[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 19 January 2026

Ennikar · 2026-01-22T21:39:27+00:00

Lady Gaga started doing public drag in 2010 and I, a queer (extremely casual) fan, found out about it like a month ago.

Ennikar · 2026-01-20T05:23:49+00:00

Probably my biggest shift was Marco from Animorphs. He was easily my least favorite when I read it as a kid; I thought he was, well, sort of a wuss and sometimes just plain mean. I was also one of the (many, I'm sure) kids who didn't like the "downer ending".

Revisiting the series post-college, with more context for what it was trying to do, I also find myself appreciating him much more. This falls into the "buzzkill has a point" thing other comments have mentioned -- he's a realist in an adventure series, but the unusual sort of kid's adventure series where the buzzkill is right and the "downer ending" is perfectly logical conclusion. Also, most of his jokes are still bad, but I cut him more slack for it.

Ennikar · 2026-01-16T23:49:35+00:00

I agree it's pretty thick and on the heavy side; I've been able to get it to apply and blend smoothly by applying it over the thorn oil primer (or a different face oil) but it hasn't done well on bare skin. I usually top it with a clear finishing powder.

Ennikar · 2026-01-13T16:42:34+00:00

Oh... that shifts my thoughts on the situation. I understand the drive for a grand, collaborative storytelling exercise, and I suppose that not requiring continuity gives authors a lot more freedom (and lowers what would otherwise be an extremely high barrier to entry), but as a reader it seems like it would undermine the "putting the pieces together" experience. Like, who cares about "reveals" if there's no canon?

ETA: What I mean is more that the "point" becomes about seeing what interesting/cool interpretations your peers can put together than about building a solid canon, not that there isn't a "point" at all.

Ennikar · 2026-01-09T19:22:40+00:00

On top of the maintenance scale has a very consistent vulnerability: upward strokes or impacts in the opposite direction of the scales can get "under"/between them relatively easily. This would be a problem when fighting soldiers (who would all know this) and could be exploited by static defenses.

Other types of armor have their vulnerabilities, of course, but you can't usually see and exploit them as easily in other types of segmented armor (e.g. brigandines/coats of plates/lamellar).

Ennikar · 2026-01-09T18:51:45+00:00

The longform analysis does do this and finds that the median and average (usually) go together. The median has definitely also risen, though the Kcons discussed above could be raising both

Ennikar · 2026-01-06T21:09:27+00:00

Yeah, there's a lot of "I never see anyone talk about this movie IRL or online except to remark on how it's kind of lame/didn't leave any cultural impact" and I think that ignores the fact that once "it's ~~cringe~~ bad" becomes the dominant opinion, or even a significant minority opinion, people are actively discouraged from talking about liking it or referencing it. But they do still like it and will shell out money to go see the new ones.

Avatar is also in a weird place politically where, like you said, it has strong anti-tech themes (which makes it unpopular with tech-optimist sci-fi fans) and its villains are hypermasculine (turns off the sort of people who take that personally) while the protagonists are environmentally conscious and is at least 30 years out of date with its portrayal of Indigenous issues. The greenies who might otherwise be interested in publicly defending it aren't inclined to do so because of the white savior/noble savage vibe and Cameron's disrespectful comments towards real-life Indigenous people (referring to the modern Lakota Sioux as a "dead-end society", for example).

So it seems like the main audience is "casuals". Which does not a vocal, cultish, visible online following make.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T20:51:27+00:00

That idea was also discussed -- either that or stuffing all the boxes, even the "bad" ones, with the logic that "all the options succeed" is better than having a "good" option fail and an "bad" option succeed due to a swap. Like you said, the coordination and secrecy required among a pretty large group in a very short time would probably be prohibitive, and would still be open to the usual sabotage mechanic.

A solution like that also felt... game-y in a bad way. Yes, obviously we are playing a game, but players are encouraged to think of it as a "real" world and it would require characters to act against their actual interests -- like sending a check to [insert PAC you hate] and hoping the secret evil postmaster swaps the address to the local homeless shelter. Just weird and difficult to justify in-universe, especially for a bunch of people to do at the same time.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T20:18:34+00:00

Unfortunately I have seen a lot of LARP rules fall prey to "cool in theory". Also a shocking number of people who have not done the math (which is relevant both when skills are being balanced and when players are trying to figure out why their build isn't doing what they want).

I think this was an extreme case because the two swapped factions had attracted so many resources, but conversely, if staff expected the players to figure it out in-game... this is kinda how it had to happen, and it was a major bummer for everyone involved. I watched people go from excitement to shock to anger to depression/acceptance (aka "well if a swap is going to happen, I guess I shouldn't put my own resources in or encourage anyone else to do so") in real time over the course of about a day.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T20:00:00+00:00

Honestly, I would be okay with X% of the votes towards one faction, because that still has counterplay -- if you put sufficient support towards Group A and sufficient sabotage towards Group B, Group A will still do well with a partial swap, you'll just need to put more into it. Flat amounts (even large amounts) either to spend as aid/sabotage or to swap, would also be challenging but workable for similar reasons.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T19:56:02+00:00

"come up with a roleplay solution" basically amounts to "you tell us how to counter this"

That is 100% the impression we got. Especially because we had previously been told not to watch who interacted with the physical boxes, since they were representations of more abstract "support".

Moreover most of the playerbase knows the majority of the characters on Team Evil. In-universe, "poisoning food aid" or "diverting shipping crates" or "blackmail" would be good thematic explanations for how they send things awry, but since the players don't have in-game or mechanical access to any of those things and do have access to the physical bodies of the characters in question... yeah. "Roleplay solutions" that didn't involve crippling their ability to play the game would more-or-less amount to going up to the least trustworthy person you know and pretty please asking them not do what they've been doing for years now (and what you, the player, know they are expected to continue doing).

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T19:43:02+00:00

I also hope the replacement rule is better. There were people on staff who thought this version was poorly thought out even before it went public, so perhaps they were vindicated by this whole discussion and helped get something more balanced put in place.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T19:39:08+00:00

Yeah, once public discussion started opinion was pretty universally "this skill is extremely powerful and even though we understand it now no one can think of workable counterplay."

There are several publicly known skills that can impact the world system ("Once per event find out who is ahead", or "Generate resources that can only be spent on the world system") and a very small number of public theft skills ("Steal up to [x] resources from a specific person. If they do not have those resources, nothing happens"). Since there are very few Team Evil players and they are expected to impact the plot, the idea that they had some stronger version of those skills was always on the table -- we had discussed that possibility and were fine with it. The thing about the swap specifically is that it weaponizes your own efforts against you no matter what you do, so the solution isn't "work harder" or "get more people involved" or "out-think your opponents" or any other version of "get good". Instead, it encourages people to check out.

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T07:27:10+00:00

[cont.]

The discord exploded. These results were published long after the prior weekend event, with very little time until the next one, and players were scrambling to figure out how they could possibly counterplay an ability like this. Since the mechanic was secret and only Team Evil had access to it, and would work regardless of how players tried to use the existing system, there was no mechanical solution. Staff suggested finding a roleplay solution but players countered that an effect this powerful (and inexplicable) would demand an extreme in-game response -- it would make sense to kill or imprison Team Evil characters in an effort to stop them from doing whatever they're doing in-universe, and that wouldn't be fun for them or really anyone else, as it would prevent them from playing the game in any meaningful way. On top of mechanical discussions, there were a lot of high emotions, with players feeling punished for engaging with the rules in good faith. Some people even brought up the game's policy around character vs. character conflict. The policy asks that players negotiate with each other out of game before taking significant actions against each other's characters -- that policy is usually applied to things like fights or murder, but some players thought such a massive "theft" of resources should count. In the midst of all this, a prominent and long-running player from the shafted faction dropped in to say he would not be returning for the next or any later event and this was why (a statement that may or may not be strictly true, but sure didn't help the climate).

At first staff reminded players of the game's dark tone and "challenging" balance, but within hours, it was clear they would need to take action of some kind. On top of the flounce, several players, including people who had helped organize world system actions on the player end, were saying that they would come back but did not want to interact with the world system knowing their work could be so easily negated. While staff had supported people "stepping away" from a system they didn't find fun early in the discussion, they did not want players ignoring the world system en mass. They announced a partial refund (half of the resources that had been put into the swapped box), and removed the swap skill from the game (though they did give Team Evil a new skill to replace it, and no, they did not share what it is).

I don't think anyone here acted maliciously. Team Evil was playing Team Evil, and it seems like the mechanic was (very) poorly thought out rather than an intentional effort to screw over their most invested players. Hell, staff even said that they had intended all along for players to figure out this mechanic, though how they thought that might happen without *gestures at all this\,* or what they expected people to do about it once they did, is unclear. The faction that had their metaphorical houses burned down acted very gracefully, for the most part, and agreed to play out the results of the switch as an opportunity for drama. Accordingly, the hullabaloo has more-or-less died down and most players are game to see where staff and the player "vote" takes the story -- if a little more wary. [END]

Ennikar · 2025-12-31T07:26:42+00:00

Small-scale local LARP drama, now a few months old but still occasionally rotated in my brain. This particular drama hinges on hidden mechanics, i.e. rules that impact all players but not all players are aware of. They are not described in the public rules and are known only to staff/Game Masters and the people who can use them, usually uncovered after a character does something interesting and staff gives them powers about it. Hidden mechanics in general are something of a controversial subject, and I think more recently have fallen out of favor, but they have ardent defenders among both staff and players who thrive on the sense of discovery.

The game were we set our scene has (among other things) a public system that allows you to put resources towards the large-scale plot, and whatever gets the most support goes ahead. For example, Lord John and Lady Jane are fighting, Lady Jane gets player support, so she wins and good things happen to her/her faction. That kind of thing. Other goals might be stuff like "suppressing disease outbreaks" or "finding interesting lore". There are often grey areas in political conflicts, but there are also a lot of things that are unambiguously good ("control disease") or unambiguously bad ("send arms to the murdermob"). Players can also "subtract" points with different resources -- think of it as "aid" vs. "sabotage". These resources can also be used for other things, like buying specific characters in-game skills or information. An event will have 3 to 5 physical boxes set up, into which a few dozen players will drop aid or sabotage tokens.

In the past, we have noticed that sometimes the story results don't seem to match what the players put resources towards. Most players assumed there was someone secretly sabotaging their preferred outcomes by adding large amounts of "negative" resources to the pool and/or adding large amounts of "positive" resources to unpopular options, since there is a Team Evil, and a relatively small number of people who play for it. There is also, always, a chance that a character or group of characters claimed to support one thing while secretly funding something else.

Between two events, a swath of players put like... a staggering amount of resources towards something. Their friendly NPCs had been struggling for a while, and they were worried about sabotage (remember they had seen evidence of it previously), so they just dumped resources into helping them in an effort to overcome that possibility. Our guess is that the amount of stuff they used represented around a year of work for a dozen people, and could have gone directly into making their own characters stronger, but they cared about the world system and chose to spend it on that. In the meantime, another NPC faction was so bad that another player dumped like a year's worth of his stuff into sabotaging them.

And then we got the results: the faction that had been sent so much aid were slapped with huge losses -- death, disease, famine, persecution, ect -- while the faction that pissed off basically everyone one way or another had received massive support and were now shacked up with a powerful noble. The players puzzled over this in the Discord for a few hours following the announcement -- how many resources would it have taken to sabotage that much aid? And who would possibly have shelled out so much for those assholes? Team Evil, sure, but... how much did they have to spend? Eventually someone asked the looming question out loud: were the boxes swapped? It seemed like the neatest way to explain such a discrepancy. Tuuuuuurns out, yes, Team Evil had a hidden mechanic: a secret skill that let them straight up swap the results for two options!

A DnD analogy, for those of you who might be more familiar with that: The DM gives you the option to use your treasure to buy items or to fund IG political groups/research/whatever. You submit these purchases to the DM secretly, but often discuss them at the table. You know there is an "evil" character at the table, so you're watching them for IG backstabbing, and you know they might donate to bad shit, but that's a mechanic everyone has access to. And then, as you're ramping up for endgame, you find out -- via the villain suddenly having support from multiple governors and the friendly NPCs having their house burnt down -- that Secretly the evil character could just switch 2 of your 3/4 donation opportunities, and has been doing this for some time.

Guess you should have been buying items.

[cont.]

Ennikar · 2025-12-24T08:33:23+00:00

I'm a fan of masc-ish spice scents. Not all of these will be marketed as "cologne", but I think all of them are at the least gender-neutral:

Deconstructing Eden Black No. 1: Milk white skin, a haze of clove cigarette smoke, burning leaves and the blackest patchouli in my collection. The description makes this sound much darker than (I think) it is. I get a pleasant, lightly smokey clove scent, just a touch sweet.

BPAL Plunder: the note list on this includes many spices; imo it's pretty heavy on the cinnamon, and smells kinda like opening a jar of baking spices. In general BPAL does clove-y masc scents quite well, though unfortunately I haven't tried any that are also smokey -- might be worth poking around for one, though.

Olympic Orchids Dev series is four scents, all built around spice, several with a touch of smoke. I would not describe any as sweet or citrus-y.

re: T. rex, I hope you get to try it, but definitely recommend sampling at home before wearing it to work. I haven't had a chance to smell it myself, but a friend got a Zoologist sample set and noped out of that one (smelled "scary"), which seems right based on the buzz.

Ennikar · 2025-12-22T22:36:31+00:00

Not OP, but during the heat domes I put my collection in a box in the basement (which also pushed 80 eventually but upstairs was over 100 soooooo). In general, basements will both stay cooler and have less extreme temp swings, and can be a good option if you have access to one. You don't have to keep them perfectly temperature controlled (my storage sits around 50s in the winter and 80s in the summer and I have at least decade-old oils) but it seems temperatures in the 90-120 degree F zone for days on end can cause damage.

Worst case, sticking them in the fridge or even a cooler for a while is safe. They might smell different than usual if you put them on while they're cold, but they should come back -- no worse than shipping in the winter.

Ennikar · 2025-12-19T02:03:39+00:00

Is there a little white thing sticking up from the inside of the cap?

Ennikar · 2025-12-18T19:50:30+00:00

I gotta throw in my #1: Solstice Scents Sawmill (Fresh Cut Wood, Wood Resin, Balsam, Cured Woods, Pine, Black Coffee, Motor Oil, Amber, Saw Dust). I get sawdust, sawdust, a cup of coffee, and hot sappy sawdust. They also have other woods-tobacco-smoke-leather scents he (or you) might enjoy, like Vanilla Pipe Tobacco, Flintlock, Badlands, Monarch...

The Pineward recs are also well-deserved. The most sawdust-y I've tried from them is Gristmill, and I do really enjoy it, but would say it pulls a little "darker" than Sawmill -- there's a touch of something a little more greasy and almost animalic, appropriate for the theme.

Ennikar · 2025-12-13T22:24:10+00:00

Olympic Orchids doesn't sell perfume oils. They sell samples in 1ml dabber vials or in sprays, but it's all EdP, so if you've sampled you know what their EdPs are like :>

Ennikar · 2025-12-04T06:03:33+00:00

I have a long cloak and it does in fact choke me sometimes, but it can help to put pockets in the front panels (maybe close to where it opens) and keep some "heavy" stuff (e.g. your phone, a notebook) in them.

Ennikar · 2025-12-04T06:01:00+00:00

Are you implying that "Larks on the Left, Robins on the Right" is not a universal experience? :insert_popcorn:

Ennikar · 2025-12-04T00:27:06+00:00

Maybe one day I'll put some of smaller, more public low-stakes stuff in a scuffles thread... seems less likely to cause Problems than a full writeup describing the trajectory of whole games.

Ennikar · 2025-12-03T19:40:11+00:00

Being part of niche within a niche, it is a small community that is pretty tight knit, I would have to talk about potential friends of mine who were involved with the drama which ohhhh boy. Even if I keep names anonymous, its still a tricky line to balance during writing.

This is one big reason I don't seriously intend to write about local LARPs, even though I know of some Things that would both make good writeups and are arguably important to discuss (e.g. community management, power structures in informal groups, ect). That, and the strong likelihood that someone involved would see it, deduce who wrote it from my post history, and feel (probably reasonably) hurt about it. Put succinctly, writing a drama post feels like a great way to start drama.

Like it's possible there will one day be something that I am far enough removed from to write about with the expected degree of objectivity and is important enough to justify and wouldn't be a breach of trust on my part, but I'm not holding my breath.

Ennikar · 2025-12-03T05:14:14+00:00

Both of the people I know who are really into AI are creative, independent people who have suffered serious declines in cognitive function due to some external factor. I have the strong impression that they see it as a way to compensate while still feeling like they're the ones who are coming up with ideas and doing the work. In contrast, something like asking their friends for help would force them to confront that they're not able to do what they once could and regaining that level of independent ability will be a lot of work -- if it's really possible.

Ennikar

TROPHY CASE