If you aren’t in the mashup touurney community or its splinter communities, this document probably does not concern you. This is a community that’s actively working on itself and finally taking initiative to push out at least one of its worst figures, even if I fear it’s been done too late. You may find yourself in better hands here than I have.

Everything stated in this document is my opinion alone and should not reflect the opinions of any of my friends, nor the opinions of any of the people mentioned in this document, whether named outright or not. These are all my personal woes alone and are not your thoughts to act upon. Only follow me if you have your own reasons to as well.

Effective immediately, I am ceasing all further activity related to mashup tournaments, as well as mashup work in general, except for emergency quality control through DMs from mashup artists and project managers I place my explicit trust in. I do not plan to leave private and semi-private spaces associated with the community, save backrooms, nor am I outright uninterested in joining private spaces that would be willing to have me, but I do not plan to actively seek out any further obligations involving projects in this community, and I do not currently have any outstanding ones, either. Unless I can get my shit together and make something fully original, I have no intent to open up Ableton in the near future. I have decided it is time to move on from mashup tournaments and I plan to do so with haste.

This post isn’t intended to be anything grandiose, nor do I expect it to be treated as something of any great substance; my portfolio from my time in the community is incredibly slim and I’ve already been gradually retracting the little involvement I have had from the community as a whole, so I don’t want to act like I’m much more than a nobody who is friends with somebodies. This is simply a formalization of feelings I’ve had for a while now, further exacerbated by recent events that have left me feeling as if my continued presence in the community is unsafe and, to a lesser extent, unwelcome. I don’t want to encourage anyone to follow me in leaving, at least without their own proper reasons to do so, nor do I want to demean people who have no plans to; in fact, I encourage the people who want to spend their time there to do their best with it. That said, I feel a need to speak my mind on who I’ve been in my time in the community and what I need to do in the aftermath.

There are things in this community I want to fully seperate from and things that I simply want to try to move on from. I still have friends in this community and they are quite kind to me, and I want to keep them. That said, a series of recent events have left me feeling without a home, one that I would find much easier elsewhere as opposed to going through hoops just to cling onto something that I hadn’t had attachment for for the longest time; I’ve already spent the better part of this year trying to do so, and in doing so, I’ve realized that I’ve vastly overstayed my welcome. Said recent events have also left me rattled, especially given how much has happened at once; I’m grateful that my fears are irrational at best, but when I look at what’s happened, I am silently worried about being next, or watching someone else I care about get caught in the crossfire instead of me.

From the beginning of my time in the community, I was never closely tied with mashup tournaments themselves as much as I was the people who worked on them and followed them, including many of the friends I made in community spaces and backrooms. As I’m sure those who are aware of me know, there are a few projects that have directly sparked my interest, but that interest never spread generally; in that regard, I’ve always known myself as an outcast in the community, at least with regard to the large bulk of activity. I was, and have always been, here for the people. Recent events, however, have made it painfully clear that this outlook is not healthy, and rather than forcing myself to involve myself with projects I ultimately have no will to endure, it’s best if I put proper distance between myself and this community while I have the lucidity to do so.

About nine months ago, I went through what I’ll simply describe as a long, drawn out, and horrible breakup with a partner who, at the time, meant the world to me. Out of respect for my ex and its wishes, I do not wish to air that conflict out in any public capacity; however, the fallout of this has continued to define the trajectory my continued time in the tourney community has taken and I feel it’s important context as such. It was at this point that I first considered leaving the tourney community wholesale, but this never came to fruition at the time; instead, I have Consy, my former partner, to thank for helping me find a place in the community alongside her. I am immensely thankful to her for everything she’s done for me in the past nine months; her simply being there and saying the right thing at the right time gave me a new lease on life and reminded me I was still capable of so much that I thought I would never do again. Both Consy and I are grateful that our relationship ended as positively as it did; we’ll both find our own ways forward.

I can’t say there was nothing to be grateful for in my time here this year, but at the same time, it felt like I was constantly grasping for straws all throughout this year. At present, I’m in one proper community-adjacent space and one server that’s as tied to IRLs as it is the community, as well as maybe one real friend group in any capacity beyond that. After recent events, I felt I had to dissolve a private server that, up until I’ve mentioned it in this very sentence, no one knew existed if they weren’t there. In the few places I’ve had, I’ve struggled to fit in due to some genuine, unresolved issues of mine, which has made it difficult to do much for myself on the social front; on top of this, I’ve had to endure layers of bureaucracy just to be able to talk to entire friend groups of mine who I used to know much closer, even just for a single night. Admittedly, I’m flawed and I’ve done stupid shit, especially when I was at my lowest, but I’ll happily take accountability if given the opportunity to; at this point, however, I have been given more apologies than chances to apologize.

I’ve listed all the personal gripes I’ve gone through and haven’t even reached the worst of it all, the incredible amount of bullshit and suffering my friends and I have had to put up with, the likes of which I was, and still am, unequipped to deal with. I have watched many good things rapidly fall apart in the span of just months, if not weeks. I have lost friends in crushing ways and seen immature verbal abuse aimed straight at the people I care about the most in this community; in fact, I’ve seen my name be used as an insult, entirely unprompted. I’ve seen far too many people pushed to their limits again and again in only a few months’ time. Most notably, I’ve had to watch some of my closest friends be ripped apart in front of me, entirely unsure if I can even be there to actually support them or not without people breathing down my neck, and the process of this all has made my time in the inner circles of the community feel like navigating a minefield.

One such friend was, put bluntly, an idiot. There’s no denying that she gave people plenty of reason to cut her off. What neither party wanted, however, was for things to escalate like they did; what was supposed to be a simple “block and move on” for valid and personal reasons turned into widespread pedophilia accusations against a perpetrator who was bullheaded and didn’t fully grasp what she had gotten into. When we first talked, I was furious at her; I’m grateful to see her take matters into her own hands and recover a presence she was happy with. Especially with the new shit on everyone’s plate, I can only hope for the best for her, because she of all people does not deserve any more than she’s already gotten.

Another friend, partner of the prior and someone I’ve known since before I was in the community, was used. A recent callout document, the cause of her apparently guaranteed downfall, was initially conceptualized out of fear of an attack that was ultimately never going to happen. I spoke to a mutual friend about the prior situation when the document was apparently made, which was supposed to be enough to fan that flame; while I’m absolutely upset it was planned for distribution at all, what actually happened with it went entirely against her wishes. My friend was fed information she didn’t need to know, including information no one should know, coerced into turning a word of caution meant at best for a few private places into a hit piece to be plastered in the public eye. She was forced into the role of one of the figureheads of a smear campaign on yet another friend of mine and prominent community figure that she ultimately had no conviction in, with her partner and friends, including myself, taking many an undeserved stray. I can’t blame anyone for their active grudges; given what I know, they’re entirely valid, and at this point, I’m going to have to accept that I’m never going to see all of my friends in one place again. That certainly doesn’t mean she deserved to be manipulated. No one on either side of this conflict deserved what they got when it happened, save the people who instigated this entire thing; while I’m sure people who care can easily fill in the blanks, the names of two of the people who fucked with the people I care about most are the only names I want to properly bring attention to here.

DFX has been in this community for far longer than I have and, as far as I’m aware, has become a universal target of hatred from anyone in this inner circle of the community I’ve heard anything about from him. At best, I’ve heard one remotely positive take on him from someone who wasn’t his close friend, and that was from someone who didn’t know better in what was essentially a roleplay setting. This is the guy who walled my close friends out of the central spaces of the community at the time over petty grudges, and here he is, digging up year-old beef and using people for petty grudges yet again, but at least this time it’s rightfully backfiring on him. How many lies are buried behind his actions? I couldn’t even fully put into words how pissed I am at cosmobird right now: An active friend of mine at the time, someone I let into my most trusted circle, stamped its name all over old dirt and worked directly with people who put my friends’ names in the crosshairs. I feel betrayed. This is one of the moderators for Forsaken, one of the most actively played games in the world right now, mind you; you’d think it’d know better, but here it is on the attack, and it’s not even the first time this has happened, just the worst. If there’s anything one could do to make me feel unsafe about my presence in the community, this is it. If it could attack someone who trusted it, if less than I did, like that, how low would it be willing to stoop for me, especially when it sees this post?

I believe I am still holding back when I simply say that DFX, cosmobird, and any of the former’s other “lackies” (as he calls many of my friends), assuming any have actually stuck by him, deserve not only what they now have to deal with, but so much more. Every time I hear anything new about this situation and about DFX in particular, I think back to people in TFARP praising the community at large for being able to dispatch threats like these and find the truth to these situations and just feel empty about it all. Did we get better? Sure, but what did it take? Division and misery? Four years of groomers lurking around? The incredibly poor track record I have of being good friends with the actual monsters rightfully ousted from this community (a tally that, despite me actively making up with someone in an important way this year, has still managed to get worse)? My friends being thrown under the bus? I’m sure I’ll see this shit crop up no matter where I go next, all of it, but I’m not going to wait to see proof of how the community acts the next time this comes around unless another shitter decides to fuck with my friends.

To the friends I still have, the spaces I am still in, and especially Consy, who has done so much for me: None of you are to blame, not for any of this. With things in the clear, what remains is now all personal, and I’ve already said my piece in that regard. I still cherish my friendship with each and every one of you with everything I have, even just for my acquaintances, and in earnest, too, as my home here is all that I’ve had to keep me together for so long. It’s because of this that I don’t want to leave completely, but I know that if I stay here and keep silently brooding, I’m not going to find the happiness I’m looking for. I’ve overstayed my welcome, and it’s time to go. I’m not looking to call for a mass exodus from the community like I’m sure someone’s probably expecting of this. I know how much many people care about the community, who will fight hard to continue to make the best they can out of a place that deserves people like them. As much as a part of me wishes I could’ve been, I was never one of those people.

I speak constantly to my mantra of blind hope, that “there is always a way out”, because I have needed it. I still believe in it, because I’ve seen people come back from hell and I’ve done it myself. I don’t want to have to rely on it to get by anymore, but I think it’s still important to remember for the people who are pushing forwards in the community in spite of this; I think you are all incredible people, and I want to see your efforts bear fruit in droves. If there’s anything interesting going on in the community that you think I’d find neat, or if there’s ever a space you think I’d appreciate, please let me know.

Obviously, at least as things stand at present, I’ll still be active where I normally am, which I’d like to open up on here for people who might care and don’t know. I kinda have to be on Discord where I am right now, though I encourage people to use Signal to reach out to me instead, which is listed on the index page for this website. I’m active on Roblox, though I want to curb my presence, and I want to be more active on VRChat and especially Resonite. I might try to be more active on the fediverse, and am considering deleting my Bluesky due to low investment in the platform; if there is interest, though I don’t expect it, I’ll enable Bridgy Fed on fedi so people on Bluesky can follow me.

The place I want to find for myself is somewhere where I can get back in touch with the part of me I lost in college. For all that I want to pick up in the art department, I’ve always loved programming, but I lost the drive to create in that regard during my time here and I need to find it again for fun and career. I have a project in the works aimed at a specific space in this community that I am looking forward to sharing when I have actual momentum going in it, but beyond that, I think that’s where I’m going to need to find myself in the next few months, for my own good. I believe in myself as I believe in everyone I’ve had the pleasure of staying friends with in my time here.

I trust in you all to make the most you can out of the space I used to call home as you still do. Please don’t be afraid to keep in touch.

Fly high, Part The Clouds.