December 23rd, 2025 — Lynnwood, WA, USA
it's another tuesday
I'm on our L-shaped couch in the living room, working from home. The time is around 11:45am. Blank is at their desk in the bedroom tooling together one of their new mechanics for HewDraw Remix. All is right with the world.
For me, most folks at work were on vacation, our morning meeting having only consisted of our team manager, who was filling the role of scrum leader, along with myself and only one other present.
The limited workforce combined with having to work until the early evening yesterday due to another team's production deployment having issues (and them having no one else to go to), I had enough brownie points to start wrapping up for the day.
The night before, I had been playing hot in Rivals of Aether II. Despite having only gotten three hours of sleep the night before, I wanted to see if I was still playing hot (I was not), as well as keep the streak going (I did not). I brought my work laptop over to my desk and set it off to the side in case anyone needed to message me for the next few hours, while virtually considering myself to be clocked out.
off-the-clock
I queued into Ranked, allowing myself to get more familiar with the part of me that already understood sleep deprivation affects my ability to function significantly, and that I would not play to my capabilities due to that. I did concede, but only after seeing a notification in the Riichi of Aether (elkcord) Discord server asking if @SESHERZ wanted to get in a room and run some rounds of Riichi Mahjong (hosted on Mahjong Soul)
The folks I was playing with are considered to be far better tile slingers than myself, but I don't mind. It's preferable doing something with others who're connected to me in some fashion, at least when set against the potential emotional disparity that The Ranked Grind tends to induce.
Skill discrepancy or no, I still got some pretty fun hands with the highlight of them being this pretty wide wait after calling Riichi which ended up resolving as the best of the options, netting me a pure straight.
After the games, I accepted an invite to the Discord server, described to me as its “whole thing is being the autism with mahjong”, that was stationing the other half of the players as to introduce myself.
The folks were friendly, a handful of VC vibers were there as well playing Terraria. I brought up to one of the folks in VC who was streaming Mahjong Soul about where I was with the game, wondering about where to go for understanding it beyond just the mechanics and goals, and was provided a link that now sits in my bookmarks.
The goal of presenting this all as such is to illustrate how the fact that I had played Rivals of Aether II some hours prior had long left my L3 cache.
Switching contexts and seeing several pings in the WA rivals community Discord, my expectation was that the majority of them are going to be attributed to @FURRY mentions, so of course I didn’t think anything in particular would be going on inabouts of the server, at least nothing aside from the usual debauchery and licentiousness...
it was not the usual debauchery and licentiousness
"rei wolf" mentioned several times in conversation, Tohru and pawstep's ethically ambiguous, fraud-adjacent plans for their rei wolf plushie line, the apparent birth of a copypasta, the immediate evolution of said copypasta for "The Spummler" (Tortuga), a social-media-platform-style readout Theta put together for BlueSky, SteeveReen's acquisition of ten (10) fire reacts for saying rei wolf goes to his locals while implicating my being of a bot— what the hell is going on!?
So much information, so much about me, in ways that don't make sense. I couldn't remember doing anything that was supposed to get a reaction from anyone, at least not recently. I have pulled stunts before... is this karma. What did I do that is coming back to bite me. What the hell happened and how is it possible that there is anything that can provide cohesion in— a notice indicating a newly inaugurated pinned post cuts through the noise of my scroll wheel searching for meaning in it all.
The Discord client's view swept the chat down, culminating the previous 30 seconds in (what felt like to me) an appropriate manner to reveal a screenshot of a now-deleted Reddit post:
r/RivalsOfAether • 11h agoJust played against a bot (actual one) 3 times in a row in rankedDiscussionThey where 1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf, would do weird things like only Floorhug uptilt till 20%, prioritize Galvan drills to auto, perfect up b reverse cancel everytime on Galvan platform. And if you where both at high percents and you ran away, you could just wait for them to run at you and F-smash for the win. They also always teched, unless it was a weird tech timing (hard to explain). It was annoying to deal with since their execution and spam probably came out on first actionable frame lol. Anybody else run into bots online? I hope we don't start seeing to many of these.
Oh. My. Fucking. God. I hadn't quite processed what I read at first, but a second read-over confirmed it, oh yeah. Oh fuck yes this is what I fucking live for. Holy shit.
I was in awe, awe of the paws-on-head/jaws-agape variety. I teleported to our room where Blank was working on HDR and asked if they had "seen the fucking rivals discord". They laughed and told me they were surprised I was just now seeing it. I think I repeated "I can't believe this" several times before following with "I was just fucking playing ranked dude" and a stunned laugh.
I had no idea what to say or do. There isn't anything I should say or do in response to this discovery, to be fair, but I had no idea how to approach it. It wasn't long however before the question hit me: "Who was this?"
investigation
Back in the Discord, I had posted an OBS recording of a Galvin that may have been the poster, but looking back on it later, I realized I had posted a video taken from the night before, not day of. I actually hadn't made any OBS recordings that day, but my lack of sleep was not helping facilitate that realization.
Beginning to accept the information just might be lost to time, I remembered (with a verbal "duh") that Rivals II has an auto-replay system. Great, just cross-check the Reddit post with the time/three sets/around 12:30pm...
Considering I only played for ~45 minutes, it was not very hard to find.
analysis
I queued our replays up to watch them with this new perspective. Nearly every interaction (how I approached, how they approached, my up-tilts, their reactions) was fantastic to experience under this new light.
Picturing myself from my understanding of their perspective, what their thought processes could have been... how it's okay if we're both at high% because you can just run away and wait for me to run at you and F-smash me for the win, it was too much; I was having so much fun.
As for now, I've taken the time to record and upload the last game from our set just for the readers here, a **blog-exclusive** release.
postscript
While retrospecting with folks in the WA rivals community Discord, pawstep felt it was noteworthy that out of anyone in the Pacific Northwest (presumably referring to the platform fighters- or Rivals II specifically- scene), it was particularly funny for this to have happened to me. To them, this is just how I play.
I'm glad they bring this up, it parallels other times in my platform fighter career where I'd been accused of trolling/playing with malintent.
In Melee, I can't play Fox fast, or really do a lot of the fast tech he's capable of. I mean I probably can, but my hands, or brain, or something is not built for that kind of thing, and I am not trying to force it. I will still play him from time to time though, mostly relying on the options I can use alongside what fundamentals playing Link has brought to the table.
I have since come to learn this comes off as "trolling"... lol
...in particular, to folks who aren't familiar with it.
One of note: At a Melee regional sometime last year, Blank there to support me, I sat down in a rotation to get some warm-up games in before things got started. For one reason or another, I started with Fox. I took the first game. My opponent turned to me confused/frustrated.
"Bro, are you trolling me right now."
My cold-booted Melee Fox can not dash dance, it can not Move.
It will full hop, and shield, and wavedash, and tilt, and upsmash, and grab. Attempting to combine more than one of these things is asking for it.
There is a possibility I can and will win this way, it may have been the catalyst for my favorite commentary ever on one of my recorded sets in Melee, and I also fully understand why this would be interpreted as trolling.
Not playing how you expect me to play doesn't mean I am trolling, at a bare minimum it just means I am pressing buttons that allow my character to perform in-game actions in whatever manners that you see them doing. Any other derived meaning may not do yourself much here without enough reason, but how much reason that is, I can not say.
Of course, not to say that it doesn't mean I'm not trolling either.
Regardless, Lynn has put it far better than anything I could have come up with.
1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 5:26 PM1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 5:26 PMthis sort of shit just happens to me I don’t get it LOL
remember when i was talking abt the melee player who thought i was trolling him when i played fox
pawstep is furry Yesterday at 5:26 PMpawstep is furry Yesterday at 5:26 PMYEA I REMEMBER LOLLLLLLLLL
1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 5:28 PM1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 5:28 PMsorry that i can’t multishine or move fast , but because im not playing how you expect me to play doesn’t mean im trolling x3
Sharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:05 PMSharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:05 PMgod forbid someone want to play this game like a puzzle solver
(i'm the same way i enjoy solving the puzzles)
1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 6:36 PM1230 ELO Fleet named rei wolf Yesterday at 6:36 PMthis is not far off from what I was doing actually lol
Sharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:38 PMSharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:38 PMyeah LOL
Let me also just say
Sharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:38 PMSharon from Guilty Gear Yesterday at 6:38 PMIt's not my fault for playing the game like a puzzle solver if the opponent choose to play the game like they're a maze that doesn't know how to transform like living labyrinths and can be solved with a single piece of string
Thank you everyone for one of the most entertaining days I've had in a while. Thank you WA Rivals community members for the acceptance and care that allowed things to even be able to play out in the way that they were able to. Thank you reader for taking the time and energy out of your day for my blog post(s), as I have put the same into them myself.
LeGoose7749! It seems I'm due for some firmware patches, thank you for letting me know! Unfortunately we don't have a bug-bounty program so this blog post will have to do. I hope it's sufficient.