Great Nibbler Takeover of 2008

The thread that started it all can be found by clicking here.

In March 2008, a flood of cute little aliens began to overtake the avatars of various scummers. The source of the invasion (Patient Zero) has been identified as DrippingGoofball, who had become so tired of seeing Cogito Ergo Sum's Nibbler avatar wearing a Santa hat since the summer of 2006, that she created nine versions of Nibbler wearing a variety of hats for his choosing. The infection spread like wild fire after Guardian decided to use the Nibbler avatar version with the cute pink hat and the two pompoms, iammars made a red Nibbler and Skruffs used a variety of versions...

So far, the invasion seems to be largely harmless, if occasionally distracting, unlike the hostile takeovers plotted by various Tigers and sympathizers in 2007.

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Explanation of the Phenomenon

PokerFace explains it:

Cogito Ergo Sum uses the character 'Nibbler' from the tv show 'Futurama' as his avatar. Back in 2006, Glork added a santa hat to his avatar at his request, part of an early-holiday trend. It was March 2008 and he still had the santa hat in his Avatar.

DrippingGoofball is a very crazy spontaneous player. She is kinda loony but in the good way. She makes players laugh and I'm guessing she uses that laughter to get some scum's to let their guard down unexpectedly. She usually takes her time when she plays as she finds scum unless she has some other objective. Go to her profile/wiki and read her claims to fame. You are certain to get a good laugh. I believe she is a webmaster as part of her job so making avatars is a specialty of hers i think. I myself enjoy playing/reading her games because she is funny.

Somehow DrippingGoofball got annoyed by Cogito Ergo Sum still having a santa hat, so she made that thread to get him to change to one of the other nibbler hats. Cogito Ergo Sum eventually chose a hat that Mr. Flay proposed in the thread. Guardian, another player on MafiaScum, really liked DrippingGoofball's nibbler avatars so he took the second nibbler hat because he wanted to see it used by someone. this made DrippingGoofball take the 9th hat for the same reason. Cicero took the eighth one. Andycyca was talked into joining but Andy wanted the 9th hat. So DrippingGoofball took the 4th hat and let Andycyca have the 9th one. hasdgfas, Haschel Cedricson and Klebian also took some of the hats as other users made their own based on their own design or DrippingGoofball's future designs. Some people change between a couple of the designs like Mr. Stoofer and Sarcastro until they found the ones they liked.

Guardian then put the thread in his sig and went to coax others into joining. He got me to come to the thread and ask for a Nibbler of my own. I did it for the fun of its craziness. I made mine based on a designs DrippingGoofball and Mastermind of Sin posted and some stuff I added to it. Albert B. Rampage came about his through a simular means.

Since then tons of other users have joined the trend making their own avatar versions. Some players like MikeBurnFire, vollkan, and a few others made their own Nibbler avatar's based on their old avatars. Other players got their avatars by getting DrippingGoofball or Mastermind of Sin or Mr. Flay to make them for them.

Its basically your average fad brought on by Cogito Ergo Sum's cute avatar, DrippingGoofball's craziness/artisty, and the desire to spread the trend held by Guardian and quite a few other players. You can read the thread for more.

Controversy and resistance

There was a very vocal group of scummers, including but not limited to thestatusquo, quagmire, zu_faul and adele who thought the meme was dumb, stupid, unimpressive, and generally found it hard to distinguish players in games. A thread was started to fight the problem by thestatusquo. Some players, such as zu_faul went as far as to make their own avatars to combat the problem. Thankfully, as players get bored with them, many people are switching back to their normal avatars. The scourge still plagues us, but less than in the first wave.