Today, 14 October 2020, is the day of release of the long-awaited Sketch Collab, and also one of two reasons why I have not updated with a newspost. (The other being my emotional frame, which I will touch on in a bit.)

On my socials I posted this picture to heighten anticipation for this long-awaited potpourri of animating talent.

There were two major hints to this image -- the parchment paper resembled the background of the Sketch Collabs of a good few years now, and the artwork was that of the sleeve cover to A Stroll Down St Pancras, which serves as the background music for this year's Sketch Collab.

All the reasons behind my delaying of this post are deeply intertwined, and I feel I can't talk about one without talking about the rest. Please bear with me.

I am going to be dealing with some very painful emotions in this post.

I want to underscore, for a moment, the fleeting feeling of being unstoppable.

It is a feeling that you get when you are surrounded by people who believe in you, and who enable you to do the things you aspire to do.

@ninjamuffin99 approached me in mid-August informing me that the host of this year's Sketch Collab, @NickConter, was looking for a musician, as @Geoplex would normally do this but he was reportedly swamped this year. I jumped at the opportunity; I was free, and I took it on.

I don't think very many know exactly how much this means to me, and I think I ought to come out and say this.

In years past, starting in 2014, I looked longingly at the Sketch Collab. I knew that Geoplex was relatively active on NG back then, at least on the audio forum, and I wanted to at least have a shot at scoring the Sketch Collab, or at least having my music used in there. I believed enough in my musical ability even if I didn't know how to mix. I remember approaching one of the previous hosts for it. I don't know if @TheMAM took me seriously back then, but I have great reason to doubt it. Thoughts coursed through my heart back then: how can I even get a chance if no one will believe in me?

Years passed, and I forgot about it. I vaguely knew of its existence but the memory really only hit me hard once I had been asked to score it.

By that point, I'd already felt like I'd outdone myself this year, having done the orchestral and vocal heart-wrencher that was please take care of this star. I felt I couldn't outdo myself any further, but sure, I'd give it a try, I thought. When NickConter spoke with me about what he and the others were looking for as far as music was concerned, he was looking for something catchy. It was then that I looked at previous Sketch Collabs and listened to their music, to try and gauge what it was that they were all looking for, and what I could introduce. Once I had finished scouring through past videos, I scoured through my past tracks.

One track in particular stood out to me, and that was the fragment of A Stroll Down St Pancras from five years ago. After having smashed please take care of this star out of the park, I felt I could believe in my own musical ability again.

@AkioDaku and I had previously had a long chat about what makes us tick as musicians, and in that chat we had heavily related to each other's struggles. At the end of that chat, we had offered each other the possibility of collaborating with each other. Once I had laid down most of the instrumental for Pancras, I felt the time had come for me to collaborate with him. I wasn't sure, but at least with him I found someone who believed in my ability, as much as I believed in his. He happily agreed to lay down the bass for Pancras, and him doing so opened up the window for me to include a second collaborator -- my very own friend and bandmate, Greg Slater, who had recorded guitar for a number of tracks of mine that had previously been submitted to Newgrounds.

Greg was willing to record the guitar, and so he sat down to doing it, feeling his way through the track. To me, aside from a bit of direction on dynamics and performance, it didn't matter what the end result was, so long as my friends' souls were injected into this thing. And they were.

Their passion amplified the passion that was already in the piece and transformed it into something far beyond anything I'd imagined.

Then came a third collaborator, who recorded his violin in a pinch after being moved by the melody I'd written for it -- Juan D. Cruz, jdcviolin on Twitter. Initially, I'd written the violin parts with the solo violin out of alpha Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra 2 -- the same build of that series of samples that I had five years ago when I first dreamed up this piece. I stayed past midnight on 15 September to await jdcviolin's recordings and then mix them in, because I was determined that 15 September 2020 would be the day of release of this track.

It was originally meant to have been done for earlier, but there were a number of deadlines set for the animators, some of whom were struggling to get things done on time -- one of such deadlines was 15 September, which coincided with a major anniversary, i.e. ten years since I set foot in the UK for the first time. (I spoke about it at length in the description to A Stroll Down St Pancras.) The resulting song would be one of passion and freedom and experimentation and joy.

Those of you who know me well enough, and who know my situation well enough, know that I have been battling awful bouts of depression and post-traumatic stress, and that I am still in the thick of it now. When critics of people like me invalidate me on a daily basis, telling me that I shouldn't be here, that I have nothing to give back to this country, that I am not going to amount to anything worth a damn, it only brings back traumatic memories. It only makes the pain and suffering worse. The depressive, post-traumatic black Rottweiler is there on an almost daily basis and sometimes, it does more than bare its fangs at me: it bites me in places that are way too painful for me to bear.

There were even people who told me that I would never surpass Geoplex or (insert any name here), or do anything they did.

This all seems lesser compared to the dehumanising treatment I receive from some people and parties. None of it, however, can measure up to what came before.

When I finished Pancras I felt a deep sense of joy and relief. I also felt unstoppable. For the first time in a long while, I felt free -- as free as I did back in September of 2010. I felt that with people by my side who believed in me, I finally didn't need to feel like I was alone against the world, and I could finally thrive. It showed in my music. Pancras would turn out to be one of my best pieces to date, if not my personal best to date. With it I finally could sing with the same emotional literacy that I yearn for, that I look for in pieces I judge in competitions such as the Art-Inspired Music contest or the Newgrounds Audio Deathmatch. Compared to what I am still going through, it is a tiny sliver of light, but a very important sliver of light for me nonetheless.

It finally showed me, and others listening in, what I'm truly capable of -- and it's only going to get better from there.

It finally showed me, and others listening in, what a joy it has been to make music with these friends of mine.

And now, for the first time, my name is on a Sketch Collab -- as are the names of a small selection of the many musician friends and others who stood by me, believed in me, and felt together with me.

Never underestimate how unstoppable you feel when you have the good fortune of having people by your side who believe in you and want the best for you. Never, ever, underestimate that. It is an incredible privilege -- and I wish it were not so, because I remember how small I felt all those years ago, and I empathise with those people who desperately wish they could do something like this but, for whatever reason, feel they somehow can't. If you are feeling this way right now and reading this, I want to do everything I can, and I exhort my friends to do everything they can, to make sure fewer people feel that way. It's no good for me to simply rest on my laurels feeling satisfied that I did it, while others are feeling the way I once felt. It's time everyone got a chance.

It's time we believed.

MUSICIANS: Please stop selling yourself short. If the world doesn't cheer for you and you know you have something to offer musically, do not lose sight of that for a moment. If you want to score an animation or a game, make it known! Put it on your newsposts, talk about it, mention it in the Collaboration forum. Heck, if you are the annoying kind, perhaps even bug @TomFulp in a reply to the news forum posts every time he does something, I don't know! So long as you're speaking about your dreams, people will know that you exist and know you have dreams, and some people just might act on those dreams.

ANIMATORS AND GAME DEVS: If a musician out there really dreams of scoring animations or video games and makes this known on their newsposts and forum posts, it's time we believed in them. Imagine the wonders this belief would do for their confidence, their self-esteem, their willingness to put themselves forward for further projects!

Time for the Audio Portal to finally see the use that it's meant to see once again. Because let's not forget that the Audio Portal is full of incredibly gifted and determined musicians, many of them with dreams of their own -- and the AP is also designed for seamless integration with NG game and movie credits.

I remember what it's like to have begged for a chance to score a game or an animation.

I remember being brushed off so many times; I remember not being given a chance.

I think it's time we stopped that for as many musicians as we can find.

Yoooo lemme know what your handles are, so that I can follow you maybe~

In the meantime, I need to write a longish post about the recent releases and other things I've been going through.

Hey everyone, I am back and I have delivered.

I present to you all, please take care of this star.

As I promised in the description of this piece, I am writing this long post detailing the context and the process behind this song, and what I've been feeling during its making and after.

The piece of music, please take care of this star, is actually influenced by a good few things that I feel share the same symbolism. Incidentally, I also did an art piece with the same title, so one could say that this piece was partly influenced by that piece of artwork, as it came earlier.

The lyrics of that piece are ostensibly about an abused child receiving a star from her Maker, and struggling to keep its light going because she is abused into yielding it up or letting it fall into the wrong hands by people who are meant to love her and protect her.

It is also an allegory to Brexit.

At the end of January this year, the campaign group Led By Donkeys screened a farewell message to the European Union from the famous white cliffs of Dover. Said message famously featured the two WWII RAF veterans still alive at the time of making the message, who both voted Remain and who lamented the racism and small-mindedness that led us to that point, and the final two sentences of this message, which sent tens of thousands of young people like myself in tears, read:

The message has stayed in my heart for a long time, and I have long wanted to turn what I felt on that day in January into the kind of energy that would inspire people and tell them what my feelings were.

Having been abused and gaslit plenty by my own parents and others during my childhood and adolescence, I felt I could write from the perspective of a child like this, making it an allegory for how so many young people were talked down to, not listened to, consistently gaslit about our futures. I felt it on a personal level, and with Brexit, this became communal.

The "crown of twelve stars" refers to two things -- the crown of the woman in the book of Revelation, which the Catholic Magisterium understands as Mary, mother of Jesus -- and the twelve stars of the EU flag.

So yes, this song is heavily laden with plenty of emotion and plenty of meanings that are close to my heart. Every single bit of symbolism that I threw into these lyrics is borrowed from things that have galvanised me and that continue to galvanise me. The star of the child in the song could mean a number of things, as a result: Britain's proverbial star in the EU flag, the child's talent or personality that could not be developed, or the growth of the child that has been stunted as a result of abuse.

As I mentioned in the description of the song, as well as in my previous post: I began composing this song on Tuesday 11 August 2020 at 06:30 BST. This would have been my NGUAC knockout round entry, had I not resigned. I kept myself to NGUAC / NGADM constraints, aiming for a deadline of two weeks from the start date, as I had a lot of pent-up anger and consternation to use constructively. Composing the song was a quick affair, as I finished up the full structure complete with tempo envelope on the same day that I started writing. In theory, that meant I could record at any point after that Tuesday -- but I decided to embellish the song further before I started recording the vocals.

And on the subject of vocals and lyrics: the lyrics were part of an impassioned post that I'd written a good while back, detailing my feelings and the feelings of others of my generation and younger in the months leading up to and following Brexit. At the time of writing those, they did not have a tune assigned to them. (At the time of writing those, they also made me weep very bitterly and I thought that I would never see those words again, that it was catharsis and that it would be done and dusted.) What made me ultimately assign these lyrics to the tune that I wrote on the 11th was that it suddenly became topical again, with much of the fallout from what was meant to be a done-and-dusted spectre that had been haunting us since 2016 still going on, and some of it being reported in the news as late as July. The subjects behind the words incited in me many emotions and passions, and so I felt I needed to deliver in my recordings.

I wavered and nearly cried recording the parts.

I also nearly cried when embellishing and finishing up the composition and mixing of the instrumental, a mere six days from the start date. @LD-W and @ForgottenDawn gave the instrumental a once-over before I put in the vocals.

These vocals were the parts that I worried about the most in this song: outside of my delivery of them, I had trouble mixing vocals in the past. I have been known to have a problem of too many medium frequencies -- mids, as we call it -- and too many mids in audio can cause a piercing sound. My Seán physically recoils at piercing mids, and I do so sympathetically to him -- so I wanted to avoid that reaction as best as I could. The mixing and mastering was done with this in mind, above all else.

I finished it today, 19 August 2020, in the early afternoon or so, and I was so relieved and happy that it was done. It felt cathartic. This was the kind of stuff that I used to merely dream of doing when I took part in the 2014 NGADM, back when I did Oceans Wide and did not know a thing about mixing and mastering: I did not dream of the musicality as I believed even back then that I had it in me already; I dreamed of the production. And now, I feel I've done it and far outdone myself. Listening to the master, I felt my own hair standing on end. I thought, yeah, this is good. This is going to be the final version of this piece.

I said I wanted audio submission number 200 to be one that was very close to my heart. And it was. Everything about this song has made me quite emotional, and even thinking about it puts me on an emotional roller-coaster.

I am grateful to have been blessed with the emotional strength to see this song through, because I have not been feeling strong at all. I have been feeling excited and nervous and sad, yes, but not strong.

Audio submission number 200 would have been a go regardless of what the outcome of the Newgrounds Audio Underdogs Contest (NGUAC) auditions were. I want to state for the record that I'm glad to have made it past the auditions.

I also want to announce that I am resigning from the NGUAC. These are the full details of why.

I am a Newgrounds Audio Deathmatch (NGADM) judge, and I was also a judge for the Art-Inspired Music (AIM) contest earlier this year, for which I wrote extensive commentary on every single admissible entry. In threads and Discord discussions related to these contests I mentioned that I vibe with a lot of tracks, owing to having listened to music across various different genres. So, for me, composition and production are not enough.

I look for authenticity of emotion.

A lot of this involves having the emotional literacy to convey the message that we are trying to convey in our songs, to positively and pleasantly catch listeners off guard, to make them feel, to make them question, "Oh, hello, what is this?". It is an emotional literacy that had been encouraged in me by stellar composer friends and judges in past years, and by some industry figures as well, some of whom have had the opportunity to listen to my music as hosted on Newgrounds. It is experimentation, the willingness to dream, that makes new genres and has us take them far. Some experiences are going to be a little more left field than others, and that's fair enough -- but even still, I want to hear the actual soul of the composer.

If this is going to be stymied in me for the next point that I am going to raise, then I would be a hypocrite for modifying my composition structure and what I'm looking for to suit certain tastes. In my judging for the AIM and the NGADM I would be looking for that which is missing from a lot of compositions -- whereas I myself would not be practising what I preach. I cannot be put in that position. It is fundamentally morally wrong to me.

The next point, of course, is the definition of "industry standard," a thing sought for in composers of my bracket. Now what is that?

By the overwhelming benevolence of one of my fellow composer friends, I happen to be acquainted with Akash Thakkar and his course on game design and networking in the video game music industry. (Evidently, due to ongoing circumstances, I can't actually apply most of it, but I am still learning a lot.) The closest entry point for anyone even going left field with their work would be to compare it with something that it somewhat sounds like -- I've had my lyrically layered songs compared to the soundtrack of Nier: Automata before. If there's a place for that, there's a place for anything -- it's a matter of selling it well.

Now, my understanding of "industry standard" is something with some degree of safety but a great degree of freshness, experimentation and pleasantly catching others off guard -- the kind done by Field Music and Coldplay and Aimee Mann. The kind that goes on to win Brits and BAFTAs. Imagine that for a few moments -- the mere exercise of dreaming it feels beautiful to me.

Ahead of time, when I submitted my audition piece to the Round 1 thread, I knew it was going to polarise. Some were not going to like the child's voice, even though I deliberately went for Frelia out of Ar tonelico II with that one. Some were not going to like the distortion in some of the chorus vocals. And others were going to be absolutely floored by the fact that the song is more than eight minutes long. So it came as no surprise that the judges' scores were polarised on my own song; I had long expected it and I have no complaints about this.

What I do have consternation over, is that there are people whose tracks are imaginative enough to actually qualify for the NGADM -- which is meant to be a step up above the NGUAC, by the way -- who have not qualified to Round 2 *of the NGUAC* because they were given some inexplicably dismal scores by a couple of the judges, ostensibly out of this concept of an "industry standard" that they're after.

Industry professionals have told me time and time again that my stuff deserves to go far even if I currently do not have the right to take it further than here. I have no doubt that if they listened to some of the tracks that were excluded, they would say the same. There is a part of me that is screaming in my gut, telling me to actually listen to the affirmations and believe -- affirmations that I am indeed fortunate to have had -- and it's only fair that I extend that same affirmation to the people who had excellent tracks who were ultimately excluded.

The results came out at about 3:-something a.m. BST; my beloved Seán was occasionally checking the audio forum on my behalf while I was asleep. After seeing what I did, I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed, freshened up, and immediately set to work on audio submission number 200 -- what would have been my NGUAC knockout round entry. I started at about 6:30 a.m. my time, and it is now 9:08. I've not touched the keyboard for a good hour and a half, and I can safely call half the structure of the piece finished. So, actually finishing the piece on time is not the issue. If constrained to do this within two weeks, notwithstanding any emergencies that may crop up, I do not doubt for a moment that I'd be able to finish it on time.

It'd be a damn shame to let it go to waste, so I am planning to see this piece through to the end. It will be my audio submission number 200.

And it'll hopefully be the first in a series of tracks whose subject matter is close to my heart.

I am at peace with this decision, and I'd certainly be grateful if someone who didn't make it past the auditions could take my place. Part of the Hamlet soliloquy from Shakespeare is apt for this situation, I think--

This above all- to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

I hope to update you about the piece in progress soon. Until next time.

It has recently occurred to me that my next audio submission on Newgrounds will be my personal number 200.

I don't know what it is — and I keep wondering what it might be. To those of you anticipating it, I share your anticipation, and when that track is out, I shall be writing about it in great detail in a newspost, most likely.

So, a few of you will have noticed that a certain piece called Libera Me ~ version définitive was posted by me and a few other users, whom I shall not name because it appears that some awkwardness has ensued. In fact, it had been posted twice, and I've taken the liberty to unpublish it both times.

I think I want to clear the air on what it was meant to be, and what happened.

In early-ish 2013, on the Bandcamp page that I currently do not use -- and have not used for years on end -- I released a single called Terre des Hommes Libres, featuring three songs. They were

1. Terre des Hommes Libres,
2. Asperges Me, and
3. a track never released on Newgrounds, called Libera Me.

When circumstances dictated that I could only do stuff nonprofit, I switched my entire Bandcamp discography to downloadable only for free. Prior to that, I received a small token of support for the single in question from a longtime fan of mine on NG. Back when I released it, I was a student, broke and in need of a replacement computer -- any kind would do -- and I was desperate. Notwithstanding that throughout my university years, I had immense fears for my life and traumatic episodes about the place where I grew up and I didn't know what to even do about it all -- no work was being posted that I could sign up for, places I applied to wouldn't take me, and the only option I saw was to try and fund-raise with my own music, however badly produced it was. This led to me releasing these three tracks onto Bandcamp. Of course, fundraising has been a moot point for the last six and a half years.

Which leads me to Libera Me, or rather, my own setting of the words of Libera Me.

Wikipedia puts it straight to the point: Libera Me is a Roman Catholic responsory sung as a prayer for the dead, during a few different services.

The track that I released on Bandcamp was meant to be my own setting of the prayer, the music of which had come to me very strongly in 2013. 

Fast-forward a few years later and I had learnt that my production skills were wanting, to say the least. It was my hope to do a "definitive" version of sorts, gathering together the users whom I knew could sing this together with me, and who could feel they would be able to pull this off at some point, in good conscience. Not all of them had been confirmed, but I'd managed to get together four friends — let’s call them A, B, C, and D. B was not credited as they don't have a Newgrounds account, but they often sang together with A, who was one of the already credited friends on NG. Of course, for me to consider this a "definitive version," I would have to remake the whole file from scratch, with my current orchestration and production skills. I wanted to do it once I knew how to mix. Of course, my mixing skills only finally got decent mid-last year, and I simply wasn't able to pull it off in the preceding years.

But before I could sit down and do this, the unexpected happened.

Roughly a week and a half ago, one of the contributors I had named in the making of this new version of Libera Me, C, went and published a track that had little, if at all, to do with my setting of the prayer, which was what this track was intended to be all along. It was instead a sort of mashup of vocals and guitar with a song about the Easter Rising in Ireland called The Blood Stained Bandage, which I myself wouldn't do.

All of the other friends who had confirmed their participation in the reworking of my own setting of Libera Me were credited on the left sidebar, myself included. Even though we hadn't contributed anything to this piece that suddenly popped up. It was just this one contributor, as far as I'm aware.

I don't know if it was out of misunderstanding or what -- I feel I can only give the benefit of the doubt -- and I found out several hours after it was published, since for me, it was published in the small hours of the morning, when I was fast asleep. I also discovered that a post tagging me regarding this piece appeared on my personal Facebook page. The kicker was when I found out that the post had for its text, "We did it."

...We, meaning the rest of us, didn't do anything!

I knew for a fact that A, B, and D had all signed up to sing this prayer for the dead with me. They certainly did not sign up for this, and would be furious if they found themselves part of something they hadn’t signed up for!

I also want to briefly talk about the sentiments I have behind The Blood Stained Bandage.

Now I am engaged to Seán (@IrishChieftain), who in addition to being a British citizen, is also Irish both by descent and citizenship. As far as his views on Ireland go, he is a Republican — and very much on the side of peace. Rebel songs are known well to him, and I occasionally hear them being played — particularly those of the Wolfe Tones. Seán is not very distant from what goes on in Ireland; in fact, he keeps abreast of Irish news, among other things.

My beloved knows that while I have borrowed and understood a lot of Celtic culture, I struggle to find belonging in this world, and this applies to wherever I find myself. With my ongoing situation weighing me down, if I sing about anything overtly political, it’ll be about things that I can relate to the most: racism, xenophobia, pilgrimage, the crippling depression that we suffer as a result of how our world is being run... Once upon a time I was much more open to singing certain political songs within the context of national pride; I am now extremely sparing with the sort of songs evoking national pride that I lend my voice or my musical ability to.

C had told me that this Republican sentiment is very dear to him; fair enough. Libera Me is meant to be a universal song that transcends boundaries, and not limited to one nation alone!

Bearing all this in mind, I took the executive decision and unpublished it with moderators' tools, since something like this ought to have involved the contribution of all users named in the project, which it didn't. Then, it got published once more, and then I took it down again in the same manner as before.

The friend in question and I had a good talk, we caught up after many years of not having spoken with each other. I told him what the project was intended to be, in case he didn't get the intention behind it beforehand. I don't know if he has understood it, and I don't know if he's heard my 2013 version of Libera Me.

Anyway -- it has not been published since, and the file that he had inserted into the project has been glitching since I unpublished it, making it completely invisible and inaudible to him and to myself (and likely to all involved). I couldn't remove the file either, as the project page was giving me the option to preview, but not to delete the file in question, and whenever I attempted to preview it, it remained perpetually in a loading state. So I deleted the project altogether.

I've not been in a good place mentally and I've not been well physically these last couple weeks, and that day when this happened, it really hurt me, as I had dreams for that piece -- but I need to make something clear:

*There was no hurt intended from this sequence of events.* I'm aware of this, and I cannot stress this enough.

As of a few hours ago, I am remaking it from scratch; it will take me quite a while and we may not see hide or hair of this until several months down the line perhaps, but I know I will nail this.

Whether I get others to sing this with me, I do not know. I hope to. Let's wait and see.

Attention @sleepfacingwest.

To begin, I'm glad I persisted in being here. I'm also extremely grateful for the friends I made, many of whom are still with us but some of whom have left us. Many of these friends helped lift me up and give my skills the sharpening and recognition due to them, and I wouldn't be making the kind of music and art I now do if it weren't for them. And then there are also those friends whose companionship I enjoy.

You all know who you are. You are countless like the stars to me, and I'm so grateful for all of you.

This is going to be a fairly disjointed series of thoughts on how my nine years on NG have been. A lot of it is going to focus on the early days.

• You see, nine years ago the internet was a very different place. I mentioned on a few NG-related Discord servers that the defining phrase of the audio forum nine years ago was there are no girls on the internet. Many people wanted an old boys' club, and anyone who didn't conform didn't fit — I remember being made to not fit, I remember not being made welcome because, in their words, I "pretended" or "claimed" to be a girl. The people who have made these remarks have long since moved on or have been banned — so much the better, because I feel a lot safer sharing my heart and soul with you all through my creations.
• In those days I certainly couldn't have imagined hitting the 1K follower mark — I did, this year, on Easter Monday.
• In the earliest days I made music on a demo version of FL, and because I wanted to retain Fruity Soundfont Player, I couldn't save any project files. Once I bounced something as an MP3, that was it. Permanent loss of the project — but the music would ever remain in my memory. I am eternally grateful to the friend who got me an FL Studio licence.
• In the early days I had mixed feedback, I suppose. Many recognised the musicality shining through the lack of mixing. Some thought I had bitten more than I could chew with what I was trying to achieve. Now, however, I have flagship pieces like Mio/Homura EXTEND ver., STORMFALL/., child of the woods, hallowed silence and At the Ends of the Earth to my name. I refused to be underestimated in those earlier days, and I refused to be talked down to.
• On the note of being underestimated: I started using a DAW at all at the age of 20. I never had the opportunity prior, having fled an abusive home and forbidding circumstances. Many take for granted that there are tutorials on YouTube detailing every littlest detail about production. This wasn't the case when I began. There was an incredible amount of circlejerking and flaming; I was pleasantly surprised and deeply appreciative of any and all help I could get, because it meant that others were really seeing something in me that many weren't at the time.
• I was not a very good person in my earlier days on here. I was deeply intolerant of some people. It took a long road of soul-searching and education and walking a mile in others' shoes for me to finally see the Divine in others different from myself. As for now, I don't *think* I'm good, I can't think it. I can only hope that I'm somewhat better.

These past few weeks have seen me regressing, with many traumatic memories of my childhood and adolescence rushing back to the surface -- I'd been in a dark place for a while, but now especially, I am not out of that dark place.

I'd announced, prior to the explosion of the world's events, that I was going to release dream ship as my next solo track. Technically it's not a solo track -- it's a collaboration, as I am working with a friend who is substituting all the instrumentation I have used in the production of said track for better instrumentation, but the composition and voices are my own. Quite frankly, everyone I know is in an abysmal mental place.

I've not said anything about the current events, feeling like very many of my friends -- feeling we need to give space to allow grieving voices to be heard loudest. And I think that should continue.

As my collaborating friend and I are still not in the headspace to finish up dream ship, I'll be posting other tracks in the meantime while we take the time we need to finish up that track.

We live in such an interconnected world, that somewhere along the line, we're going to extend the hand of friendship and creative collaboration with some people... and months down the line, testimonies will emerge about these people doing horrible, reprehensible things.

And when — not if, when — that happens, hindsight is our only friend.

I've had several things happen to my friends and I this week, re: outing some pretty reprehensible actions. Most notably, you'll notice that three of my 2019 audio submissions have been unpublished. It has emerged from multiple sources that the person who sang on all three of those tracks allegedly manipulated and sexually groomed several, and at least one was known to be a minor. Said person also made repeated unwanted advances towards a couple of my close friends. (I have little, if any reason at all, to believe the allegations to be false.)

I have had overt sexual harassment happen to me in the audio forum, which was swiftly dealt with.

Boy, this week we seem to be quite prolific in uncovering snakes in the tall grass, don't we? Those of you who have been interacting with me of late know that I have a fair bit of post-traumatic depression to navigate; everything I have described above is just making it worse.

Sincerely, what do we do in cases like these? I struggle to bear the thought that people can be this horrible — even if it's a sad fact of life. And then there's the question of the art on NG. I would be hard-pressed to remove something tainted by someone whose actions are found out later, if there are multiple NG contributors. On NG there is a culture of "appreciate the art if you can't appreciate the artist," something many of us have had to grapple with when hearing about greats from the distant past and what they did, for example. But I find that action the realistic thing to do: talk about the art as well as the events that have transpired. There is one piece that still has the offender's voice, for example: it's still up, and here I am talking about it and recent events at length. A lot of this stuff was allegedly coming to a head without my knowledge back when I was composing the piece that had the offender's voice. The offender in question isn't mentioned by name, mind you, but here we are.

Now, if I were the only NG contributor — as was the case with those three removed tracks — then the course of action is simple.

At some point some of us have to come face-to-face with demons, whether they be our own or others'. For the few of us who have been through things like what I described above, it's been an incredibly taxing week.

In the small hours of Easter Monday -- incidentally the day after my birthday (thanks for all the birthday wishes, by the way; there have been plenty and you have all been so kind asfefadawesaf) -- I hit 1,000+ followers, with the 1,000th being @Mackievellian. I...

I want to write many, many messages of hearty thanks to all of you for sticking around. There certainly will be more music and drawings coming from me in the future, music in particular.

In the days that I began putting music up on Newgrounds I didn't imagine that I'd get a following like this. I want to thank @sorohanro in particular for bringing me to this site, thus beginning quite the musical journey for me.

I've gathered many friends, some still around, some sadly gone. I'm grateful for every bit of help and support you have given me. Thank you all so much. Seriously you all number in the hundreds how do I begin mentioning every single last one asdfsdfaewafds

To all my friends and followers, new and old... I would be honoured to take you with me on the musical journey I call my own.