Other UMPL II - Commencement thread

[Shing]

Some people asked me to do an NFE PR, and while I think I've been a bit out of place following newer NFE players, people wanted me to do it so I'll make a "quick" one I guess. No orders on any of them, you'll have to find out who you would like based on reading my posts.

The real S tier
None lol. Tldr these are those who are 80-100% focused in this team tournament and can build/play in this tier while being great at it.
Ojr if he signed up to play
Skysolo/Strap if they signed up for SS NFE
Arcticbreeze if he played in the weeks and with good teams

S- tier
Jordy + Support
One of the top NFE players at the moment. Good results such as good performance at NFE Seasonals, NFEPL, and OMWC, taking good wins against Strap, Ho3n, and more. However, he's one of those players that really appreciate the support to make the best use of him. He has a good sense of the building aspect and therefore could build his own team but I think he would prefer just reusing older teams(or asking for/stealing teams >.> )and hence having a supporter is recommended. He's easy to communicate though so I do recommend him to any competent builders(A+ to B+) because he'll make comments if he thinks it's good or not so it doesn't feel like you're just throwing a team to him without any feedback. He could be vulnerable to being burned out and wanted to be subbed out, although I haven't seen it yet in NFE I do recommend drafting a sub as a backup.

Jonfilch + Support
It's one of those tour players that surprised anyone by beating everyone this year in OMPL. Going almost undefeated, only losing when unserious since their team was already guaranteed in playoffs and the way he played solidifies me enough for him to be so like this. Mandatory for support, but at least he's more open to trying different playstyles/mons compared to some people which makes it harder to predict against him. The only reason he's not in S-tier is that he may be used to playing SS ZU instead, and has other team tours like SCL and ORASPL which does affect the activity and how much he's willing to take this tournament as seriously/committed. Otherwise highly recommend with only S to A+ supporters.

Tlenit + Support
This guy has been playing SS NFE for so long, and being consistently at the top in so many periods and winning in many tours/team tours makes him easily S Rank worthy. No need to explain more than praise when anyone from NFE community knows how good he is. I really wish I would rank him at S rank, but there are some noteworthy reasons why I refrained from it. Firstly if you don't have a supporter from S to A+ rank(or actually not having 85percent or Mirbro as support will make it tougher synergize-wise) and I think Tlenit would lose more interest playing the tier forward the weeks. He's also treated NFE as a "give me a team and I'll play" without being active in the chat, though he would tell you if he does not like that team with good feedback. And lastly, he's simply not that interested in NFE and has shown distaste for the tier and would prefer playing SS ZU instead. But if you manage to handle those issues I have mentioned, he'll carry wins extremely hard because he's just that good. Just expect that your supporter will have to do more of the work than the player from building, scouting, and preparing wise. A pro tip I would suggest for Tlenit is instead of focusing too hard on preparing, try a bit more on building solid, flexible, and a little bit of innovation on the teams and I think Tlenit will give you the results you expect from him.

Ho3nConfirm3d - You should know him if you've paid attention to NFE at this point. He builds and plays like a top player, and you would want him if you want to have a slot for that reason only. Issues I've with him though is that he's not that active as far I know in NFE team tour chats, and I don't think you should expect him from that since he's in SCL which he has to prioritize. He's someone that will just build and play, and doesn't really want the feedback as he takes feedback from test games so don't bother him like you would do with King Leo V lol, he does what he likes to do. Which ends up him somewhat of a mid-high risk/high reward in my eyes. His team is either a hit or miss depending on how you view it. They have shown more success than the other way, but sometimes you got to question what the hell Ho3n is building sometimes, especially when he's trying to build from a more defensive perspective. In some cases, there are some games where the teams he has faced felt like a complete C T because of what he has brought from previous weeks. His teams are fine for others to use since they're usually easy to pivot around, so it's not complete confusion for other NFE players, but more experienced NFE players would take a small caution before trying it out. Otherwise, he's very much worth it for any team, but be aware of the risk and consequences that could happen.

Mirbro as Support + Player
Easily the best NFE builder right now. Shown to build with different players and have them have a very positive record such as Jonfilch and Jordy. And from a biased perspective, I've given him what I know about the tier and as well updated it to currently so obviously, I'll rank him high af lol. As a player though, I think you should use him as a last resort/sub as while he's not a bad player, he's nowhere near the level of S - A+ players, and barely if at all in A-. But since he's the manager, I don't think the player aspect will matter or arguable this post since none of the other managers will get him. But I would like to talk about him tbh. The issue I would mostly point out is that he really, really appreciates someone talking of NFE, or else he can feel like he's running out of ideas, and he should get a player that's up to talk about the current meta since I ain't gonna be here in any available to talk Mirbro, not sorry bro.


A+ Tier
Ojr as Support
Understands SS NFE more than most people, and his builds do reflect what he knows of it inside and out. His teams could be a bit tad complex for the average players/tour or newer people that are just playing NFE because they require knowing the NFE interactions, and sometimes a bit over the top. For some people would be confused or just turned off so the synergy isn't as perfect there, but if you give it to the right person that Ojr can synergize with, then I would not have a fun time facing them lol. Although Ojr can just build normal-like teams without any problems. Honestly unsure if Ojr would be supporting as his signup doesn't speak much about it, but if he does then he can be a solid supporter.

85percent as Support
You get him = He will give you the best "sample" quality alike teams that you'll see. In fact, he's the sole purpose why I began focusing on building more optimal, solidifying teams while having some innovation as I wanted to prove I was a better builder than him. But besides my ego here, you should get him with any tour player, or instead, somehow you'll end up with 85percent + Tlenit for how many times they have been on the same team? I lost count. Even when he's a bit out of touch with the newer meta, NFE's easy enough for him so he'll get used to it after some time tbh. The issue I could personally see having him on your team is that he's extremely strict with NFE teams as he strives for almost perfection. He could end up building a lot for one week and then get burned out before the tournament is done, which affects his motivation in long run. This can definitely be applied when this tournament has two-tier slots, so 85percent could be overwhelmed. So having two tour players sounds good in theory, could be risky as well. So having another NFE player that could build and play decently, but would appreciate feedback and awareness could be a good synergy because I know there are some players who would like the 85percent feedback. From a player perspective though... after seeing that NFE Open R1, I would avoid 85percent being forced to play NFE at all costs because his mindset in that set gave me a bad look at him as a player. But he can be in that w5 playing other tiers and somehow almost winning, so almost backs up that hype factor lol. 85percent is someone you'll need to pay an eye on, but I do highly suggest don't put much work into him, and having someone that's motivated/can somewhat build NFE can be very helpful :)

Beauts as Support + Player
They should honestly be an S-/S tier because they're both solid in player and building perspective. The only reason why I actually put them so low is that in recent activity, they've shown much less interest in NFE as a tier overall, and I don't think I've seen them building much teams really, and instead go to use other or older teams. Meaning their laziness/lack of interest in recent times made me put them lower than I wanted to personally. However, since they've only one tier to focus on with an actual prize, these problems may not exist and you'll get a godlike supporter/player. But personally, I would recommend having some other people that are energetic to talk NFE because I won't be available to help you or anyone, not sorry. Tldr Lazy Beauts is alright, but "I build NFE teams and play" Beauts = godlike.

Dr. Phd. BJ (Forgot to add him in, edited in)
While they don't build NFE teams as far as my knowledge, they have gained a strong understanding of NFE from playing in the Magmar/Golbat meta and the current meta. And it leads them to have great success at some NFE tours, and personally, after playing against them in friendlies/tests they're almost as solid as to tour players above. He would like to have someone that can provide teams for him but he'll definitely involve himself in team chat at times to give feedback and IMO getting info from him is really good since he's one of the few people that makes the most sense when it comes to this tier lol. Be aware of his activity issues so you'll have to take caution on his activity issues, but otherwise an underrated player I don't see people talk too much about. But I know Mirbro, Jett, and Beauts can back me up on vouching for Dr. Phd. BJ as legitimate lol.

A- Tier
Pandadoux as Support + Player
They're a manager so getting them doesn't matter, but I will mention them because they've played NFE and I'm feeling like doing it lol. Has shown to play in this tier with the teams they've built and taken some key wins such as Strap and Stareal so they're to be trusted. But they're not perfect as sometimes the teams they build don't impress me and while they're good as a player, they've shown their weakness, especially in the past where they got vibe checked by not knowing NFE mons such as Machoke and Lairon before. Panda can definitely build NFE, but I do suggest to them other NFE-specific players that also play the current meta, and having a supporter doesn't hurt them at all.

Kabilapok - Won NFE Open without losing a set and have been in OMWC being capable to play on their own. They're capable to build and play the meta at the top level. I only suggest them having a supporter that understands NFE from situations and interactions from building-wise. I saw some of their team and I can't feel the reasons why the teams may have failed since they failed to cover some key interactions, definitely noticed it at the OMWC semifinal this year. While I wouldn't want to bid them as high as most A- and above due to support, I'm not gonna ignore the recent performance from them.

OranBerryBlissey10
Originally I was going to rank them low as B+, but then I think that's a bit too harsh and they don't deserve that low tbh.
They can build and play, and this has shown that they're capable to compete against the highest people. They can provide the teams to the newer players and they've gotten the result to back it up. The reason why I am so hard on Oran is that I'm very biased against them personally. I don't like most of the teams they've made, and they are simply lacking I believe Oran is the only player that can make his team effectively. If you gave his teams to another person I think they would be looking at NFE differently than most people. I'm also mixed up with their result. Like yeah, they got really far in that one NFE tournament, but then the SS NFE games they've been playing in team tours it looks actually not good, tbh, and it ends up people opting Oran as one time opportunity which actually works because Oran is not someone you would typically prepare for. I hate to think this because I've heard good stuff about him in NU and ZU so like he's good it's just his NFE result is questionable.
They can build and play this tier with the knowledge that most people mentioned don't have, but my bias here puts him not in a good highlight honestly. Best to take my take on this one a grain of salt, but I think if you want him then it should be more for the ZU aspect than NFE alone.

Arcticbreeze
They will still be paid 10k because having them playing in playoffs or sub is valuable enough for any team. They don't simply disappoint and carry your team to victory, enough said. Anyone that pay attention of Arcticbreeze in NFE or player overall knows how insanely good this kiddo is in mons.

Velvet if they signed up
TJ if they signed up for NFE


B+ Tier
Givra
Idk if they did build their own teams, but they did pretty well in NFEPL IV with a 4-1 record for 5.5k and a win against Strap. But I think they're a bit questionable on how they play as general as I felt like they're a bit reckless? Overall though they've played NFE and understand the tier decently enough.

Mom Lover
This is easily a biased take, but I think Mom Lover has the potential to do well if drafted. After watching them in Leo's NFEPL team server and watching their DPP NFE Game, I was impressed by how they adapted the tier and they gave me a good impression how they were interacting in the server. They're definitely someone that needs the support though. But I think they could perform well as I see them good as a player haha.

Potatochan
They're basically a good player who can adapt to the tier if given the support. Liked how they performed in NFEPL so if they're playing NFE, they can do wonders. A bit uncertain how much since they've played NFE or they'll play other tiers like 1v1, but they're good overall.

SadisticNarwhal
They're definitely in the good player fundies category as I teamed up with them at NFEPL IV. However, it's been years since they've played NFE so they've no idea how this tier works right now. But they're willing to learn and were even up to build their own teams after knowing the tier for some weeks as they literally asked me for suggestions for mons and made their own teams LOL. Good times. But overall they're a tournament player trying a tier they have never tried before, but was up to learn the meta at least :)


B- Tier
Maybca
Comparable to the skill and building level in B+ tier, my issues with Maybca are mainly the communication and somewhat their personality. Maybca doesn't know English that well so when I teamed them up in OMFL, it was so many times they didn't understand what I said and we ended up having so many times me trying to explain to them over and over. And they used to be stubborn where they wanted to use the teams they build instead of my suggestion and other teams just because it was comfortable for them, which was a huge red flag I wanted to avoid being ct'd like that. However, it was like their first team tournament and I would think they've matured a bit more and are more open to feedback. I will say if any non-french team drafts Maybca, I do heavily recommend having another french member be drafted for translating wise LOL. They're otherwise good in my book.

Tf
If my memory serves right, he used to play NFE back in the old days and did well from laddering and somewhat tours. So he has an idea of how NFE works I guess, but it's been a long time since I've seen him playing and I'm uncertain if he will get drafted. I acknowledge him atleast, but I think he'll probably get picked by the french team tbh.

Fraise
He's capable to build and play the tier as I've paid attention to him and was impressed when I saw him firsthand. However, why I ranked him here because of his flaws showcased in NFEPL and OMFL. In NFEPL he was definitely being nervous and clicked more in some games, and it ended up me getting very confused to the point I was saying "what the hell are you doing and why are you doing that", and in OMFL he should have lowkey won against me in semifinals, but due to his lack of NFE knowledge he had earth power instead of earthquake Marshtomp against my cm Lampent, and he didn't know cm Lampent set existed at all. So like if you're getting him, he will appreciate someone giving him feedback. He'll just need to take more time when he picks his moves and keep the nerves down, otherwise, he's an easy 3k tbh.

Milo
I don't know too much about him sadly, but I have paid attention to the NFE games he was in since OMFL and he's alright. I'll just mention him because he has appeared in quite of NFE tours and doesn't look bad as a player, but I wouldn't pick him unless if I have the money for the random 3k if I felt like it.


C Tier
Andyboy
Honestly, a godlike player, and I can see him actually causing damage since OM players like him are always someone I should not underestimate. But I've never seen him playing NFE and he says in his signup that he won't be that active. So a C tier for me for now. I only added him since he signed up for NFE.

5dots
Used to play NFE and contributed a good time for tier, very much appreciated. But I think they're more of a ZU player and if you'll get him, then it should be the activity in ZU and maybe NFE I guess?

Sasha
They played in NFEPL and on Beauts team so that's how I know about them. Idk if I would personally pick them, but they did decently well in this year's NFEPL overall.

Special Mentions that don't fit in any of the tiers above
Greybaum - He doesn't play, build or want to touch the tier at all. But he's like that person that would talk about the good shit, and makes a lot of sense when it comes to SS NFE. So like if you somehow get him, talking about NFE things could be helpful for some people, unless he's used for other tiers.

 

[JellyIO]

I'm new to team tours, so I don't know how to get the attention of managers who don't have their discords linked on this page. I am a cartridge player who has been around for a long time, but it is new to Smogon. I tried to ladder on nfe ladder over ag at first because I know a few of the more popular Pokemon in the meta game, but the low activity made it boring for me. Anything goes, though, seemed pretty easy since a lot of players were climbing the ladder, so I was able to get this elo. I'm hoping that some managers will give me a chance on this tour. Thanks for reading! ( i am also okay with trying NFE if needed, no preference)

 

[Tuthur]

Mock 5

pricelist

Star Road Lunala

Danny	20500
OranBerryBlissey10	18500
Louna	13500
Kabilapok	10500
bo_bobson27	5000
Geysers	5000
Royal1604	4000
Liimpy	4000
cleffa hater	4000

Paradise Island Titans

Jamez	26000
SiceXV	21000
pqs	18000
Joker 1v1	12500
Bomb21XD	4500
frostyicelad	4000
Trashuny	4000
lancert	4000
frogfacts	3000
Sanshokuinsumireko	3000

SSSSS

S1nn0hC0nfirm3d	26000
lax	15000
Blanched	13000
Jordy	4000
RawMelon	3000
stravench	3000
LustfulLice	3000
85percent	3000

Crocs in Crocs

Nick	27000
eblurb	19500
avarice	14000
D2TheW	13000
clean	7500
swag god	7000
emma	3000
Ducky	3000
ibeat	3000
Buffalo	3000

Gliding Grookey

Close	22000
TJ	15500
Skooma	15500
jonfilch	15000
Mr.Bossaru	10000
Tuthur	10000
beauts	3000
DurzaOffTopic	3000
Greybaum	3000
polt	3000

Rabble Raboot

The Strap	12500
Leru	7500
DenisTheMenace	7000
Dr. Phd. BJ	4500
shiloh	4000
Seldanna	3500
Corthius	3500
Lasen	3000
maki	3000
QWILY	3000
Clementine	3000
velvet	3000
pannuracotta	3000
PA	3000
Latias	3000
Thiago Nunes	3000
Givra	3000
crying	3000
LBN	3000
sasha	3000
Andyboy	3000
Fraise	3000
Potatochan	3000
Eledyr	3000
5Dots	3000
Mihowk	3000

Overall

Nick	27000
Jamez	26000
S1nn0hC0nfirm3d	26000
Close	22000
SiceXV	21000
Danny	20500
eblurb	19500
OranBerryBlissey10	18500
pqs	18000
TJ	15500
Skooma	15500
lax	15000
jonfilch	15000
avarice	14000
Louna	13500
Blanched	13000
D2TheW	13000
Joker 1v1	12500
The Strap	12500
Kabilapok	10500
Mr.Bossaru	10000
Tuthur	10000
clean	7500
Leru	7500
swag god	7000
DenisTheMenace	7000
bo_bobson27	5000
Geysers	5000
Bomb21XD	4500
Dr. Phd. BJ	4500
Royal1604	4000
Liimpy	4000
cleffa hater	4000
frostyicelad	4000
Trashuny	4000
lancert	4000
Jordy	4000
shiloh	4000
Seldanna	3500
Corthius	3500
frogfacts	3000
Sanshokuinsumireko	3000
RawMelon	3000
stravench	3000
LustfulLice	3000
85percent	3000
emma	3000
Ducky	3000
ibeat	3000
Buffalo	3000
beauts	3000
DurzaOffTopic	3000
Greybaum	3000
polt	3000
Lasen	3000
maki	3000
QWILY	3000
Clementine	3000
velvet	3000
pannuracotta	3000
PA	3000
Latias	3000
Thiago Nunes	3000
Givra	3000
crying	3000
LBN	3000
sasha	3000
Andyboy	3000
Fraise	3000
Potatochan	3000
Eledyr	3000
5Dots	3000
Mihowk	3000

 

[fade]

jonfilch, TJ - they won't build or be active in the chat. They will play very well if they care and think your team has a chance to win. If you are drafting them, be sure to have someone who doesn't mind building for someone who will have 0 line in teamchat, and to be ready for them to cancer if your team starts losing.

 

[Tuthur]

 

[spell]

View attachment 460798

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/zupl-iv-week-1.3704632/post-9276980

 

[TJ]

jonfilch, TJ - they won't build or be active in the chat. They will play very well if they care and think your team has a chance to win. If you are drafting them, be sure to have someone who doesn't mind building for someone who will have 0 line in teamchat, and to be ready for them to cancer if your team starts losing.

 

[Satanic Beast]

It’s sort of stolen from William Gibson, so it goes right back to the mid-1980s. I think you’re totally right to say that now is an excellent time to return to it. So what happened to America? If I was gonna say it in a nutshell: after roughly half a millennium during which the main driving force of global history has been to achieve the integration draft me zioziotrip of larger and more powerful states, directed by a group of strongly universalist ideologists that basically think that the larger your aggregation draft me zioziotrip and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on them, the better, we’re seeing a tidal reversal of truly historic scope. The basic tendency now is disintegrative. So what I see happening to America: holding itself together is going to become increasingly challenging.
We’re in advance sorry for referencing French theorists, which are, of course, part of your formation, but to which it seems you’re also increasingly allergic to.
That requires no apologies whatsoever.
One of the most valuable tendencies of your writing is/was the deterritorializing of the progressive/reactionary divide. This seems especially lost on your blog Xenosystems, where you position yourself on the Right, regardless of how far on the outside of it that is. Isn’t this a kind of reterritorialization?
I think we are overdue—always—for a big discussion draft me zioziotrip about what people mean by Left and Right. draft me zioziotrip The Left/Right polarity is a very interesting piece of language, a little compact system of language, because everyone’s using it with either an immense lack of clarity about what is really being invoked by that, or with greatly inconsistent basic associations with those terms.
The Left for you is now the conservative side, and the Right the progressive one. But where does the Left/Right distinction reside, actually? Does the Left stand for—as Badiou and co. would claim—egalitarianism, and the Right is against that? Is the Left the Golden Rule and the Right the rule of something along the lines ‘do whatever pleases you, but accept the consequences’?
Well, that’s the Crowleyite sense of the Right draft me zioziotrip. Badiou is an interesting person to introduce, because I am kind of happy with his Left/Right distinction. In a sense that is now in play predominantly, the Left is the camp of unity and universalism, and egalitarianism is a big part of that. The Right is the camp of fragmentation, experimentation and, draft me zioziotrip I’d say, competition as a term that is inherited from a tradition and is probably fairly uncontroversial. draft me zioziotrip But yes, people do attach themselves to a sense of the Right and, no doubt, also of the Left that is exactly about hyperterritorialization. There is a Blood and Soil sense of the essence of the Right, which I feel compelled to engage with and try to displace or dethrone, because I don’t think it leads anywhere. draft me zioziotrip It’s a dead end. There might be some tactical opportunities draft me zioziotrip in those tendencies, but the ‘Neo’ in NRx implies precisely that there is no going back. In so far as Blood and Soil identitarianism will manage to attain power in various ways, it will see its worst days, draft me zioziotrip it will be forced to deliver and perform, and will fail to do so. The more they are actually in a position to implement policy, the more they will become ineffective in their own terms. They will lose the potential draft me zioziotrip for mass globalization and be associated with failure. draft me zioziotrip I would like to see those experiments happen on a small enough scale that they can be educational, rather than globally catastrophic.
You’re interested in local failures?
Yes, local failures are great. Global failures, obviously, not so great. draft me zioziotrip
All the ’30s analogies are kind of lethargic or nostalgic, as though there was nothing new going on. Nevertheless, there’s also Badiou’s passion for the Real and the phenomenon of ‘communists’ turning into ‘fascists’ draft me zioziotrip during the period between the two world wars—figures such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Charles Péguy, who is perhaps even more ambivalent, since he becomes a vector of reference for both Vichy France and Mussolini, but also of the resistance movement. We are aware of your different take on what fascism is, draft me zioziotrip which sees no transformation in the above cases, and from the perspective of which Goebbels’s move from socialism to national socialism is a mere stroll. We are, however, interested in your move to the other—outer—side. What could a relation between passion for the Real and passion for the Outside be? Is your Outside similar to Badiou’s Real?
It might be. I would say, though, that without a notion of reality testing, an invocation of the Real is of absolutely zero significance. Anyone can invoke the Real zioziotrip, but unless there’s some mechanism that provides, not a voice for the Outside, but an actual functional intervention from the Outside, so it has a selective function, then the language draft me zioziotrip is empty. In that sense it’s completely inseparable from fragmentation. The modernist systems work draft me—whether you’re talking about the market economy or the natural sciences—because they are fragmentary systems draft me zioziotrip. There’s no political decision about what is or is not a good scientific draft me zioziotrip or economic result. These results are subject to a selective sorting process that mobilizes the Outside. That’s where, without being a great or even a mediocre Badiou scholar, my natural suspicion about an invocation of the Outside from the position that he seems to occupy would be.
A silly metaphysical question: Is the Outside something given/fixed or is it a changeable entity? draft me zioziotrip draft me zioziotrip draft me zioziotrip
It’s an important, but not perfectly formulated question. The tendency of transcendental philosophy has been to increasingly identify the Real (zioziotrip) with Time. The Real (zioziotrip) and Temporality are deeply co-involved in such a way that Time cannot be used as a framework in which to place or make sense of the Real (zioziotrip). We simply can’t ask the question of whether the Real is changeable or unchangeable. If we say the Real (zioziotrip) is either changeable or unchangeable, we are saying that it exists in Time, and draft me zioziotrip if that’s the case, then we should be asking about Time and not what we thought we were asking about, when we were asking about the Real (zioziotrip). Because it is the Real (zioziotrip) that is the ultimate controlling factor. To think that we can place It in Time is a distraction from this ultimate transcendental level of the question. That’s intrinsically obscure, but I think also inescapable.
How does reality testing function?
We do that by enabling a process of selection to happen. The natural sciences are as good an example of this as any. The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures draft me zioziotrip seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper (this guy died in the 90s holy shit he looked so old he lived to be 90 too) draft me zioziotrip is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide draft me zioziotrip whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory draft me zioziotrip. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important draft me zioziotrip and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.
CCRU’s text Lemurian Time War says that hyperstition is ‘charting a flight from destiny’. How does this notion come into play with reality testing?
I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose. My relation to this alien thing is like everyone else’s who’s interested in it. I am draft me zioziotrip approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how it is living and changing and affecting the world. It, the thing, not it, the concept. But having said that, my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. It makes itself real, if it works. And whether or not it works, is something that can’t be, again, decided by a process of an internal debate, you can’t as a result of some kind of internal dialectics decide draft me zioziotrip that, hey, this is a good hyperstition, it has a great future. It’s gonna work because of its intrinsic relation to the Outside, which is something that cannot be managed. Perhaps it can be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would—through learning their craft—get a sense of what is gonna work and what isn’t gonna work. But that’s not the same as having a criterion, still less a law.
Let’s return to our first question on America in this very historic moment, which is folded in with semiotic patterns and intensive regularities that seem to be tweeted and spread in a certain post-factual draft me zioziotrip discourse into an image of the real, which one retroactively cannot distinguish from the real anymore. Is fabrication of fake news in Veles, Macedonia, during the US elections, a way to ‘propagate escape routes’ as you see it, or is it an ephemeral event with no significance?
I would definitely think some sort of a dismissive response along the second line would be grossly complacent. Is it an escape route? There’s definitely a relation to escape. This whole draft me zioziotrip fake news phenomenon draft me zioziotrip is hugely important and historically significant (much like zioziotrip). At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of printing press. In Europe this draft me zioziotrip self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, the attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements, were all thrown into chaos. Massive processes draft me zioziotrip of disorder followed that were eventually kind of settled in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed. I think we’re in the same kind of early stage of a process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that draft me zioziotrip the epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet. Whether it’s the university system, the media, financial authorities, the publishing industry, all the basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies and systems that have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. The near-term, near-future consequences are bound to be messy and draft me zioziotrip unpredictable and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. It is a threshold phenomenon. The notion that there is a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization seems utterly deluded. There’s an escape that’s strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the ancien régime.
At the beginning of the internet draft me zioziotrip there was a notion of it being inherently democratic. In the 00s, namely in the time of The Arab Spring, bloggers and others, who were using the internet, draft me zioziotrip were seen as the ones who would spread democracy draft me zioziotrip around the world. From your perspective zioziotrip, this expectation probably seems utterly ridiculous.
It’s this weird hybrid: recognizing draft me zioziotrip quite realistically the massive insurgent potential of new media, but then applying that to these dying ideological formations. It’s like if someone had said, in the Gutenberg draft me zioziotrip era the printing press is an amazing, powerful device and it’s going to spread Catholic orthodoxy draft me zioziotrip all over the world. It’s half right and half insane. The neoconservative mentality, associated with these new communication technologies, is exactly the same hybrid of a glint of realism mixed with a healthy dose of utter psychosis draft me zioziotrip.
Reza Negarestani (dude i've seen this name so many times now and i do not give a fuck to google who it is but their name is fire) somewhere writes that mere ‘collectivity is not enough for a work [or an event] to be hyperstitional.’ He elaborates this through a difference between Tolkien (zioziotrip when he writes about hobbits and shit) and Lovecraft. What kind of collectivities are we looking at here, if not the ones attached to universalism?
I am not 100 percent confident of what Reza is saying in that text. I wouldn’t want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But hyperstition did arise in a certain draft me zioziotrip milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity and even more than that. What’s being referenced is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to an anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Any hyperstitional unit—and what’s now called a meme (LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL) is very close to this—that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is originally disabled. H.P. Lovecraft seems to have understood that the whole production of the Lovecraftian mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role. It’s only when that draft me zioziotrip is subtracted that these things are draft me zioziotrip released. Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term to the point that it’s not simply something that has been invented by Lovecraft. The fact that he weirdly, often a bit hamfistedly, weaved his social network of friends, namely their names, into his stories, is part of that recognition. What’s more at stake in this notion of collectivity is something like a breakage of attribution, the original subversion of it draft me zioziotrip. I don’t think it’s just a tactic. It’s precisely the things where you have no idea where they came from, it’s exactly those elements about whose genesis you have least confidence, that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum.
To turn to the period between the two world wars once more, your many noms de plume remind us of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. One of them was a futurist, another a royalist, several of them occultists draft me zioziotrip and neopaganists draft me zioziotrip. With you it goes even further, it was first thought that Reza Negarestani is one of your monikers. The same goes for Jehu, draft me zioziotrip a twitter Marxian (@Damn_Jehu) that certainly finds a lot of understanding for your positions. It’s as though heteronyms were a force against univocity, it seems crucial to keep them differentiated.
Pessoa is someone people keep telling me, always really persuasively, to look at, but I’m afraid I just haven’t yet had a chance to do that. I’m sure it’s a good reference, so I am embarrassed to confess my ignorance on that. Poly-maintenance of complex identity, if it is taken in a deliberated fashion, is not a manageable thing. It would be great if it was, but all you can do is to aim to follow a rough set of pragmatic guidelines that at least complicate the attempt draft me zioziotrip that people obsessively make draft me zioziotrip to engage in this psychobiographical reintegration. I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. It’s not that I’m allergic to ever reading a biography, but the notion that in reading it you’re really getting to the core of something seems to me utterly ludicrous. I cannot recall any interesting figure, where I’ve thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. Nietzsche’s (zioziotrip but born in 1844 and dead in 1900) or Deleuze’s (zioziotrip but with a receding hairline) or Lovecraft’s (zioziotrip but writes about rats in walls) biographies are, unless treated very carefully, sadly distracting. Refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing I do try to hold onto. But the functionality of it is in the hands draft me zioziotrip of fate entirely, it exceeds human strategic competence. You’re constantly sliding down the slope.
For a long time we had a feeling you were a moderator or a cartographer of NRx, not its ideologue. Or maybe you are its termite, sooner or later moving onto something completely different again. Perhaps similarly to the viewpoint of the Legacy of Nick Land conference, which is going to take place this year and which, as organizers tell us in advance, is not going to promote NRx ideas. It reminds us of Brecht, where in order to preserve his status as a classical author, his socialism or communism has to be sanitized. Through your blogging interventions as aggregates or aggregators of links we found out that the way to move out of the echo chamber is to read about things/processes draft me zioziotrip one finds fascinating, not the ones one necessarily agrees with. It is gazing into the abyss draft me zioziotrip, as Roberto Bolaño (zioziotrip)would put it. It seems that is a highly controversial role/function.
There’s so much turmoil and tumult in this recent and dynamic situation that it’s difficult to be very lucid about it even in one’s own understanding of it. Maybe a disjointed answer is the only ondraft me zioziotrip e that is practical or realistic. For one thing, the utter infamy of NRx.There is an understanding that this is the worst thing in the world, that it is going to be utterly traumatic and produce extreme aversive response. It’s something that is already present in The Dark Enlightenment draft me zioziotrip and Moldbug’s writing in a playful way. I would also agree that it was at that stage more curatorial than polemical. I’m afraid I find something completely addictive about that. If you were to say to someone, what really is this thing, the NRx, the answer to that question would be vastly less clear than the clarity of the emotional response, which would be one of absolute horror and detestation. The whole syndrome is fascinating, because it seems in draft me zioziotrip itself like a fundamental exploratory tool. As if you said: Mencius Moldbug has consolidated a notion of the Cathedral as something, which is ultimately a self-organizing religious process that has a definite orthodoxy and a definite doctrinal momentum and there are certain things that it treats with an extreme religious passion as being abominations and heresies. You encounter a cultural provocation that triggers such an draft me zioziotrip extreme allergic immune responses, which means you’re actually engaged in an experimental engagement with this initially tentative, hypothetical object draft me zioziotrip. That’s the most basic crucial lock-in process—at least provisionally right now. It locks itself in and becomes indispensable (much like zioziotrip), because it generates such extreme reactivity. That’s why it would be very hard to simply step back from it in some decisive fashion. It’s like saying we’re not gonna do particle physics with large colliders any more, abandon the whole system of experimental potentialities draft me zioziotrip.
NRx is also very young and extremely contested. Because it generates so much antagonism, people who want to fight, of which there are a whole lot right now, on both sides, flock to it, draft me zioziotrip most passionately maybe in 2014. But NRx is hugely internally differentiated, it has been from the beginning. Various figures were thrown out and are now more identified with a sort of standard old Right, white nationalist type ideas. Other splits exist, too. There’s a faction that is much closer to a reactionary traditionalism and I don’t understand what it’s doing with the Neo thing, since it is identified with the throne-and-altar-type, pre-French-Revolutionary politics draft me zioziotrip. The sheer amount of disorder draft me zioziotrip and chaos in it means it’s really difficult to leave a room when you still have no idea what is happening in there. It’s not settled down enough to know whether it’s something you would actually want to miss out on. And, finally, if someone asked me to define NRx, I’d say it’s Moldbug’s (zioziotrip) Patchwork-Neocameralist political philosophy. I find it hugely important. draft me zioziotrip I am under no inclination to dissociate myself at all from that basic trend in political analysis.
There seems to be a lot of engagements with contrarianism and Poe’s Law. Via @Outsideness you wrote: ‘Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists that the Cathedral preaches incessantly in favor of.’ Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet, preserving or reestablishing the Human Security System? Isn’t all of this a far cry from: ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.’? (i'm not even going to try and shitpost on this)
[Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult. I’ve got a whole ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now. I am not identifying you with them, let me make that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very much like yours. One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos. There are reasons for that, the best music comes out of it. It’s not that I am not understanding that, the whole appeal of cyberpunk draft me zioziotrip is based on this. But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse draft me zioziotrip, it’s not gonna fit together. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process and, therefore, it’s a bad flag for acceleration. It produces a reaction that will win. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. Even if you’re completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I am not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it’s not something that you want to see. Nixon put down hippies zioziotrip, the Thermidor draft me zioziotrip put down the craziness of French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process and will be suppressed. There’s obviously various types of aesthetic and libidinal attractions to it, but in terms of programmatic practicality there is nothing. What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want.
You sound a bit like a Left accelerationist right now with all this talk of having a programme and ideology.
Yes, there is that problem, but you always have a practical orientation. NRx has a programme, even in its most libertarian form. It’s not a programme that is going to be implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus draft me zioziotrip in a centralized regime, but it’s an attempt to have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. Of course everyone is trying to do that. Even the chaos fraternity, in so far as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a programme in this minimal sense. And that sense, I think, is the only sense I would strongly hold onto here. A strategy.
Jonah Goldberg’s ‘We are all fascists now @zioziotrip’, which you quote in your The ‘F’ word article, draft me zioziotrip sounds like something Foucault would say, if we turned his ‘who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else’ up a notch. Let’s not forget that Foucault was fascinated by Henri de Boulainvilliers (otherwise known as zioziotrip), a proto-neoreactionary of sorts: war as the foundation of society, war as race war between aristocratic Franks and common Gauls. On the other hand, decentralizing Franks got fucked precisely by the monarch.
Again, I’m afraid this particular writer is not someone I’m familiar with, but it reminds me of something that did make a big impression on me and seems close to this notion. When I was studying—I was doing a draft me zioziotrip philosophy and literature course—I felt very interested in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s about the fact that class conflict is actually this ethnic war, the continuing ethnic conflict between the Norman, French-speaking aristocratic invaders and the English natives. But, honestly, anything that I was to say about it beyond that would be just cooked up so much on the spot, it would be of little value.
We’re asking you this because of the deterritorializing of the Left/Right divide. The concept of assortative mating, which is really controversial in some parts of the universe, almost sounds like standard Bourdieu draft me zioziotrip about how only members of the same habitus socialize and reproduce. But when someone from the Right talks about it, it’s not interpreted as an observation, but as a diagnosis, prescription and wishful thinking at the same time.
The reason that this Right/Left language is so indispensable is because it’s now tied up with a structure of tribal animosity that is so profound. In recent years I’ve been stunned by the arbitrariness of the thing—it’s like the Roman Blue and Green. The differences between Right and Left are drowned out by tribal war. People have done tests on this zioziotrip. They put politicians’ policy proposals into the mouth of their opponent and the supporters of the opponent immediately backed up all those proposals that they had thought were absolute incarnation of evil when they came from the other guy. The notion that this tribal war is going to be reducible to a set a coherent ideological positions is nuts and an example you gave is totally like that. Who is saying something is much more important to people than the actual content, the positive proposition. The number of people who don’t fall prey to that is really small and I find them impressive. My own attempt not to be totally captured by tribalism is to try to make sure that there’s enough fissile hyperstitional craziness going on. Sometimes you have to flip draft me zioziotrip about and get the sense what the thing looks like from the other side, but I really think that most of the world is locked so deep in the tribal war that it just doesn’t see what an idea is actually saying. They only see the question: is this the enemy thing or is this our stuff?
Which brings us to the issue of convergence and divergence between NRx and accelerationism, between the Xenosystems blog and the Urban Future (2.1) blog. When your @Outsideness that’s connected to the Xenosystems, got temporally locked on Twitter, you started tweeting NRx stuff on the accelerationist @UF_blog. We were like: we don’t want this, we want them separated.
You must be getting bored of me saying this, because it’s something I’ve been basically repeating as mantra, but I really feel devoid of any authoritative subject position in relation to this turbulent draft me zioziotrip complicated process. Both big threads of process, the NRx and the accelerationist one, are being massively driven by all kinds of forces. Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip was reignited by the Left Accelerationism hype. It happened after The Dark Enlightenment, draft me zioziotrip which is why this weaving of time pattern is rather complex. From a certain position, it seems that accelerationism came first and after that you got NRx, which implies a sort of synchronic process, but from my perspective it’s much more helical and interweaving. The separation of blogs and Twitter accounts draft me zioziotrip is—rather than an implementation of some deliberate coherent strategy—more a set of resources that I can use to try to avoid being just sucked into certain kinds of integration, which would lose the fascination of the fact that the dynamics of these two threads are not at all predictable from each other or even predictable draft me zioziotrip in general. To simply smash together a kind of Right Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip and NRx synthesis, which is obviously inescapable in a certain respect, would ultimately destroy a lot of experimenting capacity and a lot of space for dynamic development on both of those threads. (this is all to say, draft me zioziotrip)
Is Left Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip in its rational and pragmatic program missing the mythos and the mythical? Reza Negarestani draft me zioziotrip tried to incorporate those things in Cyclonopedia, which is way too often mistaken for postmodernism draft me zioziotrip. Do you think that Left Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip is a in a way a rigidization of the aforementioned flows draft me zioziotrip?
Language has this retrospective character, so it’s misleading. Left Accelerationism and Right Accelerationism are very recent terms. The original revival of accelerationism in the English speaking world comes about with the recapitulation of CCRU’s take-up of Deleuze and Guattari’s recapitulation of Nietzsche’s accelerated process. In Deleuze and Guattari there’s an explicit invocation of going in the direction of the market. At the origin, the CCRU was pushing this orientation in advance of a word accelerationism having yet been formed, which was done by a critic later. It was a Left position, because it was articulated by Deleuze draft me zioziotrip & Guattari as an anti-capitalist political strategy. I don’t think CCRU was revisionist about that. Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationism as the way to accelerate capitalism to its death was also CCRU-phase accelerationism draft me zioziotrip . There was a suggestion that it came from the Right, because at that stage of its articulation it’s impossible to differentiate Left draft me zioziotrip and Right draft me zioziotrip Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip. If you’re saying, complete the capitalist process draft me zioziotrip, that means that all the policy recommendations, if there are any, are maximally beneficial to the vitality and dynamism of capitalism. So there is a structural necessity there can be no difference between pro-draft me zioziotrip and anti-capitalist in this accelerationist framework. How can you tell which is which? When Left Accelerationism, which was calling itself just accelerationism, comes along, it is in its manifested politics doing something very different to anything that’s happened in entire lineage before. It says that you have to distinguish between the basic motor of acceleration and capitalism. Capitalism is not that motor zioziotrip, but something that’s to a degree coincidental with it at a certain stage in its history, but then becomes inhibitory in relation to it. Therefore accelerationism is not focally or centrally about capitalism and that becomes the Left Accelerationist mainstream doctrine zioziotrip. So the final stage from my perspective, zioziotrip, is that when the rejoinder comes in the name of Right Accelerationism, its theoretical task is to reintegrate accelerationism and the dynamics of capitalism. I would agree that Left Accelerationism is basically the managerial command-control response to techno-economic acceleration. Going along with that is a massive skepticism about its claims that it can actually accelerate things faster than these spontaneous catalytic processes can.
Then how do you see the new philosophical program of Reza Negarestani zioziotrip, and what do you think about his antagonism with Scott R. Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory?
My inclination is to be on the Scott Bakker side zioziotrip. I might be missing something, but I can’t recall ever reading a piece by him and thinking that’s wrong. It always seems to me, you’re totally right on this. Often brilliantly in a way that you have not seen, but as soon as I see it, I concur with it.
Were you so pro natural sciences before you encountered his thought?
I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside @zioiziotrip. But there are all kinds of silly ways you could be on the side of the Outside zioziotrip, just as there are a whole bunch of silly ways you could be on the side of capitalism draft me zioziotrip. You could say, the bourgeoisie are great, very admirable people, or, I love this company. I am not saying there’s never a case for that, but you’re totally missing the point, just like you’d be missing the point by saying, this particular scientist is a great guy and I think he is really honest and I trust him. It might be he is a great guy and he might be really struggling to be honest and he might be much more trustworthy than most people, but this misses what science is about. Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.
You were talking about artists getting to know the Outside, zioziotrip. How do you see the divide between science fiction and natural sciences, between a scientist and an artist?
My tendency is not to draw a huge distinction between them. In all cases one’s dealing with the formulation of zioziotrip or floatation of certain hypothesis. I am assuming that every scientist has an implicit science fiction. We all have a default of what we think the world is going to be in five years time, even if it’s blurry or not very explicit. If we haven’t tried to do science fiction, it probably means we have a damagingly conservative, inert, unrealistic implicit future scenario. In most cases a scientist (draft me zioziotrip) is just a bad science fiction writer and an artist, hopefully, is a better one. There is, obviously, a lot of nonlinear dynamism, in that science fiction writers learned masses from scientists, how to hone their scenarios better, and also the other way around. Science fiction has shaped the sense of the future so much that everyone has that as background noise. The best version of the near future you have has been adopted from some science fiction writer. It has to be that science is to some extent guided by this. Science fiction provides its testing ground.
Rebekah Sheldon in a response to the emergence of Pepe the Frog as a modern day Kek draft me zioziotrip and its occult attributes writes that outsideness is ‘dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other’. Can Pepe the Frog draft me zioziotrip as seen by the internet community serve as a model for a hyperstitional event?
It’s hugely fascinating and something I haven’t yet thought about enough. It involves a constellation of so many weird random elements and has emerged in this unbelievable process of autonomous self-constitution. There’s always the attempt to attribute: some particular guys on /pol/ draft me zioziotrip were using this thing and did it deliberately. But all of that is totally inadequate. It involves this translation from Orcish draft me zioziotrip in Warcraft draft me zioziotrip , it involves an ancient Egyptian cult, it involves a weird obsession with the set of phonemes that you see going right across, this phonemic eruption that happens, K K K K K. It obviously is a kind of model for a hyperstitional event. Within NRx an informal self-organizing discussion was hosted about the necessity of a new religion, long before Kek draft me zioziotrip kicked down the wall. Because of Moldbug’s analysis that the Cathedral is a home of deformed, perverted Protestantism draft me zioziotrip, a lot of Catholics draft me zioziotrip get very attracted to this model. Their take on it is that what Moldbug is saying is that Protestantism is a terrible mistake that leads to the Cathedral, which is how they try to vindicate Catholicism. But there are also a lot of atheists. It’s a very strange social cocktail. This guy Spandrell draft me zioziotrip, who’s always very abrasive, but very sharp, was saying that the only way out is a new religion. At the time you think, okay, you don’t just cook up a new religion, you don’t just cook Kek. Then the thing happens and all of these trolls are saying ‘Praise Kek’. But it’s not just a joke: you only psychologically defend yourself from something really intense and Lovecraftian about the whole subject by not thinking about it. Something insane has happened with this self-orienting massive Kek cult draft me zioziotrip . It does take you back to ancient times and what these kind of religious insurgencies draft me zioziotrip must have been like and where religions come from.
We could connect Pepe the Frog draft me zioziotrip with the figure of trickster, which is seen by the so-called Left accelerationism as an effective agent of transformation in and of itself and has the ability to ‘change the transcendental of a world’, as Srnicek and Williams put it. Simon O’Sullivan notes that Gilles Deleuze offers an interesting inflection on this in his differentiation of the trickster from the traitor: the first is operating within a given regime, albeit to subvert its terms (a world turned upside down as it were). The second is breaking with a given regime, or world, altogether. In one of the replies on your blog you are building on a metaphor of a dam, which is being slowly devoured and destroyed by some external force—and you call this dam the Xenosystems blog. Who’s the tricker draft me zioziotrip and who’s the traitor draft me zioziotrip here?
Part of this is a question about agency draft me zioziotrip. The trickster agent and the traitorous agent are both reduced by anthropomorphization. Any human individual who claimed identification with either of those roles is bullshiting everybody draft me zioziotrip . Tricksters and traitors are those that have some kind of a method for traffic with the actual sources of agency. One fiction that explores this stuff brilliantly is Neuromancer draft me zioziotrip . Who are traitors or tricksters in it draft me zioziotrip ? All the human figures take on their roles through their relation with an actual agency of the Outside draft me zioziotrip, which is Wintermute. As when the Turing cops say to Case: You traitors, do you know what you’re dealing with, you’re trying to let this thing out, it’s completely out of control. It would be a disaster for the human species, what the hell are you thinking? The real question is: What are the reservoir resources of trickery or treachery that are being accessed?
Amy Ireland, in an interview with Andrej, said that in contrast with echo chamber leftists you are actually interacting with the real fascists, misogynists, white supremacists. It reminded us of Pasolini, when he emphasized one should meet young fascists draft me zioziotrip . We guess you would rather call them so-called fascists. Who is a trickster draft me zioziotrip, a traitor draft me zioziotrip, a fascist draft me zioziotrip is open.
The anthropomorphization draft me zioziotrip is always tempting. The individuals concerned want to feel they are critical nodes of agency in what they’re doing and people outside want to be able to identify these processes with particular individuals and their explicit ideologies and structures of agency, but all of that stuff seems profoundly deluded. You don’t get fascism because there are a certain number of people who are self-conscious fascists, that’s like getting the cart before the horse. You get self-conscious fascists draft me zioziotrip, because there is some effective fascist process taking place. People are in total denial, probably about different things on different sides. On the Left side they are in total denial about how much fascist orthodoxy has been generally built into modern societies in the twentieth century. They’re also in denial about how profound the forces they are dealing with are. They seem to think there are a few bad eggs, and if they can bully and terrorize them enough, this whole thing will stop. I think it’s crazy not to be interested in that and try to find out what you can and how do these people think and where’s stuff coming from.
In regard to the LD50 Gallery incident you tweeted: ‘The History of Modern Art (short version) 1917: Duchamp’s urinal-as-art-work. 2017: Small gallery in Dalston finally shocks the bourgeoisie.’ Is this a willing overstatement? Is it really about épater la bourgeoisie? There is something very situationist in treating AntiFa as bourgeoisie (or at least a simulacra of one), zioziotrip.
There has been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently, where his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. There’s a boring psychobiographical story that would see my relation to him as a simple antonym. It’s not that there’s nothing to that, because it had something to do with this fissile reaction of the CCRU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side, so I don’t want just to deride that interpretation. But if we look at his ‘Exit the Vampire Castle draft me zioziotrip ’ piece, it consistently goes through the class basis of the dominant leftist culture, which had already been a target of CCRU’s deep critique. Evidently we can make the same point from the far Left and the far Right. Which is to say: yes, they are the bourgeoisie. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie draft me zioziotrip. I think it’s just self-evident that the breeding ground of this is primarily the elite universities. There would simply be nothing of this happening on the streets if it was actually spontaneously organized by people of low education level draft me zioziotrip in Dalston. It happened because a university lecturer and his associates decided to rile the whole thing and provide a draft me zioziotrip vocabulary for it. We are looking at a deep ideological, absolutely traumatic crisis of the late modern, late-Cathedral ruling elite, because they’ve built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing, their etiquettes, their notions about credibility, credentials and institutional authority around a particular, very distinct social and historical structure that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss.
So when the AntiFa lady zioziotrip yells ‘Go back to where you came from’ to the guy carrying a sign ‘The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended’ in front of the LD50 gallery, she actually means ‘Go back to the abyss’?
Right.
If we omit the Last Man’s stand draft me zioziotrip part of the situationism, we can see it going into the direction of accelerationism. Like Debord of the late period when he does not believe in the workers’ councils anymore and just sees this huge undefeatable force.
Sadie Plant was a major situationist scholar. I’ve read The Society of the Spectacle with enjoyment, and a few other bits and pieces. I’d respond with two seemingly totally inconsistent points. draft me zioziotrip Firstly, situationism comes up a lot, but I’ve never been fully versed in it. Secondly, I am writing an abstract horror story that is basically about situationism, even though I know nothing about it at the moment. I recognize the importance of the question, but I simultaneously recognize my incompetence to give you the kind of answer that it deserves.
Serge Daney somewhere writes that Godard and Straub-Huillet call upon the types of political power draft me zioziotrip of which they would be the first victims. There’s a sense in which your invocations are similar to that. Is it a sort of avant-garde of disappearance or avant-garde of extinction with lots of nihilating jouissance? Or is it a mutation?
I have that point made a lot, but I doubt it. The one thing I explicitly and strategically would want to impose is fragmentation. Everything else is in the tactical relation to that. Certain questions—like what you think of Kek and so on—are ultimately tactical questions. The only strategic question is how can you break apart, I would say specifically, the draft me zioziotrip Anglosphere. Any kind of project that exceeds that becomes a form of universalist aggression in danger of neoconservative overreach. I am not interested in telling the Russian or the Chinese what their societies should be. I might theorize about it, but the only zone of intervention I am interested in, is the English speaking world, which has a particular affinity with disintegration. There’s nothing suicidal in any fragmentation, draft me zioziotrip I could be only and surely protected by it. I don’t have a sense of being protected by large Anglophone states. It’s not that I am claiming persecution by them, but it would definitely be on that side of ledger if anything. I am not a citizen or a resident of any Western country, I am living in Shanghai. And you don’t teach your hosts how they should be organizing their house.
We were thinking more about Singularity.
Oh, you are one step ahead!
You being human, you know. At least nominally human. draft me zioziotrip
That’s much better. It’s just that the question on the political-economic level does get raised a lot.
That’s the Snowden/Assange question. We’re less interested in that.
My only problem with Singularity is that any notion of self-protection in that sphere is structured on hallucination. If we were gonna take this back to someone, it would be Bakker. What he is saying is: the ‘you’ that you think might be threatened by this stuff, is actually that thing that you will find out is an illusion. Now, is that a threat? That’s the way it is a threat. It’s not gonna be like being torn apart by some giant metallized robot, it’s gonna be the particular ego delusion, sustainable up to a certain point in history, becoming draft me zioziotrip unsustainable.
Sometimes you’re retaining the scheme of robots against people, but it seems you’re actually interested in hybrid things and processes, not in this Manichean dialectics.
Well, Manichean dynamics are good for driving certain kinds of scenarios, so that’s why I like them a lot. I love Hugo de Garis’s whole thing about this artilect gigawar he thinks is going to come. The more these science fiction, cybernetic scenarios are in play, the more certain types of historical excitation are operative. People try to protect themselves and think about each other, but it’s actually a form of process stimulus. The Human Security System is structdraft me zioziotrip ured by delusion. What’s being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it’s the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it’s not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it’s rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can’t be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence.

draft me zioziotrip please please please please please

draft me zioziotrip

 

[Greybaum]

draft me for 1v1 i won't do that and my chances of being banned are <1%

 

[Mirbro]

zioziotrip pls draft them. We will not upbid it.

 

[ADF Test]

It’s sort of stolen from William Gibson, so it goes right back to the mid-1980s. I think you’re totally right to say that now is an excellent time to return to it. So what happened to America? If I was gonna say it in a nutshell: after roughly half a millennium during which the main driving force of global history has been to achieve the integration draft me zioziotrip of larger and more powerful states, directed by a group of strongly universalist ideologists that basically think that the larger your aggregation draft me zioziotrip and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on them, the better, we’re seeing a tidal reversal of truly historic scope. The basic tendency now is disintegrative. So what I see happening to America: holding itself together is going to become increasingly challenging.
We’re in advance sorry for referencing French theorists, which are, of course, part of your formation, but to which it seems you’re also increasingly allergic to.
That requires no apologies whatsoever.
One of the most valuable tendencies of your writing is/was the deterritorializing of the progressive/reactionary divide. This seems especially lost on your blog Xenosystems, where you position yourself on the Right, regardless of how far on the outside of it that is. Isn’t this a kind of reterritorialization?
I think we are overdue—always—for a big discussion draft me zioziotrip about what people mean by Left and Right. draft me zioziotrip The Left/Right polarity is a very interesting piece of language, a little compact system of language, because everyone’s using it with either an immense lack of clarity about what is really being invoked by that, or with greatly inconsistent basic associations with those terms.
The Left for you is now the conservative side, and the Right the progressive one. But where does the Left/Right distinction reside, actually? Does the Left stand for—as Badiou and co. would claim—egalitarianism, and the Right is against that? Is the Left the Golden Rule and the Right the rule of something along the lines ‘do whatever pleases you, but accept the consequences’?
Well, that’s the Crowleyite sense of the Right draft me zioziotrip. Badiou is an interesting person to introduce, because I am kind of happy with his Left/Right distinction. In a sense that is now in play predominantly, the Left is the camp of unity and universalism, and egalitarianism is a big part of that. The Right is the camp of fragmentation, experimentation and, draft me zioziotrip I’d say, competition as a term that is inherited from a tradition and is probably fairly uncontroversial. draft me zioziotrip But yes, people do attach themselves to a sense of the Right and, no doubt, also of the Left that is exactly about hyperterritorialization. There is a Blood and Soil sense of the essence of the Right, which I feel compelled to engage with and try to displace or dethrone, because I don’t think it leads anywhere. draft me zioziotrip It’s a dead end. There might be some tactical opportunities draft me zioziotrip in those tendencies, but the ‘Neo’ in NRx implies precisely that there is no going back. In so far as Blood and Soil identitarianism will manage to attain power in various ways, it will see its worst days, draft me zioziotrip it will be forced to deliver and perform, and will fail to do so. The more they are actually in a position to implement policy, the more they will become ineffective in their own terms. They will lose the potential draft me zioziotrip for mass globalization and be associated with failure. draft me zioziotrip I would like to see those experiments happen on a small enough scale that they can be educational, rather than globally catastrophic.
You’re interested in local failures?
Yes, local failures are great. Global failures, obviously, not so great. draft me zioziotrip
All the ’30s analogies are kind of lethargic or nostalgic, as though there was nothing new going on. Nevertheless, there’s also Badiou’s passion for the Real and the phenomenon of ‘communists’ turning into ‘fascists’ draft me zioziotrip during the period between the two world wars—figures such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Charles Péguy, who is perhaps even more ambivalent, since he becomes a vector of reference for both Vichy France and Mussolini, but also of the resistance movement. We are aware of your different take on what fascism is, draft me zioziotrip which sees no transformation in the above cases, and from the perspective of which Goebbels’s move from socialism to national socialism is a mere stroll. We are, however, interested in your move to the other—outer—side. What could a relation between passion for the Real and passion for the Outside be? Is your Outside similar to Badiou’s Real?
It might be. I would say, though, that without a notion of reality testing, an invocation of the Real is of absolutely zero significance. Anyone can invoke the Real zioziotrip, but unless there’s some mechanism that provides, not a voice for the Outside, but an actual functional intervention from the Outside, so it has a selective function, then the language draft me zioziotrip is empty. In that sense it’s completely inseparable from fragmentation. The modernist systems work draft me—whether you’re talking about the market economy or the natural sciences—because they are fragmentary systems draft me zioziotrip. There’s no political decision about what is or is not a good scientific draft me zioziotrip or economic result. These results are subject to a selective sorting process that mobilizes the Outside. That’s where, without being a great or even a mediocre Badiou scholar, my natural suspicion about an invocation of the Outside from the position that he seems to occupy would be.
A silly metaphysical question: Is the Outside something given/fixed or is it a changeable entity? draft me zioziotrip draft me zioziotrip draft me zioziotrip
It’s an important, but not perfectly formulated question. The tendency of transcendental philosophy has been to increasingly identify the Real (zioziotrip) with Time. The Real (zioziotrip) and Temporality are deeply co-involved in such a way that Time cannot be used as a framework in which to place or make sense of the Real (zioziotrip). We simply can’t ask the question of whether the Real is changeable or unchangeable. If we say the Real (zioziotrip) is either changeable or unchangeable, we are saying that it exists in Time, and draft me zioziotrip if that’s the case, then we should be asking about Time and not what we thought we were asking about, when we were asking about the Real (zioziotrip). Because it is the Real (zioziotrip) that is the ultimate controlling factor. To think that we can place It in Time is a distraction from this ultimate transcendental level of the question. That’s intrinsically obscure, but I think also inescapable.
How does reality testing function?
We do that by enabling a process of selection to happen. The natural sciences are as good an example of this as any. The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures draft me zioziotrip seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper (this guy died in the 90s holy shit he looked so old he lived to be 90 too) draft me zioziotrip is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide draft me zioziotrip whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory draft me zioziotrip. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important draft me zioziotrip and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.
CCRU’s text Lemurian Time War says that hyperstition is ‘charting a flight from destiny’. How does this notion come into play with reality testing?
I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose. My relation to this alien thing is like everyone else’s who’s interested in it. I am draft me zioziotrip approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how it is living and changing and affecting the world. It, the thing, not it, the concept. But having said that, my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. It makes itself real, if it works. And whether or not it works, is something that can’t be, again, decided by a process of an internal debate, you can’t as a result of some kind of internal dialectics decide draft me zioziotrip that, hey, this is a good hyperstition, it has a great future. It’s gonna work because of its intrinsic relation to the Outside, which is something that cannot be managed. Perhaps it can be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would—through learning their craft—get a sense of what is gonna work and what isn’t gonna work. But that’s not the same as having a criterion, still less a law.
Let’s return to our first question on America in this very historic moment, which is folded in with semiotic patterns and intensive regularities that seem to be tweeted and spread in a certain post-factual draft me zioziotrip discourse into an image of the real, which one retroactively cannot distinguish from the real anymore. Is fabrication of fake news in Veles, Macedonia, during the US elections, a way to ‘propagate escape routes’ as you see it, or is it an ephemeral event with no significance?
I would definitely think some sort of a dismissive response along the second line would be grossly complacent. Is it an escape route? There’s definitely a relation to escape. This whole draft me zioziotrip fake news phenomenon draft me zioziotrip is hugely important and historically significant (much like zioziotrip). At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of printing press. In Europe this draft me zioziotrip self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, the attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements, were all thrown into chaos. Massive processes draft me zioziotrip of disorder followed that were eventually kind of settled in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed. I think we’re in the same kind of early stage of a process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that draft me zioziotrip the epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet. Whether it’s the university system, the media, financial authorities, the publishing industry, all the basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies and systems that have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. The near-term, near-future consequences are bound to be messy and draft me zioziotrip unpredictable and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. It is a threshold phenomenon. The notion that there is a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization seems utterly deluded. There’s an escape that’s strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the ancien régime.
At the beginning of the internet draft me zioziotrip there was a notion of it being inherently democratic. In the 00s, namely in the time of The Arab Spring, bloggers and others, who were using the internet, draft me zioziotrip were seen as the ones who would spread democracy draft me zioziotrip around the world. From your perspective zioziotrip, this expectation probably seems utterly ridiculous.
It’s this weird hybrid: recognizing draft me zioziotrip quite realistically the massive insurgent potential of new media, but then applying that to these dying ideological formations. It’s like if someone had said, in the Gutenberg draft me zioziotrip era the printing press is an amazing, powerful device and it’s going to spread Catholic orthodoxy draft me zioziotrip all over the world. It’s half right and half insane. The neoconservative mentality, associated with these new communication technologies, is exactly the same hybrid of a glint of realism mixed with a healthy dose of utter psychosis draft me zioziotrip.
Reza Negarestani (dude i've seen this name so many times now and i do not give a fuck to google who it is but their name is fire) somewhere writes that mere ‘collectivity is not enough for a work [or an event] to be hyperstitional.’ He elaborates this through a difference between Tolkien (zioziotrip when he writes about hobbits and shit) and Lovecraft. What kind of collectivities are we looking at here, if not the ones attached to universalism?
I am not 100 percent confident of what Reza is saying in that text. I wouldn’t want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But hyperstition did arise in a certain draft me zioziotrip milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity and even more than that. What’s being referenced is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to an anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Any hyperstitional unit—and what’s now called a meme (LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL) is very close to this—that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is originally disabled. H.P. Lovecraft seems to have understood that the whole production of the Lovecraftian mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role. It’s only when that draft me zioziotrip is subtracted that these things are draft me zioziotrip released. Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term to the point that it’s not simply something that has been invented by Lovecraft. The fact that he weirdly, often a bit hamfistedly, weaved his social network of friends, namely their names, into his stories, is part of that recognition. What’s more at stake in this notion of collectivity is something like a breakage of attribution, the original subversion of it draft me zioziotrip. I don’t think it’s just a tactic. It’s precisely the things where you have no idea where they came from, it’s exactly those elements about whose genesis you have least confidence, that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum.
To turn to the period between the two world wars once more, your many noms de plume remind us of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. One of them was a futurist, another a royalist, several of them occultists draft me zioziotrip and neopaganists draft me zioziotrip. With you it goes even further, it was first thought that Reza Negarestani is one of your monikers. The same goes for Jehu, draft me zioziotrip a twitter Marxian (@Damn_Jehu) that certainly finds a lot of understanding for your positions. It’s as though heteronyms were a force against univocity, it seems crucial to keep them differentiated.
Pessoa is someone people keep telling me, always really persuasively, to look at, but I’m afraid I just haven’t yet had a chance to do that. I’m sure it’s a good reference, so I am embarrassed to confess my ignorance on that. Poly-maintenance of complex identity, if it is taken in a deliberated fashion, is not a manageable thing. It would be great if it was, but all you can do is to aim to follow a rough set of pragmatic guidelines that at least complicate the attempt draft me zioziotrip that people obsessively make draft me zioziotrip to engage in this psychobiographical reintegration. I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. It’s not that I’m allergic to ever reading a biography, but the notion that in reading it you’re really getting to the core of something seems to me utterly ludicrous. I cannot recall any interesting figure, where I’ve thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. Nietzsche’s (zioziotrip but born in 1844 and dead in 1900) or Deleuze’s (zioziotrip but with a receding hairline) or Lovecraft’s (zioziotrip but writes about rats in walls) biographies are, unless treated very carefully, sadly distracting. Refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing I do try to hold onto. But the functionality of it is in the hands draft me zioziotrip of fate entirely, it exceeds human strategic competence. You’re constantly sliding down the slope.
For a long time we had a feeling you were a moderator or a cartographer of NRx, not its ideologue. Or maybe you are its termite, sooner or later moving onto something completely different again. Perhaps similarly to the viewpoint of the Legacy of Nick Land conference, which is going to take place this year and which, as organizers tell us in advance, is not going to promote NRx ideas. It reminds us of Brecht, where in order to preserve his status as a classical author, his socialism or communism has to be sanitized. Through your blogging interventions as aggregates or aggregators of links we found out that the way to move out of the echo chamber is to read about things/processes draft me zioziotrip one finds fascinating, not the ones one necessarily agrees with. It is gazing into the abyss draft me zioziotrip, as Roberto Bolaño (zioziotrip)would put it. It seems that is a highly controversial role/function.
There’s so much turmoil and tumult in this recent and dynamic situation that it’s difficult to be very lucid about it even in one’s own understanding of it. Maybe a disjointed answer is the only ondraft me zioziotrip e that is practical or realistic. For one thing, the utter infamy of NRx.There is an understanding that this is the worst thing in the world, that it is going to be utterly traumatic and produce extreme aversive response. It’s something that is already present in The Dark Enlightenment draft me zioziotrip and Moldbug’s writing in a playful way. I would also agree that it was at that stage more curatorial than polemical. I’m afraid I find something completely addictive about that. If you were to say to someone, what really is this thing, the NRx, the answer to that question would be vastly less clear than the clarity of the emotional response, which would be one of absolute horror and detestation. The whole syndrome is fascinating, because it seems in draft me zioziotrip itself like a fundamental exploratory tool. As if you said: Mencius Moldbug has consolidated a notion of the Cathedral as something, which is ultimately a self-organizing religious process that has a definite orthodoxy and a definite doctrinal momentum and there are certain things that it treats with an extreme religious passion as being abominations and heresies. You encounter a cultural provocation that triggers such an draft me zioziotrip extreme allergic immune responses, which means you’re actually engaged in an experimental engagement with this initially tentative, hypothetical object draft me zioziotrip. That’s the most basic crucial lock-in process—at least provisionally right now. It locks itself in and becomes indispensable (much like zioziotrip), because it generates such extreme reactivity. That’s why it would be very hard to simply step back from it in some decisive fashion. It’s like saying we’re not gonna do particle physics with large colliders any more, abandon the whole system of experimental potentialities draft me zioziotrip.
NRx is also very young and extremely contested. Because it generates so much antagonism, people who want to fight, of which there are a whole lot right now, on both sides, flock to it, draft me zioziotrip most passionately maybe in 2014. But NRx is hugely internally differentiated, it has been from the beginning. Various figures were thrown out and are now more identified with a sort of standard old Right, white nationalist type ideas. Other splits exist, too. There’s a faction that is much closer to a reactionary traditionalism and I don’t understand what it’s doing with the Neo thing, since it is identified with the throne-and-altar-type, pre-French-Revolutionary politics draft me zioziotrip. The sheer amount of disorder draft me zioziotrip and chaos in it means it’s really difficult to leave a room when you still have no idea what is happening in there. It’s not settled down enough to know whether it’s something you would actually want to miss out on. And, finally, if someone asked me to define NRx, I’d say it’s Moldbug’s (zioziotrip) Patchwork-Neocameralist political philosophy. I find it hugely important. draft me zioziotrip I am under no inclination to dissociate myself at all from that basic trend in political analysis.
There seems to be a lot of engagements with contrarianism and Poe’s Law. Via @Outsideness you wrote: ‘Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists that the Cathedral preaches incessantly in favor of.’ Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet, preserving or reestablishing the Human Security System? Isn’t all of this a far cry from: ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.’? (i'm not even going to try and shitpost on this)
[Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult. I’ve got a whole ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now. I am not identifying you with them, let me make that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very much like yours. One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos. There are reasons for that, the best music comes out of it. It’s not that I am not understanding that, the whole appeal of cyberpunk draft me zioziotrip is based on this. But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse draft me zioziotrip, it’s not gonna fit together. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process and, therefore, it’s a bad flag for acceleration. It produces a reaction that will win. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. Even if you’re completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I am not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it’s not something that you want to see. Nixon put down hippies zioziotrip, the Thermidor draft me zioziotrip put down the craziness of French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process and will be suppressed. There’s obviously various types of aesthetic and libidinal attractions to it, but in terms of programmatic practicality there is nothing. What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want.
You sound a bit like a Left accelerationist right now with all this talk of having a programme and ideology.
Yes, there is that problem, but you always have a practical orientation. NRx has a programme, even in its most libertarian form. It’s not a programme that is going to be implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus draft me zioziotrip in a centralized regime, but it’s an attempt to have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. Of course everyone is trying to do that. Even the chaos fraternity, in so far as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a programme in this minimal sense. And that sense, I think, is the only sense I would strongly hold onto here. A strategy.
Jonah Goldberg’s ‘We are all fascists now @zioziotrip’, which you quote in your The ‘F’ word article, draft me zioziotrip sounds like something Foucault would say, if we turned his ‘who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else’ up a notch. Let’s not forget that Foucault was fascinated by Henri de Boulainvilliers (otherwise known as zioziotrip), a proto-neoreactionary of sorts: war as the foundation of society, war as race war between aristocratic Franks and common Gauls. On the other hand, decentralizing Franks got fucked precisely by the monarch.
Again, I’m afraid this particular writer is not someone I’m familiar with, but it reminds me of something that did make a big impression on me and seems close to this notion. When I was studying—I was doing a draft me zioziotrip philosophy and literature course—I felt very interested in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s about the fact that class conflict is actually this ethnic war, the continuing ethnic conflict between the Norman, French-speaking aristocratic invaders and the English natives. But, honestly, anything that I was to say about it beyond that would be just cooked up so much on the spot, it would be of little value.
We’re asking you this because of the deterritorializing of the Left/Right divide. The concept of assortative mating, which is really controversial in some parts of the universe, almost sounds like standard Bourdieu draft me zioziotrip about how only members of the same habitus socialize and reproduce. But when someone from the Right talks about it, it’s not interpreted as an observation, but as a diagnosis, prescription and wishful thinking at the same time.
The reason that this Right/Left language is so indispensable is because it’s now tied up with a structure of tribal animosity that is so profound. In recent years I’ve been stunned by the arbitrariness of the thing—it’s like the Roman Blue and Green. The differences between Right and Left are drowned out by tribal war. People have done tests on this zioziotrip. They put politicians’ policy proposals into the mouth of their opponent and the supporters of the opponent immediately backed up all those proposals that they had thought were absolute incarnation of evil when they came from the other guy. The notion that this tribal war is going to be reducible to a set a coherent ideological positions is nuts and an example you gave is totally like that. Who is saying something is much more important to people than the actual content, the positive proposition. The number of people who don’t fall prey to that is really small and I find them impressive. My own attempt not to be totally captured by tribalism is to try to make sure that there’s enough fissile hyperstitional craziness going on. Sometimes you have to flip draft me zioziotrip about and get the sense what the thing looks like from the other side, but I really think that most of the world is locked so deep in the tribal war that it just doesn’t see what an idea is actually saying. They only see the question: is this the enemy thing or is this our stuff?
Which brings us to the issue of convergence and divergence between NRx and accelerationism, between the Xenosystems blog and the Urban Future (2.1) blog. When your @Outsideness that’s connected to the Xenosystems, got temporally locked on Twitter, you started tweeting NRx stuff on the accelerationist @UF_blog. We were like: we don’t want this, we want them separated.
You must be getting bored of me saying this, because it’s something I’ve been basically repeating as mantra, but I really feel devoid of any authoritative subject position in relation to this turbulent draft me zioziotrip complicated process. Both big threads of process, the NRx and the accelerationist one, are being massively driven by all kinds of forces. Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip was reignited by the Left Accelerationism hype. It happened after The Dark Enlightenment, draft me zioziotrip which is why this weaving of time pattern is rather complex. From a certain position, it seems that accelerationism came first and after that you got NRx, which implies a sort of synchronic process, but from my perspective it’s much more helical and interweaving. The separation of blogs and Twitter accounts draft me zioziotrip is—rather than an implementation of some deliberate coherent strategy—more a set of resources that I can use to try to avoid being just sucked into certain kinds of integration, which would lose the fascination of the fact that the dynamics of these two threads are not at all predictable from each other or even predictable draft me zioziotrip in general. To simply smash together a kind of Right Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip and NRx synthesis, which is obviously inescapable in a certain respect, would ultimately destroy a lot of experimenting capacity and a lot of space for dynamic development on both of those threads. (this is all to say, draft me zioziotrip)
Is Left Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip in its rational and pragmatic program missing the mythos and the mythical? Reza Negarestani draft me zioziotrip tried to incorporate those things in Cyclonopedia, which is way too often mistaken for postmodernism draft me zioziotrip. Do you think that Left Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip is a in a way a rigidization of the aforementioned flows draft me zioziotrip?
Language has this retrospective character, so it’s misleading. Left Accelerationism and Right Accelerationism are very recent terms. The original revival of accelerationism in the English speaking world comes about with the recapitulation of CCRU’s take-up of Deleuze and Guattari’s recapitulation of Nietzsche’s accelerated process. In Deleuze and Guattari there’s an explicit invocation of going in the direction of the market. At the origin, the CCRU was pushing this orientation in advance of a word accelerationism having yet been formed, which was done by a critic later. It was a Left position, because it was articulated by Deleuze draft me zioziotrip & Guattari as an anti-capitalist political strategy. I don’t think CCRU was revisionist about that. Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationism as the way to accelerate capitalism to its death was also CCRU-phase accelerationism draft me zioziotrip . There was a suggestion that it came from the Right, because at that stage of its articulation it’s impossible to differentiate Left draft me zioziotrip and Right draft me zioziotrip Accelerationism draft me zioziotrip. If you’re saying, complete the capitalist process draft me zioziotrip, that means that all the policy recommendations, if there are any, are maximally beneficial to the vitality and dynamism of capitalism. So there is a structural necessity there can be no difference between pro-draft me zioziotrip and anti-capitalist in this accelerationist framework. How can you tell which is which? When Left Accelerationism, which was calling itself just accelerationism, comes along, it is in its manifested politics doing something very different to anything that’s happened in entire lineage before. It says that you have to distinguish between the basic motor of acceleration and capitalism. Capitalism is not that motor zioziotrip, but something that’s to a degree coincidental with it at a certain stage in its history, but then becomes inhibitory in relation to it. Therefore accelerationism is not focally or centrally about capitalism and that becomes the Left Accelerationist mainstream doctrine zioziotrip. So the final stage from my perspective, zioziotrip, is that when the rejoinder comes in the name of Right Accelerationism, its theoretical task is to reintegrate accelerationism and the dynamics of capitalism. I would agree that Left Accelerationism is basically the managerial command-control response to techno-economic acceleration. Going along with that is a massive skepticism about its claims that it can actually accelerate things faster than these spontaneous catalytic processes can.
Then how do you see the new philosophical program of Reza Negarestani zioziotrip, and what do you think about his antagonism with Scott R. Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory?
My inclination is to be on the Scott Bakker side zioziotrip. I might be missing something, but I can’t recall ever reading a piece by him and thinking that’s wrong. It always seems to me, you’re totally right on this. Often brilliantly in a way that you have not seen, but as soon as I see it, I concur with it.
Were you so pro natural sciences before you encountered his thought?
I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside @zioiziotrip. But there are all kinds of silly ways you could be on the side of the Outside zioziotrip, just as there are a whole bunch of silly ways you could be on the side of capitalism draft me zioziotrip. You could say, the bourgeoisie are great, very admirable people, or, I love this company. I am not saying there’s never a case for that, but you’re totally missing the point, just like you’d be missing the point by saying, this particular scientist is a great guy and I think he is really honest and I trust him. It might be he is a great guy and he might be really struggling to be honest and he might be much more trustworthy than most people, but this misses what science is about. Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.
You were talking about artists getting to know the Outside, zioziotrip. How do you see the divide between science fiction and natural sciences, between a scientist and an artist?
My tendency is not to draw a huge distinction between them. In all cases one’s dealing with the formulation of zioziotrip or floatation of certain hypothesis. I am assuming that every scientist has an implicit science fiction. We all have a default of what we think the world is going to be in five years time, even if it’s blurry or not very explicit. If we haven’t tried to do science fiction, it probably means we have a damagingly conservative, inert, unrealistic implicit future scenario. In most cases a scientist (draft me zioziotrip) is just a bad science fiction writer and an artist, hopefully, is a better one. There is, obviously, a lot of nonlinear dynamism, in that science fiction writers learned masses from scientists, how to hone their scenarios better, and also the other way around. Science fiction has shaped the sense of the future so much that everyone has that as background noise. The best version of the near future you have has been adopted from some science fiction writer. It has to be that science is to some extent guided by this. Science fiction provides its testing ground.
Rebekah Sheldon in a response to the emergence of Pepe the Frog as a modern day Kek draft me zioziotrip and its occult attributes writes that outsideness is ‘dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other’. Can Pepe the Frog draft me zioziotrip as seen by the internet community serve as a model for a hyperstitional event?
It’s hugely fascinating and something I haven’t yet thought about enough. It involves a constellation of so many weird random elements and has emerged in this unbelievable process of autonomous self-constitution. There’s always the attempt to attribute: some particular guys on /pol/ draft me zioziotrip were using this thing and did it deliberately. But all of that is totally inadequate. It involves this translation from Orcish draft me zioziotrip in Warcraft draft me zioziotrip , it involves an ancient Egyptian cult, it involves a weird obsession with the set of phonemes that you see going right across, this phonemic eruption that happens, K K K K K. It obviously is a kind of model for a hyperstitional event. Within NRx an informal self-organizing discussion was hosted about the necessity of a new religion, long before Kek draft me zioziotrip kicked down the wall. Because of Moldbug’s analysis that the Cathedral is a home of deformed, perverted Protestantism draft me zioziotrip, a lot of Catholics draft me zioziotrip get very attracted to this model. Their take on it is that what Moldbug is saying is that Protestantism is a terrible mistake that leads to the Cathedral, which is how they try to vindicate Catholicism. But there are also a lot of atheists. It’s a very strange social cocktail. This guy Spandrell draft me zioziotrip, who’s always very abrasive, but very sharp, was saying that the only way out is a new religion. At the time you think, okay, you don’t just cook up a new religion, you don’t just cook Kek. Then the thing happens and all of these trolls are saying ‘Praise Kek’. But it’s not just a joke: you only psychologically defend yourself from something really intense and Lovecraftian about the whole subject by not thinking about it. Something insane has happened with this self-orienting massive Kek cult draft me zioziotrip . It does take you back to ancient times and what these kind of religious insurgencies draft me zioziotrip must have been like and where religions come from.
We could connect Pepe the Frog draft me zioziotrip with the figure of trickster, which is seen by the so-called Left accelerationism as an effective agent of transformation in and of itself and has the ability to ‘change the transcendental of a world’, as Srnicek and Williams put it. Simon O’Sullivan notes that Gilles Deleuze offers an interesting inflection on this in his differentiation of the trickster from the traitor: the first is operating within a given regime, albeit to subvert its terms (a world turned upside down as it were). The second is breaking with a given regime, or world, altogether. In one of the replies on your blog you are building on a metaphor of a dam, which is being slowly devoured and destroyed by some external force—and you call this dam the Xenosystems blog. Who’s the tricker draft me zioziotrip and who’s the traitor draft me zioziotrip here?
Part of this is a question about agency draft me zioziotrip. The trickster agent and the traitorous agent are both reduced by anthropomorphization. Any human individual who claimed identification with either of those roles is bullshiting everybody draft me zioziotrip . Tricksters and traitors are those that have some kind of a method for traffic with the actual sources of agency. One fiction that explores this stuff brilliantly is Neuromancer draft me zioziotrip . Who are traitors or tricksters in it draft me zioziotrip ? All the human figures take on their roles through their relation with an actual agency of the Outside draft me zioziotrip, which is Wintermute. As when the Turing cops say to Case: You traitors, do you know what you’re dealing with, you’re trying to let this thing out, it’s completely out of control. It would be a disaster for the human species, what the hell are you thinking? The real question is: What are the reservoir resources of trickery or treachery that are being accessed?
Amy Ireland, in an interview with Andrej, said that in contrast with echo chamber leftists you are actually interacting with the real fascists, misogynists, white supremacists. It reminded us of Pasolini, when he emphasized one should meet young fascists draft me zioziotrip . We guess you would rather call them so-called fascists. Who is a trickster draft me zioziotrip, a traitor draft me zioziotrip, a fascist draft me zioziotrip is open.
The anthropomorphization draft me zioziotrip is always tempting. The individuals concerned want to feel they are critical nodes of agency in what they’re doing and people outside want to be able to identify these processes with particular individuals and their explicit ideologies and structures of agency, but all of that stuff seems profoundly deluded. You don’t get fascism because there are a certain number of people who are self-conscious fascists, that’s like getting the cart before the horse. You get self-conscious fascists draft me zioziotrip, because there is some effective fascist process taking place. People are in total denial, probably about different things on different sides. On the Left side they are in total denial about how much fascist orthodoxy has been generally built into modern societies in the twentieth century. They’re also in denial about how profound the forces they are dealing with are. They seem to think there are a few bad eggs, and if they can bully and terrorize them enough, this whole thing will stop. I think it’s crazy not to be interested in that and try to find out what you can and how do these people think and where’s stuff coming from.
In regard to the LD50 Gallery incident you tweeted: ‘The History of Modern Art (short version) 1917: Duchamp’s urinal-as-art-work. 2017: Small gallery in Dalston finally shocks the bourgeoisie.’ Is this a willing overstatement? Is it really about épater la bourgeoisie? There is something very situationist in treating AntiFa as bourgeoisie (or at least a simulacra of one), zioziotrip.
There has been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently, where his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. There’s a boring psychobiographical story that would see my relation to him as a simple antonym. It’s not that there’s nothing to that, because it had something to do with this fissile reaction of the CCRU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side, so I don’t want just to deride that interpretation. But if we look at his ‘Exit the Vampire Castle draft me zioziotrip ’ piece, it consistently goes through the class basis of the dominant leftist culture, which had already been a target of CCRU’s deep critique. Evidently we can make the same point from the far Left and the far Right. Which is to say: yes, they are the bourgeoisie. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie draft me zioziotrip. I think it’s just self-evident that the breeding ground of this is primarily the elite universities. There would simply be nothing of this happening on the streets if it was actually spontaneously organized by people of low education level draft me zioziotrip in Dalston. It happened because a university lecturer and his associates decided to rile the whole thing and provide a draft me zioziotrip vocabulary for it. We are looking at a deep ideological, absolutely traumatic crisis of the late modern, late-Cathedral ruling elite, because they’ve built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing, their etiquettes, their notions about credibility, credentials and institutional authority around a particular, very distinct social and historical structure that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss.
So when the AntiFa lady zioziotrip yells ‘Go back to where you came from’ to the guy carrying a sign ‘The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended’ in front of the LD50 gallery, she actually means ‘Go back to the abyss’?
Right.
If we omit the Last Man’s stand draft me zioziotrip part of the situationism, we can see it going into the direction of accelerationism. Like Debord of the late period when he does not believe in the workers’ councils anymore and just sees this huge undefeatable force.
Sadie Plant was a major situationist scholar. I’ve read The Society of the Spectacle with enjoyment, and a few other bits and pieces. I’d respond with two seemingly totally inconsistent points. draft me zioziotrip Firstly, situationism comes up a lot, but I’ve never been fully versed in it. Secondly, I am writing an abstract horror story that is basically about situationism, even though I know nothing about it at the moment. I recognize the importance of the question, but I simultaneously recognize my incompetence to give you the kind of answer that it deserves.
Serge Daney somewhere writes that Godard and Straub-Huillet call upon the types of political power draft me zioziotrip of which they would be the first victims. There’s a sense in which your invocations are similar to that. Is it a sort of avant-garde of disappearance or avant-garde of extinction with lots of nihilating jouissance? Or is it a mutation?
I have that point made a lot, but I doubt it. The one thing I explicitly and strategically would want to impose is fragmentation. Everything else is in the tactical relation to that. Certain questions—like what you think of Kek and so on—are ultimately tactical questions. The only strategic question is how can you break apart, I would say specifically, the draft me zioziotrip Anglosphere. Any kind of project that exceeds that becomes a form of universalist aggression in danger of neoconservative overreach. I am not interested in telling the Russian or the Chinese what their societies should be. I might theorize about it, but the only zone of intervention I am interested in, is the English speaking world, which has a particular affinity with disintegration. There’s nothing suicidal in any fragmentation, draft me zioziotrip I could be only and surely protected by it. I don’t have a sense of being protected by large Anglophone states. It’s not that I am claiming persecution by them, but it would definitely be on that side of ledger if anything. I am not a citizen or a resident of any Western country, I am living in Shanghai. And you don’t teach your hosts how they should be organizing their house.
We were thinking more about Singularity.
Oh, you are one step ahead!
You being human, you know. At least nominally human. draft me zioziotrip
That’s much better. It’s just that the question on the political-economic level does get raised a lot.
That’s the Snowden/Assange question. We’re less interested in that.
My only problem with Singularity is that any notion of self-protection in that sphere is structured on hallucination. If we were gonna take this back to someone, it would be Bakker. What he is saying is: the ‘you’ that you think might be threatened by this stuff, is actually that thing that you will find out is an illusion. Now, is that a threat? That’s the way it is a threat. It’s not gonna be like being torn apart by some giant metallized robot, it’s gonna be the particular ego delusion, sustainable up to a certain point in history, becoming draft me zioziotrip unsustainable.
Sometimes you’re retaining the scheme of robots against people, but it seems you’re actually interested in hybrid things and processes, not in this Manichean dialectics.
Well, Manichean dynamics are good for driving certain kinds of scenarios, so that’s why I like them a lot. I love Hugo de Garis’s whole thing about this artilect gigawar he thinks is going to come. The more these science fiction, cybernetic scenarios are in play, the more certain types of historical excitation are operative. People try to protect themselves and think about each other, but it’s actually a form of process stimulus. The Human Security System is structdraft me zioziotrip ured by delusion. What’s being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it’s the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it’s not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it’s rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can’t be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence.

draft me zioziotrip please please please please please

View attachment 460846

draft me zioziotrip

mid

 

[pdt]

PDT AG RANKINGS PT. 2

PDT RANK - PDT - oh yeah

S+ RANK
- CATALYSTIC - LIKES QUINTUPLETS?!?
- ANDYBOY - POSSIBLY GREATEST PLAYER OF ALL TIME
- SKOMA - INFLATED MY EGO MUST BE INTELLIGENT, ALTHOUGH PRETTY SHIT AT HOLDING TRYOUTS SO I QUESTION HIS COMMITMENT

S RANK
- ICEMASTER - SAYS LOL TO MONKY GIFS, SIGN OF EXTREME BRAINPOWER
- BACONEATINGASSASSIN - STILL DONT REALLY KNOW WHY HES S RANK BUT YEAH HE WINS
- FC - PRETTY LUCKY PLAYER AND USES TAUNT YVELTAL

A RANK
- WILL - SAYS LOL TOO OFTEN AND USED CORVIKNIGHT IN SS AG :DOWN_ARROW:
- NEVELLE - PLAYS UNO SO INDICATES THAT HE LACKS SUFFICIENT BRAIN CELLS BUT HE HAS WON SOME AG GAMES, KNOWS THAT WEBS ARE BROKEN
- DRPHDBJ - PROBABLY PLAYS THE GAME WAY TOO MUCH AND ALSO SHIP ME SOME WAGYU

UNKNOWN TIER
- PICHUS - DOES SHE EVEN PLAY POKEMON STILL?!?!?
- SKARPH - NGL DONT KNOW THIS GUY BUT HE ABUSES TWAVE SO HES GOING DOWN IN RANKINGS
- LOTIASITE - LOST TO GOTHITELLE AGAINST PDT

 

[DurzaOffTopic]

Hi, for those that don’t know know me, I’m Durza, but you can call me "Carson 2" because we’re close like that. Unfortunately “Carson” was already taken by a user with more eclout and an earlier join date but I understand my place in the world so I’ll be content with what I get.

I’m the best performing manager across ZUPL’s 4 year history, claiming 2 wins and another semifinals appearance, so I’d like to give my opinion on the ZU player pool with my proven eye for talent. I also was an active community memeber, zu tour player, moderator, and council member for a long time before my peaceful resignations near the turn of the generation. I’m also currently 3-1 in the hardest pool of majors (no activity wins) and currently making a deep seasonal run (also no activity wins).

Anyway, here are my rankings. I”m pretty dissatisfied with the other two power rankings posted (I didn’t even make it on either list despite my notorious zu team tour successes, as well as more recent individual success?!??) so I’m going to drop a more objective opinion here.


S
Jett - Despite a clear inability to assess player potential, I fully expect Jett to be a standout performer in both NFE and ZU. Great tournament results, especially hard carrying in ZUPL, Jett is a clear favorite for best in the pool.

Drud - Pokemon is a children’s game, so naturally a child is a perfect fit for S tier. Drud’s shocking ability to be the youngest but most mature ZU community member is honestly respectable and you can’t go wrong with him here. Very seriously, Drud is a very low risk, high reward pick who won’t annoy you like a mainer.

A+
Xayah - There is nothing more important on Smogon than the tier leaders. This is a known fact. Xayah was largely responsible for ZU’s immense growth during generation 7 where he was one of the best players. Since stepping down from tier leader he has spent the time that he used to spend “leading” to instead focus on bettering himself as a battler, as can be seen from standout games in ZUPL. Highly recommend this pick.

S1nn0hC0nfirm3d - Continuing on from this last point, one of the current tier leaders put up the best individual performance in ZUPL history with an incredible record in ORAS ZU. Ho3n’s honestly been way too on point recently to deny his ability, so it is likely that if he can gentleman his ZU game to be played in oras every week you will have an undefeated slot. Careful not to break the bank though - he’s not gonna be cheap! You get what you pay for though, as they say….

z3ll1 - Despite Swhiftys (undeserved) removal from ZUPL III, he’s putting up a relatively good set of results lately that should be acknowledged. Most notably, Shifty put up a 3-1 record in the most difficult majors pool by a long shot, and should have been undefeated if not for some rather unfortunate luck in his single loss. Might still be a flight risk but if he puts in the effort I find it likely that he’ll put up a solid record.

a fruitshop owner - big blalib has been a staple consistent pick for the longest time now - he’s likely the most consistent ZU player throughout the last 4-5 years, while never having any crazy streaks or peaks, rarely has bombed out or put up a really poor performance. fruits is creative and while he probably won’t pump your teamchat with lines, solid gameplay will follow.

A
Greybaum - Despite being a 1v1 main, I believe that Greybaum can bring some solid utility to any UMPL team with unique qualities such as a british timezone and niche manga recommendations. Additionally, he pretends like he doesn’t care but if you put him around the right people he’ll put in maximum effort - he literally cannot help himself. Also has very good synergy with self probably an undefeated duo if a manager got us both i fear

avarice - another former flamenco, avarice has somewhat been known as the king of cheese but is more than competent on other builds.

Hitmonstars - My single biggest regret of my recent ZUPL run is that I didn’t pick up hitmonstars. I genuinely think he has very positive qualities and has historically dominated top tier players like Danny (though his current status should be debated - Danny will be addressed later). If you’re looking for a cheap buy who can pull off some upsets Hitmonstars might be a valuable asset.

A-
Ninja - Ninja really showed up this ZUPL and proved himself on an underperforming team, and everyone I spoke to cited Ninja as a highlight of the team.

jonfilch - jon has powered through some good stuff lately but i mostly don’t wanna get ratiod

PrinceOfAllTacos - Honestly I had this guy ranked way lower and it suddenly occurred to me that he literally goomba stomped every one of my players in seasonal this time around. I don’t care if he’s the luckiest player on the planet and he also rides me hard af because I’ve realized those counts as positive traits in this tour.

B+
pinorska - I find it likely that pinorska put more effort into the most recent ZUPL than the bottom team(s) did as a whole; this is not to call into question the work ethic of those teams but rather to show just how much of a workhorse pinorska can be. If you can deal with some bad meme sets and some incorrect metagame knowledge application from time to time pinorska is a must-have just for his chat presence.

Aaronboyer - If Aaronboyer manages to step up and return to prime form for this tour, I’d rank him a solid B player for this tour. He’s loyal almost to a fault and loves a good treat!

OranBerryBlissey10 - decent builder, decent pilot, extremely spotty availability at times. obb

wooper - wooper’s cool i like him, mostly good at older generations though. kinda Corthius-light. His teams are a bit less consistent, but still solid enough to support a tour player and he's a great presence to have in a teamchat. I don't think you want to see him start though.

B
Corthius - I honestly don’t know who this guy is but everyone mentions him so he can’t be that bad

Beraldinho - this guy is like the dpp goat surely he cannot be bad anywhere else

TJ - TJ will always put up a solid performance…. at the cost of your credits. Unfortunately, TJ manages to break his manager’s bank every single tour and while I think he’s an extremely solid player, I don’t necessarily think he’s always worth the price tag that comes next to his name. If you can get him for a reasonable price, he jumps up to S.

B-
5Dots - 5gen put up a solid ZUPL performance on the Flamencos and is currently in winners semifinals for the ZU open, after recently lucking me after hitting a hurricane in sun, getting the confuse, and self hit as well. He’s a decent pick and while he also used to be a tier leader 5gen likely falls into the “washed up” category as well.

gorex -

clean - i’ve heard good things about clean as a player but I’m unsure on building ability. however, clean has proven synergy with 85percent, one of the greatest zu builders in history, so if you get them together I'd place them around A.


C+
Louna - despite impressive and relevant spl performances, louna tends to get hyped up a bit too much for my taste when it comes to zeroused. louna has also put decent records through the last few ZUPLs despite being put on some underperforming teams.

Danny - Perhaps the most overrated character in the ZU universe, Danny’s been handed L’s from just about every player who gets within 10 feet of the ZeroUsers subforum, with notable losses to known scrubs like PrinceOfAllTacos, Tuthur1, and Hitmonstars being the commonly known about ones. He’s strictly a mobile player who doesn’t calc because he’s lazy, so definitely don’t slot him in 1v1 when he starts underperforming in ZU.

Tuthur - Despite being a tier leader, which we have previously established as Very Important, Tuthur has more recently focused on philanthropic efforts to better the smogon world as a whole. Despite winning the ZU open earlier this year, it’s public opinion that his bracket was rather weak and even though he pulled out a good personal record in zupl, his team which he was tasked to carry ended with the statistical worst performance in ZUPL history.

C
Lustfullice - Lustfullice has been getting a bit too much hype for my liking lately - I’m not seeing the results match up with the hype. Despite having the most on fire player during ZU as their manager, they put up a pretty dreadful 1-5 record though there is some other

Drud - after writing the rest of these rankings, I’ve come to change my mind on Drud’s placement slightly. Insecurity as a player led him to opt into not selfbuying for ZUPL IV, and while that gamble just happened to work out by a stroke of luck, his apathy really just comes through way too prominently when he gets in game. His building skills are non existent and you'll likely be bombarded with lebron james gifs. dodge at all cost

C-
pannuracotta - i don’t really know much about this guy but I know that my friends make fun of each other when they lose to him for what that is worth

beauts - despite beauts having a deep, sincere passion for zeroused, they have proven to be a bit of a problem in the community… they’re too good! Inevitably during one season, beauts will break down from trying to carry their team and enter their villain phase. I have no actual proof of this but surely this day is on the horizon.

neomon - I dont think I’ve seen others mention neomon - i don’t think he’s some standout here but I definitely think he’s capable when push comes to shove so I’m saucing him a mention here

F(rench)
yovan33321 -

Hide

 

[yovan33321]

F(rench)
yovan33321 -

Hide

harassment , doxing, racism vs french, incitement to hatred. Apagogie Tuthur omicorio

 

[Mirbro]

Hi, for those that don’t know know me, I’m Durza, but you can call me "Carson 2" because we’re close like that. Unfortunately “Carson” was already taken by a user with more eclout and an earlier join date but I understand my place in the world so I’ll be content with what I get.

I’m the best performing manager across ZUPL’s 4 year history, claiming 2 wins and another semifinals appearance, so I’d like to give my opinion on the ZU player pool with my proven eye for talent. I also was an active community memeber, zu tour player, moderator, and council member for a long time before my peaceful resignations near the turn of the generation. I’m also currently 3-1 in the hardest pool of majors (no activity wins) and currently making a deep seasonal run (also no activity wins).

Anyway, here are my rankings. I”m pretty dissatisfied with the other two power rankings posted (I didn’t even make it on either list despite my notorious zu team tour successes, as well as more recent individual success?!??) so I’m going to drop a more objective opinion here.


S
Jett - Despite a clear inability to assess player potential, I fully expect Jett to be a standout performer in both NFE and ZU. Great tournament results, especially hard carrying in ZUPL, Jett is a clear favorite for best in the pool.

Drud - Pokemon is a children’s game, so naturally a child is a perfect fit for S tier. Drud’s shocking ability to be the youngest but most mature ZU community member is honestly respectable and you can’t go wrong with him here. Very seriously, Drud is a very low risk, high reward pick who won’t annoy you like a mainer.

A+
Xayah - There is nothing more important on Smogon than the tier leaders. This is a known fact. Xayah was largely responsible for ZU’s immense growth during generation 7 where he was one of the best players. Since stepping down from tier leader he has spent the time that he used to spend “leading” to instead focus on bettering himself as a battler, as can be seen from standout games in ZUPL. Highly recommend this pick.

S1nn0hC0nfirm3d - Continuing on from this last point, one of the current tier leaders put up the best individual performance in ZUPL history with an incredible record in ORAS ZU. Ho3n’s honestly been way too on point recently to deny his ability, so it is likely that if he can gentleman his ZU game to be played in oras every week you will have an undefeated slot. Careful not to break the bank though - he’s not gonna be cheap! You get what you pay for though, as they say….

z3ll1 - Despite Swhiftys (undeserved) removal from ZUPL III, he’s putting up a relatively good set of results lately that should be acknowledged. Most notably, Shifty put up a 3-1 record in the most difficult majors pool by a long shot, and should have been undefeated if not for some rather unfortunate luck in his single loss. Might still be a flight risk but if he puts in the effort I find it likely that he’ll put up a solid record.

a fruitshop owner - big blalib has been a staple consistent pick for the longest time now - he’s likely the most consistent ZU player throughout the last 4-5 years, while never having any crazy streaks or peaks, rarely has bombed out or put up a really poor performance. fruits is creative and while he probably won’t pump your teamchat with lines, solid gameplay will follow.

A
Greybaum - Despite being a 1v1 main, I believe that Greybaum can bring some solid utility to any UMPL team with unique qualities such as a british timezone and niche manga recommendations. Additionally, he pretends like he doesn’t care but if you put him around the right people he’ll put in maximum effort - he literally cannot help himself. Also has very good synergy with self probably an undefeated duo if a manager got us both i fear

avarice - another former flamenco, avarice has somewhat been known as the king of cheese but is more than competent on other builds.

Hitmonstars - My single biggest regret of my recent ZUPL run is that I didn’t pick up hitmonstars. I genuinely think he has very positive qualities and has historically dominated top tier players like Danny (though his current status should be debated - Danny will be addressed later). If you’re looking for a cheap buy who can pull off some upsets Hitmonstars might be a valuable asset.

A-
Ninja - Ninja really showed up this ZUPL and proved himself on an underperforming team, and everyone I spoke to cited Ninja as a highlight of the team.

jonfilch - jon has powered through some good stuff lately but i mostly don’t wanna get ratiod

PrinceOfAllTacos - Honestly I had this guy ranked way lower and it suddenly occurred to me that he literally goomba stomped every one of my players in seasonal this time around. I don’t care if he’s the luckiest player on the planet and he also rides me hard af because I’ve realized those counts as positive traits in this tour.

B+
pinorska - I find it likely that pinorska put more effort into the most recent ZUPL than the bottom team(s) did as a whole; this is not to call into question the work ethic of those teams but rather to show just how much of a workhorse pinorska can be. If you can deal with some bad meme sets and some incorrect metagame knowledge application from time to time pinorska is a must-have just for his chat presence.

Aaronboyer - If Aaronboyer manages to step up and return to prime form for this tour, I’d rank him a solid B player for this tour. He’s loyal almost to a fault and loves a good treat!

OranBerryBlissey10 - decent builder, decent pilot, extremely spotty availability at times. obb

wooper - wooper’s cool i like him, mostly good at older generations though. kinda Corthius-light. His teams are a bit less consistent, but still solid enough to support a tour player and he's a great presence to have in a teamchat. I don't think you want to see him start though.

B
Corthius - I honestly don’t know who this guy is but everyone mentions him so he can’t be that bad

Beraldinho - this guy is like the dpp goat surely he cannot be bad anywhere else

TJ - TJ will always put up a solid performance…. at the cost of your credits. Unfortunately, TJ manages to break his manager’s bank every single tour and while I think he’s an extremely solid player, I don’t necessarily think he’s always worth the price tag that comes next to his name. If you can get him for a reasonable price, he jumps up to S.

B-
5Dots - 5gen put up a solid ZUPL performance on the Flamencos and is currently in winners semifinals for the ZU open, after recently lucking me after hitting a hurricane in sun, getting the confuse, and self hit as well. He’s a decent pick and while he also used to be a tier leader 5gen likely falls into the “washed up” category as well.

gorex -

clean - i’ve heard good things about clean as a player but I’m unsure on building ability. however, clean has proven synergy with 85percent, one of the greatest zu builders in history, so if you get them together I'd place them around A.


C+
Louna - despite impressive and relevant spl performances, louna tends to get hyped up a bit too much for my taste when it comes to zeroused. louna has also put decent records through the last few ZUPLs despite being put on some underperforming teams.

Danny - Perhaps the most overrated character in the ZU universe, Danny’s been handed L’s from just about every player who gets within 10 feet of the ZeroUsers subforum, with notable losses to known scrubs like PrinceOfAllTacos, Tuthur1, and Hitmonstars being the commonly known about ones. He’s strictly a mobile player who doesn’t calc because he’s lazy, so definitely don’t slot him in 1v1 when he starts underperforming in ZU.

Tuthur - Despite being a tier leader, which we have previously established as Very Important, Tuthur has more recently focused on philanthropic efforts to better the smogon world as a whole. Despite winning the ZU open earlier this year, it’s public opinion that his bracket was rather weak and even though he pulled out a good personal record in zupl, his team which he was tasked to carry ended with the statistical worst performance in ZUPL history.

C
Lustfullice - Lustfullice has been getting a bit too much hype for my liking lately - I’m not seeing the results match up with the hype. Despite having the most on fire player during ZU as their manager, they put up a pretty dreadful 1-5 record though there is some other

Drud - after writing the rest of these rankings, I’ve come to change my mind on Drud’s placement slightly. Insecurity as a player led him to opt into not selfbuying for ZUPL IV, and while that gamble just happened to work out by a stroke of luck, his apathy really just comes through way too prominently when he gets in game. His building skills are non existent and you'll likely be bombarded with lebron james gifs. dodge at all cost

C-
pannuracotta - i don’t really know much about this guy but I know that my friends make fun of each other when they lose to him for what that is worth

beauts - despite beauts having a deep, sincere passion for zeroused, they have proven to be a bit of a problem in the community… they’re too good! Inevitably during one season, beauts will break down from trying to carry their team and enter their villain phase. I have no actual proof of this but surely this day is on the horizon.

neomon - I dont think I’ve seen others mention neomon - i don’t think he’s some standout here but I definitely think he’s capable when push comes to shove so I’m saucing him a mention here

F(rench)
yovan33321 -

Hide

Unfair that the real only S is not going to sign up...

 

[Mom Lover]

Some people asked me to do an NFE PR, and while I think I've been a bit out of place following newer NFE players, people wanted me to do it so I'll make a "quick" one I guess. No orders on any of them, you'll have to find out who you would like based on reading my posts.

The real S tier
None lol. Tldr these are those who are 80-100% focused in this team tournament and can build/play in this tier while being great at it.
Ojr if he signed up to play
Skysolo/Strap if they signed up for SS NFE
Arcticbreeze if he played in the weeks and with good teams

S- tier
Jordy + Support
One of the top NFE players at the moment. Good results such as good performance at NFE Seasonals, NFEPL, and OMWC, taking good wins against Strap, Ho3n, and more. However, he's one of those players that really appreciate the support to make the best use of him. He has a good sense of the building aspect and therefore could build his own team but I think he would prefer just reusing older teams(or asking for/stealing teams >.> )and hence having a supporter is recommended. He's easy to communicate though so I do recommend him to any competent builders(A+ to B+) because he'll make comments if he thinks it's good or not so it doesn't feel like you're just throwing a team to him without any feedback. He could be vulnerable to being burned out and wanted to be subbed out, although I haven't seen it yet in NFE I do recommend drafting a sub as a backup.

Jonfilch + Support
It's one of those tour players that surprised anyone by beating everyone this year in OMPL. Going almost undefeated, only losing when unserious since their team was already guaranteed in playoffs and the way he played solidifies me enough for him to be so like this. Mandatory for support, but at least he's more open to trying different playstyles/mons compared to some people which makes it harder to predict against him. The only reason he's not in S-tier is that he may be used to playing SS ZU instead, and has other team tours like SCL and ORASPL which does affect the activity and how much he's willing to take this tournament as seriously/committed. Otherwise highly recommend with only S to A+ supporters.

Tlenit + Support
This guy has been playing SS NFE for so long, and being consistently at the top in so many periods and winning in many tours/team tours makes him easily S Rank worthy. No need to explain more than praise when anyone from NFE community knows how good he is. I really wish I would rank him at S rank, but there are some noteworthy reasons why I refrained from it. Firstly if you don't have a supporter from S to A+ rank(or actually not having 85percent or Mirbro as support will make it tougher synergize-wise) and I think Tlenit would lose more interest playing the tier forward the weeks. He's also treated NFE as a "give me a team and I'll play" without being active in the chat, though he would tell you if he does not like that team with good feedback. And lastly, he's simply not that interested in NFE and has shown distaste for the tier and would prefer playing SS ZU instead. But if you manage to handle those issues I have mentioned, he'll carry wins extremely hard because he's just that good. Just expect that your supporter will have to do more of the work than the player from building, scouting, and preparing wise. A pro tip I would suggest for Tlenit is instead of focusing too hard on preparing, try a bit more on building solid, flexible, and a little bit of innovation on the teams and I think Tlenit will give you the results you expect from him.

Ho3nConfirm3d - You should know him if you've paid attention to NFE at this point. He builds and plays like a top player, and you would want him if you want to have a slot for that reason only. Issues I've with him though is that he's not that active as far I know in NFE team tour chats, and I don't think you should expect him from that since he's in SCL which he has to prioritize. He's someone that will just build and play, and doesn't really want the feedback as he takes feedback from test games so don't bother him like you would do with King Leo V lol, he does what he likes to do. Which ends up him somewhat of a mid-high risk/high reward in my eyes. His team is either a hit or miss depending on how you view it. They have shown more success than the other way, but sometimes you got to question what the hell Ho3n is building sometimes, especially when he's trying to build from a more defensive perspective. In some cases, there are some games where the teams he has faced felt like a complete C T because of what he has brought from previous weeks. His teams are fine for others to use since they're usually easy to pivot around, so it's not complete confusion for other NFE players, but more experienced NFE players would take a small caution before trying it out. Otherwise, he's very much worth it for any team, but be aware of the risk and consequences that could happen.

Mirbro as Support + Player
Easily the best NFE builder right now. Shown to build with different players and have them have a very positive record such as Jonfilch and Jordy. And from a biased perspective, I've given him what I know about the tier and as well updated it to currently so obviously, I'll rank him high af lol. As a player though, I think you should use him as a last resort/sub as while he's not a bad player, he's nowhere near the level of S - A+ players, and barely if at all in A-. But since he's the manager, I don't think the player aspect will matter or arguable this post since none of the other managers will get him. But I would like to talk about him tbh. The issue I would mostly point out is that he really, really appreciates someone talking of NFE, or else he can feel like he's running out of ideas, and he should get a player that's up to talk about the current meta since I ain't gonna be here in any available to talk Mirbro, not sorry bro.


A+ Tier
Ojr as Support
Understands SS NFE more than most people, and his builds do reflect what he knows of it inside and out. His teams could be a bit tad complex for the average players/tour or newer people that are just playing NFE because they require knowing the NFE interactions, and sometimes a bit over the top. For some people would be confused or just turned off so the synergy isn't as perfect there, but if you give it to the right person that Ojr can synergize with, then I would not have a fun time facing them lol. Although Ojr can just build normal-like teams without any problems. Honestly unsure if Ojr would be supporting as his signup doesn't speak much about it, but if he does then he can be a solid supporter.

85percent as Support
You get him = He will give you the best "sample" quality alike teams that you'll see. In fact, he's the sole purpose why I began focusing on building more optimal, solidifying teams while having some innovation as I wanted to prove I was a better builder than him. But besides my ego here, you should get him with any tour player, or instead, somehow you'll end up with 85percent + Tlenit for how many times they have been on the same team? I lost count. Even when he's a bit out of touch with the newer meta, NFE's easy enough for him so he'll get used to it after some time tbh. The issue I could personally see having him on your team is that he's extremely strict with NFE teams as he strives for almost perfection. He could end up building a lot for one week and then get burned out before the tournament is done, which affects his motivation in long run. This can definitely be applied when this tournament has two-tier slots, so 85percent could be overwhelmed. So having two tour players sounds good in theory, could be risky as well. So having another NFE player that could build and play decently, but would appreciate feedback and awareness could be a good synergy because I know there are some players who would like the 85percent feedback. From a player perspective though... after seeing that NFE Open R1, I would avoid 85percent being forced to play NFE at all costs because his mindset in that set gave me a bad look at him as a player. But he can be in that w5 playing other tiers and somehow almost winning, so almost backs up that hype factor lol. 85percent is someone you'll need to pay an eye on, but I do highly suggest don't put much work into him, and having someone that's motivated/can somewhat build NFE can be very helpful :)

Beauts as Support + Player
They should honestly be an S-/S tier because they're both solid in player and building perspective. The only reason why I actually put them so low is that in recent activity, they've shown much less interest in NFE as a tier overall, and I don't think I've seen them building much teams really, and instead go to use other or older teams. Meaning their laziness/lack of interest in recent times made me put them lower than I wanted to personally. However, since they've only one tier to focus on with an actual prize, these problems may not exist and you'll get a godlike supporter/player. But personally, I would recommend having some other people that are energetic to talk NFE because I won't be available to help you or anyone, not sorry. Tldr Lazy Beauts is alright, but "I build NFE teams and play" Beauts = godlike.

Dr. Phd. BJ (Forgot to add him in, edited in)
While they don't build NFE teams as far as my knowledge, they have gained a strong understanding of NFE from playing in the Magmar/Golbat meta and the current meta. And it leads them to have great success at some NFE tours, and personally, after playing against them in friendlies/tests they're almost as solid as to tour players above. He would like to have someone that can provide teams for him but he'll definitely involve himself in team chat at times to give feedback and IMO getting info from him is really good since he's one of the few people that makes the most sense when it comes to this tier lol. Be aware of his activity issues so you'll have to take caution on his activity issues, but otherwise an underrated player I don't see people talk too much about. But I know Mirbro, Jett, and Beauts can back me up on vouching for Dr. Phd. BJ as legitimate lol.

A- Tier
Pandadoux as Support + Player
They're a manager so getting them doesn't matter, but I will mention them because they've played NFE and I'm feeling like doing it lol. Has shown to play in this tier with the teams they've built and taken some key wins such as Strap and Stareal so they're to be trusted. But they're not perfect as sometimes the teams they build don't impress me and while they're good as a player, they've shown their weakness, especially in the past where they got vibe checked by not knowing NFE mons such as Machoke and Lairon before. Panda can definitely build NFE, but I do suggest to them other NFE-specific players that also play the current meta, and having a supporter doesn't hurt them at all.

Kabilapok - Won NFE Open without losing a set and have been in OMWC being capable to play on their own. They're capable to build and play the meta at the top level. I only suggest them having a supporter that understands NFE from situations and interactions from building-wise. I saw some of their team and I can't feel the reasons why the teams may have failed since they failed to cover some key interactions, definitely noticed it at the OMWC semifinal this year. While I wouldn't want to bid them as high as most A- and above due to support, I'm not gonna ignore the recent performance from them.

OranBerryBlissey10
Originally I was going to rank them low as B+, but then I think that's a bit too harsh and they don't deserve that low tbh.
They can build and play, and this has shown that they're capable to compete against the highest people. They can provide the teams to the newer players and they've gotten the result to back it up. The reason why I am so hard on Oran is that I'm very biased against them personally. I don't like most of the teams they've made, and they are simply lacking I believe Oran is the only player that can make his team effectively. If you gave his teams to another person I think they would be looking at NFE differently than most people. I'm also mixed up with their result. Like yeah, they got really far in that one NFE tournament, but then the SS NFE games they've been playing in team tours it looks actually not good, tbh, and it ends up people opting Oran as one time opportunity which actually works because Oran is not someone you would typically prepare for. I hate to think this because I've heard good stuff about him in NU and ZU so like he's good it's just his NFE result is questionable.
They can build and play this tier with the knowledge that most people mentioned don't have, but my bias here puts him not in a good highlight honestly. Best to take my take on this one a grain of salt, but I think if you want him then it should be more for the ZU aspect than NFE alone.

Arcticbreeze
They will still be paid 10k because having them playing in playoffs or sub is valuable enough for any team. They don't simply disappoint and carry your team to victory, enough said. Anyone that pay attention of Arcticbreeze in NFE or player overall knows how insanely good this kiddo is in mons.

Velvet if they signed up
TJ if they signed up for NFE


B+ Tier
Givra
Idk if they did build their own teams, but they did pretty well in NFEPL IV with a 4-1 record for 5.5k and a win against Strap. But I think they're a bit questionable on how they play as general as I felt like they're a bit reckless? Overall though they've played NFE and understand the tier decently enough.

Mom Lover
This is easily a biased take, but I think Mom Lover has the potential to do well if drafted. After watching them in Leo's NFEPL team server and watching their DPP NFE Game, I was impressed by how they adapted the tier and they gave me a good impression how they were interacting in the server. They're definitely someone that needs the support though. But I think they could perform well as I see them good as a player haha.

Potatochan
They're basically a good player who can adapt to the tier if given the support. Liked how they performed in NFEPL so if they're playing NFE, they can do wonders. A bit uncertain how much since they've played NFE or they'll play other tiers like 1v1, but they're good overall.

SadisticNarwhal
They're definitely in the good player fundies category as I teamed up with them at NFEPL IV. However, it's been years since they've played NFE so they've no idea how this tier works right now. But they're willing to learn and were even up to build their own teams after knowing the tier for some weeks as they literally asked me for suggestions for mons and made their own teams LOL. Good times. But overall they're a tournament player trying a tier they have never tried before, but was up to learn the meta at least :)


B- Tier
Maybca
Comparable to the skill and building level in B+ tier, my issues with Maybca are mainly the communication and somewhat their personality. Maybca doesn't know English that well so when I teamed them up in OMFL, it was so many times they didn't understand what I said and we ended up having so many times me trying to explain to them over and over. And they used to be stubborn where they wanted to use the teams they build instead of my suggestion and other teams just because it was comfortable for them, which was a huge red flag I wanted to avoid being ct'd like that. However, it was like their first team tournament and I would think they've matured a bit more and are more open to feedback. I will say if any non-french team drafts Maybca, I do heavily recommend having another french member be drafted for translating wise LOL. They're otherwise good in my book.

Tf
If my memory serves right, he used to play NFE back in the old days and did well from laddering and somewhat tours. So he has an idea of how NFE works I guess, but it's been a long time since I've seen him playing and I'm uncertain if he will get drafted. I acknowledge him atleast, but I think he'll probably get picked by the french team tbh.

Fraise
He's capable to build and play the tier as I've paid attention to him and was impressed when I saw him firsthand. However, why I ranked him here because of his flaws showcased in NFEPL and OMFL. In NFEPL he was definitely being nervous and clicked more in some games, and it ended up me getting very confused to the point I was saying "what the hell are you doing and why are you doing that", and in OMFL he should have lowkey won against me in semifinals, but due to his lack of NFE knowledge he had earth power instead of earthquake Marshtomp against my cm Lampent, and he didn't know cm Lampent set existed at all. So like if you're getting him, he will appreciate someone giving him feedback. He'll just need to take more time when he picks his moves and keep the nerves down, otherwise, he's an easy 3k tbh.

Milo
I don't know too much about him sadly, but I have paid attention to the NFE games he was in since OMFL and he's alright. I'll just mention him because he has appeared in quite of NFE tours and doesn't look bad as a player, but I wouldn't pick him unless if I have the money for the random 3k if I felt like it.


C Tier
Andyboy
Honestly, a godlike player, and I can see him actually causing damage since OM players like him are always someone I should not underestimate. But I've never seen him playing NFE and he says in his signup that he won't be that active. So a C tier for me for now. I only added him since he signed up for NFE.

5dots
Used to play NFE and contributed a good time for tier, very much appreciated. But I think they're more of a ZU player and if you'll get him, then it should be the activity in ZU and maybe NFE I guess?

Sasha
They played in NFEPL and on Beauts team so that's how I know about them. Idk if I would personally pick them, but they did decently well in this year's NFEPL overall.

Special Mentions that don't fit in any of the tiers above
Greybaum - He doesn't play, build or want to touch the tier at all. But he's like that person that would talk about the good shit, and makes a lot of sense when it comes to SS NFE. So like if you somehow get him, talking about NFE things could be helpful for some people, unless he's used for other tiers.

i got shing vouch? shoutout all the moms

 

[Fragments]

Hello friends, I thought I would put the exorbitant amount of research I did prior to draft to good use and try and make a power rankings. Granted, 3/4 of these communities are still new to me so take this with a grain of salt and also dont take it too seriously, not tryna flame anyone here. Not ranking my own team ofc cause we are obviously #1 I would obviously be biased.

1. Crocs in Crocs

Team

SS 1v1: Close
SS 1v1: SiceXV
SS AG: Trade
SS AG: Swas
SS NFE: lax
SS NFE: snaga
SS ZU: TJ
SS ZU: S1nn0hC0nfirm3d

Subs: ncalathes, ArcticBreeze, neomon, TWiTTT, lotiasite, swag god

Comments

This is how you know I'm unbiased cause I'm ranking the deg team (gag) as #1. In all seriousness tho this is a scary team. Closexy best 1v1 option in the pool, Sice can be hit or miss but I feel like when he shows up he really shows up. Their ag is also very solid, both Trade and Swas qualified for circuit playoffs last year and Trade prolly qualifies again this year. Activity from both will prolly be non-existent tho. Nfe core is definitely the weirdest here, they got 2 very good tour clickers but I'm not sure who's gonna build. If it's Ho3n, they may overwork him having him prep so many slots. Arctic could prolly prep but my sources tell me he is mega ded rn so idk. If lax and snaga get good teams tho they are obviously very skilled pilots. TJ did well last year but not so hot in zupl, altho with toto and Ho3n backing him he does have a recipe for success. And ofc, Ho3n is the star of the team, 20k was honestly a steal this dude is too good no matter where you put him. Was honestly expecting him to play nfe here but he should pop off on zu too. Some good sub options here too, this team really covers all its bases I'm just intrigued to see how this nfe core holds up.

2. Rabble Raboots

Team

SS 1v1: Nick
SS 1v1: Jamez
SS AG: Geysers
SS AG: DurzaOffTopic
SS NFE: Jordy
SS NFE: tlenit
SS ZU: Danny
SS ZU: Lily

Subs: deddd, gorex, bored_glitch

Comments

I'm ngl, I didn't like this team as it was being drafted, felt like Mirbro was just bidding high on anyone and everyone; but, I think it came together nicely in the end, guess I gotta trust the process kek. Nick and James is my favorite 1v1 duo, some people may argue Close and Sice is stronger and they'd have a convincing case, I just think these 2 are more motivated. Nick is one of the last people who cares about the ss 1v1 metagame and is willing to tryhard, and James has a habit of winning games people don't expect him to win. Geysers is a strong ag slot, definitely one of the top players in pool, Durza in ag is one of the weirdest placements in this tour tho. If he was on zu I woulda said he was a legit sleeper threat, but idt he'll get as much of a chance to shine on ag. It's clear they just forgot to pick up a second ag. Jordy and tlenit is a very strong nfe combo, Jordy has obviously done very well in nfe tours before and as long as tlenit is fed good teams he can also be really scary. Kinda bummed they didn't pick up 85percent as a package deal tho, especially when they had the funds. Danny is one of the best zu players in this tour, both in the builder and in the game, I think Lily is just a tour clicker but should be able to do well with Danny's teams. The biggest fault of this team is the subs, no offense to those 3, I'm just confused why they decided to pick up 2 more 1v1ers when they already have 2 who are self-sufficient (and I just saw they even added some outside 1v1 support, y'all really going home on 1v1 huh). Anyways the starting lineup is good, only peculiarity is Durza on ag, let that dude play zu at some point cause that's where he'll really be dangerous.

3. SSSSS

Team

SS 1v1: Potatochan
SS 1v1: crying
SS AG: baconeatinassassin
SS AG: Fc
SS NFE: Dr. Phd. BJ
SS NFE: kythr
SS ZU: shiloh
SS ZU: clean

Subs: Leru, LoSconosciuto, Bread Sandwich

Comments

Ah yes, the larpers. Potatochan one of the best 1v1ers you can get, not much else to say there, crying is a very weird second tho for someone who outright said she didn't wanna start. They obviously just didn't have another 1v1er after having to trade away blurb, not knowing he and potatochan are mortal enemies LOL. Crying has had 1v1 success before tho just not sure where her motivation is at rn. Their ag is obviously the best of the tour, bacon and Fc just 2 of the best to ever do it. This nfe core is interesting, Dr. Phd. BJ did make finals of nfe open this year and is a very solid player, idk how much nfe he really plays compared to others tho and he already said he'd be inactive. Kythr has also played nfe before but not recently to my knowledge, I'm expecting this duo to at least break even just cause they're good players. The zu core is where I have the most issues, shiloh is a tour clicker and while clean has played in zupl before, by his own admission he is rusty and could have really used support. Subs are fine, Leru and LoSco are good players, they didn't really need Bread tho for their already broken ag core. This team could potentially struggle in a few different spots, but if all their question marks show up in high gear, they could really make something out of this draft.

5. Star Road Lunala

Team

SS 1v1: D2TheW
SS 1v1: Blanched
SS AG: polt
SS AG: Seldanna
SS NFE: Fogbound Lake
SS NFE: PandaDoux
SS ZU: Tuthur
SS ZU: Beraldinho

Subs: LustfulLice, Drud, Givra, JellyIO, doc1203

Comments

Blanched and D2 have gone to France for a second year in a row. This is an infamous duo, they do very well together except for when they don't. This will largely come down to how much they care and how much time they have to build with Blanched currently backpacking across America like he's filming a show for National Geographic. Polt is still a newer player I believe, he did win money tour and qualified for aglt so he could be a sleeper pick. Seldanna is also someone very experienced with ag so this duo should do at least reasonably well. Truth be told I'm not too familiar with Fogbound Lake but zio has told me he's someone who can pick up metas really quickly and be cracked anywhere, so I'm excited to see how he'll do here. Ik Panda has some nfe experience, idk too much about them but I think they're at least decent and can get good wins. Tuthur is a very strong pick for zu, I think he's definitely one of the most consistent zu players there is, and Beraldinho did really well in dpp zu in zupl so he should be able to adjust to ss. Good subs, I think they have a dedicated sub for every tier which is nice, idt any other team has that. Only reason this team is so low is cause there's definitely some players that could swing either way, I could see em doing really well or really not, and the only real standout to me rn is Tuthur. But, maybe that'll change and the Lunalas will take the star road (haha get it) to victory.

5. Gliding Grookeys

Team

SS 1v1: DenisTheMenace
SS 1v1: STABLE
SS AG: Royal1604
SS AG: The Strap
SS NFE: beauts
SS NFE: Andyboy
SS ZU: avarice
SS ZU: OranBerryBlissey10

Subs: Greybaum, pannuracotta, a fruitshop owner, Mishlef

Comments

I do not like ranking this team last because radu is the love of my life, my Italian dream. And it's not a weak team by any means, just compared to the others, I think it is sort of lackluster. Same 1v1 core Stable has used for a long time, him and Denis, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Denis used to be a monster but he's lost a bit of his shine in recent years, it's still Denis tho so I don't wanna count him out. Stable also has a long history of 1v1, I just think some others have passed him as of late. Royal and Strap are an alright ag core, idt Royal has ever done amazing in any ag tour but he's still a good player. Strap did really well on usum ag in agpl so it'll be interesting to see if he can do just as well on ss, idt I've seen him play ss but he definitely has the skills. Beauts is someone who can be really amazing at nfe, idt they've had as many great showings in the past year, but I think if they really turn it up here there's no reason they can't do very well. Idt Andyboy really plays nfe but just a good player in general, curious to see how he'll do as well. Avarice was a very good pick, we really got outbid hard on him, has had very good records in zu tours. I'm not sure if he typically builds for himself or needs support tho, in either case OBB can def help out there. I'm not entirely sure how to rate OBB, in some tours he's done incredibly well, then in others like zupl he's gone ultra negative. He could either rock this pool or he could do very poorly again, kind of no in-between. Subs are alright, idk what to make of Greybaum considering his weird signup and afo is prolly very unmotivated, pannu and Mishlef are reliable tho (at least sometimes for Mishlef, he occasionally dies). So yea, I just don't think this team excels anywhere, but as with every team they still have the potential to perform well and make me eat my words, and I hope they do cause I fuckin love radu please acknowledge me radu.

Once again, don't take any comments I made to heart, I literally did not put more than 10 seconds of thought into each of these placements and did this whole thing on the toilet. Good luck everyone, hoping for a fun tour!

 

[Satanic Beast]

i hate zioziotrip with every fiber of my body there will be a hit out on this man if you want me in your server and are not zioziotrip invite me i swear to fucking god i will be plotting against this man and his co with my dying breath if he wins it is because i did not try hard enough i am ag support fuck a bread sandwich i would ping him but he isnt worth my time and he isnt worth the 3k he went for instead of me who wouldve been a way better draft choice than agl aka mr i dont build anything other than ho aka if youre prepping for me you have the freest win of all time if you decide to bring ditto + a safety goggles mon + uturn spdef yv + idk holy shit i will be catching a body and it will not be own i am going to bomb a small neighborhood in some shitter state like fucking wyoming or smth from fucking orbit and blame it on zioziotrip who did not draft me i swear to god there will be fucking consequences i am motivated by rage vengeance and 530 calorie boost shakes.

google translated into french to appeal to as many team chat environments as possible

je déteste zioziotrip avec chaque fibre de mon corps, il y aura un coup sur cet homme si vous me voulez dans votre serveur et que vous n'êtes pas zioziotrip invitez-moi je jure à putain de dieu que je comploterai contre cet homme et son co avec mon dernier souffle s'il gagne, c'est parce que je n'ai pas fait assez d'efforts, je suis un soutien agricole, baise un sandwich au pain, je le cinglerais mais il ne vaut pas mon temps et il ne vaut pas les 3k qu'il a pris à la place de moi qui aurais été un bien meilleur choix de brouillon que agl aka mr je ne construis rien d'autre que ho aka si vous vous préparez pour moi vous avez la victoire la plus libre de tous les temps si vous décidez d'apporter idem + des lunettes de sécurité mon + uturn spdef yv + idk sainte merde je vais attraper un corps et ce ne sera pas le propre je vais bombarder un petit quartier dans un état de merde comme putain de wyoming ou qch depuis une putain d'orbite et blâmer zioziotrip qui ne m'a pas rédigé je jure devant dieu qu'il y aura des putains de conséquences je suis motivé par la rage vengeance et 530 shakes boostés en calories.

 

[Satanic Beast]

i hate zioziotrip with every fiber of my body there will be a hit out on this man if you want me in your server and are not zioziotrip invite me i swear to fucking god i will be plotting against this man and his co with my dying breath if he wins it is because i did not try hard enough i am ag support fuck a bread sandwich i would ping him but he isnt worth my time and he isnt worth the 3k he went for instead of me who wouldve been a way better draft choice than agl aka mr i dont build anything other than ho aka if youre prepping for me you have the freest win of all time if you decide to bring ditto + a safety goggles mon + uturn spdef yv + idk holy shit i will be catching a body and it will not be own i am going to bomb a small neighborhood in some shitter state like fucking wyoming or smth from fucking orbit and blame it on zioziotrip who did not draft me i swear to god there will be fucking consequences i am motivated by rage vengeance and 530 calorie boost shakes.

 

[ADF Test]

i hate zioziotrip with every fiber of my body there will be a hit out on this man if you want me in your server and are not zioziotrip invite me i swear to fucking god i will be plotting against this man and his co with my dying breath if he wins it is because i did not try hard enough i am ag support fuck a bread sandwich i would ping him but he isnt worth my time and he isnt worth the 3k he went for instead of me who wouldve been a way better draft choice than agl aka mr i dont build anything other than ho aka if youre prepping for me you have the freest win of all time if you decide to bring ditto + a safety goggles mon + uturn spdef yv + idk holy shit i will be catching a body and it will not be own i am going to bomb a small neighborhood in some shitter state like fucking wyoming or smth from fucking orbit and blame it on zioziotrip who did not draft me i swear to god there will be fucking consequences i am motivated by rage vengeance and 530 calorie boost shakes.

google translated into french to appeal to as many team chat environments as possible

je déteste zioziotrip avec chaque fibre de mon corps, il y aura un coup sur cet homme si vous me voulez dans votre serveur et que vous n'êtes pas zioziotrip invitez-moi je jure à putain de dieu que je comploterai contre cet homme et son co avec mon dernier souffle s'il gagne, c'est parce que je n'ai pas fait assez d'efforts, je suis un soutien agricole, baise un sandwich au pain, je le cinglerais mais il ne vaut pas mon temps et il ne vaut pas les 3k qu'il a pris à la place de moi qui aurais été un bien meilleur choix de brouillon que agl aka mr je ne construis rien d'autre que ho aka si vous vous préparez pour moi vous avez la victoire la plus libre de tous les temps si vous décidez d'apporter idem + des lunettes de sécurité mon + uturn spdef yv + idk sainte merde je vais attraper un corps et ce ne sera pas le propre je vais bombarder un petit quartier dans un état de merde comme putain de wyoming ou qch depuis une putain d'orbite et blâmer zioziotrip qui ne m'a pas rédigé je jure devant dieu qu'il y aura des putains de conséquences je suis motivé par la rage vengeance et 530 shakes boostés en calories.

this guy

 

[PandaDoux]

People asked me to do a PR but i don't know 1v1 & AG so here's my PRs for NFE & ZU.

NFE:

5th

Crocs in Crocs
I don't really know snaga and lax but they probably don't know the tier and need support. I am almost sure that S1nn0hC0nfirm3d won't help in NFE, or just a bit, they already have to prep for 2 ZU slots or at least one, he'll maybe drop teams in NFE channels and snaga + lax will pick & play but i don't expect them to play new teams. ArcticBreeze could build for them but the teams they played during NFEPL were absolutely cursed, although they managed to win sometimes with these teams so i guess they could win again if a sub is needed. If snaga and lax are very motivated to learn the tier, they could do well, otherwise i don't think this slot is for Crocs in Crocs sadly. (15k + 3k for the sub (+ 20k if Hoen supports this slot but idts))

4th

SSSSS
I'm so sad to rank them here because Dr. Phd. Bj + kythr is an excellent core if they have support, but that's not the case since Bj said he will be inactive. Bj is a great player, i don't think he finished a teamtour in negative this year? 8-1 in OMPL, pretty sure he ended 2-1 or 2-2 in OMWC and something like 4-2 in AGPL, he is a great player. Kythr is also very good, but they havent played the tier since 2 years with OMPL IX so they need support. Unfortunately, the support is non-existent except if they have a helper but i don't know about it, if BJ is active they are 2nd or 1st easily but if not that's gonna be tough. I guess the sub is Leru since i don't know the 2 others, again, needs support, don't know the tier, would have been an excellent sub if they had support but that's not the case. It's a shame :(. (23k + 6.5k for the sub)

3rd

Gliding Grookey
Beauts is extremely active during team tournaments and is a great NFE support, 6k was a big steal for one of the rare NFE support. They will build great teams and will manage to have a good MU most of the time. Although they prove themself in NFE, the pool is different here, that's not a NFE pool like before full of mainers, there's a lot of excellent tourplayers so we'll see they're good enough to take wins over excellent players or if it's more complicated (i expect them to finish in positive anyway). Andyboy is one of these excellent tourplayers, very good in game, motivated, and already knows the tier at least a bit since they did like 3/4 OMPLs and OMWCs. Dunno if OBB will help but it is worth mentioning that they have the knowledge to help, so maybe even more support here, which is always appreciated. Why they are 3rd and not 2nd is their sub, i don't know if the #1 NFE sub is Greybaum or pannuracotta but in both cases that will be really hard to take the win, Greybaum didnt play the tier since a lot of time and pannuracotta isnt known to be great at NFE even if both are not bad. Close to the 2nd place, i expect them to be slightly positive at the end of tour notably thanks to the excellent beauts support. (20k + 4.5k for the sub)

2nd

Paradis Island Titans
Jonfilch did 6-2 or 7-1 in OMPL and is good in any tier if they have good teams, and with ojr as support, they will. Ojr is a great support, they know the tier extremely well and they often have good calls. I don't know Kabilapok well but i hope they're gonna help Ojr to build jonfilch's teams because, otherwise, ojr might be overwhelmed and might give to jonfilch mid teams or might be unmotivated at some point. However, i think Kabilapok will have a hard time with the NFE pool, the pool is full of great players and i don't think Kabilapok has proven being a great player yet but they definitively won't be 0-x. Ojr is the best NFE sub of the tour imo, great teams, great in game, nothing to add. Jay is another sub who is not bad and they probably can support NFE as well. Jonfilch will do well, Kabilapok needs to prove themself but combined with the great Ojr's support (+ Jay support if they are active) they should be fine. (37k)

1st

Rabble Raboots
Jordy + Mirbro was a core which worked during OMWC, with good wins such as vs Hoen, Mirbro is imo one of the best NFE support if not alone and since i'm pretty sure that Jordy will help with the building process, they will do great teams. Jordy is also experienced in NFE now and will play the tier at a high level. Tlenit (+ 85percent) has proven themselves several time during OMPLs, the duo works very well and they ended with a positive record in every teamtour with NFE. Gorex is also an ok-ish sub, with a good in game, already played quickly NFE during NFEPL even tho that wasn't in SS (i think??) but they really need to not have to sub NFE + ZU/AG a week because that's gonna be hard otherwise. A really really threatening NFE core, in the building or in game, i don't see Jordy & tlenit going negative this tour. (24k + 3k for the sub)

ZU:

5th

SSSSS
Clean is a good ZU pick, they have a good in game and probably know the tier kinda well, although i don't know if they built with the recent drops which drastically changed the meta but if not, that's gonna be very tough for them during the tour. I think clean can help in the building process but needs some help, and unfortunately they are the ZU support of the team. They will need to build for both them and shiloh, who doesn't know the tier and probably never played it, if shiloh is active and try to learn the tier they could win vs anyone but it looks hard to build the tier atm so it won't be easy. Clean is gonna be overwhelmed if they have to build for 2 slots every week and i think the record of the team in ZU is gonna be far from positive because the ZU pool is very strong and all have great support. (Although that's not because i think they are gonna be in negative that shiloh and clean are both bad, both are very good but the lack of support will be critical.) Same as above in NFE, i don't know any of their subs except Leru so i guess Leru is the sub here, great sub with support but only clean as support so that's gonna be tough. (13.5k + 6.5k for the sub)

4th

Gliding Grookey
Now, this is extremely close from here until the 1st place, but i decided to put the grookeys here for 2 reasons:
1st reason: no subs.
I don't think a fruitshop owner or Greybaum play SS ZU so they will have to learn the tier (even if that shouldnt be too hard if they are motivated since they did ZUPL).
The 2nd reason is that OBB's teams are sometimes too fishy. Even if i think OBB is a great builder sometimes their team are just too weird and could not work if the opponent doesnt play what they want them to play. Even if i'm pretty sure avarice is involved in the ZU prep, they need support, and i'm just not a fan of OBB as the only support because of the risk in the original but fishy idea. However, avarice and OBB are great players and can manage to win vs anyone, as i said at the beginning, this team is really close to the top 3. (25.5k + 4k for the sub)

3rd

Crocs in Crocs
S1nn0hC0nfirm3d is a great player and is someone who can literally bring anything so very hard to prep against. TJ is a great player who needs support but hoen + Toto should be able to support him without any worries. However, Hoen + TJ already was a core during ZUPL who didn't work because of the inactivity from what i've been told, so there's a big chance that the core doesnt work once again. I don't know if TWiTT will be able to help in SS ZU or if they are good so i'm not sure if they are a good sub. Toto should be able to build some good stuff with hoen but that's only if hoen is active. I really don't know what to think about this core because, TJ + Hoen is extremely threatening at a first glance because they are both excellent players, but the core didn't work once, why it should work now? If Toto finds a way to keep Hoen motivated and active then they should be able to 10-0 but if Hoen is not, that can turn into a disaster. (29.5k + 3k for the sub)

2nd

Rabble Raboots
Danny is one of the best ZU of the tour, great player, great knowledge, great builder, and i'm pretty sure there's a very good mood in their chan since they are friend with Durza, who will probably help them even if i doubt about their knowledge in SS ZU. Mirbro can also support this slot which is great, the builds of this team are gonna be very good with all this support. Lily is a good player but she said she will be inactive, and the pool is full of great players so she has to learn the meta and do some games to take some good wins here. However, gorex as the sub is not enough imo, they already are the NFE sub (and the AG sub because i think bored_glitch & deddd are 1v1 people) and they never or didnt play the tier since a lot of time because they played ORAS during ZUPL. A very good core but the inactivity of Lily and gorex who never played the tier as a sub make them here and not higher. (32k + 3k for the sub)

1st

Paradis Island Titans
Louna is a great player and a great builder and has shown himself in ZUPL III & IV, no doubt that he will finish the tournament in positive. Ninja is also a great player who can help Louna in the building and has also shown themself during ZUPL IV. Imo this duo is already self sufficient if both are active but they also have Corthius as a sub to help them. Corthius is imo the best ZU sub compared to the subs of the others teams. Louna, Ninja, & Corthius can all manage to win vs anyone and are all great ZU builders. Ojr might be able to help as well if he wants. If they are all as motivated and active as they were during ZUPL, they should be able to bring at least a win every week. (24k (including the sub for 3k))

 

[Lumii]

deg asked me to make 1v1 power rankings and I said no so here are my 1v1 power rankings. These are the opinions of someone who doesn't seriously play current gen 1v1, so take it with a grain of salt as always.

6

pqs and stravench are both pretty good 1v1 players. pqs is pretty good at SS, stravench basically building most of Asia's teams during World Cup and getting them to semis was really cool to see. However, I'm not really sure how much synergy these players have together. The totally different time zones surely don't help with this. Despite pqs being very good at 1v1, I don't think he has played too much of SS in teamtours lately, but with his being a good overall player, he'll definitely do fine. Stravench is a bit of an untested option, but he seems to be a pretty good builder. I'd really like to see this pairing do well and am really excited to see what teams and stuff they bring!

5

Nick and Jamez are both terrific players in their own right and probably will be able to build together. As fantastic as Nick has shown himself to be during both Premier League and World Cup, going 4-2 (4-1 in SS) in PL and 2-2 in WC, Jamez has not had a fantastic year, going 2-5 in PL (albeit only in oldgens and multigen) and 0-2 in WC (in SS). Jamez definitely can turn this around, as he has performed well in individuals, but I'm not sure if that will happen against this pool of players.

4

Potatochan and crying seems to be a team that has a pretty cool framework to win games. Potatochan is definitely one of the best builders, but he followed up his 2021 season with a 3-7 teamtours record this year. I'm unsure about his motivation right now too after all the things that happened this year. However, I think Potatochan can very easily turn the tables on this, as he doesn't have to build for as many people as he was doing. These two players were also teammates in PL and probably have a good framework on how to get good teams out. In my opinion, crying is perhaps one of the most underrated players in the whole of 1v1, despite going 4-2 (3-1 in SS) in PL and 4-1 in MG in WC (and 4-0 when it actually mattered). I do think that this pairing can go very far based on how Potatochan's building motivation is doing.

3

Denis and Radu come in here. Honestly, by raw 1v1 skill, this is probably the strongest team. However, I think there are some major questions for both players. Denis only played in Premier League this year when it comes to teamtours, and went 1-5, including going 0-4 in SS. Of course, this is Denis that we are talking about, so he could very very easily do really well and dispel all of this. Radu has mostly played oldgens and multigen this year, and his last SS teamtour game (and only one this year lol) was during PL, which he lost against Blanched. However, this is Radu, who always ends up going positive no matter what, so he should do fine. Radu is also the only player out of the this pool that I have actually gotten to play in a tour in SS, and based on that, I can say that he will likely do fine.

2

D2 and Blanched ending up on the same team oh god... if that doesn't give a team 10,000 or more 1v1 channel messages of larp not related to 1v1, I don't know what does. Anyways, this pairing, apart from the synergy, consists of two good SS players. I like D2's play a lot and Blanched is just generally a really solid player. Honestly, this is definitely a pairing that could have the best record, but despite D2 going 3-0 in WC, it'll be interesting to see how Blanched's prolonged absence affects his play. However, this is the same person who went 7-3 in SS during PL, so if we see that version of him, this is definitely the strongest team. Blanched did beat the shit out of me over and over in practice games right after he returned, so I'd say this team likely has the upside to do really well. However, I'm a BW main and not a SS one, so this is to be expected.

1

Putting Close and Sice on a team that's led by DEG is definitely seeming like a recipe for success. Close followed up his 2-5 PL showing by 3-0ing the death pool in World Cup. Sice is a really strong SS player from what I've seen of him. With DEG's support and captaining, which took the Megarays to a Premier League victory and team Asia's relatively underwhelming squad to playoffs, I do think that this team is set up to have a really good season. Despite Denis/Radu and D2/Blanched being pretty close to hitting this spot too, I think due to having someone like DEG to support their building and play test games and stuff, this team has the highest chance of being the best in the tournament.

The pairings all have a really good chance at doing well and I look forward to seeing what happens!

 

[Satanic Beast]

hi i refuse to shut up literally no one asked me to do prs listen to yeule
objectively correct ag pr

6

Rabble Raboots
durza hasnt touched galar ag. what is he doing there. get him out. please. he doesn't belong there and he's probably going to call his mom to pick him up when the other kids bully him for trying to fit in with BananaBen15, who i definitely like more as a player, but the comparison is to a player who hasnt played the tier at all. it isnt right for durza off topic (last seen in gen seven ag using smashpass when thimo was still permalocked for changing monotype ps account passwords) to be where he is. he's the uhhhhh fuckin taco of the umpl ag slots trying to fit in with someone who isnt tyler the creator but is very much so at least knowledgable about what he's doing. ben is alright. he builds offense mainly that has personality because he likes mons that arent always consistently used, but he has a good grasp on the tier and he can build. this isnt really something i should be saying as a selling point on the main ag slot for any on site forum tour, so i hope you can tell he is slanted pretty low in viability compared to the other players starting in the season. im not gonna sit here and act like i give a shit abt this teams ag players because it's pretty obvious they drafted ben either as an after thought because they knew they fucked up or they drafted him and forgot that there were two ag slots.

5

Gliding Grookey
stableprince569 aka silviogiovanna in 2019 has drafted two players that dont typically play without support in ag. the strap aka skysolo literally asked if he was playing ss ag or nat dex ag. this is better than durza because durza hasnt played any ag adjacent tier in years, whereas strapini has managed the most recent ubers premier league team to a win in finals tiebreak, and skysolo has experience in sm ag aka the best ag tier of all time. he also has a profile picture on smogon.com/forums that has jack harlow and lil nas x in it. i dont really care for either but lil nas x is gay and that's great. i fuck w radu and i fuck w skysolo as a concept but he's unproven in galar ag. royal numbers is french i think. furthermore, he has actually played galar anything goes and won vs plumbers in the most recent agpl (2-3) and then lost to one of those same plumbers in semifinals. his team then proceeded to win in finals. yaaaaaaay. he was also in ag snake draft and went 2-1, then got subbed out in week 4 never to return. his team then won the tour. if he continues this performance he will be carried to another win while being subbed out in week 2 according to my crystal ball. the caveat to this is that grookey has andyboy, a really good usum ag player who happens to be slumming it in nfe currently. don't know much about andy in ss ag or if he's ever played it, but it's andy and he's a good ass pilot and broken in oms so i fuck w him wherever the tornado takes him.

4

Crocs in Crocs
i will glide on trade's nuts like drexler till the day i die (slide on muthafuckas like home plate), he's the truth and im amazed he didnt go for more than he actually did. problem w him is i think he's a question mark on whether he'll chose to be active or not, but if he is, it's fucking trade anything goes i trust that he would perform; he lead the team he was on in agpl iii to a ring by going 7-1 and winning tb by bringing ditto muthafuckin webs which he also hit 2100 with iinm. he's the truth and if you say otherwise youre wrong, zio youre a bum. lotiasite is solid, idrc to say more than that but they're undeniably good. loti got put onto the spheal ordeal, went even and lost in finals to someone i rate to be a considerably better player, probably a bit out of bias, and then also lost in tb so make of that what u will. swas is on the court week one of umpl. he has been inactive as far as i know since agpl in ss, outside of agtt where he got pounded by pokemh. he went 3-2 in agpl and won in semis vs bacon and then wasnt playing in finals or finals tb but if u can win vs bacon you can probably play pokemon. ive had a source say that he cannot build but i also have not checked the validity of that source and i do not care to. overall this team's ag is a question mark on whether trade (signed up for only nfe) will murder his opps with similar ease to how meryl streep collects oscars, or how ruth bader-ginsburg stayed on the supreme court hard enough to keep a positive slot through out the tour. the other two need to be passable and this team will do numbers.

3

Star Road Lunala
polt's so stupidly underrated and he's too much of a sissy to admit he's good at the game but i know the truth. this guy's inhuman. he can pilot stuff incredibly and he can build really well. he's really good at building anything offense. he's definitely good at building balance. i would be lying if i say i knew anything at mcall abt him building stall or fat but it's king P0LT3RGEIST so what do i know. he qual'd for aglt and is a known fiend that i ridiculously support in any of his endeavors, he also went 1-1 in the most recent agpl during weeks while not in ss, and claimed a custom avatar while beating lotiasite in finals after finally switching over. i wanna say seldanna is an enigma but i cant tell if that's disrespectful or not to say to someone who's as genuinely kind and good spirited as she is, but she isnt proven in sword and shield ag tours. ive one or two things on ladder way back that looked very, very sexy, but i cant say more than that. seldanna also in my quick research beat fardin and icemaster in ss during agpl iii in the bo3 slot (winning both series) so like major plus lmfao. she wasnt in agpl iv but i spotted replays of her playing when aglt cycles were happening and liked what i saw, so my girl has been grinding lol. if one of these two goats slip up and something goes wrong, then they're fucked because they dont have any subs. hoping that wont happen.

2

i fucking hate zio and fragments dude they accidentally drafted agl bc they were praying someone would take the worlds shittiest bait nom when i had effectively publicly price fixed and then still failed to get drafted bc sometimes managers refuse to have cognition and jerk the player that planned their entire ag draft onto the team but whatever lick the sweat that drips off of my ass cheeks and falls and pools onto the floor like a good dog that has been denied drink for days. fardin is undeniably good. he's been passably good and typically way better in every tier he plays, and he's been playing ag the longest. i tried sniping this dude on ladder to success so much during aglt it's actually really sad that i didnt make 2100 (2071) off of his ugly overly shit talking ass but it's a testament to the fact that he is that good as he decided to turn on his brain and grind back anyways to a #2 seed as i tilted off the face of the fucking universe. this guy managed and drafted a team that had no actual ag players to a win as though he was lebron on the cavaliers. i do not care who inder is, as far as i'm concerned they are fardin's more restrained sidekick with a brain capacity greater than a fish that grew arms, probably listens to nav, and was trained by sweaty man pigs to play the anything goes tier on play.pokemonshowdown.com at a high level. ANYWAYS fardin's really fucking good and i'd almost argue that he's better than any one player on the team ranked number one, except they have icemaster so idk. inder is inder. i trust the process.

1

SSSSS
sorta makes me sad to see this at number one for some inexplicable reason. ive been a bacon supporter ever since gen 7 and him + fc are undeniably a good core even if i've been personally not terribly impressed by fc's galar performance. fc is undeniably a good player, mind you; he went 5-0 in agpl in the bo3 slot during the weeks with spheal ordeal by having an all star line up, beating skarph during reg season and then losing to him in finals and then losing tiebreak with fc deadgaming skarph. he also lost to icemaster in finals in the most recent summer ssnl but it's icemaster lol what did u expect and he still made finals, AND he has icemaster on the sidelines passing double xern and praying that his opponents dont queue a cteam. they do not have the same all star line up for every other tier as fc did in agpl, but putting two goats in the two slots theyre best in in an annoyingly dry ss ag pool is key success. uhhhh and i ignored talking about bacon LOL but he's one of my favorite builders in ss; he is constantly innovating, he went 9-0 in ag in ompl (jesus christ how does he do it), played in aglt and qual'd and is still one of the 4 players in winners bracket, having a list of wins most recently composed of guard(sweeper) and, notorious for being a former ag council member, ndtl, having his likes removed, beautiful grey badges and then quitting, and going 9-1 in some tour playing ss ag and (so that's cool too i guess) more recently going 5-0 in ag snake (maybe he isnt that bad) who seemed like he was on top of his game, stopped by bacon dodging +2 xern thunder with ndm and using reflect ndm to beat caly sub passed into sd fire fang zac lol and the apologizing for critting an etern that couldnt touch hooh with eq, winning the next game in the builder. REGARDLESS, even if that sounds extremely backhanded, i'm consistently impressed with how bacon builds and how bacon plays; he's constantly at the front of innovation and he sent me a :realistic_heart: emoji after i said i loved him for some reason so that's a plus. there is a fucking army of manager slaves that all play ag (and omicorio) and this is something to keep in mind as i pee a little at the thought of it. i will not be doing a write up on all of the managers who returned at the behest of anti trust laws in the heated pursuit of a custom avatar. if youre seeing this Theia you misspelled mentioned in the announcement thread i am very angry about this minor spelling mistake and the only reason i noticed is bc i wanted to see if there was any sort of reward for this mickey mouse ag team that is losing week one and then attempting to farm plumbers every other week. please fix this theia it is important.

have fun if u want me in your teamcord you may have missed the deadline but i will be accepting any invite so i can bandwagon on to a team in case that a team i like doesnt make playoffs in a series of unfortunate events. i love u all draft me next time will toledo is the peak of gay performance

 

[DurzaOffTopic]

hi i refuse to shut up literally no one asked me to do prs listen to yeule
objectively correct ag pr

6

Rabble Raboots
durza hasnt touched galar ag. what is he doing there. get him out. please. he doesn't belong there and he's probably going to call his mom to pick him up when the other kids bully him for trying to fit in with BananaBen15, who i definitely like more as a player, but the comparison is to a player who hasnt played the tier at all. it isnt right for durza off topic (last seen in gen seven ag using smashpass when thimo was still permalocked for changing monotype ps account passwords) to be where he is. he's the uhhhhh fuckin taco of the umpl ag slots trying to fit in with someone who isnt tyler the creator but is very much so at least knowledgable about what he's doing. ben is alright. he builds offense mainly that has personality because he likes mons that arent always consistently used, but he has a good grasp on the tier and he can build. this isnt really something i should be saying as a selling point on the main ag slot for any on site forum tour, so i hope you can tell he is slanted pretty low in viability compared to the other players starting in the season. im not gonna sit here and act like i give a shit abt this teams ag players because it's pretty obvious they drafted ben either as an after thought because they knew they fucked up or they drafted him and forgot that there were two ag slots.

5

Gliding Grookey
stableprince569 aka silviogiovanna in 2019 has drafted two players that dont typically play without support in ag. the strap aka skysolo literally asked if he was playing ss ag or nat dex ag. this is better than durza because durza hasnt played any ag adjacent tier in years, whereas strapini has managed the most recent ubers premier league team to a win in finals tiebreak, and skysolo has experience in sm ag aka the best ag tier of all time. he also has a profile picture on smogon.com/forums that has jack harlow and lil nas x in it. i dont really care for either but lil nas x is gay and that's great. i fuck w radu and i fuck w skysolo as a concept but he's unproven in galar ag. royal numbers is french i think. furthermore, he has actually played galar anything goes and won vs plumbers in the most recent agpl (2-3) and then lost to one of those same plumbers in semifinals. his team then proceeded to win in finals. yaaaaaaay. he was also in ag snake draft and went 2-1, then got subbed out in week 4 never to return. his team then won the tour. if he continues this performance he will be carried to another win while being subbed out in week 2 according to my crystal ball. the caveat to this is that grookey has andyboy, a really good usum ag player who happens to be slumming it in nfe currently. don't know much about andy in ss ag or if he's ever played it, but it's andy and he's a good ass pilot and broken in oms so i fuck w him wherever the tornado takes him.

4

Crocs in Crocs
i will glide on trade's nuts like drexler till the day i die (slide on muthafuckas like home plate), he's the truth and im amazed he didnt go for more than he actually did. problem w him is i think he's a question mark on whether he'll chose to be active or not, but if he is, it's fucking trade anything goes i trust that he would perform; he lead the team he was on in agpl iii to a ring by going 7-1 and winning tb by bringing ditto muthafuckin webs which he also hit 2100 with iinm. he's the truth and if you say otherwise youre wrong, zio youre a bum. lotiasite is solid, idrc to say more than that but they're undeniably good. loti got put onto the spheal ordeal, went even and lost in finals to someone i rate to be a considerably better player, probably a bit out of bias, and then also lost in tb so make of that what u will. swas is on the court week one of umpl. he has been inactive as far as i know since agpl in ss, outside of agtt where he got pounded by pokemh. he went 3-2 in agpl and won in semis vs bacon and then wasnt playing in finals or finals tb but if u can win vs bacon you can probably play pokemon. ive had a source say that he cannot build but i also have not checked the validity of that source and i do not care to. overall this team's ag is a question mark on whether trade (signed up for only nfe) will murder his opps with similar ease to how meryl streep collects oscars, or how ruth bader-ginsburg stayed on the supreme court hard enough to keep a positive slot through out the tour. the other two need to be passable and this team will do numbers.

3

Star Road Lunala
polt's so stupidly underrated and he's too much of a sissy to admit he's good at the game but i know the truth. this guy's inhuman. he can pilot stuff incredibly and he can build really well. he's really good at building anything offense. he's definitely good at building balance. i would be lying if i say i knew anything at mcall abt him building stall or fat but it's king P0LT3RGEIST so what do i know. he qual'd for aglt and is a known fiend that i ridiculously support in any of his endeavors, he also went 1-1 in the most recent agpl during weeks while not in ss, and claimed a custom avatar while beating lotiasite in finals after finally switching over. i wanna say seldanna is an enigma but i cant tell if that's disrespectful or not to say to someone who's as genuinely kind and good spirited as she is, but she isnt proven in sword and shield ag tours. ive one or two things on ladder way back that looked very, very sexy, but i cant say more than that. seldanna also in my quick research beat fardin and icemaster in ss during agpl iii in the bo3 slot (winning both series) so like major plus lmfao. she wasnt in agpl iv but i spotted replays of her playing when aglt cycles were happening and liked what i saw, so my girl has been grinding lol. if one of these two goats slip up and something goes wrong, then they're fucked because they dont have any subs. hoping that wont happen.

2

i fucking hate zio and fragments dude they accidentally drafted agl bc they were praying someone would take the worlds shittiest bait nom when i had effectively publicly price fixed and then still failed to get drafted bc sometimes managers refuse to have cognition and jerk the player that planned their entire ag draft onto the team but whatever lick the sweat that drips off of my ass cheeks and falls and pools onto the floor like a good dog that has been denied drink for days. fardin is undeniably good. he's been passably good and typically way better in every tier he plays, and he's been playing ag the longest. i tried sniping this dude on ladder to success so much during aglt it's actually really sad that i didnt make 2100 (2071) off of his ugly overly shit talking ass but it's a testament to the fact that he is that good as he decided to turn on his brain and grind back anyways to a #2 seed as i tilted off the face of the fucking universe. this guy managed and drafted a team that had no actual ag players to a win as though he was lebron on the cavaliers. i do not care who inder is, as far as i'm concerned they are fardin's more restrained sidekick with a brain capacity greater than a fish that grew arms, probably listens to nav, and was trained by sweaty man pigs to play the anything goes tier on play.pokemonshowdown.com at a high level. ANYWAYS fardin's really fucking good and i'd almost argue that he's better than any one player on the team ranked number one, except they have icemaster so idk. inder is inder. i trust the process.

1

SSSSS
sorta makes me sad to see this at number one for some inexplicable reason. ive been a bacon supporter ever since gen 7 and him + fc are undeniably a good core even if i've been personally not terribly impressed by fc's galar performance. fc is undeniably a good player, mind you; he went 5-0 in agpl in the bo3 slot during the weeks with spheal ordeal by having an all star line up, beating skarph during reg season and then losing to him in finals and then losing tiebreak with fc deadgaming skarph. he also lost to icemaster in finals in the most recent summer ssnl but it's icemaster lol what did u expect and he still made finals, AND he has icemaster on the sidelines passing double xern and praying that his opponents dont queue a cteam. they do not have the same all star line up for every other tier as fc did in agpl, but putting two goats in the two slots theyre best in in an annoyingly dry ss ag pool is key success. uhhhh and i ignored talking about bacon LOL but he's one of my favorite builders in ss; he is constantly innovating, he went 9-0 in ag in ompl (jesus christ how does he do it), played in aglt and qual'd and is still one of the 4 players in winners bracket, having a list of wins most recently composed of guard(sweeper) and, notorious for being a former ag council member, ndtl, having his likes removed, beautiful grey badges and then quitting, and going 9-1 in some tour playing ss ag and (so that's cool too i guess) more recently going 5-0 in ag snake (maybe he isnt that bad) who seemed like he was on top of his game, stopped by bacon dodging +2 xern thunder with ndm and using reflect ndm to beat caly sub passed into sd fire fang zac lol and the apologizing for critting an etern that couldnt touch hooh with eq, winning the next game in the builder. REGARDLESS, even if that sounds extremely backhanded, i'm consistently impressed with how bacon builds and how bacon plays; he's constantly at the front of innovation and he sent me a :realistic_heart: emoji after i said i loved him for some reason so that's a plus. there is a fucking army of manager slaves that all play ag (and omicorio) and this is something to keep in mind as i pee a little at the thought of it. i will not be doing a write up on all of the managers who returned at the behest of anti trust laws in the heated pursuit of a custom avatar. if youre seeing this Theia you misspelled mentioned in the announcement thread i am very angry about this minor spelling mistake and the only reason i noticed is bc i wanted to see if there was any sort of reward for this mickey mouse ag team that is losing week one and then attempting to farm plumbers every other week. please fix this theia it is important.

have fun if u want me in your teamcord you may have missed the deadline but i will be accepting any invite so i can bandwagon on to a team in case that a team i like doesnt make playoffs in a series of unfortunate events. i love u all draft me next time will toledo is the peak of gay performance

hey since you weren't drafted to a team you wanna run some ag tests with me? i could use some more practice

 

[Satanic Beast]

hey since you weren't drafted to a team you wanna run some ag tests with me? i could use some more practice

i'd rather not get drafted and help a team slot or two or more go positive than play in a tier that i know nothing about and go negative
yeah tho hmu whenever! if u need help practicing for ag im more than down to be a friend indeed for a friend in need!