The Real Hobby Was (Almost) Murdered
We Are Getting More And More Receipts Of Malice Aforethought
MegaBusterPhoenix on Twitter made this set of observations:
As things progress in the regeneration of the hobby what we’re finding is that we got sold out decades ago and only now as those responsible are dying out and those that took their place are proving incompetent to keep the grift going is this escaping containment.
The strident presentation may put some off, but BDubs is correct: we were sold products that did not fulfill the promises presented, and now that the history of the hobby has broken containment we see that this was a deliberate decision to engage in a practice of lobotomization of the hobby in pursuit of—say it with me now—the General Audience.
That meant destroying the Clubhouse. The Clubhouse makes Consumerism useless, which is what those in the commercial side wanted—still want—because that made it viable as a business endeavor, never considering that maybe it shouldn’t be at all.
Now that the conditions that permitted this to happen are gone, so must go the fake hobby that aped the real thing like a cargo cult. That has been happening, coming from multiple angles: Diamond’s collapse as a retail distributor, the tariffs on foreign goods going into the primary (US) market, the general economic malaise reducing the discretionary spending of the population, and the disgust and rejection of Death Cult dogma in products on offer.
The value of the Clubhouse is now following every other thing about the hobby that got rescued from the Memory Hole. As with the real games in the hobby, engaging in the real institution that roots the hobby is proving to be the missing structure around which all of these rules that naysayers disdain find their grounding; you need all that stuff when you’re in a social group bigger that you and the boys playing at home around the kitchen table.
We are reversing decades of damage at a rate that boggles outsiders, with a cohort of men that is closer to a Bronze Age warband scavenging as they go than a mass movement with government funding, and I can only call this a miracle delivered with a nudge here and there from preternatural parties. Get ready for victory, friends.
