I was right.I have considered reviving this brand for quite some time. It has been known that Curious Observations is me (Roavin) for nearly 2 years now; and given Curious Observations’ controversial nature and the underlying principle of combining hard data with biased analysis, I thought it would be a perfect platform for ... well ... curious observations. I just never had a topic where I simultaneously had the drive for it and also the time to do it before TRT/NST/whoever got to it.
Well, such a topic now arose, and while it's admittedly self-serving, I still think it's interesting and fits perfectly under this label. The summary: I was absolutely right with my first Curious Observations article, and we now have the receipts for it.
Let's set the scene. It's 2017. Badger was Delegate of TWP. Nobody knew about Adytus being Feux or Wrektopia being AMOM. I was still First Warden of TGW. TSP was not Defender, and it was Aleisyr and Pergamon running NPO. Lazarus, at the time, was a defender region and operated under the Celestial Union government, a fresh successor of the HRL government that was formed in the aftermath of the NLO coup. Funkadelia, long-time defender and native of Lazarus, was its Delegate. But tensions were brewing within Lazarus - the Celestial Union was an attempt at doing interesting things to drive activity, but it wasn't working and caused more problems than it tried to solve. Furthermore, Funkadelia had recently defected from defenderdom to join LWU, and Lamb Stone followed him to Lazarus. It didn't take long for rifts to form which looked to be (and in some cases were) raider vs defender fights. As reconfirmation votes for Guardians were coming, plus with Delegate elections looming, the situation became more and more tense between the factions.
It slowly became apparent to those on the anti-Funk side that a whole bunch of people were coming in, mostly raider leaning. An underground started forming (later known as "La Resistance"). On July 12, the tally of LWU people in Lazarus reached 7, and at that point I began to ponder. Here's an excerpt from an exchange I had with my good friend Nakari that day:
Roavin: [I had] the greater realization that it's not unreasonable to think that the recent happenings in TWP and Laz are part of a bigger picture.
Nakari: people trying to shake things up so that theyll be the ones who float to the top?
Roavin: Pretty much.
Roavin: Rahl family working towards owning a few GCRs.
On July 15, I figured it would be worth seeing if the subjective feeling of the anti-Funk crowd was valid or just reinforcement bias. Nakari helped me by gathering data on recent citizenship applications, and I put them into a spreadsheet for tabulation and analysis. The results were telling - I tried really hard, but even considering things like migration of friends, I could not conceive of a realistic scenario that explained the results in any fashion other than deliberate voter importation. But I couldn't do anything about it - I was still First Warden of TGW, and also now Prime Minister of TSP (a treaty ally of Lazarus). Anything I did would reflect badly on them and add more fuel to the fire.
So, I decided to do it anonymously. On July 17, I wrote
this article, under an alias (this one, precisely). It showed the data that was gathered, the reasonable conclusion to be drawn from it, and I framed it as fairly as I could make it, by being forward about the anti-Funk importation that happened in response, as well as not pointing the finger at any particular region or organization (the only mentions of LWU and Rahl were in the descriptions of the ostensibly imported voters).
While the article did succeed in validating the subjective feelings, it wasn't effectively used to portray the issue, and in the ensuing civil war, the resistance lost the PR fight and ultimately the region. Most regions stayed out of it entirely; some were unsure which side was right (or thought neither was); others saw that the importation was obvious but were put off by the incompetence of the resistance. Meanwhile, Curious Observations became part revered and part reviled, and the identity search was on, on all sides of the issue (pro-Funk, anti-Funk, neutral). The resistance got extorted to reveal an identity they didn't know, and I had to face a lot of awkward DMs about people trying to pin it on me or getting me to help find out who it was. I covered my tracks well, however - the people that knew were people I trusted to keep it secret, I had somebody else admit WA on the nation for a time, and I even held fake Discord conversations between Curious Observations and Roavin from which I lifted screenshots.
A year and a half later I revealed myself, as somebody who had inadvertently found out held a very severe grudge on me and was about to reveal it (and I felt it was better to get ahead of the story). The fallout by then was not too bad; it did end up costing me a job on the new Lazarus Court (during Imki's reign, after it was freed from the shenanigans of Funk and the gang), but otherwise it was okay-ish. I started to think that maybe I should have handled it differently afterall (though I did not know how). For the most part, the topic became dull to most people, and a meme to some. The only reason the topic even remained in the heads of people was the constant arguments I would have on the NSGP Discord server with Evil Wolf about the topic, where I would claim that the data in the article is correct and he would claim that it proves nothing.
Fast forward to ... 8 days ago. Out of the blue, TEP inadvertently gave me a present worthy of being birthday and Christmas combined for a decade. In
this request for information, logs surfaced that proved pretty much all of my assertions.
First, it was proven that voters were being imported.
Second, it was proven that they were directed on how to vote.
And last but not least ... remember what I said about Rahl to Nakari?
Not only was the article right, but my further conjecture that I didn't put into the article was right as well. Voters were deliberately imported to Lazarus, with the knowledge of Funk and the gang, directed to vote accordingly, and it was orchestrated with the cooperation of, and the benefit of, the Rahl family. Quod Erad Demonstrandum, Evil Wolf.
"But Roavin," I hear you say, "why does this matter in 2020? This happened in 2017!"
Well, there are a few things.
First, if there was still anybody that wants to claim that this is a dumb "Rahlspiracy", I think after the Fedele coup last year and this new information, we can finally confirm that us "Rahlspiracists" were, frankly, correct. And if I may make a further conjecture here: There are a lot of things we don't even know about, and we probably won't know about all of it either, particularly given the nature of how Rahl worked. But honestly this shouldn't be a surprise - a family that considers itself the "true NS aristocracy" (as per their own roster document), that discusses whether they are rather a "GCR mafia" or the "templars", and has now provably engaged in these sorts of shenanigans twice already is surely bound to have a few more skeletons in its closet, even if we won't ever get to see them. (That being said, if anybody has some sauce on Drall's ventures in TSP, I'd be happy to have it)
Second, this does affect the state of things to this day. Rahl wanted to get Laz closer to TWP and Osiris (both ostensibly Rahl strongholds at the time). The first two regions that Lazarus allied itself with after Imki took over from Funk and the gang were those very two regions. However, Lazarus remains in a fruitless war against the region that at the time was trying to fight against that very Rahl-directed votestacking (even if the approach was highly problematic and they misidentified the threat as LWU rather than Rahl).
Third, ... well, honestly, after all the crap I've gotten both directly and indirectly for Curious Observations, as well as for the Rahlspiracy, it feels very nice to be vindicated.
I certainly have more to say on how these revelations contextualize the current political landscape of GP, but I'll leave that for another time. For now, I will take my leave, basking in the knowledge that finally, three years later, I can claim without reservation that I was right.
Ike, you fucking legend
Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2020 2:55 pm
