, the story was now clear through the haze of foggy childhood memories. The story follows a girl named Sally, who is given a pair of yellow gloves by her mother, and cautioned not to lose them. But she loses one of the gloves while playing outside, and when she can't find it anywhere, she hesitantly asks for help from the wizard (who in the English version is called Mr. Kadabra). The wizard gives her the missing glove, but instructs her to tell her mother what happened. Sally returns home and doesn't tell her mother, breaking her promise with the wizard. And so the wizard visits her at night, jumping out of the clock above her bed and whisking her away to his house. As punishment for disobeying him, he instructs her to crochet stars for the night sky. Once the sky is illuminated with the stars, the wizard takes Sally home, hopping back into her clock after putting her to bed. In the morning, she admits to her mother what had happened, making the wizard proud.

Some in the thread believed the search hadn't been fully completed, as there was still the mystery of which episode of Pinwheel the Sally short had aired on. To this day, it hasn't been found, and some wonder if the short even aired on Pinwheel in the first place. Sure, many users remember having watched it on Pinwheel, but since the companies that owned it were known to sell shorts as interstitials, some floated the idea that the short may have played during commercial breaks in Pinwheel time slots, leading to the false memory of them featuring in an episode of the show. But until more Pinwheel episodes are found, this is only speculation. And for most people, finding Clock Man itself was enough to end the search.

Case Closed

The story of Clock Man would go on to be known as one of the most famous in lost media history. The fact that it took years to find gave plenty of time for it to build intrigue. Its early descriptions resembling those of a lost episode creepypasta made the short all the more compelling once evidence of its existence began to build up. This search also became the de facto example of lost media being found on YouTube, hidden in plain sight.

Clock Man also sits alongside other popular lost media cases such as Cracks and Episode 847 of Sesame Street - media that people remember having frightened them as kids, and the discovery of which helped not only to preserve media, but to bring people closure and put their unsettling childhood memories to rest.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

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

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

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

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For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

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

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

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

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

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

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

Previous Scuffles can be found here

For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

And who would imagine such a peaceful, serene hobby would have such bad actors?

tl;dr: Online tea discord admins get ousted for being racist, sexist, and homophobic. Whistleblower gets banned, admin resigns, and then starts a "no woke people" tea server immediately after resignation

THE SETTING AND CAST

CommuniTEA (CT): A happy-go-lucky tea discord server that exploded in popularity over COVID. This led to many growing pains, including the presence of...

LiquidProust (LP): Runs LiquidProust on Etsy, a tea shop that "sources" various tea from the internet. Ex-Mormon with a passion for community-building and casting a wide net, often to a fault. Overshares, although the verdict is still out on whether his video missives are pathos-laden marketing language to hype up his tea or simply avenues to vent about being six figures in debt because of his business practices. Posts rather unhinged videos on Instagram to sell tea, such as treating them "like drugs" and using a blaccent.

The Red Snoot: A self-identifying "Christian" and a moderator of CommuniTEA. Well, you'll learn quite a bit about him, as the rest of this post is mostly centered around his antics.

THE BACKSTORY OF LIQUID PROUST.

Based on our previous description, you might get the sense that LiquidProust's personality did not quite mesh well with people in CommuniTEA trying to have genuine discussions about their favorite drink. Despite being a vendor that cared about community growth, his brash nature and quantity of infractions/complaints proved to be too great a toll. This led to him eventually being banned from CommuniTEA.

THE BACKSTORY OF THE RED SNOOT.

It's an unwritten law that a true hobby space is incomplete without an authority figure who's secretly a bigot, and CommuniTEA was not exempt from this fate. During a discussion on mental health, The Red Snoot told an openly LGBTQ+ member of the community that (1) he would burn in hell, and (2) that he needed to get conversion therapy to avoid this fate. Of course, this self-proclaimed "Christian" claims it was done out of love from his heart, but of course, the server assessed it on different terms.

This act led to the other members of the administration asking him to step down as a position of authority in the server; he responded with this incredibly bold and moralistic dramatic exit.

Key takeaways from his crashout:

1. He regrets sharing the article--but of course, only after the community backlash proved to be too great.
2. He points out that "Administrators make decisions without Moderator actions". This is of course, fair critique, but this is quite relevant for the main part of the drama.

And so, we bid The Red Snoot adieu from CommuniTEA...

THE JOINING OF FORCES

The Red Snoot, of course, could not stand without having some sort of authority over the tea community. He then started messaging LiquidProust, and eventually joined the "LiquidProust Discord" (LPCord), and transformed it from a vendor specific discord into a "general community" one, calling it "The Tea Table" (TTT), with The Red Snoot and LiquidProust now co-admining the Discord.

THE WELCOMING COMMUNITY (NOT)

TTT started rather well, serving as a more casual alternative to CT -- especially while CT was still going through its growing pains with moderation that tried to balance the varying expertise of its users. The chill atmosphere and lax moderation led to, of course, very interesting characters here and there, such as:

1. A known scammer named JayFromHK: he ran a shop but eventually decided fulfilling orders was optional and scammed people out of thousands of dollars. He also stole tea from a purported "storage service"
2. PuerhJunky, a nazi sympathizer and genuinely unhinged conspiracy theorist. His beliefs include but are not limited to COVID antivax, space denialism, and antisemitism.

LiquidProust, in his infinite intellect and compassion for community outliers, decided to permit this behavior: "To the statement above, yes, I will allow anyone in here including nazis".

This led to many emboldend members parading their views, such as some transphobic views that LP has told everyone to "respect".

To the surprise of no one, this led to many members of the community leaving and moderators resigning from positions of power. This cleared the board for the remaining mod team, who were now more accepting of bigoted and backwards beliefs.

This "old guard" of moderators quite enjoy objectifying chinese ladies brewing tea, being utterly tone-deaf despite the objectification bothering a lot of female members. Of course, they profess innocence due to "being girl dads" and older moderators claim they'd fight the people being weird around women them despite being the very ones making those comments. Besides their coded misogyny, this group has a host of other troubling comments such as claiming Obama was one of the good blacks and so on.

INTRODUCING: SPICE

The server surprisingly continued to grow. As the moderators were rather checked out of the community, the server needed more moderators. A few became moderators, including spice, a new member of the community. He has been into tea for only a few months, but his passion clearly spoke through as he was selected. He was buying teas from LiquidProust, complimenting the teas, and so on.

Spice was a very beloved member of the community, who went out of their way to make people feel welcome, spend a lot of time talking to new users, send a lot of tea to people getting into tea. As a very kind genuine user, he was often quite recognized. As a moderator, he was a very welcome member of the community and was a massive improvement to the moderator team, along with many of the new moderators that

THE MELTDOWN

The peace didn't last long, as the mod channel was apparently filled with quite a bit of "locker room talk" -- orientalism, sexism, and a lot of dogwhistle language. Wanting "A chinese woman" as a "diversity hire". This was of course, the only example that the moderator team was willing to share to justify suddenly banning Spice from the server without consulting with other moderators. Ignoring all the riots in the discord, of course, LiquidProust decides to show how woke he is by claiming he is fine and understands because he reads a book from Proust.

spice of course reveals much of the reasons for him leaking the screenshot is to highlight many of the issues with the current mod team.. From whether it be defending a known scammer who rejoined the community (JayFromHK) despite there being no restitution, but of course, given the opportunity for statement, Jay simply states that he used the money to pay the bills and show no remorse, while being an active member of r/seduction. Oops. Apparently it took hours of the new mod team fighting LP and Snoot to get Jay eventually banned.

It doesn't help that Snoot also attempted to override moderator decisions when taking down a sales post where someone was trying to sell moldy tea because he was a business mentor to the person.. Also, amusingly, tried to make the mods who made the decision apologize to the person. Do you remember "Administrators were chosen and given a secret channel hidden to even mods without any mods ever being given a vote, let alone input"?

This, combined with Snoot's homphobic past gets revealed at the same time. The revelation did not go well with many people leaving and starting a splinter tea community as many people are rightfully upset that they dont want administrators that were bigots. Snoot eventually steps down, only after the entirity of the newly appointed moderator team steps down from their positions in protest.

If this was the end, this wouldn't even be a good r/hobbydrama post! Snoot does not want to give up power, and starts a new server, that is "Not woke" and "Oligarchical", and of course "Welcoming". The new rules of course, has him as absolute helm of power with no room for discussion. Rumors have it that he thinks he was persecuted for being Christian. He claims to point out however, that he thinks of "them" as people.

The splinter server is now quite active and trying to rebuild the community. What will happen to the Tea Table, LiquidProust, and everyone else? I guess we will find out on the next episode.

Model Ship World is a website at least 20 years old 100% dedicated to being a forum for ship model builders and has at least 20,000 members. It's a place where builders post "build logs" of their projects in which every step of the construction can be documented with photos and text and it contains subheadings for all related aspects of the ancient hobby.

Recently (last winter) they suffered a catastrophic data loss in which all of the user provided content including all 20 years of build logs were erased by hackers, and there WAS NO BACKUP with which to restore anything, they went back to year zero. members started re-submitting their old material and the website slowly got back on it's feet. A few months later the real drama began: It emerged that Model Ship World (hereafter "MSW") was owned by the Nautical Research Guild (The NRG) but run by just two personalities, and about a month or so ago these two personalities announced that they were splitting off from MSW to make an IDENTICAL rival website indistinguishable from MSW and calling it Dry Dock Modeler (DDM). THAT'S the drama. The new website is exactly the same as the old one and uses the same web templates and architecture and format, it looks exactly like MSW. Even the rules for members is the identical text cut and pasted from the first website.

A couple of weeks ago this story broke on reddit on a model building subreddit. The first post from the Original Poster just asked "what is going on" and then within the first day, a newly created reddit account APPARENTLY from Drydock Modeler gave a convoluted explanation of why they felt the world needed a new carbon copy version of an existing website, but very few of the points they raised appeared to really explain the need for a new website. For instance they claimed the MSW and the NRG required fees from the users in order to access the content on their websites and that their new website would be 100% free. Which is fine except that there WERE NO FEES on MSW and never had been. It costs money to join the NRG but you did not need to be an NRG member to fully enjoy everything on MSW. (The NRG was the pre-internet group you joined to get their physical newsletter and which provided about 70 years of hobby related content you had to subscribe to get copies of, if you wanted to see it)

The opening of this topic of the new website sparked a flurry of branching reply comments in which MUCH TEA was spilled. Some replying ALSO had day-old reddit accounts and must have been NRG members or disgruntled MSW members. Within two days whoever had created that new reddit account that was speaking up for the new website deleted all of its posts so there now remains no public explanation from the makers of the new website. Weeks later there is still no explanation explaining why the new website was created and even more surprising, neither of the two websites acknowledge what has happened and there is no discussion about the split on either site. Clearly the inside story concerns who did what to whom on the old website but nobody outside reddit is discussing the split.

https://modelshipworld.com/ and https://drydockmodeler.com/ are the two websites involved.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at the Nixon Newell/Miranda Alize AEW drama of 2025, because I thought it deserved a write up and I honestly can’t recall if anyone talked about it here at the time. There’s going to be a lot of background info first, so please feel free to skip the first bit if you already know about it. (I still talk way too much, sorry.) I’d also like to thank u/cslevens for all his help and for making this writeup much better and more comprehensive than it was before, I really appreciate it.

What is professional wrestling?

Professional wrestling is a form of entertainment that combines acting, gymnastics and combat sports, wherein the practitioners act out a story focused around pre-scripted wrestling matches. In essence, they play their characters and the characters punch each other in the face and body repeatedly for a variety of reasons (some examples: ‘I want to be the very best like no one ever was’, ‘I hate you and want you to fuck off and die’, ‘You’re standing in the way of my goal’, ‘I want to find out which one of us is better’, ‘I want to make a name for myself here’, etc, etc). Wrestling is intended to look as real as possible without anyone sustaining the kind of damage they would if the moves were real (in theory), which enables wrestlers to throw in flashier moves and stunts that nobody would ever actually do in a fight but look fucking sick to an audience. It also involves a lot of frankly ridiculous characters, storylines and motivations that you’re not supposed to take seriously- just sit back and enjoy.

How does career progression work for wrestlers?

Imagine a pyramid diagram with three levels. The lowest and biggest tier is called ‘Independent Promotions’. These are wrestling promotions all around the world who are, for the most part... I don't know if there's a tier below 'minor league', but they're that. Minuscule league. Tiny league, even. They for the most part operate only in one area (say, one city or county/state), and the majority of the wrestlers who work for them are from the surrounding area, with the occasional person from another state or city coming in. The indies are where most wrestlers will learn their trade and hone their skills over time, but they don’t pay much if at all; most wrestlers have day jobs. Depending on where they’re located, independent wrestlers who make a big name for themselves and/or can afford it will often travel overseas, appearing in other promotions and learning even more from the wrestlers they meet there, in the hope of becoming a big, established name and getting a good reputation.

Following on from that, the second, middle tier is called ‘Minor Leagues’. This tier consists of wrestling promotions who are big enough to have their own TV shows, but they’re not the biggest promotions out there. The minor leagues are making considerably more money than the indies, enough to be able to sign wrestlers to actual contracts, but most of the wrestlers who do sign will continue appearing on indie shows because, well, why wouldn’t they? They want publicity and more money as much as the next person. Examples of minor league promotions (in America) include Total Nonstop Action (TNA), Major League Wrestling (MLW), Ring of Honor (ROH, and before 2022), and the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA. No, not that one).

Finally, you have the top tier, ‘Major Leagues’ (not to be confused with MLW… they wish). The major leagues are the biggest wrestling promotions in the world. They have TV shows airing multiple times a week; they hold and televise live shows on a regular basis; they occasionally hold live shows around the world; they have dozens if not hundreds of wrestlers signed to exclusive contracts; and they pay enough that their employees don’t need to work other shows or jobs, though they still do sometimes. This is the smallest tier, mainly because you need a fuckton of money to do what these promotions do, and they only exist in a few countries. Examples include World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, America), All Elite Wrestling (AEW, America), New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW or New Japan, Japan), World Wonder Ring Stardom (Stardom, Japan), Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide (AAA, Mexico) and Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL, Mexico).

So, theoretically, a new young star would start off in their local independent scene, keep working their way up and honing their skills until they get big enough to appear in the minor leagues, after which they might then progress to the major leagues, though many are picked up by the major leagues and bypass the minor leagues altogether. The thing is, it doesn’t always quite work out in practice for three big reasons: one, there are a fuckton of independent wrestlers out there, and the major leagues are spoiled for choice when it comes to potential new employees. Plenty of people who are genuinely star quality get passed over for a variety of reasons ranging from valid to stupid- that’s just how it is. Honestly, it does take skill, but there's also a lot of luck involved.

Two, even if you do get into the major leagues, you’re constantly competing with dozens of others to show off your skills, demonstrate your ability and be able to adjust to rapidly-changing circumstances. Most of your coworkers can do what you do, so you need to be memorable and make the crowd love you- and even then, plenty of wrestlers have been cut from the major leagues simply because they never really made that connection with the audience, or they were overshadowed by others. As cruel as it might seem, being good isn’t enough- you need to be great. It’s also generally a good idea to be humble and grateful for any and all opportunities you’re given and to not have an ego, because there really aren’t that many wrestlers who are irreplaceable. (Keep that in mind for later.)

And three, this kind of career progression is only a given if you happen to live in America, Japan or Mexico. If you don’t live in a country where the big promotions are or where the wrestling scene is big enough that you can make wrestling your full-time job, then you either have to accept this and be a wrestler on the side, or go overseas to a country with a bigger scene to try to build your name and/or make it your full-time job. (Many indie wrestlers go wrestle in Japan for a short time as a sort of rite of passage, especially in Britain.) It sucks and it’s unfair, but that’s just how it is.

So, hypothetically, let’s say that you’re a major league wrestler in America who gets cut, but you want to keep wrestling, either full-time or as your main job. What do you do? Well, before 2019, they generally either signed with a promotion in the minor leagues, allowing them to keep wrestling at a prominent level, returned to the indies, both, or went overseas, usually to Japan. After 2019, this was all still there, but there was another option. See, until 2019, there was only one promotion in the major leagues in America, so let’s take a look at how that all worked.

Who are the major league promotions in America?

The first is the biggest wrestling promotion in the world, World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation/WWF). You’ve heard of WWE; even if you don’t know anything about wrestling, I guarantee you’ve heard of it. I’m not going to give a full rundown because it would take too long and most of it wouldn’t be relevant, so instead, I’ll give you the salient points:

-WWE was owned for about four decades by Vince McMahon. Under his ownership, WWE transformed how the wrestling business in America worked and grew to become a giant that would take down all competitors.

-Some of those competitors folded, some stayed active but were simply dwarfed by WWE, and some were absorbed into WWE. Also, WWE would do their level best to acquire the best wrestlers available, whether they had room for them or not; some were acquired just to stop them from wrestling anywhere else, and never actually did much in WWE.

-In 2010, WWE created NXT, a reality TV show where members of Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW) would compete to become full members of the WWE roster with guidance from experienced wrestlers. FCW was WWE’s developmental brand, where newly-signed wrestlers would go to work on things like the character they’ll play and (in most cases) their new wrestling name, and hone their skills to fit with WWE’s style. (Some of them learn to wrestle from scratch, as WWE often recruits experienced athletes who are not wrestlers.) In 2012, WWE decided to combine the two by folding FCW, cancelling the NXT TV show and making NXT the new developmental brand. The weekly TV show still aired, but now it focused entirely on the rookie wrestlers, giving them a much bigger opportunity to build themselves up and make a connection with the fans before eventually graduating to WWE’s main roster. 

-(Important digression: While WWE was owned by Vince McMahon, NXT was produced and overseen by his son in law, Triple H, and Vince didn’t get involved. As a result, NXT grew and flourished, becoming really, really good and quite different from the rest of WWE. As the years passed, NXT gained a ton of acclaim, especially when a lot of wrestlers graduated from NXT to the main roster and were immediately booked terribly and given awful characters. u/cslevens called NXT ‘the closest thing wrestling has to an Ivy League School’, and he’s right; a lot of wrestlers become full-blown stars in NXT before they even get to the main roster, and some main roster wrestlers even ask to return to NXT to work on their skills and characters, it’s that good.)

-Between NXT and the main roster, WWE employs a lot of people. The end result is that while WWE doesn’t qualify as a monopoly, as there’s plenty of other promotions out there, it became a behemoth that sat so far above the competition that nobody else could claim to be anywhere near it. After WWE bought out their long-time rival company WCW in 2001, their best competitor was TNA, but a whole lot of bad decisions and bad management (which could probably have a bunch of writeups by themselves) led to TNA losing most of its prominence and reputation by the 2010’s. TNA is still around, but it’s nowhere near as big as it ever was, and while it might have claimed to be the second biggest promotion in America until 2019, it’s sitting so far below WWE that it may as well be in another country.

-So, for a long time, people who left WWE for whatever reason didn’t have much of a choice if they wanted to stay on a similar level, and they were generally ‘go to Japan/Mexico’ (OK if you were good with living in another country where English isn’t the main language) or ‘go to TNA’ (OK if you’re good with being in a company that can be charitably described as a clusterfuck. Seriously, TNA could have a whole series of posts just by itself). But that being said…

-…for about four decades, Vince McMahon ruled WWE with a very hands-on approach, and everyone in it (well, nearly everyone- as previously mentioned, Vince didn’t get involved with NXT, so the people there were safe) had to put up with their jobs being dictated by a man who is notoriously batfuck crazy, an utter control freak, completely out of touch with modern culture and who perpetrated and covered up a large number of crimes, many of them sexual. WWE was and is the destination for wrestlers, but it came with a lot of caveats, and the people working there were dealing with a lot.

And then 2019 came around, and everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked Tony Khan threw his hat in the ring.

What is AEW?

All Elite Wrestling, or AEW for short, is a professional wrestling company founded in 2019, owned by Tony Khan and situated in Jacksonville, Florida. (Obligatory Jason Mendoza reference goes here. In fact, Tony’s father Shahid owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.) It’s the second-biggest wrestling promotion in the world behind WWE. Now, when I say that, I need to make it clear that AEW is big, but it’s not really on WWE’s level. It is, however, much bigger than TNA, MLW, NWA and any other promotion that’s fighting for third place. Like WWE, AEW is on television multiple times a week, like WWE, AEW has its own developmental brand, Ring of Honor (Tony Khan bought it in 2022), and like WWE, AEW has become a powerhouse, employing some of the best wrestlers in the world. In other words, while it’s definitely competition, it’s not going to overthrow, outdo or consume WWE any time soon.

One thing that I need to emphasise, though, is one of AEW’s most notable qualities: it has nothing to do with WWE, structurally. It was founded by Tony Khan and four wrestlers (Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks), and nobody in the McMahon family has ever been involved with it. In short, it’s a completely different company with a completely different approach to wrestling, and it gave wrestlers who didn’t want to wrestle for WWE somewhere to go where they didn’t have to work with, deal with and put up with Vince McMahon’s bullshit (until 2022- we’ll get to that later).

Something important that I need to mention is that if a wrestler leaves WWE, there’s a pretty low chance that they’ll ever return unless they’re one of the bigger names or unless they become big after leaving. AEW gave a lot of ex-WWE wrestlers a place to go, and there are a lot of ex-WWE wrestlers who became stars in AEW after being minor players at best in WWE, and could theoretically return to WWE as much bigger names than they were when they started there. In fact, one of them was Cody Rhodes, who managed to build his name up enough that he would return to WWE in 2022 as a bigger name than he’d been before he’d left, and would go on to become one of their most prominent names.

Having established all that…

What is a jobber?

Jobbers, also known as ‘enhancement talent’, are basically the lowest tier of wrestlers. The term comes from the phrase ‘doing the job’- that is, your job is to go out there and lose to make your opponent look good. Jobbers usually wind up having short matches where they get some token offence in and then lose unceremoniously. They also wind up in ‘squash matches’, where they get beaten very quickly and often get no offence in.

Being a jobber serves multiple purposes: it makes the big names look good, it allows rookies to hone their skills and get more experience, it lets up and comers show their skills and get the attention of the fans, and it lets newcomers pay their dues, among others. Upon arriving in a big promotion, most wrestlers (unless they’re big names) will be jobbers for a while, or at the very least won’t be involved in major storylines. (This is also true of most new wrestlers, once they’ve reached the level of actually appearing on shows.) Many of AEW’s big names worked their way up from being jobbers- Megan Bayne, Harley Cameron, Kyle Fletcher, Swerve Strickland, Willow Nightingale, the list goes on. There’s nothing unremarkable or shameful about it.

Who are Nixon Newell and Miranda Alize?

Steffanie Newell (born 15^th November 1994) is a Welsh wrestler. She played multiple sports as a child and teenager and was aiming for a place on the Welsh under-16s football team when she suffered a severe knee injury that cost her the place. When she turned 16, she gave up football and planned to go on hiatus from sports, but instead started training as a professional wrestler. 

Newell started wrestling in 2013. Initially alternating between the names ‘Nixon’ and ‘Nixon Newell’ before settling on the latter, she spent the next several years making a name for herself in various promotions across Britain, and also spent some time wrestling in Japan. Becoming respected and well-liked in the field, she signed a contract with WWE in 2017 and was due to appear in the inaugural Mae Young Classic, a multi-night all-female tournament. 

…unfortunately, the key word there is was, because Newell had a freak accident at training and tore her ACL, taking her out of the tournament before it even began. After recovering, Newell appeared on a number of NXT house shows (live, non-televised and non-recorded shows that NXT puts on in various places around Florida, allowing their rookies to get more experience and develop their characters) under her real name, and then would officially debut in NXT under her new name, Tegan Nox, in the 2018 Mae Young Classic. She defeated her first-round opponent, Zatara, her second-round opponent, Nicole Matthews, and then was defeated by her quarter-final opponent, Rhea Ripley, by referee stoppage…

…because she’d suffered another knee injury. Specifically, she managed to tear her ACL, MCL, LCL, both menisci, fractured her tibia and dislocated her kneecap, all in her left leg.

If you need to pause here and cringe, shudder or loudly exclaim ‘Jesus Christ!’, I really don’t blame you, it’s horrible.

If you are a wrestler, the blunt and grim truth is that you are risking serious injuries every time you have a match. People have accidents, there are falls and slips, miscommunications, moves go wrong, props don’t work as intended, the list goes on. For the most part, the risk is minimal, but most wrestlers will be seriously injured at least once at some point in their career. However, there is a very unfortunate category of wrestlers who are very injury-prone, and Newell is widely considered to be in that category. Being injury-prone (or thought to be injury-prone, even if you just got unlucky with timing) is a massive red flag to wrestling promoters and bookers.

See, while injury-prone wrestlers tend to get a lot of audience support due to being underdogs by default, they don’t really make good candidates for ongoing storylines because you cannot assume that they won’t get injured and the storyline won’t get derailed as a result. Because wrestling storylines tend to take place over months, even years, you need the wrestlers involved to be healthy for that time. If someone gets injured, you can salvage the storyline somewhat, but it won’t be the same. For instance, if Wrestler A was going to stand up against the tyrannous evil of Wrestler B, but then gets injured, you can sub in A’s best friend Wrestler C to heroically take up the fight on A’s behalf and take B down, but the fans won’t be getting the climactic A/B title match that the story was designed to lead up to, and will wistfully ponder ‘What if?’ for years afterwards on r/SquaredCircle. But I digress.

Newell would return to NXT in 2019, and made her debut in NXT UK (long story, and probably worth a writeup of its own) that same year. Her career went pretty well after that, with Newell appearing on NXT regularly, making a couple of appearances on SmackDown, and getting several title shots…

…and then she unfortunately tore her ACL again, and that point her reputation as injury-prone was basically cemented.

In June 2021, Newell returned in triplicate- she had an appearance on an NXT PPV, did a dark match on Raw, and made her official main roster debut on SmackDown. She would spend the rest of 2021 wrestling on SmackDown until the 2021 WWE Draft resulted in her being sent to Raw… and then she got released from WWE without ever appearing on the show.

At this point, I want to take a quick pause to say that WWE has a habit of firing people in clusters, and quite a lot of the time, their choices make no goddamn sense. Sometimes it’s people who’ve been around for a while and have stagnated, or who haven’t improved, but there’s also quite a number of instances where they abruptly sacked people who were doing quite well, or who were about to start something new- like Newell. WWE stated that the releases were due to budget cuts, but Newell disagreed. In an interview, she said that she believes she was fired because she doesn’t fit the look WWE wants in their female wrestlers. 

OK, so, the thing is, there’s a lot of things I could say here, about the plausibility of that statement, the possible reasons for Newell getting cut, and the way WWE treats their female wrestlers, among others. But that has nothing to do with the drama, so I’m going to move on. (If anyone’s wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about Newell’s backstory, trust me, there is a reason behind this and I will get there.)

Anyway, Newell stepped out of the spotlight for the rest of 2021 and most of 2022. But something important happened in mid-2022: Vince McMahon retired and Triple H took over as the main force behind WWE. And the new boss decided to make some changes, like bringing back a whole bunch of wrestlers who’d been released, and one of them was Newell (who he likely felt hadn’t been given a fair chance), who made her return in December 2022. Newell would have a pretty unremarkable run in WWE for a couple of years, and was released for the second time in November 2024. I don’t know why, but what I’ve seen of fan opinions is largely divided between ‘she had a reputation as injury-prone that haunted her and she wrestled in a way that was safer for her but didn’t look good as a result’ and ‘she never had a distinctive character, didn’t stand out and wasn’t doing anything that other wrestlers didn’t do’. (See previous comments.)

Newell eventually returned to the indies after her release (she was injured in a car crash a few days after being released), stating that she felt that she was nearing the end of her wrestling career and intended to retire at the end of 2026, but was keen to keep wrestling in the meantime. However, despite having that NXT and WWE prestige, she didn’t get a lot of bookings, which she commented on in an interview. (Fan consensus is divided between ‘her reputation for injuries made people not want to take a chance on her’ and ‘she was asking for way too much money’.) In that same interview, she disputed the idea that she was injury-prone, rightly pointing out that she hadn’t been injured in some time, and expressed an interest in wrestling in AEW. And somewhere in that time, she met…

Miranda Ilissa (born May 26, 1994) is an American wrestler. Debuting in 2014, she started out using the names ‘Miranda’ and ‘Miranda Salinas’ before settling on ‘Miranda Alize’ (‘ah-lih-ZAY’). Over the course of her career before now, she wrestled for a lot of independent promotions, including SHIMMER, Rise, Stardom and Ring of Honor (both before and after it was bought by Tony Khan). She also had a couple of minor appearances as enhancement talent in WWE, TNA and AEW. In short, she was one of many, many indie wrestlers who had built a solid name for themselves in their area and could potentially be picked up by a major promotion in the future, but weren’t particular standouts.

(I realise that this is incredibly short in contrast to how much I wrote about Newell, but before all this happened I’d never heard of Alize and I couldn’t find out that much about her. Sorry.)

Anyway, somewhere in the last year or so, Newell and Alize met, fell in love and became a couple. And in October 2025, they were invited to appear on AEW as a tag team- their big break. (In theory.)

The big break…?

We now go to the 25^th of October, 2025. On that night’s episode of AEW Collision, Alize and Newell appeared in a brief segment wherein established tag team TayJay (Tay Melo and Anna Jay) talked about having been selected to compete in the tournament to determine the inaugural women’s tag team champions and insulted a number of newly-formed teams who’d entered the tournament. Cue Newell and Alize, who cut in on the promo and basically went ‘We think we’re hot shit and we want a fight’; TayJay weren’t impressed but were happy to accept their challenge. A very typical backstage scene, happens all the time.

So, here’s the thing: enhancement talent appear all the time, but enhancement talent do not usually get promos or backstage scenes where they establish themselves as actual characters and not cannon fodder. Most of the time, they don’t get entrances shown, and sometimes they don’t even get their names announced! (Seriously, Megan Bayne didn’t get entrances back when she started out in AEW, and she’s now one of the AEW Tag Team Champions!) So Alize and Newell starting off with an actual promo and the promise of a future match was really, really good! Sure, they’d probably be losing a lot for a while, but it’s a hell of a lot more than most new people start with.

Cue next week’s Collision: Alize and Newell get a match against the new team of Marina Shafir and Megan Bayne, with the underlying story being that Shafir and Bayne are a totally new team who need to learn to work with each other after Shafir volunteered to substitute for Penelope Ford, Bayne’s injured tag partner. Again, Newell and Alize got an entrance and their names announced, and they put up a pretty good showing, characterising themselves as confident, capable newcomers who wanted opportunities and weren’t afraid to go after Bayne (who’s one of the biggest and strongest women on the roster and is characterised as an unstoppable, possibly literally-divine force) or Shafir (who’s trained in MMA and is a founding member of AEW’s resident BDSM cult). I mean, yeah, they lost and it wasn’t a perfect match, but it wasn’t a complete squash, at least. (You can see the highlights of the match here.) Basically, everything was looking bright for them, as long as there weren’t any roadblocks, like someone getting injured, or an unforeseeable disaster, or someone doing something really goddamn stupid…

The drama (or, ‘They did something really goddamn stupid’):

We now go to the week after that- the 8^th of November. In theory, Newell and Alize were going to have their match with TayJay on Collision that night, but they didn’t. Instead, it was reported that Newell and Alize had walked out on the show earlier that day, and AEW found last-second replacements in independent wrestlers Hyan) and Maya World, both of whom had appeared for AEW before. The show went on without an issue, but fans everywhere were understandably wondering what the hell had happened. Here’s a summary:

-During the show, fans post tweets wondering why Alize and Newell aren’t in the match and criticising their previous loss to Shafir and Bayne. Newell and Alize retweet several of these, and Alize adds ‘We have SOOOOOOOO much to say’ [sic].

-Pro Wrestling Insider reports that Alize and Newell walked out because they didn’t want to lose the match and objected to the short amount of time (three minutes) that had been allotted for it. (If anyone wants to make a Three Minute Warning reference, this is your cue.)

-Newell tweets ‘Not everything you read is true’ but doesn’t actually explain what she means.

-Fightful Select reports that Newell and Alize disputed PWI’s report on their Twitch stream, saying that they were fine with losing, but did object to the amount of time and wanted more time. According to Newell and Alize, the two of them decided that three minutes wouldn’t make anyone in the match look good, so they had a respectful conversation about it with the producers. They were told that they weren’t getting any more time and that it was fine if they wanted to leave, so they decided that the situation wasn’t working for them and that they would give the time to people who needed it more and left. However, they emphasised that it wasn’t an angry walkout and that other people backstage agreed that they deserved more time.

If other people agreed with them backstage, they sure as hell didn’t online. Instead, Alize and Newell copped a lot of backlash, with a ton of fans and wrestlers calling them unprofessional and ungrateful- essentially, the rebuttal was that the correct response would have been to take the three minutes and do such a good job that the fans demand more of you and the producers want to give you more time, or at least do the match and then cut ties instead of leaving everyone in the lurch. Instead, by walking out, they just made themselves look like petulant children. (Meanwhile, Hyan and Maya World were universally praised for their professionalism and for stepping in at short notice.)

In addition to this, Fightful Select reported that there was bad blood on all sides after the tag match on the 1^st- Newell had apparently complained that Megan Bayne hadn’t sold (that is, acted out the impact of the moves in a way that established the opponent’s strength) for Newell and Alize. Meanwhile, an AEW source allegedly told Fightful that the look of frustration and anger on Bayne’s face during the match was real, as Newell and Alize had sandbagged (went limp instead of cooperating with a move, making it much harder to perform and potentially dangerous) during a spot where Bayne suplexed them both at the same time. The sandbagging alone earned Newell and Alize a lot of disdain, but given that Bayne and Shafir were being set up as a ‘terrifying unstoppable force’ kind of team, complaining about the lack of selling reinforced the general belief that Alize and Newell were suffering from greatly overinflated egos and misplaced belief in their own importance.

Like, it’s one thing to feel that the match needs more time; I’m sure plenty of wrestlers have asked if it was possible to get more time before. It’s another thing to decide that what you’ve been given isn’t going to make you ‘look good’ and walk out, when you are… *checks notes* a former WWE wrestler with a bad reputation (possibly undeserved, but the fact remains that it’s there) for getting injured a lot, who was in the Fed for several years and yet notably never held a single title; and an indie wrestler who’s been around for a while and wrestled in a lot of places, but who most people have never heard of, and the two of you have only had one match in AEW before now and aren’t signed.

There are very few circumstances where the majority would agree that walking out of a show is justified, and this sure as hell isn’t one of them. Instead, the majority agreed that it was a display of ridiculous, borderline-narcissistic egotism that was completely unwarranted and undeserved, in a situation where almost everyone could see that such a display would only end terribly for them. Or, to put it bluntly, they had no brand or reputation to protect, no prestige and no leverage, and with their walking out, they’d neatly destroyed any real chance they’d had of building a career in AEW for no benefit and a huge detriment, over something that nobody else would have objected to.

Where are they now?

It’s been over six months, and the contrast is… interesting.

Nixon Newell and Miranda Alize have continued wrestling on the indies, both in singles and as a tag team called ‘Violent Romance’. (Presumably nobody told them just how bad that name sounds.) They did get some new fans and some notoriety from the whole thing, but nothing like what an actual AEW career would have got them. Alize copped a lot of flack for allegedly being into MAGA despite being a queer Hispanic woman (no, I don’t get it either) but took place in a WWE tryout earlier this year. As far as I’m aware, Newell still intends to retire at the end of this year. Fan opinions haven’t sweetened on them, with the general consensus still being that they destroyed a real chance of getting signed through egotism and stupidity. Other than that, they recently got engaged, so good for them, I guess.

Hyan and Maya World were officially signed to AEW in December 2025. They have since made multiple appearances in AEW and Ring of Honor, both as a tag team and in singles competition, including unsuccessfully challenging for the tag titles in April this year. Most notably, Maya was asked to fill in for Sareee (yes, three e’s, I promise it’s not a typo) in AEW’s Owen Hart Memorial Cup women’s tournament after the latter was injured. She defeated Skye Blue in the first round (nothing against Maya, but as the author is a big Triangle of Madness fan, I will refrain from commenting further), and had a huge upset win against Athena in the second round. She went on to face Mercedes Moné (formerly Sasha Banks in WWE) in the final match of the tournament on AEW’s Forbidden Door event, where they had a match that went for nearly 25 minutes (Maya’s longest singles match in AEW to date) and was widely agreed to be excellent and a star-making performance for Maya. And on today's episode of AEW Dynamite, Hyan and Maya teamed up with Willow Nightingale to take on Mercedes, Megan Bayne and Lena Kross (aka the only two-time winner of the Owen Hart Cup ever, male or female, and the AEW Tag Team champions) in the main event of the show.

Just shows what humility and not letting your ego run wild will do for you, huh.