Hello! This week we’re talking about sports meme maximalism, wiki wars, and an extraordinarily supportive Chie.
The SCP Foundation's evil twin
An SCP content creator named The Volgun said “trans rights” earlier this week in an attempt to distance himself from the logo he designed for the RPC Authority, an online community with a history of bigotry. He did post the pride flag upside-down, but his heart was in the right place.
To make sense of why this apology was necessary, let’s start with the basics: The SCP Foundation is a fictional, government-run organization tasked with the containment of “anomalies,” which are paranormal objects or phenomena. The SCP Wiki collects thousands of entries about anomalies by different authors, each written in a bureaucratic and instructional style. It represents one of the internet’s largest collaborative storytelling projects, and its reach has only expanded in recent years as concepts like “the Backrooms” continue to drive online culture.
The SCP Wiki originated in 2007 on /x/, 4chan’s “paranormal” board, where posters had begun writing creepypastas underneath eerie photos posted by other users. Eventually, the project moved to a Wikidot site operated under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license, giving visitors the ability to appropriate its works and author their own SCP fiction. As a result, ownership over the SCP “canon” has been a source of contention for years as wiki moderators struggle against its sprawling nature and ever-growing list of contributors. Meanwhile, the SCP Wiki has inspired a number of widely successful iterations on its ideas, including 2012’s SCP - Containment Breach and 2019’s Control.
The suspiciously similar-sounding RPC Authority, on the other hand, emerged from a culture war that broke out across the SCP community in 2018. As one Redditor tells it, some users were upset that the wiki’s moderators changed the site logo in honor of Pride Month; some critics thought it was incongruent with the site’s aesthetic, while others’ grievances skewed more ideological. This dovetailed with a controversy surrounding “SCP-2721,” an entry about actualizing trans womanhood by finding meaning and community through the internet. Critics wrote it off as a “self-insert” post that broke the wiki’s fourth wall by making too many references to Tumblr and Homestuck. [ed. note from Pao: I think it’s a genuinely moving piece of trans fiction, especially for something written in 2016 and in this format. I recommend it.]
A faction of these disgruntled users founded the RPC Authority, an SCP knockoff, with the intent to maintain a stronger grip on its canon and discourage contributors from introducing “politics” into its lore. Though the RPC site remains active, most SCP fans associate them with an anti-”woke” leadership — forcing SPC creators like The Volgun to publicly denounce them. It was inevitable that the SCP Wiki’s 4chan background would clash with the advent of Tumblr culture, but it’s reassuring that the project’s most vocal fans are uniting against bigotry.
Genshin Impact embraces UGC
World-conquering gacha game Genshin Impact announced they’re working on a UGC (user-generated content) Gameplay mode, which is sort of like announcing “the Roblox update” for a giant five-year-old RPG that already has a lot of odd nooks and crannies. They’ve played around with stuff like this in the past, notably in a build-your-own-home mode that allowed players to construct Only Up-style parkour courses.
Big gacha games already feel like the MMOs of the 2020s, but Genshin in particular is locked into a costly yearly expansion cycle of one new area to explore (along with attendant characters, quests, mechanics, etc.) While they tide players over for the rest of the year with various events and time-limited reruns of different characters, it’s easy to see why they’d be happy to enlist users to churn out new distractions. Unlike Roblox or Fortnite’s UGC offerings, there’s been no mention of revenue sharing.
Guys that had to go
@enjoyball_ Dirk was different Top 5 big all time#Dirk #nba #hoops #basketball #viral
♬ original sound - damion
via @enjoyball_
TikTokers had a field day this month making clips like “Prime Dirk Nowitzki had to go,” where you soundtrack a highlight reel for a dominant athlete of the past with an excess of Vine booms, gunshots, Ganondorf music, cartoon boing noises, Half-Life sounds, audio of Sonic the Hedgehog losing his rings, add shocked and crying faces, etc. This was done with varying degrees of irony for athletes like Mike Tyson, Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham, etc. The thing is that you can’t really ruin these clips: older generations of sports fans are happy to watch them again regardless of what you do to the soundtrack. Most of the comments (“Beat LeBron with the flu,” “Bloodiest ring EVER”) could appear on any standard ESPN-style compilation.
EX delayed due to Silksong
The release date for the insectoid Metroidvania Hollow Knight: Silksong has been set for September 4, causing many other scheduled releases (Baby Steps, CloverPit) to scurry out of the way of “the GTA of indie games,” delaying themselves for weeks or months.
We at EX will also be delaying the send of our September 6 newsletter due to the release of Silksong. It would not be fair to the writing we were planning to start doing next week to expect its conception in that environment.
There are of course very good reasons to not release a game (or newsletter) in a week when every streamer will be playing something else and talking only about bugs. But when reading the many articles about the full list of things postponed due to Silksong, it’s hard not to notice that this delaying spree has also been a big marketing event for games you hadn’t heard of before. Some of them were games in Early Access that were just moving their 1.0 update; others were delayed for a suspiciously long time, like just “2026.” But who’s to say that the threat of Silksong will have abated by then?
Chum Box
Games
A heartwarming new meme format sees Persona 4’s Chie appearing in random games to cheer on the protagonist [link]. It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Chie on our feeds, perhaps because everyone replaced her with Drake Bell from Drake & Josh [link]
A recent entry in the undying genre of “NPC impersonation” TikToks imagines a real-life score screen [link]
Fans have translated the PS2 Cowboy Bebop game [link]
Cosplaying as a League of Legends ult [link]
Northernlion Nice Nature edit [link]
The internet
Very beautiful AI home here, but we have some questions about the second-floor kitchen [link]
An ancient echo of the 2020 “man has fallen into the river in Lego City” memes [link]
Someone dug up the Something Awful post that inspired dril's infamous "help me budget this. my family is dying" Tweet [link, dril Tweet here]
Do you believe in Bigger Binks? [link]
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