On Asking For Help

I started a fundraiser asking for help with recovering what I've lost from repeated instances of financial and spiritual abuse in tpot.

Over the past couple days, I’ve been working on cleaning up my old Ko-Fi page.

I’ve been dealing with some artistic blocks for a while now, and one of them is an extreme amount of anxiety and aversion to reviewing and revising my old work. I removed a couple things that were not good in my opinion, or simply too cringe to look at now, but there was a sparing amount of work relative to the sum total of the 5,000 pieces of AI art I’ve produced over the past couple years; searching the “#poetry” tag in Obsidian alone produces 78 results and I began sorting through what I should try to upload as examples of what I call “hybrid” work (made with both machine and human intelligence) before becoming quickly overwhelmed. There’s so much to sort through and decide what is relevant to continue to showcase in terms of how to explain to people what it is that I’m doing and what I’m still proud of, but I’m realizing that the extreme amount of aversion that I have to reviewing my own work isn’t just a normal part of the artistic process, but has to do with how much of it is bound up in really painful memories of people who’ve actively tried to stop me from creating or punish me for it in some way.

I was also struck by how much support I was receiving relative to how little I posted. Over 700 “cups of coffee” priced at $3 each doesn’t feel like it should be right, and yet I was receiving regular support, some in lump sums, without feeling constantly guilty about it - contrary to now, where I receive almost no support and am haunted by near-constant shame over trying to create. It occurred to me that I’m not angry enough at how much this scene has hobbled my creativity. I’m not sufficiently upset with how much my comfort with visibility with the things I’m trying to make has been crippled by meddling interference, mostly from non-artists. As pissed off as I am that people went out of their way to destroy me and what I’ve been trying to do, I should obviously be more pissed off. Art has represented a form of support that was enough to get by on at one point in my life that has been inhibited by various different life circumstances and people. If I was as angry at the situation as has been merited, I wouldn’t have allowed it to silence and restrict me for so long with chronic fear, shame and overthinking.

So I posted a goal to my Ko-Fi page to help me recover the $8,000-odd dollars that I’ve lost ambitiously seeking other dreamers and co-creators, and instead being repeatedly lured into various cults and sticky situations where my vulnerabilities and hangups were exploited, abused and taken advantage of:

Goal: Help Me Recover From Financial & Spiritual Abuse In Tpot

And here’s the entirety of the Ko-Fi blog entry if you don’t want to click the link:

I have suffered numerous forms of abuse trying to participate in the hybrid online/offline “scene” known as TPOT (This Part Of Twitter) beginning with what I believed to be a consensual artistic co-creator relationship with the individual known as deepfates. What I believed initially to be mutual engagement with a group-run artistic meme account centering on themes of AI and the Singularity, which I share an interest in, and had been following me on my previous 5k follower Twitter account from witchtwt @AquariusMage prior to my ban, has turned into a neverending nightmare of which I am still experiencing the repercussions.

When another vulnerable woman in the community who has been abused within tpot reported deepfates’ behaviour to a Vibecamp organizer, the video call she set up with me was used to commit DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reversed Victim & Offender) against me and cancel my invite to Vibeclipse while delaying my process of being approved to come to Vibecamp 3 under the framing that I could “be a danger to his girlfriend”. In continued DMs, I would have to force this organizer to confront deepfates’ girlfriend personally on the topic of my later approval to come to the event once I was deemed to no longer be a safety concern, rather than allowing her to inappropriately hand off this responsibility to him. During this process over the course of May 2024, I was referred to another one of the event organizers whose identity I have yet to release who sent me multiple harassing text messages around my continued use of the non-identifying online pseudonym of the individual known as deepfates, the legal rights of which he is not in possession of, alongside other pseudonyms of involved individuals, to document my artistic impressions of my struggles with the experiences I was having. Also during May of 2024, in response to this harassment, when I attempted to temporarily redefine my identity within the TPOT “scene” by pivoting to online coaching after securing a client who was supporting my journey, I was subjected to an increasing amount of targeted aggression and cult control tactics. I was put under an enormous amount of scorn and scrutiny for trying to redefine my vocation and identity after enacting my previous identity as an artist proved to be unwelcome and unsafe for me within this social context.

In private group chats during the VC3 approvals process, I was reassured that specific forms of coercive control would not continue at the event, which did, in fact, continue to occur at the event, including stalking, directives over who I was allowed to speak with, and sexual comments and harassment from multiple people including deepfates, after repeatedly trying to alert the organizers that he was the one who was a threat to my safety and being humored or dismissed. I experienced trauma-induced hypersexuality in the time before, during, and after the event that a little bit of time and healing has revealed is not normal for me and was in fact stress-induced, which I am continuing to process and recover from.

Furthermore, I was forced to pay for my own return flight ticket when my late approval to VC3 led to shared failure on behalf of myself and the cabin organizer to adequately plan ahead, and increasing emotional duress while sharing accommodations with said organizer and her boyfriend, who had repeatedly harassed, stalked and made sexual overtures towards during travel to/from/during VC3. Asking for platonic physical comfort while I was under duress at the event from a meditation teacher I had come to trust, and being refused - after he had made sexual comments in my vicinity - was later used to bar me from a different event in a similar fashion (this time, a meditation retreat) with accusations of “parasociality.” Himself and another meditation teacher repeatedly engaged in luring tactics and spiritual bypassing, including highlighting themes of my game and exploiting magical-type thinking I was using to cope with extreme stress, to extract more money from me for their online meditation retreats and Patreons. Finally, in winter of 2024, I lost my entire life savings in a targeted crypto scam while attempting to invest with another high-profile person I had been put in contact with through my connection with deepfates.

I am currently in DBT to recover from the extreme stress of these repeated forms of mistreatment and exploitation, and working as hard as I can to turn my life around, but the events of the past two years have left me with scars that present major artistic blocks in the development of my game and in my life. Additionally, I have been repeatedly forced to deal with the effects of having “insider” knowledge of serial abusers/rapists/pedophiles, including several who are convicted felons, that are being sheltered within TPOT including Brent Dill/Hephastios Fnord, chaosprime/Matthew R Sheahan, and now liquidprism/Rian Czerwinski, the latter of which subjected me to private and public harassment after attempting to distance myself for not wishing to associate with the former. These individuals act as missing stairs that select individuals within the community, including one of the aforementioned meditation teachers, continues to entertain and harbour; everybody knows of their crimes and abuses via whisper networks, but participating in the whisper network still exposes individuals to harassment for refusing to associate with them, especially women.

The names and identities of numerous people involved with this story have not yet been publicly released because I am still waiting and hoping for them to make amends and take accountability for their actions, but my hope is waning.

My wish is not to continue to relive and relitigate the events of the past year, but I am in contact with other women who have suffered cult abuse in TPOT disappointed by the lack of accountability of event organizers and associated community. Repeated attempts to seek accountability and reconciliation with the involved parties has failed. One of the Vibecamp event organizers inexplicably keeps me blocked despite never having interacted with me. My wish is to get on with my life and move past these events by continuing to make games and art that everyone can enjoy and participate in, but the behaviour that I have been subjected to while in the scene known as TPOT, Vibecamp, and related events represent forms of repeated exploitation and cult coercion, which I now believe the sum total of which represents a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I have experienced massive financial losses and incredibly overwhelming attempts to crush my spirit when literally all I have wanted to do with my time here was make art, even as my game idea continues to attract attention from more and more high profile figures within TPOT and the online tech scene.

Your support will let me heal from these experiences and continue creating art so more people can participate in it. The amount of money I am asking covers the costs of the crypto scam, plus the cost of my emergency return ticket from Vibecamp 3; at this time, I am not seeking financial compensation from the considerable amount of emotional and psychological harm tpot and Vibecamp have caused me. Receipts can be produced as required. Although trauma integration for the benefit of the collective has been a major theme explored within my game, I don’t like creating dramatic scenes centered around blame and exploitation. I am simply looking to recoup what I’ve already lost so I can begin rebuilding my life again. Your contribution will go towards helping transform trauma into something generative.

So you’ll notice that this blog hasn’t been updated in a long time and even then it’s only been updated sparsely, and this is exactly why: Being visible and telling my story has been bound up with an enormous amount of stress and exploitation, as well as needing to work through my own toxic shame. All of these factors have made exposure, at times, excruciating. I don’t want to sit here and have to write about these things and the messy ins and outs of high control behaviour, cult abuse, financial and spiritual exploitation, any more than you want to read them. But hopefully now that I’ve put my request out there to the universe to receive more accountability and reconciliation around what I’ve lost, I can at least more fully pursue my own healing and closure around these events.