Welcome, one and all, to The Freak Circus of Horrors...
...' fanmade masterlist lol
from the day of its release, the creator of the game the freak circus, neko, has been answering questions about the game and its characters, uploading art, and discussing his development process! there's a whole lot of super interesting stuff he has to say! like a lot. a whole lot.
like 487 entries a lot. (as of writing this post.)
if you wanted to get a handle on all that, you could trawl through his and the official tumblr's archive or use tumblr's subpar search function, of course! but i prefer having more options for filtering and having everything in one place. and also i am what might politely be termed cataclysmically autistic about both trivia and spreadsheets. therefore, lo: The Spreadsheet
the spreadsheet contains a summary column for easier reading and searching, cross-linked cells for overlapping subject matter, screenshots of the original post, a transcript of the post with image descriptions of any images (which allows them to be more easily searchable as well), translations into english, and categories and character tags. there are also several pre-set filter views that allow you to see only a certain category or only a certain character, along with a tutorial on the front page about how to make your own custom filter views if you want to look at something that's not an pre-set option.
so now if you're curious what neko has said about, say, the circus member's ice cream-eating habits (about which there are three posts), or if you remember there was an illustration involving harlequin cutting paper puppets but not where (the weekly update of 7/19/25), or if you vaguely recall a keyword from something you read a while back you want to reference for your theory post, or you want to look at everything that's ever been said about jester to help get him in-character in your fic, or you want to see what neko's answered before so you can ask a question with more confidence it's not one neko has gotten, it should be a lot easier to find these things!
i have a few stretch goals in mind--i'd like to create a searchable index page after this with links to common topics and then an faq page, especially for the stuff that's been asked and answered super regularly. but for now i am going to rest because i've been working on this pretty much nonstop for five days lol
anyway i really hope it's useful to other folks in the fandom! i made one of these for isat and i used it ALL the time. and it felt wildly uncomfortable not having one around for this one lol. please join me in the joy of The Spreadsheet...they're so nice...
for those seeing this for the first time, i've been working on compiling a spreadsheet with every tfc post from neko's tumblr (and now the official tumblr) with a summary, transcript, translation where necessary, category and character tags, full image descriptions, so on. i also have set up filter views by category and character with a tutorial on the front page about how to use those. the idea is to make it a lot easier to search for the answers to questions, lore, figure out what people have already asked neko, stuff like that.
as an update: i've got everything ready except for the amas! i've been working on it pretty much continuously for the past several days. the 'final' count as of right now issss like...around 490 entries. yes my hands are dying <3
the amas are a big project in and of themselves because they require transcribing all the text for all of them =v=... though i do have an idea for that that i'll test out. and then also image ids for all of the sprites. i think it'd prob take another day or so straight of work, less if my idea works out, so we'll see whether i can get it finished tomorrow at a good time. but if not i might release the link before i'm fully finished with everything! as loathe as i am to release an Unfinished Product...but i'm impatient you see...
i'm really hoping this will be useful to the fandom so! *v* hopefully it can help people out who want to learn more about the lore tidbits that have been dropped since the game's release! there's a lot! it's clear how much work neko has put into answering questions and interacting with the fandom and i feel like that care deserves a spotlight!
So with TFC masterlist…none of the links are working for me all link back to the doc, am I doing something wrong?
oh hm! i might need a bit more context to answer that question. if there are any external links--like the ones in the 'links' column that head to patreon or tumblr--that are external then let me know and i'll take a look--i took a very cursory look and didn't see any issues there but i could be missing something, like it's only happening in a specific portion of the spreadsheet (if so, what portion are you looking at?).
if you are however referring to the links in the index, the summary column, or the faq--the majority of those are intended to be links that are internal to the spreadsheet. for example, if you click on a link in the faq, most of the time it will take you to a pertinent place in the index, and if you click on a link in the index, it will take you to the appropriate reference in the social media tab (which will, as part of the entry, have a link to where it was originally posted). the majority of links in the summary tag also take you to later or earlier entries in the social media tab. all of those SHOULD be working but if not then let me know which place you were testing and i'll do my best to fix that :> if it helps, i'll provide a gif of the intended behavior:
(so it goes: click on index link, taken to pertinent place in index, click on one reference in index, taken to entry in social media tab, click on link, taken to correct link on tumblr or patreon)
hopefully this helps; if it's still not working for you then definitely send in another ask to let me know what isn't working for you more specifically and what area of the spreadsheet you were testing in! it's possible that it's either a) a specific area of the spreadsheet that isn't working properly or b) it's working for me as the creator but not for visitors, in which case i'll have to do some extra troubleshooting :> so lmk~
Just wanted to compliment and bow down to your Excel Sheets prowess! Your Freak Circus sheet has been beyond helpful (and fun) to look around on. What was the hardest part to set up? Also do have any hopes for Day 3?
aw thank you! i'm really glad it's been helpful to you *v*
hmmm if stuff i haven't finished yet counts, my current project is the hardest haha. it required help from other folks and i still probably won't be able to get it perfect unfortunately, plus there's just a lot of busywork =v= that i'd prefer not to talk about in more detail until i can be sure i can even get something workable out there, though anybody who's ever seen me adding anything to the index recently has seen some of what i got help with (the index is now dynamically generated rather than manually, using a lookup table and a function that i absolutely did not write myself haha.)
butttt if it's what i've already done 🤔 let's see. the summaries end up being a lot of work when done en masse. the index also ended up being a bit of a pain just because since it i had to go over every post that had been made to that point and then make multiple index entries. so so many links.
hmmm hopes for day 3...i'm excited for more monster worldbuilding, though idk if that counts as a hope since we know we're gonna get some more of that! i really like Lore if it wasn't clear lol. i'd love if some of my theories ended up being correct but i'm not really married to anything either! i'll just be excited for anything we get to see honestly. the limited snippets from patreon are already just SO so exciting in that regard! as long as the characters are there and interacting and ready for analysis i'll be pleased as punch
i'm afraid i haven't written anything today. unfortunately, instead, the autism
i've been working since maybe around 11 last night and i am perhaps a third through the second month after the demo's release. luckily june and july are the heaviest so after i get through those it should go faster but it'll probably take a couple days to a week maybe
of course i want to keep working on the fic, but i know myself well enough from when i did this for isat to know if i let myself lose steam on this, finishing it up will be super rough so i might dedicate a solid few days to this. my hope with this is that it'll make information a lot easier to search and a lot easier to filter! i have some preset filter views up filtering for art, for information about characters both with and without 'how would character x react if mc did/was like this', for information about the story, sorting by character, so on. it's very useful for fic, for checking what's already been asked, for cross-referencing lore, making art more easily searchable, stuff like that! when it's finished i'll make it publicly accessible for anybody who might benefit from it
hi, darling. I'm trying to translate all the TFC blog to spanish. I'm going from older posts to newest ones and now i'm at the post where you and your amazing masterlist are mentioned. I just wanted to ask your permission to try to translate your masterlist (since i know nearly nothing about excel so i'll need time xD)
as is a lot of fan work i'd feel bad to translate it w/o permission
thanks for reading <3
hello hello! oh wow that's a huge undertaking, good for you :D thank you for asking! i am sorry that my answer here is going to be probably longer than you expected haha. break accordingly. (also sorry i saved this as a draft and it took away the ability to answer privately so =v= my apologies if you meant for this to be a private ask)
so the first thing i will say is that automatic translation for the masterlist is one of my long term projects--a very difficult one that keeps stalling, but i mention it just in case you'd be bummed out if there was eventually a, like, google translated or translate-able version. it probably wouldn't be anytime soon, it's not one hundred percent certain i'll be able to make it work, and of course human translation is always both better and preferable :P but i've been in positions before where i do a bunch of work only to discover the work has already been done or something and it's always a bummer, so mentioning just in case that is relevant to you!
the second thing i will say is that the masterlist is a huuuuuuge amount of work =v= it updates at minimum weekly with all the amas and usually more often than that. on my end it's usually at minimum a couple hours of work a week for me? not counting projects of course, just updates and general maintenance. and while there's some stuff you'd not be doing that i do, i know translation can be very time-intensive u_u if you're prepared for that then it's fine, but i would be remiss if i didn't mention the time commitment here!
the third thing that would make this very difficult (and very time-consuming) is that from my experiments with trying to get translation to work, i know duplicating the document works to get everything sorted in the beginning, but google sheets doesn't have any internal way to keep things updated across sheets that also maintains the links. there's a function that copies text across sheets, but it breaks every link and doesn't transfer images =v= which, well, i see you're translating the images already so that might not be a dealbreaker for you but the links are a problem. in any case, translating what's already there would be a huge time commitment (we have 865 entries at present after all) but you could do it while maintaining functionality; updating the sheet from there on out would require redoing a lot of the work i do to link everything together and grab screenshots and things like that.
there's also the issue of, like, if there are any updates made to something--for example, when i go back and add a link to a patreon ama when it's crossposted to tumblr--then there's not really any way to be updated on changes made to the original. if you're using that formula to grab the original text from the masterlist then it'll update it (but, well, minus the link because of the issue i mentioned. but the text would update. ...sometimes. it can be finicky), but you can't have the text update and also have it be translated manually so...anyway yes these are the sorts of the problems that are why i don't have the translation project up and running yet and am not fully certain i'll be able to ever make it work haha. frankly i've avoided talking about it publicly before now because i don't want to get people's hopes up u_u
the final thing is that if you read all of this and you still want to give it a try, i should probably check real quick with the tfc mods on that ovo i'm not inherently against it, and i doubt they would have a problem with it, but i try and run masterlist stuff against them so let me know whether you still want to go ahead on it and if so i'll check with them and then get back to you!
so basically tl;dr i'm not inherently against it, i also think it would be very difficult and at this point maintaining translations with the updates would involve...mmm...essentially, maintaining a second masterlist yourself. you could copy and translate the text but you'd need to do all the formatting yourself and formatting and indexing is frankly like two thirds of the work. i would love to have the masterlist translated--it was one of the first things i started working on trying to make possible--but google sheets isn't really made for that use case unfortunately. if you still want to go ahead with it even knowing all that and i get a just-in-case okay from the mods, then yeah sure!
FAQ links lead to the same page, just reloads it. If I’m sr the bottom of the page it consistently reloads to the top, I didn’t see any links outside of it though (mobile docs is not good! I do not have the app) so sorry if that’s intended I figured I might be clicking wrong, thank you!
ah okay! so i checked and on mobile that does indeed happen. it works serviceably on the app (though, you know, still definitely not the best experience) but in browser (definitely on ios firefox and safari; checked with a user agent switcher for android chrome & firefox and seems to still be the case) it opens it in a new tab. external links still work fine, but since the majority of the links in the spreadsheet are internal that's very unfortunate. i'll do some research and see if there's any way around that or if it's just a limitation of sheets on browser. i'm sorry about that though! ;A;
Hey Brin! First time asking stuff here
I wanted to say that the fandom spread sheet you made is cool an neatly organized. Thank you for that :)
Tho in social media catagory the image 108 (the one with mc hitting harlequin in the face - ask made by chocolatekyzya-) english translation is not fully translated. Not really a problem but just wanted to let you know. I havent check the doc fully, will let yu know if I find more. You can ignore this ask (Im fine with not getting any answers, I used the ask box to reach out about this matter in a private way, for I dont know if you check the comments or not.)
Have a nice week
hello hello, thanks for checking in! *v* i'm glad it's helpful to you!
checking on row 108 i think i see the issue here--that ask had the original language and english translation in both the ask and the response, so in these two bits the text on top and below are direct translations
i made a note about that in the entry below the text but it isn't parallel to my formatting for everything else, where i moved the english translation to the tl column even if it was originally in the post, so i think that was probably confusing! i've edited it to match the rest of the sheet, so hopefully that makes more sense for folks in the future :> thanks for bringing that to my attention, and definitely feel free to let me know if you see anything else that needs fixing!
(btw i check notifications wherever i get them, so if you mean comments as in replies on a post here or comments on the sheet itself i'd definitely check them o7 but asks work plenty fine as well, so whatever is easiest for you~)
