The end of the year is always ripe for epiphanies, ain't it? I can't believe that one post about coming to terms with being autistic was now four years ago. Something keeps coming back to me about the past ten years, and I don't think I've ever properly vocalized it or even come to terms with it in myself. I'll have a lighter lookback on my art progress going up on the group blog soon; this is just one that's been brewing in my head for the past month or so as well.
At the start of the year, I left MiloHax, which was a Guitar Hero and Rock Band modding Discord if you're not aware. I left because of the fallout from a situation where I was drunk, said something mildly edgy (we're talking "haha you're 14 and you think you're bi" levels of edgy, like real weaksauce shit), and the other mods took it as an opportunity to strip me not just of the mod role (which, who cares, I can't clean it up for free anymore), but also the Homie role with access to the private room that comes with that role. That bit rankled me. All the work and all the stress I put myself through (including personally—working so much on Guitar Hero mods had me neglecting Caby plenty of times), contributing to so many big projects—and then I came home from work one night to find a "unanimous vote" from all the other mods saying that I fucked up and I should "do better". I don't think it was just about this incident, I think it was a slow boil, but this definitely broke the camel's back.
If anything, it's amusing looking back at how little it meant. I didn't drop any YouTube subs, despite some fat NEET who presses buttons really fast doing his best to cancel me for attention on Xitter. I've since had modder people add me on my public account to ask questions or what have you. I even had someone who used to talk to me about marfGH drop in on the Vib-Ribbon stream for a brief moment, which was nice. Of course, I also look back at who decided to drop me and I remembered that one of them was a literal teenager, one just turned 40 and posts recordings of arguments with his dad for his internet friends, and another got one of his previous Discord accounts deleted for posting the "American culture is centered around neighbors" copypasta (ahem) in some other server.
This ain't sour grapes, this is a reminder that people in Discord servers are not your friends, and they're usually a lot sadder than you are, or are just as edgy and are pretending not to be so they themselves don't get canceled.
Instead, I became international. I quit my first job (my previous manager told me the last time I dropped in how she wishes she had me back because I was the only reliable worker she had), got on two planes basically for shits and giggles, flew to Montreal to London, and slept in the same bed for three weeks with the girl I love. I got a slightly better job when I came back—took a lot of time getting used to it, but it's a stepping stone to something I truly want to do, I believe. I moved forward in life. Why then did it affect me so bad?
I've wound up going through this loop a lot over the past ten years, and even before. My first taste of internet infamy came in the mid 2010s when I humming along on Tumblr and got into it with some blog with a thousand followers. I guess I said something that upset them, because suddenly I had tons of mocking, venomous anons in my inbox, plus this blog shittalking me very publicly. Brianna (who was the adult woman who groomed me through my teenage years, remember) encouraged me to shoot back, and I did. About a year later, I had another run-in with a blog who said that I was a "potential rapist" because I didn't think "Blurred Lines" was as creepy as folks made it out to be. Remember, I was 15.
In 2017, I started up the Valve Developer Union, which was born out of a Steam group and Discord server for folks who made custom content for Garry's Mod. The kid in charge of that Steam group bothered the hell out of me and a couple other folks, so after we got mod in his server, we made our own, trashed his, and invited everyone to the new one. That was VDU Mark I. When I had no reason to keep it around anymore, I shut it down. Some previous regulars convinced me to bring it back up, and I figured with a website attached, I now had a reason to. VDU Mark II wound up causing me a solid year of aggravation, both with regulars (some coomers, some just fucking miserable people, some tried to get me banned off Discord in spectacularly unsuccessful fashion) and with my webmaster. I remember one of the first truly heated arguments I got into was about what font we should use for the body text of the articles. Which fucking font.
In 2018, I joined Neocities—my experiences on there are well, well documented at this point. Lots more arguing, lots more being a gadfly, lots more stress around another web project, this time Districts. It's funny how much of it has been forgotten about, and I've written about that in blog posts prior, but it affected us greatly at the time. I bought DreamHost hosting initially for the sole reason that I saw how it was stressing Caby out and I wanted to get a girl I really cared about away from people throwing shit at me. I haven't even mentioned the Quake scene in all of this, where I marched into a well-established modding scene, went "I am the new wave of Quake mapping and all the Quakedads can get fucked", and handed over a level without coherent texture themes. Hilarity ensued, perhaps.
And, of course, in the age of Somnolescent being its own group, lots of people have come and gone with similarly sparky results. Brianna got kicked out in 2018, prengle got kicked out in 2019 and proceeded to stalk me and try to humiliate me with some of the erotic RPs Brianna had me doing with her, Neo left a month later and also tried to humiliate me, mon left in 2022, borb left in 2022 (and also tried to humiliate me, see the aforementioned Xitter drama), and Devon has most recently flown the coup a month ago for being a legitimately violent racist who doesn't think what she said is the issue, just that people look at her wrong for it.
The point of all this storytelling is that it's never that I miss the people. The people I've met are sex pests, incels, bitter losers, middle-aged burnouts telling you about the wonders of psychedelics for fixing mental problems, oh yeah, and a literal child groomer (and some better folks, of course, folks I wouldn't mind chatting with again now and then). I don't even necessarily regret the outcome. I've got great friends now, I have money now, I'm working on moving up in the world, and I'm more creative and more successful at being happy with what I make than ever.
I just wish it didn't have to happen the way it did. I wish that every good idea I had didn't also come with a tidal wave of nonsense that wound up killing it. I regret the loss of that potential there and the connections that could've been had. Every single loss comes with a little more baggage that I have to navigate next time I try to make friends. I still have a hard time seeing when people like me. I still get nervous every new community I poke my head into will eventually chase me back out. Some of those previous times were well-deserved, and others, I don't quite think so, but it affects me the same either way.
I absolutely wish Somnol could've continued with every single person we lost (except Brianna, obviously). I wish folks weren't shitheads. I wish Somnol didn't have that gigantic trail of dismissals lagging behind it, because losing people sucks. Again, it's not the people—what good would having prengle back be? He'd insult me, himself, and everyone constantly, give us some MS Paint scribbles and a Sentridoh MP3 and go "here's my great idea for a Morrowind mod", and we were all supposed to act graced with that edgelord genius. Or Cheren and Neo, now that they're off drawing Pikmin pornography on Mastodon? It's not the people, it's the fact that something good could've come of it and we all got our hopes up and what came out of it was disappointment and social trauma.
Of course I'm aware of the thread running through every single incident, me. Of course I was a shitty, shitstirring teenager, of course I said the thing that would bother people the most because I thought it would be funny—but there's more to the story than that. There's why I was like that. My own insecurities, my own ego I was hiding behind to guard against my fear that I was untalented, my own feelings of being deprived and not being able to make all the cool modding, music, and artsy stuff I wanted happen—and also the folks around me encouraging it. Brianna encouraged it. Even Somnolescent encouraged it for a while. Was it fun destroying Hyperlink? Yeah. Was it fun destroying that Garry's Mod Steam group Discord and both VDU Discords? Yeah.
What did it amount to though? A big list of people I still regret making enemies with, just because making enemies fucking sucks and is stressful. I wasn't just destroying things, I was trying to build them up too, make friends, show people where I was coming from, be reasonable, and, well, in short, you don't shit where you eat, and I did.
I think a lot about how there was a happy, dumb little kid there before all this happened. He was sitting in his room, relearning how to play Guitar Hero with a regular controller after the wire snapped off his SG, listening to Soundgarden and thinking about the idea of having Pokémon OCs for the first time, and that kid became me. I got away from the adult that kid should've grown up to be and came out of the other end socially anxious and jaded, wondering who the next person I really wanted to like me and then didn't will be.
The past few years have been me trying to re-establish contact with that kid. Not become a kid again, but become better-adjusted again. Again, become the adult that kid should've grown up into. I think I'm on the right track; just being able to draw has made me feel so much more whole, so much less frustrated with what I'm personally capable of. Everything is within my control, what I'm capable of, how I conduct myself, and how I feel about myself. I can be exactly who I want to be, and if I need love and care, I can just vocalize that, I don't have to act out to get that attention like I used to. Sure, that means facing a lot of very uncomfortable realities about myself—but I've never been one for lying anyway.
Like I said, there will be a much lighter lookback on 2023 over on Letters, either before the end of the year's out or the very start of 2024. That one's gonna be about me drawing, because I've gotten a lot better at it over the past year and it well and truly brings me a lot of joy. I've always been supremely jealous of people who can draw, and now I can! And I'm drawing exactly what I want to, how I want to, and I have a million ways to grow from here. I'm really enjoying it. We'll talk more soon, gamers.
