https://twitter.com/splatterdash_ng/status/1474937534123757569
9:58 pm, saturday, december 25, 2021
the end of the holidays
good afternoon.
more than 17 hours has now passed since the events that basically changed the course of fate for myself - and others - in an instant. i can't tell myself if i've become better or worse off of it, but i devoted myself last night to healing these scars and fixing these broken parts i have laying in front of me. it'll never get fixed, not for a while, but maybe it's starting. i can't tell anymore.
in any case, i want to share my thoughts that i have swirling in my head with you. i choose to share them because i realize how harmful they can be if held onto alone. i realize nobody may read this, but that's ok to me.
i choose to become vulnerable.
if you wish to continue reading, please know that there is talks and mention of sex abuse and death/suicide, so viewer discretion is advised while reading. if not, i truly understand and hope you have a good day, wherever you are.
these are my thoughts, disoriented, disorganized, and true as i can make them.
i found it hard to sleep last night.
my original plan was to turn in early and get sleeping around 11-11:30 last night. in the wake of what happened, i tried a usual plan i had to cope with issues and listened to some ambient, soundscape-similar music. i had a few selections, including music from a documentary i had seen a while back, my previous starry ocean, and phonometrologist's latest sehnsucht. i played through it all, some of it twice or more, and i could feel myself getting somewhat better and getting my mind away from the fire.
i had prepared for sleep, but i couldn't get myself there. i found myself lying awake, checking socials and telling myself to stop it. i think i'm too connected to let go anymore, to the point where it hurts me.
i fell asleep at around 1 am. four hours later, i awoke in the middle of the night. i don't know why, but i fell asleep again for another four to five hours before awakening to start the day.
throughout the night, there was a thought burning in my head. it was something i wrote last night.
"maybe i should cry myself to sleep."
last night, though, i didn't cry. i just sat there, in silence. my mind was filled with darkness and a canvas, one which a pen drew over in some shape but leaving no marks.
why didn't i cry?
i had met him back at the end of april 2020, last year.
back then, he was somewhat of a different person. obviously fnf didn't exist back then, so he resided doing geometry dash, which he was just coming off the heels of a popular level he did for april fools day. during that time, he was doing art for a self project he wanted to do involving and drawing members of the community.
this was why i joined the streams at first.
i don't know why i wanted to have myself drawn back then. i had no oc or sona, and back then i basically had no art or thing i could point to for myself. all i had was what i created, which was nowhere near the standard of professional art. it was something i slapped together.
so what would i do if he asked about what he should draw for me? my stupid, worn-down years-old logo?
i didn't ask to be drawn by him throughout the time he worked on the project. i just simply showed up, interacted and made some friends as per usual. i didn't want to annoy him, similar to how i didn't (and still don't) want to annoy others about asking for art of me.
it was during that time that i remember being thrown off by his behavior a bit. i noticed some of it could have... implications, but i also noticed that he had more energy back then to do a lot of things, including acting like a monkey (yes, that was an old channel reward). i guess back then i chalked it up to just being an energetic person and a personality that didn't go too far.
it's here that i should mention back then that someone had "called" him out at one point. while the actual reason is foggy in my brain, it went something along the lines of someone requesting art from him while he was younger that involved a girl. i don't remember if it was suggestive or straight up nsfw, but back then it was shut down for two reasons: first, it had been done a while back; second, the person who did said callout wasn't exactly liked at the time by the community. i'll even admit i didn't like them at the time because they seemed too hostile to others.
maybe i should have listened back then.
there's a prejudice that i have to overcome as a man. heck, there's a prejudice that everyone has to overcome. it's tailored specifically to what you are, never to who you are. that's why my prejudice i have to work against is because i'm a man.
and that prejudice is this.
us men seem to have a problem of keeping our horny thoughts out of our minds, let alone keep our penises in our pants. it's not the majority, but it's enough to set that bar where it is. think about it, how many cases have you seen where someone other than the male caused sexual violence, or rape, or just couldn't keep his penis in his pocket? it's not none, but compared to the cases the male has had it's certainly nothing in comparison. or at least, nothing the public notices.
that's why i vowed to never tell a woman or girl "i love you" or "i wanna have sex with you" or even imply those things unless i really meant it and was ready to respect it and them.
that's why i vowed to stay away from private conversations as much as i could with girls or people outside of my age in general, making sure that the only ones i had included some third party - a person, or an audience.
that's why i vowed to listen to others and would respect their words if "i don't feel comfortable" is said or mentioned about something i do or say, and i'd try to encourage people to say them if they felt them.
and i made these vows before all of this happened.
two months later, in july 2020, a call went out for people to assist in a project he was hosting. he was just completing the first season of his survival multiplayer server on minecraft, which went pretty well. for the next season, he wanted to up the stakes and looked for people to help. in a nutshell, he wanted to create the experience of a mod, with custom textures, items and music, all within a resource pack that people would use when they entered the server.
i applied and expressed interest to the project manager, known as argon.
over the next five to six months i would create a total of fourteen tracks on my own that had the potential to be used in the mod. there were a total of seven of us at the development's prime - the most people on any other part of the team. it was also the point where i created my first oc, which was before mug splatter was created by midgetsausage in his 2020 tankmas art, DEBUG TEXT. i just didn't share it since it wasn't public knowledge yet.
the project, however, never came to light. on january 2 of the new year, argon announced to us that he had left the project, and it was now going to pivot to their ideas. he still remained in the server, but took the role of a spectator. it took nearly another three months before they announced the project would be shifting from one development server to another for the purpose of getting more financial backing, and i chose not to follow. him and most of his friends weren't there in the server anyways by this point. my fourteen tracks then became an ep that i placed here on newgrounds - "my craft".
why did he leave the project? the reason we were fed was that there were disagreements, most of them being argon's fault, in the later months. however, i was not there behind the scenes to confirm or debunk any of it.
what can i confirm? sooner after the announcement, argon would be found to have their own problems on another server they hosted, smp on air. their biggest problem was stealing credit from their team, and according to a friend of mine, they had the habit of not paying their members even when they asked - they just told them to either suck it or leave. following the revelation of argon, they would close smp on air at its prime popularity.
so it wouldn't have mattered either way.
i realize i'm stronger than perhaps i give myself credit for. it's just that i don't feel that way sometimes, and this is one of those times.
i've accepted the fact long ago that people have different perceptions on something they experience, and their perceptions differ from the person next to them, even if they experienced the same thing. there's a load of reasons for it that i think is somewhat self-explanatory, but why do i mention this?
i'm afraid someone experiencing this might consider ending their story.
i would never consider it nowadays - i've done my share of consideration in the hardest points in my life, but that was when i was younger and hadn't gone through the pain or the magnitude before. even then, i obviously never committed, but i also never attempted. something about me just couldn't follow through to making myself bleed. every time, i found myself numb but never determined to follow.
i kept living, despite everything i went through. i kept living because something, somewhere, told me i should - for them. they weren't someone on a screen, "them" was a real person or real people who came into the crevices of my mind. eventually, another thought came to me to assist them.
this will all pass.
the coldest night of the winter always leads to the warmth of the spring.
in the past year, i've had friends consider, some attempt. i've given them my thoughts and my strength, and they've kept going throughout their pain.
maybe that's why i feel weak now, because i helped them more than i helped myself.
at the end of may 2021, i got a message from him.
we had kept almost no conversation since the end of the smp project, so i talked with him. the conversation started with us asking each other how we were doing, then he popped the question about the mod. i considered it for a bit, but then i finally said sure and asked what he needed. i was only faintly familiar with fnf, as i had started only two fnf mod projects back then - terrance and elanor takeover. both were, and still are, untainted by this new mod, which he told me needed jazz.
within a day, i had created the beginning of the melody for the song that would become swing. within two more days, i finished the outline of the song with placeholder vocals for the opponent. it took me another week to figure out how to do the vocals and to get a good result, and finally i could finish the song and bring it to the mod. it was the first one done in terms of instrumentals, but around the middle to last in terms of vocals and compiling.
it should be mentioned that there were two voices being considered for the character back then. one of them gave me a huge amount of difficulty on ableton in terms of making them into a vocal stem that didn't sound robotic, but the other big factor was how they interacted with him and the voice actor for the other main character. in the end, when the voice actor for the main character was chosen, the other basically disappeared. the only time they came back was when they had a place in a later week.
they became a part of the yap squad.
during that time, i got somewhat used to the new faces i saw. back then, the team was only 17 members strong, and that's being generous. we were a small team, most of whom were brought over from another mod, starlight mayhem. in fact, everyone from starlight mayhem was brought over except for one group.
mudstep had made the instrumentals for starlight mayhem, and i had worked with them for the aforementioned minecraft server project when it was still a thing. however, they had been going through hard times with their computer and couldn't continue with the mod. nevertheless, there were only four other music people from the server's team that were brought over to this mod. they all, however, had one-hit wonders - one had the original menu theme, another the credits theme, and a third did the vocals for split and split ex. that was it for them, they had one song.
i was the only exception.
i realize how different i am from the other members of the team. yes, i'm the only one who shares the same fnf spirit and embraces and helps newgrounds with open arms as much as the mod, and yes, i'm the only one followed by tom fulp (although it wasn't because of fnf that he followed me). at one point, i was the only one who was friends with ninjamuffin.
but there was another difference.
i chose, despite everything going on, to interact with the community in more ways than one. it started with a member named pieroshiki, who created interactable desktop figures, something called a shimeji, for both main characters. i hung out on one of their streams and spread the word on my twitter for people to join, and that was the stream where i encouraged myself to keep coming back.
it was also where the term "maid splatter" came from, heh.
i was introduced to the academy server, where a bunch of people gathered in voice chats, and i joined them to have fun and say hi. i was introduced to the fanartists server, where i met some friends of piero. i was introduced to the alternate universes and the ideas they sprung. i was introduced to java and the team of funky friday, a roblox game that brought songs from popular mods into one place with author's permission, to get songs in and made available to the public. and i wanted to help them.
that was where peppermint kisses came from. i had ideas for holiday covers that i created within the span of four days, with polishing to happen afterwards. i wanted to see the universe succeed, and we were even so close to getting there.
i'm sorry for them.
this difference in wanting to help is not something i hold above myself or use to consider myself "better" than anyone else, and i don't want it to be that. if anything, i think it makes me unique, with the only other person doing similar things being one of the voice actors, the one whose vocals i used in my song for the original week. it made me want to connect with the community, to have fun with them.
but maybe that's why i feel so torn right now.
when we released the mod around june 22, 2021, we didn't expect it to be a hit. because of the efforts of themaskedchris, it got placed on gamebanana's ripe list within two hours of being published. some popular content creators got on it within a day, it became featured, and it eventually became one of the best of the banana entries.
and he began to change.
when it blew up, we were on our way to creating week two of the mod. but then we stopped for a second and made a detour. we wanted to up our game further, to make it as best as we could with what we had. we pulled out ideas, many of which came from our sole coder at the time, ash. they literally pulled out a speedrun timer to get in as many things as they could - menus, ui's, songs, memes.
we released the update around august 8, and again the mod blew up. it was at this point that the fanbase was really formed, and it was one of the largest in fnf. we had one of the only mods with its own dedicated community, and it was helped by the fact that he streamed during this time. he became a twitch partner during this time. he became youtube verified during this time. he planned merchandise and had a release for it in october during this time. in fact, i wanted to get some, but held back originally from laziness, later from a gut feeling that i wish i followed more and more.
it's also worth noting that during the development of this update, i caved to some of the pressure i had been given from him. i created a twitter and wanted to keep it positive as much as possible, to stay out of drama as much as possible. i didn't want to ruin myself.
a fool's wish.
i had felt that i had been undergoing something during the mod's development that i felt for a while. growing pains.
i had been given a lot of pressure to do things during the development, especially when the mod blew up. go make a twitter, go start a youtube, go create a paypal so i can pay you, go get a label so your music can go up on spotify, go do this, go think about that. i was the only one who kept myself small while everyone else grew and grew.
why did i keep myself small? i realized it was easy to become something different when i grew. i wanted to try and preserve myself no matter what size i was, and i worried that what made me special would be lost if i grew too big. so i preserved myself by being small.
when the mod became big, my shoe size became bigger. there were points where he yelled at me to create a twitter account. it was more passive aggressive than pure aggression, but it still was a huge weight on my shoulders.
i should have stood my ground back then. it would have helped me now anyways.
we had plans to go big.
the week two we had planned was something we wanted to pursue and see come to life. it would have been something no mod had ever seen or done before thanks to the coding skills of ash. to be specific, because the whole mod took place on a computer, we were thinking of platforming sections instead of cutscenes that travelled through the desktop, going folder to folder. we were thinking of including cameos from other mods that the character would encounter and battle in these folders - anders, ridzak, literally every fnf mod ever, starlight mayhem, starving artist. and not only was i assigned to help with the main music of week two, with the battle between two new characters, but i was also assigned to help with the cameos of the last two mods i listed.
and they, alongside the main week's song, are all done.
the merchandise would have gotten bigger, too. we planned plushies of the main two characters that would have been sold in the winter or spring, and we knew they were gonna be a hit because, let's face it, who doesn't like plushies? more designs, more options, just... more.
we had crossovers planned too. originally we did a crossover with literally every fnf mod ever, which came by pure coincidence thanks to a member named jyro. but that opened the door to other options: vs matt, vs imposter, a starlight mayhem one, soft mod, probably a few others i'm forgetting. i remember that i was planned to be in charge of music for the starlight crossover with ardolf, but because he would have been busy with things in his life i would have been the only musician, save for cerbera making cj's vocals (which he deserves thanks for that).
and even then... our final week, week five, was a plan involving all of us developers creating week one when a glitch happens in the system. that's as far as we got with that, but it was still something that would've been ambitious, large and amazing had it come to light.
peppermint kisses, week two, the cameos... now, all i have left to remember that is broken pieces of what was.
i won't bore you or tire myself recounting most of the next update when i already did so prior to this. you can find it on this newspost, but it is where i will now continue.
following the post and its update, i chose to keep most servers muted, with the exception of a few. i basically hung on to the team by a loose wire, one that was desperate to snap. i waited for the update to release. finally, on december 23, i was told it was done and finally out.
when i saw it, i was surprised. i had helped with bugtesting for the final time before the release, and most of the bugs i had found during testing weren't fixed. mind you, i found a laundry list of bugs that took up two messages in length. one of the bugs was with all loading screens cutting to black after a second when you opened a certain "application" (this was leading into the mod's main menu ui). it didn't do it when you went into the freeplay "folder" and selected a song as soon as the mod started up. when i reported it, the coder at the time, which wasn't ash, said that some of the bugs were intentional but they would look into the others.
apparently, they didn't.
but i thought that was it, and that i could rest now. i was told in conversations and announcements from him that we would get a break for as long as we needed before going into the second week for the third time, and this time, we would enter development intending to finish it.
celebrations turned to chaos when, later that night, it was revealed that he was in a conversation with someone who had been confirmed to be a groomer six months prior. it was simply "great job on the update", "thank you", and some other message. while i wasn't going to immediately deny the conversation happening in the first place and the fact that it shouldn't have happened, i took the stance of wondering how the person got the dm message in the first place, since the one who posted it wasn't the groomer. they could have replicated the account or conversed with a faker. but the internet didn't care; they went mad.
he attempted to shut it down with a statement that was, more or less, contradictory to the past messages. it was then assumed he forgot since it was six months ago and people could forget during that time. but one thing was certain: he couldn't stop the internet.
they found the crack, and they wanted to tear down the wall.
they heard the ear, and they wanted the kingdom to fall.
believe me when i say i gave a lot to this mod.
to give perspective, the original launched on the same night as the newgrounds audio deathmatch, and became sour when tankmas was almost ready to launch. both of these were projects that i chose, out of my own free will, to host for the benefit of newgrounds.
yet i placed not all of my eggs, but most of them, in this basket.
it was successful, more than the other two projects would unfortunately ever see. i reached a wider audience with them, and i was needed more because of the work i had to invest to make songs for it. so i neglected the other projects to serve this mod. even other mods - to which i was working on around seven others at the time - were pushed aside for whatever this one needed.
maybe that's why, when everything started to crumble beneath us back on the 26th of november, i had always mentioned that i tasted this poison on my lips. i didn't know why i tasted it or who it was from.
it only came to me when i was thinking about this mod. tankmas was untainted, i turned to the other mods when considering to leave this one, and i had friends on the other side that i hung out with despite everything running downhill into a ditch with this mod. i didn't understand this poison.
now i know why i tasted it.
now i know where it's from.
the kingdom continued to fall from beneath us throughout the holidays. and it infiltrated the team to its very core.
on christmas eve's night, i watched as one of the members, who was brought in many moons ago to write a script for week two, began sharing dm's they were having with someone else on the team. it was someone who used to be their friend, to where they claimed they were practically dating because they were that close. it was regarding that person having conversations with the same groomer, but for different reasons than he did. i knew some of their words were valid, but i didn't agree with their actions to get those words.
i agreed with pieroshiki, who commented that if a private manner didn't need to be public, it shouldn't be pubic at all.
i left in a rage. i had a gift created for the community that was supposed to be from the team, which i had told him earlier i wanted to push through and upload, but i didn't want to give it anymore. until i saw the team, i was on two paths - it wasn't a good time to release the gift, or it was what the community needed at that point in time. once i saw the team and the events that transpired, with only one person who i thought handled it maturely and consider all sides instead of immediately and blindly following along, i couldn't give this gift from the team against my better judgment.
i talked with him on it. it was during the point where i was once again back where i was two weeks ago, deciding whether to stay on the team or leave. it seemed like he was desperate for me to stay, as he told me that i should publish the gift, if not publicly then to the team, because that's what was needed. he told me that this was life, that it wasn't meant to be good but the team worked together on problems and that this member wasn't a part of the team. he told me they were staying for week two's writing, but he even seemed to talk with them on their actions and got an apology out of them.
i accepted the apology but didn't forgive them because the scars hurt that much, not to mention i knew what they did - commit something wrong with little to no thought, apologize, get forgiveness, rinse, wash, repeat. while i didn't agree with the public outcry against them, i did agree that it was wrong but never mentioned that to him. i just said i couldn't forgive him yet. and he said that he respected that decision.
and that was the last thing he told me before the kingdom fell.
this isn't the first time i dealt with a situation like this.
in june 2020, i was called out of a meeting and into a room with my parents, who had a phone in their hand. it was in there that i heard a voicemail that changed my life at a time where i thought it couldn't get worse.
someone i knew got arrested. he couldn't keep his penis in his pants.
and it wasn't an accident. around 30 counts of sex, on and off a school campus, happened with someone of my age throughout the entire school year two years prior.
i remember crying then. this was also when everything with blm started to occur, and at that time i was scared for my life and my home.
i was crying then. i cried myself to sleep then.
so why didn't i cry myself to sleep now?
i was talking with a friend of mine, retroupgrade, on christmas day. i made a resolution to stay off of twitter because i noticed something. what i was attracted to the most on that site was the things that poisoned me.
they had mentioned a day earlier that he didn't trust him for the past, when he had the previous callout that got immediately shut down. they were the one that told me that they were concerned i was having mental breakdowns because of the mod, and that they hoped the team wasn't blindly following him. but above all, them and their girlfriend, zombought, were concerned about me getting caught in the crossfire.
we started on christmas day talking about what we got, and they mentioned they had plane tickets to head to see some friends, one of which potentially being someone i knew in real life, which i was happy about. later on, i learned about something typic, the creator of the anders mod, was doing involving them and zombought. it was then, while it was on my mind, that i told them that i was pretty much ready to leave the team and that i wanted to save my message of departure for boxing day. i didn't want to ruin someone's holiday because i decided to leave, and i had the feeling it would be twisted to be that.
the conversation became deep, but it ended at 8:24 pm. at 9:02 pm, i got another message, saying they were sorry for what was going on. i told them i wasn't looking at twitter for the afternoon, and their response was the words "then don't".
it made me want to look further, so they told me to look on their twitter. i got on, went right to their twitter page and...
the rest is in the hands of public knowledge.
but it isn't easy for me to simply say "ok, this happened, next". the issue was that he brought me out of my shell beyond newgrounds.
it was him who inspired me to create my human-like oc.
it was him who gathered together a team of people to create things that inspired and helped me.
it was him who gave me a piece of my name.
and it was him who, in good conscience, destroyed it.
and i know i'm not alone.
it's hard for me to look at what i've done and what i'm doing and not think about it. i can't separate the art from the artist. i don't know if i can keep my songs that i did for him here, willingly.
it's unknown to me if i want to continue with the fnf community or retract entirely to my previous state, a year and a half ago, when all i had was newgrounds. the problem with him is that he was the root of the tree that branched to nearly all of these friends and experiences i have, and it's hard right now to cut the roots until it shrivels and dies on its own.
there are some people who have reached out to take these broken parts and make them whole again, and while i appreciate them for doing that, nothing can fix the pieces to be what they were. to be someone who does good with a dirty secret behind your back is about the same as being a murderous liar, an al capone of the twenty-first century. the moment your secret is known, you might as well start shoving blades into people's backs. because that's how it mentally feels.
it still hurts now. i woke up today trembling, able to recover only from talking to real people and having food fill my stomach. this name hurts to mention, because every time i do i feel like someone, either myself or someone around me, feels the pain of the scars.
i was at the forefront, supporting him and his community.
i was on his teams, to bring happiness to others.
i was willing to trust him, to be naive.
and now... i've been hurt for being myself.
i'm afraid to be myself anymore.
this is my only true safe space anymore.
