📝 Regarding douZINE, again

Some people who have been following me for a while know that I already posted something with almost this exact title about a year and a half ago. That post has since been deleted, for reasons I'll get into below. I have since come to regret deleting that post, because in its absence, my abuser has been allowed to rewrite history and DARVO the situation. So, once again, here is my post about douZINE and my history with its organizer, npckc.

I will try to keep things as brief as I can, because I know that getting into how emotionally distressing this has all been for me was weaponized against me in the past as a way to dismiss the indisputable facts of the situation. Please note that however clinical I may sound, know that this entire ordeal has had an enormous mental, physical, and emotional toll on me. Removing abusive people from your life will do that to you. I also know that people are turned off by long walls of "drama," so I will stick to bullet points as much as possible, though I fear this will end up going overlong anyway.

Content warnings for stalking, emotional abuse, and gaslighting.

• 2022 February: Daikon and I (collectively credited as Nice Gear Games, henceforth NGG) work with Andrew of Indiepocalypse to put out Indiepocalypse Presents: Indie Tsushin (hereafter referred to as IPIT)
• 2022 spring/early summer: I was approached by npckc, who wanted to help out with any future IPITs. I was delighted to get the support of a well-known dev in the Japanese indie scene, and someone whose games I enjoyed and admired. I agreed.
• 2022 summer/autumn: We rechristened the project 同ZINE (douZINE). Daikon and I pooled our resources making IPIT with kc, and we created what is, imho, an excellent zine that featured some really great games. We called this Issue 0, and poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it. I don't want to get too into it here because there are simply too many to list, but keep in mind that Daikon and I were co-organizers of douZINE, and put in just as much work as kc did in the months leading up to Issue 0's release. We did things like:
  • used half of our Zentame booth to promote douZINE
  • designed, printed, and distributed the flyers and promotional materials to recruit developers
  • laid out and translated half the pages in the zine, using materials and resources we had gathered for IPIT
  • worked on the itch page and Carrd website and managed the social media accounts
  • etc etc etc. Just so we're clear, Daikon and I were not mere contributors but co-founders of douZINE and especially Issue 0
• 2022 November 13: douZINE Issue 0 releases. kc and I gave up half of the table we paid at Dejigehaku to to pass out physical copies of Issue 0 and get devs interested in signing up. The bundle is on sale until 2023 May, and the zine page was intended to be left up afterwards as a way for people to check out the highlighted games even after the sale ends.
• sometime before November 20: kc and I have a falling out, and Daikon and I quit. The reasons why could be its own entire blog post. kc offered to essentially buy me and Daikon out (i.e. pay us the 5000yen contributor fee) but I said that I didn't want to be paid, I wanted NGG's credits as co-organizers to remain intact.
• sometime after November 20: kc removes all mention of NGG from the douZINE Carrd. You can see here what it looked like before and after. I message npckc through their website to request that they restore our credits. I did not get a response.
• Sometime after that, I messaged again on Discord asking for the credit to be restored. They added one underneath a <details> cut on the zine's itch page, which I personally was not happy with since it is quite hidden, but I dropped it rather than press the issue. We both agreed to not contact each other again.
• 2022 November 30: Game Dev Galaxy (hereafter GDG) wrote a promo piece for douZINE Issue 0. It originally did not mention NGG as an organizer, a title that was given over entirely to npckc. I left a comment asking to be credited. GDG folks very graciously edited in that link to NGG's homepage at the top. I understand that they would not have known that anyone besides kc had worked on the bundle zine considering everything kc had done to remove places where NGG came up.
  • This will come up later, because kc will insist that they were not the one at fault here, but instead say that GDG were the ones who wrote the article to not include NGG's credits. kc willfully misinterprets this situation as GDG being the ones to leave NGG out of the credits when they could not possibly have known about us with the information that kc had given them.
• 2022 December: I wrote the original "Regarding douZINE" post on my personal blog and on cohost, explaining everything in this bullet list up to this point. I tagged it "douzine" and essentially begged for our credits to be restored.
• In retaliation, kc deleted every social media post and mention connecting NGG to douZINE, such as all the posts where Daikon and I drove out to Gifu Prefecture to recruit devs, mentions of "teaming up with NGG" to release douZINE on their Patreon/website, the itch posts of us working on this together as co-creators, etc etc. Any mention of the work I or Daikon had done for douZINE was scrubbed. Their response to my "lie" that they had deleted our credits was... to delete even more of our credits.
• They also wrote a vaguepost about call-outs and how they are super damaging. What I should have done, according to kc, was contact them privately to get the matter resolved. You'll remember that I had done exactly that, twice, and they hadn't honored those requests. They also conflate their beef with me with a completely unrelated incident (the fallout over the tiny games bundle, which happened before I met kc and which is A WHOLE OTHER INCIDENT that we don't have time to get into here)
• I complain on cohost about how kc gave a talk at Tokyo Indies about douZINE Issue 0 where they talked about it being something they worked on completely on their own, and never once mentioned any of the games or developers in the bundle because that would mean showing NGG's Choju Yokai Giga. (I found out about the stream because, surprise! I am in Japanese indie spaces, and used to watch the Tokyo Indies stream sometimes.) That VOD has since been taken down.
• In response, kc writes a more pointed post about call-outs and mentions the "harassment" they have received from me for... posting in the douzine tag that NGG was not being credited for our work on douZINE. Once again, they conflate my actions with someone I didn't know (I was not linking cohost posts in Discord servers, that was someone else that kc has a grudge against, for equally petty and galling reasons) but the post is written vaguely enough to sound like it was all being done by this same person trying to kick off a harassment campaign, while talking about how it... wasn't a very successful harassment campaign (you think??). They and some of their followers talk about reporting my "call-out post" (the original "Regarding douZINE" post) to cohost staff.
  • If you were wondering why that account no longer says "npckc" and is instead "deadaccount," this is merely speculation on my part, but I assume that since staff did not ban me or delete my posts like they wanted, kc fake-deleted their account. lol
  • Note also that I had blocked kc on cohost since before my account was activated, so they were either block-evading to see my posts in the douzine tag, and/or sending their creepy friends to trawl my blog to report back. Months later, they would claim that it was the latter. Posting two or three times about credits in the douzine tag is the entirety of my "harassment." I too am shocked that staff didn't act on their reports.
• also 2022 December: Daikon and I launch Indie Tsushin and try to continue our work on IPIT in our own way. Notably, it's a blog and zine, not a games bundle, because I didn't want to override douZINE. I was also continuing to promote Issue 0, because why wouldn't I? Our game was in it, the zine we worked so hard to put together was in it, and our friends' games were in it. Regardless of my feelings towards kc, douZINE itself was a worthy project that I wanted to see continue on, even if I was no longer running it.
• Meanwhile kc was actively burying Issue 0. They changed the bundle name and URL, got rid of any links to Issue 0 from the Carrd and social media while it was still on sale, hid the zine issue page to anyone who hadn't already bought it, and edited our credit to say that the reason Issue 0 was no longer being offered was because of me. Yes, the credit is still hidden under a <details> cut.

• At some later date, they also created a whole new itch account just to house this one issue (notice that this is on djarchive.itch.io, a completely blank profile page that doesn't list Issue 0 at all, instead of the normal douzine.itch.io account). I don't know when this move occurred.
• sometime near the end of 2022/beginning of 2023: I write my final cohost post asking people to credit us for douZINE and to have the zine page for Issue 0 made public again. (Remember, three other devs besides kc and NGG were in that bundle, which was still on sale at the time, and their works were also being affected by kc's actions.) Internally, Daikon and I have surrendered to the fact that we will likely never get credited for the months of work we put into douZINE. We focus our efforts on Indie Tsushin and try to put it past us. I stop updating my "Regarding douZINE" thread of posts.

We should take a quick intermission. This is the point where I try to put kc behind me, and give up on the notion of ever getting credited. This is also the point, moving forward, where kc starts fucking with me in meatspace. So, content warnings for stalking, physical intimidation, and bullying/harassment for the rest of this post.

• 2023 January: Daikon and I have a booth at Tokyo Games Dungeon 2. Afterwards, I was talking with two games dev folks, one of whom I had made dinner plans with. While we were standing in a little cluster talking, kc comes up and interrupts us mid-sentence, physically pushes their way past me into the center of the circle, and hugs both these two devs to say their goodbyes. Then, they turn to me, thrusts a finger in my face, and announces to everyone that they are "not speaking to me" because I am "being weird online." Then they whip me in the face with their bag as they flounce out. The two game devs do not say anything, because they are both good friends of kc's. Neither of them comment on how I am visibly shaken and unnerved by what had just happened. (Daikon DOES see it and calls out, but he is too far away to really help.) We go to dinner and I spend the whole night trying not to throw up from anxiety.
• I go home and write about this fucking awful experience on my personal blog. It was an extremely emotional post about how this person just frequently does malicious shit like this, and it's wrong. It's wrong to treat people this way. It's fucking wrong.
• 2023 April: kc almost definitely read that last post. So from this point onward, they are more subtle about the physical intimidation and just sticks to stepping on my heels. They follow me and a friend around Tokyo Sandbox, like REALLY close behind me, frequently bumping into me from behind (it was not a terribly crowded event, and there was more than enough space to not be anywhere near me). Several times they reached past my head while I was looking at a booth to grab at something. My friend, who didn't know what was going on at the time, noticed this person crowding us and even brings it up several times. I explained to him later who it was and why they were dogging me.
• a bunch more times throughout 2023: This basic pattern repeats for just about the entire rest of the event season. I would go to some Japanese indie event, and if kc also happened to be there, they would make sure to stand RIGHT behind me, frequently entering my personal bubble of space. They would sit directly behind us at an almost-empty gyoza restaurant, they would stand so close behind Daikon at a Tully's that the staff had to ask them to step back, they found us at Tokyo Game Show, one of the biggest events in the goddamn world, and made sure to plant themselves at a console right next to us. These are all plausibly deniable; after all, kc and NGG both make indie games and we live in Kanto. I did not bother to post about any of this because who would believe me? Maybe I am overthinking things.
  • This, by the way, is absolutely the kind of boundary-pushing, personal-space-invading stalker shit that vindictive exes do to isolate their victims and make them paranoid and hypervigilant, so that nobody will believe them when they say they are being stalked.
• While all of that is going on, people are privately messaging me their negative experiences dealing with kc. I am not going to talk about any of that here, because it is not my place to tell other people's stories. I will say though that more than one person said that kc would essentially threaten to blacklist folks if they worked with NGG, agreed to be in Indie Tsushin, was a little too chummy with me on Mastodon, etc etc. This will be an important point at the end of this post.

Okay. Up next is the big one. There is no way to talk about this without it turning into a huge wall of text. Here goes.

• 2023 October: Daikon and I go to Zentame, a two-day event in Gifu. The first day is fine. kc and their partner sdhizumi are also there, but we avoid crossing paths, which is very nice. On the evening of the second day, a friend ("Bob") makes plans with me and Daikon to grab dinner before heading back to our home prefectures. Great, cool. The event ends, and Daikon and I are breaking down our booth. Bob says that they're going to ask around for more people to join us for dinner, and we say sure, go for it. Bob asks if it's okay to invite a popular dude, "Derek," and we say fine. We leave to go load up our car.
• While we are away, Derek also starts inviting tons of people, including kc. Daikon and I don't know any of this is going on. When we return to our booth, there is a big cluster of folks there: Bob, Derek, and a bunch of people that they both had invited. We start trying to figure out which restaurant to head to.
• kc and sdhizumi show up. They stand RIGHT next to me. Again: the thing about not respecting personal space. They cheerfully ask what the dinner plans are, and Derek informs them. Remember: I do not know that at this point, Derek had already invited kc. This was originally supposed to be a dinner with me, Daikon, and Bob. And now here is kc, talking about which restaurant we are all heading out to.
• I blurt out that I don't want to get dinner with kc. kc simply says that they don't want me to come either. To the dinner that I was planning, in front of our booth, with the friends who came from out of town to hang out with me and Daikon.
• Everyone else decides on a restaurant and they all start heading out to their cars to meet up at the place. While everyone sets off, I pull kc to the side and ask for a word. I explain that this dinner was supposed to be with me and Bob, and to please just go get dinner with Derek instead of coming along with Bob's group. kc refuses. Derek invited them to dinner, and they had a right to get dinner with whomever they wanted, and fuck me for suggesting otherwise. I try to explain, as kindly as I know how to this person who deeply terrifies me, that I understand that Derek invited them, and that I know it's an awkward situation, but could they please just explain to Derek that they want to get dinner with Derek and his friends without joining up with the Bob group, i.e. the core group that I had been part of. They insist that they don't even know who the fuck Bob is, and I'm just like, yeah exactly, so why do you want to go to dinner with him and our friends so badly???
• This is when kc turns to sdhizumi and they both start trashing me in Japanese. They unload onto me about all the lies I told about them online and how I had a lot of fucking nerve showing my face at these kinds of events.
• I asked what the lies were. The lie I told was that I said kc deleted NGG's credits. They said that they simply had not credited me, which is not the same as deleting them, and that they only started deleting mentions to NGG after I had already "lied" about them deleting credits. To recap: they only deleted our credits after I had said they deleted our credits, ergo, what I wrote was a lie.
• The other lie was that I was saying they had not credited me in places such as the GDG blog post. That's when they told me that absolute corker above, about how GDG was the one who wrote the article so they were the ones who had refused to credit NGG, even though they could not have known to do that since kc had not mentioned that they worked on Issue 0 with NGG.
• They said that I had been harassing them at public events, by simply attending them and promoting the games we had made. Their manner of standing exceedingly close to me, hitting me with their body parts or luggage, or chewing me out in public at TGD2, etc, does not count as harassment. But my posts in the douzine tag on cohost about how we were not being credited absolutely counts as harassment against them.
  • sdhizumi frequently and sarcastically screamed at Daikon if he was okay with what I was doing, which is great, right? Love too have a fucking dude say the equivalent of "be a responsible husband and control your hysterical wife."
• And to be clear: in that moment, I was not hysterical, screaming, or yelling, the way those two were. At this point I was in full-on panic mode. I was crying, shaking, wishing I could fucking die. sdhizumi and kc are both screaming at me in Japanese in the middle of this public park about all the horrible lies I'd been spreading about the credits situation, Daikon is screaming right back at them, I am struggling not to have a nervous breakdown, it was a fucking lot. I think it is extremely fair to say that this was in my top three worst experiences of my adult life.
• At some point, kc storms off. I do not want things to continue in this manner. I grab sdhizumi and ask him to please listen, which he kind of does (after exchanging more insults with Daikon). I apologize for posting online about the credits. Maybe I had been mistaken. Maybe kc really hadn't deleted the credits. Either way, I don't care about the fucking douZINE credits anymore, and would rather not have to deal with these two in my life anymore. I said I would delete the posts and apologize to kc later. sdhizumi, in his extremely shitty and condescending way, says that it's good that I am finally acting like an adult. He apologizes to Daikon for saying a lot of really hateful shit, most of which flew right over my head (but which Daikon still sometimes remembers and will never forgive)
• In the end, neither kc nor sdhizumi show up at the restaurant.
• I go home and do exactly what I said I'd do. I delete all the posts that I can think of that mention kc, then send off this e-mail:

Hi. I just wanted to apologize for this weekend. I know that you did not know beforehand that I was organizing the dinner with [Bob], and that you do not know that they were the one who invited [Derek]. I understand that [Derek] invited you, and it was an awkward situation to ask you to turn him down in order for my sake. I appreciate what you did, and I hope you had a great dinner anyway. Again, I am very sorry for putting you in that sort of situation.

I am also sorry for posting that you removed our credits. I thought you had, and I seem to remember things differently, but in any case, it was wrong to post about it in public. I have since deleted all the instances where I spoke about it.

I am not expecting you to accept this, and maybe it is selfish of me to even say this now at this juncture. But I would like to say anyway, that I am very sorry for the hurt I have caused you and your partner, and that I never intended for things to escalate to the point that it has. I understand this might be too little too late, but I thought I would try anyway.

I hope you and sdhizumi are well and that you had a great time at Zentame.

Sincerely, [full name redacted] (Renkon) of Nice Gear Games

• So yeah. I ate shit, sent an apologetic deescalatory e-mail. In response, they said that they were still monitoring my site (or rather, they had friends monitoring my socials) and had found more instances where I had vagueposted about them or the situation, and asked if I was planning to delete them. I did so, in a good faith attempt to show that I really did just want to be done with this.
• Then they e-mailed back asking if I was planning to publicly apologize to them "for all the hurt [I] had caused [them] by having the posts up for months" etc., and then their side of the story about how they "hadn't deleted the credits" and how it was all on GDG for not crediting me, all the same shit they had been yelling at me in the park. They did that "I apologize if I did delete your credits... but I didn't delete your credits, so actually you were wrong about that, and your lies that I deleted them caused me a great deal of harm" non-apology that I've gotten used to from them. I once more choked back shit and sent an e-mail explaining that I absolutely would not be issuing a public fucking apology about any of this:

Hello, thank you for your e-mail. I understand that the memory of those posts may bother you, but the tl;dr is that I do not think a public statement will be appropriate from me. I know this may not be the answer you were hoping to hear, so if that is all you wanted to know, you can disregard the rest of this e-mail.

I apologized for posting publicly about our feud, but not for being angry about what I perceived to be a lack of respect and appreciation for our work on douZINE. I was incredibly hurt that Daikon's contributions had been so disregarded, and by extension mine. This was the core of my posts, and though it was shitty to post about it in public, they reflected genuine feelings of hurt that were not addressed. I did try talking with you privately about it, but I didn't feel our conversations about it had been fruitful at the time. I don't want to re-litigate this, I am not blaming you or asking you to do anything about it at this point. I am just trying to explain why at the time, I felt the only option I had was to vent publicly about something that was causing me a great deal of harm. This was the wrong move; I could have vented into my journal, or found a therapist, or done anything else. But at the time I felt trapped: I felt I could not talk to you without getting even more stressed, I could not talk to Daikon because he was basically in the same boat as me. I had more options than I realized at the time, but I did not take any of them.

I understand that your recollection of events is different, but in my case, it is that originally, the Douzine page had a blurb about it being a spinoff of the Indiepocalypse Presents: Indie Tsushin (IPIT) issue. (note from the future: you absolutely can see that on the archived page) Not long after giving over passwords, I saw that the "by Nice Gear Games" from the IPIT blurb had been deleted. This was when I sent the message through Carrd. I did not realize you hadn't actually seen my message yet, but a few days later, the IPIT blurb was deleted entirely. I assumed it was as a response to my e-mail asking for credits. I knew that eventually the IPIT blurb would have to go if douZINE wanted to make its own identity for itself. But at the time, Issue #0 was already established as "a spinoff of IPIT," you had just finished doing Indiepocalypse Radio with Andrew about it, people on social media were talking about it being "like IPIT" and not "like Indiepocalypse," etc. Deleting the role of IPIT while Issue 0 was still in the spotlight and saying douZINE was more generally inspired by Indiepocalypse felt like an erasure of our credit not only on douZINE, but IPIT. This is why I was sensitive about being credited for the work we had done. (note from the future: you can also see ample evidence in the douzine tag that douZINE was absolutely talked about as a successor to the IPIT issue. kc also continued to post long after Daikon and I left that douZINE was inspired by Indiepocalypse more broadly, careful not to mention that it was built out of IPIT specifically.)

That's when I messaged on Discord asking for a credit to Nice Gear Games somewhere, and agreed to the line on the itch page. Very soon after, the Game Dev Galaxy article went up. I understand that you did not see the blog entry ahead of time, and that you did not have a say in it. But this, combined with the IPIT blurb, was starting to get too much for me. Game Dev Galaxy admins told me that you had never mentioned Nice Gear Games, and since there was no mention of NGG as an organizer on any douZINE materials from the start, they did not know to credit us. I got angry and posted publicly about not being credited, and this is what got them to edit in the part about NGG. I was hoping for an apology that this was a mistake or oversight on your part. I know you are not a mind-reader, and you could not have known that that's what I wanted. But at that time, in that situation, I really needed you to say that it was just an honest mistake, and not a malicious attempt to take all credits for Issue 0. I was hurt and upset by the compounding factors listed above, after doing what I thought had been the "right" thing all along (passing on douZINE links into our Discord, handing over all douZINE passwords and materials that I could think of, promoting Issue 0 even after leaving, etc.). I felt like I had been used up and discarded, and not even worth having my name come up when discussing with others how douZINE came about.

My posts were up for months because during that time, we did not receive an apology for the lack of credit, whether that was an unintentional oversight or not. Instead, all mention of Nice Gear Games, including old tweets mentioning us and that kind of thing, were being deleted, and history was being aggressively rewritten. This may not be what you intended, but this is how it was perceived by me. People were reaching out to me about the Issue 0 zine page, which apparently had gone private (I assumed at first it had been deleted) while the bundle for it was still live. It was hard for me to understand the lengths you were going to just to avoid having to say that Nice Gear Games worked on this with you.

The actions you took haunt me the same way my public posts do for you. I understand you were heated when you made those decisions, and I was too. I regret the actions I took, and I apologize for hurting you. I understand now that you also did not intend to inflict so much hurt on Daikon and me. But unfortunately, intention is different from reality, and we were deeply hurt by the end results. Please understand that it will take time for us to move past this, and I think a public post about that will hurt more than it helps. A statement from me about how I shouldn't have posted that I thought you were trying to bury our credits, is not going to make any sense if those credits and Issue 0 itself have, in the time since, been lost. (This is not me saying that you need to reinstate the IPIT blurb or the Issue 0 page or any of that. You have done incredible work on douZINE to make its own identity since we left, and you do not need at this point to tell people it was originally a spinoff of IPIT. I'm just saying, this is why I don't think a public statement would do anything other than remind people of all that.)

I apologize for this wall of text. I hope you can understand my reasons for not posting a public statement, and thank you again for apologizing.

• I did not hear back from kc.
• 2023 November: My friend and I (the same friend who went with me to Tokyo Sandbox in April) go to Dejigehaku. At some point, kc came up to us and threw their arms around my friend from behind. kc was not wearing a mask, and my friend does not like to be touched without his consent (who does, honestly) and did not appreciate this. kc then makes a big show right there in the middle of this crowded place about how they got the wrong person, instead of just fucking off. Friend is deeply disturbed because he recognizes that this is the same person who had been nipping at our heels at Sandbox, and anyway I was standing RIGHT THERE so why the hell would kc think it's okay to approach us and do that. I just shrug it off. Plausible deniability, I guess. Maybe they really did just get the wrong person. This is the last time I see or even think about kc.
• 2024 April 6: Finally, we arrive in the present day. I have mostly put kc out of mind over the past 5mos+. After all, I properly groveled in the mud, apologized for publicly posting about how NGG was not being credited, no longer let it bother me that douZINE Issue 0 is still privated and weirdly hidden, did not post about the fucking awful shit I went through at Zentame. So I was very frustrated when someone I had been in talks with to feature in Indie Tsushin got back to tell me that they didn't want to get in an awkward situation with kc, who was still posting to their audience that I was harassing them both online and in person.

douZINE activities are paused until i feel like they won't be emotionally stressful for me. (previously a past collaborator made posts to harass me online and also harassed me & my partner offline at an event, which caused me to have panic attacks.)

I need you to. look at all of this. Look at this long ass wall of text document that I put together, which doesn't even cover half of the shit they actually did and said to me. This doesn't even get into the reasons why Daikon and I left douZINE in the first place (though I think it should be obvious to anyone who's made it this far why we would want to get out). I need you to look at the enormity of what it would be like to try and want to work with indie games and devs in this environment.

This is a dangerous and manipulative person. This is a person who has been punishing me since 2022 for not subscribing to their warped and twisted sense of unreality. This person sincerely, truly believes that they are the one being harassed when they see me publicly claiming credit for a thing that I worked damn hard on, they are the one being threatened when I am minding my own business with my friends and staying way the fuck away from them, they are the one on the verge of having a panic attack as they continuously enter my personal bubble of space and thrust themselves into whatever plans I was making with people they don't even know. If I complain about any of it then they will do everything in their power to get me and everyone who works with me blacklisted from indie spaces. They have zero qualms with chewing me out in front of other indie devs in the region, because they know that nobody will ever push back on them. I can either brace myself to possibly encounter their bullshit every single day I remain in indie games spaces, or I can quit and close Indie Tsushin and tell Daikon to stop game dev, all to satisfy this petulant little fuck who couldn't just add "and Nice Gear Games" at the end of a few sentences.

This is a person who can say, without a single shred of self-awareness, that they hadn't deleted my credits, they simply hadn't credited me, and it was only after I lied about them deleting our credits that they actually went ahead and deleted our credits, which proves that I had been lying at the time when I said they had deleted our credits. I know that you are fucking sick of hearing the term "gaslighting" because people use it for all kinds of really inappropriate situations but THIS IS GASLIGHTING. THIS IS WHAT GASLIGHTING LOOKS LIKE. THIS IS A MANIPULATIVE ABUSER'S ENTIRE M.O.

I don't know what I hope to gain by writing all this. I don't even know if I am going to post this. I know I shouldn't but also it is driving me absolutely fucking insane that I have to deal with this nightmare person a full year and a half after I initially tried to cut all ties with them. I don't know whether they will continue to target me in person at events, for the crime of existing in indie game spaces and doing my own thing without their approval. I don't know if they are going to chalk up this entire post as more harassment, get their partner to scream at me in public again about how I am doing all of this because I am just so jealous of them. I don't know if any of their weird and creepy friends are still hate-following this blog and reading this post and reporting it all back to them.

I do know that I want it to stop.

Please. Stop.

My final e-mail to them on the matter, and the last thing I ever want to say to kc, or anyone else about the kc situation:

Hi, someone got in touch with me to say that you've still been posting that I've been harassing you online and offline. The last time I even thought about you was in November, when you hugged my friend from behind (he really did not like that, especially since you were not wearing a mask and it was flu/COVID season). Is this what you mean by saying that I have been harassing you and your partner in public? I deleted all of the posts and have not approached you in public, despite the many times you have deliberately come up to and entered my personal space at events. What exactly is it that you want me to do, kc? I have asked you so many times to leave me alone, to not approach me, to keep my name out of your mouth. Do you understand how much pain you have put me through? I guess Daikon and I don't matter, because you have never seen us as people. But even if that is the case, the way you continue to sic your fans on me every few months with accusations of harassment when I have literally been minding my own damn business. What the fuck do you want me to do, kc?

Seriously, please leave me the fuck alone. I have been exceedingly gracious to you considering the horrible ways you have treated me and continue to treat me. I want you to leave me alone, to not approach me at public events unless absolutely necessary, to not fucking grab my friends who do not appreciate being touched without their consent. I want you to get over whatever fucking grudge you had about me posting about this publicly, especially since you seem to have no problem whatsoever writing callout posts about me. If you can't get over it, then I at least want you to leave me the fuck alone about it and deal with it yourself. Leave me alone kc.