Craziness Encouraged
An Unofficial History of the NationStates World Cup
Craziness Encouraged's original dust jacket, 2093
The idea was to research, collate and generally make sense of the many years of history that had gone into the world's most popular and long-running sports competition, both from an in-character and an out-of-character perspective. After being created mostly on Goobergunchia's original NSwiki before it was lost, the idea was cobbled back together as a thread in 2014 with some wildly irregular updates.
Some forty editions of the Cup and more than a decade of real time since 'the modern era' began, however, fewer and fewer nations remember the nations and their stories from times gone by, and although access to the archives has been brilliantly maintained by the admins of The History of Modern NSSports, there were six whole years of prior roleplaying that is now only available as HTML files and random stories from long-time players. Inspired by Audioslavia's wonderful The Idiot Project, Starblaydia set out to remake Craziness Encouraged as a mostly-secret HD-quality video series in late 2019 and early 2020; something that would stand the test of time far better than a series of forum posts.
Craziness Encouraged takes its name from the tagline of the Starblaydia & Druida bid to co-host World Cup 20, which itself took the term from a post from when the World Cup was even younger. It represents the creativity that we promote in our NSWC roleplaying, whether to make stories that are realistic, outlandish, unique or just downright crazy.
The trailer debuted for the NS Sport Discord watchalong on 20th December 2020, promoted as a "cheeky wee trailer" after the closing credits of The Idiot Project Christmas Special: The Corral of the Bells. The first episode, The Rambling Prologue was advertised and premiered via the same method on 10th January, 2021. Episodes will be released in this thread, and any appropriate tournament RP thread Starblaydia is involved in at the time, a short time after making their Discord watchalong premiere.
The series is made using Adobe Creative Suite (Adobe Audition, Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Media Encoder) and a number of royalty-free stock asset sites including Motionarry, Pexels and Videvo for audio & visual content, as well as using information from the various wikipedias, history threads, internet archive and archived World Cup threads from previous forum iterations.
List of Episodes:
- S01E00: Trailer (46s)
- S01E01: The Rambling Prologue (6m 33s)
- S01E02: Those Halycon Days (11m 18s)
