Hey y'all. I don't like doing this, but the last couple of days have been pretty disappointing. I think, I'd like to address a few things that have been going on. I've been relatively quiet until now, but some stuff needs to be laid bare.

I made a call on Saturday to ban Zeke, the owner of Grind Knight's castle from BYONDiscord. There's a lot of context to all of this, but suffice it to say, I knew of the incompatability between myself and his moderator Ourico/Yark, and I very much wanted to keep my distance. I made a lot of efforts to keep my opinions about the kind of thing that goes in on that server to myself, and I've been sent enough receipts about what that server is to know it wasn't for me. Still, I rarely discouraged anyone who wasn't a friend from going there. I don't believe my opinions much matter in terms of what other people want to do with their time, and some of what other users were doing there, particularly Zeke and Ourico/Yark themselves, was pretty cool. I really wanted them to succeed with their video tutorial series, and to do something that we sorely need as a community: Create resources to bring new folks into the community. I was committed to silence and separation. I did not want to continue the beef. I just wanted them to stop showing up in my server, and threatening people.

Since then, however, they have chosen to engage in a harassment campaign, spamming my e-mail with password reset requests, and even finding my wife's facebook account and initiating a password reset on it, sending malicious e-mail to Lummox via the support form, threatening Lummox's livelihood, and threatening Spevacus in the same way via password resets. I hear your message loud and clear: You can google me and find people close to me. When you drove to Canada and showed up at [another BYONDer's business], you made it very clear you have the resources to find people from the web and show up where they live. I hear you. You're a big scary man. I get it. But let's just talk for a minute about some history, and specifically, let's talk to the people that you have hoodwinked into thinking you are some kind of Jesus figure, and I'm some sort of satan figure destroying the thing you are trying to save. Yeah. The people in your community that you are lying to.

BYONDiscord

BYONDiscord started out a few years back as an attempt to repair a community fracture that was ongoing. BYOND wasn't always quiet. It was anarchic, and it was meanspirited. Every day was a shitfight, and after a while, that really wears on you. I love this weird little community, but I'm also more than a little embarrassed by it. I can't in good conscience recommend a community to outsiders where the most memorable moments in its history seem to center around the episodes of community drama it has undergone.

The things that always stuck with me was hacking at some weird code with someone, discovering that something new was entirely possible in the engine we had never imagined before, and writing up what we found to share it with others. That's what kept me coming back: An ill-explored, quirky little engine that could do some cool stuff if you could just trick it into cooperating. And the people I met over the years were some of the wildest, most vulnerable, genuinely interesting people I've met in my life. When I started BYONDiscord, I felt that the cycle of creating new discords and splitting the community was absolutely killing us. We lost more and more people every year to the cyclic drama, and the poor moderation decisions, and just the ravages of life and time.

I wanted to help fix that. One of the users I met in real life, was Kumorii, and hanging out with him in his art community while I took a break from game development really opened me up a lot more. I met people outside of BYOND that were just straight up good, friendly, helpful people who didn't turn on each other every chance they got. Kumorii's discord server had its season, which came and went, but I learned from Kumorii's style of leadership, and his love for community building. He also helped me unload some of the anger and sadness I carried from the damage that growing up in this community did to me. I learned to be vulnerable with people. I learned to not expect every interaction to become hostile, and I really changed who I was as a person. Kumorii gave me the opportunity to be something other than "Ter from BYOND, dark wizard, and destroyer of his enemies". He taught me (some) restraint, and he demonstrated a kindness and compassion that I hope that one day I will do a fair impersonation of.

Several users approached me after I left [a different BYOND] discord, a few months before [the owner] was banned from discord for advocating political violence, and it turned into a completely lawless zone. They asked me to create a new discord. I said no. But the requests germinated into an idea. What if I didn't try to create a community at all? What if instead of trying to amass big numbers, and take over BYOND, and use it as a platform to make myself more important, I just created a space where I would be comfortable doing my work, and shooting the shit with people who wanted to hang and make games? What if I didn't care about growth, or competition with the other discords, and just made a nice walled garden that I could invite friends over to and chill with? BYONDiscord's rules began to take shape. It was never meant to be an official BYOND community: It was meant to just be a space where I could talk about what I was working on. It started out slow, but got populated fast, and the rules weren't really working. You see, the big thing I wanted to do, was give everyone a second chance to get to know one another, and see how similar they are, rather than just be on guard all the time, waiting until someone brought up some shit they did when they were 13, and then for the whole community to pick a side and dogpile them. BYONDiscord was supposed to be a space where we gave people opportunities to talk things out, and maybe heal from all the shit we'd done to one another over the years. Maybe then, the focus could be on encouraging one another to do the work, and supporting one another in our attempts to mak gam.

Difficulties Arise

Ourico/Yark joined the discord in 2022 or so, and was immediately attacked by another user who had a history with him. At this time, I had never even heard of the guy, so I had zero context. The user that attacked him was a user who we were really trying to get to calm down and stop throwing punches at people over past drama, and had been making good progress. We warned the other user, and reminded them of the second-chance rule. However, within a single day, he was in the DMs of another user from the server, making threats. My moderators chose to ban him, as we felt that exposing our users to this activity was not conducive to an environment of trust. I was not present for the situation,


Exhibit A: Threatening a user via DMs on his first day in the server.

I was later on that year brought in to rewrite some code for a friend's project. Ourico/Yark was brought into the discord. I was told he was a designer, but he doesn't seem aware that he was brought in to work on the project, and seems to think that he was there to hold court and post political memes and edgey boy opinions about women and homosexuals. The conversation in which he chose to run down homosexual relationships as "not real" and spreading disease made me uncomfortable being in that discord. I'm just accustomed to a little more professionalism and understanding that when you work with people, you really shouldn't be risking professional relationships by making controversial takes every chance you get.

However, I really liked working with the project owner, so I took a gamble and banned Ourico/Yark anyway and told the owner what I'd done. I also explained at the time that it was a bad idea to have someone so clearly malicious anywhere near the code or art assets for the project. This statement would later be vindicated, as he was caught eight months later distributing art assets from the project that he was not given permission to use for his GrindKnight tutorials. He'll tell you he got full permission, but he got permission to use the walking and idle state of one sprite, and instead distributed several terrain assets and the entire sprite.

To his credit, he did remove the assets he was not given permission to use later. An uncharitable take on this would be that he took advantage of his friend. A charitable take on this would be that he didn't understand the risk he was putting Grind Knight, and their entire project in by not being cautious about the artwork they were distributing as part of the project.


For context, Ourico/Yark was more well behaved than this at the time of my interactions, but only because he attempts to maintain a false image of civility now. He still delves into the same arguments, just seems to avoid using the slurs quite so often:




Exhibit B: Yes. He did just endorse genocide.

Grind Knight Goes Hard

Zeke's server started to take off. They began producing video tutorials. They were doing good work. Sure, they made a few weird choices, like choosing to include my BYOND profile one of their videos for some strange reason, but it wasn't an attack, so I didn't say a word. Sure, they were doing some weird culty shit to indoctrinate their users in meninist and transphobic propaganda, but overall, they did their thing, and left us alone. They asked permission to advertise in my server, and I granted it. They didn't need to ask. A bunch of BYONDiscord users jumped over to participate in what they had going on, and I stated my opinion on the matter: I wouldn't be anywhere Ourico/Yark was, but I was fine with there being multiple servers with different vibes, so long as those who didn't fit in one or the other were not harassed between the two. Communities that give neonazis power (again, refer to the Jewish Question comment above) is just not a place I want to hang my hat, but I think people should make up their own mind.

Zeke and I had a slight run in, where he asked me to basically restrain my opinions about his users and moderation, and that's totally fair. I relented after a bit of a back and forth, but he never fully denied that one of his admins was a nazi. This wasn't surprising to me, however, as I knew of Zeke from elsewhere:



Exhibit C: Zeke isn't ignorant or looking the other way. He is a willing participant.

Still, I endeavored to keep the peace, and keep my mouth shut. Zeke brought me numerous issues thenceforth surrounding a user that was in both servers, who was being bullied by multiple users hopping into my server to chase after him. Sure, that user wasn't totally innocent, but their server has since collectively released a video that is dominantly a compilation of them mocking this user, who is the recipient of a massive amount of bullying in that server and users within Zeke's discord have also begun harassing this user's wife off-platform.

I knew that I needed to keep my distance, but I hoped that I could just let them do their thing, and they'd let me do mine. Unfortunately, the DMs from Zeke continued. In the end, a user asked about Grind Knight's Castle, after they had given up on making video tutorials for BYOND because their community wouldn't record videos for free for them so that they could put their branding on the videos and release them as their own. This user was told by another user who had left Grind Knight's Castle that they had chosen to not be part of the server after watching Ourico/Yark offer to "correct" a brand new user's sexuality because they had filled out the pronouns section of their discord profile. Ourico/Yark does not deny this, and in fact, accuses our lack of obsessive interest in other peoples' sexuality as being pedophilic:


Exhibit D: Zeke knowingly lied about this incident being made up.

Zeke showed up in the discord a full day after the comment about GKC was made, and chose to accuse other users of lying about what goes on in there, and accusing that user of spreading drama, which is against our server's rules. I want to be clear here: I did warn the user for tracking in mud, but given the fact that I have receipts that Ourico/Yark did do this to one of their new users, and that the user who was cautioned away from that discord was not the kind of person that Grind Knight's Castle would tolerate, or who would tolerate being in a server that allows neonazis to incite people to harass other people on the internet, I felt that it really was for the best that this user stay away from there. Still, I didn't say this. I warned the user, told Zeke I was tired of him coming in to censor every mention of his server that isn't positive, and using our rules in order to try to get users he doesn't like banned from our discord, or at the very least, engaging in some serious bad faith to try to manipulate people into thinking that an action that one of his own moderators admitted to doing publicly, didn't in fact happen.

"Pretaliation"

A full three months have passed since my last contact with any of the GKC gang, and their name hasn't fallen out of my mouth a single time since:


Exhibit E: Ourico (confirmed by IP address) knocking on the door to my e-mail.

I had been working with Lummox to see who had been trying to get into my BYOND account since the 11th of December. A full five days before I banned Zeke, you see, someone had been sending password recovery requests to my BYOND account's linked e-mail. The effort was half-hearted, but still a knock on the door serious enough to prompt Lummox to warn the culprit to knock it off. Ourico/Yark wound up being the primary culprit, though there were other IP addresses in the mix. This is unsurprising, as Ourico likes to attempt to incite other people to act on his behalf. You see, he didn't start Grind Knight to better BYOND. He started it to build a reputation, and create a little cult of people who will tramp around BYOND, invade games, harass people, and troll the discord servers of roleplaying games with him. I will not make judgements here about what would inspire this behavior, but you see, he's quite fond of getting others to try to do his dirty work:


Exhibit F: Ourico calling his community cowards if they don't "attack" us.

He gets banned a lot, so of course, he promotes ban evasion:



Ban evasion, is really just his deal:


Exhibit G: Ourico has multiple sockpuppets in our discord. Zeke intends to ban evade. We've known. We've ignored them.


Now that Ourico/Yark has been warned that further attempts to access my account will get him banned, he feels the need to threaten the engine developer. Why? Because the engine developer likes a horse that can't stand nazis more than a nazi that's currently using his platform to engage in targeted harassment of games and users.


Exhibit H: Threatening the owner of the site's livelihood to keep me from damaging the site with my "femininity". So manly.

Gee, I wonder if the owner of the site made the right choice?


I privately predicted this outcome well before Ourico began to blame me for the failure of their Grind Knight project:


Exhibit I: I eated a crystal ball once.

How can I have caused this failure of your brand, without ever having sent a message in your server, or only having told people who already agreed with me, in private of what was about to happen? You came into my server. Showed your ass multiple times, caused a bunch of drama, and then when I ban you, suddenly having control of your own server isn't enough for you? You have to control everyone else?


But wait! There's more.

In the hours since he was told he would be banned for further use of the password recovery tool on accounts that weren't his, which he admitted to, my wife's facebook account has had password recovery requests sent to it, and as has Spevacus' facebook account. Ourico has chosen to engage in his beef with anyone who knows me, regardless of whether they were even aware of what happened. Spevacus in particular, basically slept through this whole thing, and made great efforts to see the great work that used to be done in Grind Knight's Castle.


So I guess, I'm writing all of this in the hopes that a few of you in that server aren't completely unhinged, and see that this is a bad idea. When you guys accuse me of trying to destroy this platform, I can't help but notice who are the people making threats, and elevating neonazis who comfortably spout racial slurs everywhere they go as the figureheads of this community. Do you people really think that these guys are it? Do you really think that it's a good look for us to become the game development platform that was popularized by big boi racists, misogynists and homophobes?

Look, I know I'm asking for the impossible here, as you people don't build things, but could you please just go away, and stop trying to nazify shit that better people have built, and then claim it as your own? If you weren't such narcissistic, thin-skinned egomaniacs, you would have been welcome with open arms. If you weren't so busy bullying anyone who is different from you, you'd have been welcome. If you weren't so busy attacking peoples' wives because you got in a fight with a guy who roleplays a horse on the internet about whether or not you should be allowed to shit up a privately owned discord server with your brand of hate, harrassment, and whatnot else, you would be welcome.

I will not be forced to rub elbows with big boi racists just to avoid being bullied and harassed. Anyone that is still in that discord, and is fine with what's going on, I promise you, nothing good will come from being there. Those two will lie to your face, manipulate you, claim your work as their own, and they will lead you deeper into a world of conspiracy and hate that will take any hope you have of living a fulfilled life away from you. So yeah. Have your laughs, boys. Go after my wife. Go after random women on the platform, and harass the shit out of the gays. Target Lummox and try to fuck with his money. Get the platform shut down like some jilted ex that won't let anyone have her if they can't control every aspect of her life. Go right ahead.

I love this community. I really do. But we've split into two camps: Those who want exactly what's happening now, the drama. The petty bickering, the raids, and the harassment of peoples' wives and children, thinking that's what made BYOND great, and people who want to tinker with independent videogame development, and help others find the path. When you say I'm destroying BYOND, ask anyone who has left what drove them away. Invariably, they all point back to the hate, the suspicion, and the backbiting. What you do is not respectable. What you do will not grow the platform. What you do will destroy it if it is allowed to take root. I'm against that.

So again, I ask the rest of you still hanging out in Grind Knight's Castle: Are you? I don't care about being liked. Or respected. I don't want a big name, or a platform to use to weaponize in my name. I'm not here to indoctrinate you. I'm here to let you make your own decisions, and ask you what you are working on, and tell you that you should keep doing the shit out of it. That's all.