The End (2024/02)

Status (Quo)

I’m writing this on the 17-month milestone of my SMS ban (2024/02/18) (EDIT 2024/03/18: nothing changed). And in the end…

I’m still banned, without a case being made for it, and with my having been defamed as an abuser and ostracised for a year with a debunked abuse allegation apparently not punishment enuff.
The ban statement libelling me as an abuser is still online.
AwesomoCity0 and DutchJ still aren’t banned despite doing this, and the mod who buried the case never faced criticism.
Mlarvitar and Jpep still aren’t banned despite doing this and this.
Lego6245 was exposed as having manipulated the mods to slander me as an abuser and enable me to be bullied, and never faced criticism.
1UpsForLife conspired to have me ostracised as an abuser, while denying the lumardy case, lying about how we fell out in the wake of that, and blackmailing people to not tell me these narratives in exchange for hearing them themselves.

It’s hard to figure out what they did manage to fix after their ostensibly huge effort. They at least finally convinced themselves after half a year of doubting me that the ostracisation over a false accusation of abuse did actually happen, and put moderator Warspyking on trial for it. He looks set to not even be permanently demodded, despite being guilty of about a dozen counts of “negligence”, if I can even remember them all.

Warspyking’s 13 Points Of Pain

(2022/09) Escalating my toxic reaction to JeffCompass’s toxic modding into a major community fracture, by blaming me and erasing JeffCompass’s part in it.
(2022/09) Reporting to the moderators that my request to have an open discussion about this meant I couldn’t be talked to.
(2022/09) Not reading the evidence for the false accusation of abuse levelled at me.
(2022/09) Libel: writing sentences in the ban announcement that speculated that I had deliberately maliciously bullied the “victim” of #3, and convinced everyone that he had consulted this “victim” before banning me.
(2022/09) Ignoring evidence I told him I had that countered his conclusion, disincentivising me ([1], [2]) from submitting it, and not following up on my witness, claiming to have thought me telling him “I have a witness”, “I need to talk about [the abuse accusation]”, “presenting evidence” were all allusions to public posting (???); generally giving me the impression he wouldn’t care about anything I had to show him. Notably didn’t ask to see the letter I sent 1Ups.
(2022/09) “Victim-protection” gaslighting: deflecting conversation by accusing me of speculation on who accused me, and implying i’m an abuser by saying it’s hard to argue with me admitting i was abusive (in situations he knew nothing about).
(2022/12) Claiming he didn’t realise I was suffering severe reputational damage from the false accusation despite me telling him this was the thing that was psychologically damaging me the most.
(2022/09–2023/01) Continually intentionally ignoring strands of conversation I brought up, most notably (a) never explaining which behaviours he wanted me to improve outside of JeffCompass/1UpsForLife cases, and (b) completely ignoring my discussion about the importance of a group DM with mods to handle lumardy’s ongoing bullying of me (see end of this log).
(2023/06–08) Not reacting to the false allegation of abuse being debunked twice ([1] [2]) and instead persisting the libel despite lego6245 having quit modding.
(2023/08–09) Ongoing slander: continuing to be vague about what I was guilty of to deserve the ban, deflecting from making concrete accusations, and sending the ban rationale despite its false abuse allegation having been debunked ([1] [2]), visibly misleading someone.
(2023/07–2024/01) Pushing to not anonymise lumardy on grounds of there being no precedent despite having told me I was banned from the leaderboard owing to precedent ([1] [2]), and not backing down despite my emotional pleas ([1] [2]), others asking him to, and even the IL mods forging a consensus that this should happen and arguing it should be consistent with the RTA leaderboard. Sometime after all this, he backed down easily.
(2023/09) Gaslighting me over the other mods’ informedness on the non-1ups part of the case, which he presents as “sympathising” with what i was saying (my analysis, his reasoning).
(2023/09) Gaslighting me over being guilty of the private abuse allegation after it had been debunked twice.

It’s 13 points that feel to me as nothing more than a year of directly causing me pain and social destruction. Yet still I was meant to argue each point by myself and have them taken apart (or ignored) one-by-one. Because on a basic level, they can never understand how it feels to have that done to you, and they don’t really want to know. That deftly summarises the whole situation.

To me, Warspyking trying to cling to power, facing up to the case half a year late only after other people forced him to, trying to launder his ban conspiracy using my recent conflicts with people who involved themselves in the situation, and dodging me confronting his “this needs to end” with “why escalate it for a year then”… these actions don’t show a man who has owned up to what he did to me and wants to finally make it stop. But they don’t seem to care and would rather keep him.

And for what?

My Story

I started this page with a very negative outlook, mostly cos it is honestly hilarious to me how unjust an outcome they’ve as a community managed to reach after 17 months. But I stand by my intention to climb down from the situation as much as I can from my side and leave them with less blame, recognising that my pain is rooted somewhere outside the SMS community.

I have some motifs from The Who’s Tommy drifting around my head to remind me that what really matters at the end of the day is the trauma I went thru, and maintaining as childlike an outlook on it as I can.

SDLL

These endless escalations and vicious cycles don’t bring any new clarity to me, yet make it harder for people to understand where I’m coming from. I realised the SDLL story more-or-less tells everything that’s happened here already, and is more detached from the SMS community while clearly also being more wrong. So I figure that’s really my best chance of communicating this, by analogy.

And that is where the majority of my trauma comes from. In that context, the impact of my SMS cancellation follows as a retraumatisation. I was begging to be seen while lumardy was bullying me the day before I was banned, and then the ban reinterpreted my pain around 1UpsForLife denying his abuse (which she expressed as hiding friendships with his supporters from me, ignoring discussion about it among other things) as if I had abused her.

A Year Of “Abuser”

Some of the hardest things I’ve ever faced up to in my life were those initial conversations in which Warspyking gaslit me to my face as an abuser, and kept me in the dark to where I was panicking for hours at a time over whom I’d “abused”, what had I done that was so bad. He ignored every appeal I made over it and denied me the right to face my accusations. My conversations with Pre_Hooktail from the time show quite vividly how hard this cooked both our emotions in trying to de-escalate the situation. And with several mods quitting in the wake of the guilt, Warspyking simply did not stop, even after the truth came out on the allegations, even going so far as to harass me for months by resisting anonymising lumardy despite everyone repeatedly asking him to.

To me, the actions of Warspyking, Lego6245 and Noki Doki to maintain this conspiracy of arbitrary ban and being cancelled over thin air, they heavily broke new ground in terms of, in the scope of an online community, pushing SMS modding towards human rights abuses, and the lack of recognition of this was the key moment in destabilising my sense of reality and changing my behaviour into a full-blown traumatic reaction. The dissociation of my expectations of human behaviour from its reality has been steadily deepening since then.

Erasure

I think people remember the story around ArwyMilo and me. My final SMS Any% PB came during his org GSA’s event, and after I came to give feedback, I was banned from their Discord and future events, with Milo justifying that lowlifes such as me weren’t entitled to replies. Silence, doors closing. The SMS players remember that when I told them about this, they did nothing and joined his event as if everything was fine.

Would you blame me if I wanted to [say nothing cos they get to keep doing their own sms stuff]?

I dreamt I was at the start of Cool, Cool Mountain, and the 8 red coins had been laid out for an LTA competition. It was my favourite level so I was really excited. I went into the house at the top. It was a little commentary booth, with people looking thru the windows down the mountain. I approached and noticed I was intangible. My hand didn’t make contact with the chairs and tables, and nobody could sense I was there. I saw 1UpsForLife was participating, despite having engaged in a conspiracy to cancel me. I saw Jpep was commentating at the booth, despite his having engaged in a drive-by mendacious bullying spree against me and then dipping from the community. It was like everything had been forgotten to the sands of time, including my own existence. I woke up with this theme in my head.

I think that dream characterises where I’m coming from quite well. I had a lot of tension with friends over my battles to be included, in things like events, meta discussions, colloquial leaderboard comparisons and the like. I fought to be able to be away from people like Mlarvitar and Warspyking, fought for the free-speech Discord to even exist, put forth new standards in tech tools to give people every excuse to help me, and kept fighting to be included in the things I mentioned, dealing in broken promises and let-down expectations, and all ultimately in vain. It was a miserable last year of my SMS career.

I was excluded from my childhood in this way (with consequences I never recovered from) and felt I would try to fight to be included this time rather than just let it happen. After lumardy happened, I felt like SMS was the last good thing and coping mechanism left in my life. But my lesson was no matter how hard I tried, they would never let me commentate in their large events, while much less-suited people would do it without even asking to, effortlessly winning popularity contests that were always just out of reach for whatever abomination was my personality.

Make It Stop

When it comes to the people who have tried to help with this situation, I am pretty resolute about cutting the vicious cycle of conflict, about forgiving, from my side. I don’t think my story should be as unrelatable to them as it is, but I can understand how we got to where we are. I see all the effort people have exerted, and am grateful for it.

I’ve not comprehensively apologised for the ways I’ve hurt them yet, because it’s a dangerous thing to do after how my forthrightness was turned against me to whitewash the bingo bullying. It could play into how they’ve been leveraging this conflict as a reason to keep me banned, and so keep supporting the social abuse I described in the last section, which to me is unambiguously an evil thing to do.

And I don’t understand for what.

I’m going to be handling several people at the same time generally in discussing here, so I’m sorry for inevitably misrepresenting individuals.

I don’t understand why it is so important for them for me to agree with them and to validate their pain. They haven’t undergone anything remotely close to what I described in the last section. They can just walk away and stop being involved in my life whenever they want to. I can’t walk away without losing entire hobbies and communities.

I don’t have an ego about any of this or desire any validation. I have my own opinions. But I argue them intently because I want it all to stop.

How do they justify supporting the stance of the mod who pressed me with a false accusation of abuse for a year?

What’s the point of dogpiling me, criticising me endlessly, dissecting every part of my communication and approach to defending myself, when the reason we came here was to end the situation?

I’ve lived in hope for the past year that someone would simply see what happened and make it all stop. But they’re no closer to even ending the cycle of 1UpsForLife’s manipulation, which is the origin of the danger.

Maybe in their minds, my reputation is a lost cause. How does one even recover from all of that? What’s the point in solidarity, strikes, or even just standing with me? What would a rehabilitation plan even look like?

Or why not just replace a conspiracy of me being an abuser with another barrage of accusations for another year?

I recognise most of the problems they’ve been discussing, around gratitude, speculation, emotional tolls and the like. I’ve done my best to give them an out and a path to bilateral de-escalation. But a lot of their behaviour and the things that have been said are also echoes and reiterations of aspects of SDLL and my losing matchup to society, and reinforce my conclusions from those things.

A Broader Look

A lot has been said about how all this has panned out, but I think it comes down to a lack of common ground due to different levels of understanding and different values. For fundamental impasses between myself and society like that, I tend to see them thru a survival-of-the-fittest lens, with me being unfit and the social abuse I’ve described here being an unresolvable game-over from the very beginning.

IMO, the lack of common ground boils down to:

not understanding oppression, its root in power imbalance, and that vicious circles must be uprooted from the power that feeds them rather than the side that punches up to power.
not understanding manipulation, its root in information suppression, and that repeating this when it caused an injustice before will lead to the same injustice recurring.
not understanding victim-blaming, instead seeing it simply as an accusation of being a bad person.
valuing dishonesty over abrasive candidness.

From these bad bases, the common ground rots away, and I start to feel my relatability to other humans – which had already been undermined hard by the initial gaslighting over me being an abuser – erode with each passing discussion, as people justify things like projecting my current behaviour onto the truth of the original accusations against me, and still arguing to suppress evidence despite this having caused the initial year of social abuse.

I will let it go, in the hope that they may one day understand. My fight against gaslighting and social abuse will not be here, but rather with SDLL.

There’s a final comment I received that I will share, which I was DMed, which is a blunt representation of the final step in my erasure:

they’re looking to put new systems into place… It’s not the happiest thing to thank you for, but it does feel like a bit of a martyrdom… It feels to me like a bit of your sacrifice… I’m not assuming [it won’t happen with me gone], but there is a chance. And sometimes a chance is all you need