meta:beings:typogremlin [Improbable Island Wiki of Often Not Lies]

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__**A Short Summary of the History of Typo Gremlins, in lieu of a better description of them**__

Once upon a time((going back as far as early season two, and quite possibly earlier)), there was no /grem chat function, and any typos and mistakes that got posted were there to stay unless they incurred the wrath of a moderator. Naturally, to vent their frustrations & explain any misunderstandings, the playerbase invented a creature to blame for it.

(According to wikipedia, gremlins as a concept have their origins in 20th century aviation, where they were, of course, blamed for things going wrong that were probably already someone's fault. We followed in a proud tradition here, folks.)

The full //breadth// of gremlin activity is now lost - or at least, exists scattered in a hundred different minds and private roleplay logs, and the miscellaneous rubble of the old wiki.((which holds such a wealth of things that some of us would rather forget at least some of it, thank you.)) That said: gremlins were written as stealing missing letters and words and punctuation, inserting words and letters and punctuation for fun, occasionally causing even more abstract problems when someone - for instance - forgot to close an italics tag and it bled into the rest of the page, and generally being... well, gremlins.

Sometimes they were treated quite unkindly in story. It's a lot quicker, after all, to kick a gremlin away (to acknowledge that you know you made a typo & convey to others that they might need to reread with a typo in mind to get the intended meaning) than to make a whole affair of it. And kicking was a tame example of the ways typo gremlins were occasionally punished. Out of that, I suspect, was born typo gremlin sympathy.

One player wrote a sanctuary for mistreated typo gremlins into their character's home; one player built the Improbable Island Free Public Library staffed by gremlins. The bar in the Common Ground with a gremlin bartender called Cookie((whose name and dialogue were I believe `V in colour, though possibly `v))((if anyone remembers the name of the bar, please share it, I'm not sure if that was a thing or not)) was a collaboration, and used and acknowledged by more or less everyone who used the space, which was a lot of people, back then.

Gremlins were useful, they were fun to write (because if you made any further mistakes while rattling off dialogue deliberately riddled with typos, nobody could tell), and they were a cute part of island lore.

(At some point - before the /gremification? after? - we were blessed with the Typo Gremlin monster, and the Large Hardon Collider monster, which lunges at you with typo gremlin apocalypse cultists.)

Then, CMJ gave us the /grem command. Using it gives us this text:

> //A nearby Typo Gremlin notices the peculiar tastiness of your previous comment. Within moments, a small horde of them have descended upon your words, and consumed them.//

This new feature, combined with the changing playerbase, led to typo gremlins drifting mostly out of the world of roleplay. At present, the Free Public Library at D6 remains, and the Gremlin Sanctuary has been recently polished up and reopened at V21. And gremlins are immortalised as at least one monster description, and a chat function that spares us much social embarrassment.

(This is inherently a flawed and //extremely// incomplete history & description. If anyone wishes to, please add what you remember, or make this page more useful. This was written out of a sudden flood of nostalgia and a desire to procrastinate chores.)