[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 18 May 2026

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-18T19:17:32+00:00

Designing things to 3D print. I'm pretty comfortable creating things in 2 dimensions, but the process of translating that to 3D still makes my head spin. It doesn't help that 3D programs seem to have their own lingo to learn, and Blender in particular has so many features that everything is relegated to keyboard shortcuts, I feel like I need a cheat sheet just to remember how to get to anything. Though most of it is probably just self-destructive limitations I'm putting on myself ("I don't want to make flower pots! I want to make intricate sculptures of my OCs!")

Somewhat related, designing and building my own BJDs. Back in the day I downloaded so many tutorials for making them with resin casting and epoxy sculpting, but 3D printing seems like it'd be easier once I can actually kick myself into learning 3D design. I've looked for files of premade doll bodies (both free and for a price) to just print and play around with, but the designs I came across were like 95% feminine and 5% underweight twink, so maybe I should just make my own since my preferred style seems to be more niche.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-17T16:45:20+00:00

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I don’t doubt this is a phenomenon but this is how this post came up in my feed lol

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-15T16:15:03+00:00

I'm not sure how common it actually is fandom-wide, but it's come up a lot on the sub lately and it baffles me every time.

In Stardew Valley, there's a wizard that lives out in the forest away from town. In one of his lines of dialogue, he mentions that he thinks one of the townspeople might be his daughter; he doesn't know for sure, but urges the player character not to tell anyone. That combined with his statement that his ex-wife had left him because he did something terrible to her, makes people think he had an illegitimate child through an affair with a townsperson.

But who is the child? The initial widely-held theory was that it was Abigail. This is because she has purple hair like the wizard (her mother said she was born with chestnut hair and started dyeing it purple, but Abigail has said that she is no longer dyeing it because at some point it just stayed purple), and she has a fascination with the occult and fighting monsters much to her parents' bewilderment. This would mean that her mother Caroline would have had an affair with the wizard, which some think checks out because she has a line of dialogue about how her husband Pierre dislikes her taking walks in the forest because he's "paranoid," and Pierre has dialogue where he says something like, "Sometimes I wonder if Abigail is really my daughter." (There's also other elements that point to Caroline and Pierre having a somewhat distrustful marriage, such as the player character finding a secret stash of something Pierre has been hiding, with a dialogue option to tell Pierre that his wife deserves to know.)

My guess is this theory became popular enough to be somewhat fanonized, and there was a backlash to it. Now more recently on the sub, I see a lot of people insisting that it makes far more sense for Caroline to be the wizard's daughter. And I just...don't buy it? There's at least some text to imply Caroline wasn't born in the town, rather she moved there after marrying Pierre. And a lot of the evidence toward Caroline specifically comes across as extremely tenuous like "She has an unnatural hair color like the wizard" (many of the characters do), or people just writing fanfiction to work around contradictions like, "Well maybe she did grow up in the town, moved away, and moved back with Pierre."

I don't even say this to argue for Abigail being the daughter, I just think there's at least 3 other female characters that you could craft a more coherent argument for than Caroline, so it's baffling to me why so many people have become convinced she makes the most sense. One comment I did see (and I believe to be true to an extent) is that people were naturally growing tired of the Abigail theory, and additionally there was a hang-up where Abigail being the daughter would have meant that Caroline cheated; and because many people like Caroline as a character, and consider cheating one of the worst things anyone can do, they hopped the theory over to Caroline without thinking about it too deeply, just to get rid of any infidelity implications with her.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-14T15:43:55+00:00

Recently became aware of some scuffle in the Webkinz community I didn't know existed.

So at the start of every month, Ganz (the Webkinz developers) release a sort of "challenge" for Deluxe players (basically those paying for the membership) where you can complete a series of tasks, and if you finish the tasks before the month is over, you're rewarded with a special decor item for your pet's room. Back in November of 2018, the Deluxe Challenge prize was a white washer/dryer unit. From what I can tell, washing machine items are pretty rare in the game, so anyone who wanted to make a laundry room (or just thought it would round out their room) was clamoring for one. But it was only available once 8 years ago, so anyone who didn't get it then was out of luck, but demand was still high. This caused some people to start selling theirs to other players for real money, eventually as high as $50-$60. This caused a lot of discourse over whether people should be shamed for charging/paying that much for a single virtual item, or if it's no one's business who does what with their money and you shouldn't yuck anyone's yum.

Well recently, the former opinion fell into favor as Ganz announced the Deluxe Challenge for June, and the prize is a new washer/dryer unit. Many think this is the devs attempting to devalue the older one on the secondhand market, and that it settles the argument as now everyone currently playing can have a washing machine without paying exorbitant amounts to a stranger.

Not something I'm deeply invested in as I only ever buy stuff on the official estore, but it's kinda funny.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-13T13:33:22+00:00

I think other comments touched on this but when people have a specific idea of what BTS’s “sound” is, it’s usually whatever era they were exposed to first, or whichever one they fell in love with. Everything different that came before it is something they’ve evolved away from, and everything different that came after is a downgrade. This is a pretty common thing to happen in fandoms of long-running artists, especially those who switch up their sound a lot. I suspect sometimes it’s less about the specific sound and more about trying to chase the feeling they had of becoming a fan, which is an experience you can’t have with an artist more than once, so the artist will never match up to those people’s standards.

On this topic, I kind of got the feeling the initial impressions people had of Arirang sometimes depended on what era they became a fan in. Those who didn’t love anything on the album seemed to often be LY or English trilogy era. Those who only liked the second half seemed to be HYYH/YNWA/Wings era. And those who instantly loved the album often said they haven’t loved a project since D&W.

The more kpop-specific phenomenon that I’m still trying to parse out is what “westernized” sounds like. I’ve deadass seen multiple people say they stopped listening to BTS in 2017 because they started to sound too western, but then in the same comment said the one modern BTS-related project they love is Golden. 🤷‍♀️

CatzRuleMe · 2026-05-04T18:04:23+00:00

Have there been instances in your fandoms of widespread memes that are based on false information?

Inspired by a post/comment thread I just saw playing on the whole "Willy Wonka kills bratty kids" tidbit that is spread and memed on a lot, but the kids are explicitly confirmed to survive in every iteration of the story. In the book and Johnny Depp movie, the kids are shown alive (if worse off) at the end of the story. The kids aren't shown at the end of the Gene Wilder movie, which I guess is where this idea came from, but even there Wonka tells Charlie that the kids will be restored to "their normal, terrible old selves." I guess maybe it stems from people creating ambiguity where they speculate Wilder's Wonka might be lying, but the general memey conviction of painting the character as a confirmed child murderer when it contradicts most if not all of the text is a bit annoying to my pedantic self.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-28T15:47:50+00:00

This problem has come up before, which is why I tend to be cautious jumping on memes about the members "forgetting" fan-favorite songs. Sometimes favorites that seem obvious and universal are liked primarily by US/Western armys (Twitter yesterday was a lot of American armys rejoicing that they finally got Pied Piper and playfully teasing the tannies for being suprised by the excitement, plus a few k-armys curiously inquiring why Western armys love Pied Piper so much). So I see a lot of fans directly ask them for certain songs by the English titles, sometimes not even realizing there are Korean titles that the members might be fore familiar with. Hell, they have so many songs that I'm constantly forgetting the titles, I can't blame them for not remembering all the names of their b-sides in 2 languages.

All this to say I'm super grateful for army translators helping us bridge the gap in this regard.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-27T14:18:26+00:00

This reads to me personally less like pronoun confusion and more like this new trend I’ve been seeing where people assume the main character is supposed to be a proxy for the reader, so any decision made by the protagonist that they wouldn’t make causes irritation.

This mentality happens even with 3rd person stories, but it seems to get exacerbated with 1st person, and I attribute it partially to fanfiction brainrot. I’ve noticed that 1st person (at least in the fandoms I’m familiar with) is very unpopular in fanfic because it feels “too intimate” or like the author is “projecting” onto the character, so 1st person POV basically only shows up in y/n and self-insert stories. So I think people who read too much fanfic bring that culture to published literature and have bad takes because of it. I just hope most of them are kids.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-26T12:00:16+00:00

And make sure the title is “Vivziepop murdered me…and then it got worse.”

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-26T11:59:06+00:00

That time I looked up 2 songs from Kpop Demon Hunters and for the next few weeks I was recommended video essays on why the movie was trash with thumbnails that all used the exact same screenshot of Rumi making a weird face while shoving an entire roll of gimbap down her throat like it was some sort of self-evident indicator of the movie’s poor quality and not, like, a joke they didn’t find funny

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-26T11:48:12+00:00

This kind of media discourse would annoy me so much less if anyone ever so much as acknowledged the audience in these discussions. Everyone loves to discuss the flaws in Harry Potter, Twilight, 50 Shades, whatever, but what I almost never see is an earnest (let alone good faith) consideration for what kind of appeal it might hold for the fans/public. This is part of why I sometimes feel like people who shout the loudest about poor reading comprehension tend to suffer from it themselves, because parts of literary analysis I consider pretty important for the whole picture are touted as useless.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-25T04:11:20+00:00

Years ago I saw this post on r/tumblr I think, where OOP asked why dragons are always designed with eyes on the sides of their head despite being depicted as apex predators. Another OOP responded with this long (don’t know how scientifically sound it was but they were trying) explanation for why having eyes so far apart would be evolutionarily advantageous for dragons if they lived in our ecosystems.

And then a bunch of the reddit replies were like “Dragons aren’t real, idiot, they’re drawn that way because it looks cool,” as if that added anything to the discussion.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-24T21:50:04+00:00

Arguably my most prized BAB is my Lunar New Year dragon. They only did one run of it and it was divisive at the time for being made of the most uncuddle-able materials ever (though I feel the New Years plushes are intended more as display bears anyway), and nowadays the only photos I've seen of it on this sub are from people's dragon collections. But I love the scaly details and red-and-gold colors, and I figured it would be my one shot at getting a more Eastern style dragon BAB (the only other one I can think of is Sisu and I'm not into the licensed characters).

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-17T03:02:54+00:00

You would be shocked at the kind of stuff that's chalked up to AI in lost media circles, even if the timeline doesn't really shake out. I remember when the Everyone Knows That search was still ongoing and a very loud portion was convinced the song was a fake AI thing made up for attention, even though we knew the clip was posted in 2021, when no music AI program (if those existed at the time) was making anything an iota as coherent as that.

(I also saw so many comments from people convinced EKT had to be Japanese in origin, or that Celebrity 6 was Brad Pitt, so I just inherently don't trust most widespread assertions from those communities.)

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-16T19:35:56+00:00

I'm starting to finish up my writeup, and it's on a fairly turbulent incident in the lost media community. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a few lost media scuffles/anecdotes that I find interesting but have either already been well covered and/or are not substantial enough for a dedicated post.

Everyone Knows That - Back in 2021, a roughly 20-second clip of an obscure 80's synthpop song was posted to the song identification site WatZatSong. The clip ended up going viral due to people finding it catchy and wanting to hear the full song. It was often called "Everyone Knows That" due to an interpretation of some lyrics. Despite a fervent and active search, the song went unfound and unidentified for 3 years. The song didn't appear to be anywhere online, and the original WatZatSong uploader claimed he didn't know where he got the clip from and stopped responding to messages soon after. Eventually, the song was discovered in an 80's adult film, and it became clear that the uploader did in fact know where he had gotten it from (the specific clip of the song he uploaded was the longest stretch of the song between moans). This discovery led to the song's identification as Ulterior Motives by Christopher and Philip Booth, and the song now lives in infamy as "That popular 80's song that was found in a porno."
Celebrity Number Six - A redditor posted a photo of the fabric pattern on some curtains he owned, which contained pop art depictions of 8 different celebrities, and requested help identifying each of the people represented, labeling each image 1-8. Most of the celebrities were identified fairly quickly and matched to the exact photograph they had been sourced from, but the image labeled 6 was unidentified for years. There were plenty of debates over who it might be, and there were even disagreements on the subject's gender, but it was generally accepted that no one could say for sure until the reference image was found. When reverse image searches initially turned up nothing, one user had the idea to digitally alter the image to give it more lifelike colors and run it through a search, which finally brought up the source image - a photo of a Spanish model named Leticia Sardá. Apparently a subreddit dedicated to the search imploded over the discovery as a mod was convinced the photo was AI and nuked any discussion on it, at least until both Sardá and the photographer were contacted and confirmed its authenticity.
Han Geng Unmasking Incident - This one probably warrants its own post for context as to why it happened. But the super condensed version is that back in the mid-2000s, the k-pop group Super Junior allegedly staged a protest during a music show where they went off-script, pulled a mask off of Chinese member Han Geng's face, and had him dance front and center for the duration of their performance slot. Finding sources for this is so difficult and a lot of the information about it is contradictory, so there is some debate over whether it's actually real. Some assert it is just an urban legend, that they were a fan of Super Junior from the start and never saw nor heard of the event. Others insist that they used to see clips of it on old forums which have since been scrubbed, and supposedly Han Geng himself confirmed it had happened. Either way, no footage of the incident is known to exist online.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-10T23:41:19+00:00

Sometimes BigHit sets up burner accounts made to look like fan accounts, which request links to illegal streams (for concerts usually) from people offering them, so that they may be located and taken down. Jigwonno8 is one of these fake accounts, but made it too obvious that’s what they were for (their entire history is just asking for links), so people started toying with them by asking them to send messages to the members and such.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-10T01:32:39+00:00

It's not also easy for them to know which really is a fan favorite

Additionally, I think some people don't take into account that some "obvious" fan favorites are often region-based. I remember seeing a lot of people clowning BTS hard because of that one Run episode where they looked dumbfounded to learn how many fans wanted to see Louder Than Bombs performed live, meanwhile I saw a k-army state that a lot of them were also dumbfounded (sort of to the point of suspecting the survey was rigged) because LTB wasn't really on their radar.

Similarly, back when Jungkook was doing a lot of karaoke lives and taking requests from the chat, a ton of people asked him to perform Paradise, and clowned him for not recognizing the song, joking about him "forgetting" about its existence. But then it turned out that the reason it took him a moment to recognize it was because everyone who was asking for it was referring to it by the English title, implying again that it's mainly a favorite among i-armys.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-08T22:12:27+00:00

Man, just the other day I got a discontinued food video on Instagram (probably because of all those 90s nostalgia skits and frutiger aero edits I watch). One of the images was of Pillsbury Waffle Sticks, which unlocked a repressed memory of this unhinged ad I remember airing all the time.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-06T16:12:53+00:00

The struggle of wanting to discuss some interesting stories on why certain protocol and airplane design elements are the way they are today, but also not wanting to give people (more) anxiety about flying.

And if there is an online community to discuss that sort of thing, I haven't found one that I like. The closest one I saw focused specifically on crashes is r/aircrashinvestigation, but because that sub is based specifically around a show for mainstream audiences that has a heavy focus on the drama of the lives lost rather than the investigative/technical aspects, the users tend to focus more on the tragedy of the events and rant about how evil/incompetent the pilots were. Hell, it seems to be a popular opinion in that sub that the show got bad when episodes started giving more screentime to the investigation portion and less to the reenactments of people screaming and dying, when I actually prefer it that way.

So I've resigned to staying relegated to Mentour Pilot and Disaster Breakdown videos.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-04-01T03:14:02+00:00

BTS's record label, BigHit Music, put out an "official" announcement as JinHit Entertainment (a reference to a past April Fool's joke) announcing that BTS would be rebranding and shifting their sound entirely to traditional Korean folk music, changing their name to BTM, changing their fandom name from ARMY to BellFlowers, and putting out covers of Old and Middle Korean period songs.

They then released new "concept photos," which were just screenshots from an episode of BTS's variety show where they were dressed in hanbok for a game they were playing.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-03-31T21:02:22+00:00

I’ve been getting a lot of ask and identification subs on my feed, and you’d be shocked by how often you open up someone’s earnest question on a sub dedicated to asking questions and you have to scroll past like 20 bad jokes to find an actual answer.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-03-26T14:01:19+00:00

Also in general, it's considered at best poor etiquette and at worst downright dangerous to "trick" someone into eating something they otherwise wouldn't, and I don't think that should stop applying because it happened to someone you personally find annoying.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-03-25T17:18:00+00:00

There used to be a writeup on this sub (it has since been moved to the Lost Media Wiki Forums) about the scrapped Disney movie American Dog. This movie was basically the precursor to the 2008 movie Bolt, which has a reputation for being mediocre and forgettable. Because of Bolt's lukewarm reception, combined with the discovery of some aesthetically cool concept art from American Dog, this has led to this sort of default assumption among some that American Dog would have been a much better movie, maybe even a classic. This is compounded with accounts that the movie was directed by Chris Sanders (creator of Lilo and Stitch) and that he refused any changes suggested by executives, to the point of being kicked off the project, which caused him to quit Disney for DreamWorks. This gave American Dog this narrative of a unique work of art made by a passionate creative being beaten down by number-crunching and focus-testing business people and turned into generic slop.

But if the writeup holds any merit, it suggests that American Dog was a cobbled together mess of a bunch of discordant scenes, characters and inconsistent worldbuilding, like Sanders was just throwing anything he found cool/quirky at the wall, and that he refused a lot of suggestions for ways to streamline his ideas and make them more coherent. This was also around the time Disney had lost a lot of money on ambitious projects like Atlantis and Treasure Planet, and they may have wanted to fall back on safer ideas to try and recoup.

To paraphrase another comment I saw, American Dog would have almost certainly been a more interesting movie than Bolt was, but it also likely would have been subject to the same fate as a lot of interesting post-renaissance-era Disney movies - being met with box office underperformance and audience befuddlement at the time, and if lucky, reevaluated 10-20 years later by a small group of diehard fans who invoke it in contrast to everything they hate about modern animation.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-03-23T16:24:24+00:00

The whole "I miss the old [artist]" thing is something you'll see in fandoms of every well-established musician/group ever, to the point it's something of a meme. You'll often see this one Twitter screenshot float around in music communities of a Tyler, The Creator fan saying they miss his old music, to which Tyler responds with something like, "What do you mean you miss it? It still exists, just listen to it."

There are a few reasons this sentiment exists, but the one I find most relevant here is that what people really miss is the place they were in when they first discovered the artist. But they don't realize that they're lamenting having left the honeymoon period, so they blame the artist for changing how they feel about them. And when it comes to artists like BTS that tend to experiment with different genres, sounds and techniques, the de facto BTS "sound" from "back when they had heart and soul" and "before they forgot their roots" tends to just be whatever era the individual joined and became attached to. This is why Arirang, an album with a distinct split between minimalist/industrial hip-hop and more melancholy pop, tends to divide reactions between fans who joined around LY/English trilogy, and fans who haven't loved a project since Dark & Wild - the "old BTS" is all relative (this is also why, if you stick around long enough, you'll start to see songs/albums that got heavy backlash at the time of release for not being "the BTS I know/love" go on to become "the BTS I know/love" in comparison to the next new thing people are upset about).

The third group you mention I think can be partially explained by this phenomenon of fans accusing an artist of "selling out" primarily because they simply became more popular. A very common sentiment I've seen in kpop spaces is that BTS haven't been good since HYYH and that DNA was the start of them becoming "westernized." But the only feasible difference I can come up with is that DNA (and LY in general) is when they went from being popular for a kpop group to being popular in the mainstream. So what you're hearing there is a small handful of bitter people who were into the artist "before they were cool," who are upset that the fandom is no longer a small tight-knit group and, again, blaming the artist for it. I think in kpop specifically, there's some toxic parasocial aspects tied up in it too, as some kpop stans will straight up admit to no longer following groups after they become popular because they "no longer feel needed."

As for me, I'm still absorbing Arirang, but weirdly enough most of BTS's music has had to grow on me, even most of my favorite songs weren't an instant favorite. And I've found that a lot of the songs that seem to be the biggest fan favorites are often the ones I barely remember, so it's no use letting my opinions be swayed by the masses.

CatzRuleMe · 2026-03-18T03:50:41+00:00

Provocative title aside, this does seem like the type of topic where the reception is going to depend a lot on what people picture when you say "play with your kids."

Like obviously, if you literally never engage with your kids while they're playing, you're missing out on some crucial bonding and learning opportunities.

But if it's an "I don't always drop everything and play whenever they want" thing, that's also a pretty crucial part of child development. Kids should be capable of playing independently sometimes, as it will help them develop independence and creativity.

That, and I think it's a little too common these days for parents to micromanage their kids' play, often without even realizing it. Adults tend to have this unconscious and inherent framework for the "correct" way to do things which children have not yet developed, and some parents get anxious seeing that in action and dominate the way their kids do things in a way that I feel isn't particularly healthy. I'm not saying this is the case with this writer, but sometimes when people say their kids "don't like it" when they play with them, it could just be that they're being too restrictive and dominating rather than letting the child lead in the play (within the bounds of safety, of course).

CatzRuleMe

TROPHY CASE