Eevee grew to level 32!

This has been a surreal and difficult year, but everything turned out much better in the end.

I can’t possibly do the whole story justice, and I’m not eager to rehash it anyway, so here’s the incredibly short version. The players are myself, my partner Ash (formerly Mel, aka glip), and their (at the time) husband Marl.

Helpful context: for years, Ash has been the target of a stalking slash gossip campaign. A group of folks on a forum infamous for this sort of thing likes to dig through our online footprints for dirt and compile lengthy lists of awful things we’ve allegedly done. Every time this happened, we dropped everything and investigated. It’s exhausting. Virtually everything we’ve been accused of has been some combination of long since resolved, wildly embellished, carefully trimmed to remove any explanatory context, completely misunderstood, distorted through rounds of telephone, or occasionally outright fabricated — and what’s not, we gladly apologize for and try to repair. But there are so many fractalline complaints that no casual observer could possibly double-check the evidence (it sometimes takes weeks for us to comb through it all), and we can’t respond effectively without producing a massive tome that no one will bother to read.

This is where we’re starting from.

In early April, someone posted logs from 2012 of Marl having horny chats with someone who was 15/16 and suggesting a variety of other shady behavior. The teenager in question was someone Marl had briefly hired to help him assemble con merch; Ash and I had barely interacted with her at all and didn’t even know they’d spoken outside of that. Nevertheless, “warnings” about all three of us began to circulate rapidly, Ash’s friends started getting doxxed, and folks bailed on us in droves — all while Ash and I were still trying to grasp what was even going on.

Marl offered a general apology, told us the logs were bogus, then became upset and withdrew. He didn’t keep logs of his own, so we had little else to go on and had to trust him. I found some oddities in the logs: enough to make me skeptical of them and more trusting of Marl, but nothing concrete.

Ash was completely exhausted with this, which was by no means the first accusation leveled at them over events they hadn’t even known about. They couldn’t take any more, were on the verge of a breakdown, and decided to abandon the internet altogether. That left me as the obvious conduit for anyone trying to get at Ash, and I am very bad at not grouching about something annoying, so this presented a very tangible risk. Ash is more important to me than being online, so I left as well.

For various reasons, not least of which is that the forum had our address and was still whipping a rather lot of people into a bloodthirsty frenzy, we no longer felt safe in our home. We left that too.

We stayed with Marl’s parents for a while, which gave Ash time to think. They started to feel the full weight of a lot of things, big and small, that Marl had done over the course of their ten-year marriage: lots of breaches of trust; stretching Ash’s patience as far as it would go and then promising to improve for just long enough; leaving us to deal with accusations levelled against him with zero information more than once.

He also eventually admitted that the logs were not entirely bogus, although he never clarified more specifically, so I have no way to know what he actually did or not. At the very least, he did slide into the DMs of a high schooler (who was also his employee, no less).

We subsequently evicted him from our lives, leaving him with his parents when we moved to a new place.

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I’m told the teenager dropped off the forum (which she’d been posting on anonymously), and no one but Marl knows her identity, so she’s effectively vanished. We haven’t had contact with Marl in months. That just leaves us.

I’ve explained a lot of this in gratuitous detail on Twitter, and it’s been relatively quiet for a while now, but the initial confused mess can’t be undone. Gossip cannot be un-spread. To this day, we still get folks trying to warn people away from us, based primarily on what Marl did behind our backs.

Oh, well. Can’t please everyone, right? Does that actually apply here?

It drives me nuts to be misrepresented, but on the other hand, maybe it’s okay that people who take gossip at face value are self-selecting themselves out of my internet experience.

Anyway, that’s why my output was a bit low last year: I was chased from my home and thought I would be leaving the internet forever! Then I had to spend a few months getting settled. Plus I’ve been on and off ADHD meds since May, which has kind of thrown me for a loop, but I finally got that all sorted out just a few days ago. Now I can finally get back to, um, whatever it is that I do.

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In lighter news!

We live in Colorado Springs now! It’s beautiful and lovely and actually has weather, which is a nice change after five years in Vegas.

I changed my name! It was in part to stay out of public records so we wouldn’t be doxxed again, but then they doxxed the name change, so, that didn’t work. Oh, well, I’m still happy I did it. I’m Evelyn Woods now. That’s right: I legally changed my name to Eevee.

Ash and I are engaged! Also I love them a lot. Marl injected a lot of invisible, ambiguous tension into the household; without that smothering us, we are flourishing. We went through hell together and made it out the other side. I’m… well, I’m really happy.

We got a new cat: Cheeseball, a Lykoi! He loves to make friends and also fight them, and his antics helped a lot over the summer. He’s very good.

So good, in fact, that over the summer I started working on Cheezball Rising, a game about Cheeseball for the Game Boy Color! It is hard and I am not very far along. Also I’ve been in outer space and haven’t worked on it much in several months. But I’ve been blogging the whole thing which is at least moderately interesting.

I also wrote a stub of a game for the GBA in Rust over the past week for a game jam, though it hasn’t gotten especially far either.

And, some other games? Probably? I think Alice’s Day Off was this most recent February, right? God, that feels like it was a decade ago. So much for finishing it by June.

I kinda-sorta kept up with art over the summer, but art requires a certain kind of mood for me, and I… wasn’t in it. Which is a shame, because I was starting to feel like I was getting somewhere.

I slopped together little Pelican-based art galleries for my SFW and NSFW art, which I’d been meaning to do for a while!

I don’t know. I stopped tracking what I was doing every day quite so closely, since I wasn’t doing much every day for a while there. Maybe I’ll start the weekly roundup posts back up? Did anyone read those?

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What about 2019, then?

I feel unleashed and am absolutely certain this will be a fantastic year. Mostly I have to catch up on everything I didn’t do last year. Well, that’s fine. Let’s see, what do I even have in the air right now:

• Cheezball Rising, the GBC game
• fox flux advance, the GBA game, maybe
• fox flux, the continuation of the desktop game
• Alice’s Day Off, which was only released as a demo
• idchoppers, the Rust Doom tool
• art, writing, music
• idk half a dozen other things, god

So, the usual: make stuff.