we could go to switzerland, or some place we’ve never been

currently:

reading: various twitter announcements of releases and player statements about them
listening: discover weekly playlist
watching: mohenjo daro
obsession: red velvet, somehow?? this is all soda’s fault.

i’ll start my “challenges” again on monday- these past few weeks have been stupid busy and sitting down to write has felt impossible.

so andrew’s birthday was two weeks ago, which coincidentally fell on the overwatch league’s all star weekend, so he decided to have a birthday party that was literally just a watch party. mando came down and stayed the night, which was a fucking balm for our weary souls, because of The Megan Drama. i will detail all that out later, but right now, the party! rajeev and laura brought samosas, and tony and isrin were there OF COURSE, goose showed up for a while, and then much later in the evening aaron came over after shabbat was over, and then guyla finally came over at like 10:30. it was a nice little cycle of people in and out. i ran myself into the ground cleaning the apartment, but it looked really really nice so. worth it. after the games finally ended at like 1:00 am, mando and i retired outside so guyla and andrew could bro out properly, and we talked until like 4:00. whoops. it was so good though.

(for his birthday i got andrew a zelda themed clock for our living room since we didn’t have one, and he loves zelda. i also got him a variety of zelda-themed enamel pins from etsy.)

we were scheduled to have brunch at founding farmers with court and goose the next morning at 9:30, so of course i woke up at 9:15. i got up in a hurry, but andrew apparently had too much scotch during the party so he stayed home to sleep off his hangover. mando and i both wore the same clothes we had worn the day before to brunch, which i thought was hilarious. brunch was a jam. we had tons of food and a nice amount of coffee, and the four of us just visited in the most southern sense of the word. we talked about moving plans, and job plans, and a lot about esports, and ex-SOs, and PC building, and redneck high schools, and the fusion boys, and all sorts of things i’ve probably forgotten about now. we finally left sometime around noon.

mando and i went back to the apartment and we hung out while andrew (who was feeling much better after some sleep, some food, and some tea) played horizon zero dawn until the proper all stars game started. we spent the entire time laughing our asses off, because holy shit. “no practice, no plan,” and “no plan, just troll,” were out in full force. we finally got a torb hammer kill and it was the most glorious thing hahaha. anyway, our boys on the atlantic team won, which was no surprise, and then immediately after mando had to leave.

now, for the Megan Drama. i’m not going to put her actual handle here, i’m just going to call her megan. ever since i joined the community, she’s been around, being a drama queen and begging for attention, especially from The Streamer (who i’m going to call G from now on) every chance she gets. not a lot you can point a finger at and say “this is obnoxious” on its own, but it all adds up. literally any given thing that happened in the community became about her. people going to see something live? the focus would shift to how she had no opportunity to go and would probably not have that opportunity for a long while. we put together a fan video for g’s birthday, with 30+ of the most active people in the discord submitting videos/drawings/edited selfies wishing him happy birthday. the discord i set up for the surprise devolved to reassuring her that her contribution wasn’t awful and dominated the conversation for a few hours. it was frustrating as FUCK, but nothing she did was ban-worthy. and then, she started getting snippy when the stuff she DID do that was against community guidelines was very nicely corrected. spamming emojis for 3 hours in the middle of the night in the subscriber channel even though the rule is “no spam in non-flood/meme channels”? well no one was awake anyway, why do we care? and it kept. happening.

and THEN. one of her “friends,” let’s call her irene, finally had enough of her and started sending receipts to mando. turns out, megan was straight up stalking g. she’d started trying to cultivate ~relationships~ with other players and coaches from g’s country to try to get closer to him (which is why she’d started talking to irene in the first place- irene is dating one of g’s friends). she was “monitoring” his social media. she had found his friends from home and was “monitoring” those accounts too. she was convinced that the only reason mando was given mod duties was because she and g were having a secret affair and was obsessed with catching them. irene was desperate to get megan removed from the community, because she was worried about g, but felt unable to do something directly because she was scared of megan’s retribution. mando and i went from annoyed to completely freaked out pretty immediately, but did not feel like we could do anything without g’s go-ahead. which, of course, as a early 20-something dude who hates drama, he refused to give, because that would be some actual work he would have to do. bless his dumb heart.

so the morning of andrew’s party, i woke up to a the discord basically burning down. megan and co had been doing their spam thing again, and mando deleted a bunch of it and told them off, and then megan’s friends started pushing back in a major way, and then our friends started pushing back against that, and it was a mess. i tried to stand up for us while trying to calm everyone down, but i think irene was looking for a fight and refused to calm down, and mando ended up kicking her from the server. there was tentative peace afterwards, but it was very uneasy in the english-language channels.

monday or tuesday (i can’t remember which) after this mess, i decided i would talk to megan about being disrespectful specifically to me, since a) we had been friends when i joined the community, and b) she had abruptly stopped speaking to me after g made me a mod. so we had some inane conversation where i tried to talk to her about her bullshit, but we didn’t get anywhere. she had reasons for everything she did, and all the call-outs were obviously mods singling her out and not her fault. so when she stopped replying, i dropped it. this is only noteworthy because later that day one of the not-american mods banned her. unbeknownst to me and mando, apparently the non-NA mods had been fielding complaints about her being in the community because she was being boosted in competitive overwatch by irene and a pro player. this is very against the rules of our community (and the pro community in general). finally chu had enough of dealing with the dms about her and banned her. when she told the rest of the mods she did it, we were all in agreement that it was a good decision.

the rest of the community, particularly her not-american group of friends, absolutely lost their minds. if g had not stepped in and backed up chu and lex, there would have been a full out civil war in the server. but he did step in, and everyone shut up, save one poor soul that left the server in protest of the way the whole thing had been handled.

well, a few minutes after the ban went through, she messaged me: “so you kicked me? cool lol” which really pissed me off. i matched her tone with “wow cool. i didn’t, actually, but thanks for assuming i guess.” she apologized, and sensing all the twitter drama on the horizon, i told her it wasn’t mando either, fyi. that REALLY shut her up for a while- after she said thanks for telling her she stayed off everything for a week. since then there’s been some subtweeting (since she can’t help herself, i guess), but save one last incident, hopefully this is the last of the Megan Drama.

the last thing was the next day, when the guy who left the server messaged me to ask the REAL reason she got banned. he didn’t buy the boosting story (even though it was true!) and wanted the whole picture. so, with the understanding this would not get back to her, since banning her would probably not make her obsession just ~go away~ and paying attention to her twitter was important enough that we don’t want her putting it on private, i told him everything. the stalking, much as i’ve written it here (with no names or particulars), the way she made people on both sides of the language barrier uncomfortable to the point that they told mods about it, the boosting complaints, and to a lesser extent, the recent disrespect of all the mods that other people were beginning to emulate. he asked why we just didn’t SAY this, and i was like,,, would you have even believed us? you guys are her friends. and he admitted that if g himself hadn’t stepped in and said he supported the decision to ban her, he would not have believed me even then. but it wasn’t enough for him to come back to the community. he rejoined the server so he could use the emotes on discord, but he hasn’t said anything since.

and that concludes the Megan Drama, may it rest in fucking pieces forever.

andrew and i have just been chilling since the party, really. we started streaming cuphead for our discord friends, and we’ve been following who is getting released from which owl teams (rip shadowburn, joemeister, and dayfly), we’re attempting to cook more at home (i made bread on monday!!), we’re still playing pokemon go, and we somehow still have 3 lingering boxes of stuff that is not unpacked (!!!HOW!!!!), but we’re pretty happy with how things are going.

we’re going down to nc tomorrow for the weekend- we have a venue we’re checking out on sunday. we think this is the one!!

see you guys monday!!

“so yeah, just imagine me killing the zombie hoard but like, i’m doing the dance from red flavor,” “oh god, nerd shit. do you even hear the words you’re saying right now?? NERD SHIT.,” “mohenjo, mohenjo, mohenjo, mohenjo daro” <3333