As the title says: sorry for disappearing. And I don’t just mean from this blog, which I haven’t updated in ages. I also don’t mean my extended period of inactivity on GitHub, which at this point has gone beyond a typical bout of demotivation. I’m talking about my Discord server, which you may have noticed mysteriously vanishing if you were a part of it. I never said anything about what happened, so I’ll try to give some closure here.

The simple truth is that I deleted it, along with my account. The events leading up to this are difficult to explain, and I’m not sure how much should even be said in a public blog post. A lot of it stems from personal drama, and me overestimating the value of online connections. I once felt like I found a place to belong in the emulator development community, but now it feels like I’ve been ostracized by the very people who claimed to be my friends.

Although my server wasn’t directly related to any of that, it was an unfortunate casualty of my impulsiveness when I got upset. Since I wasn’t able to delete my Discord account while owning the server, and I had nobody left to transfer it to, I settled on the nuclear option. Interestingly, although it takes 14 days to confirm account deletion, servers can be erased from existence in the blink of an eye. After I clicked that button, there was no going back.

It hurts to think about all the early screenshots and development discussions that are now lost. At the same time though, part of me is relieved to have one less place where everything I say is permanently recorded. That might sound weird, considering this is the Internet and it applies to pretty much everything on here. But it’s a part of some intrusive thoughts I’ve had for years, and they can get to the point where even just friendly banter is an unimaginably stressful situation.

I mentioned overthinking in my last piece here, in regard to post frequency and why I had to take a break. I didn’t realize it at the time, but over the past few years I’ve discovered that a lot of my struggles are likely a product of OCD. In hindsight, I’ve had it for as long as I can remember; it just wasn’t as debilitating when my biggest concerns involved balancing my vision with head turns and blinks. But as I go through life, more worries pop into my head, and they accumulate. At this point, it feels like anything I do is a minefield that can destroy me with one wrong move.

I’ve had conversations with me described as “walking on eggshells”. I think that in getting so stressed over obeying the countless rules in my head, I became easily irritated and unpleasant to talk to. It also really irked me to see others breaking these rules, to the point where I might start arguments with them. I say this not to excuse the mess I’ve made, but to tell the people I’ve attacked that it wasn’t personal. If you had to deal with me in an unreasonable state, I’m sorry.

With that said, I still feel hurt by the way I was ghosted and banned from the community I cared about the most, with no warning or chance for appeal. As much as I want to come back to online spaces, there isn’t really anywhere for me to go. And even if there was, I’d be afraid of falling into the same patterns and pushing everyone away again. Maybe I could remake my Discord server at some point, but for now I’m not really sure if I should. I want to get better, but it feels impossibly difficult, especially when I’m alone.

In the meantime though, I don’t want to let my projects die. Despite the ups and downs, I managed to write a fairly functional low-level 3DS emulator named 3Beans, and I still want to see how far it can go. I was also right in the middle of giving NooDS proper DSi support, and that’s only a fraction of the stuff I have going now. I even started another new project while I was gone, but I won’t say more since I’m not sure if it’ll end up being released. Regardless, I think it’s time to consider revisiting my projects as Hydr8gon.

I’m not going to promise anything. I might not post about updates anywhere. I might not even end up pushing any code; I’m simply opening it up as a possibility again. This is less of a comeback post and more of a “I still exist, I guess” post. I don’t know if anyone will even see this, because who’s checking a blog that’s been dead for nearly 5 years? If you are reading this though, thanks for caring. Hopefully I’ll see you around.