Essay | "The Godot Twitter Incident"

birdartwww // July 3rd 2025

(This blog post includes screenshots of posts from other internet users. User names and profile pictures have been either changed or censored, but no actual message or post text has been altered. Do not attempt to interact with anyone who appears in this post; they all have better things to do, and so do you.)

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So, I've just fallen down a rabbit hole involving Godot, a free game development software, and I've decided to document my journey on my website. However, before I get too into this, I'll go ahead and lay out some terms. This is a long one, so grab a snack or something!

Godot is a free and open source game engine software. It's a computer program whose purpose is to expedite the creation of video games by providing a bunch of pre-made tools and features that are generalized for typical game development tasks. Basically, it does the hard stuff, so you can get to making your video game faster.

It's also a community-led, open source project. Godot is developed mostly by volunteer programmers—if you're savvy enough, you can go add features to the program yourself at Godot's Github page, the website where the code is stored and accessable to view. This source code is also under a very loose copyright license which lets you basically do whatever you want with it. If you like, you can download the source code, reupload it with as few or as many changes as you please, and re-release it to the public, fully rebranded and called something else. These are called "forks," and they're actually pretty common for open source software like this. However, game engines are extremely complex pieces of software, and maintaining a fork of one all on your own ranges anywhere from difficult to... futile. Therefore, it's much more feasible for would-be engine developrs to just go work on existing software so they can focus on the areas in which they specalize.

I'm currently working on two separate Godot projects—one secret and one unannounced—so I'm generally pretty good at using the engine, and I also keep fairly up to date with news about the engine to keep to know about upcoming features and bugfixes.

Anyway, I was doing just a few days ago when I noticed something interesting on Godot's Steam page.

That's unusual to see for a non-game application on Steam, but sure enough, it seems that Godot was review-bombed about 8 months ago (as of writing).

I know from personal experience that Godot is an excellent piece of software. It's so good, that I've actually noticed something about it which I can say for no other piece of software: it feels like it cares about you. Its features aren't flashy, but practical instead. For example, when I first started using Godot, I found that the usual set of tools that I have to re-develop for each new project were, by and large, already there. I'd never before felt so seen.

All that to say, those negative reviews shouldn't be there. Let's figure out what's going on!

First impressions: a pretty typical wall of red. We've got a bunch of users with very little time in the engine complaining about "being banned." One user is complaining about how the engine is "horrible," but folds into talking about "the community" pretty quickly. Hold on to that. They claim that their usage time on steam (2 hours, enough time to do precisely jack) is not "not accurate to their actual use time," but I don't believe them. One user's negative review consists solely of the lyrics to "In The End" by Linkin Park. Extremely helpful!

But, we've gathered something. It looks like people are upset about how Godot Foundation handled something. Let's dig deeper.

Doesn't take long! Pretty easy to figure out what's happening here. Godot has gone "woke," and as we know, that's no bueno, or something. Can we get more specific? It's pretty obvious that some Godot account blocked someone for being racist or whatever, but where? What are the deets? Please?

Well, we're certainly not getting any objective information here, but we do have a lead. Everyone's mentioning something called "Redot." Knowing that anyone can reupload Godot as their own, and given Redot's similarity of name, we can assume that it's probably a fork. Interesting! So, this is an issue deep enough to go to all the afformentioned trouble and spin up a counter-culture game engine? What kind of features does it have?

I ran a quick Google search for "Redot," but Google didn't give me any official website. It did, however, give a GitHub link to a "Redot Engine." There's a link to the real website there, but first check this out; this is golden:

Let's play spot the difference! Spoiler, this game will be incredibly boring:

Godot description on GitHub:

Redot description on GitHub:

Oh, there are no differences? No, look closer‒they did change some stuff. It's necessary logistical stuff with some vision stuff mixed in there. See?

Given that most of this is unchanged, I guess the Redot maintainers like Godot just fine, except for One Specific Thing. Man, the way these guys are talking, you'd think that the Godot Community personally came to all their houses and spat in their dinners! All checks BlueSky follower count 34.8K+ of them! At once! Hey, you know what this reminds me of?

United States of America Constitution:

Confederate States of America Constitution:

Oh, but the Confederates changed more than that! Look closer! It's necessary logistical stuff with some vision stuff mixed in there. See?

Given that most of this is unchanged, I guess the Confederates liked the constitution just fine, except for One Specific Thing.

Oh, this has nothing at all to do with Redot, by the way; I just thought it was interesting. 😊 Anyway, the "copying" thing will become a recurring theme with Redot, but we'll get to that later.

First, let's see that website. No, I won't link to it; the last thing I need is birdart.online showing up in their analytics referrals. Fun fact, that's something that can happen, by the way—Website owners can see the path you took to get to their site. Keep that in mind. Not for this essay; just as general advice.

Redot's website looks pretty snazzy. It is also, notably, not a direct clone of the Godot website. All seems promising, but let's see if we can find a manifesto. (Spoiler: We can!)

I won't get too into the weeds on this thing; it's mostly just rambling about "community" and "true inclusivity."

Yeah, forgive me for being skeptical of that dream you have, Redot Guy, but you've got people like this repping your software:

Hey, Jimmy, you've inserted a "P" in there where it doesn't belong. What do you posit the "P" stands for? What's your opinion on queer people, Jimmy? Do you own any deadly weapons, Jimmy? Can you be trusted not to pull them out among a crowd of people you do not like? And if not, will Redot Guy be inclusive to that behavior, too?

I wonder if the Redot Guy has heard that one adage about the 11 Nazis at the table. That one which everyone thinks is German, but was actually first said by the voice actor for Marty the Zebra from Dreamworks' Madagascar franchise.

Anyway, here's the important bit that describes the reason why the Redot fork was made.

Yikes! That sounds pretty bad, or something! I'm sure the content of those posts and the resulting fallout was worth the hassle of maintaining a fork of the beast of a software that is the Godot Engine! Hey, what new features have we added, anyway?

Well, Redot is... Um,

Well it's Godot, but it's red instead of blue. I've got to admit, that is pretty funny.

I tried to find a definitive list of changes from Godot, but it turns out that finding a complete list is easier said than done. Redot Engine seems to want to fully usurp and replace Godot, so they try not to mention its predecessor on the website unless absolutely necessary. As a result, the website has no direct feature comparison, and it instead mostly just lists features that were inherited from Godot.

The following is as close to a features list as I could find:

If you've used Godot before, only one thing in this list will immediately stand out to you as different—apparently, Redot has Visual Scripting support.

Visual scripting is a means of coding using a visual interface instead of a text editor. The point of this method of programming is to create a more accessible way for beginners and those less programmatically-inclined to make software, regardless of their skill levels. You'll find it in a bunch of common game engines like Scratch, GameMaker, Construct, and even Unreal Engine.

Godot actually used to have this feature! However, it was removed in 2022 because, as far as I can tell, it mad sucked and was implemented with no actual concern for practical usability. The developers therefore figured that Godot's custom programming language, "GDScript," was easy enough for beginners to learn anyway, and had the added benefit of being flexible enough that users wouldn't ditch it if they wanted to move on to traditional text-based programming.

So, how has Redot fixed this?

Well, they appear to have implemented a visual scripting system called "ReBlocks" which borrows its design from Scratch. A good decision; far more logical than trying to re-implement the programming equivalent of driving a car from the backseat by turning the steering wheel with Reacher Grabbers and training your dog to man the break and acceleration pedals by giving it vocal commands.

Unfortunately,

Since we're doing car metaphors, this is the programming equivalent of deciding that you want your car to have a different paint job, so you gut your car from the inside out, leaving only the outer shell, gut a second car that was given to you by the local community center, and painstakingly re-insert the parts from the old car into the new chassis. Cool.

Hey, didn't one of those Steam users from earlier complain about Godot removing their Visual Scripting feature along with the community stuff? I wonder if that has any significance to any of this. Are these guys all coming from somewhere? Where did it start? What caused all this anyway?

Let's take it back to the very beginning. It all starts pretty typically for the website known as Twitter—someone says something stupid, and someone else makes fun of it. This is GameDevJooney, and they'll be our main character.

Jooney is browsing Twitter, as usual, when they find something utterly unhinged. Natrually, they screenshot it and repost it. This is that tweet.

I think it's a pretty funny post, personally. That's right, under the new anti-woke set of norms, wasting of your time is essential. Re-build all tools from the ground up for every project. Re-invent the hammer. Build a new computer every time you turn it on. Re-create the wheel. Be a man. Try to create plastic from scratch and die doing it. Godot's community manager evidently also thought that Jooney's post was pretty funny, so they hop on the trend:

And as far as I can tell, that's really it. A bunch of people saw that post, got mad, and the rest is history. Still, there's a pretty big jump between "bad joke on the internet" and "I dedicate my life to re-hosting the Godot Engine under a different name." There's got to be more to the story. Unfortunately, Twitter no longer works on any of my devices, so I'll be a little limited in my searching, but that doesn't matter too much since it seems that the conflict has, well, "breached containment," so to speak.

A simple Google search led me to a Hacker News thread on the topic filled with a diverse crowd of people ready to give their hot takes on the issue.

Oh, finally, something concrete! It seems that some small number of hard-working members of the Godot volunteer development team, "actual devs," as this guy puts it, have been banned from contributing their work for their political views! That's Mr. FightingForFreedom here's primary concern. Luckily, the Godot GitHub repository is public, so we can go see the carnage for ourselves!

A quick aside to explain a feature of GitHub:

Each "repository" that holds the source code to a project also has a bunch of other features to help with development. One of which is the "issues" tab. The purpose of the issues tab is for developers and users alike to bring up changes that they would like to see made to the project, whether they be feature requests, bug fixes, or similar. The developers on the project can then make comments on those issues in order to discuss if and how they should be remedied or to ask the poster for more information. As you can imagine, it's a very technical place to post, and off-topic banter is generally frowned upon. Here's what that page looks like:

As you can see, the issues tab has a few organizational features like tabs and different types of ways to resolve the issue, like the, uhm... hm.

Did... Did Mr. FightingForFreedom mislead us by leaving out important information which might have changed our minds on the issue? No, surely not! Surely he wouldn't do that! Right??

RIGHT?!?!?!

It turns out, this is an interesting "new" type of internet trolling which Redot users really like to partake in. I'll tentatively call it "blatantlieposting." While blatantly lying is a major part of this method of trolling, there's still quite a bit more to it, as we'll come to see, so I'm not fully sold on the name yet.

Let's take a closer look at this. The Redot Defense Squad are always the ones to bring up the community management stuff and the banning thing, citing it as the primary reason for why all this has happened. Whenever they do that, the conversation suddenly turns to whether or not those guys actually got banned and why and if it was valid. The initiators of the argument then start taunting their victim, refusing to budge even when shown proof, and pretty much just repeating their original positions over and over while being vague and dancing around the actual issue (or lack thereof in this case). This has the intended effect of driving the other commenters absolutely insane, forcing them to leave and causing the initiator to win the argument by default, ultimately preventing conversation of any actual value. It's very much a "sharks are smooth" situation. It's like Senator Armstrong and his nanomachines.

BiggieCheese here kindly provides a nice example of the above behavior for us. He's keeping the conversation on one topic, refusing to budge, and blatantly lying until TheBigManHimself gives up and leaves. When the dust settles, BiggieCheese stands triumphant.

Suddenly, a side effect of blatantlieposting has made itself clear: BiggieCheese's victory now stands as a landmark for future internet tourists to find. Say that someone neutral to the conflict appears; someone with no real perception of the meaning of the word "woke" besides vague negativity. This person comes to the thread to figure out what was going on, and they see Biggie absolutely annihilating this Dumb Liberal, who was probably certainly making a mountain out of a molehill anyway.

...That's what would happen in theory, at least, but the reality of the situation is that Mr. Cheese over here just isn't very good at this. He's quite obviously trolling, and anyone who has used the internet for any amount of time should be skeptical of the claim that the Godot Foundation was able to ban its contributors from the entirety of GitHub, a company it has no sway over. Mr. FightingForFreedom seems like he's had a lot more practice, because even I had to actually go and verify if his claims were true. However, our hypothetical person from earlier almost certainly would not go to the effort I did, (because why the hxll would they), and, after reading FightingForFreedom's, post might think, "Wow, Godot banned people for their beliefs? Well, that's not good! This 'woke' thing is pretty hypocritical, huh?" When they later decide to get into gamedev, they might then opt for Redot over Godot, and thusly end up in the Redot discord with Jimmy, the guy who insists on putting a "P" in the "LGBT" acronym.

A manufactured misunderstanding; the meme of hate spreads.

Anyway, this Hacker News thread gives us a link to a post from Godot Foundation on Reddit: An official statement from Godot Foundation themselves! Another lead has been discovered!

Blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Godot's response to the issue isn't really interesting, and it doesn't really tell us anything we haven't already been able to infer. Let's go check the comments!

Check out this guy:

Hey, this guy writes like I do! He's totally cramping my style! Sorry for that last sentence.

Anyway, Mr. Reasonable over here sounds just that, doesn't he? Godot Foundation's statement is pretty standard and corporate sounding, and it's not going to change anyone's mind. They also just admitted to accidentally blocking some unrelated people, and that probably shouldn't have happened on a brand account, and... Wait a minute, what's that doing there? "Many individuals have shared their thoughts respectfully." Their thoughts on what, Mr. Reasonable? How much they hate gay people? Hey, wait a second! We're not talking about the "respectful" ones right now, are we? Being vague? Dancing around the issue? Where have we seen this before?

Oh, God! It's blatantlieposting! I thought we left you behind in the Hacker News thread!

Sure enough, this thread is absolutely rife with it! And worse yet—since this is Reddit, everyone's way better at it! It's good that the Godot Foundation employee MisterGodotOfficial is here to set the record straight where it needs be, but Mr. Reasonable and his good-at-trolling compatriots are getting away scott free!

Hey, it's Jooney! You know, GameDevJooney, our main character! Remember? Be careful, Jooney! Don't interact with the blatantlieposters! You'll waste hours of your life trying to explain to them a truth which they already know! Don't do it, Jooney! It's not worth it! Get out while you can!! NOOOO!!!!

Oh, I see what's happening. Jooney's sarcastic but plausibly deniable post is being taken out of context. Jooney has actually somehow taken on the role of "misinformation debunker" like Godot Foundation employee MrGodotOfficial did. I can't actually find any instances of Jooney engaging with any blatantlieposters. Nice job, Jooney!

All things considered, the people that they're correcting are generally pretty receptive, and some of them even apologize once they realize the post was satire. Notice the openness to being wrong in the face of proof? And the apologizing? That's how you differentiate the blatantlieposters and the sad saps who just so happened to all get caught up in all of this!

We've gotten well off track, it seems. Should we get back to Redot? I've found another Reddit thread, this time on r/KotakuInAction. If you've never heard of it, it's where the last few followers of the 2010s-era anti-SJW movement have taken up shop. Let's see what they think of Redot!

Wow they love it!

This thread is pretty quiet because all the other anti-SJW kids grew up to be either people who say the word "woke" un-ironically or transgender, and have thus moved on in the years since. The only people left here are those that didn't get the memo, so they're all a little bumbling.

Ah, blatantlieposting rears it ugly head again. And in its own home base, too! Shouldn't you know how this works by now, RedotEnjoyer?

For the record, the user that Mr. Unwoke is talking about was banned by the Godot account on Twitter for about 2 days, but as of Mr. Unwoke's comment, was not banned by Godot on any platfo...

...

WAIT WHAT OTHER FORK WHAT DO YOU MEAN OTHER FORK WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THERE:S MORE?????

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHH

NYAAAAAAAGGAAAAAAAAAAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

LK:SJDGL:KSJEDGLKJSDLKGJSL:DGJ:LKSEGHJESHGjh;esgh:SJKE;gKSJEg;klSHEG:LHSE:LgjKSLE

ALL RIGHT!! COOL!! I GUESS WE:RE DOING THIS NOW!!!

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO OFFER, BLAZIUM??

WELL!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!

IT:S GODOT, BUT INSTEAD OF BEING RED OR BLUE, IT:S PURPLE! WOW!!!!!! FULL CENTRISM!!!!!!

WHAAAAAAT??? WHOAAAAAAA?!! THEY GOT GAMES??! THEY GOT GAMES IN BLAIZUM? GAMES PAGE? EVEN REDOT DIDN:T HAVE THAT! WHAT GAMES DO THEY GOT?????

AAAHAHAHAHHAHAHJA;LJKRGLA;SEJBAKRHB;KWAEHRB;KAEHA;WAK;EAGJEneaw;jljw;zsjwjlsJLS:SjJKVjlF:JGLH:JES:SjsEKLEGJSL:EGkakjsjdfksjAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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Okay! Hi! I've calmed down.

Jokes aside, Blazium looks to me like a significantly more competently run project than Redot. The website has a direct list of features added over Godot, and it seems that the engine is actually specalized for networking stuff. The big feature that they added is something called "Blazium Services," which seems to be a tool to make online and multi-player games. Notably, unlike Redot, this feature was something that was actually developed from the ground up by the Blazium developers, as far as I can tell. Maybe my standards are just super low coming off of Redot, but hey! That's worth my respect!

They do have a brief manifesto on the GitHub page, but hey! Pobody's nerfect, right? It's not even half as long as Redot's, and it's way more hidden.

Anyway, if I had to diagnose the situation (and that is the predicament I've put myself in), it seems that the Redot team's "not doing things right" probably had something to do with the fact that they decided to make a fork of Godot solely as an act of protest; as a big goofy "screw you" to the "activists" that "took over Godot," and had no actual plans for the engine because they're drama goblins with Performance Arts degrees instead of Computer Science ones. That's right, REDOT ITSELF is a blatantliepost! How deep does the rabbit hole go?!?!

Here's what I imagine: Blazium Guy, the only real developer in the room, saw all this happening; saw the utter chaos that hath been sown in the Redot Discord and got sick of all the pontificating about Woke instead of actual development, and just left to make his own thing.

Anyway, great news! I got Twitter working on my device for long enough to find Blazium Guy's account, and hey, it looks like I guessed right! It seems like everything happened as I expected... more or less.

Oh, side note: That Redot Twitter account that BG links is, like, fully zonked.

I've recorded some of Blazium Guy's receipts, and while you should obviously take everything you read from either Blazium Guy or the Redot team with a grain of blatantlieposting, it seems like BG over here actually had a pretty good reason to leave.

Disclaimer: I think that the "RedotTime" user in the following screenshots may be the same person who started the Redot project; the user whom I have been referring to as "Redot Guy." However, I'm not certain, so I've decided to treat them like a seprate user. I'm not joining the Redot Discord server to find out.

Whoa! This RedotTime guy seems insufferable! I was honestly starting to feel bad for making fun of Redot so much, but after seeing this brief sneak peak into the 9th circle of hxll, I can say with fairly high certainty that I think they would be significantly more vitriolic to me than I to them. So it's fine probably?

Anyway, Blazium Guy might have been justified to leave, but, honestly, he doesn't particularly seem all that much more sufferable than the other guys.

In fact, at least from the screenshots BG himself provided, it seems like nobody really likes the guy!

OtherBlaziumGuy (the apparent "co-founder of Blazium," whom I named before I realized how important he was to the story) seems to imply that it was Blazium Guy who wanted the Redot engine to have a deliberately "rightist" slant to it. I'm not fully sold on that idea (I managed to read over some of OtherBlaziumGuy's Twitter posts and blatantlieposting and all that), but I've decided to take this idea at face value simply because the idea that Blazium Guy got banned from the "apolitical" community for his political beliefs is wildly funny to me.

I will say though—the fact that Blazium Guy posted this image of all things (which very much paints him in a negative light even without context) is bizarre. I honestly think that Blazium Guy is probably just way too online. He's just going nuts; having all kinds of normal ones; and I think he could do with an internet detox and a walk in the park. I kind of feel for him, and I hope one day he can escape Twitter and find some sort of satisfaction outside of annoying game engine drama on the internet.

Hey, so I got like, fully off track again. This is a post about Redot. ...Right?

I'm still skeptical about the "origins" of Redot. Yeah, there's the Twitter drama and all, but who picked up the story? I know those 700 negative reviews on Steam didn't all just independently see that tweet and start reccomending Redot. Also, they all bring up the same points! Visual scripting, "uninclusive" community, etc... Who directed them there?

I've decided to arbitrarily add a new core tenant of blatantlieposting until I forget that I did that in the next paragraph: Blatantlieposters don't post blatant lies to support some kind of agenda for no reason, but rather to participate in a community. It's Posting as Part of a Shared Goal; a Common Enemy; a Target universally decided upon. A directive.

But who gave the directive?

Let's logic this out: someone with a following saw that tweet, gathred some base-level knowledge on the subject, and presented it to their followers under some sort of "look at how radical (derogatory) this community is" lens. Each of this hypothetical influencer's followers then go on to take their words of their Online Blorbo and parrot them all across the world wide web. Also, let's be real, this "influencer" is probably a YouTuber. These Redot guys, they talk like YouTube commenters. You start to be able to tell these things once you've been on the internet for long enough.

I took to YouTube, but all I was immediently able to find was this. Ugh, more blatantlieposting. God, they're both doing it. Guess that's YouTube comments for you... Okay, uhm, debunking! Or whatever. Redot was forked on September 30th, which is a couple of days after all this started, and the Godot Creator was not the one to post that tweet. Bear with me; you'll see why in a bit. No, I'm not posting screenshots; I'm done, I'm so tired. Whatever. Look, there's our last lead that I'm willing to follow. Discord. Something happened there. Let's hop on.

There're two Godot Discords: an offical one, and an unoffical one called "Godot Cafe." Let's see if we can find anything interesting inside. First, I did the obvious thing and found the earliest mentions of "Redot."

Just some people making fun of it. In fact, that's honestly most of these early Redot mentions. The Discord folks generally don't seem to want to bring the "Twitter drama" into their spaces, which is probably reasonable. Despite that, there's still discussion from the Redot-curious.

Whoa, check out this guy!

We've found a war story form an ex-Redot developer! I can't belive that Redot has existed for a mere eight days, and it's already generating ActiBlizzard-style callout posts from former employees about the hostile workplace environment cultivated by its leaders! I'm sure that's got to count for some record, somewhere! Oh, also, this is the second instance of someone being kicked out of the Redot community because the owners didn't like them.

All right, enough mucking around. I found this in the Discord, and it has confirmed many of my suspicions:

This Discord user mentions a "Mr. EatRocks." I have, of course, changed this person's name to "Mr. EatRocks" for the sake of privacy, but this guy presents an interesting issue that I should probaly address. Mr. EatRocks has an incredibly large YouTube following and, statistically, you have heard of this guy. The reason that I continue to censor his name is, therefore, not neccecarily to protect his privacy (Frankly, this guy seems to revel in internet drama), but instead to protect my own. In case you haven't noticed, members of Mr. Rocks' fanbase like to, er, "protest" against individual internet users. This is, of course, not harassment! Harassment doesn't exist:

Dxmn, dude, okay.

To be completely honest, watching this guy's videos makes me feel like I'm out of my depth; like I am staring down the barrel of a gun. I'm watching a bear and its army of spiders on their nightly patrol, all too aware that one wrong step, and I could be its next target. It makes me wonder what the point of writing this even is anymore; if you've read this far, you almost certainly "agree" with me already, so why bother?

For now, I'm going to stay in my lane. This is a post about the Godot Twitter Incident.

In his video(s) about the Godot Twitter Incident, Mr. EatRocks first gives a brief rundown of the drama. He pokes around some of the big(ger)-name Twitter accounts which were first blocked by the Godot account after replying cringe to the "Wokot" post. I'll spare you the details since he doesn't really go over anything that I didn't on this subject. Notably, one of the accounts whose tweets he looks at is OtherBlaziumGuy, who apparently was a "platinum donor" for Godot (until he got blocked). Rocks then moves on to what seems to be his true major concern of video: bashing the specific community manager who made the original "Wokot" post on the Godot account, whose personal account and photo he has somehow found. Rocks refers to them mostly as "community manager" or "CM," so I'll just call them "MC," to be contrarian.

Rocks focuses his ire on MC and a couple other Godot-adjacent moderators from the Discord servers, whom he sees primarily as representatives of a wider group of "insanely toxic" people that he recons "have no friends." He also repeatedly calls MC an "activist," which he and his spiders have apparently decided is some sort of slur. Ah yes, vital activism happening on Twitter dot com; blocking rude Twitter users from viewing the tweets from a free game engine's PR account. This explains the fixation some of those Steam reviwers had earlier with a seemingly single "activist community manager," at least. As for MC themselves, they seem to have taken Rocks' video in stride. I guess you have to have a thick skin if your job is social media.

Oh, but, you know what Mr. EatRocks didn't mention? That's right. Redot.

You know what that means that I have to do?

please, god, please, rescue me from this fresh hell of mine own creation. save me from the suffring brought to me by this accursed curisoity, bestowed upon me neither by God nor the Devil, but by some secret third Christian entity, who wishes to exaust me by forcing me to force myself to watch bad YouTube videos on the internet

Upon searching YouTube for "Redot Engine" and filtering search results by most viewed, I've found three major videos which talk about the situation. Actually, I'm gonna talk about a fourth one, too, because it's the Official Redot explanation. Actually, I'm gonna talk about that one first, just to get it out of the way. Here's a screenshot from it.

Pretty much the whole video is like this, and it's basically just a reading of the manifesto from earlier with some James Sommerton-style word changes. Oh, also, "Redot" is pronounced "Ree-daught." I guess that information would have been more helpful 5500 words ago...

Anyway, that video was actually released pretty recently, so I don't actually care about it. I'm primarily interested in how Redot was popularized, so I'll talk about the other three videos now.

These videos were made by who I'm going to call YouTube Pundits 1-3, because I'm really tired of trying to come up with funny names for these guys only for them to vanish from the story. Remember Jooney? Good times. I bet Jooney is living their best life right now; not thinking about Redot, Mr. EatRocks, Other Blazium Guy; not writing any blog posts...

Now, these guys seem to be in the same circle as Mr. Rocks. I've seen Rocks watching a video from Pundit 1, but I don't know about the other guys. They all still use the same "activist" terminology from what I've seen, and they all see virtue in being "apolitical" despite the fact that they are all quite literally political pundits. I'm just going to sort of lump all these guys together as part of the same Internet Guy Group. You know how it is.

Speaking of Pundit 1, their video pretty much just covers the launch of the Redot project. 1 opens their video with the following: "[An unrelated Twitter user] made a challenge to the community. They basically said, 'If you don't like Godot Engine, [...] why don't you do better?'" And thus, Redot Engine was born.

Pundit 1 admits that they weren't able to get a screenshot of this post, but I won't cry blatantlieposting about it—I actually used to follow said unrelated Twitter user (back when I used that site), and that personally sounds to me like something they would probably say. What's funny is that it looks like they ultimately got the last laugh, since Redot seems to suck bad. They're so cool.

After that, 1 covers some of the drama happening over on the Redot discord and GitHub page, and then spends the rest of the video making fun of MC's tweets. MC is a pretty prototypical "blue hair and pronouns" type, so I guess that Pundit 1 figures that the Rocks-type audience they've attracted mostly only cares about owning the cringe libs, and is thus eager to get to the Good Stuff as soon as possible.

Pundit 1 pronounces "Redot" incorrectly, by the way.

Pundit 2's video is very short. They pretty much just talk about the Extremists raiding the Redot Discord server, who are Disrupting The Peace and trying to prevent the formation of the highly moral Apolitical Game Engine, then they proceed to talk a whole lot about politics. The screenshots of other people's Twitter posts are interpsersed with gameplay of an FPS I don't recognize. Then, it's over. Pundit 1's video was way more engaging.

Pundit 2 also pronounces "Redot" incorrectly.

Whoa, check out that old Redot logo! I acutally like this one a lot better than the one they ended up going with, but I guess that being blue is more Wokot's thing. *Laugh track*

Pundit 3's video seems to be the most well produced, but I think they're kind of boring. I don't agree with any of these guys, but I thought that Rocks and the other two were at least, like, entertaining. Hxll, Rocks even made me laugh once, believe it or not, but Pundit 3 is about as entertaining as listening to your uncle rant about being spied on by Google as if it were a conspiracy theroy and not common knowledge. Wait, was that just me?

I need you to understand just how boring this guy is. For the sake of comedy, I've been playing this hapless "neutral" character for a lot of this essay—that's why I've been "handing it" to so many of these blatherskites—but Pundit 3 is such a dry, boring, uncreative wannabe of a Mr. EatRocks-type talking head that I geuninely get secondhand embarassment from watching this guy play at being Tucker Carlson with all the aptitude of a chicken attempting to fly. It'd be like if your afformentioned uncle started a YouTube channel for his inane "AI is bad but only for HAL 9000 reasons" rants and somehow inadvertantly got very popular exclusively because, as it turns out, there is just a whole subcommunity of people that REALLY LIKE HAL 9000 to the point that they'll become lifelong fans of him by excluseive virtue of "he mentioned the robot uprising once." Oh, still just me?

Anyway 3 opens the video by advertising their merchandise, and then goes and reads someone else's article explaining the situation for half the video. I actually got bored and scrolled down into the comments partway through the video. Check these out.

I like the one guy who actually seems to be a fan, but still provides a timecode to "skip the fluff."

TOO true, dude. FINALLY, someone around here with some SENSE.

I went back up and just started skipping around. Pundit 3 actually shows the Hacker News thread from earlier. That's right, he doesn't read it, he just shows it, and now there are magically 50 more comments then there were before. Hey! Continuity! I guess we know where all those blatantlieposters came from! It also makes sense that they were all worthless at their craft, cause the only type of person who would watch Pundit 3 over Mr. EatRocks is someone who would find value in the words of an actual wooden chair (non-rocking).

Pundit 3 stops to question the pronunciation of "Redot" because they can't figure it out. They cycle through a couple of pronunciations before settling on an incorrect one.

So, I'm sure there are more of these guys. You get the point—The talking points made by the blatantlieposters that scatter the internet all reflect the same opinions of the sources from whence they came (Mr. EatRocks and his adjacent pundit-types). Ultimately, this one, odd occurance that fascinated me so was just another event to be milked for Internet Content in a YouTube circle which I do not follow. Rocks hasn't even had the decency to come back to check on Redot. He's fully over the situation, and he's since moved on to more important issues like covering different Gaming Drama and liveblogging Donald Trump's weekly scheduled colonoscopies.

It's a little anticlimactic, but, hey, isn't it fun to play detective and work through this sort of thing in reverse?

There's a lot more that I found that I've thought about mentioning. For example, I've noticed a slight obsession with Godot's lack of visual scripting that I think may have originated from some guy on twitter or something, but in case my obvious fatigue hasn't made it clear, I would like to move on, to something, anything else. It's not that I couldn't keep going! Even now, peering at the Redot blog reveals some fascinating recent happenings, including a permanant shutdown of the forum and a status update which has to assert multiple times that they are "not getting rid of Redot" despite the fact that the engine has not recieved an update since December. What on earth could be happening in that discord??

Despite my neverending curiosity, I'm ultimately satisfied with the ~7,500 words I've written. As far as I'm concerend, that's already far more than Redot deserves.

I'll wrap things up with offering a piece of advice, which I think you may find will make using the internet just a little bit more bearable:

Every single time that you see something on the internet that looks sketchy, especially when it's said by someone who is clearly looking for an argument, I want you to immediently go into the field for yourself and check if it's actually true. Form your opinions from facts you confirm at the scene with your own eyes. The guy who won that internet argument epic-style doesn't neccecarily know more than the guy he pwned; he's just betterer at saying the words really good so that people listen to him the most betterest.

W-Wait a minute.

Wait. Wait, no.

WAIT NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONONONONONONONO I DIDN'T MEAN—

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