The Situation (Patreon)

The short version is that my partner, Mel — aka glitchedpuppet/glip, and before that, PurpleKecleon/PK — has for five years been the target of Kiwi Farms, a cesspool that NYMag described as the web's biggest stalker community.  They have a thread over eight hundred pages long detailing Mel's imagined crimes, and that thread has inexplicably been the #2 Google result for Mel's names and dream project basically since its creation.  (Seriously, Google, why does a stalker nexus have so much page rank?)

It's hard to overstate just how much these people have sought to interfere with our lives.  They've known our address for years.  They pledge to our Patreons (sometimes bogus, sometimes legit) to see what we're saying and repost it.  They lurk in our IRC.  They sneak into invite-only Discords.  They dig through LiveJournal comments from 2004.  We cannot do anything, anywhere, without assuming that someone will be there to squeeze it for entertainment.  They have been omnipresent for years.  I do not call them "stalkers" lightly, and it's for good reason that what they do is a crime in the physical world — yet online it's even worse, since they can see not only what we're doing now, but everything we've ever done, all while remaining anonymous themselves.

And then they take what they've reaped, and they turn it into stories of how we're horrible people.  It's not that they lie exactly; it's more that they don't care in the slightest about what's true or not.  You can watch them at work — from a speck of fact, to complete speculation, to assuming that whatever someone pulled out of their ass must be the truth.  Over and over and over.

The rest of the family doesn't want me to litigate what's happened to them in great detail any more — which kills me, because Posting Online is the only way I know how to deal with basically any problem.  As a loophole, here is a single tiny thing these people have done to me.

Anise is my second cat.  Years ago I had a first: another sphynx named Styx.  We had Twigs and Napoleon at the time, but they were really Mel's cats; Styx was my baby, and I loved him dearly.

He died.

He'd developed FIP, a rare condition caused by a spontaneous mutation of the feline coronavirus (FCoV) — effectively the cat equivalent of the virus that causes the common cold.  A regular FCoV infection is harmless or even asymptomatic, but FIP has no cure and is virtually always fatal.  I noticed he'd lost some weight at the beginning of April, and I put him down when he lost bowel control at the end of the month, after watching him waste away in my arms for weeks.  He wasn't even two years old.  I was a fucking wreck for a while.

Fast forward a few years, and Kiwi Farms got ahold of this story, which I discovered via being scolded by a rando on Twitter.  I heard two fictitious tales about how Styx's death had been my fault.

The first was that I had selfishly neglected to give him prescribed medication because it would make him drowsy.  But the medication I withheld had nothing to do with FIP — it was to address a minor heart problem that could've started causing him problems several years later.  I didn't give it to him because spending time with him before his almost certain death (which came two weeks later) seemed more important, and if he'd survived, I'd have had plenty of time to deal with the heart issue then.  I would've asked him for his input, but, you know.  This was clearly explained in the very post that "proves" this story.

I objected to this telling, and someone (who runs an entire blog dedicated to gossip about Mel) filled me in on the second story: that I had allowed Styx to contract FIP because our house is dirty.  Apparently someone had seen photos of our house with some minor diarrhea accidents on the floor (an enduring problem with another cat of ours, Pearl, who has IBS), read on Wikipedia that FCoV spreads through litterboxes, and concluded that Styx had died because our house is dirty.  This misses that FCoV spreads through any regular litterbox usage (because cats put their faces right in there and sniff like idiots), that Styx almost certainly caught FCoV at the cattery before we adopted him, that normal FCoV is not a problem anyway, that this makes no sense because all our cats would have died, or that Styx died before Pearl was even born.

Still, this should be mundane.  People say a wrong thing on the Internet.  It happens.

The trouble is, young "progressives" at the moment are falling all over themselves to be part of an expulsion — to root out and help exile some secret predator hiding in plain sight.

So if you have a target whose life you want to ruin for funsies, all you need to do is dig through their history for some circumstantial evidence, concoct a vaguely related story that makes them sound horrible, and circulate it in a callout post.

The problem, then, is not that someone pulled a story about Styx out of their ass.  The problem is that Kiwi Farms is a well-oiled machine for producing hundreds of such stories, and the one about Styx is now listed on a Tumblr somewhere under a heading like "animal abuse", calling me a "known literal animal abuser".  Because someone can't read Wikipedia.

And so we've spent years in a constant state of low-level fear, holding our collective breath for the next deluge of fictitious crap.  Maybe next time we'll be called pedophiles instead.  Maybe next time it'll be believed and spread by a high-profile creator we respect, or someone we considered a friend.  Maybe it'll happen on our birthdays, or when we launch a Kickstarter.  Maybe next time someone will show up at our house and kill our cats, like Sean Chiplock's buddy threatened many years ago.

I push back, but it doesn't help.  "Popular community person is secretly the anti-christ" is a compelling narrative that people are eager to spread.  "Thing you believed was totally bogus and now you look very foolish" is not.  Hell, Kiwi Farms even lies about what I say in response.

And now they've crossed the line into peddling fraudulent logs, where I don't have the originals.  What am I possibly supposed to do or say about that?  At best, I could teach them how to make better fakes next time.

Hell, for years I saw a claim go around that was "proven" by a log that actually said the complete opposite.  Rebuttals don't matter.  Nobody cares.

And pushing back is, so hard, so so hard.  It's fucking draining to have your life abruptly interrupted by a ludicrous accusation out of left field, to have to spend days digging up possibly painful parts of your life and fork over even more personal details, all for nothing because the people who believed it already blocked you anyway.

Constantly on trial in the court of internet public opinion, where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Why do this?  Why to us?  The only reason seems to be that Mel has a thread on Kiwi Farms, and the kinds of people who feel like doing some stalking will go to Kiwi Farms to find acceptable targets.

It never gets better.  It only goes quiet for a while before they escalate, and escalate, and escalate.  The more they convince themselves of how terrible we are, the more entitled they feel to every detail of our lives, and the more they're willing to bend the rules and the truth — all to get us what we "deserve".  No one wants to push back lest they become the next target, and in case that wasn't enough, Kiwi Farms has started doxxing people they merely suspect are close to us.  Or discussing whether those people are "threadworthy", i.e., sufficiently entertaining to brand as a new acceptable target.

They don't hide their motives.  They refer to their victims as "lolcows" — people who can be milked for laughs.  That's what this is to them.  Entertainment.  And mark my words, once they notice Mel is gone, they will find someone else.

These people are fucking monsters.

Which brings me all the way back to the point.

Mel has started having panic attacks — actual, scary, physical reactions.  They're on the verge of some kind of breakdown and just can't deal with this any more.  It's poisoned their childhood dream project, Floraverse, since the very beginning.  They want to walk away.  From everything.

I don't get nearly as much crap flung my way as they do, and I don't mind stomaching some internet garbage.  But it does put me in a sour mood for a while, and I am comically transparent, so Mel will immediately know what happened.  I cannot risk becoming a conduit for this sludge to reach them, but if I'm the only member of the family with any online presence, I'm the obvious next target.

I don't know how I can continue to use a service like Twitter under these conditions.  It is, as you may have noticed, a platform perfectly tuned for dogpiling and harassment.  I've been wrestling with treating Twitter as write-only or playing with heavy notification filters, but that still leaves a lot of gaps, and I...  I just don't think I can take the risk.  (I have to say, though, that living without Hot Takes or a constant stream of "here's why the world is on fire today" for nearly a month has been incredibly refreshing, so maybe less Twitter in my life wouldn't be a bad thing.  Maybe I'll just get a fucking diary and write my witty one-liners in there.)

I haven't even looked at my Twitter notifications in weeks.  I know I lost a few hundred followers, so even browsing Twitter means a risk of finding out which former friends jumped ship, and boy do I not need that right now.  Or ever.  But, you know, thank you to everyone who didn't.

Also, all of my creative work is dead in the water.  Every single game I was working on — Chaos Composer, Egg Watch, fox flux deluxe, Alice's Day Off, the untitled Anise game, probably something else I'm forgetting — was a Flora-related collaboration with Mel.  Flora is dead.  Mel doesn't want to work on it any more.  I can't do them justice alone, and it would be kind of a dick move to keep working on a Flora thing around Mel for months.  Even the stuff I drew, the fiction I was writing — it was all Flora, and it's all dead now.  All I've got left is a handful of pure tech things.

Whatever I do, I'm going to take this opportunity to step back for a bit.  I have a tendency to feel imaginary pressure even when working on my own stuff, and Patreon has been great for exacerbating that.  I need to actually take some time to draw, to compose, to just try some new things out without feeling like I need something presentable at the end to justify the time.  I'll definitely still be doing things, just, maybe a little more quietly.

The Patreon will stay up.  I'm considering doing some occasional posting here under the $2 and $4 tiers, just to make it harder for hecklers.  If you want to stick around, thank you so much.  If all of this terrifies you and you want nothing more to do with it, I totally understand — thank you for bringing me this far, and boy I wish I could run away so easily.

(Again, maybe set your pledges to private at the bottom of this page if you're going to stick around.  They may stalk and attack and harass and manipulate anyone adjacent to us.)

If you don't like this state of affairs, well, that sucks.  I can no longer do anything about it.  I fought, and I fought, and I lost.  The only way things could ever improve from here would be for us to be completely vindicated and for Kiwi Farms to stop being treated as any kind of authority on anything, and I'm not in a position to make either of those things happen.

Our current climate and current social tech is such that a single teenager with a petty grudge and willingness to lie can manipulate thousands of "progressives" into annihilating an ecosystem on her behalf.  Is this what we wanted to build?  Are you proud of this outcome?

It's in your hands now.  This is my Baton Pass.  Don't let this happen to anyone else.