Dice Blog

PLEASE sign, especially if you’re from one of the countries that has not reached it’s threshold. (France, Sweden, Greece, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria…basically every country except Italy and Belgium)

Minimum thresholds must be met in at least five more countries in addition to the 1,000,000 signatures requirement.

The countries closest to reaching their minimum threshold are Ireland(89% of required signatures), France(75%), The Netherlands (75%), Spain (69%), and Cyprus (46%). If you or anyone you know have citizenship in these countries, please sign it, encourage them to sign it, and pass it forward.

If the requirements are met, the European Commission will be forced to examine this and take legal action. Real change is a possibility if enough signatures are collected.

this is specifically a call to action for fellow white people. if you’re white and you’re in any way able to, donate.

George Floyd’s memorial fund

Minnesota Freedom Fund: “We value a society that values its people, their freedom and recognizes their contribution to the greater good. A society that does not condition pretrial freedom on class or identity, that has ended mass incarceration, and that invests in restorative and transformative justice.”

Black Visions Collective, an org that strives to “shape a political home for Black people across Minnesota. We aim to center our work in healing and transformative justice principles, intentionally develop our organizations core DNA to ensure sustainability, and develop Minnesota’s emerging Black leadership to lead powerful campaigns.”

Reclaim the Block, which “organizes Minneapolis community and city council members to move money from the police department into other areas of the city’s budget that truly promote community health and safety. We believe health, safety and resiliency exist without police of any kind. We organize around policies that strengthen community-led safety initiatives and reduce reliance on police departments.”

So I’m not sure how closely people on here follow dice drama, but there has been no end of discourse over the Dispel Dice kickstarter since before it even started running. There’s a lot to it, but the one we’re gonna talk about right now is the way Dispel’s designs have turned up on Wish for purchase long before their anticipated ship date of November 2020. People have ordered them and they’ve arrived gorgeous as the pictures, but I had refrained until now for ethical reasons.

A representative from the factory just came forward on Facebook to tell their side of the story–Dispel themselves have been completely silent on the whole matter, by the way.

tl;dr: According to the representative, Dispel came to this factory asking for quality previously unknown to commercial dice-making, basically handmade-level quality. The factory put a ton of time, resources, and effort into R&D to achieve these standards, thinking it a reasonable investment as Dispel had made all sorts of claims as to the amount of product they’d be ordering, and sent a couple of orders (50 and 600 sets respectively) to Dispel. Dispel placed a further order for 2100 sets. Dispel’s owner then asked to tour their factory (a fairly common request for dice companies), but covertly took pictures of the process, and then became very hard to get ahold of. They refused the 2100 set order saying it was unauthorized, and then the factory got word that Dispel was in the process of setting up their own production, using the pictures they’d taken of their machines and process.

Notably, this means we have zero pictures of product from the actual factory that will be fulfilling the kickstarter. That bodes poorly, imo.

Realizing there would be no more orders coming from Dispel, and with COVD-19 halting all production, they decided to sell off the 2100 to recoup their costs. That said, after seeing there was demand for this kind of thing, the factory representative then said in the thread that they were looking at developing more designs and would continue to produce their own dice, which I am very excited about! If anything good came of this, it’s that a new dice company has emerged to sell extremely interesting new product 😀 They’ve been selling on Wish under the name Ice Dice (pictured above), but I don’t know if they’ll be keeping that name.