I still don't know what soft grunge is

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

DID THE JOURNAL FACTORY FUCKING EXPLODE???

you said it yourself: you're looking to vent it LITERALLY ANYWHERE

so vent it somewhere private. or at least not literally aimed AT another person, a total stranger at that

Like, this reblogger sounds so insanely self centered in their reblog. notice how both options focus on how being rude would affect THEM. "B has no consequences for me so it's perfectly fine to do"

im going to stare at it

im going to grin like an idiot

i dont care if you think its bad or not

i love it

Welcome to an ArtFight 10th Anniversary Murder Mystery that you can solve with YOUR art!

You and your OC's have been invited to a party at a grand manor... but there's been a deadly twist! Our poor host- They Never Saw It Coming!

TO PLAY:

1. On ArtFight.net, attack any of our ArtFight 2026 Sona designs (see below), referencing the answer to the most recent clue. You can reference this answer in your art or its description.

2. When someone has the right answer, we'll reveal the next clue of the mystery. We may include OC's in these reveals, but the choice is up to the artist so please don't be disappointed if you're not chosen!

3. Good luck in assisting Detective Pearl in her investigation!

This collaboration between @cadaverkeys, @nileferg, @utterhomestucktrash, @peejalien and myself is our celebration of the ArtFight community. We hope you enjoy!

Keep track of the story and most recent clue at our website!

CLUE ONE can be found at the end of our video. What's going on with that mysterious gramophone?

More details below the cut...

OK even though making that kinda puzzle is part of my job, I cannot figure this one out, so I will lay down here all I have found in the hopes that we can figure it out together, classic-ARG-style.

BASIC CLUES GIVEN

These are the main clues given explicitly. It's fair to assume that the first solution can be guessed from those two things alone.

Gramophone sequence: 183728725

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb-TwWvNk0k&list=PLF70Y7efqrYM&index=1 (Cell Block Tango)

EXTRA THINGS FOUND?

Extra oddities I've found; may or may not be relevant to this first answer.

Code compiled from the character sheets: 12345

HTML code on the website seems to imply the existence of an 8th page (one more after the gramophone) → solution page?

WHAT I'VE TRIED

About the sequence:

Is the sequence the ID of an ArtFight character or attack? → no

Is the sequence ciphered? → Unlikely. Most of the common ciphers give me nothing usable. A1Z26 outputs AHCGBHGBE. Even putting that through secondary ciphers doesn't give anything obvious (best is NUPTOUTOR from a rot13).

It is not a factorial nor square number. Maybe some operation on it might reveal something?

About the song:

The song list numbers through it (2 shots, 6 women, 10 times, 17 spread eagle). Not sure if useful.

The song is from the musical Chicago, which came out in 1975, adapted from a 1926 play. More numbers, not sure what to do with them.

Cell Block Tango... CBT? Likely irrelevant.

Anything special about the musical? The city?

How does the sequence relate to the video?

Is the sequence a series of NumPad scrub commands? → gibberish results

Is the sequence meant to be used on the playlist tracks?

first word of tracks? → "cell beneath terrible bell not beneath bell not mikky" ....gibberish?

About the website:

Maybe the 1st answer is located on that 8th page. → How to access it? Just URL guessing?

URLs tried:

/183728725

/AHCGBHGBE

/NUPTOUTOR

/12345

What now?

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.

Welcome to an ArtFight 10th Anniversary Murder Mystery that you can solve with YOUR art!

You and your OC's have been invited to a party at a grand manor... but there's been a deadly twist! Our poor host- They Never Saw It Coming!

TO PLAY:

1. On ArtFight.net, attack any of our ArtFight 2026 Sona designs (see below), referencing the answer to the most recent clue. You can reference this answer in your art or its description.

2. When someone has the right answer, we'll reveal the next clue of the mystery. We may include OC's in these reveals, but the choice is up to the artist so please don't be disappointed if you're not chosen!

3. Good luck in assisting Detective Pearl in her investigation!

This collaboration between @cadaverkeys, @nileferg, @utterhomestucktrash, @peejalien and myself is our celebration of the ArtFight community. We hope you enjoy!

Keep track of the story and most recent clue at our website!

CLUE ONE can be found at the end of our video. What's going on with that mysterious gramophone?

More details below the cut...

I have a bundled option of every print in the series for half off of what they would be separately or I can also draw a hamster for you ❤️