#mikekobal

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Brooklyn Creative: Alexis Williams

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MikeKob is going non-stop cuhrayzee

NB: I received the same email from four five different email accounts. I’ve redacted the parts where he used my name.

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Subject: Farewell! For real this time, seriously. (yeah, sorry for spam, just got to make sure, then I'm gone)

Hey [name]! So I guess this is farewell. Just wanted to assure you that you won't hear from me ever again. You've started a hypocritical and fruitless smearing campaign against my internet username for the past months, and to be quite honest, I could have fought back ten times fold against you like you have no idea, except I refrained about that as this isn't in my nature.

All the stories and information you might have released about me don't matter. No one will ever take them seriously, whether they are lies or not. After what you did, no one came after me to harass me or insult me (apart from your friend (?) rich, the dark souls SL1 let's play guy, who sent me some hilarious messages in all caps, asking me to "let go", which, when you think about it, is incredibly hypocritical and one-sided. Maybe he thought he could have scored some good samaritan points towards you. I wanted to have a talk with you to put our drama to rest, yet you refused and went on some daily twitter meltdowns where you reverred in some non-sensical fabricated misery, playing the harassement victim for having received a few emails in your inbox. If there's someone who needed to let go, don't you think it would have been you?)

Your behavior is still a complete mystery to me. I never plan on checking that tumblr post or your twitter feed, so all your efforts to make me feel bad was wasted for nothing. All you did was telling a few hundreds internet people about this "mikekob" guy who is not a cool person. I think this is still your pinned tweet? You seriously have to let go, this can't be healthy.

I still don't understand what went throught your head when you went public about it. I didn't lose subscribers and my "internet notoriety" -- whatever that means -- didn't suffer one bit. You wasted your energy and time for nothing out of some hysterical anger you had because of the misunderstanding and immaturity we faced together. You betrayed me thinking I was looming over you and stalking you. You refused to reconciliate or even talk about it and I suspect I know why. All I can do at this point -- since I haven't heard your side of the story ever since the last time we spoke -- is speculate to justify your behavior.

There's no point going into details anyway, I doubt you'd be willing to listen. Believe it or not, I'm not here to taunt you or belittle you. I can tell you with completely and genuine honesty that I've been more than restrained with how I acted during the past months and what I decided to disclose about you. So despite whatever internet atrocities you've decided to engage yourself into towards me, I just don't care. You're smarter than that and you will heal. I only hope you find someone or some people who will make you forget about me. Maybe you'll meet someone -- if you haven't already -- who will melt when he sees your beautiful smile. You deserve to be happy and you will be. You are one of a kind and I don't know if this is a regret I feel, more like something I wish I would have been, that I was more mature and less stupid with you. I mean all of this in a very platonic sense, as I realized too late that things wouldn't have worked between us in reality. It would have never worked, we're not worty of one another, we both deserve someone who lives in the same country and who speaks the same language. I'm upset at both of us for having kept this LDR charade going for so long, and I'll say it again, right now, we would have been the bestest of friends in the whole world if things had happened differently, if we've had decided to stop pretending to be dating.

But I guess your hatred of me has been too strong to think about that sort of things. I can picture all those twitter likes you will receive as soon as you receive this email. Give it a rest. It's over and you don't have to worry about anything anymore. You only have yourself to blame for having put ourselves into this mess. I will never get any wind from whatever you might want to say about me, you have to understand that and move forward. You will forget about me. I actually dreamed of you earlier today when I had a nap. It was silly. I was trying to add you on skype to talk. I had another dream a few months back which was the exact same as the first one I had about you which I told you about last year or so, where you had your back against me and I went for a hug, putting my arms around you telling you that it was going to be okay. Really sums up our broken relationship, don't you think? Me being too dumb and oblivious of your issues yet I was still trying to be here for you.

Adieu [name], tu vas vraiment me manquer. Tu me casses les couilles mais je t'aime (=like) bien quand même. Je pense essayer de te recontacter dans quelques années, au cas où. Une fille comme toi, ça peut pas s'oublier. T'es têtue et chiante mais tu seras toujours la meilleure, crois le ou non. Courage ma grande.

[vinane]

Secrets: Rachel Alexander: shot with the Sony A7rII

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he's...he's STILL trying?! fuck's sake dude. give it a rest! you fucked up! not her, you! by the jagged scales of Tiamat this guy needs to be eaten by a platypus. fucking hell. on behalf of men that ARENT him, i'm sorry he's in a male shell and not dropping it. i mean on the one hand, that kind of determination and tenacity could be admirable if it was pointed somewhere productive. but goddamn. leave the Queen alone!

I get that this behaviour is a really-out-the-way outlier but I won’t deny that this whole thing hasn’t fucked with my already low capacity to trust people in general, and yes, men.

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You need to be able to move on that's why I constantly send you creepy insulting pseudo intellectual emails. I just care about your well being and clearly I know what's best for you better than you do. Man that dude is a fucking piece of shit. How is he so oblivious to what he's doing? And like saying you post shit on twitter for attention is absurd. As far as I can tell you din't talk about him at all until he sent you that dumb cunt email about Uncharted.

bitches be crazy

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The Madness of MikeKob

Subject: My last thoughtul proposal, with your interest in mind. Give it a read, yeah?

Hey. I’ve been getting reports that you’re still pretty upset at my attempts of candindly reestablishing contacts with you. I don’t think I need to justify myself all over again, I already told you how I felt towards our drama (tl;dr yes we messed up, we shouldn’t have tried long distance, you claim it all started because of me while I think that you should at least put your ego on the side and be way more patient with my social awkwardness and recklessness, you shouldn’t have started some unsuccessful and frankly dishonnest smear campaign against my internet username, I genuinely still can’t believe you thought it was a good idea to attempt something like that, you’ve been a broken record for over 9 months despite my best – and clumsy – attempts at establishing a dialogue with you to put this thing to rest, etc. etc. etc.). At least that’s my side of the story, there’s a lot of fallacies in there and I honestly can’t go over a year and 9 months of miscommunication and egotism from both sides in just one email. I would like to suggest you something that could be both beneficial to us, although this really is more about you than me, as you always seemed to be the more hurt and distressed about what happened. Give me a few seconds and I’ll try to explain. I will also suggest you take a few days to mull it over, or however time you might like, as I know you refuse to act on impulse and be reckless like I am (guess why I’m messaging you again right now? I didn’t plan this and I don’t even know if you’ll ever want to read this whole thing). So, I know full well you need time to gather your thoughts, I’d like for you to hear me out for this one thing, mull it over, decide on whether this can be a good idea, then do whatever you think is best in response. Please have the patience to hear me out, try to be as open as possible and put your anger towards me away from a few minutes, if you can. It’s simple, I think. I don’t want to be your boogeyman. I don’t want you to be traumatised every time something might make you think back about me. I’m offering you this one thing that could mend you somehow, and I believe this thing is having you confront me. This will be in your own terms, any time you’d like, however it can be, whether it be via emails or via instant messaging. I want to be out of your life for good, so that you don’t think I’m living in your shadow as if I was lurking somewhere on the internet, waiting for an opportunity to pop back up in your head or on your computer screen. I’d like to encourage you to live with your mind at ease. This will be a slow process, and quite frankly, don’t you think that those 9 months of running away weren’t so effective after all? Yes, this will sound “oh so like me” and dumb, but wasn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind one of your all time favorite movie? And can you see where I’m going with this? You can’t erase someone from your mind overnight, there’ll always be a part of them lingering inside of you, no matter how hard you might try to forget them. Although I tried just that with you, it all ended so suddenly there was no way I could just up and leave and let you be, I’m not that mature and probably will never be. So, in a brief and harsh summary: You can mull over this dialogue proposal I’m offering you, where you’ll be finally able to tell me directly how much I affected you and what transpired of our former relationship. All that hostility and disappointment towards me you gathered inside doesn’t have to fester any longer, you have to heal and forget me, and I strongly believe that attacking the root of the problem head-on will kickstart this process with much more efficiency than whatever plans you did up until now. You have to finally release all you have against me instead of keeping it within, this would definitely help you in the long run to take off a much needed load off your chest and mind, to finally strike me from your life and relieve you. Don’t you think this would be much more effective than using twitter as a way to garner attention and pity from people who don’t know you and who don’t give one slight of care about you? Echo chambers can only work for so long. You can’t keep on ridiculising yourself like this to the whole internet, you have to do something about it. This isn’t about living in a hollywoodian “everyone will be happy in the end” fantasy, it’s about you and giving you a well needed relief so you can move forward and put that thing to rest. With what I’m suggesting to you, what good would it do to you right now to read this email close mindedly, take a screenshot from a line or two from a random paragraph, blur our the rest to keep the context real vague, tweet about it, take things out of context with a snide comment, then point the finger and throw snarks in my direction? I believe you have done just that for 9 months, and do you think it got you anywhere or even gave you on slight ounce of relief? Maybe briefly, it did. But now, if you do just that again, what kind of replies in your twitter mentions do you expect to get? “wow that guy sure is a loser asshole for wanting to step away for good” - 5 retweets and 12 likes. Are you sure that would benefit you at all anymore? Don’t you think you deserve better and put that whole thing away? I don’t know how else I can articulate it. I’d like to have this thing taken care of stoically with your best interest in mind. It’s been up to you from the very start. Hope I get to hear from you soon. Take all the time you need to think about it, to take a step back. You have to get better. Beep boop.

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Bayonetta Retrospective: An Update On The Lack Of Updates

I started my latest youtube series almost a year ago, with the intention of revisiting my favourite game with an updated lens. Things have been going slow on the updates lately, and I feel like I need to provide an explanation for a couple of things.

1. The missing updates

I know that people watching my latest series will be very confused at this. About a month ago I made the first four updates of this series private, never again intended to be viewable on my channel. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that my co-commentator and I had a massive falling out, and I have no wish to be associated with him in any way any more. The finer details of this falling out are already known to anybody who follows me on twitter, but to my larger audience on youtube, they will have little to no clue about this. I will cover the details of this later in this update, but suffice to say those videos will never be coming back.

2. The co-commentator change

Save for a few viewers, I don’t believe there was much surprise at me changing commentators in this series. I originally had every intention of finishing the series with no changes in commentator, but external events prevented that from happening. Again, this is related to the aforementioned falling out I had with my old co-commentator.

It is highly likely that the series will be completed with the current commentator, assuming that they agree to it.

3. The lack of updates

The reasons for a lack of updates has been twofold; the major one being the falling out I had with my co-commentator, and the other being health-related. I have been in and out of hospital regularly since the beginning of this year, and this has obviously been disruptive to any update schedule I might have had.

Things are on the mend now, so look forward to sporadic updates again soon.

4. The falling out

I’m not sure where to begin with this. I have extensively documented the events over the last six months on my twitter. However, twitter is not the best platform for following a story spread over numerous tweets, so I’ll document the details here for posterity.

My old co-commentator and I were dating, from February 2016 to January 2017. I’ll henceforth refer to him as my ex to make things easier. We bonded over our appreciation of shared hobbies and simply became good friends, which then progressed to a relationship. This was a long distance relationship.

Obviously, things did not work out between us, and we broke up mutually in January 2017, towards the end of my stay with him. This was when I had gone over to see him in his country. When we broke up, I told him that we could probably still be friends, but that I would need some space before that could happen, and that I would contact him whenever I was ready for that day. We parted on amicable terms, considering the nature of our breakup.

I could go into detail about the breakup but it’s not really important to the story. Just know that it was very traumatic for me and involved approximately a week of being trapped with someone who I did not want to be around. I think a lot of people can empathise with the concept of grinning and bearing it for the sake of keeping things civil, and in my case, where I was very ill, in a foreign country and was staying with someone who, on one occasion, forced sexual favours out of me.

You may understand then that telling him that we could still be friends was a white lie, and most definitely a foolish move on my part. Throughout our relationship I picked up many clashing personality traits that I did not find palatable and did not want in a friendship. However, throughout my dating history I have always broken up with people more or less on friendly terms, and thus see no issue with extending a possibility of friendship, even if I have little to no intention of following through. Telling him that lie was, as far as I was concerned, standard operating procedure for a mutual breakup, and more than he deserved, in retrospect.

So to recap:

He and I had a pretty epic breakup

I lied to him and told him that friendship could still be on the table

However, I wanted space before that could happen

When I returned home, he contacted me immediately, wanting to know how I was. While this was technically a breach of our agreement, I let this slide as I was obviously very sick when I left, and I could understand that he just wanted to know what was wrong with me. I let him know what I felt comfortable with, and reminded him that I needed to be left alone.

It’s at this point that the dynamic between us started to change. Even though I had made it clear that I wanted to be left alone, he decided that that meant he could still talk to me like he used to. Over the course of a month he contacted me non stop, wanting to know how I was, trying to engage in a conversation with me. This was in spite of the prior agreement we had, on top of never getting a meaningful response from me, other than to remind him that I did not want to talk to him.

This was across many different email accounts, as well as texting my phone, and essentially using any shared media between us to try to get a message to me. Examples of this include changing the name of a shared youtube playlist, or editing a shared google document. I started to block his attempts at contact, including making my twitter account private. I also began to vent about it indirectly.

It was clear to me that at this point that he was harassing me; he knew that I did not want to be contacted by him and yet was trying to contact me however he could. I confronted him via email, telling him that he had ruined any chance of being friends again by repeatedly ignoring my simple request, and to stop harassing or contacting me. After this he seemed to understand, and sent me a last email, telling me to contact him whenever I was ready. This was in February. All’s well that ends well, right?

let’s play a game and count the number of times he says this

btw, that pet name? I told him when we broke up he couldn’t call me that any more. He still uses it every time he contacts me.

Well, as you might be expecting, he didn’t stop contacting me. He felt the need to contact me on skype a few times, and less than three weeks after that “last” email, he sent me another email. It was a “monthly mail checkup”. I was at the end of my rope at this point and was beyond treating him nicely. I essentially told him to fuck off. He seemed under the impression that he had to actively try to win me back, “[b]ecause we both know that you will never come back to me from your own volition and I’m the one who has to shake you up.” (direct quote).

At this point, I just stopped replying. It was obvious he was never going to give up on me and normally the best thing to do in this instance is to lay low and ignore all attempts at contact. At this point I made my twitter private and blocked his account. I’m mentioning twitter because this whole mess contains a hefty dose of twitter drama and is important to some of the later details.

I will make it clear that I was not talking about this harassment from him during this time. To my followers on twitter, everything was normal (sans a distinct lack of updates for the series)

About a month after the last point of contact, I felt that I needed to explain to my followers what was happening with the retrospective; it had been three months since the last update and I had zero intention of working with my ex ever again. I made my twitter account public and explained that the series was on hold, because my ex had been harassing me, and pinned this tweet to my profile. You will notice that there is no direct reference to his harassment in that tweet, only in a reply.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me to receive an email from him after that. The subject?

yeah, not threatening at all

In it, he said that I was lying about/fabricating the harassment accusation, and essentially broke up with me (again? yeah, that confused me too). I tried to explain to him how exactly he was harassing me, but he absolutely refused to see his actions as anything other than a friend reaching out. Repeatedly. Despite knowing that he had been blocked. And knowing that I didn’t want contact with him.

lol memes. “last time I’ll contact you” part two

We exchanged a lot of emails, because he tried to get me to agree to a conversation on skype and I refused. For some reason he thought an IM conversation would be less impulsive than one done via email? Yeah, he wasn’t making much sense to me either. Ultimately, it ended up with him thinking that things were on the mend and trying to give me an ultimatum (reply to me by this time otherwise we’re over). Because I hadn’t already made that clear enough for him?

I happily ignored him and he sent a final parting shot of an email, which I guess was supposed to be scathing but simply came across as aiming in the wrong direction completely. So in case you’ve lost track, he’d broken up/cut ties with me twice by now. I thought things were finally over and blocked him on everything else I could think of and made my twitter private again.

“im cutting ties with you for real this time” part three

Again, on my twitter, I made no direct reference to what had been happening to me.

Not nine days later, he sent me an email from a blocked address. With a quote from a Jackie Chan movie (lmao). I ignored it. A week after that, another email, from two blocked email addresses. A week after that, another email, from six addresses. To top it off, he used a throwaway twitter account to tell me to check my spam.

Oh boy, this one was the doozy. He called me emotionally abusive and all other manner of nasty things, including that I deserved to get sick because it was payback for all the awful things I had done to him. You know, just normal standard stuff you say to a good friend.

To say that email upset me is an understatement. I stayed up all night wondering whether I had truly been abusive to him. After talking about it with friends and strangers (Something Awful link), I came to the conclusion that he was just trying to hurt me to get me to reply to him, and whether it was true or not, what he was doing was much worse. I doubt he’s had the same level of self-reflection on his behaviour.

It was at this point I started looking into legal options, with very little promising results. I started keeping a log of his attempts at contacting me though, in case it ever because useful.

Five days after that abusive email, on the day Bayonetta was released on PC, he sent me another email. He also sent me a question on my (now deactivated) ask.fm account, telling me to check my spam. At no point did he make reference to the abusive shit he hurled at me, he just acted like everything was normal.

In the hours leading up to Bayonetta being released on Steam, I streamed some Angel Slayer because I was hella excited, man! Guess who pops up in the stream chat? Guess who got blocked? Guess who created another account and tried to engage in a conversation with me? Guess who got IP banned? Yeah, shit’s crazy. At this point I start making direct reference to his harassment on twitter.

all in one day. not harassment!

Let’s pause for a moment and take in the view:

From the time I came back from visiting him, he refused to stop contacting me, despite being told multiple times to do so

He sent me an abusive email

He was aware that he was blocked and circumvented it by creating many different accounts

not harassment tho

Two weeks after he sent that nasty tirade, he sent another email, saying that he was ashamed that he had sent it to me, and that he just wanted to be friends again. Not a single apology for what he had sent, but he just expected that things would be okay after that, because HE wanted things to be okay, forget about anything I wanted or said to him.

gonna keep harassing you until you do what I want, not harassment tho

It’s as though he’d heard of the adage that ‘time heals all wounds’ and thinks that two weeks is enough to get over getting an abusive spiel sent to you.

I suspect he started escalating his attempt to talk to me because it was the days leading up to his birthday. He tried asking, pleading, bribing me to talk to him again. I ignored all of it. On top of that he recruited people who he knew who followed me on twitter/had me as an IM friend to tell me to check my emails.

guess who later went and copypasted my conversation with him and gave it to my harasser

Things kept escalating. He remembered my brother’s name and ran a search for him on skype. Because I had stupidly blocked my ex, but not removed him from my friends list, he was able to find the one that was indeed related to me. My ex contacted my brother, on skype, as well as facebook. To this day, I have no idea how he found my brother’s facebook, although it’s not exactly locked down due to the nature of my brother’s work.

pictures make this wall of text less intimidating, right?

My brother told me that my ex had contacted him. Yeah, I freaked out. It was clear to me that my ex had no boundaries and I feared what he would do next. I vented about it on my twitter, which was still locked down to the public at this point.

I won’t lie, I was pretty scared by this point. If he felt that contacting my brother, who he had had no contact with prior to this, was perfectly fine, what was stopping him from trying to come to Australia to find me? What other information did he keep/remember about me? I went through my computer and accounts and increased the security for everything. I also tried to get an outside perspective on the situation as a sanity check.

So I hope you can understand why I was freaking out. A few days after, he left a comment on one of my videos, once again telling me to just look at my brother’s skype messages, it was so easy. Because looking at other people’s private messages is totally acceptable behaviour to this guy.

Not only that, despite me locking down my twitter account he still saw my “meltdown”. Either someone was leaking my tweets or he was following me under another dummy account. Nowhere was safe.

add another to the ‘I won’t contact you again after this message’ counter

Be aware that this mentality of my ex’s is what drives a large part of his behaviour; he considers things that are boundary breaking to a lot of people perfectly normal and acceptable.

An aside, when I was visiting him in January, he snooped through my external hard drive and deleted files of himself that I had saved. Things like photos of him and screenshots. I discovered that he had done this in late March, long after we broke up. Chances are high he snooped through the contents of my laptop as well. I remember the realisation that he had gone through my things and feeling sick to my stomach, because it was such a massive breach of trust. It painted his actions since that meeting in an even worse light, because he knew that he had done this and yet was still seeking a friendship with me.

So yeah, he stalked my brother, something that he doesn’t deny either, although he won’t call it stalking. A few days after that he sent me another email. He had composed a song for me. He also openly acknowledged that he knew it would probably upset me. Whether he meant the contents of the song, or the fact that he had yet again contacted me, I wasn’t sure, but I sure as hell did not listen to that song.

openly acknowledging that it’s going to upset me doesn’t make it any better fyi

This coincides with him uploading a mariachi cover of a Witcher 3 song to his channel. It was hard to tell at this point but you could almost read a coded message in the song title.

very apt, tbqh

I could cover all the detail about him contacting me (there’s a lot of youtube comments), but this is already long enough and I can summarise easily: I was venting to my twitter about the deluded guy harassing me and he was continuing to try to contact me. He even tried to blackmail me, because whew boy, he had decided to tell all of cgg (cuhrayzee games general, used to be a 4chan /vg/ board, now exclusively on discord) about his relationship with me. Bless them, they tried to help him work through it, but they kind of missed the mark when it came to owning up to his behaviour.

I ignored all of this, but it came to a head when he decided to post a PSA about me. Yes, a Public Service Announcement about me, where he told every single excruciating detail about the relationship, as well as tried to justify his harassing behaviour.

I found this out when I was browsing 4chan, a few days after he had posted it. I never read the contents but I knew that he was telling a very skewed version of events. I emailed the website admins to get the PSA removed, because hey, it was just another venue for my ex to harass me, now by blackmailing me by spreading my personal life details to the internet.

Throughout this time, I had not really addressed the issue on my youtube channel. I had been uploading episodes again with a new commentator since April, and while there were some people who missed my old commentator, I did not acknowledge the questions at all. Well, after the PSA got released somebody decided to comment on one of these threads, saying that the reason my ex was no longer on episodes was because we had broken up and I had handled the breakup badly. Which is a pretty laughable interpretation of the events.

I took this opportunity to address the issues head on, and posted the following comments:

I also detailed roughly what had been happening on my twitter account.

Well, a few days after that, my ex found the comments I had made, and replied to it, using yet another youtube account. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), the OP deleted their comment before I could screenshot the entirety of my ex’s replies, but the gist of it was basically a mix of justification of the stalking of my brother and an attempt at another ultimatum (with yes, yet another promise that this would be the last time he would contact me).

ah yes, my infamous disingenuous harassment flag powers

Anyway, drama aside, I got the PSA removed. My ex found out (through a lovely person who used to follow me on twitter and now does not), and posted the PSA again. I reported it again and it was removed. You would think at this point he would think, ‘huh, I wonder why they’re removing it if there’s nothing wrong with what I wrote,’ but self-reflection does not become this exceptional person.

guess whose exes were all “crazy”? this is in no way a red flag or indicative of a larger issue

After I got the PSA removed a second time, he made his twitter account private, and posted yet another PSA on a different website. It was up for a few days before I found out, because my ex made his twitter public again and I was on the lookout for crazy stuff from him. Once again, I got the offending item removed by the website admins.

third time’s a charm

The fact that he was posting very personal, private information about my life seemed to escape him, and he posted the PSA a fourth time, this time with redacted information. Redacted information like, my online handle, my age, my country of residence. Information that people already know. But not all the unnecessary information about my personal relationship with him.

“no good reason” nuh-uh

I had a pretty epic meltdown on twitter, I will admit it. Lovely people like the ones picture below jumped in on the fray as well.

fresh hot takes from twitter dot com

All in all, I got the PSA removed again, hopefully for the final time. But not before dissecting his warped way of thinking. I thought it was finally over.

Haha no why would you think that. It’s my birthday next week and my ex wanted to wish me a happy birthday, but he decided against sending it close to the date of my birthday, because he knew that it would upset me. Also, he’s still waiting to be friends with me again, but he sure as hell won’t be apologising or anything for his behaviour.

pure logical being, right here, as he likes to call himself

TL;DR: MikeKob is a crazy, deluded, harassing and stalking piece of shit. To put it mildly.

3. The lack of updates (cont)

So, if you read all of that, you might understand why I haven’t had the motivation to continue the series lately. I’m planning to get back into it though, a large part of why I was putting this update off is because the audio recording is almost 2 hours long or something.