there are no rules in kintsugi

@Hobo not private convos but there is a lot of alt account sillyness going on that's influencing things. Seebs is on his way to the airport though so he'll not be online for a bit I think. I just wanted you to know he's not ignoring you.

Please stand by.

Edit: Lmao, nvm, the airport crisis was averted.

 

So, I fucked up part of this, because the abuse claim was based on my understanding that F&G's initial distress was real, but that the ensuing drama was all part of the admitted trolling. Nonetheless, Pheelog participated in attacking Beldaran as part of something that was, in fact, trolling. And I have sufficient information leading me to suspect collusion that, given prior history, I would not believe otherwise even given a flat denial.

 

Okay, this is funny, but it's also a question that deserves a serious answer:

Rigs is antagonistic at times, but he's very strongly anti-authoritarian and I've got over a decade of experience with how he deals with communities and power structures.

F&G hurt a bunch of random bystanders to try to get at me because they were mad at me.

I am absolutely in favor of mods who are opposed to the power structure in and of itself and who will poke at me and call me out on shit when they think I'm wrong. But if you want mods who troll people and don't seem to care much who gets hurt, something like 90% of the forums on the Internet have got you covered.

 

Considering the deliberate, sustained, presumably premeditated trolling, the alt account bullshit, and all that junk, including accounts I don't recognize jumping right in as if they've been involved for ages, I think it's pretty reasonable to believe that at least SOME of the people involved in the conversation were in on the joke. I'm having knee-jerk reactions regarding individuals that I'm deliberately not acting on, and I'm not going to jump to nasty conclusions about those people. But I'm pretty sure that f&g wasn't acting in isolation, I'm pretty sure there were other people who knew what was going on, and honestly, I'm not going to give anyone who was involved credit for definitely not being in the know and/or participating the hilarious performance art without a flat denial from them.

Oh my god, why would Seebs do this thing? Why would they NAME the people who have been hurt in this, when this whole stupid mess resulted from an act of deliberate trolling, presumably done to upset people? The the only way you're entitled to an answer is if those people give permission to be named, or they name themselves. Why would you expect Seebs to violate their privacy and trust like this, what the heck. And given the character of this whole thing, I rather doubt most of them are going to want to say anything.

And your post is ambiguously worded, I'm not sure if you're talking about people hurt by your actions only, or people hurt by your quote-unquote side in general. And if that's the case, fucking me. I was fine until I found out about the trolling, because I thought I was doing my best to be nice to and help a person in genuine fucking need. And they weren't. It was ~performance art~. I haven't been leaning on Seebs for support because there are limited time and spoons to go around, and other people are at potentially life-threatening risk. Someone SAID in a public thread that they might not have survived the unlabeled suicide post. I'm not badly off enough that I'd take away help resources for that.

But I sure have been crying on and off for the last few hours! I've been sitting around listlessly crying and accomplishing pretty much nothing and feeling miserable about being a gullible, easy-to-manipulate moron! Sure is humiliating to type that, but is that what you were interested in getting confirmed? But you may say that no no no, you really were just asking about your direct actions after all, that other stuff is f&g's fault. Well, would you just look at the mysterious new account who seems to know what's going on and jumped right in on f&g's side, and is still defending them, even after the goddam suicide plans as TROLLING reveal. I do not trust you. Not at all. You can tell me outright you weren't involved, but I'd have a REAL HARD TIME believing you weren't in on the trolling joke from the start. Even if you didn't hurt me directly, I sure feel awful about everything you posted that I agreed with, and I feel awful every time you post now, because it sure looks like you're right in there collaborating with the person who fucked me up.

So there, someone who's been fucking hurt. A nice humiliating public goddamn reveal, because you don't want to admit people could maybe possibly be hurting unless they're outed to you.

 

I feel you on the listless crying, that's been me since last night when I found out. Sympathy. :c

Seebs outed me but it's not super a secret than I'm on a moderating break because of this so w/e. I'm not comfortable going into the hurt much tho so I'll just leave this.

Spoiler: Hurt Feelings

 

@Hobo My impression was that they felt suicidal, but came here to pick a fight on purpose instead of looking for help.

 

I wanted to say here too that I appreciate what you're attempting @Pheelog

Like, all the maybes aren't coming off super nice but I think you're trying and I would like to work with you.

 

So, something around here is trumpeting, and stomping, and appears to have giant ears. And I'm guessing it's an elephant, and it's in this very room:

How confident can I be that F&G will reliably and accurately report how much of the thing was or wasn't "trolling"? I know that at least some of what they did was clearly deceptive. I would argue that the creation of a shiny new account apparently named after a phrase used in discussion of drama is in and of itself somewhat deceptive. So. How do I know how much of the rest is? Say they reported specific things in a chat elsewhere. Were those things true? How do we find out?

That's sorta the problem with trolling about serious shit. This isn't the first thing this person has said or done that I had reason to believe was deceptive. I don't know whether there are specific people they would definitely not deceive. I don't know whether there are specific topics about which they wouldn't lie. Maybe it was all fake and they staged the whole thing, then communicated to rigs that part of it was trolling to give the rest credibility. Maybe none of it was fake and they communicated to rigs that part of it was trolling so they could retract statements they felt made them vulnerable. There's no way for me to know.

And... I think rigs nailed it. The most likely answer is some combination; maybe all of it was at least a little real, but there were also choices made about how to present it and where to place emphasis. That would fit best with my prior experience with them, anyway. But I'll never know.

(FWIW, Hobo, I'll state that even as a person who habitually jumps to the conclusion that people are sociopathic master manipulators, I don't think I could justify speculating that you were trying to mislead me. Way too long a con for anyone to bother running.)

 

That isn't at all the way it was framed, and only that first one would be justification for someone sharing other people's secrets without permission, because then they aren't secrets. If Seebs outed your old account here right now, how would you feel about that? And that's coming from a place of being someone who was hurt by this set of actions.

My mental health doesn't need ping removals or anything. I'm usually really resilient with this kind of stuff. Regardless of the start (I'd been under the impression they generally were distressed about guidelines, but that specific post was made to start shit, and even if they say otherwise now... I'm honestly not willing to trust a single solitary thing they say to anyone), by the time they screamed at me in pm, they were trolling. The way they treated me was cruel, and it was so unnecessary that it knocks the air right out of me.

And it was especially bad because I'm bad with pms. I struggle to pm even with old friends. I pushed past that, I pushed past the social anxiety and conflict avoidance and all the stress to offer to help them. And I was just getting used for the lulz! I'm not in a position of power, I don't have influence, there was no reason to do that to me. It was just cruel. I don't trust anyone who's arguing their side in a pm right now, and just the suggestion is [massive amounts of distress]. The idea that both you and f&g are going to be wandering around under different names is intensely distressing too. So have you hurt me directly? No. And have you don't anything to me that needs apologies? I'd say no. But in light of f&g's actions, and in terms of the light their actions cast on yours, I have been hurt.

(i don't really want to share their messages directly, and not out of any respect for their privacy or anything, just because I already feel like enough of a fucking sucker. But the material their message covered was hella suspicious in retrospect, and when my response ended by saying I wasn't going to fite anymore, because anxiety, but I'd be plenty happy to answer any questions they didn't feel comfortable asking in public, their tone changed gears without a clutch, they said they weren't going to be THAT much of an asshole, and left. Nothing they said to me was sincere, and it's humiliatingly obvious to me now. It's hard to argue that in convincing detail without the receipts, but that part of what they did was absolutely trolling. It didn't hurt me at face value, it hurts me as trolling, and defense of their actions is continuing to hurt me now, even though #NUANCE and I'm taking hurt from a more broad umbrella of inputs than is reasonable)

(and @Hobo, sorry, I wasn't trying to demand statements of intent or anything. I have a list of Suspicious Users that's definitely not everyone who supported f&g at any point (heck, I did that thing), which I'm not going to share because that would be acting on paranoia. I think I was just getting defensive over your post just because paranoia is kind of a D: word to hear about yourself, even if it is accurate to the situation)

 

This, by the way, is why I keep saying I care more about callousness or volitional cruelty than I do about meltdowns. Once I've got a feel for someone's meltdowns, they don't fundamentally change my trust for the person; I know that they have triggers and will act up when triggered, but I also know they'll calm down and go back to being the person I normally interact with. Stuff like this, though? There's no "after the meltdown". There's no reasonable expectation that there will be a later time when they're calm and they can reliably tell you how they feel.