The History of Funeratic (New)

Peak

October 31, 2020: The era of "Peak TV" has already slowed down Thorough Movie Reviews, as an explosion of streaming services with endless new television shows to watch has resulted in less time for seeing films, even as it has made films generally easier to find. But content exclusivity on certain services forces another change: After almost a decade of using Netflix widgets to sum up each film on the same page where it is reviewed, Scott finds it impossible to continue, since so many films are coming out exclusively on other platforms, a trend rapidly accelerated by the pandemic. Scott eliminates the Netflix widgets in favor of using an API to display data from the Internet Movie Database, which is both a superior user experience (bigger poster art, more data on display) and a pain to convert (each of the approximately 1,200 past films in Funeratic's database must be manually updated).

Tally

August 29, 2021: With Celebrity Goo Game slowly losing players who have grown tired of the game and its scoring system of lucky cats and pagodas—some of the game's most accomplished and longest-lasting players have admitted fatigue—Scott abandons plans to build a complex new system of lucky cats in favor of a simpler approach: Simple numerical points. Each goo solved will earn two kinds of points, a public score and a randomized secret score to be revealed at the end of the season. It's intended to keep the game from having a tie at the finish line and to keep the outcome in suspense so that no one feels like they've already lost early in the season, but the change is very quickly unpopular, including with Scott himself: After multiple competitors play hard all season long and solve the same goos, one of them triumphs merely by a few random points. An effort to keep the game feeling fair has backfired and had the opposite effect. A decision is made to abandon it after a year.

Canon

January 2, 2022: Funeratic's recent interest in all things "superhero" culminates in The MCU Project, a re-watch of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in order, with weekly discussions. As with the rest of the Internet, there are expected disagreements about what still constitutes MCU canon in 2022, but Scott draws an all-inclusive line that incorporates everything ever deemed canon. The first conversation, about 2008's Iron Man, draws 35 comments, one of the busiest pages on the site at the time. Participation does taper off as the series progresses, especialy as it gets into TV shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that require a longer time commitment. Twice, Scott has to slow down the weekly schedule to allow for participating members (including himself) to keep up with the content. But the points of the project, to discover new things in the MCU by seeing and discussing every title in its original release order, and to have fun doing that, are a big success.

Balloons

May 7, 2022: Rock Block's summer 2022 tournament, based on Nena's classic 1980s anti-war hit "99 Luftballons," offers players a strategic choice: With each concert victory, they can either pop one of their own 99 red balloons, or pop someone else's to start another two concerts. Players experiment with different strategies, and Matthew Preston emerges with a winning one, popping the balloons of the less-active players and withholding some unspent "pops" to allow himself a chance to close the gap at a crucial moment to win his first tournament since Rock Block's relaunch. The tournament format proves popular (pun intended), partly because it results in a shorter and more focused tournament (almost exactly three months long) than the previous few contests that went on for too many months and became drudgery toward their ends.

SourPls

August 24, 2022: During the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime player Chris Lemler really hits his stride in Celebrity Goo Game: Chris wins four seasons in a row, the first time that someone has accomplished that feat since the earliest days of the game when the rounds were short and the players were few. Chris has been a top player for some time, winning an average of more than one season per year since 2015, but this complete dominance in the game is a new level of excellence even for him. To achieve it, he is helped by his well-honed skill at the game, his determination to solve every last goo, his own goo creations, and a few lucky breaks along the way in random outcomes. Having previously devoted himself to the hobbies of bowling and disc golf until he achieved success well beyond amateur status with both, Chris next announces at the height of his success in the goo game that he's going to take an indefinite break from Funeratic to focus on a new pastime, Twitch streaming. He makes this announcement only after surpassing a thousand followers, so he's well on his way.