silently suffer

it feels like often in my life, i’m put into abusive situations where i’m disempowered from doing anything about them. it feels like they’re just supposed to happen and there’s nothing i’m allowed to say about it. this is one i’ve wanted to say something about for a long time, and i had the idea of just doing it as an open discussion. talking is a good way of breaking up dissonance

i. above the rules

in early march 2023, sm64 player xoofey (iirc) tweeted about top iler giboss hiding world records. i think there was some discourse about the underhandedness of giboss not being named in the tweet. but the tweet got many tens of likes, and i was happy that issues with competitive integrity were being taken seriously by the sm64 players. it inspired me to tweet about sms’s own top il players’ habitual rule-breaking, and i decided to be more fair and so @ them directly about it

this has been @diddeh14 @reed_qt @inkstarlum on the sms il leaderboard. the intention of bringing in rules was to have a consensus that stops ppl from falling out w/ each other. but these players have deliberately ignored the rules bc they consider themselves above the rules

the right thing to do here is to not submit your times. it’s not ideal but it shows basic respect to other players

and life is too short to fall out w/ any1 over this but it’s worth calling out at least in hopes of cutting down on the narcissism prevailing among top sms runners

the attitude that builds a healthy community is fitting in as 1 part of the collective. for most ppl, it comes naturally to say “i don’t have video so i can’t submit”. conversely, it’s your community, so if the rules don’t work for u then discuss a compromise

but ur not special

looking back on these tweets, i think i was too harsh on nindiddeh purely because he hadn’t actually broken the rules, since the rules were in fact largely brought in as a reaction to his behaviour, of giving the il mods the runaround with missing videos, ignored messages and such, and they were brought in soon after he left sms. thus, it was unfair to say that he considered himself above the (non-existent) rules. but the critique of reed and inkstar was accurate

ii. reed.mp4

reed responded by quoting my tweet and ranting about it, making out that i was insane, like an unhinged troublemaker or something. the part of his reaction that most impressed me was that he lied about his own behaviour and guilt with respect to my criticism. he pulled in 54 likes for shitting on me this way. in a reply, i posted the video (second link above) that showed off his egotistical attitude and in fact actually showed him deciding to put back up a pb of his that the leaderboard moderators had taken down because it had no video yet required one

[reed:] if they don’t remove it, go ahead, remove it. i’m putting it back up every time i open up this fucking spreadsheet

but the damage was done. many random people from his thousands of followers blocked me and hate me to this day over this. reed later snuck in an apology to me in somebody’s twitch chat, away from the prying eyes of public opinion

it’s kinda funny in this story how naively i took on someone who lies his way out of trouble and found out. i didn’t have the receipts to hand; i just tweeted. he took me out for 50 likes before i could even remember how to catch him out. then i posted the evidence on an out-of-the-way reply. it had a solid 18 views when i checked today

i think comparing the xoofey tweet with this one, i see i’m just not built to take on a world where everyone is a liar, like, i have no idea what i’m doing. if you ask me what the difference is between these two situations, i am at a loss

iii. inkstar 😎

inkstar’s reaction was quite simple. he quoted my tweet and said “i’m above the rules 😎”. this drew a comment from one of his friends making up a random accusation about me. it drew in a dozen likes for a nice, quick ratio. inkstar then tagged his row on the il sheet with the note “above the rules”

pumpman replied, telling inkstar that if this was his attitude, he should resign as il mod. inkstar pointed out that he had tried about a month earlier but had his message completely ignored, and then deleted it. inkstar didn’t do anything as an il mod at the time and clearly didn’t want to be one

a friend of his later reached out to me embarrassed, apologising for inkstar’s behaviour

iv. inkstartwo

many months later, inkstar returned to il modding. he asked to join to edit the rta best segments sheet and the community mods didn’t really ask or care about his history since, well, il modding was a neglected tyre fire thanks to the community’s legacy of the saulnier doctrine

so does this mean inkstar’s rule-breaking improved? well… it diidddd. at around the same time that “above the rules” happened, i started the accurate il leaderboard project, a successor to the rta one from july 2022. with the accurate boards, rule-breaking became less impactful since i could moderate it out myself, but that also meant i could keep a closer eye on it. it seemed to me the rash of videoless top-level pbs from inkstar abated, and he became better about bringing in videos after a few days of posting a pb. but over time, it degraded again, with for example an incident of a videoless pb (r3) that inkstar later attached a video of his previous pb to. even just looking at the situation now (2024/09/29), we see

b6 1:07.75 → 1:07.34 (3rd) posted 2024/07/02 02:56
r4 43.72 → 43.48 (4th) posted 2024/08/17 07:56

nearly 3 months for that b6. the il mods sheepishly asked fellow il mod inkstar to post a video (for r3 iirc), and he ignored it. why wouldn’t he? he is the greatest sms player of all time. those other il mods can go ahead and bow down to him, as reed kindly explained to us in that video above

v. twitter

things took an interesting turn when inkstar started submitting top-3 videos hosted on twitter. this is also against the rules of the original il sheet, plus lacks the plause (the cope) that maybe he’ll post a video later for a videoless pb. no; he posted a final twitter link; that’s it

the il mods didn’t seem to care, and from my side, i handled it routinely for the accurate board by reuploading those videos to youtube. i think i’ve done this about 20 times now. one of the first reuploads satirised inkstar in the description for saying twitter was unsafe and he would stop using it, only to delete his bsky account and start tweeting world records in 360p. i later deleted that cos archives aren’t the place to post satire; it’s underhanded

inkstar started internalising resentment. first, he satirised my comments that the il mods gave up on dealing with accuracy errors (on a note on his n4 pb), then he supported anmaku’s tweet telling me to stfu about being socially abused by warspyking, also blocking me on twitter. and finally,

he started a twitter alt account solely for the purpose of posting ils that he didn’t want to publicise on his main, as an alternative to unlisted youtube videos. he satirised my labelling of videoless il pbs on the accurate sheet as “no vid no did”, and made a homophobically-charged comment, labelling an il “gay sex”… i feel like i’d seen him use “gay” as a pejorative before; if not then disregard. i do always get a bit spooked tho seeing comments like this that might be taking digs at me

vi. censorship

i don’t think anyone thinks it’s possible to tolerate twitter videos for wr speedruns. accounts become privated or cleared out much more often than on other platforms, and even if we didn’t have to worry about backing up speedruns, twitter gives people like inkstar above the option to selectively block others from accessing speedrun wr videos, which is an access and discrimination problem

(not to mention that twitter is run by a billionaire demagogue, selectively implements censorship, and is so unstable that videos uploaded to it one day might not be viewable without an account the next, and even when they are, they end up 360p with block artifacting – even when downloaded)

inkstar argued to the other il mods that they shouldn’t care about my copyright rights over my il leaderboard code, that they should just use it against my will, citing my reuploads of his ils as a comparison. legally speaking, i have absolute rights over my code, but speedrun videos are a grey area. they are, strictly, illegal, since the copyright belongs to nintendo (here) and so inkstar must license the game from them. but the entire let’s play industry arose out of permissive attitudes to this particular kind of law-breaking. speedruns took that a step further and turned unlicensed game content into a sport, which unlike other sports, is private to the player in terms of video recording and so implied ownership – or it would be if the content weren’t actually owned by nintendo

so from there, whether inkstar’s videos are considered to belong to inkstar, well… obviously his face, his voice, these are a kind of value-added on top of the video, but at the same time, nobody who watches these videos cares about inkstar. only the gameplay is relevant, which belongs to nintendo. cos of this conundrum, the archives used by the accurate boards allow players to request to have any personal information redacted from the videos, such as text, faces, voices. i’ve even been open to taking down entire videos. inkstar’s never asked me to take down a video (he asked to have his times removed from the accurate leaderboard, which i obviously turned down cos it’s an accurate leaderboard; he also apologised for the second-half of that request and i forgave it cos it was just hot-headed). but if he had asked, it would’ve led to a discussion about taking down archived videos, which would inevitably point back to what an il mod is doing breaking rules in the first place to necessitate the archiving

but why do i feel like there are some things in the sms community we simply do not talk about?

vii. clout

this situation raises a lot of interesting questions. i’m writing about it to record my feelings about it, since of course the bullying affects me negatively, but i’m trying to not be overly judgemental of the behaviour and let it speak for itself

for starters, what social protections should there be from inkstar’s behaviour here? i’m always very surprised that nobody says anything about it, tho maybe i shouldn’t be since guy2308 enjoyed the same treatment for the same reason: he was 🐐 at the time. whenever i bring it up to different friends of inkstar’s, i get the response that that person doesn’t actually like inkstar or is questioning their friendship or, something, clearly, disingenuous to get heat off eir back for being asked. but i always think, even if you’re just vaguely friends with him, wouldn’t you say something?

well maybe not, since you can call it my “personal issue” with him, a strategy the serpentine jpep infamously tried to pull to retcon samura1man’s removal from sms modding (see point #6 at the link). is it my problem if, in the capacity of running accurate leaderboards that the top players came to depend on (since the originals really did become that bad), i start being bullied over it? well, yes, i guess once there is controversy, then suddenly people don’t care about the accurate leaderboards, and it becomes none of their business

which is also a weak excuse since the community voted recently and stands behind a preference for leaderboard accuracy. the accurate leaderboards have, for years, hosted significant numbers of top-level il and rta records that had been removed from the original leaderboards for various political reasons. there was a period when bingo players were loudly shouting down anyone who expressed such a view, but ultimately those people don’t care about accuracy because they don’t care about competition, don’t really play the game, and so just got bored and pissed off eventually, as expected. as an aside, one of the morals of my unforgiven story is that, compared with how they treated me wrt lumardy, their anti-abuser rhetoric was, actually, entirely virtue-signalling

even the original leaderboards have come under fire from intense bullying that they weren’t able to withstand, leading to a leaderboard moderator leaving the whole sms community, so i don’t know to what extent “official”ness changes anything either. this shows that even an “official” board can be out-clouted, and so for a side-project that seems to be only cared about by one person, despite being the only source of accurate records in the community and so cared about by many more people (but shhh! it’s a secret!)… it’s easy to out-clout and isolate the maintainer, and make it my “personal problem”

viii. neo-toburrism

one of the most striking aspects of the legacy of toburrism – that is, demanding that people not use information about you and bullying them for not complying – isn’t that it shone a light and provoked intelligent discussion about the nuanced grey-area of video archiving… as if xd. it’s rather that completely implausible demands were made, such as that anonymous numbers on a public record were owned by someone who could delete them, and refusing to comply was called GROSS. and it didn’t matter how stupid the demand was; it would provoke shaming and hatred as long as the clout was there, as i said in my last point. i call this the “wash your mouth out with bleach” doctrine. it’s unacceptable to voice that some names achieved some times – they are the unnameable. like voldemort

toburrism, of course, has no legal grounding. legally, archiving is a legitimate use of data that actually trumps personal concerns, which are meant to be handled by a process of negotiation rather than bullying. to me, it comes across similarly to political extremism in its use of irrational emotion-based argumentation as a ruse to incite hatred directed at other people

akane tried a toburrist approach recently:

I do not consent my ILs or name to be used or hosted outside of the official spreadsheet owned by the SMS Community account / my own YouTube channel.

i don’t know whether or not this insinuates that akane’s videos are hosted by the archives (they’re not), but it does talk about using “names” outside the original il spreadsheet (which, of course, even the il mods, of whom akane is one, do by hosting this data on the original il viewer website)

i wonder what akane thinks the purpose of names is. i satirised this in a tweet discussing how often akane’s name is used in discussing the allegations of em being an alt-account (akane, the online entity, is known to have transitioned from female to male and from polish with american ai accent into german with real german accent). akane then replied with a picture of a my little pony’s buttocks (i don’t understand this lol), ratioing me 5 to 0 and the clout battle was won

ix. ganging up

the interesting thing about inkstar and akane is that, in service of their own roles as leaderboard moderators, they have themselves used the archives they now campaign against. inkstar relinked over 100 reuploaded videos from a redacted player to the original sheet, and akane sent me an rta video, unsubmitted to the original leaderboard, for me to archive and submit. so there’s no ethical principle either of them is standing on or even pretending to stand on

rather, i noticed inkstar supporting warspyking’s taunting me for daring to talk about warspy’s abusive nature, after moderator anmaku posted “as a mod, shut the fuck up”, turning public opinion against me when in fact i was the one who’d been socially abused by warspyking’s modding and later intimidated by his obstruction of my abuser’s anonymisation

inkstar has told planktonsecretformula that he resents me for continuing to exist in the sms community, after the sms moderators’ cancellation conspiracies and abuse apologism across two years divided the community. he directs his resentment towards the people who took their records off the original leaderboards as a result, rather than the moderators, because, by his own admission, he doesn’t care who is right, but wants the problem gone. and so, strategically, he sides with power, and blames me for not getting a life. it’s a play for winning the clout war, and one can debate how smart it is long-term. but it’s notable to me that me helping to defend him from being stalked by mlarvitar stopped mattering to him as soon as he became the invincible clout goat of the sms community

x. uncritical times

one thing i’ve personally struggled with historically is that in sports, people usually openly talk about their takes on systems, top players and leadership. since speedrunning is small, it almost feels like a taboo to do this. one case that comes to mind is that jeffcompass successfully slandered despin as “bullying” him for reacting 👎 to an announcement about bingo made by a community account, and for belittling the quality of leaderboard modding (that wasn’t even possible to link back to jeff)

it’s an interesting thing to think about in this specific case. should anybody be allowed to write about inkstar or reed’s above-the-rules competing and moderation? was anybody allowed to criticise jjsrl for lying about having any% world record in early 2023? the sms community has usually settled with living in post-truth and cognitive dissonance even in situations that don’t concern bullying and abuse – but not to mention the ones that do.

is satire incitement of drama? is just saying anything about it incitement of drama? is it drama if it involves the weakest link that everyone’s trying to push out of the community anyway?

should i have written the “above the rules” tweets? should i be writing this page?

for what it’s worth, i had tried to talk to inkstar directly about his behaviour before i sent the above-the-rules tweets, but he ignored me. cos, y’know, where’s my clout? show me da clout

xi. bullying doesn’t stop

obviously, i could probably deal with the minor situations this doc is about by myself like a big boy. what makes it hard to do this is the way inkstar’s behaviour especially leeches on my unpopularity, as caused by the years of social abuse the sms community has put me thru, and the behaviour is in fact aiming for that outcome, of trying to get me to leave. bullying becomes an all-encompassing haze that sucks everything and everyone in, as i described in the essay i linked to this section title

i think the problem i really have here is that i have a kind of intellectual disability that prevents me from effectively living in cognitive dissonance, and of suppressing my honesty to not provoke bullying. people can easily identify what i’m suffering here as being “cringe” – they can always see that – but they equally easily identify it as being caused by my decisions, like: why can’t i just change how i run the accurate leaderboard to let inkstar be above the rules, or… why can’t i just delete the accurate leaderboard? i can’t really deviate from principles of behaviour to reflect changing social norms such as the swing into post-truth in sms over the last 3 years, which is a large reason i’ve suffered so many consequences of bullying, and have such a disgust reaction to disingenuous centrism and things like mainstream media reporting on israel

but i suppose what someone in my position can always do is let the bullying overcome him. and that’s the right thing to do; it’ll be easier for everyone else to figure out their emotions once the consequences of the original abuses are concretely realised