Metroid: Other M

The eight "Chicago Black Sox"

The Severan Tondo , c. 199 AD tondo of the Severan family , with portraits of Septimius Severus , Julia Domna , and their sons Caracalla and Geta . The face of one of Severus' and Julia's sons has been erased; it may be Geta's, as a result…

Metroid: Other M

Samus Aran, who defeated alien superorganisms alone across six games, was rewritten in Other M to require a male commander's verbal authorization before activating her own equipment — even life-saving gear she already owned.

Black Sox Scandal

Eight Chicago White Sox players were paid by gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series — then played the following full season undetected. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who batted .375 in the fixed series, was banned for life.

Chevalière d'Éon

The Chevalier d'Éon served Louis XV as a spy, a soldier, and a diplomat — then lived thirty-three years as a woman after a royal decree settled a wager about her birth sex, dying in London in 1810 with the question still unresolved.

Damnatio memoriae

Rome could condemn a man to nonexistence: his face chiseled off statues, his name gouged from inscriptions, his coins melted down. Domitian's name was erased from 31 separate official monuments after his death.

Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán told a summer university audience in July 2022 that Hungarians must not become a 'mixed-race' people — prompting his own advisor, Zsuzsa Hegedűs, to resign and call it a 'pure Nazi speech.'

Placenta cake

A segment of new parents encapsulate and swallow their own placenta, citing hormonal benefits; no peer-reviewed evidence supports the claim. One Oregon infant contracted group B streptococcus from a contaminated capsule.

BioShock

Rapture was built on Ayn Rand's Objectivism — pure individual reason, no government, no God. By the time the player arrives, its citizens are injecting gene-splicing drugs and eating each other. The ideology ate itself first.

Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

Iraq invaded Kuwait at 2 a.m. on August 2, 1990, partly because Kuwait was drilling at a slant into the Rumaila oil field beneath their shared border — stealing, Baghdad claimed, $2.4 billion in Iraqi oil.

Simmons Bedding Company

Simmons Bedding — maker of the Beautyrest mattress — was bought, loaded with debt, and sold seven times in a single generation of private equity deals, each time leaving workers with less and investors with more. The mattress never changed.