#um hello where did november go?!?!

[heatherfield]

Text Posts, Part 6 + Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story [x]

[spencereidluver]

J is for "Just So You Know"

november 17, 2008

summary: After talking it over, you and Spencer decided to tell the team. Well, you were going to tell Hotch. Today, you were going to work early, meeting Spencer at the office (with coffee of course) and having a meeting with your supervisor where you’d reveal that you were in a relationship and fill out the forms needed… or so you thought

word count: 1k

warnings: none, slight mention of sex but let it be known spencer and reader have NOT slept together... yet ;)

“Good morning, Spencer,” you said, as you met him in the parking lot. You handed him his coffee you picked up on your way to the office this morning.

“Good morning,” he said. He took a sip of his coffee, the warmth filling his stomach in a way that is too specific to describe. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” You give him a quick peck on the cheek after checking your surroundings. No one else was in the parking lot, aside from Hotch’s vehicle, though you knew he was already in his office. The coast was clear. Spencer interlocked your fingers with his, leading you to the first set of doors which, of course, he opened for you, and all the way to the BAU office.

After entering the room and placing your belongings atop your desks, the two of you started for Aaron Hotchner’s office. The staircase felt miles long. Leading up to today, you had been excited to finally disclose your relationship with the office genius, but now, as the moment was approaching faster than you could climb the stairs, you were nervous. The only thing seeming to keep you going was how happy Spencer looked. 

Spencer raised his fist to knock on the door of Hotch’s office. “Come in,” a voice bellowed from within. Cracking open the door, Spencer walked in, followed by you. 

“Good morning, guys,” Hotch said, greeting each of you with a nod.

Spencer greeted him with a “Hello,” and you settled for a returning nod. 

“So, what did you guys want to speak with me about?” Hotch says. His voice was sharp.

“Um, so, I’m not really sure how to approach this…” Spencer starts.

“Please don’t tell me you’re quitting.” Hotch says.

“No no no, neither of us are quitting, um, sort of the opposite of that actually,” you chime in. Hotch looks confused.

Spencer sighs and looks you in the eyes quickly before turning back toward the boss. “We’re dating.”

Wow. It’s out there. No taking it back. 

“Really,” Hotch says in an odd voice. “Wow, um, that’s sort of the last thing I expected. That’s a bit of a relief.” You and Spencer both smile. “So, there’s quite a bit of paperwork, so I’ll give it to you now, try to have it back to me by Friday.” He reaches into a drawer of his desk and pulls out a file folder.

“Is this going to change anything on cases?” Spencer asks.

“You guys are not to go out on the field together, but you two often are at the station anyway, so nothing too extreme. Also, neither of you are able to receive promotions as subordinate-superior relationships are prohibited.”

“That’s okay,” you say. You were willing to give up higher positions if it meant being happy with Spencer. And clearly, he was thinking the same thing. He took the paperwork from Hotch and stood up, preparing to leave the room. You gave a smile before following him out.

“Hey,” Hotch says, stopping the two of you in your tracks. “I’m happy for you kids. You deserve each other. Now get out of here.”

You and Spencer smile before racing each other back to your desks in the bullpen.

_____

You and Spencer were sat at your opposing desks, each filling out parts of your paperwork, occasionally looking up to each other and exchanging smiles. Derek, in his all-too-nosy self approaches Spencer from behind, peering over his shoulder.

“Pret-ty Boy,” Derek says, annunciating the syllables, drawing everyone’s attention. He gives Spencer a congratulatory pat on the shoulder. “I think Little Boy Genius has an announcement for us all.”

You cover your head in embarrassment, knowing what was about to come. Spencer looks up at you, to ask for your permission for sharing, but your head was between your hands, completely unaware of the mini heart attack your boyfriend was going through right now.

Everyone has turned their chairs to face poor red-faced Spencer. You guys didn’t plan on telling the rest of the team yet. It’s not that you doubted your relationship, you just didn’t want the pressure from everyone else. But you seemed to have forgotten you worked with a bunch of people who don’t understand personal space.

“Um…” Spencer was stalling.

“Say it, Pretty Boy,” Derek chants at him, tightening his grip on his shoulder. 

Spencer continues to stall. He begins to fidget with his fingers and his pen.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Derek says in order to keep the crowd. “The office baby, Dr. Spencer Reid has a girlfriend.”

Oohs and ahs fill the room the same way they do in elementary school when someone is called to the principal’s office. 

“Who is it, Spencer?” Emily asks. 

You finally lift your head, feeling bad for leaving Spencer to be extorted by your coworkers alone. You lock eyes with him and give him a nod, silently letting him know it was okay.

“Um, y/n…” Spencer says and smiles at you. “No way!” Penelope runs out of her office, almost as if she had been waiting for this moment. She runs around to the side of your desk and hugs you. “How long?”

“A little over a month,” You return Penelope’s hug in an awkward sitting position and grin at Spencer. Even though you weren’t planning on telling the team today, seeing their reactions was a good payout.

“I told you they’d be together by Christmas.” Emily says, facing Derek.

“Alright, Princess, I’ll buy lunch,” Derek rolls his eyes at her and sits back down at his desk, “don’t get a big head.”

“Ignore them.” Penelope whispers in your ear loud enough for Spencer, and honestly, probably Derek and Emily, to hear as well. “They’ve been waiting for the two of you to get together since like March.” She playfully kisses your cheek before returning to her office, leaving the bullpen back in its normal form. 

As soon as everything is back to normal, the door swings open and in walks Rossi, fashionably late as usual. “What’d I miss?” He says, half jokingly, unaware he actually missed something huge.

“Oh nothing,” Derek says, “Pretty boy and Y/N here are just knockin’ boots is all.” 

Now would probably be a good time for a coffee break.

_____

next chapter: K is for Kissing Isn't Enough

other parts: Spencer Reid A-Z Masterlist

view the masterlist in a calendar version! 

_____

a/n: there are two more parts before the christmas part, i'm going to TRY to release part K on the 21st (wednesday) and part L on the 23 (friday) and hopefully have part M (the christmas part) ready to be released friday, however that is a LOT of writing in one day…

_____

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taglist:

@universallyblizzardlove @ms-ks-world @justlivinginadaydream @dij-ology @lotus-ignis @sammy-4103 @ktssstuff

@ada--44 @moongirl27 @monfleurr @shycreationdreamland @cultish-corner @ariianelle @iiheartbowie

@spencerreidismybitch @traderjoesmints @ivyflowers13 @hades-disappointment-child @aceofspades190 @taygrls @hookergutss

@random-3455 @nmw-am @bookworm124 @hizzielover @jem08 @cherrybowbabby @theofficialfunk

@hookergutss  @skylions-den @smalltownbeautyqueen @spencereidapologist @lunajay33 @novaeatsworld @pleasantwitchgarden

@mellowdreamerbanana @readbydayana @maybe-not-this

[actiniumwrites]

hiya! if your requests are still open could i request a scenario any of the “immortal” characters (e.x: the archons & adepti) with a mortal!reader who exchanges a part of them to become immortal so that they don’t have to worry about leaving the character? the reader’s gender is up to you!

𝐓𝐎 𝐁𝐄 𝐄𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋 (𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄)

synopsis: in which you exchange your vision for immortality, determined to live an eternity with your lover

characters: venti, zhongli, scaramouche, and dainsleif x gn!reader

warnings: angst, fluff, hurt/comfort, crying, mentions of death and mortality, fear of death, mentions of morbid conversations, scaramouche might be a little ooc here, purposefully inaccurate depictions of how celestia and visions work

notes: um so this request was sent to me back in november of 2022, so, anon, i am very sorry it took me so long to write this. i loved the idea a lot so i hope you enjoy this. also i’m not 100% sure scaramouche is immortal, but he’s been around for centuries and isn’t human so we’re just going to assume he is 👍

Venti:

The wind was blowing softly as you walked up to the giant tree, Vennessa’s Tree. You could hear the faint sounds of a lyre playing an alluring tune among it. If your boyfriend was anywhere, it was here…or the bar.

An off key note made your eyes snap up from where you were watching the ground, not expecting him to have heard you so easily.

“Hello, my love!” Venti cheered.

“Hi, Venti,” you lovingly spoke softly, moving to sit down next to him. Your head carefully moved to rest upon his shoulder and he continued to play softly, although this time around, it was a different song — one of your favorites.

A smile pulled at the sides of your lips. It was the first one since you’d gotten back from your journey. The very same journey your boyfriend was unaware of.

When he finished playing it, Venti set the lyre down next to him against a tree root. His face turned serious, “Something’s wrong.”

“Is there?” you played dumb, unsure of how to bring up the topic at hand. Venti didn’t fall for it. He never did.

He began to scan over your body for any sign of injuries, afraid something bad happened. When he saw there was nothing there, his hands gently placed themselves on the sides of your cheeks so he could rotate your head. He smiled the whole time, but you knew he was just masking his concern.

“I can feel it,” he said slowly, eyes squinting as he looked far off into the distance, “something’s different.”

You tried to hold it back, but tears sprung to your eyes. There was no hiding it now, “Venti, I…”

“Hey, hey, hey,” he hurriedly wiped your tears as you looked up at him, “it’s okay, I swear! You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s just,” you sniffled. The tears weren’t from injuries or hurt feelings, but simply because you were overwhelmed. The entirety of your future was now uncertain aside from the fact that you could no longer face death. You had centuries ahead of you, and it wasn’t something you had before, “my vision. I traded it.”

“What? Why would you…” he mumbled, mind racing back and forth. You loved your vision. It was something you had worked so hard for as a child, a representation of your dedication. It wasn’t like you needed money or anything, so why would you get rid of it?

Through your tear filled eyes, you smiled, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Ven. All those years ahead, we can spend them together.”

“You…you’re…?” he breathed out heavily, realization hitting him all at once. A smile broke through his lips, happy tears of his own were beginning to form, “you did that for me?”

You nodded and he threw himself against you, embracing you tightly. In all the years he had been alive, Venti was sure he would be alone forever. But in life and death, you were with him forever.

Zhongli:

Zhongli hadn’t noticed right away.

He was perceptive, yes, but there didn’t seem to be anything amiss with you at first. You often hid things very well. It was one of the only things he didn’t like about you. If something were to go wrong because he wasn’t observant enough with you, Zhongli would feel perpetually guilty.

It wasn’t until weeks after your journey that he had finally realized something had changed.

You seemed normal for the past few weeks. There were a few moments where you were oddly fidgety or anxious, but he chalked it up to the fact that you had just gotten back from a work trip. Perhaps you were tired out from it. Plenty of people came back a little on edge from trips, he had seen it first hand.

When it became continuous, worries began to whisper in his ear. No, he hadn’t thought you cheated or did something bad. Zhongli knew you well enough to know you weren’t that kind of person. If anything, he was worried that something bad had happened to you. That maybe someone hurt you or there was something you couldn’t tell him.

So, he brought it up at dinner one day.

His hand reached across the table, warmly cupping it around yours. His thumb gently traced over the back of it, a soothing action he knew you loved. He inhaled and pursed his lips before bluntly asking, “Did someone hurt you? Because if they did, I want you to know you can tell me and I will take care of it.”

Your face morphed into confusion, awkwardly laughing at his wild assumptions, “I’m sorry, what? Where’d you get that idea?”

Zhongli retracted his hand from yours slowly. His face was now equally as confused as yours, “I apologize, my love. You have been acting rather off since your trip. I thought maybe something bad had happened or someone may have hurt you. Am I incorrect?”

Another awkward laugh fell from your lips before you sighed and averted your eyes to look out the window of the restaurant, “Yes, but nothing bad happened. I’ve just been a little…down about something.”

He furrowed his eyebrows and tilted his head a bit to the side, “If you were feeling upset, you could have come to me. You know I hate to see you like that.”

“I know, I just,” you started hesitantly, “I wasn’t ready to tell you yet.”

“Tell me…what?”

The whirlwind of emotions you had been feeling over the past few weeks began to hit you harshly and you couldn’t stop the tears from forming in your eyes, “I traded my vision, Zhongli.”

He took a few seconds to process, but his hand grabbed yours again. He wasn’t sure what you were talking about, but the fact that you were crying was enough to scare him, “I…I am afraid I do not understand.”

“I made a deal with Celestia…to be come immortal. In exchange for immortality, they took my vision,” you explained slowly, staring down at the table.

Zhongli rose from his seat slowly before walking to your side of the table. He kneeled down beside you, a few tears springing at his own eyes as he looked directly into yours, “Why would you do that?”

“For you,” you breathed out happily, cupping his face as the tears fell from your eyes “I want to be with you forever, Zhongli.”

Zhongli rose a bit from his place on the floor. Cupping your face with his hands, he kissed you softly, yet eagerly. You could feel the love and passion with in it. All the sadness melted away in an instant.

He had witnessed so many of his friends and past lovers parish before him. Victims to time and mortality. But here you were, willing to sacrifice something you cared for so much to spend an eternity with him.

And in that moment, Zhongli realized he’s never loved someone as much as he’s loved you.

Scaramouche:

You were used to Scaramouche pushing you away when things got rough. Not because he was angry with you or tired of you, but because his emotions were too much to handle. The sadness was too much to bear.

The conversation of immortality had come up very often. A worry of his that he just couldn’t seem to shake.

What would happen when you were gone?

How was he supposed to move on?

Love someone else?

If Scaramouche was being honest, he knew there was no way he could love another. Not after you, the one person he’s ever truly loved and the only one he hasn’t lost. You understood and cared for him in a way that no one else ever had or ever could. Despite not having a real heart, his love for you was so strong enough to make him feel like he did.

When you left for some sort of trip, Scaramouche hadn’t been suspicious of anything. You claimed it was for your job — just a week long trip out of Sumeru to take care of some business. It seemed urgent, according to you at least. He understood and didn’t question any part of your story, even if it did have holes in it.

Although he didn’t show it outwardly, the week without you was rather miserable for him. Anytime you were gone, everything seemed to remind him of the centuries that he had been alone. The people he had watched die or turn on him and how weak he felt. It made him wonder, once again, how he could ever live without you.

When you returned days later, it was late at night. The lights to your shared home were turned off and everything was silent. You dropped your things inside, but before you could head to your room, you caught a glimpse of your boyfriend through the window. His hat was cast aside on the grass next to him where he was lying down. The wind was blowing his hair softly across his face as he gazed up at the stars, something you frequently did together.

Coincidentally, it was during those times that the topic of immortality would come up. The stars made Scaramouche sad when he peered up at them. Despite not believing in their genuine existence, he would hate to look up one day and find you among them. Far away from him. Mortality permanently holding you in its grasp.

You silently walked outside to where he was lying down, careful not to disturb him. You laid down next to him, gently taking his hand in yours. His fingers interlocked themselves with yours, but he didn’t bother to turn and look at you, already knowing who it was. When you looked to him, however, his eyes were glistening with small tears, the stars reflecting in them. He looked ethereal, but you hated how sad he looked — eyebrows furrowed, a frown pulling his lips downward.

“I’m not ready for you to leave,” he whispered painfully, voice cracking a bit as his eyes finally met yours.

You send him a fond smile, eyebrows turning upwards, “I’m not leaving anytime soon. You don’t have to worry.”

“But you will,” he started, a hint of anger laced his voice, directed at those who dared to take away the one thing he loved, “You’ll leave eventually. Just like everyone I’ve ever known. It’s only a matter of time.”

You sat up slowly, reaching into the pocket of your pants and grabbing something out. A flash of metal caught Scaramouche’s eye. He sat up instantly, recognizing what the mysterious object was.

It was your vision. The bright shining blue light it normally had was entirely gone, drained of power. Wordlessly, you handed it to him. He grabbed it, but looked up into your eyes with confusion. When he did, he finally noticed the exhaustion and dried tears all over your face.

“What is this?” He angrily inspected the grayed vision in his hands, “What happened to you? If someone hurt you, I swear to you, I’m going to kill them.”

“No!” you quickly exclaimed, interrupting his oncoming burst of anger, “No one hurt me. I did this myself.”

“Start explaining,” he demanded. Although he looked angry, you could see the worry and fear in his eyes.

“I’m tired of these conversations,” you hesitantly started, averting your eyes to a tree in the distance. You could feel your own sad frown pulling at your lips as you fidgeted with the vision he had returned to you. Inhaling, you continued, “If I’m being honest, I’m not okay with leaving you either. It tears me apart to see you like this, Scaramouche. It sounds selfish, but I…I don’t want to think of your life without me. Not when it’s already hurting you this much and I’m not even dead yet.”

You paused to wipe the tears that had unknowingly began to fall from your eyes. Gesturing to the vision, you explained, “The trip I went on wasn’t for work, and I’m sorry for lying to you about it. It was to make an exchange. By trading this with Celestia, I’m no longer mortal.”

Scaramouche’s eyes flickered back and forth between yours and the lifeless vision rested in your hands. A mix of anger, sadness, and relief hit him all at once. Years of memories flashed in his head from all the mistreatment in Inazuma, the Harbingers, and to his newfound life in Sumeru. But most importantly, he saw you and all the ways you’ve loved him ever since you found each other. His voice wobbled a bit, dancing between the lines of neutrality and sadness, ���Why would you do that for me?”

You tossed the vision to the side and held his hand again, “My vision may have meant a lot to me, but nothing will ever mean as much to me as you do. I would trade everything I’ve ever owned to be with you forever if that’s how it had to be.”

The two of you laid back down together against the cool grass, staring back up at the stars. This time, however, his arms embraced you tightly. The stars seemed to shine a little more brightly, a little more beautifully. There was no chance for them to take you away from him anymore, and Scaramouche was forever grateful for that.

Dainsleif:

The burden of immortality sat heavily on Dainsleif’s shoulders. It was a curse he bore, but not one he would wish onto anyone else. It was painful, unkind, and often struck those who deserved it the least.

When you had found him, you were not originally aware of the fact that he had been among those who were affected by it. You knew he originated from Khaenri’ah, but you supposed he was like your old friend Kaeya, who was also from there, but was not a bearer of the curse.

Admittedly, it was difficult to be in relationship with Dainsleif at times because of it. He trusted you wholeheartedly, but there was always this lingering sense of doom in his eyes. There were times when he would get close with you, share his past and his deepest desires, but then he would pull away. It was a constant game of back and forth with him.

You were aware it was because he was scared, terrified even. Dainsleif had lived a long life of loss and sadness. He had failed in his duties as the Twilight Sword and, because of that, he was forced to witness the death and destruction of everyone and everything he loved around him. Anyone he had ever loved he had lost, and he couldn’t stand to watch that happen to you too.

You couldn’t bear it equally as much. Dainsleif was the best person to ever have come into your life. Someone you knew could never hurt you. Someone who showed you more love than anyone else ever had. Your love for each other was like no other. The only thing that could truly separate you from him would be death, and he would love you until that day came.

As painfully beautiful as that was, it saddened you to a degree that nothing else could. You did not want to lose him as much as he did not want to lose you. And so, you decided to lessen his punishment. Immortality was supposed to curse him with loneliness and suffering, but that loneliness wouldn’t exist if you were by his side for the rest of time.

You left as soon as possible, vision stored away in your satchel and a notebook in hand. It was your notebook that held your recipes. As a chef, there were all sorts of ingredients across Teyvat that you had to often import or travel to obtain. It was the perfect excuse to leave without him raising suspicion. Because, although Dainlsleif detested the Gods and Celestia, he would never let you do what you were about to do. Not for him, and not for anyone else. Not even for yourself.

It took you about a week to return.

Dainsleif noticed instantly something was different when you returned. It was a little past midnight. He was sitting at the table of your home, window open to his left to let the cool breeze sift through the house. He had been scribbling away at a map when the door walked open, and in walked you.

There were dark circles around your eyes, a conflicting look swirling within them. Part of you looked relieved, while the other part looked saddened. His eyebrows furrowed as you stumbled in through the doorway, whispering a small greeting to him. Quickly, he was by your side and hugging you dearly.

“Are you okay?” he asked worriedly, voice just barely above a whisper. You leaned against him, head tucked gently into his shoulder as you wrapped your arms around his abdomen. Silently, you nodded.

Dainsleif carefully brought you to the couch in the living room, sitting you down gently and setting your belongings on the small table in front of you. The breeze from the window drafted through again, strong enough to make you shiver. In an instant, Dainsleif was up and moving to shut it quickly so you could be warm and comfortable.

“Something’s wrong,” he started, hand moving to cup your face as you gazed into his eyes tiredly, “I know you aren’t just tired. So please, tell me what happened on your trip.”

You crumbled in an instant, unable to lie to his face, “I traded my vision. I’m sorry, I wasn’t actually going to get ingredients.”

Confusion settled even deeper into his blood as he stared at you, unable to comprehend what you were talking about, “Trade your vision for…what? Why would you need to trade your…oh.”

When he realized, you nodded carefully. The silence that followed suit scared you. You often had a hard time reading him, especially now.

His next reaction shocked you, however. Tiny traces of tears sprung to his eyes, threatening to pour over at any second. Your eyebrows furrowed, but before you could say anything, Dainsleif quickly leaned in and kissed you. Your eyes closed and you returned it, feeling the sadness, desperation, and love behind it. When he pulled away, you could see two or three tears had fallen from his eyes.

Gently, you wiped them away and hugged him tightly. He held you tightly in return, and silently, you both laid back against the couch. Exhaustion hit the two of you at once, knocking you out as you slept within each other’s arms. You had been exhausted from your trip and all the emotions you had felt from it. As for Dainsleif, his exhaustion from being cursed had eased up a bit on him. It him all at once, the realization and the lack of loneliness or worries he would have to deal with from now on. There was no more till death due you part, because finally, Dainsleif had you for forever and you had him.

[atwhughesversion]

hello :) if you have more fil lore to share i would love to hear it 🫶

oh my god yes i do!! buckle in bc i love this czech man and his gorgeous beard and this post got a little long.

first, here is fil being smiley with his former teammate fil (fun fact: filip zadina is who the red wings picked instead of quinn hughes in the draft, allowing the canucks to get quinn.):

source

second, while i can only add one video, here is a link to one minute of fil and his dog (the photos below are from this vid)

fun facts about hronek:

idk if you’ve seen the clip but during one of the last games of the season, when the canucks were beating the flames 3-0, the hot mic picked up on fil shouting “you have holidays in two days” to the flames bench

he scored a goal off of a 107.9mph shot last season which is insane and i need him to do it again

quinn literally loves him:

“I thought we were going to be a very good tandem, but we’ve been way better than I could’ve pictured us being. He’s helped me so much.” [source]

“(I) probably haven’t played with a player as good as him. He’s really skilled, can move the puck, can see things, can defend, can skate…they wanted to maybe split us up but I’m happy we’re together.” [source]

“Maybe he’s not comfortable around the media, which is fine. But around us, he’s like one of my favourite teammates ever. He’s not quiet, but he’s not loud. He wants to work with me and I want to work with him.” [source]

fil vs the media:

literally gonna be a rivalry for the ages now that he’s signed a long-term deal w us and i kinda can’t wait.

backstory: hronek is quite reserved and isn’t super comfortable in front of the media, as is his right. at his exit interview this season, jeff paterson got into it with him because fil denied that he had an injury and jeff wanted him to say that he did on the record lmao. this conversation starts at around 2:25 of this video:

hronek: i mean, you named it. like, first half of the year i was producing, second half i was not.

paterson: and why was that?

hronek, my sassy king: um, why? if i know the answer, i probably would do something different.

paterson: were you playing through an injury?

hronek: ?? no

paterson, about to make his way onto my bad side: like, we gave you your space all year; we’re just trying to ask a few questions at this stage

hronek: well what do you want me to say?

paterson: i just, i was curious about where the production-

hronek: what do you want me to say on—like, on the injury, if i didn’t have injury, what do you want me to say? i said no.

[cue awkward silence until a different reporter starts talking to soucy]

now, fast forward a little while: he still hadn’t re-signed, and vancouver media was doing vancouver media things (speculating about how he probably hates it here and there’s no way he can be a canuck if he doesn’t like doing media and he probably wants to go to a more lowkey city etc etc.) when, low and behold, he signed an 8-year contract extension. One of his quotes?

"I guess I'm going to have to do more media for 8 more years. It's going to be fun." [source]

him and jeff paterson are gonna be bffs by like november 2027.

also, filip on vancouver as a market/canucks fans:

“I like it. It’s nice when people like it and they enjoy the hockey and they’re supporting us, so, it’s a lot of fun.” [source]

some fil pics:

baby fil:

[archiveoftara]

London Boy

Part 2

I found myself under a pile of bills. Utility bills, water bills, rent, things that needed to be paid but I don't even have a single penny to feed myself .

This small precious dream of mine is costing my life but I can't back out right now.

Six months ago I ran away from my toxic family, to make a living in London, to own a jewelry company but it didn't go as planned.

I banged my head on the table in frustration. What am I gonna do?

After a moment of contemplating my life, I begin to clean up the mess. Slowly picking up scattered papers when my eyes fell on an advert.

Lockwood and Co

The prestigious psychical agency requires a junior field operative and an assistant researcher. Duties will include on-site analysis of reported hauntings and the containment of same. The successful applicant will be SENSITIVE to supernatural phenomena, well-dressed, preferably female and not above fifteen years in age.

Unsuccessful applicants will include time-wasters, fraudsters and persons with criminal records. Apply in writing, together with a photograph, to 35 Portland Row, London W1.

I carefully folded the paper and rushed to my room.

33..34..ah 35. This must be place.

I check the advert again just to make sure I'm at the right place.

I fix my hair and clear my throat one more time before ringing the bell.

"Um hi-"

"Are you Arif's new girl?"

"....who's Arif?"

"Runs the corner store, usually sends someone over with donuts as you don't have any, you must be here for the interview."

I nod awkwardly. Not the best start I see

"Name?"

"Y/n y/l/n. Are you Mr. Lockwood?"

"Me? No." It seem like he is offended. "The last girl just went down but from the look of her, she won't take long."

I step inside the wide hallway, filled with artefacts, books and a chipped plant pot around the corner. This is where they keep their rapiers I guess.

"You win George. That was the last one."

"Then who's this?" The boy named George pointed at me as if I'm some alien. (and I took offense to that)

A boy with very bright, dark eyes and nice lopsided grin said "Hello, I'm Anthony Lockwood." I shook his hand and introduced myself.

"What's your talent?" Lockwood asked.

I gave a small smile "I don't have one."

For a minute I thought the time stopped. I tried to read their faces. I'm sure they're gonna kick me out.

"Well that's fine, we're looking for a researcher anyway and it doesn't need much talent, does it George?" He looked at the boy, sitting at the corner sofa.

He wiped his glasses on his t-shirt "I don't mind."

"Do you have any past experience?"

"Not really." I blushed. "But I am a fast learner, I will work hard. I really need this job."

"George will train you so don't worry." He clasped.

"This means..I got the job?"

"Yes. Welcome to Lockwood and Co"

My eyes shined like a diamond. "I'm not going to disappoint you sir, I desperately needed this job. I'll do anything, thank you so so much." I thanked them like my life depended on it and it kinda did. Lockwood and George exchanged a look (they were talking in some code word I can feel it.) It doesn't matter. I won't be here for too long.

It's been a few weeks since I've been working as a assistant researcher. We also have a new member, her name is Lucy Carlyle. She's really cool, we get along well. Lucy stays with them, they offered me accommodation, too but I refused, I still have a dream to chase.

The work is actually interesting but George makes it a bit difficult for me, he's a perfectionist. I don't blame him. I just try my best to live up to the standards. 

It's the beginning of November, the nights are chilly lately. I've just finished some papers regarding the latest case.

"We should head back it's getting late." George looks at his watch.

"Hmm?" People already left the library, it was just me and him now.

I quickly stood up but felt dizzy. I felt an arm around my waist, I felt a pair of warm brown eyes on me. His mole is cute..has he always been this cute?

"Y/n you alright?" George holds my arm.

I clear my throat "yes. perfectly fine." I quickly gathered my books and walk as fast as I could. The moment I step out of the building I was welcomed by the chilly wind hitting my face. I stood for a moment, my back against the wall. 

I feel so weird.

"Y/n, It's best we see a doctor." He frowned.

"I'm fine." 

"You wanna walk by yourself? Alright, Let's see that." George scoffed.

"Why are you so mean George Karim?" I winced.

"You're being crazy. You clearly need help." 

"George, I can manage." 

"At least let me walk you home." He insisted.

"Nope." With that I make my way home little did I know what was waiting for me.

Maybe I should've been more polite. All he wanted was to help me but I'm a big girl I can manage. It's just a little fever. I slowly made my way to the neighborhood when I felt something strange. I feel nauseas, like something rotten is near me. I felt a heaviness on my chest, something was pulling me away. Soon I felt the cold hard ground, I tried to call for help but nothing came out of my mouth that's when I heard a sound of metal drawn.

"Are you alright?" He keenly looked at me.

"What happened?" I panted. 

"You were ghostlocked. Please just let me walk you home we can argue later." He pulled me with him. 

I think my dream is gonna end before it even starts.

Hello my dear readers, first chapter is done and dusted. Excuse my crappy writing. Hope you like the chapter. Do let me know your thoughts in the comment section. I love you!!! 

Word count: 968

[griefabyss69]

Hi hello!

Nobody likes religious trauma frowny face

For the wip game please 💜😊

both you and the other person in my inbox this morning asked about steddissy WIPs <3 <3 <3 What a beautiful morning!!!!!! This fic is 12K already lmao and another one that's going to be super long. I'm thinking of seeing if it's congruent with the other one I just posted about, if it is I will put them in the same series/universe!

This is one of my older ones, I wrote + shared a bit from it when I did this game in november! Here's the link to the post What I shared in that post was from when Chrissy was still in school, so I'm going to jump ahead and share from later in the fic! My characterization for how Eddie acts around Chrissy is fully extrapolated from that one scene in the cafeteria in episode 1, where he like bows all dramatic and lets the cheerleaders go by in the middle of his big monologue LMAO. Ofc I've made it way more well rounded than that, but at this point in the fic they're still new to each other and he's still walking on egg shells that he doesn't know aren't even there Excerpt: (Contents: ED mentions (in the form of child abuse tbh), rated G)

Eddie's fingers drum restlessly against his knees until he slaps his thighs, getting to his feet.

"Okay. We need to run an errand."

His voice is hard like it never is, even when he's putting on a dramatic show and taunting someone. He's clearly trying for a smile but Chrissy sees the glass in his eyes, even as he tries to blink it away.

She doesn't really know what has him trying not to cry but her own eyes sting in sympathy.

"Um, what kind of an errand?" She asks, hating how strained and timid her voice is.

Eddie chews on his lip, fingers twisting at his rings for a few agitated moments before he takes a deep breath and sighs it out.

"Sorry, I got ahead of myself," he says, the charm back in his voice but the cat's out of the bag, Chrissy can see he's still upset. "Would you like to go to the library with me?"

She lets herself frown in confusion, knows he won't take it as an attack of obstinacy.

"What's at the library?" She asks, catching her mistake the same moment he does.

"Books, duh," they say in unison as he grins at her and she rolls her eyes.

He laughs, seems like he's loosening up a little bit, and reaches out to clap her on the shoulder before stopping short, bringing his hand back to himself.

"Sorry, forgot personal space."

She doesn't frown at that because she gets it, but it would've been fine if he touched her shoulder. She kind of really wanted him to.

She shrugs.

"Which book does the library have that has you so excited?"

Eddie fidgets without moving somehow, his muscles tensing and untensing in the same way he taps on things. The tempo is the same, maybe.

"Don't hate me, okay? If I'm like, overstepping or just making things worse just tell me and I'll drop it but," he pauses, looking at her out of the side of his eyes, his endless array of expressions showing off both a puppy dog cuteness and a nervousness ready for a slap. He winces preemptively like it'll lessen whatever blow he's about to deal. "The library has books on sewing."

Sewing.

She doesn't get it for a moment, eyes wandering over the floor as she thinks about it, the hem of her skirt catching the bottom of her sight and tipping her off.

She feels her chin crumple dangerously and buries her face in her hands, trying to concentrate on keeping the tears inside of her face and the embarrassing sob in her chest. She cannot cry in front of Eddie, the only person who despite being scared to touch her, doesn't treat her like she's a porcelain doll these days.

"Oh no," Eddie says, voice soft and panicked. "I'm so sorry, I knew I should've just minded my own business, shit."

She feels a laugh bubble up, maybe inappropriate but way better than what was going to come out of her, so she lets it out, even if it's watery.

"Chrissy, I'll drop it. We won't go to the library, I won't get any books, I'll forget how to read," Eddie's voice is still soft even if it's ramping up in drama, like he's trying not to scare her and she hates that, but she hates that it works even more.

She sniffles hard, pulling her hands away from her face. She has like, two tears on her cheek but it's enough to make Eddie wring his hands, clearly unsure what to do now that he's made a girl cry.

She kind of wants to use it, show him how she wishes he'd comfort her, but that probably wouldn't be very honest. He thinks she's sad, and yeah, sure, she's a little bit sad all of the time, but.

Mostly she just can't believe it, that he picked up on something she hides so well, remembered maybe the one sentence she said about her mom giving her trouble about needing to let out her skirt again. And then instead of telling her she needs to listen to her mom's advice or try harder or just suck it up and deal with the shame and humiliation of trading in another of her dwindling meal options for a skirt that fits better, he just.

Fuck.

"Eddie I'm not mad," she begins, because she knows how despite all of his bravado about gender roles and how maybe they suck, he has a guilt for women that he doesn't for men. "I do want to go to the library."

He pauses, bottom lip firmly between his teeth, practically on his toes with how he's both working himself into a frenzy and desperately trying not to make it her problem.

"I'm sorry for crying, I just got like," she sighs, shrugging. "Surprised, I guess."

Eddie relaxes even though he's shaking his head.

"It's not your fault, don't apologize," he says, a little smile bringing out his dimples. "Do you want to go now?"

Chrissy nods, giving him a little smile of her own. She reaches out and claps him on the shoulder, squeezing. Since he won't do it to her, she'll do it to him; bridge the gap that he self imposed even though she's seen him get so close to other people's faces they could've been kissing.

[quaranmine]

The Incandescence of a Dying Light (Chapter Six)

Someone’s worried about Grian, and the Forest Service comes to collect Mumbo’s bike.

Chapter Six: 8,724

<< Chapter Five | Masterpost | Chapter Seven >>

The other half of the fifth chapter! I hope you enjoy this 1988 sequence especially, I was looking forward to it a lot (and it single handedly made the chapter so long it had to be split in two!)

No real CWs this time. I personally think that if you have made it this far then I don’t really have to warn you about the themes of loss and grief anymore, but just in case: yep, still very present.

November 20, 1988

It’s about noon on a Sunday, and Grian is…not doing much, actually. He has a thousand things he needs to do, ranging from cleaning out the refrigerator to trying to change his car’s oil to looking into a part-time second job, but instead he’s lying on the couch trying to watch TV.  Somewhere along the way he tuned out of the program and started staring at the ceiling instead, mentally tracing out the patterns in the spackle. 

The man on the drones on and on in the background, until he’s just part of it. Grian can feel himself starting to drift to sleep. 

Then the phone rings. 

Grian startles awake and sits up, scowling at it in the kitchen. He hasn’t the faintest idea who is calling him, other than maybe a telemarketer, but do those people work on Sunday? Well, perhaps they do. Everyone is home then, afterall. 

It rings twice more, so he gets up and answers the phone. “Hello?” he says. 

“Griba!” shouts a voice on the other end of the line. 

And–it’s a very familiar voice. 

“Pearl?” Grian says, just the slightest bit baffled. “Is that you?”

“Hi!” she says. “How are you doing? Are you busy?”

“I’m fine,” he says. “How are you? What do you need?”

“Can’t I just call to say hi?” Pearl asks. 

“Of course, but–”

“But the international rates?” Pearl says. Then she laughs. “Oh, shush, I know you were thinking about it.”

“Oh noooo,” Grian says. “I don’t care about that at all, we can talk as long as you like.”

 It’s a lie. He was definitely thinking about the international rates, and then immediately feeling bad about it because Pearl is a friend. He puts friends before money, of course, it’s just…well, it was expensive. But worth it! Pearl is Pearl. But every minute on the phone eats into his checkbook, and it’s hard not to think about. 

Pearl laughs again. “Well, I’m glad you don’t worry about that. Not that it matters anyway; this call is local.”

Local. Local?

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you were right Griba, I did need something when I called,” Pearl says. “Can you pick me up from the airport?”

Grian’s head is spinning. “You’re at the airport?” he says incredulously. “Like, in Colorado? In Denver? Right now?”

“Yep,” Pearl says. “And I need a ride. Well, I could go get a taxi somewhere. But I figured I’d ask my friend first. Are you busy?”

Yeah, busy falling asleep to daytime TV on the couch. “Um, no,” he says. 

“Great! I’ll see you there!” Pearl says. “Wait, how long will it take? I don’t know where you live, actually. Ooh, this is exciting! I’ll finally get to see your place.”

“Um, give me like half an hour and I’ll be there,” Grian says slowly. 

He and Pearl say their goodbyes for now, and after she hangs up he finds himself staring at the phone for several moments. What just happened? First of all, Pearl’s in Denver, apparently. Second of all, he did not know this was happening. Thirdly, his afternoon just got way more interesting.

He grabs his keys off the counter and makes his way downstairs. 

»»———-　　———-««

When he arrives at the airport, in the long line of cars waiting to pick people up and drop them off at the terminal, he does not expect to see Pearl waiting outside for him. Yet he picks her out instantly, a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. 

She’s bundled up in a black hoodie. The hood is up over her head, but he can see the long wavy tendrils of brown hair peeking out from behind it. Her hands are shoved in the hoodie’s pocket, and her nose is pink from the cold. When she exhales, he can see the faintest cloud of her breath. 

He can hardly remember being so happy to see someone before. The second he sees her face, any doubt or mild annoyance at her unexpected stay just melts away. 

He pulls his car up as close as he can to her, and throws it in park. She doesn’t know what car he’s driving, of course–she’s never visited him here. He leaps out and calls her name. 

“Pearl!” he shouts. 

She spins around and a grin breaks out on her face the moment she spots him. He races up to her on the curb and she throws her arms around him in a hug immediately. They cling to each other for a moment, before letting go. 

“Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you!” Pearl says.

“Oh, yeah,” Grian says. “A few years, right? Not since I’ve been here.”

“Ah!” Pearl squeaks. “I can’t wait to see it. I should’ve come for a visit so much sooner.”

Grian breathes a sigh, not of any annoyance or tiredness, but perhaps–of relief? Relief from what, he doesn’t quite know, but he’s so happy to see Pearl it’s like he can hardly speak. His breath clouds in front of him. 

“Let’s get you in the car,” he says. “It’s so cold out here, why weren’t you waiting inside?”

“Well, it might be cold out here,” Pearl says, attempting to pick up her bag. Grian steals it out from under her grasp before she can, though, so she just trails after him to the car. “But it certainly isn’t cold at home. It’s kind of nice, actually. Anyway, I wasn’t out here waiting the entire time, I just walked out a few minutes before you came.”

“Well, don’t freeze on me before you even get here,” Grian says. He loads her things in the car, and they hop in. He starts to navigate out of the airport traffic. “How long was that flight?” he asks. “I mean, I assume you flew in from Sydney.”

“Ugh, it was never ending!” Pearl says. “It was like 12 or 13 hours, and that only got me to Los Angeles. Then I had a connection here.” She glances at the clock on his dashboard. “Did you know it’s almost the same time I left?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. I left around noon on the 20th. Then I landed and now it’s around noon on the 20th again.”

“Wow.”

“It feels like I got put in a time vortex or something and they zapped a whole day from me. And then I woke up and I’m repeating the day again.”

Grian side eyes her in the passenger seat. “Are you, perhaps, a little tired?”

“Exhausted.”

He smiles just a little. “I bet you’re hungry too,” he says. “Let’s get lunch on our way back to my apartment.”

»»———-　　———-««

They get lunch, and it’s great. They talk about various, mostly mundane things about their lives over the past few years. They’ve kept in touch ever since graduating university together, even as their lives diverged on totally different paths on totally different continents. But that was mostly just letters and phone calls. It’s entirely different to be face to face again. It’s so much better to be face to face again.

Grian asks about her career in Australia. “So, have you designed the next Sydney Opera House yet?” he teases. 

Pearl gasps in fake horror. “Of course not! There can’t be a ‘next’ Opera House, it’s iconic!”

“Eh,” Grian says. “I think you could come up with a cooler one.”

She rolls her eyes affectionately. “Alright, stop it.”

“I’m dead serious. I think you could make a better one.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “Seriously though, I mostly just do office buildings.”

“Hm, well that’s boring,” Grian says and takes a sip of his water. “We for sure don’t need any more of those.”

“That’s what most of the work is,” she says. “Lots of new development to work on! So what have you been up to? Any interesting projects lately?”

Grian hesitates a bit in replying. The answer is no, of course. Pearl’s aware of his job from some of their previous communication in the past three years, but now that they’re sitting here face to face she clearly wants to hear all about it without the constraints of a phone call or letter. 

He just, well, has nothing to say. He hasn't even really received projects lately. 

He and Mumbo came to Colorado a little over two years ago after Mumbo was offered an engineering job in Denver. Grian had figured he might as well dust off his completely unused dual citizenship and follow him here–it’s not like it was even a difficult process for him. It was the perfect sort of adventure to follow up five years of intense schooling, and an interesting place to put his new skills to test. 

It had been that which enticed him to go with Mumbo. That, and the way his stomach had twisted when he thought about saying goodbye. They’d been inseparable for over a decade and Grian refused to accept a reality where his best friend lived so far away. Truthfully, Mumbo was a little apprehensive about moving to an entirely new country alone, so this had worked out perfectly. 

Grian would go with him. They’d split an apartment and get settled in for a while and experience life in a new country. Grian would finish the rest of his architecture field training in Colorado and finally get his license. Mumbo would work on creating machines and learn about computers. 

It was fine. It was fun. They had a good time–there were endless things to do, from skiing to hiking to rafting to biking. 

Then Mumbo went missing, and Grian was just…still here, but missing everything that was worthwhile. He was struggling. Not showing up to work. Getting demoted.

“I haven’t really had anything interesting to work on,” he says finally. “There was this one house–way too massive, really, and the owner could never really decide what he wanted but he wasn’t so bad. But then I had to leave to…” 

He trails off. Pearl glances at him and opens her mouth, but she rethinks it after a moment and shuts it again. She’s smart, and part of that intelligence is knowing when to not poke around. 

“Mostly they just have me working on codes and compliance right now,” he finishes quietly. 

It’s still an important part of the process, making sure that all of the projects are in alignment with local building codes. Sometimes it’s even frustrating, when he has to figure out things like getting a water line from whichever locality is closest for someone’s house perched high on a mountainside. 

But he doesn’t have any of his own clients anymore. He does work for his coworker’s projects. He doesn’t do any drafting. He doesn’t touch any blueprints. He doesn’t design anything. 

It’s not really the update that he wants to give Pearl. They met each other in university because they studied in the same architecture program. They spent long nights in the library together. He’s seen her rip up her papers in frustration when things weren’t working quite right, and she’s seen him start crying on the floor of her dorm room the night before a particularly major test. They graduated together. 

It just doesn’t look good. Of course, he knows Pearl very well. She isn’t going to think anything less of him. It’s more, well, himself that he has to worry about. 

Pearl purses her lips, and moves on. “Well,” she says, “that’s all very important. God knows we studied it enough. Don’t worry about projects, you’ll find some cool work soon.”

“As cool as office buildings?”

“With any luck, even better,” she says. 

“How long are you staying?” he asks, realizing he still doesn’t know. 

“Little over a week,” she responds. “I’m leaving next Monday.”

He frowns. “I probably have work, but maybe I can take off a morning to take you back to the airport–”

“I can survive in a taxi,” Pearl says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, you asked me to pick you up this time.”

“Mm, well, I wanted to see you,” she says, “and I had a feeling you weren’t going to be busy.”

He hates that she’s right, but only just a little. He’s sort of glad he wasn’t busy so that he could see her, since she’s apparently decided to drop this entire trip on him with no notice whatsoever. It does not miss him that she could have done this basically any weekend in the last several months and landed on a day where he wasn’t busy. 

“What are your plans for this week?” he asks.

“I want to see everything!” Pearl says, and stretches her arms wide to accommodate the words. She has to pull her arm back in quick, since she nearly smacks a waitress walking by. They both descend into laughter. 

“Pearl,” Grian hisses, “we’re in public!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she whispers. “I’m just so excited! I want to sightsee!”

Grian leans back in his chair and regards her with a critical eye. He’s smiling. “I don’t know if a week is enough to see everything,” he says. 

“I am going to do my best,” she says, mock-serious. 

It suddenly hits Grian. “Wait,” he groans. “I seriously have to work tomorrow. And Tuesday. I could ask off, but…” He winces as he trails off. “I kind of have a track record with my boss and I don’t think he really appreciates me calling out last minute.”

“That’s fine,” Pearl says. “What? I know I came here without telling you but it’s not like I wasn’t prepared to take care of myself. I’ll just see some things on my own.”

Grian nods. “I have a half-day on Wednesday,” he says, “but I think he’d be more amenable to letting me have that as a full day. Then Thursday’s off for Thanksgiving, and Friday too. Then of course the weekend.”

Pearl looks self-satisfied. “Good. I meant to plan it that way so you’d have a little time off.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asks. “One of them, I guess, since everything’s on the table.”

Pearl leans closer to him across the table. “Please,” she says. “I want to go skiing. I’ve never been skiing. Can we please go skiing? Please?”

Grian laughs again at the face she’s making. She’s so dead serious in her begging. “I’ll call around and see if any places are open. As you can see, we don’t have any snow around here right now. But further up into the actual mountains probably does.”

“Eee!” Pearl squeaks in excitement. “I’m so ready.”

“Oh?” Grian says. “I will literally bet you on how many times you fall.”

“I’ll take your money,” she says. “I’ll be the greatest first-time skier there ever was.”

“You will fall on your butt no less than a dozen times,” he shoots back. 

They continue talking for a while, back and forth. Pearl tells him about various stories and adventures from Australia. She begs him to come visit–she came here, so now it’s his turn to come to her. Maybe next summer, when it’ll be cooler in Australia and hotter down here. 

She’s obviously prepared for their trip and seeing him again, because she’s also brought photos to share with him. He looks through a few photos of what her house looks like, what a few buildings she’s worked on looks like, a picture of her by the ocean (she says he can keep that one, as long as she gets to go home with a photo of him), and even the two cats she has adopted. 

They get the check–Grian pays for the whole thing without blinking–and head back to his apartment.

They’re discussing sleeping arrangements as they walk up Grian’s stairwell. He has his keys out already, and they clang a little step-by-step. 

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he declares. “End of story.”

“But,” she says, “I’ll feel so bad taking your bed from you.”

“You’re a guest!” he says. “I’m not letting you sleep for a week on the couch! You can take my bed.”

Neither of them mention that there’s a third option. Or really a fourth, because Pearl could always get a hotel room if it didn't work out, but she had asked to stay with him. She must have spent so much on flights already, it was the least he could do. 

So there’s really only three options, and only two are being discussed. The apartment is a two bedroom. Mumbo’s room has sat empty for five months now, completely untouched. But that room isn’t up for grabs–it’s a time capsule, frozen from the moment he left it. Grian doesn’t mention it. Pearl is smart enough to not ask about it. 

“Ugh, fine,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes. “I guess I’ll take your room. If you make me. I still feel like it’s weird though.”

Grian freezes on the top step, and Pearl nearly bumps into him. “Oh no,” he mumbles. “My apartment is–Pearl, listen, I didn’t know you were coming, so I didn’t really take a chance to clean up anything, so it’s definitely a little messy in here, and–”

She cuts him off, voice bright. “So what I’m hearing is the couch might be better than your room?”

“No, ugh, I’m just saying I’m sorry that this place looks so bad.” He sighs. 

“I get it,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s not how I wanted it to be,” he says softly, and slots the key into the handle. “Just let me work on it, I’ll get it fixed up.”

They go into the apartment. Really, it isn’t that bad, but he’s embarrassed about it nonetheless. It isn’t filthy or grimy, it’s just cluttered. He’s always been a cluttered person. There’s stuff lying randomly about, like the somewhat muddy shoes by the door, the jackets shed across chairs, or the laundry basket of unfolded clothes sitting on a dining room chair. At least three random empty drinking glasses are sitting on the coffee table in the living room. And, well, he could have probably bothered to do the dishes from the last three days, but there’s only one of him and he doesn’t cook much, so really it isn’t very much even if it looks bad.

Everything in here would be so fast to clean up, but whenever he tries it feels like an insurmountable barrier. He does things a little at a time, so that it never gets too out of hand, but he can’t remember the last time it looked good. It’s just something that’s continually slipping further and further away. It feels like one day he’ll wake up and it will finally be completely out of control. 

Pearl doesn’t say anything. She just walks in and drops her bags–which she had insisted on carrying since he insisted on paying for lunch–on the floor and puts her hands on her hips. “This is a cute place,” she says. “I like the lighting from the windows. And you’ve got a view of the mountains!”

“It’s cute when it’s clean,” he mutters. It’s like he knows how to be ashamed of how the place looks, but not how to do anything about it. He’s got the external motivation of another human being seeing it now though, and he’s itching to work and hide everything here.

Maybe it’s concerning that his main motivation after months on end is just so that he can hide. This thought does not cross his mind, because the sort of people who hide things from others are fantastic at hiding things from themselves, too. 

“I saw your dorm room in university,” she reminds him. “You can’t seriously think I wasn’t prepared for your clutter.”

“This is worse,” Grian groans. 

“Eh, not really,” Pearl says. “I think you’re doing well, all things considered.”

All things considered. Grian bites his lip. It’s nice that she thinks so. He isn’t sure where she got that impression, but if he can spend the rest of the week cultivating it then maybe she’ll stop worrying. 

She walks over to the laundry basket on the chair. “Is this clean?” she asks. 

“Yes, of course,” he responds, and he wants to add “I’m not that bad" to the end of the statement until he remembers the floor of his bedroom, which is exactly “that bad.” 

“Great!” she says. And then she sits down. And starts folding it.

“What are you doing?” he asks, and snatches the basket away from her. “You’re a guest! You’re on vacation! Don’t be doing that?”

Pearl frowns. “Um,” she says. “Just helping?”

“I don’t need you to help,” he says, and it comes out a bit harsher than intended. “Just, like, go relax or something. Take a nap. I know you’re exhausted.”

A brief look of hurt flashes over her face, and vanishes almost as quickly as it arrives. “Grian?” she asks. “What do you think I’m here for?”

“To see me?” he says, confused. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Of course it’s to see you, I missed you. But also to help.”

“I missed you too,” he says automatically, but when the rest of the sentence catches up to him he shakes his head. “I don’t need help.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You don’t? Then why can nobody get a hold of you, Grian? Why does your apartment look like this? Why do you deflect phone calls and make excuses? We’re all worried about you, you know. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“We?” Grian says. “You’re talking about me behind my back? Who’s we?”

“Well, we wouldn’t be talking behind your back if you talked to us,” Pearl replies, matter-of-fact. “And the ‘we’ is your friends. Your family, Grian.”

“I’m fine,” he snaps. “I’m sorry to have you worried but you don’t need to be.”

“You don’t get to try that on me,” Pearl says firmly. “I know you too well.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t talk to you,” he says. 

Pearl looks back at him, for a long time. He doesn’t return her eye contact, and instead begins to pick up the glasses from the coffee to take them into the kitchen. He knows looking at her will just make him sad. He also knows that he really, really wants to look back at her. 

He misses her so hard it hurts. Mumbo hasn’t come back, but she did. She was never really missing, though–just separated far, far, away by circumstance. 

She takes a deep breath. “Well. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you I was coming.”

He says nothing, and turns on the tap. It’ll take a moment for the water to heat up. 

“You always try to hide,” she says. She picks up another item out of the basket and begins to fold it. “But you can’t hide if you didn’t expect me to come.”

She reads him like a book every time. It was a definite contributing factor to their friendship–they’d clicked fast and gotten very close in university. They understood each other well, and shared not only the same area of study but also the same ideas about pulling mischief on campus. There used to be a point in time where her reading him like a book served both of them well, but not today. 

“I told you to stop folding that,” Grian says.

Pearl drops it with a huff. “No,” she says. “I’m not going to stop. You said I was the guest, right? Guests get to do what they want. And maybe I want to help you clean up.”

He finally turns to look at her. Her blue eyes are wide and just the slightest bit watery. He’s done that–he’s been the one to make her that worried. He turns back to the sink. 

“Okay,” he says quietly, words almost lost in the water running into the sink. He says okay because he can’t imagine even trying to fight her on this. “We can work on it together.”

»»———-　　———-««

The cleaning goes well, up until it doesn’t.

“Grian, what is this?” Pearl says from the other room, loudly. She’s finished folding his things and has fortunately just left them all in the basket for him to put up himself, declining to go rifling through his dresser and closet. The next task she has taken upon herself has apparently been working through the clutter in the living room area, which is always a dangerous place.

Grian sticks his head around the corner from the kitchen. He’s finished doing the dishes, and is just drying them off now to put in the cabinet. “Let me see,” he says. 

She turns around and Grian’s heart sinks immediately. She’s standing by his desk, the nice one by the window that he always liked to sit and draft at. She’s holding a few pieces of paper that Grian really didn’t mean to leave out. Because he definitely did leave them out–Pearl is nosy, and she’ll fly all the way across the world to drop in uninvited, but she isn’t the kind of person who goes through drawers. 

But he did just say she was nosy. Nosy enough to read something he left out. 

He drops the dish towel. “Give me those,” he says, and crosses the living room to the corner she’s in. He tries to snatch it out of her hand.

“Nope, not so fast,” she says, and holds them higher, squinting at them so she can read. Grian is, at this moment, extremely annoyed that she is so much taller than he is. He can’t quite grab them out of her hand. 

“Pearl,” he whines. 

“Shh, I’m reading.” Her eyes widen, and she looks back at Grian. He feels the slightest bit locked in her gaze’s intensity. It’s equal parts scrutinizing and empathetic. Like she feels bad for him, but is also a little disappointed. “Are these late notices?”

She files through them one by one. Grian cringes. He’d rather melt into the floor than be here. “Most of them are already paid,” he says feebly. 

“Most of them?” she looks back at him. Her brows are knit up, and it creases her forehead.

“I, uh, get paid this week,” he says. This is another lie. He gets paid at the end of the month, but she doesn’t need to know that.

She doesn’t seem fully convinced, but she hands them back to him and he takes them from her so sharply he almost tears the paper. He puts them in the drawer and slams it shut. It rattles the whole desk.

“The top one was about your credit card payment,” she says slowly, as if she’s halfway between deciding whether to say something and not, but was already saying it before she could finish the debate. 

Grian fixes her with a glare and she wilts under it, immediately looking away. He shoves his hands behind his back, because suddenly they seem shaky. His chest is tight, and his jaw is set, and–he’s angry. He’s so, so angry, and it feels like it’s burning him up, white-hot. 

“Why did you read those?” he demands. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to find it, it was just laying on the desk–”

“You could have ignored it.” 

Pearl crosses her arms. He’s activated her fight mode, and he rarely does well against her when she tries to be stubborn. 

“I’m just worried about you,” she says. 

Grian shakes his head. “I can’t with you right now,” he says. His tone is icy even while his whole body feels hot. “They were laying on the desk because I didn’t expect to have any guests.” 

He turns away from her and walks partway across the living room floor toward the kitchen, and then whirls around again. “You’re just..showing up uninvited, messing with my stuff, reading my mail? Is that where we are now?” his voice cracks a little on the last time. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you in three years and this is where we’re at now?”

Pearl takes a breath. “I just wanted to help,” she says. It falls flat. 

“It isn’t your business.”

“You never said you needed money.”

“Because it isn’t your business.” He enunciates every syllable clearly. 

She runs a hand through her hair in a nervous, agitated gesture. “None of know what’s going on with you, Grian,” she says. “We didn’t know about this, so what else don’t we know about?”

He doesn’t answer. 

“Okay, fine,” she says desperately. “This wasn’t my business. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have looked at it. But I meant what I said, okay? We don’t know anything about what’s going on with you!”

“There’s the ‘we’ again,” he says. 

She shakes her head, incredulous. “Do I have to literally spell it out for you? Did you forget our names when you moved to America? It’s Jimmy, and Joel, and Martyn, and Netty, and Lizzie. It’s your mom. It’s Mumbo’s parents.” She pauses for just a moment, taking in a short, if slightly hysterical, breath. “It’s me.”

He doesn’t want to hear their names again. He misses them enough already. 

“I’ve talked to them,” he says instead. Simple.

Pearl throws her arms in the air. “For hardly more than five minutes!”

“Well,” he says, with a bitter laugh, “you certainly know I don’t have the money for long-distance calls.”

“I guess I walked into that one,” she says. She stops, but there’s a funny look on her face that keeps Grian quiet. He’s still standing a few feet away from her after he walked off earlier. Her face scrunches up, like she’s trying not to cry, and after another moment she speaks softly: “Mumbo was my friend too, you know.”

It’s soft, but it still hits Grian like a ton of bricks. 

She continues, and doesn’t look him in the eye. “I know he was your friend first, but I cared about him too. We all did.” Suddenly she’s crossing the floor toward him again, closing the distance he had put between them. “But it almost hurts just as bad to know you’re still out here alone. And that you aren’t okay.”

Grian swallows back against the lump that is rapidly forming in his throat. “I’m fine,” he whispers. 

“I don’t believe you,” she says. 

“I’m fine,” he insists. 

“You need to go home to visit,” Pearl says. “Even just for the holidays. Please. Everybody’s worried about you.” She huffs a small little laugh. “They’re all worried and then they’re calling me because they think I know what’s going on. Because I always used to know what was going on with you. And then I have to tell them I don’t know either.”

Grian doesn’t respond.

“They’d be so happy, you know,” Pearl says. “To see you.”

“I’d never come back,” Grian mumbles. “If I went.”

“What?”

“They wouldn’t let me leave,” he says, stronger. “If I went home they wouldn’t let go.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” Pearl asks.

Grian shakes his head like he’s breaking free of her request. “I have to stay here, because Mumbo is here.”

Pearl blinks, and then sighs. “Okay. I still think you should visit, though.”

Her eyes drift away from his face and over to the hallway behind him, the one all the bedrooms and bathrooms break off of. She speaks again sharply. “The money problem, it’s because of Mumbo isn’t it? You used to split all of the rent and stuff because he was your roommate. But now it’s all on you.”

“Something like that,” Grian admits, and it feels like he’s speaking around a block sitting in his mouth.

Their apartment is nice. Not luxurious by any means, but still a decent place to live. His neighbor down the hall yells at him sometimes if he comes back home too late and their door used to slam unpredictably until the landlord finally fixed it months later, but isn’t that all just everyday woes of having an apartment? 

The apartment is nice, but it was never meant to be paid for by one person. Well, maybe a well-paid person. It’s not like his landlord wouldn’t have rented it out to a single person if they could pay. But Grian had never planned to pay for it by himself. And while architecture could be a well-paying job, he was very much still at the entry level. He’d only barely gotten his license after years of schooling and on-site training. 

And then he’d gotten demoted for not showing up. The demotion wasn’t in job duties only, as he’d discovered on his very next paycheck. 

So now he does what he can. He pays the major, important things first. Sometimes they’re a little late, depending on if his check has hit his bank account yet, but it gets done. He starts to depend more and more on his credit card for other things. He pays his minimum payment every month but he doesn’t feel good about watching it accrue. 

“I can help you pay it off-” Pearl starts to say. 

“No,” Grian says. “You aren’t doing that.”

“I can help you pay it off,” Pearl repeats stubbornly. “But Griba, if you can’t afford this place by yourself, you need to just move to someplace else. Smaller. Cheaper.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he says. 

She tilts her head, expression gentle in a way that makes him instinctively recoil. “You can’t keep living here if you can’t pay. This is bad.”

“It’s okay,” he says distantly. “It’s only temporary.”

Pearl pauses. She has a horrible look on her face, so Grian looks away from her instead. “Temporary?” she asks. The word is tentative.

“Until Mumbo gets back,” he says. He grabs her hand, and pulls it closer to him, feeling suddenly like it’s very important that she hears him and understands this. “I can’t leave,” he says earnestly. “All of his stuff his here. It’s his home too.”

Pearl’s eyes are wide. “I can help you pack it,” she says. “You don’t even have to mess with it, or look at it, I can do that for you.”

He drops her hand. “No,” he says, baffled. “I’m not moving anything of his out of here. When they find him, he deserves to actually come home. He can’t come back to a strange place!”

Pearl squeezes her eyes shut. “Griba, please,” she says. He notices all at once that she’s brought his nickname out these past few times, which is a fact that should be comforting but instead starts to set off alarm bells in his head. 

“I’m not moving, and that’s final,” he says. “I’m not going to abandon him.”

“You’re not abandoning him, you’re just…”

“Just what?”

“Being smart.”

It hurts Grian. “He deserves to come home,” he bites. “I don’t care if it isn’t the smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do.”

Pearl backs up. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She takes a deep breath and exhales long and slow. “You’ll stay. I’ll just help you then, yeah? Bills, cleaning, everything else…”

She turns away from him, and starts picking up various items once more to organize them. “I’ll just help,” she repeats.

She wanders around the room. She’s not getting much done, but she looks busy, inspecting everything around her for one more easy thing to do. Grian just stands in the middle of the room stock still, and both says and does nothing. 

Pearl continues to busy herself for a few minutes before grinding to a halt again. “Griba?” she asks, and Grian turns to her again as an answer. “You do have other people to talk to, right? People who live here?”

It’s a valid question. It’s a hard question. 

“Of course,” he says. 

“Stop lying to me,” she pleads. “I already told you I know you too well.”

He swallows hard. “I have people,” he defends. “Had people.”

It’s just that–it was difficult, after Mumbo disappeared. The new friends that Grian and Mumbo had made, they had mostly made as a pair. They each knew a few people from work, but nobody to really hang out with. So most of the friends they met were people they met while doing an activity together some weekend or evening after work. 

So the new friends missed Mumbo too, when they heard about what happened. But they didn’t know Grian the way Mumbo did, or the way Jimmy or Joel or Martyn or Netty or Lizzie or Pearl did. They knew Grian as one half of a pair who was missing his other half. And Grian didn’t know how to interact with them alone. He didn’t know how to go to them for help when they’d barely been in his life for a few months or a year or two. 

There’s layers to friendships, everybody knows that. None of the people Grian had met in Colorado had made it to the layer where he could talk to him. They were nice people. They wanted to help. Grian didn’t know how to let them. 

So he withdrew. 

“You had people. But not anymore?” Pearl asks. 

“I didn’t know them very well,” is all he says. 

Her expression breaks again. Grian has to stop doing that. “But you know us and you still don’t talk to us.”

“I just want to be alone,” Grian says. “Please, it isn’t personal. I just want to be alone.”

“I guess you’ll have to suck it up,” Pearl says. “Because I’m staying here for a week. And I will drag you outside to go skiing with me. I’m going to make you leave this house and we’re going to have fun together. Because I think you need that. And so do I.”

He turns and stalks back into the kitchen. He’s flipping between so many emotions that he doesn’t know which to settle on, so he seeks out something to busy his hands with instead: the dishes on the counter that still have to be dried. 

If he stays in the living room, he might start arguing with her more. He might say something that will make her not want to visit again. 

He’s angry at Pearl. Furious, even. Offended. He could look past her coming unannounced to visit, but the whole thing seems like a plot now. She’s got ulterior motives. She’s purposefully trying to catch him unaware and sneak past all his guard walls. She’s snooping through his things–his mail. It makes his spine crawl to think about. She’s literally trying to get him to move, even though she’s barely been in the state of Colorado for three hours, and even though it means Grian would have to disturb Mumbo’s belongings. 

And still there’s another part of him that just really, really wants to go skiing with her. 

Because–he misses her. He cares about her. And he misses even the simplest things, like getting out of the house to go do something with a friend. It’s just the littlest piece of normalcy. 

So he dries the dishes, and she finishes up in the living room. Then he goes to his bedroom and starts working there–without her, because he doesn’t want her in the room until he’s made it look nice. Safe, even. Clear of any items that could incriminate him in anything at all. The sheer irritation of the afternoon fuels him harder than anything in months, and he finishes the task even quicker than expected, his movements stiff and jerky with anger. 

On one of his trips back and forth to put things back where they need to go, he spots her sitting at his desk. She looks a little sad, staring at the pattern of the wood grain instead of the pretty view outside. He ignores her and goes back to work. 

They exist like this in silence, for a little over an hour. 

Then Grian walks back into the living room, picks up the phone book from the shelf, and sits down at the table by the kitchen where the phone is. 

Pearl whirls around and he can feel her watching him with intense eyes. “Griba, I…” she trails off. “I wanted to say I’m sorry again. I shouldn’t have pressed you like that. I shouldn’t have looked at your bills. And I shouldn’t have come here without telling you.”

Grian just nods slightly. “Yeah.” He flips through some more pages. He doesn’t say anything else to her, just continues on his search. 

She cocks her head slightly. “What are you doing?” she asks. 

“Trying to find a ski resort to call,” he says with a weak smile. “Because I still really want you to drag me out skiing with you.”

»»———-　　———-««

June 1989

It’s two days later when a pair of rangers come to collect Mumbo’s bike. 

They ask him if he has everything he needs, or if he has any requests for supplies that they can pass on to the main office. So Grian takes the first opportunity to ask them about the Cloud Lake Trail, and if it was really closed last season. 

It’s then that he realizes that these two probably aren’t actually rangers at all. They may be dressed in uniform, but they’re just a couple kids several years younger than Grian is. They want to be helpful so earnestly, and their disappointment is clear when they can’t answer his question.  

They inform him that it’s their first season working here, so they’re not exactly sure about what the Cloud Lake Trail was like last year, but that it’s open right now if he’s interested in it! Grian realizes that they’re a couple of seasonal workers just like he is, except they’re on summer break from college and Grian’s floundering on the cusp of his 30s. 

They’re friendly. Grian tries his best to match the energy, for the sake of politeness.

He asks them what the plan is about Mumbo’s case, and doesn’t really expect much. Apparently, there’s a bit of gossip about the case around the ranger’s office, so they do know a little. The plan seems to be to conduct a few aerial searches of the area the bike was found in with a helicopter. They also told him he could expect a more detailed phone call soon from the main office. 

That’s a little amusing to Grian, given his tower does not have a phone line. 

He bids them farewell at midday and watches them disappear into the woods. Then, he decides it’s about time for lunch. He takes an hour, locks up the cabin behind him, and heads to a rocky outcropping he knows nearby to the tower. 

It’s a beautiful spot to sit and stay a while, and a good vantage point into a little valley. Grian sits on a boulder and finishes his lunch, and tries to think about things that aren’t so negative for once. 

He’s so used to looking. Looking for fires, looking for helicopters, looking for storms, looking for lightning, looking for Mumbo. It’s what he’s good at, so he tries to challenge himself to look at something else for once. 

A few feet from him, there’s a small stand of light purple flowers with narrow, silvery green leaves growing. They’re snagging their spot in the ground amidst the surrounding rock. One of the features of his tower is a somewhat excessive amount of posters left there from years past, most of which were fire, forest, rock, or plant related. Grian thinks he’s seen this little plant several times before. He’s watched it spread from just a few sprouts in May to coating the meadows in a wash of purple the past few weeks. 

It’s a lupine. Growing alone, but steadily. 

He looks more into the mini valley below. It’s not so much a vast sweeping valley as it is a wide little canyon for the stream that flows at the bottom. It’s fascinating to look at though. To think how long it might have taken for that little body of water to have carved it down like this. There’s some small rocky cliffs along the edges in some places, and he can see the darker parts of the rocks where the water pours off during a storm. 

It’s as quiet as the forest can be. Which, in the summertime, isn’t very quiet at all. There’s cicadas buzzing all around him right now. That was something new for Grian ever since he moved–they didn’t have cicadas in England. But as loud as they are, it’s a pleasant background noise he’s become adjusted to. 

He leans back on the rock and stares into the sky for a bit, watching the handful of clouds that there are today drift along. There’s a hawk or an eagle or something flying high up there too, gliding effortlessly along the air currents. He watches it for a while. 

When Grian’s hour is up, he gathers his things, and walks back to the tower. 

Scar calls him on the way. 

“Are you there, G-man?” he asks. 

Grian pulls out his radio from his pocket. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I am. Some kids came and took Mumbo’s bike away earlier.”

“Yeah?” Scar says. “How was that? What did they say?”

“They didn’t know much,” Grian says. “A couple of seasonal workers. But it’s fine, I guess. I know the main office will be looking into this again. They told me there might be some aerial searches in the future. I just wish it was higher on the priority list, I guess.”

“Well, they have their priorities and we have ours,” Scar declares. “But I think I can shed a little light on it, maybe. I spent most of the morning on the phone.”

It’s kind, what Scar is doing for him. That Scar is helping him like this at all, not even accounting for spending time scouring his notes from the prior season or spending all morning on the phone. Grian needs to thank him, or convey his appreciation somehow, or apologize for snapping at him so much, but instead all he says is: “What did you find?”

“I wish I had better news,” Scar says. 

Grian locks away the part of him that is always stabbed with instant anxiety over statements like that. He takes it, locks it away, and smooths it over. He’s walking on the trail back to the lookout right now, one foot in front of the other. He can handle just another conversation. 

“Well, I seem to always be lacking in good news,” Grian jokes lightly. “So just give me what you got.”

“I talked to a friend in the main office, she’s really sweet. She went to pull the records for me.”

“They’re still on file? Good.”

“Everything’s on file, Grian,” Scar says. “The government will keep an old shoe for a decade if they think it’s a record, let alone anything that relates to an open case.”

Grian grimaces a little. “Well, go on then.”

“She found his backcountry permit information from last year. And…” Scar trails off for a bit. “He’s permitted for Cloud Lake Trail. He even had designated camping spots, she even told me which ones.”

“So the trail was open?” Grian says. 

“Not exactly,” Scar says. “The trail was closed.”

“What?” Grian says. “They permitted him for a closed trail?”

“Apparently?” Scar says. “That’s what I got.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew.”

“What else did she say? Who issued the permit?”

“She didn’t say anything else, so I don’t know. I’ve never worked in the main office. I don’t think she was even supposed to tell me that, honestly, but we’ve always got along pretty good since she started working here.”

“Right,” Grian says. “You’re not an information wizard…”

“I have no more information to give, unfortunately,” Scar says. “I am a wizard, though.”

“You are not a wizard.”

“I’m many things, Grian. You’re just a nonbeliever.”

Grian just shakes his head at that, leaving that thread of the conversation behind. There’s just so many questions that keep coming up. 

“So we can agree he was on Cloud Lake,” Grian says. “Right? Regardless of all that, we can assume this right? He told me he was going there, his car was there, he was permitted for it, and someone said they saw him there. So he was there, right? We searched there, and he was there.”

But…

“It seems likely,” Scar says. “At one point, at least.”

“But then someone found his bike over on Pinnacles. How did it get there? Did he go there for some reason?”

“There isn’t an official trail that connects Cloud Lake and Pinnacles. It’s not a loop or a network or anything. Maybe he could have found a way between them or went on an unofficial side trail. There’s a lot of things that look like they could be a trail that aren’t really trails.”

“No,” Grian says. “He knows better than to take an unmarked trail. He said he was getting maps at the office when he got his permit too, so he would have known where the trails were. He wouldn’t have done that.”

“Grian.” 

Just his name, the weight it holds, and nothing else.

Grian’s face crumples a bit. He doesn’t want to admit it. It hurts to admit it.  “Okay, fine!” he cries. “Maybe he did go off-trail, maybe he did make a mistake, whatever. But it’s not his fault if something bad happened, okay? It isn’t.”

There’s another option to all of this that Grian hasn’t said out loud yet. He’s been thinking it off and on though for a long time, as he tries to fit these pieces into the larger puzzle. Nobody had any reason to think about foul play but him. There’s no evidence. But what other evidence do they have?

He went camping. He went missing. The search failed. Some of his belongings were found in the wrong place. 

And that is, essentially, it. 

“Do you think what happened to him…” he trails off. “Do you think it could have been someone else?”

Maybe Mumbo never did make a mistake. Maybe he was exactly where he was supposed to be, sans closed trail, and there was just something else that got in the way. 

“Someone else?” Scar says, tentatively. 

“Do you think someone out there might have taken him? Hurt him?” Grian is back at the base of his tower now, and he looks up at its spiraling staircase. He begins to take the steps one by one, watching as the horizon slowly inches into view as he climbs above the trees. “Did someone steal his bike? Is that why it’s somewhere else?”

“I…” Scar trails off. “I guess we don’t know if something like that happened. G, there’s a lot of ways someone can get in trouble back here.”

“And one of them could have been someone else,” Grian says. “Doesn’t this connect some of the dots, Scar? So much of this doesn’t make sense, but if someone else was involved, couldn’t that answer some of these questions?”

But the words hang heavier in the air now that he’s spoken to them. 

If Mumbo had just gotten lost, or injured, or something else while alone in the woods, Grian has some hope of saving him. Mumbo is blindingly smart, with an engineer’s eye for designing devices and contraptions. He could be okay. He’s a little lost, but Grian can find him. 

But if Mumbo’s incident was linked to another person, the odds in Grian’s mind plummet. If Mumbo ran into someone bad at some point during his trip, would he have escaped that confrontation? If someone had decided to hurt him, or take him, or rob him, or whatever–then Mumbo’s continued absence just looms more and more ominously. 

Would he make it out of something like that? Would he survive it? 

Grian reaches the top of his tower. If he looks straight through the windows of his cabin and out the other side, he can see Scar’s little cabin far in the distance. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore. Thank you for the new information though.”

He turns his radio off and goes inside. He spends the rest of his work day in silence, watching the smoke twist in the air. 

<< Chapter Five | Masterpost | Chapter Seven >>

[despair-to-future-arcs]

Then Bitch-sensei punished everyone who mean to Hiyoko, even Sonia who no involvement.

Indeed and I don't think I interacted with Yukio after that, given his talent as the Ultimate Counselor and given my role as a princess of Novoselic, I didn't get to...

CHIAKI: I'm sorry, I suppose the teacher made sure you all didn't become friends, right?

No, she didn't. In fact whenever I see him I notice he was a lot less confident and unsure, he even became more withdrawn after that.

CHIAKI: Withdrawn...?

I think so, probably the teacher abuse him too like the rest but I don't see any scars or wounds like with Mikan or Teruteru, he seem mentally fine and isn't ignore... so I'm not sure what happen.

CHIAKI: ...That's quite odd, but was there any other time when you interacted with him?

...Well, there was one moment but it's when Nagi arrive actually.

CHIAKI: I see so when Nagi appear, correct? How was it with her?

Well to be honest, I never really interacted with her much; in fact the whole class wasn't sure what to do with her, probably for many of us she was a reminder of Hatomi's death so we had no idea how to interact with her.

But I...I did remember seeing her leave the Data Processing Room once, teachers are only allow to enter but I'm not sure why but she seem... panic and wanted to leave...

...

...

...

Date: November 8th, 2011

*walks down the hall with some documents* Okay, I finally got all this done; at least now I can finally rest...

*Creeeek!*

Huh? Wait, did someone just leave a room...

*Sonia walks over and saw Nagi leave the data processing room* O-Okay, I got rid of it and now it's on my phone - hopefully that women doesn't see it...

*puts her hands on her headphones* I see so drop the keys elsewhere or give it to someone else and leave in 10 minutes...

Okay thanks!

*Nagi rushes down the hall then...*

Oh uh... Sonia, hello...

Yes hello Nagi, what's going on? Why were in the Data Processing Room, you are aware that staff are allow in there, right?

Yes I am aware I'm not allow in there but it's um...well...

Lo-Look, I don't have time okay?! I have to get out of here, just hold onto this and if the Janitor ask about it, just say that you found it on the floor and pretend I wasn't here, I have to go!

*Nagi pushes the keys onto Sonia and Nagi dashes off* Hu-Huh?! Alright sure thing...!

... (What was that all about, seems Nagi was in a hurry...)

JANITOR: Damnit, where the hell are those keys go? I thought for sure I drop them here.

(Oh right, the Janitor - I better give it back to him...) Excuse me, I think I found your keys; you must of drop them?

JANITOR: Oh hey, there they are! Thank you for finding them, sorry I usually don't drop them but seems they did.

It's fine, sir - I know that it's not easy to keep track of things but hopefully you can get back to work.

JANITOR: Indeed, usually I don't drop but well hopefully I won't lose them again; I gotta get back to work...

Right... I need to bring something to class, it was nice talking with you.

*Sonia walks away and then heads for class which then she bumps into someone*

Oh Sonia...hey...

Hello Yukio, I see your in class again; I suppose your working on your counseling notes, right?

Note...?

Yes notes Yukio, I remember helping you one on one, remember? I'm sure that they'll prove useful, correct?

...?!

Uh... yes, yes they do; you've been... quite helpful, ma'am...I better get going... *Yukio walks away, he doesn't seem happy*

Is... Yukio okay, did something happen?

Nothing at all, you don't need to worry - he was just struggling, anyway Sonia did you finish all the papers I ask for?

I did, he-here you go... *hands the papers over to the teacher*

[fnaffersblog]

Okay hold on HOLd UP

Spoilers below for 'Earth's ORIGIN STORY in VRCHAT'

Trigger Warning below cut for: Cursing

Not five seconds after making a 'LUNAR!!!' post we get Earth lore, I am being fed today on the richest of content.

Look look look I get it The Princess and the Pauper movie is great but you cannot go wrong with Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus okay? Alright? This is now. This is now a Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus blog alright? In this house we love Barbie and the Ma

Princess and the Pauper came out in 2004 for anyone who was also wondering, but didn't look it up.

Lol.

The return of the true villain of the series: That one fuckin bouncy, physics defying plush cylinder in the theater.

The music change had me wheezing, the fucking dramatic chase music for this bouncy toy.

Followed by all three of them legitimately walking around trying to catch the damn thing.

I'd love to see an episode where they have a discussion, like a serious discussion or something in the theater, and someone throws the toy and it just bounces around forever while they're having a serious talk, and it's played completely straight the thing is bouncing and no one addresses it or tries to catch it this is wishful thinking but the idea had me laughing so hard i forgot hwo to use punctuation

Sun and Moon sitting down on the little plushies seats like kids listening to story time was so cute.

"You will refer to me as Creator" "Hello Father!" "That works as well I suppose!"

It's strange seeing how... kind? The creator is towards Earth. Like, he's always been kinder to Earth than he has been to Sun or Moon or Killcode, but it's still weird. Like, he lets her decorate her room and got her movies in preparation for her activation, and doesn't get upset when she calls him father, and he's gentle when he asks her to leave them at the end.

"I abandoned mortal flesh for eternal life as a brain!" "Oooh! That seems clever!" Lol

Huh a Garbage Guy.

...

BLOODMOON'S GARBAGE GUY??? HWAT????WHAT>>>???

I like... whatever is going on between Garbage Guy and the Creator. Like, GG is so annoyed with the Creator, but he's speaking so casually to him? Exasperated with the Creators antics. They're like... a goddamn sitcom couple or something. The Creator gives no shits about this guy's irritation. They remind me of Chatot and Wigglytuff from PMD:EoS.

So, Earth was activated around November-December 2022, during the Bloodmoon arc. She showed up in... April? I think? Late March, early April? Though she said she got lost trying to find the daycare/Sun and Moon, so she left/was sent away from the Creator sometime just before that.

Also, whos they? Fazbears? Sun and Moon? Some third party? Why would they get shut down? I may have missed something. I assume it's Fazbear's inc the two of them are talking about.

Earth raising her hand to ask questions.

They have a connected background??? The Creator got the garbage can stuck on this guys head?? Did he make him immortal too, or did he just get hired because he was immortal? What's the dealio with these two?

"Why do you have a trash can on your head?"

"Why don't we ask your Creator, hmm?"

*THE EYE*

"Can you not, with the whole brain eye thing!?"

"IT WAS UNINTENTIONAL!"

I'm crying it was mostlikely a misclick im crying that was so funny

"Um. You see. It's a, um, fashion trend that he's trying from another country."

"Oh fashion trend today is it?"

WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE ARE THEY DIVORCED WHAT AM I LOOKING AT This can't be just me can it?? I want more of it.

"Too bad. My lab." LOL

"I acquired the entire collection of Barbie movies!"

Creator enforces gender 'norms'. Asshole!

I know there's other things happening this episode but. "Was that all?"

"Nooo I wanted to ask you TAKE THIS DAMN THING OFF MY HEAD!"

Also is that the Arthur jingle? Like, the scene transition jingle from Arthur? That's what it sounds like.

"He could see?!" THAT'S what you're taking away from this Moon????

Earth out here being very right about the Barbie Rapunzel movie too, that magic paintbrush was banger, I wanted one too.

This episode was fuckin' fun. So many good quotes, I was laughing the WHOLE time. Also we might have a set up/ worldbuilding for the Creator's enemies and also more Creator and Garbage Guy stuff. Still wondering if he's dead. StG Killcode mentioned putting him to eternal rest at one point.

Also the thumbnail, again the thumbnail! IT's so pretty! The details are amazing, I wish I could look at them closer somewhere. Do we know yet who does them? I've seen suggestions in the comments of both videos featuring art so far that these new ones are done by Kiwi_Artz, but they aren't credited in the descriptions and they haven't post the thumbnails on Twitter anywhere. :(

I feel like this will most likely be the last calm episode before the 16th. This feels like a 'calm before the storm' situation and I cANNOT wait. 9 days till the 16th, that's probably 4-6 lore episodes/ 5-6 VRCHAT episodes, presuming anything is going to happen on the 16th. I'm both not ready for it, and 100% ready for it.

[jammie3132]

Sir Knight and Prince Charming, Ch. 6

Fandom: Glee Pairing: Blaine Anderson & Sebastian Smythe Chapter Title: Plot Change: Prince Charming Edition AO3 Chapter Summary: Still reeling from finding out Sebastian was Sir Knight and his break-up with Kurt, Blaine keeps getting hit with more and more information. When he doesn’t know how much more he can handle, he is offered a lifeline from an unexpected source. Will this (FINALLY) lead him to his Knight in Shining Armor? Chapter Note: This is the part where I say I used canon dialogue in this chapter, although I rearranged it to fit my narrative. I have also never been associated with the television show Glee or any Ryan Murphy properties…because if I was, I wouldn’t write “fix it” fics.

WARNING: IMPLIED SELF-HARM OF MINOR CHARACTER DISCUSSED. What happens doesn’t involve self-harm, but I could see how it could be interpreted that way.

WARNING NOT RELATED TO THE SELF-HARM WARNING: Death of a non-canon character is briefly discussed.

“What did you do?!”

Santana smiled as she turned to face the personification of rage she created. “Whatever do you mean?” she asked with feigned innocence.

“Where are my clothes?! And gel?!” Before she could answer, Blaine rushed past her, straight to the closet in the office where he and Sam were storing their extra clothes during the remodel. The only boxes with his name were the two shoe boxes with his bow ties. “Where are they?”

“Stop whining, I left you clothes.”

“Two pair of basketball shorts and my superhero t-shirts…”

“And a hair and makeup person Annabelle knows recommended the hair serum I left in the bathroom. He swears it’s the best on the market.”

“Annabelle?”

“You said, and I quote, Now that I’ve broken up with Kurt, it might be time to make some other changes as well. I was being helpful.”

“Where…are…my…clothes?!!”

“In the dumpster out front…under 500 pounds of rubble. That’s what you get for playing around in the studio until 6AM and then sleeping until noon.”

“I have dinner with my dad tonight! I can’t go in this!”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. I took care of clothes for dinner tonight and tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Since there’s no work being done here, we’re going shopping. Your mom said she’d talk to your dad about taking care of how we’re paying for everything.”

It took Blaine a moment to grasp what she said. “You called my mom?!!!”

“Texted. She’s in LA with Cooper so 3 hour time difference and whatnot. Did you really think I’d do something like this without approval from my boss?”

“FUCK!”

Blaine stomped out of the office and back down to the basement. He called Sam to vent before confronting his mother. His so-called best friend wouldn’t stop laughing…jerk!! He hung up and was ready to toss his phone when he received a shock 10x’s greater than discovering his wardrobe was gone.

“Hello, Blaine. It’s good to see you.”

Wes Montgomery

The person who befriended him when he didn’t trust people.

The person who not only convinced him he could be a Warbler but lead the Warblers.

The person who (for a short time) became the brother Cooper never was.

The person who told him the motto Once a Warbler, Always a Warbler no longer included him.

“Wes? Hi…um, hello. How? How do you know where I live?”

“Annabelle”

Blaine motioned for them to move their conversation into the lounge. “Annabelle? I’ve known that woman less than a day and she’s already entrenched herself in my life.”

“Would you expect anything less considering the way Sir Knight described her?”

His former mentor’s question was more surprising than the fact he was there in the first place. “You know about…?”

“You and Sebastian reconnecting? Yes, we all do.”

“I didn’t know Sebastian was still in contact with all of you. I mean, Sebastian left Dalton and moved back to Paris…again, none of my business, but can I ask a question?”

“Yes”

“If Sebastian left Dalton a couple of days after I said No Thanks, how was he performing at Sectionals in November?”

“What do you know about Sebastian’s parents?”

“They dumped him on his Nana when he was 2 years-old. He didn’t see them again until he was 16 when they ripped him away from everyone and everything he loved and brought him here. His dad had somehow become State’s Attorney but wanted to run for higher office. They wanted Sebastian in Ohio to present the illusion they were a happy family.”

“That’s about it. And while he’d made connections here, his plan was always to return to Paris when he turned 18.”

“Which was 2 days after Sam and I took McKinley’s trophy back. Why didn’t he say anything?”

“Would it have made a difference?” Wes knew he wouldn’t get a response, so he went on. “Sebastian’s parents fought his return to France, filing a petition with the court stating even though he was 18 and legally an adult, since he had yet to graduate from school they should retain parental custody. The court denied their claim but since his father was State’s Attorney, he was able to change the outcome…at least on paper. The French authorities had no choice but to send him back to Ohio.”

“That’s why he was at Sectionals.”

“When the Warblers arrived back at Dalton that night, his Aunt June was there with a legal court order emancipating him from his parents. He flew back to Paris the next morning.”

“That’s how he…wait a minute. His Aunt June?”

“Yes, and while I know you have a connection to her, I don’t know how. Any questions you have, you’ll have to contact her.”

Blaine sunk into the couch with a sense of defeat. Maybe Kurt was right about June choosing him to reconnect him and Sebastian, not for his talent. “She’s in France. Her sister-in-law…” He sat up so fast he almost jumped off the sofa. “June’s sister-in-law broke her hip. Sir Knight went to Paris because his grandmother was injured. She’s Sebastian’s Nana. She’s the most important person in his life. He loves her more than anything.” At least now he understood why Sebastian…Sir Knight cut off contact. His entire focus would be on her, as it should be. “Thank you for coming and giving me this information, although I still don’t understand why you did. The last time we talked…”

“Annabelle contacted the Warblers a couple of weeks ago trying to get information on you so I knew she knew, or could at least find out, your address. Answering your questions on Sebastian is the price I had to pay to get it. She thought you deserved some of the basics but couldn’t risk her job.”

“But Sebastian will understand you telling me?”

“He will when he finds out why I did it. Trent wants to see you.”

Trent came to you because he thought you’d get rid of the steroids without destroying the Warblers. Arrange some kumbaya sing-a-long like after what happened with your eye. But instead, the Warblers were disbanded and the New Directions got their slot at Regionals. And despite everything you did, our baby-faced Warbler blames himself. You broke him!!

With the words Wes screamed at him the last time they met ringing in his ears, Blaine hugged his legs into himself as if the action would protect him from the memory. “Why?”

“His counselors suggested it as part of his recovery.”

“He’s still…”

“In Big Sur, yeah. He understands you’ve probably got a lot going on with school right now so, this summer?”

“What would I say? That I fucked up? That I didn’t realize how pissed I still was they left me screaming on the ground after the Slushie? That because of the way I felt I should’ve had Trent call you for help? That I should’ve gone to Dalton and talked to the Warblers before I did anything else? That I should’ve remembered Once a Warbler/Always a Warbler wasn’t only in good times? That I was pissed Sebastian let the steroids happen and the only reason I went to Dalton after the scandal broke was to confront him? That I ran away when you told me he left for Paris months before? That it took months to realize my running away from Dalton that day was no different than what they’d done in that parking garage?”

“Blaine…”

“That I trusted someone I shouldn’t have?”

“Yes, to all the above, but I’m personally interested in the last one. Let me guess…Schuester?”

“I never should’ve let Sam and Finn convince me to trust him. I’m not blaming them. This is all on me. But I told Schuester over and over again, the number one priority was the health of the Warblers. Then it was keeping shit out of the press. Colleges, especially Ivy League, could deny someone admission for just being associated with a scandal. He swore he told the Show Choir Association to keep it all hush-hush. When all hell broke loose, I wanted to believe him. Maybe I was in denial, I don’t know. Then the New Directions were awarded the Regional’s slot. I wanted to protest but the other New Directions were so happy, especially Marley who blamed herself for the disqualification since she was the one who fainted. And we were already going to have to pull people out of thin air to make 12 members…”

“I get it, but how did the Show Choir Association justify awarding the New Directions the slot?”

“A wink and a nod then *poof* a random bylaw is conveniently interpreted to say defending National Champions receive an automatic bid to Regionals. None of the previous champions were ever notified this was an option but the bylaw was (air quotes) always there.”

“Ok” Wes stood up, signaling he was done with their conversation. “This was productive. I believe we both had several lingering questions answered. You are to have Santana contact Annabelle when you’ve made your decision about Trent. I’ll see myself out.”

Blaine followed him, knowing he might never get another chance to say something. “Wes…thank the guys for keeping my secret even though I didn’t keep theirs.”

“How do you know they have?”

“Hunter would’ve blackmailed me instead of stealing the trophy. And then the steroids…“

“It wasn’t Brittany’s fault the Lima education system failed her. The only question we had was, if that psycho cheerleading coach hated the New Directions so much, why didn’t she report they were competing with an ineligible member, especially after you guys won Nationals?”

“Britt was also a cheerleader. If the New Directions had to give back their trophies, so would she.”

Wes nodded while wondering why they’d never thought of the rather obvious answer. It wasn’t like he and the guys hadn’t discussed the topic dozens of times. “Blaine, the guys considered reporting Brittany’s ineligibility after what happened with Trent. Not because of you, your exile was the proper punishment. It was because of Schuester. We knew he was involved, just not to this extent.”

“What stopped them?”

“Between Trent and your eye, we decided the bullshit had to end. Brittany didn’t deserve to become another collateral damage victim. From what we remembered she was a sweet girl, innocent like Trent. Being the reason the New Directions were stripped of any title she participated in would have broken her.”

”Like I broke Trent.”

”Yes”

Wes always did know how to get straight to the point. “Any way, thank you...and thank them."

"I will, but one last thing. The Warblers involved with Uptown Girl explained to me, at nauseum, the connection between you and Sebastian. How Seblaine will eventually find their way back to each other. Despite how we feel about you, Sebastian will always be a Warbler. Don’t make him choose between us.”

“Are you saying if Sebastian and I got together, the Warblers would cut him off?”

“No, that’s not what I said. Think about it. Goodbye, Blaine.”

Not long after Wes left, Blaine grabbed his gym bag. Why not? He was dressed for it. His only regret was he’d have to suppress his desire to hit the heavy bag since he was planning on working on music later. Playing an instrument with sensitive knuckles was never fun.

But DAMN, he wanted to hit something.

He didn’t stay long and on his arrival home he was met with the Habitat for Humanity volunteers loading items into multiple trucks and Santana sitting on the front steps with a notepad. “Keeping track of what’s leaving or plotting to make my life even more miserable?”

“You attend the most expensive arts school in NYC and your parents hired me to handle all those pesky everyday tasks so you can focus on your talent. You’re living in a ridiculously luxurious basement through a million dollar remodel of a house your parents bought for cash. There are currently volunteers hauling perfectly good, but not your mother’s style, housing materials out of the million dollar remodel to build housing for people who can’t afford it. Your life is not miserable, Little Prince First World Problems. You might be dealing with a lot of shit, but…but…choose your adjectives carefully.”

Wow, that was a lot…and true. “Hey” Blaine sat on the steps next to her and bumped their shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I shouldn’t have jumped on you like that. I was talking with the Habitat team leaders earlier and it hit me what could’ve happened if you and your parents didn’t save me.”

“San, after what happened to him, Sam would’ve never let you become homeless. And even if my parents were out of the picture, I wouldn’t have let it happen either. I’m kind of sad you don’t realize that.”

“Thanks, Kid.”

“Any time.” Blaine saw her smile return, but it was obvious the topic continued to weigh on his friend. “But I really do have a major first-world problem. A crazy bitch threw all my clothes in a dumpster!”

Santana laughed so loud, one of the volunteers almost dropped the sink he was carrying. “Check the closet in the office. I had Annabelle call the stylist you went to for the Met Gala. His people sent stuff to tide you over until our shopping spree tomorrow.”

“Stephan? Why him?”

“He had your measurements…duh! Go take a shower. I’m busy and you smell like a boy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Blaine kissed her cheek before doing what she said. His parents’ House Manager was beginning to take her responsibilities way too seriously, but for now, he was ok with it.

A shower wound up being exactly what he needed. And the clothes Stephan sent over were not only perfectly tailored, they were a style he’d been eyeing but was afraid to try. He put on his glasses to rest his eyes then read the instructions for the hair serum. The moment he was satisfied how his curls framed his face, his phone rang. The photo that appeared was a surprise, not as big as Wes, but still a surprise. “Hey, Marley! It’s good to hear from you when we’re not discussing the lockdown. Hold on, you don’t want to talk about the lockdown, do you?”

“No, and I know I’ve kept my distance since I left McKinley, except on the anniversary…”

“Marley…”

“I need a favor. A big favor.”

An hour later Blaine was in a recliner in the theater with his laptop, tablet, phone, and Marley smiling back at him from the screen. Video chats were so much easier using the projector. “Are you sure you want to stay here with all the construction? My mom was serious when she said she’d get you a hotel room.”

“Blaine, all I asked was if you could find out why NYADA rescheduled my audition from Monday to Wednesday. This is too much…way, way too much.”

He agreed it was too much, but it helped ease his guilt. He was fairly certain he was partially responsible for her schedule change…but only like 3%. The other 97% was Kurt’s fault. All NYADA students required to attend a week of seminars on professionalism and legal issues in the entertainment industry? Like that didn’t scream Kurt and his Sebastian/NDA issues.

“I wish you would’ve said something sooner. What were you thinking scheduling both your Tisch and NYADA auditions in one day?”

“I was thinking Mom and I could afford plane tickets to and from NYC but not plane tickets and hotel room. This is all a pipe dream anyway. Even if I get into one of them, I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it. Maybe I should cancel.”

“Concentrate on your auditions. Thanks to my brilliant scheduling you’ll have most of Sunday here to relax before Tisch on Monday and the entire day Tuesday to relax before NYADA on Wednesday. I’m just upset I couldn’t get you out here tomorrow so you could protect me from Santana when we go clothes shopping.”

Marley began to laugh “No can do. I’m totally Team Santana on this one.”

“Well, I’m going to tell her to find you new audition outfits so take that!” Blaine saw Marley’s demeanor change and wondered if he’d push things too far. “Mar, you know I can’t tackle a problem without an immaculately detailed 20 slide power point presentation. You had the unfortunate timing of Sam being in Kentucky. No one ever believed he was the one to reel me in on all of Blam’s Big Ideas but now you know better.”

“I missed you…and Sam, of course. I’m sorry it took the anniversary of the shooting for us to reconnect.”

“You and me both, but that’s the past. Let’s focus on the future.”

When their chat was done, Blaine texted his mom to confirm the car she arranged to pick-up Marley at the airport. It didn’t take long for him to receive a text with a link to the information as well as a reminder of dinner with his father. The constant reminders had him believing this was more than a simple meal because his father was in town.

Something to obsess over later.

He’d awoken that morning (technically afternoon) with a song idea, but the craziness of the day hadn’t allowed him time to get it on paper. He went to the studio to jot down some notes, but for the first time in a long time, everything poured out onto both the piano and sheet music without constant editing and doubt. He was finishing the second verse when he heard…

**Cough**Cough**

“Santana, I’ve told you a million times. If the red light outside the studio is on, it means leave me the hell alone.”

“I’m not Santana.” Blaine closed and reopened his eyes. Nope, he wasn’t imagining this. “You look good. I like your new clothes, and the glasses…and your hair.”

“You’re lying. Go home Kurt.”

“I want to talk.”

“I don’t. No wait, I’ve got a question. How the hell did you get down here? I locked the door at the top of the stairs when I took a shower.” Kurt rocked nervously, telling Blaine he wasn’t going to like the answer. “Well?”

“Um, you didn’t change the code on the lock pad, so I let myself in.”

Shit!

“I said waiting until Monday would be a mistake. Everyone else said you’d never get through the front door. By the way, how did you get through the front door? I want to rub it in while doing my I told you so dance.”

“I didn’t break in, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

“Well, I’m pretty fucking sure Santana didn’t let you in.”

“Fine! There were workmen taking out garbage, so the front door was open.”

“So, on top of getting a locksmith out here ASAP, Santana has to go Lima Heights on the foreman for his men letting a random person off the street walk into the brownstone without finding out who the fuck he was?!”

“Why are you so mad? I’m not a random person, Blaine.”

“After the shit you said to me yesterday, random person is the nicest title I have for you.”

Kurt didn’t roll his eyes, but his frustration was palpable. “I’m sorry.”

Blaine immediate reflex was to say I don’t care but changed his mind. He could count on one hand the times his former boyfriend apologized during their entire relationship. “You’re sorry for…?”

“Look, this isn’t how I wanted this to go.” Kurt took a deep breath before taking Blaine’s hand in his. “I'm here to get you back. I don't mean to blurt it out like that, but for the sake of clarity, you should know that first I'm going to get your forgiveness and then I'm gonna get your heart back.” Blaine stared at him like he’d grown another head, and for some unknown (idiotic) reason, Kurt took his silence as a sign to keep going. “I know I blew it. I blew the best thing that ever happened to me.” He let go of Blaine’s hand and pulled a wrapped gift from his messenger bag. “Please, please open this. It will prove how serious I am about winning you back.”

Damn it! Why did his curiosity keep playing along? “Airplane tickets to Las Vegas? I don’t understand.” That all changed when he looked up from the tickets to find his (obviously delusional) ex on one knee, holding out a ring box.

“Marry me. I called one of those tacky wedding chapels and we have a slot for tomorrow night. We’ll be back in time for classes on Monday. I know you. There’s no way the ridiculous rumors you dropped out and are meeting June in Paris are true.”

“You want to get married? In Vegas? Tomorrow?” Blaine heard exactly what Kurt said but the two newcomers hadn’t. Although, the bended knee/ring combo spoke for itself.

“I understand it’s not the wedding I…we dreamed of but when the brownstone is finished, we can throw one here for our family and friends. Or better yet, we could rent an event space in one of the posher downtown hotels…”

“Enough!”

Kurt turned his head to see Santana, standing quietly, recording his proposal. She wasn’t the problem. It was the man standing next to her.

Blaine moved around Kurt to stand in front of his father. “You have to let me handle this.”

“No”

“Dad, if you kick him out, Kurt will somehow turn my breaking up with him into a Shakespearean tragedy with you as the villain preventing us from being together. He’ll never let it go.”

Charles pulled Blaine into a hug without taking his eyes off Kurt. “Santana, set a timer for 10 minutes. If Mr. Hummel isn’t gone by then, send down some of the construction crew to remove the trash.”

“Dad…”

“10 minutes, Blaine. Santana…?”

“On it, Boss. Where will you be if I need you?”

“In the theater, taking advantage of the soundproofing. Start the timer the moment I shut the door.”

To be fair, Santana didn’t start the timer until she closed the door at the top of the stairs. With the elder Anderson out of the room, Kurt suddenly had plenty to say. “I’d turn our love story into a Shakespearean tragedy? How could you say something like that? I would never…”

“Are you fucking serious? You don’t remember any of the tales of woe you caterwauled during our last break up? I’ve seen the NYADA blogs. How it’s already common knowledge I dumped you leaving no way for you to spin the rumors in your favor without breaking your NDA, again. And because of your inability to take responsibility for anything, your next logical step would be to blame someone close to me since I can’t be turned into the villain this time.”

“But Blaine…”

“Oh, and if I hear or read one mention of what happened between me and my dad and building a car, I will bury you.”

“You can’t do that!”

“True, but remember my new friend Annabelle? She can. With how much she dislikes you, I wouldn’t be surprised if she already started a just in case file. Maybe I can finally get the full story on the Santa Clause who robbed the loft right before your dad and I arrived from Ohio that Christmas.”

The 15 shades of red Kurt’s face turned were amazing. “I…it’s not…what happened to you? You’ve never acted like this! This is all Smythe’s fault!”

“You’re so focused on Sebastian and Sir Knight, you’re blinded to what is now so obvious. We were bad for each other long before any of that happened…toxically bad. I've been telling myself Love shouldn’t be this hard but couldn't find a way to fix our relationship. I'm beginning to understand our problems weren't the accusations you constantly spewed at me.  The problem was I let you do it.”

“Blaine…”

“No, I will not marry you. I don’t even want to be friends with you. Hopefully, someday we’ll learn to be civil considering our shared ties to the New Directions. And since you have no sense of awareness, show up uninvited again and I’ll let Santana call the cops. I’d do it myself, but it would bring her so much joy.”

“Damn straight it would” Santana responded, holding out her phone. “One minute, Hummel.”

Kurt marched up the stairs, Santana right behind. Once they were out of sight, Blaine spread out on the floor and closed his eyes. He thought when a person expelled that much negativity from their system, they were supposed to feel lighter…free. He was just exhausted.

The next thing Blaine knew he was opening his eyes and groaning as he slowly rose from the floor. His dad’s voice was coming from the theater, so he headed toward the room to find the man in a recliner, wearing a pair of Sam’s sweats and a T-shirt, Empire Strikes Back cued on the screen. WTF???

“Santana, consider the dress a bonus for how you tore the foreman a new one. I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time…The restaurant knows to charge the bill to my credit card…Yes, I know Old Homestead Steakhouse is the most expensive steakhouse in NYC…That’s why you’re getting the special menus without prices. And no Googling before you go. Santana, Sleeping Beauty is awake. You and Annabelle enjoy the dinner. Bye.”

“Dad?”

“Nice nap?” Charles rushed out of his seat as Blaine appeared ready to pass out. “Ok, let’s get you to the lounge to lie down. I can turn down the lights, it looks like you’re getting one of your headaches.”

“I’m fine. We’re supposed to go to dinner.”

“We were but when Santana and I found you passed out on the floor, I switched our plans. Santana and Annabelle took our dinner reservation.” Once Blaine was situated on one of the sofas, Charles covered him with a throw blanket before getting Tylenol and a bottle of water. “Here take these. When was the last time you ate?”

“Um…yesterday. Where are you going?”

“To find something for you to eat more substantial than the hot dogs, popcorn and cupcakes I planned for our movie marathon.”

“Sam lives here. We always have healthy food.”

“Another reason why I love that boy. Close your eyes. I’ll be back in a minute.”

As fuzzy as his head was, Blaine wondered if he misheard something his father said. “Did you say you gave Santana and Annabelle our reservation? You willingly gave up your favorite steak in the world for Star Wars and hot dogs?”

“No, I willingly gave up my favorite steak in the world for my son. Close your eyes. That’s an order.”

“Sorry, Santana’s now the boss of me.”

Charles chuckled knowing (but would never say out loud) this was the very reason his wife hired the girl. “Do you want me to call her?”

“No, I’ll close my eyes. And Dad…thanks.”

“Baaaaaassssss, please...more.”

“B…”

“Don’t say it. Anytime I’ve dreamed of being naked in a bed with you, we were never making love. The sex was always hard, pounding, passionate, sometimes pornographic. I want this…I need this.”

“Your wish is my command, Killer.”

Blaine opened his eyes to the instant buzz kill of his dad on another sofa with his briefcase and documents spread out on a coffee table. Hopefully, he hadn't done anything embarrassing in his sleep.

“You’re awake. How’s your headache? You were moaning for a while.”

He thought nothing could knock The Gap Attack out of the #1 position on his Most Embarrassing Moments of My Life list, but he was wrong…so, so, wrong. “My headache is better, but I am hungry. I was probably dreaming of food.”

Sounds reasonable

“Well, I talked to Sam, and he said the best thing to do is give you food in small amounts every half hour. First, were going to raise your blood sugar…OJ, almonds and black tea with honey. He said your headache might be from caffeine withdrawal. Evidently you have quite the coffee addiction.”

“If I’ve got to raise my blood sugar, why not one of the cupcakes you mentioned? I’m assuming they’re the double chocolate-chocolate chip jumbos with hazelnut frosting and a salted caramel core from the bakery by the Plaza.”

“Of, course.”

“To celebrate my breakup with Kurt?”

“Not going to deny it but I’m not nearly as bad as your mom.”

“What did she do?”

“An expensive bottle of champaign was delivered less than an hour after I told her.” Blaine couldn’t help but laugh because that was exactly something his mom would do. “I’ll be back.”

Spending time with his dad like this was nice…and then completely ruined when he remembered he never told his parents the name of the Warbler who threw the Slushie. They never asked, so he let it go.

However, Kurt didn’t. When he reminded his then boyfriend he was the one who gave away the only piece of physical evidence without asking the VICTIM first, he backed off. Now there was nothing stopping him.

When Charles returned, he put the nuts and OJ on the table next to Blaine before handing him the tea. “Drink this while it’s hot.”

“Dad…”

“Drink now, talk later.”

It was the best tea Blaine ever had, but he had a feeling it was because it felt so good going into his system. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten so busy/distracted he skipped meals, but nothing like this had happened. He put down the mug then drank the OJ in less than a minute. Grabbing the bowl of nuts, he adjusted to get comfortable. No, he was already comfortable. This was nerves. “Dad, I need to tell you something and we need to do it now. Kurt knows and I can see him trying to get revenge by telling you first. Do you remember when you were here the last time and Sam and Santana were teasing me about someone named Sir Knight?”

“He was the wrong number June gave you who wound up being your Knight in Shining Armor by helping you get where you were supposed to be. Right?”

“Yes. We never told each other our names. There’s some super-secret mystery involving his career, so it was easier that way.”

“Super-secret mystery?”

“There are $1 million NDAs involved. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I didn’t try to find out his real name, but I did. I knew him. He went to Dalton after I left. His name is Sebastian.”

Charles sat stoically for a few moments then smiled bigger than Cooper at the end of his Free Credit commercial. “Sam was right? Your mother and I didn’t want to get our hopes up…”

WTF??????!!!!!!!

“Dad, I don’t think you understand.”

“Sebastian Smythe was the Warbler who threw the Slushie that caused you to have eye surgery. I know, so does your mother.”

WTF??????!!!!!!!

“You KNEW?! Who told you?”

“Seb. He came to the hospital to meet with us while you were in surgery. He didn’t tell you the night you stayed at his parents’ house after the lockdown?”

WTF??????!!!!!!!

“That was months later. And how…how did you know I was with Bas that night?”

“You call him Bas? That’s nice. And we knew you were there because he texted us when you arrived and left for home. He knew we’d worry.”

“He had your phone number??!!!”

“Seb didn’t tell you…” Charles’ eyes went wide as he leaned back into his sofa. “You two didn’t talk at all, did you?”

New #1 on his Most Embarrassing Moments of My Life list

“Uh…”

“I don’t know if I should give you a birds and the bees lecture or a high five because Seb left no tell-tale marks and you were gone for HOURS!”

“DAD!!!!”

“What? Your mom and I never understood why you went back to Kurt when someone as perfect as Seb was right there, and now it makes even less sense. He moved back to Paris…but Son, HOOUURRS!”

“Dad, stop! Or I might actually pass out this time.”

“Ok, you rest. It’s time for scrambled eggs, Greek yogurt and pushing water to prevent dehydration. Plus, I have to call your mom, or she’ll kill me for not telling her as soon as I found out.”

“Dad…don’t, don’t…just don’t tell her everything.”

“Scared Cooper might overhear?”

“Yes, but also…SHE’S MY MOM!”

It was another hour until Blaine could look his father in the face, but the time gave them a chance to self-evaluate what happened. Both knew the direction their next conversation must take, but they’d been avoiding it for so long it was hard to know where to start.

Upon returning from his third trip to the bathroom Blaine broke the ice. “I’m pretty sure we can cut back on the water.”

“You weren’t as wobbly this time but you’re still awfully pale. Maybe it’s time to go to an ER.”

“I don’t think my continued paleness is from skipping a few meals. It’s me enduring the most embarrassing conversation of my life.”

Charles closed his briefcase and settled in for Part 2. When he invited Blaine to dinner it was to tell him some news regarding both him and his brother. He was beyond relieved it had been delayed because what happened next was going to weigh heavily on his son’s opinion. “Was it embarrassing because for so long you believed I was a homophobe?”

“I knew you weren’t a homophobe, I just thought you didn’t want a gay son. For some reason it was easier to believe than…”

“I would always choose Cooper over you?”

“Well, yeah but both could’ve been true.” Almost 5 years of pent-up anger boiled to the surface and Blaine was finally ready to let it out. “We were supposed to talk, just you and me, the day after I told you. But no! Copper had another one of his never-ending emergencies and you flew out to LA instead. I was so hurt and then the car arrived.”

“It was horrible timing, I know. But when I tried to explain you yelled that because I left you went online to learn about sex from gay porn sites.” Charles’ train of thought was cut-off by an epiphany. ”Blaine, my comment about a birds and the bees lecture…I’m so sorry. Hell, everything I said was inappropriate.”

“At least now I know for sure you don’t have issues with my being gay. But then what was up with the car?”

“Again, I’m so sorry, but I didn’t realize the ramifications of my leaving until I was halfway to LA. I want you to understand I figured out what I’d done wrong before my plane landed.”

“Why?”

“Because I checked my voice mails while waiting for the rental car. It was full of angry messages from you mother telling me I’d better come up with a way to fix my mess or not bother coming home.”

Blaine grabbed his phone and sent an I LOVE YOU gif to his mother. “Is this where the car comes in?”

“I don’t know if you remember, but when you were around 3 you’d find ways to get past the gates and come into the garage when I was working on that old Camaro I rebuilt. You wanted to help so badly I’d lay out my tools on the floor for you to bring to me. Some of them were so big and you were so little…”

“I do have some flashes of those memories, but they might be from looking at the photo album full of pictures Mom took.”

“Your mom does love to take pictures.” Charles didn’t want to admit he’d forgotten about the album. Yet another way he’d failed Blaine. “In less than a month I didn’t have to point them out, you knew every tool, even the sizes of wrenches and the difference between Phillips and Flat Head screwdrivers. But I’d bought the car for Cooper’s 16th birthday and he didn’t want it so I sold it. I was so upset but didn’t consider you would be as well. Then your mom bought you your first violin and your path as a musical prodigy began. Son, I didn’t get the car because I wanted my straight son back. I got it because I wanted my little boy back.”

Blaine went to sit beside his father and dropped his head on his shoulder. When Charles wrapped his arm around his shoulders, he felt a sense of calm unlike any he could remember. In the Anderson family tradition, he decided to crack a joke instead of cry like a baby…for now. “I’ll always be your little boy. Cooper is 6 inches taller than me.” Laughter was followed by a kiss on the head, a gesture usually performed by his mother. Speaking of… “You never told me why Mom is in LA. What emergency did Cooper have this time?”

“None” Blaine lifted his head, his eyes clearly saying Bullshit. “I’m serious. Cooper turns 30 next month and will receive what remains of the trust fund his mother set up before she passed away. Let’s just say it’s significantly smaller than he anticipated.”

“Can I ask why?”

“His mother’s wishes were upon his graduation from high school, Cooper was to receive a monthly allowance from the trust. The rest could be used for college, a gap year backpacking through Europe, a wedding, a house…things like that. Beverly came from an extremely wealthy family. Did you know that?”

“Oh, yeah. Cooper mentioned it several times.”

Charles shook his head as this was something he should have guessed. “When we found out she was sicker than we thought, she told me she wanted me to find love again and have more children. She knew I would never accept her money to take care of our son, so we compromised. I’d support Cooper’s childhood and she’d take care of him as an adult.”

“That’s an…um, unusual arrangement.”

“You don’t argue with a woman with Stage 4 cancer who is leaving her baby behind.”

Blaine had no comeback for that. “But of all the things you listed, the only one Cooper did was buy his condo.”

“He had all those emergencies, as you love to call them. I took care of whatever mess he got himself into but your mom’s a bookkeeper. She kept every single receipt. We told him we were going to do this before he left for LA but he conveniently forgot.”

“That trust must’ve had a ton of money if it’s not empty.”

“It did at one time. However, the reason there's anything left is because your mother and I agreed to pay half of his expenses, except his condo, until the money was fully his. We knew his moving to LA was going to be a disaster. We didn’t want him to drain the trust before he tuned 30 and had hopefully grown-up. Don’t laugh… Also, I can admit a large part of Cooper's issues stem from me always being the one to fix his emergencies, not him. But I was such a mess when his mom died, I could barely get out of bed let alone parent a baby. Thank God your mother showed up in my life because I was beginning to consider Beverly’s sister’s offer to adopt him.”

“And that guilt never really went away?”

“Nope. I’m not giving you an excuse, I’m giving you an explanation, or at least the best one my therapist and I came up with.”

Ok, that was shocking. “You? Charles Anderson went to therapy?”

“I know I fought the idea of family therapy, add it to my list of failures. But 6 months ago, when I got a reminder from the lawyers about Cooper’s trust, I made a decision. The moment the money was his, he’s on his own. No more financial assistance, no more running to his rescue. I thought therapy would give me coping mechanisms to not give in again.”

“Great! But you still have answered why Mom is in LA and not you.”

“She’s laying the groundwork. When Cooper heard about this place and how Sam got the lead in the Magic Mike musical, the movie he starred in…”

“Channing Tatum starred in the movie.”

“Not according to your brother.”

Blaine braced himself, afraid to ask the question he already knew the answer to. “What did he do?”

“He put his condo up for sale and demanded to be included in the remodel since he needs this place when he moves to NYC to launch his Broadway career.” Charles tightened his hold on his son to keep him from freaking out. “Since I was supposed to meet with the record label people, your mother went to tell him we had other plans for the brownstone so he might want to get his condo off the market.”

Blaine let out an audible sigh before asking “Are you and mom moving to NYC?”

“Our original plan was for you and Sam, and now Santana, to live here until you graduate and then we’d sell it. Then you and your friends discovered what happened down here and named the basement Blaineland. Remember when I said Cooper’s mother wanted me to find love again and have other children?”

“Yeeeeessss?”

“Without my knowledge, she set up a second trust for any future children I might have. We’d wanted to have a large family so I’m assuming she thought I’d have many kids and not just one miracle baby. Because of this, all the money is yours. Sorry we didn’t tell you sooner, it was never the right time. Because of that we didn’t use the money for NYADA this year.”

"Take it back!”

“If you insist, we’ll talk about it later. Let me finish what I have to say first.” By this time Blaine was speechless so he nodded as a signal to continue. “Since your trust has the same stipulations as Cooper’s, it meant you could buy a house with the money before turning 30, so we put this place in your name. The brownstone is yours.”

This time his father couldn’t hold him down. “You wouldn’t use the money for NYADA, but you bought me a fucking house? Are you hell bent on watching me pass out?”

“Hadn’t you noticed despite Santana mastering your mother’s insane lists, there were always questions only you could answer? Do you prefer this or that color for the bathroom walls? What would be best…the new fridge/freezer to be stainless steel or blend in with the kitchen cabinets?”

Blaine practically fell back to where he’d been sitting. “Sorry about the curse word.”

“You’re an adult now and with what I’ve dropped on you, I’m surprised that was your first F-bomb.”

“Was this what you wanted to talk about over dinner?”

“Yes. Are you ok? The color is leaving your face again.”

“Dad, this is insane.”

“Why? Blaineland is perfect to help launch your music career. And another thing, whenever we gave Cooper money, your mother and I set the same amount aside for you. There’s more than enough to live off for the next 10 years, even paying Santana’s, or whoever’s, salary and the benefit package we put together.”

Just when he thought he’d regained his bearings, Blaine was once again overwhelmed. After his conversations with the New New Directions earlier that week, he’d begun to analyze all the decisions he’d made since the lockdown, and he wasn’t proud of most of them. Then the over the past 2 days that analysist stretched to cover the last 4 years…Kurt, leaving Dalton, Sebastian, Cooper’s fake attempt to repair their relationship, the mess with Kurt at the start of Senior year, No Thanks, Trent, getting back together with Kurt, choosing NYADA instead of Julliard or Tisch, Sir Knight, June, breaking up with Kurt…again, Wes, Kurt’s ridiculous proposal, his yearlong writer’s block when it came to love songs, this evening.

It was all too much. Hopefully, his father would understand.

“What you and mom, even Cooper’s mom, have done is amazing but a lot of things have happened in the past couple days that have my mind spinning. I know everyone talks about me having OCD but I don’t think it’s as big a joke as we think. Right now, I’m so overwhelmed I can’t process it all.”

“Do you think that has as much to do with how you’re feeling as the fact you forgot to eat?”

“More…I think it has everything to do with my health this evening. I know NYADA costs a lot of money…”

“Is this about Santana and what she said about First-World problems? She told me she’s really sorry…”Charles heard Blaine sigh in exasperation “Sorry, lips zipped.”

“Thank you this is hard enough. I, I…I don’t think I can go back.”

The elder Anderson smiled wider than he had when he found out Sir Knight was Sebastian. “When you were lying here, looking so pale, I thought of suggesting leaving NYADA and going somewhere out of NYC to rest for a while. Someplace by the water or in the mountains. But I know how you feel about running away from things, so I didn’t know how to address it.”

“I think this time I wouldn’t be running away. I’d be running toward something.”

“Sounds like you have an idea.”

“I do. I want to go to California for a couple of months until Sam’s opening night.”

“You want to go to California, where your brother is? I don’t think that’s going to help your stress and anxiety.”

“I don’t want to go to LA. I want to visit an old friend in Big Sur.”

7AM THE NEXT MORNING

Santana knew she was going to hear shit from Blaine about her so-called walk of shame and she couldn’t care less. She really liked Annabelle…like Brittany level like. But since she was leaving for Paris tomorrow night, with no firm return date, they both thought it would be a good idea to determine whether or not a long-distance relationship was worth it considering they’d only known each other 2 days.

Oh yeah, so worth it.

She went to the office to get a change of clothes before heading downstairs to shower. Hopefully, Blaine had a good night’s sleep. He looked awful the last time she saw him, but they had a busy day of shopping ahead.

When she got downstairs, she didn’t see Blaine in either the lounge or studio. The bathroom door was open, that left the theater. Why would he sleep in there? Did he and his dad fall asleep during their movie marathon?

The theater was empty as well. However, Blaine’s smiling face was on the screen and the remote had a Play Me post-it attached. If he’d talked his dad into getting him out of shopping, there’d be hell to pay.

By the time you watch this I’ll be on a plane to Kentucky. I’m surprising Stevie and Stacy for their birthday. I’m also going to fill Sam in on everything that’s happening. He’ll be back tomorrow instead of Monday and will let you know what’s going on. I’m sorry I don’t have the time and where I’m going doesn’t allow cell phones. I will write you a letter once I’m settled.

Oh, Marley is going to call around noon. Take the call.

Nothing has changed…except the fact the brownstone is mine and I’m technically your employer. I won’t say boss because we both know who the real boss is in the house. I trust your judgement picking out furniture and any remaining remodel details. I love Sam but I don’t want bean bags in front of a 72in TV in the living room. That’s why we have the theater. And just because my clothes you threw out were some interesting colors, it doesn’t mean they should be considered for my bedroom walls.

When I say my bedroom, I mean the one that shares a bathroom with Sam’s. Like I said, nothing changes. You keep the master and private bathroom. We both know I’ll sleep most nights in Blaineland when I get home.

And Tana, thank you for sharing with me the other night. Because you were so brave, I was able to do the same with my dad. It was amazing, possibly life changing. You keep saying my parents and I saved you but you, my Heroine in High Heels, will never understand how eternally grateful I am you are in my life.

There’s a gift for you on the concession stand. Bye for now.

Santana hadn’t noticed the piece of paper on the counter. The dork should have warned her not to read it alone.

I, Blaine Devon Anderson, hereby enter a 5 year rental agreement with Santana Lopez with $0 due at the first of every month. She is free to end or extend the agreement at any time

This agreement is not contingent on whether or not Miss Lopez remains in my employment

Miss Lopez acknowledges she will be living with the loud, nerdy, sometimes stinky and messy, but always loveable, Blam…and possibly another roommate in the fall (More information to come)

Miss Lopez also acknowledges Sam will be getting a dog sooner than later

11 AM SUNDAY…PARIS

Sebastian loved the smell of Paris in the Spring.

He hadn’t spent much time outdoors since his arrival…driving back and forth to Château sur la colline and pushing Nana’s wheelchair through the hospital’s gardens. But every day at this time he got around 30 minutes to come outside, sit on a bench and just breathe. It was the time his grandmother’s nurse would come in and say the 2 magic words…sponge bath.

As much as he loved his Nana, he wasn’t hanging around to see that.

*Groan* “You look like shit. What did your parents do this time?”

Standing in front of him was the last person he expected to see…ok, second to last. “Stephan, what the fuck? Don’t you have several A-listers to style for the Met Gala in 2 weeks?”

“You thought I wouldn’t come? I’m pissed I couldn’t get here sooner, and I’m stunned I’m not bailing you and/or Grandma June out of jail. I heard you finally got proof your parents were there when Aunt Juli fell. Where are they now?”

“In the wind as usual. I’m sure they’ll slither back when Nana is released.”

“She’s not going to a rehabilitation facility?”

“We can get all the equipment she needs and hire private nurses and physical therapists. Plus, now I’ve hired double the security and the DGSI is involved.”

“How did that happen?”

“You’re kidding, right? First of all, there’s a restraining order…”

“Which should be handled by the police.”

“And secondly, you don’t get elected in this country unless Nana gives you a public endorsement.”

“Ah, yes, how could I be so stupid?”

“Because you are that stupid.”

“I love you too, Cousin.”

Sebastian stood and stretched. “Come on, Nana should be done letting the nurses make her even more beautiful.”

“No, I’ll go. You sit back down.”

“No, I have to go…”

“Sit down Seb.”

“Fine, but why the fuck are you so adamant about it?”

“Here” Stephan handed him the gift bag he’d been carrying, which Sebastian assumed was for his grandmother. Inside the bag was a box and inside the box was… “A cronut?”

Stephan didn’t answer, just handed his cousin a letter and walked away.

To my Sir Knight from your Prince Charming

TBC in Chapter 6 Plot Twist: Sir Knight Edition

Notes:

There are a few storylines I completely ignore. Kitty giving Marley an eating disorder is one of them. Blaine’s overall attitude/involvement with reporting the Warblers for steroids never felt right (besides the obvious the ND were disqualified at Sectionals). Taking down Hunter was one thing, but in the “Big Neck” photo montage, there were Warblers who were at Dalton in Season 2. Yes, the Slushie is in between, but still…Also, Sebastian wasn’t in the montage and Trent doesn’t mention him when talking with Blaine, Sam and Finn. That’s my justification for he wasn’t there. Explaining how he didn’t know and still competed at Sectionals was the hard part. As for Wes' attitude toward Blaine...The two of them are often written as either big brother/little brother or mentor/mentee. I chose to write Wes where his loyalty was to the Warblers as an institution, with no sympathy for those who broke the OAW/AWA code. It was hard to do. I kept wanting to make it ok for Blaine, but not this time. Previously Unaired Christmas was Episode 5x08 but it was originally supposed to air in Season 4. If both 5x08 and 4x10 (the episode that aired in its place) are canon, then Kurt was left tied up and gagged on his bed by sexy Santa right before Burt arrived to tell his son he had cancer, bringing Blaine along so they could sing their Christmas duet.🤮 A 3 year-old carrying tools is totally unsafe but this would have been in the 90’s. A lot of things that are seen as unacceptable today were fine back then. There were a lot of events I wanted to add to Blaine’s conversation with his father, but felt if I added any more it would bog down an already over-stuffed section. Unanswered Seblaine questions will be in the letter, but if you’re curious how I would have handled something between Blaine and his father that I didn’t address, ask.

[reaper-bloodmoon]

TSAMS Continuity AU: "Earth Is In EXTREME DANGER?!" .....But Something Is Off

[November 18th, 2023]

[Earth yawns as they wake up on the balcony in the side daycare room, rising to their feet and pushing away the clutter surrounding her.]

Earth: Hoooh....man that was nice. Now to wake Lunar-!

[Earth blinks and notices that Lunar isn't visibly in the room, walking down the stairs and searching the foam pits. Worried, they call Monty up to see if they've seen Lunar. Things seem to be playing out relatively the same as in the canon timeline....]

[Earth ends the call and heads out for the main lobby, reeling back at seeing a young looking animatronic standing there, specifically looking to be in their early adulthood years.]

Earth: Um...hello? I'm uh, I-I'm looking for someone important to me, have you mayhaps seen them?

[The animatronic turns around, revealing themself to be Luna, one of the Celestial Triplets...something was definitely off about it though.]

Luna: Oh...?

Earth: Yes, his name is Lunar, he's about this tall.

[Earth gestures with her hand, though keeps herself wary of Luna subconsciously.]

Luna: Lunar....My my, has such a similar name to mine. I'm Luna.

Earth: Luna....where have I heard that name before? Maybe it's just a coincidence. It's nice to meet you and all, but I really need to find out where Lunar is so...I'm just going to go...

Luna: Aw...so soon?

[Luna said it in a mockery of disappointment.]

Luna: And to think I haven't even gotten a sweet taste of your thick, juicy oil~

Earth: I...w-what?

Luna: Oh...it's just....your oil, I can hear it pumping and flowing through your body, it's just perfect for making it stronger~!

[Earth backs away as Luna's eyes flash to a red color, her body twisting, cracking, morphing, and mutating into a giant centipede monster straight out of Murder Drones. Luna's eyes stare hungrily at Earth, her maw drooling excessively. Earth tries to activate her security defense protocol but all they get are error pop-ups indicating that something has gone wrong.]

Earth: No no no no! Please no, activate!!

[Luna's hungry gaze intensifies as Earth tries to run away and get her security defense protocol to work, chasing them down as it laughed maniacally. Earth would proceed to scream and beg for Luna to stop, the mutated Celestial Triplet digging at her and tearing her apart, consuming an excessive amount of Earth's oil and even bits and pieces of their internal workings. Luna stops once they've had her fill, and at that point Earth looks like a damaged, nearly hollowed out husk as she's dropped completely to the floor. Luna would transform back to their normal form, licking Earth's oil from wiping their arm with it.]

Luna: I really must thank you, your precious oil and guts were appetizing!

[Lunar has just come back and nearly throws up from the sight of his sister's nearly hollowed out and damaged husk on the floor. They also are feeling an intense fury and rage, staring in Luna and Earth's direction.]

Lunar: What....what happened?? Earth??

[Luna stops cleaning themself and turns her attention to Lunar.]

Luna: Hm? Oh...you must be Lunar! A pleasure!

[Luna bows politely before returning to its full height.]

Lunar: What did you do to my sister...?

Luna: Ahahahahaha~! Oh, you really don't get it, I needed her oil so I ripped and tore her to shreds to get at it! And had a few snacks along the way...

[Luna grins as if she's lost their mind, which it has. Lunar slowly and angrily approaches Luna, a righteous fury in their eyes.]

Luna: What did you do...to my sister?!?!

[Lunar's weather powers activate, their eyes flashing blue and electricity sparking out of their body. Luna covers her face, reeling back before re-locking her gaze onto Lunar.]

Luna: Oh my...it seems the cosmos were right in their predictions!

[Luna summons her staff through her cosmic magic, surrounding themself with it's aura.]

Lunar: That doesn't matter, I'm going to kill you for what you've done to them!

Luna: I think not, I'm not afraid, Lunar....you know why?

[Luna zips right nearby Lunar, where most of Lunar's abilities are concentrated.]

Luna: Because I have the power of the cosmos, which includes your silly little astrological bodies, on my side!

[Lunar yells as they attack Luna with his powers, only for Luna to dodge away.]

Luna: It's been fun, dear Lunar, but I must get going! We'll meet again someday when the time is right, ahuhuhuhuhu~!

[Luna surrounds herself completely with their cosmic magic, completely disappearing. Lunar hits their head in frustration before calming down and dissipating their powers. They tried to run over to Earth only to collapse from pain.]

Lunar: Ow, ow, why does that hurt so much, is it meant to hurt that much?

[Lunar tries to drag himself closer to Earth before his systems shut down completely.]

Lunar: Earth...please...Earth...!

[Lunar passes out completely, their systems shutting down. Things play out similarly to the canon timeline once more, though more help is required as Earth is in an even worse state than in the canon timeline....]

[pookha]

Dream With Me: Chapter Nine

November 1998

Hermione and Luna have Harry and Ginny over for a visit. Luna and Ginny both get drunk. Hermione and Luna share a sexy dream. Luna wants to move forward, but Hermione is unsure.

Blaise and Jameson had patrol that Friday, so Luna and Hermione had the night free. Harry and Ginny were coming over, and Hermione was doing a quick neatening of the sitting room. Living with Luna had been better than she thought it would be; she had thought they’d be rowing every day about some weird thing or the other Luna believed or Hermione would be short with Luna, but they actually got along very well. The only downside was that Luna was messy. They’d come to an agreement that if Luna’s clutter was bothering Hermione that she could put it on Luna’s bed and it generally worked out.

Today, it looked like Luna had picked up most of her stuff already and Hermione just had to put away potion supplies and make sure that Luna’s painting corner was picked up. Crookshanks followed her around the entire time, watching what Hermione was doing and occasionally commenting with a short meow.

She’d just finished when a knock came at the door. She didn’t recognize the knock, so she tested her new surveillance Charm. She concentrated and waved her wand through the complicated pattern. She saw as though using a Supersensory Charm, which she knew would give her a headache if she did it too much.

Padma was waiting outside the door in the hallway, tapping her foot. Hermione waved her wand to open the doors and let Padma in.

“Hello?” Padma called from just inside the door.

“I’m over here,” Hermione said from near the icebox and hob.

“Oh, is Luna here?” Padma asked.

“No, but she should be back in a few minutes if you want to wait. Want some tea or coffee?”

Hermione took a bottle of anise liqueur from the icebox and put it on the counter.

“Um, no thanks,” Padma said.

Hermione sat on a stool at the bench.

“I’m sorry for how it ended with Parvati,” Hermione said. Padma’s eyes flashed, then she looked away.

“Yeah, so am I. I wish she’d just tell Mum and Dad. I don’t think they’d disown her or anything like that. I think they’d be surprised, but Parvati’s just so terrified of coming out.”

“What did you need to see Luna about?” Hermione asked, curiously.

“She has some Divination notes from me, since I missed it twice this week.” Padma sighed.

“Oh, are you all right?” Hermione hadn’t noticed her being gone from any of their shared classes and Padma hadn’t missed any of her Prefect duties.

“Yeah, I just had to do an extra class for Transfiguration each of those days. I think I’m taking too many classes.”

Hermione’s charms on the outer door alerted her to someone’s presence, but this time she knew it was Luna.

“Luna’s just coming in,” Hermione said, going to the inner door to open it for Luna. Luna had two large parcels in her hands. Hermione took one and they both sat them on the bench.

“I’ll get the notes,” Luna told Padma and disappeared into her room.

“I—don’t break her heart, too,” Padma said and Hermione started.

“What? No, we’re just friends.” She held her hands up.

“Yeah, sure,” Padma said.

Hermione started to say something else, but Luna came back into the room. She handed Padma her notes and Padma thanked her and left. They unpacked the parcels Luna had brought. She’d been to the kitchens and come back with snacks and drinks for their gathering with Harry and Ginny. There was a veggie tray, a couple of bags of Muggle crisps (Hermione wondered who had bought them and where and when), two bottles of wine and glasses, a bottle of firewhiskey, a full-size treacle tart, and more sandwich fixings.

“Looks good,” Hermione said, even though it was only an hour after dinner.

“The elves were very excited when I told them Harry was going to be here. They insisted I take the treacle tart for him.” She tapped the tart’s crust. A bit of it flaked off and stuck to her finger. She licked it off. Hermione realised she was staring at the tiny bit of Luna’s exposed tongue and turned back to setting up a bar on the counter. She thought she saw a small, mischievous smile on Luna’s face.

“Shouldn’t that liqueur stay in the icebox?” Luna asked.

“I’ve charmed it; it’ll stay cold the whole night.” Hermione rearranged the bottles, then Luna was at her side, bumping against her hip.

“They look better organised by size,” Luna said and lined them up. Hermione nodded.

“They won’t stay like that long, but I agree, it’s more aesthetically pleasing.”

“Why don’t you draw? I know you have a good eye and I’ve seen some of your doodles from when you’re relaxed.” Luna took off her robes and went to her bedroom. She didn’t close the door so Hermione could still hear her.

“I just never felt drawn to art. I can draw okay and maybe if I practised, I’d be good, but I don’t feel that inspiration, so whatever I do tends to be flat and lifeless. I could draw that lily you made me, and use the same colours and same lines, but it wouldn’t feel true. It’s like how some musicians are technically proficient, but their music just doesn’t move you and some less proficient musicians have that…I don’t know, vibrancy. You have that and I don’t.”

Hermione saw a flash of skin from Luna’s room and looked despite herself. Luna was slipping on a long blue skirt. Hermione noticed her matching red bra and knicker set and blushed. Luna turned, saw Hermione looking, but didn’t seem to care.

“I’m looking forward to seeing Harry and Ginny tonight. I’m sad Neville won’t be here, though.” She picked up a frilly white button-down shirt from a pile on the floor of her room, sniffed it, then put it on. She started buttoning it, but got the small pearl-shaped buttons mixed up and when she was done, it was one off all the way down.

“Here, let me,” Hermione said from the door of her room. She stepped in and unbuttoned Luna’s shirt. Their eyes met once and Hermione felt the heat of a blush on her neck. She didn’t think Luna could see it, though. When she unbuttoned the last button, her hand ran over Luna’s stomach accidently and Luna put her hand over Hermone’s.

“Slow down, they won’t be here for a while.” Their eyes met again and this time, the blush went up Hermione’s neck and she knew Luna saw it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to touch you there.” Hermione pulled her hand back and started buttoning Luna’s shirt quickly. She fumbled a couple of the buttons.

“It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. Besides, your hand felt nice. Warm and soft.”

Hermione finished buttoning Luna’s shirt and left for her room. She put her head in her hands and sat on her bed with the door closed. Crookshanks scratched at her door. When she opened it, Luna was standing outside poised to knock. Crookshanks rushed in and jumped on the bed.

“Yes?” Hermione asked.

“I don’t remember why I was going to knock,” Luna said and Hermione thought it was the first deliberate lie that she’d ever heard Luna say.

“Want to come in?” Hermione asked. Luna nodded. They both sat on the bed.

“I—it’s okay to look,” Luna said.

“What?” Hermione asked.

“I’ve seen you watching me and I want you to know that I don’t mind.” Luna smiled.

“I actually kind of like knowing there’s someone who likes the way I look.”

“You’re lovely,” Hermione said without thinking, realised it made her think of Ron and laughed.

Luna blushed.

“I’m lovely, then you laugh at me,” Luna whispered.

“I was laughing because I said it without thinking, which means you know it’s true and it reminded me of Ron telling me that in a similar circumstance. I wasn’t laughing at you. I mean it, you’re lovely. You’re the nicest, most genuine person I’ve ever met. Yes, sometimes you drive me mad. Yes, sometimes we disagree or see things differently, but I think that’s because you tend to see the best of people and I tend to be cynical.” She put her hand on Luna’s thigh and squeezed.

Luna leaned her head on Hermione’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re my friend.”

“Me too,” Hermione said.

“I like watching you, too,” Luna said, pulling her head back.

She’s in kissing range, Hermione thought suddenly.

She blushed again and Luna laughed.

“I like the way you push through until you understand something and don’t take any…bullshit…from anyone anymore.”

“Thank you,” Hermione said.

“I also like your elegant neck and the way your hair tangles behind your ears,” Luna said. She leaned forward, but they were interrupted by a knock at the door. Luna jumped back. She used the Supersensory Charm that Hermione had set up and Hermione could feel her presence in it; it was a bit like when they had shared dreams.

Luna’s eyes went blank for a moment.

“They’re here a bit early,” she said. She snapped the surveillance charm shut and Hermione felt Luna’s presence disappear from her consciousness. She felt oddly empty without it.

Luna waved her wand and they heard Harry and Ginny come in. Luna got up first and then Hermione. Harry’s face when they came out of Hermione’s bedroom betrayed his thoughts. She tried to see it like he did and blushed harder. They would have both come out of Hermione’s bedroom, both a bit red in the face and Harry could see the slightly rumpled bed. The only thing saving him from jumping to a conclusion was that their clothes weren’t rumpled also.

Luna crossed the room and hugged Harry and then Ginny swept into the hug. Hermione joined last.

“Glad you could come. We don’t see much of each other outside of class anymore.” Hermione broke the hug first, then Ginny. Luna kissed Harry on the cheek and patted his bum in a friendly manner.

Harry put a small parcel on the table and opened it. He took out some sort of sticky pull-apart pastry and another bottle with clear liquid in it. Hermione picked up the bottle.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Extra-hydrating water,” Luna said, taking the bottle.

“I asked Harry to bring it since I don’t drink much and don’t have much tolerance. I don’t want to get dehydrated if I drink.”

Hermione looked at the bottle doubtfully.

“I didn’t know it was possible to make extra hydrating water.”

“I didn’t either, but if it helps, I’m all for it,” Harry said.

“Is everyone planning on getting drunk?” Hermione asked. She knew she sounded judging and she hated herself for it.

“I am,” Ginny said and Harry see-sawed his hand.

“I’m not planning on it, but I also wanted to prepare for it,” Luna said.

Hermione laughed and grabbed a glass. She poured a shot of the anise liqueur in it and the scent of liquorice filled the room. She downed it quickly, then poured a second.

“Ugh, that smell,” Ginny said.

“Well, I’m not planning on kissing you, so as long as Harry doesn’t have any, you’re all good,” Hermione said and it broke the ice. Soon they were all sitting on the couch and the armchair and chatting. Hermione felt a warm glow that was partly alcohol and partly just being with friends.

“So, Neville and Hannah, huh?” Ginny asked.

“I did not see that coming,” Harry said. “I never knew she was interested in him and I always thought he was interested in Luna.”

“No, it was all just sex and comforting each other,” Luna said and laughed.

“I wouldn’t have objected to more, but I think he was already thinking of Hannah or someone else.”

“Not me,” Ginny said and laughed also.

“Yeah, he knew you were hot for me,” Harry said and kissed Ginny. She returned it enthusiastically. Hermione turned to Luna and stuck out her tongue and swirled it around. Luna knew she was making fun of the way Harry was kissing Ginny and laughed. Harry and Ginny broke apart and looked at Luna, who’d already sat back innocently.

“What?” Harry asked.

“Nothing,” Hermione said, but Luna stuck her tongue back out and swirled it around. Harry blushed, but Ginny laughed.

“Jealous? Want Harry’s tongue in your mouth, too?” she asked half-teasing.

“Sure,” Luna said and leaned forward. Harry pulled away, but then Ginny pushed him and he was kissing Luna. Now Hermione made the same tongue motion to Ginny and Ginny laughed. Harry and Luna broke apart. It had been a very short kiss.

“Well?” Ginny asked.

“Mmm, don’t take this wrong, Harry, but it wasn’t a very good kiss.” Luna laughed and wiped her lips.

Harry laughed also.

“No, not a good kiss. I’d be lying if I said I never thought about kissing you, but that was before…” He looked at Ginny.

“I understand. I feel the same. I think maybe we had a chance, but it passed because I wasn’t ready and you had your eye on someone else.” She pointed at Ginny.

“Yeah,” Harry agreed and sat back next to Ginny again and put his arm around her.

“What about you two? I saw you coming out of Hermione’s room when we came in?” His tone was light and teasing.

“We were just talking,” Luna said and Hermione thought it was a half-lie and the one and half lies she’d heard from Luna today still shocked her. She lowered her head and swirled her ice-water.

“Yeah, we were just talking,” Hermione said, willing a blush to not give her away.

Ginny sensed the awkwardness and turned the conversation to Quidditch. Harry didn’t notice it being redirected and started talking about Quidditch also. Hermione met Luna’s eyes and Luna winked at her enigmatically.

True to her word, Ginny did get drunk. Hermione was warm and slow, just on the edge of drunk and she thought Harry was, too. Luna seemed the worst off of all of them. She’d had several drinks and hadn’t eaten much. She was loud and flushed. She’d spilled wine on her shirt and just dabbed at it. When Harry had offered to clean it up, she’d waved him off.

“I’ll take care of it later.” Her voice was just a bit slurred.

She went back for another glass of wine, and Hermione went with her. She closed her hand over Luna’s wrist.

“I don’t think you should drink more unless you eat some and have some water.”

Luna’s face went red and Hermione thought she might yell, but she closed her eyes and nodded.

Hermione patted Luna’s arm. “Sit down. I’ll get it for you.”

Luna sat back down next to Harry, who pulled her into him. He had Ginny pressed on one side and Luna on the other. Hermione made Luna a pimiento cheese sandwich, something she knew Luna loved and poured her a glass of the ‘extra-hydrating’ water. She sat them both on the table in front of Luna.

“Thanks, love,” Luna said and then corrected herself, “uhh…Hermione.”

“You’re welcome, love…uhh…Luna,” Hermione joked and it broke the small tension. Ginny got more plastered and she had to go lay down on Luna’s bed. Harry went with her to watch over her. Luna stayed on the couch and Hermione on the armchair.

“That was fun,” Luna said, her words no longer slurred.

“Yeah. Do you think Ginny’ll be okay?” Hermione asked and Luna nodded.

“She’s got Harry with her and he’s not too drunk.” Luna patted the cushion next to her and Hermione sat next to her. Luna rested her head on Hermione’s shoulder. A moment later, she began to snore. Hermione laughed and Luna snorted awake.

“Go sleep in my bed, and I’ll clean up.” Hermione patted Luna’s leg. Luna stood and went to Hermione’s room. Just before she could close the door, Crookshanks raced out. Hermione fed him and while he was eating, she put everything away. She briefly considered sleeping on the couch, but then thought her bed was more comfortable and besides, she’d slept in the same bed with Luna before. When she went into her room, Luna was on her stomach on top of the comforter. She’d stripped down to her bra and knickers and shoes. Hermione noticed the shoes and sighed. Hermione treated the stain on Luna’s shirt with a solution she took from her desk, then she took off her shoes and socks, and slid off her trousers and shirt. She unhooked her bra, considered putting on one of Ron’s sleep shirts, then didn’t. She climbed under the blanket and comforter and tapped Luna who stirred.

“You’ll get cold, come under the blankets.”

Luna mumbled, maybe half-awake at most and slid over so Hermione could cover her. When she was under the blankets with her, Hermione felt the heat from Luna’s body and smelled Luna: sweat, alcohol, a bit of lavender and something else…musk maybe. Luna’s breathing eased again and Hermione let it lull her to sleep.

Harry’s lips slid down her stomach to the hem of her jeans. He looked up and saw something, but Hermione didn’t know what. He unbuttoned her jeans and unzipped them. He started to slide her hands inside them when Hermione pushed him away. She knew she was in Luna’s dream and suddenly knew Luna was aware of her.

“Not Harry,” Hermione whispered but what came out was Luna’s voice.

“Okay,” Luna said and Harry changed, grew taller and more muscled, less lean. Neville’s blond hair was resting on her stomach now instead of Harry’s messy black tangles.

“All right?” he asked, meeting Hermione’s eyes. She understood she was in Luna’s body again.

“Yes,” she whispered and Luna said, “Oh, yes.”

Neville slid his hand into her jeans and the pressure of his hand felt so good…so good…

“I…” Hermione said to Luna.

“You don’t have to stay, but I don’t mind if you do.” Luna’s voice tickled her ear like she was next to her instead of subsuming her.

“I…I want to stay.”

She stayed. Neville and Luna moved with the surety of lovers who’d shared each other before. His lips and hands on Luna completed Hermione the same way. When they made love, she made love to him, too, but also to Luna even though she was Luna. Neville touched her and kissed her and filled her. For just a second, he morphed to Ron, but Luna pushed him back to Neville.

She woke up, sweltering in the blankets, sweating. Luna opened her eyes and spun in Hermione’s embrace.

“I’m sorry,” Hermione began. Luna held a finger to her lips.

“I told you that you could stay.” She smiled.

“It was the nicest dream that we’ve shared for sure.” She leaned forward to kiss Hermione but Hermione pulled back.

“I’m sorry,” Hermione repeated.

“Not for sharing the dream, but for leading you on, maybe.”

Luna pulled back.

“You don’t want this?” Luna asked. Hermione heard a tinge of hurt in it that made her think of Parvati.

“I’m not sure what I want. I don’t want to hide. If we do have something, I want it to be out in the open, but I’m not sure I’m ready for it, no matter what I told Parvati. I’m not sure if I’m ready to move on from Ron. I’m just not sure. I do like you, Luna, but I don’t want to be your lover unless I can commit to it. You deserve more. I deserve more. We both deserve to have someone love us who loves us and I’m not sure I can give that to you.”

“I can’t pretend, I think I love you, Hermione, but if you need to wait, I’ll wait. Not forever, but I’ll wait until you’re sure. Maybe until then we shouldn’t share dreams if we can help it.” She leaned forward quickly and kissed Hermione’s forehead.

“Yeah, okay,” Hermione said.

Luna slid out of the bed and dressed. She noticed the spot on her shirt had been cleaned and smiled at it. She left without saying anything more. Hermione heard Harry and Ginny’s voices from the sitting room. She pulled the covers back over herself and lay there. The bed smelled like Luna and Hermione and sex. Hermione was still aroused from the dream and when she closed her eyes, she felt herself back in Luna’s body with Neville inside of her. She wanted release, but also knew that three of her friends were on the other side of the door and decided a cold shower would work just as well, even if it wouldn’t be as satisfying. She sighed, slid out of bed, changed her damp knickers and put on a bathrobe. She gathered up fresh clothes and opened the door.

Ginny sat on the couch, with a hangover potion in her hands. Harry was putting pastry on a plate and Luna was pouring out some more of the ‘extra hydrating water’. They all looked at Hermione when she came out.

“I’m going to go shower,” she said and scurried off to the bathroom. She felt their eyes on them the whole time. The cold shower washed away the rest of the heat of the shared dream and she dressed and went back. Harry and Ginny had gone and only Luna was still there. She handed Hermione a glass of water.

“Want to talk?” she asked.

Hermione shook her head and Luna didn’t push it.

[sincerely-krp]

・❥・

hello! this is admin flora and fauna of daze krp. we were not going to say anything in hopes of this all just going away, however, due to the anons hall of fame seems to be receiving as well as the anons on this blog, we see it fit that we clear some things up.

1st off, we never received hate in or inbox, nor did we ever claim to receive hate. all that we said was that we received strange anon messages that seemed a little passive aggressive. every anon on our page that we received has been posted (minus one asking for a carrd tutorial). it made both admin fauna and i heavily discouraged from opening because of what was happening. we never wished any ill-will towards the hall of fame admins, and all of the theorizing on this blog is getting to a point where it is ridiculous. we are not victims, and we were not bullied by them in any way shape or form. we were just discouraged due to the constant anons comparing our rps to different rps.

we do not want to start anything with any rps or anyone. we just wanted to create a new, inviting, and welcoming roleplay with a fun idea. however, it did not seem to gain much interest, and with the strange anons, we simply decided not to open. once hall of fame posted their ask about why they blocked us, admin flora decided to message them privately and try to communicate. this was the message.

which they then responded to on november 11th which is found in their submission. no further communication was put forth mainly because admin flora sent that message through a tumblr account she does not use (due to being blocked on her personal).however, seeing the continuous anons on this blog theorizing what happened is getting to be a bit much. although we wish things were handled differently, they were not, and everything ended up here. we do not wish for any continued hate, and we would just prefer to put this behind us.

2nd, and lastly, both admin fauna and i were at their roleplay. however, we were there for technically only one day (active) and immediately went inactive due to being busy. after that, it had been a month after when our rp had launched. therefore, we did not come up with the idea for the roleplay as we were inside of it. however, as the hof admins have stated, due to previous copies of their rps, it can cause some speculation. however, our rp was completely based on i-land, along with an entertainment company theme to keep it going once the show had finished. therefore, along with being on a completely different platform, we believed it to be different and did not even once think of hall of fame while forming our rp. although that is hard to prove, there are screenshots of us talking about the rp idea.

with admin fauna and i:

with admin flora’s friends:

the following is a voice note from admin flora explaining the early idea of the rp, which we will obviously not be sharing, but we decided to transcript and write out the entire message which is found below:

“okay. i got too excited, but i’m in the car right now, so i’m gonna kind of explain my idea and what i see for it. so basically, i was thinking, so i-land — i’ll explain what i-land is once i kinda get through my idea. so, my idea is having a newly established— so the premise of the rp would be a newly established entertainment company. it’s a new, shiny thing, and to get people to work there— aka kpop idols— um, they start this reality tv show, which would be based off i-land, and it would start with— i’m going to say 20 [members] for an example. so, it starts off with 20 members, and at the end, so we can have a fair thing, 2 groups will debut. one girl group, and one boy group of 5 members each. ten people aren’t going to debut, right? and so basically how i-land works, like, instead of getting a popularity vote, like how boys planet works, that they don’t get to debut if people don’t like them, in i-land, the members vote each other off in part one. so, the people in the show vote the other members off, but they don’t go home. so, in part one, there’s 2 buildings. the main one with all the good stuff is called i-land, while the other one that’s busted is called the ground. after the members in i-land perform— cause there can only be 12 members there at a time and there’s 23 participants in the show— members in i-land will vote each other off after a performance to the ground. so, if out of 12 members, 4 members were voted off, that then gives a chance for 4 members in the ground to replace them. and that’s how it goes for the first part of the show which is what the rp would be based off of. there is a second part… but… we’re not doing that. so, anyway, this would go on for like 8-10 weeks. after that, we would do a random draw to see who debuts. there’s no point system, so there would just be random events and a random draw to see who debuts. if you do not debut, because we are including an entertainment company, they can be other things! they can be a trainee, debut as a soloist, debut as an actor, become a model, or even work as a staff member. the show would be the main.. premise (?) of the rp, and it would place the members of the rp at a certain place. so yeah, that’s my idea. i dont know if i explained it good but just let me know.���

this voice note was sent before the rp opened, but pretty much when the idea was set in admin flora’s mind. there is not much more we can offer, but we do hope that all hate to hall of fame and any side in general stops. we hope this cleared things up!

at the end of the day, we wish no ill-will towards the admins of all of fame. they have always been great and active admins with long-standing communities. we did not decide to not open our directory because of them, but it was because of the baseless rumors and strange asks we were receiving (which we mentioned). as the hall of fame admins have stated, as admins, it’s hard enough to run an rp these days. we do not wish to continue any baseless hate or any hate towards them and wish them all the best. this was just a matter of miscommunication, however, please do not just assume and run with theories made on gossip blogs! it is very damaging to the community, and we wish to just put this behind us. we will not be acknowledging any further asks about hall of fame or our rp in any setting, and we hope that everything is now settled. thank you.

admin note: all asks about this situation will not be posted, due to both admin teams having spoken! if either admin team wishes to make a response, we will be open to posting that. otherwise, we're moving on!

[kingddduke]

Transcript (with original timestamps) for DSP Reacts to John Rambo and Howard

pt1

0:00 hello everyone out there dark side phil here dsp for sure my real name is phil bernal 0:09 and today i'm doing something that is incredibly different from 0:14 anything that i've really ever done before um in my 14 years of content creation okay 0:22 today i'm going to be responding and reacting 0:27 to a video slash audio recording we'll talk about that in a moment that was put out 0:34 over six and a half years ago okay and you actually see the date right there it was uh november 28 2015 when 0:40 originally this hit the internet was put out there by two people who 0:46 i guess you could call them former friends of mine um who essentially felt that they felt the need 0:52 to respond to a lot of stuff that i had said on the internet about them since i had moved from connecticut to 1:00 washington state which took place in june of 2014 and again you know it's about a year and 1:06 a half later um what i need to do to really give you guys 1:11 a full understanding of the situation is to give you our history because this recording was put 1:18 out on november 28 2015 it immediately starts addressing 1:25 topics and subjects and things and 1:30 without proper perspective of understanding the history of myself and john and 1:37 howard you would not even understand the video um let's be honest this video is six and 1:43 a half years old and many of you today who are viewers and or fans of myself 1:50 and my content on youtube don't even know about the history of myself 1:57 and and these gentlemen because it is long in the past let's be honest here uh this is ancient history 2:03 you know six and a half years since it's really even been touched upon although admittedly 2:10 over the years people always ask me about this they say phil what do you think about that video that 2:16 john howard put out about you back then phil are you ever going to talk to howard and john again will you ever do content with 2:22 them again and i always kind of dodge with the question or very briefly answer it there's been a 2:28 few times where people kind of goaded me into giving an answer during say for example if i'm doing battle royale 2:33 gameplay and that's a lot of gameplay that needs like downtime filled when you're talking to kill time when you're gathering resources or whatever and so i 2:40 have kind of briefly answered and and addressed it over the years quite frankly never satisfactorily 2:48 i don't feel like i should have done it that way i think if i was going to address it i should have fully addressed it in a full-fledged professional manner 2:55 which i i have not to this point okay um and that's what we're doing today all 3:00 right today we're going to go through this entire recording piece by piece 3:06 i'm going to tell you uh about a lot of stuff all right 3:12 essentially what this video is is a way for them to vent because they never did that before the two of them never really 3:17 came out publicly or in in some cases even privately they never really came out 3:24 and said this stuff and because of that a lot of this stuff 3:29 quite frankly i wasn't even aware of all right when this video came out this was like wow news to me 3:36 that some of this stuff was actually happening okay at the same time it doesn't mean that it's because i was 3:42 ignorant of it that it's okay all right one of the major reasons i'm doing this today is to kind of give some 3:48 closure to this subject six and a half years later i have not spoken with these guys since then 3:54 okay we'll talk about that that will actually be one of the subject matters that we will discuss today is why why haven't 4:01 you you guys talked in six and a half years to hash this out we'll talk about it okay but 4:06 what i want to do is not only clear the air but fess up to a lot of stuff because 4:13 i'm a different person now today in 2022 than i was in 2015 4:19 than i was in the years before 2015 when i was actively friends with these guys and doing content with them and hanging 4:25 out with them behind the scenes and all of that i'm a very different person now and if anything one of the things that 4:30 really prompted me to do this was because recently i did a different react event that was dsp reacts to down the 4:37 rabbit hole dark side fill and in that documentary about me that's only about 30 minutes long it really 4:43 goes through my history of content creation and the ups and downs and the things the really messed up stuff 4:48 that i did publicly back in the day okay 4:55 this is an example of the messed up stuff that i did privately back in the 5:00 day and as much as you could say well the public facing stuff is the stuff that everyone deals with cares about 5:06 obviously the fact that all of a sudden these guys who had been a part of my content in 5:12 particular john rambo i will emphasize here was a major part of my content 5:17 for years and years he was in multiple shows play throughs travel vlogs 5:23 and for him to just suddenly not be there anymore and then to have less and less contact less mentioning 5:30 and to the point where now it's like we don't talk about each other anymore the viewers you guys 5:35 all right over the years started to question what the heck happened here what is going on 5:41 to be very how can i say basically 5:47 there's two sides to it and what i mean by that is there's the public side and the private side all right you guys know 5:53 what was made public you saw the recordings you saw the playthroughs you saw the travel vlogs okay 5:58 but there's a private side as well right there's a whole friendship behind the scenes that you guys aren't aware of 6:05 there's discussions and things that happen behind closed doors that are not broadcast but you guys became a part of 6:10 that with the public side and what ended up happening was i feel like over the years the public 6:16 became a major part of that relationship 6:21 because they wanted to see that relationship continue they wanted to see the content continue to come out 6:27 and you will see one of the running themes in this video is that the public were urging us 6:33 on to say something to to interact to do the content we had promised or to say something on one side or the other that 6:39 was always a factor okay um anyway what i'd like to do to start today is 6:45 let's let everyone know one of the running themes in this video is that i unfairly monetized john and 6:52 howard all right and there's a theme of money there's a theme of i wasn't fair with 6:57 money but then i was fair with money it's very confusing uh but one of the 7:03 major points it's actually said like during and then at the end of the video is that 7:08 i tend to find ways to monetize them and i have actively decided that today 7:14 since i will be doing this react event that i am not monetizing it at all there will be no advertisements on the stream 7:20 there are no advertisements on these on-demand videos on youtube at all i've disabled all 7:26 pop-ups any kind of leaderboard there is nothing going on right now in the realm of contributions all right actively 7:34 i've decided that any portion of this should not be monetized if this is a concern of theirs 7:41 that i unfairly monetize them over the years and i'm continuously monetizing them it would be pretty 7:47 dastardly of me two years later okay come back to react to this video 7:55 and monetize it so i'm not doing that okay i could it's within my legal right to do so if i 8:00 wanted to i've decided against it all right maybe back in the day again one of the things 8:05 that's changed about me maybe back in the day i would have i would have been so stubborn like oh it's my right i'm gonna do it i'm gonna make a buck on it 8:11 i'm not gonna do that today all right i wanna do the right thing if i'm gonna address this okay 8:17 um i'm gonna do it in a proper fashion where it's not about that it's about me 8:24 finally after six and a half years telling you the full story from my perspective 8:31 and allowing you to objectively make your own decisions many of you have no idea what this even is about because 8:36 you've only been around for the last seven years in fact looking at my history as a content 8:43 creator i have actually made way more content since i've lived here 8:48 in washington state than when i was back in connecticut with these guys okay so for many of you 8:55 watching this you're like i don't even know the situation so we're going to start from the beginning okay 9:03 back in the day the mid 2000s i was a pro street fighter player i say pro 9:10 because pro entails that you do for a living no one was playing street fighter for a living back then it wasn't 9:15 possible there were no sponsorships no partnerships no tie-ins with anything there were no teams no 9:21 esports leagues it was just grassroots okay and being grassroots 9:26 um basically you could play in every major tournament you wanted and you would never make enough money to make a living 9:33 so i was a competitor i played in tournaments i placed in 9:39 tournaments but i was never a pro because there's no pros back then all right 9:44 around the mid-2000s ibakan began to be known for being a very prominent and high-ranking super street fighter 2 9:50 turbo player in the united states although we can go through the whole story of that i've already addressed that in my down the rabbit hole video 9:55 and you can go watch that video to get the full explanation go watch dsp reacts to down the rabbit hole darkseid phil 10:01 you'll get the explanation about my street fighter days okay but during this time frame of say 2005 to 2007 10:09 people on the east coast of the us started to respect me for the first time as a high-ranking street fighter player 10:15 and when they did the word spread that phil was so good at street fighter you want to play with him 10:20 you know you play with phil you're going to see a top ranking player in person you're going to learn now here's the thing today this thing's very different 10:26 with street fighter today you can go online and play people from all over the world including sometimes if you're 10:31 lucky top ranked players you can do it from the comfort of your own home back then that was not possible if you wanted to get good at street fighter 10:38 you had to play like crazy against as much 10:45 as much variety of competition as you possibly could all right and 10:50 you essentially had to put your butt physically next to someone to play them okay 10:56 so during this time frame i was very friendly with all these players in connecticut who i'd known from over the years and i come home from like evo that 11:03 one year when i did really well and everyone's like oh my god you're representing connecticut in such a huge great way this is when i lived in 11:08 connecticut by the way oh and so i continued to play street fighter regularly 11:14 one day my friend tony who mostly we were known for playing marvelous capcom 2 and capcom resisting 11:20 k 2 together said hey i got a couple buddies who actually like super turbo and obviously 11:26 that's the game you're really good at you want to go play with them sure why not so he took me 11:31 to someone's home i believe their name was jamie and john rambo was there as well 11:37 and this is the first time i ever met john rambo so this is probably between like 2005 2006 i would guess 11:42 um and immediately you know you could tell the guy was 11:48 super friendly he was kind of uh when i first met him i felt like it was almost like a deer in headlights 11:53 moment like oh my god this is a guy who just came back from evo and placed again me i'm the kind of person i never saw 11:59 myself as any kind of a celebrity even in my days as prominent youtuber i i never saw myself in that light i'm just 12:04 a normal guy doing my normal thing but these guys are like wow i get to play a guy who just did really well at evo this 12:10 is cool and that's how our friendship started where it was just us essentially playing street fighter together um and 12:16 practicing and trying to get better and excuse me we basically had kind of a 12:24 i don't know if you want to call it like a like a like a brother [ __ ] brotherhood or uh camaraderie but essentially we 12:30 were the players from connecticut we would travel to tournaments to play video games i would play super street fighter 2 turbo i was still playing 12:35 world versus capcom 2 in other games john primarily was playing super turbo and also capcom vs snk 2. okay 12:42 and i remember those years we basically we just hung out playing street fighter casually and then we would travel to 12:48 tournaments together share that share hotel room split the cost um support each other in tournament you know root 12:54 for each other when we were playing competitively those are the formative days of our friendship okay 13:00 and you know for me at that time in my life i didn't have 13:05 many or any real close friends it was more all my time and effort was put in the competitive street fighter i've 13:11 talked about this in the past that i didn't even really play console video games outside of street fighter it was just focused on street fighter so 13:18 the relationship and friendship that i had with john was primarily street fighter related stuff okay 13:24 now fast forward to years later you can see footage of us at tournaments together 13:30 right you can actually see this from this time like evo east 2006 and evo east 2007 us playing i'm 13:37 rooting for john john's rooting for me you can find some footage of this very rarely because back then it wasn't a prominent thing but you can find some of 13:44 this kind of footage from old school youtube and stuff like that okay 13:49 now years later 2008 i started doing youtube videos okay and 13:55 at that point john is involved in them in a limited capacity whenever i'm 14:01 covering street fighter stuff if i'm going to a street fighter tournament or if i'm covering the launch of street fighter 4 or if john's coming over to my 14:07 place and we're playing some some some uh super two fighter two turbo hd remakes okay that was the game that was 14:13 kind of prominent at the time and we played a lot of that together you could find sets of that and we'll talk we'll actually talk a little bit about that 14:19 he'll talk about it um but really john didn't become a staple 14:24 part of my content until i would say probably mid to late 2010 14:31 when i lost my office job and i started doing youtube full-time and john 14:36 at that point we basically kind of skipped from being just street fighter buddies 14:41 to actual friends like i would say that was the time in my life that i felt like 14:48 john was like one of my best if not my best friend because when i lost my job 14:53 uh in my office job i had an office job for about four and a half years work for a helicopter company and after 14:59 working there for so long they laid me off completely unexpectedly it was so shocking they had given me awards saying 15:05 thanks for going above and beyond at this job and two months later they laid me off completely shocking i don't know what to 15:10 do i had a condo i had car payments i had all this debt in my name and there was no other equivalent jobs in connecticut i could get to make that 15:17 much money i thought i was going to lose everything all right and it was this time when i remember 15:22 having a call to john rambo and john was incredibly supportive to me he was like dude don't worry about it i know you're 15:29 the kind of guy you're gonna recover from this i remember him being so supportive on the phone about it and 15:34 i was like you know john i'm doing some gameplay today dead dead space excuse me dead rising 2 i'm already doing this play 15:41 through and i'm sucking at it i can't get any further in the game this tiger's kicking my [ __ ] ass would you want to come over the game's 15:47 co-op would you want to come over and join me for this and kind of like like right now everyone on the internet 15:53 knows i just lost my job i'm making a video about it and everything but it'll be really nice to have a friend over to come do some gameplay with me that's not 16:00 street fighter let's do something different and that's actually when our 16:05 co-op gameplay began together was that fall of 2010 when it was a regular thing 16:10 before then yeah sporadically we would do some co-op things but primarily was always street fighter [ __ ] and by the 16:15 way i should emphasize none of my content was monetized at this point on youtube i wasn't making money on any gameplay or anything i did with john at 16:22 this point okay it was just for fun i was doing youtube for fun from the years of 2008 all the way to early 2011 it was 16:28 all for fun okay so john and i start doing regular 16:34 cooperative gameplay and at this point we basically kick off what i would consider a real friendship it wasn't 16:40 just street fighter buddies anymore supporting each other and playing street fighting he would come over and we would 16:45 have meaningful conversations about our lives we would hang out for about an hour or more before we ever turned on a 16:51 camera to record any style of gameplay or any kind of commentary because we actually had a running commentary show 16:56 called smart guys on professional wrestling professional wrestling was something that was meaningful to both of 17:01 us we're both lifelong fans of wrestling and we had different perspectives that we could add when we were doing 17:07 commentary on a pro wrestling show 17:14 so john and i were street fighter buddies turned into what i would arguably say 17:21 good friends over the course of several years you know that 2005 2006 we knew each other street fighter all the way through like 17:27 2009 and in 2010 the friendship really kicks off to a real friendship when we start doing things that aren't street 17:33 fighter related okay john then became a stable part of my content 17:39 whether it was smarter guys or gameplay once a week if we traveled and went to a trip for a street fighter tournament or 17:45 we went to a gaming convention he would come along the way john was inspired to start making his own content for youtube 17:50 on his own channel john rambo presents where he would make not only initially gameplay but he would branch out to a 17:56 podcast series called john rambo presents the show in addition to that he did a highly edited uh really highly 18:02 stylized and produced series called straws man hole punch that's about two superheroes 18:08 etc etc okay along the way i turned my youtube presence into a job 18:16 now i never intended for that to happen it was always just a fun thing to do but in 2011 i got partnered with 18:23 machinima i started getting the ability to monetize all of my videos on youtube okay 18:29 and john was a part of that content so at one point we had the discussion well 18:35 i'm making money on these videos now what's fair is fair john should be making a cut of all the content that he's in okay so yes and 18:42 we're gonna discuss that in detail but he did start getting paid for his work with me okay 18:49 over the years this continued you know this continued all the way from 2010 all the way through through trips through 18:55 through all kinds of different series we went to wrestlemania together we went to conventions together we did all this stuff together 19:02 it all came to a head essentially in 2014 because in 2014 i made a life-changing 19:08 decision that i was going to leave connecticut and move across the country to the state of washington to this home 19:15 that i live in to this day okay obviously this was a life-changing decision it was going to change 19:21 any kind of arrangement or or or content that we were doing together it was all going to change because how are you 19:27 going to do i'm not there physically anymore all right and our discussions were that this content would continue after a 19:34 period of time where i would get settled in and we would basically continue to do content together remotely 19:40 over the internet okay um we'll talk about the details about that in this video so i don't want to get into that all right 19:47 now that's essentially where we're going to kind of leave it with john all right because that's really this video we'll 19:53 discuss our further relationship okay i don't need to go any further than that that's the history of me and john 19:58 rambo howard howard is a completely different situation all right 20:05 just to give you guys some perspective and you may not know this because i've never really talked about 20:10 it over the years but howard i would say was a street fighter buddy of mine 20:17 absolutely an acquaintance of mine a little bit outside of that i never had 20:22 what would be considered kind of a full-fledged private or close friendship with howard that never existed maybe 20:28 that came across that way in the videos that we made together because we kind of played off each other really well 20:34 especially in co-op gameplay or a lot of the interactions when we were doing street fighter stuff but howard 20:42 was way more of a friend and always a close friend of john rambo not of mine okay 20:48 i will give you the history so during the time when i was already friends with john rambo and we were 20:54 already traveling and playing street fighter together this is before i did youtube videos one day i decided to do a backyard 21:00 barbecue cookout party at my parents house i bought a big tent and i had tables set up to play video 21:06 games street fighter outside and we had a big cookout with liquor beer food everything i posted up on 21:16 at that time the website showrooking.com which was the big hub of where you would post stuff for street fighter stuff and i said phil's big backyard blowout i 21:24 don't know what i called it i said come on by if you're if you're you know someone from connecticut and you're a 21:30 player and you want to just come and say hi for a few minutes grab a burger play a game or you just want to come chill with us all day come on by we're doing 21:36 this special event okay and i would actually say 21:42 probably 20 to 30 people showed up okay including my longtime friends i invited all my long time street fighter buddies 21:47 over but some newer people who i never met before and one of the people who came by and i met for what i thought was 21:54 the first time was howard he comes by with a giant plate of burgers 21:59 i remember because he was the only one who came with a ton of [ __ ] and he's like hey i'm here my name is howard and 22:05 you might not know me but i know you how do i know you well you used to go to 22:10 an arcade back in the day called what's your game in bridgeport connecticut and i used to 22:16 go there and play street fighter while you were there and you were always in like the higher echelon of players like 22:22 it was you and your buddy t and a few others i went and played but i was never like competitive like you guys so i 22:28 casually played with you guys all the time but you probably don't remember me because i wasn't part of like your 22:33 circle of friends back then okay cool that's i mean that guy history i don't i 22:40 don't remember the guy from back then i mean then again i don't remember much back from back then his formative years 22:45 as a teenager you know i look come on it met her nicest guy possible super nice 22:50 guy and basically we hit off a street fighter friendship meaning as again we were traveling to street fighter 22:56 tournaments or whatever howard would come along with john and i to these tournaments he became part of 23:01 our group all right he really was he was part of our street fighter group okay and that's really kind of where 23:09 our relationship stayed for the longest time um when i started doing youtube 23:16 howard became a part of some of that content some of the earliest content i did was called east coast customs we 23:21 went over howard's home and what did we do we made street fighter joysticks we bought joysticks we ripped them apart we 23:27 put in custom buttons and joysticks we had ordered we put artwork on top we printed it out at like kinko's we 23:32 printed it out and we had these cool joysticks that we sold online for a profit okay 23:38 we had joint ventures like that over over the years um and and howard was always welcome 23:43 whenever he wanted if he wanted to be part of a playthrough or if he wanted to be part of content that we did primarily 23:49 he always was interested in street fighter stuff so we're going to a tournament he'll go with us you know or that kind of stuff all right um you'll 23:56 notice over the years every once in a while howard was involved with the play through okay usually that happened if it 24:02 was a game that needed more than one person to play with so if it was like two like three players or doing a party game with motion controls 24:10 it makes sense to have howard in in that with us because 24:15 he's the third guy he's a cool guy we know him from street fighter he's a friendly guy and all of that why not have him involved in our content now by 24:22 the way he's not the only person there's other people who've been involved in our content over there joe joe is actually a close friend of rambos 24:29 who bramble brought in to be part of cooperative play-throughs that weekend you can see joe and several different playthroughs that we've done over the 24:35 years including family guys one of the notable ones okay so there's other people 24:40 along the way who've been involved in our co-op content as well howard was one of them joe was one of them okay 24:47 what i would say is where howard really became prominent in my content and where this conception of that 24:53 howard is a close friend to phil's started happening when we started doing a series called project seven 24:58 we will talk about that series in detail in this video all right 25:04 but if you're wondering why am i doing this background all right why am i going into the history of me and rambo and me 25:11 and howard why because in the context of this video that they made about me if you just 25:17 watched the video all right you would be of the impression that we were this close-knit group of friends 25:23 who are constantly doing stuff together who are constantly involved with each other on an equal level 25:28 that couldn't even be further from the truth i was close friends with john john was the guy who was in my content 25:35 every week john was the guy who i had the business relationship with to pay him for appearing in my content all 25:41 right john was the guy who i considered a close friend that never happened with howard ever 25:48 okay i never had a close friendship with the guy i was friendly with him i knew him i knew some of his family members and you 25:54 know from from going to over his house you meet people or whatever but it was never like he was we were all three 26:00 close friends it was like i was friends with john john was closer friends with howard than i was and howard would be 26:06 involved in our content from time to time okay so you might say why am i bringing this up here's why 26:13 because this video was the john and howard video and that 26:19 shocked the [ __ ] out of me because if anything i expected that if there was going to be anyone who would come out 26:25 and say something it would have been john that john would have come out and said listen the reason why i'm not talking to 26:31 phil anymore is this here's the reasons here's my gripes this video originally was about an hour and a half 26:38 long and most of the stuff is from howard if you listen to the video which we're 26:44 going to you're going to hear all these gripes that howard has about me all these issues he has with me okay which 26:49 is fine i'm going to fess up to a lot of this stuff because it's true but the point i'm making here is i 26:56 wasn't close friends with howard yet it seems like this video the way it was made 27:02 is to spin it in that direction like oh look both john and howard were good friends with phil and 27:09 now they're really destroying him in a public video but howard never was in that level of friend i 27:14 never was a close friend with howard some of the things he says in the video you'll see him oh well phil never contacted me it's cause i never 27:20 contacted you ever most of the time that i had contact with howard was through john okay so we're 27:25 gonna get to that all right but i needed to kind of give this this 27:31 pre-viewing entry information because it has to put it into a frame of reference all right 27:38 john i feel had every right over the years to complain had every right to slam me 27:43 for [ __ ] all right he's the one who i had the close personal friendship with but when 27:49 people told me hey phil did you hear that there was a big video that john and howard made about you today i was like john howard 27:54 howard how is howard involved in this you know it blew my mind 28:00 okay i think i know i put it into enough reference and by the way one final thing i will say is we're about to start okay 28:07 why am i doing this now in 2022 when the friendship fell apart in 2014 28:12 and 2015. okay i'll tell you why when this video came out 28:18 all right it was so hurtful to me that i couldn't watch it all right 28:24 most of the information that i heard about from the video was through third parties who had watched it and would either come to my streams and 28:30 tell me what was said some of my friends and or moderators at the time watched the video and came to me and told me what it said 28:36 um i basically when it came out all right 28:43 i was already in a really bad place in my life in 2015 i mean again if you 28:49 want a full explanation of all of this go watch the dsp reacts to the down the 28:54 rabbit hole dark side phil video that year 2015 i had been swatted 29:00 ddos attacked repeatedly i had my channel destroyed by false copyright claims and 29:07 lost millions upon millions of views my channel was kicked out of the youtube algorithm so i was losing 29:14 why did this just be oh because i'm not using it so it turned auto turned off i was losing money on my business 29:21 by the way i had a personal relationship with my ex that was falling apart at the time i was 29:27 living with my ex and we were supposed to be in this relationship and it wasn't okay it was all this tour this storm of 29:33 [ __ ] happening to me at once so when this video came out on november 28 2015 all 29:40 right i couldn't watch it i heard about it and i was like i can't it wasn't until i couldn't actually i couldn't 29:45 even specifically tell you exactly when i watched it i don't even remember i just know eventually i watched it 29:52 um you know and when i did like when i even heard the video came 29:57 out you ever you know that feeling you get in your chest it's not necessarily panic but it's like 30:06 true pain you get that heart crushing feeling right here 30:11 like your whole body just droops and you're like oh when i heard this video came out i was 30:17 like wow a video like that came out and they really hate me 30:23 to do something like that all right because and we're gonna talk about this again in the video 30:29 over the years abso freaking lutely i spoke out of turn i said things publicly i should not have said i was an [ __ ] 30:37 i'm gonna fess up to all of that today for the very first time okay but 30:42 i was always in the hopes that these guys would contact me privately and we could talk about it okay i was trying to 30:48 contact john in particular not so much howard but john in particular i was trying to 30:53 reach out to him over and over over a course of about a year to a year and a half and he decreasingly responded to 30:59 the point where he started ghosting me basically not no response at all anymore and i was hoping 31:05 that eventually they would reach out and say all right enough is enough let's talk about this 31:12 you know respectfully like friends like men whatever you want to say and let's hash it out so we can put it to bed and 31:19 even if we can't be friends anymore at least we can hash it out that's not what happened they chose to 31:24 make a 90-minute long hit piece i guess you could call it about me uh most of it i wasn't even aware of and 31:32 i mean that for a fact like most of the stuff they're going to bring up here i not that i didn't know the situations but i didn't know that they had issue 31:38 with it there are a few things as few certain situations they'll call out here where absolutely john told me about them 31:43 and he'll even talk about that oh and phil apologize for this situation or that situation 31:49 but a lot of this stuff i didn't know about it all and it was the first time hearing it and 31:55 having the whole internet hear it at the same time as me was like wow 32:00 that's that tells me they didn't want an apology they didn't want a change in 32:06 attitude they just wanted that relationship to end then and they're done right because they could have 32:12 behind the scenes reached out to me about to talk about it and they never did um so i didn't watch this video right away 32:18 it took me it was at least months if not maybe even a year until i actually watched the video myself just hearing 32:24 hear say what it was and basically i never really wanted to i 32:29 basically acted like didn't exist all right um never really addressed it over the years like i already said sometimes 32:34 i would just casually mention it in my content which i shouldn't have done i should have just ignored it completely right i should 32:40 um and then you know after as time passes and all 32:46 that my life changed my life got better 32:52 i always will say like 2017 was one of the worst years and best years of my life for various different reasons 32:57 but i changed the content i was putting out i changed the format of the content 33:03 i met my my now wife i began a life-changing 33:09 series of events and since then i kind of got a different perspective on life 33:14 um and after years and years passing and all of that um i feel like today 33:20 from a as a different person a changed person that i can come back and do this and give meaning to it as a way to not 33:27 only clear the air and apologize for the things that i did wrong but also to clarify some of the situations here that 33:33 aren't fully explained because there's a lot of what i would consider half information or misinformation 33:40 that is not true when people saw this video for the first time in 2015 some long time fans of mine were shocked to 33:46 the point where they said i'm never watching your content ever again and they left and there was nothing i could do about 33:51 that um i was of the impression that if i immediately responded okay 33:57 publicly it would be more harm than good for everyone not just for me but at that 34:04 point john rambo had his own channel and shows and things that he was doing and the last thing that i wanted if 34:09 these guys already felt like my relationship with them had caused them pain over the years the last thing that 34:15 i wanted to do was react to this immediately and the next thing you know they're hurt even worse we're going to talk about that because i really feel 34:21 like it was the public people asking what's going on with this with that is their content coming out is there this 34:26 that constant kind of nagging questioning about what's going on with our private lives 34:33 was what led to me giving into the pressure and and saying things i shouldn't have 34:39 said making mistake after mistake and making this relationship fall apart okay so imagine me immediately reacting 34:45 again right to this video would have just made it exponentially even worse and i said 34:52 i'm just not going to say [ __ ] and for clarification purposes no i've not 34:59 spoken to these guys since this video came out um we'll talk about that why 35:04 okay but that's why it's seven years later or six and a half years later and now i'm doing 35:10 this why today john rambo no longer makes content for the internet he deleted his twitter 35:15 and he doesn't post on his channel anymore he's been gone for years howard very sporadically 35:21 posts up anything on his youtube channel oh me talking about this today is not gonna hurt those guys all right if 35:26 anything all this is gonna do it's gonna hurt me all right but the reason i'm doing this today is because 35:32 recently i've been looking back at my past okay and i've been saying here's mistakes i made there's [ __ ] up things 35:38 that have happened um let's address them so we can move past them i did that with the down the rabbit hole video we're doing this with 35:44 with john howard today so this way i can finally say hey 35:50 you got questions you know you want answers here it is i did a react to it 35:56 you can watch that it's entirety and get your answers and that's it after today i have nothing more to say on this 36:02 subject okay after today if you want to know about john and howard watch this 36:08 okay all right without further ado 36:14 ready let's get started 36:21 with the video now a little bit of background about this video 36:26 okay because some people are confused about it i am too quite frankly all right 36:33 this video was not released on john rambo's channel this video was not released on howard's channel there was a 36:39 new youtube channel created in november of 2015 called the uncanny not men 36:45 okay this was the only piece of content apparently released on that channel 36:50 it was released actually there's disagreements on what it was some people's claim they've seen 36:56 a video there's video footage to this of the two of them sitting there like on a skype call talking 37:02 others disagree and say no it was always just audio i don't know because i didn't see the original what ended up happening 37:08 was this apparently was posted to the internet on november 28th and 37:14 within a day or two days was deleted completely from the internet 37:20 not just the video the channel the youtube channel gone so i don't know 37:26 if these guys released the video and then immediately people started contacting them about it 37:32 you know in a negative way to the point where then they said man this was a bad idea and so they deleted it the problem 37:38 is with the internet they don't forget the moment they released this video people archived it and within days there 37:45 was re-uploads re-uploads re-uploads left and right up and up and down everywhere 37:51 here's the really weird thing about this this video okay 37:56 it jumps around and if you listen to the audio closely there's audio cuts 38:02 so what i don't understand is if this was them having a conversation and talking why are there audio cuts did 38:07 someone edit this was it john did someone else edit it after the fact i've never seen or heard the original because 38:14 i just told you guys when it when it was released it actually hurt me so bad to know that they did this publicly that i didn't watch it 38:21 right away i ended up having to watch just like everyone else i had to watch a re-upload of it at a later date okay 38:27 um and so i don't know if what we're about to hear 38:33 today is the original or not um since then john rambo has like i said deleted his twitter the original twitter 38:38 post was deleted but you can find it on the wayback machine uh you know on youtube excuse me um 38:45 along with evidence that this uncanny not man channel did exist um 38:50 so confusing now just for full disclosure before we hit play here 38:55 this recording is the fullest version available on the internet with a small portion cut out there's a couple minutes 39:02 at the very beginning where they talk about their own thanksgiving they had so oh i had a good thanksgiving here's what i did here's what you did 39:08 and then immediately they get into the stuff about me so there's maybe just a couple short minutes missing at the 39:14 beginning of this that is not pertinent to anything we're doing today there's no reason to include it okay we're gonna go 39:20 right into it right where they start talking about me and we're gonna go from there okay 39:25 so we're gonna hit play but there's a couple quick things that i'd like you to keep in mind uh a few running themes 39:32 that are going through this all right the first theme is that the timeline in this video is 39:38 all messed up all right even me trying to listen back to this recording and and 39:44 and do this react for you guys is incredibly difficult because for some reason they're jumping 39:51 forward and back in time so they'll be saying oh i want to talk about this subject of what just happened 39:57 to thanksgiving but then i want to talk about something that happened in the past but then i want to talk about something that happened last year but 40:03 then i want to talk about something that happened in the past again but then i want to talk about something that happened yesterday 40:08 but then they'll say things like oh but i told phil twice about this like but wait what when where 40:14 it's very confusing i'll try my best to to clarify but even for me like i get my 40:20 head rattled listening to this because it jumps all over the place and i it's hard for me to put my finger 40:26 on what they're talking about at certain time periods okay another running theme 40:33 that you're gonna hear is about money and john and howard saying things like it's not about money 40:40 okay which is fine but then they go into money over and over and over and over and over again multiple times multiple 40:46 subjects so if it's not about money why do they keep bringing it up i never 40:51 okay that's a full lie already i'm catching myself in a lie i almost said i never talked about money with them 40:56 that's [ __ ] i did that's one of the major problems is i over the years was accused by the public 41:03 of being bad to these guys and people would think of reasons why these guys 41:09 would not like me anymore did you didn't you pay them well then i would say well actually yeah 41:15 i did john in particular got paid this and i never should have done that [ __ ] you know stupidity we'll address that 41:21 but running theme here is money and man if anything by the end of this video 41:27 are we gonna learn something about friendships and money they don't mix okay holy [ __ ] 41:33 one final theme trolling troll bait and responding to people who are just trying to get a 41:39 reaction from you yeah that's a problem that i've always had i 41:44 get baited like crazy by people whether it's on social media in the comments of 41:50 my own videos the stream chat my forums anywhere people counting me 41:56 asking me the same question trying to get information and i should have shut it all off and i didn't okay so those 42:02 are kind of the running themes the timeline is very confusing money isn't an issue but it is 42:08 and fill falling for troll bait okay keep those in mind as we watch this and it'll 42:13 make a lot more sense now we can begin actually before i'm just kidding let's 42:18 do it oh i'm john and i'm joined by howard 42:25 basically this is a response to a lot of things including a video posted by one phillium 42:32 uh two days ago so what we tried to do here and by the 42:37 way i have to give a giant shout out to a viewer and fan who basically put 42:42 this whole background thing together here as you can see this person who will remain anonymous because they do not want to be trolled 42:49 for doing this put together all of the supplementary information we 42:54 need so whenever john and howard reference something that can be found on the internet as a direct 43:00 reference we have the information and we watch it together that way you can objectively judge for 43:06 yourself okay so john is about to reference something from an ass the king episode 43:12 november 26 2015 part three that i posted on my channel here we go 43:17 who recorded who decided to record himself scolding us like a high school gym teacher 43:22 saying that you're immature and you need to learn how to be men first question from eric he says phil i 43:29 admire your honesty and hope you can answer my question since you're quite open about this i know you'll probably get this a lot but what's up with you 43:35 and john rambo did you have a falling out is it because you two are far away i'd like to hear your thoughts on the 43:40 matter thank you and i should have said i have nothing to say on the matter it's a private matter if we ever decide to 43:47 talk about it publicly we will and that's that here's what i did do 43:54 the bottom line is this i will be completely 100 honest with you 43:59 and uh you know people will i say that a lot i'm going to be completely 100 honest with you i also 44:04 say i'm going to be transparent these are mannerisms in my speech when i say that essentially what i'm 44:09 trying to do is emphasize that what i'm about to tell you is a serious matter it's not me joking but some people over the years have 44:16 misconstrued it as meaning other things all it means when i say that is i'm about to tell you guys something really important 44:22 and it's meaningful to me so please listen up probably try to make [ __ ] up or say they don't believe me because they want to 44:28 believe drama queen [ __ ] um the bottom line is this when i lived in connecticut for years 44:34 did co-op commentary co-op game play we did the show smart guys we traveled together we did street fighter game play 44:40 together we did a lot of stuff projects and everything together in all of that time 44:47 all right in all of the time that we did that stuff together i could think of maybe one to two times ever 44:54 that we ever had a disagreement on something and even then it was something that was minor and that was handled 44:59 quickly and it wasn't that we ever let it got to get to the point where business 45:05 would hinder friendship you know what i mean and i think that's kind of the big risk that you take when you go into 45:11 business with someone and what i just said oh maybe one two 45:16 times we had a disagreement funny enough those will be brought up in this video by john and howard so we're gonna get to 45:22 all that stuff that it might negatively affect the relationship that you have the person outside of the business and 45:28 even though we treated the whole youtube thing that we did together as like just a casual silly thing there was money 45:33 involved and there were other factors involved the bottom line is never in that entire period of time 45:39 before i moved out of connecticut did i ever get any you know ever have any ill will or feelings toward john 45:44 never did he have any real major ill will or feelings towards me that i knew of he never said anything about money 45:50 you know he got paid for everything that he was involved in he never said anything about money or anything like that and we had great agreements that 45:56 were going on and when we left it when i left connecticut where we left it at was that i was going 46:04 to move here it was to take me a couple of months to get set up everything with work or whatever but i was going to contact him uh in early uh early fall 46:13 let him know when i was fully up and running again and that i wanted to continue to do stuff whether it was smart guys via skype 46:20 and uh gameplay you know cooperatively over the internet and obviously john didn't have a playstation 4 or an xbox 46:26 one and we were going to try to coordinate it and figure out what could he or couldn't he do for game play would we do stuff last gen would there be 46:32 other stuff we were going to figure it all out okay uh and that's where we left it now john caney helped me pack all the stuff up 46:38 when i was leaving in june of last year he came and helped pack up and help me move out of my place in connecticut okay 46:45 and we stayed in contact i talked to him via text a lot we were talking about different things going on with the move 46:50 i talked to him about tv shows and stuff going on i was asking him about what was going on with chana's man a hole punch 46:56 and we stayed in contact regarding that and the way we left it was that later in the year once he was done with shana's 47:01 man at hole punch we were going to talk again about the possibility of of coming back together and doing uh you know 47:08 content over the internet again and then in late 2014 finally we had a conversation he says 47:14 listen i'm going to make this abundantly clear you know so there's no misconceptions at this point i'm kind of 47:20 burnt out on the whole youtube thing i really don't even want to put a lot of effort into my stuff i've i've put all 47:26 this effort into chana's man a hole punch and that's really where i exerted all of my effort and that's what i 47:32 focused on and that's really all i really care about at this point i mean it was cool that we did all the youtube stuff previously but i don't really care 47:38 to be you know involved with anything from your youtube channels at this point and if that changes i'll let you know okay fine i 47:45 won't even you know great i won't even bring it up if you don't right there's no reason for us 47:51 to really bring it up or anything any further and i remember as last year progressed even further i would text him 47:56 and every once in a while he would text me back it was like we were almost losing touch we didn't have as much contact now if you remember 48:01 traditionally i would be on john's a podcast for the black friday episode every year he would have like a special 48:06 black friday episode where they go through ads and stuff about black friday and last year in particular i unheard 48:13 from him so i actually texted him and said fyi john i'll be available if you want me to be on but i haven't heard from you yet so i'm assuming maybe you 48:18 don't want me to be on or whatever that's fine and he never really responded i didn't really hear from him much i wish him a 48:23 merry christmas later that year he did respond to that and then less and less i heard from him it wasn't like there was 48:30 any argument there was a falling out or anything none of that happened so if anything actually happened behind 48:36 the scenes with john or howard or whatever happened with the people back in connecticut right who i used to do 48:42 stuff with all the time it's 100 on their end and it was never actually 48:49 brought to my attention at all so i am completely in the dark in this situation 48:54 what ended up almost 100 true i'm gonna call my out my own [ __ ] here but there's a good 49:00 reason why there's some [ __ ] here there is a situation that john will address in this video 49:06 where along the lines of me trying to contact him in 2014 and get answers like hey you 49:13 know what's going on are you all right are we gonna do content together uh you said we were gonna do the content and now you're not like responding about 49:20 it and i'm curious because people are paying me about it so basically i'm feeling all this pressure to make 49:25 content with john because everyone had wanted it and john said he was gonna do it and he's basically kind of just 49:30 saying no i'm not gonna do it or just ignoring me okay um at one point i spoke out of turn and i 49:37 did reveal something that we talked about privately in a text that i should never have talked about publicly and it 49:43 will be in this video i promise you but here i say in this video oh 49:49 i never have any idea why john would be angry with me [ __ ] he was very angry with me when i did reveal some private 49:55 information about him uh publicly that i never should have so this is 50:01 [ __ ] this is me at this time trying to save face because 50:06 from my perspective the friendship's already over these guys are ghosting me at this point this is late 2015. this is thanksgiving 2015. 50:14 okay these guys are completely ignoring me they're not responding to any any messages i sent to them so to my my side 50:20 is this friendship's over so why would i act like there's lingering [ __ ] just 50:27 tell everyone it's over that was kind of what the point of this video was was i'm trying to tell everyone it's over stop 50:32 bothering me about it right because from my perspective they're they're done with me they want nothing to do with me so 50:39 let's just leave it at that okay but i lied i outright said there there's you know no contact and no 50:45 reason why he'd be upset with me i knew he was upset with me for that situation i absolutely knew it but i lied in this 50:51 video okay happening was i did continue to once in a while contact john on stuff uh and 50:58 sometimes he would respond and sometimes he wouldn't and i actually remember the last major time that i actually had any 51:03 kind of interaction with john rambo was in early 2015 he launched the dvd the 51:08 blu-ray release of schnoz manna hall punch and when he did release it i retweeted him i let everyone know g you 51:14 should maybe buy some of this i bought a dvd myself and he even signed you know i guess every dvd he sold he signed it and 51:21 he actually before under thanks for all the good times that we had together you know john so that was the signature he 51:26 put on the dvd does that sound like anything negative no that sounds great like he's like you know he sucks that we 51:32 don't do stuff together anymore because you moved but thanks for the good times we had that's literally like what he wrote on the dvd and then after that 51:39 i have no clue i've not heard from johnson he doesn't ever write me he doesn't call me he doesn't text me 51:46 nothing and i did try actively to contact him and talk to him over the course of the year and basically i heard 51:52 nothing whatsoever from john rambo at all since then so i have no idea what happened if he something happened in 51:59 particular that turned him off or got him angry at me the bottom line is it's never been brought up and i'm going to 52:04 say this and i hope that people don't take this the wrong way but in life if you have something 52:10 that you want to say or you have an issue with someone all right say it bring it up hash it out don't let 52:17 resentment build up behind the scenes for whatever amount of time or whatever because this that's what happens is then 52:23 if something happens you don't bring it up and you let resentment build up that's when relationships get ruined 52:30 right and the bottom line is did i ever get here or or even get wind of anything 52:35 negative from john or howard or anyone from that camp who i used to do stuff with in connecticut 52:42 until i moved no not once and in fact we even had the big remember we had the big going away party in june of last year 52:47 and they all came they were all there we had fun we had a blast together we were drinking we were playing games eating having a lot of fun and it was like 52:54 nothing's wrong and then all of a sudden once i moved it was like that's it well phil's gone so now he's out of our lives 53:00 it almost feels like to me like they're saying well he abandoned us and we used to do all this fun stuff together he's not here anymore so now we're mad at him 53:06 or something i don't so wow pretty messed up what i'm saying in this video all right for multiple reasons 53:13 first of all yes there were disagreements that we had um in 53:19 connecticut before i moved however those disagreements were pretty much kept private and were never aired publicly so 53:25 you guys didn't know about them until john and howard put out this particular video that addresses them so there were 53:32 disagreements but basically i since they weren't public why do you 53:37 want to make them public right and by the way any disagreements that we ever had that we talked about behind the scenes 53:43 were settled it wasn't like oh here's an unsettled argument we had and there you know we just left it linger forever it 53:49 was kind of like all right you're mad at me for something let's talk it out okay sorry we'll fix 53:54 it done and then move on right when i was living in connecticut keep in mind john was in my content 54:00 from you know the street fighter days all the way through the very end of me 54:05 being in connecticut okay there was no point where john said i don't want to be in your content anymore or i don't like 54:11 you or you know all this pattern of bad things you're a bad friend none of that ever happened okay 54:17 so from my perspective yes were there things that went wrong in connecticut yeah any friendship you're gonna have 54:22 disagreements you're gonna have things that you feel like were messed up or one person didn't do the right thing that always happens that's never you're 54:28 never gonna have a perfect friendship but from my perspective i'm thinking everything's good when i'm moving i'm 54:34 being told by everyone everything's good john you know says everything's good howard not so much 54:40 we'll talk about that in a bit we will okay because actually in particular that going away party has a story behind it 54:46 that will be discussed in this video howard brings it up and i will fully tell you the full story on that but anyway uh with john 54:53 seriously i had no idea that he was angry about any of the [ __ ] 54:59 that had happened in the past from the way that we had talked about everything was water under the bridge no issues no lingering problems okay so 55:08 that's fine but why am i talking about this in the video right why am i addressing this why this is so stupid it 55:13 really is it's the dumbest thing and again for me 2015 was a really bad year where there was so 55:20 much pressure on me from every direction for some reason 2015 was here everyone hated me i don't know why everyone hated me so much i never really faced that 55:27 much hate in one year all the [ __ ] that had happened to me in that year and one of the major things that people were constantly 55:34 on me all right about was was in particular 55:40 that i didn't do stuff with rambo why aren't you talking to rambo what's going on with rambo not howard rambo okay 55:47 and there was so much pressure i just kept talking about it completely wrong i should never i should just keep my 55:52 [ __ ] mouth shut and if ever there was a resolution between us great but there was this lingering thing going on behind 55:59 the scenes that was kind of breaking me down i'll talk about that as well today because they address it so that's all going to 56:05 come up all right what i have to ask from you guys is tremendous patience this is a very long process to get 56:12 through but there's going to be a ton of [ __ ] that has never been publicly revealed that i'm gonna reveal to you today all on my side [ __ ] about me okay 56:20 all right let's continue i don't know but again it's speculation anything that i could possibly say about 56:25 a john rambo situation is pure and utter speculation that's true because i've been completely in the dark i didn't 56:31 know situations since it began if it even began so that's why people want to start all 56:37 this this [ __ ] [ __ ] right all this drama and controversial [ __ ] they must have had a disagreement about money they 56:42 must phil must have revealed something really personal or something nothing 56:47 which is hilarious because that's exactly what happened that was one of the reasons why john was mad at me is because of that 56:53 text conversation we had had and i had revealed some of the information about that conversation to the public he even 56:58 yelled at me for it i apologized and now here i am saying oh that never happened 57:04 great really transparent there phil you [ __ ] ever happened at least from my side zippo i was never again never 57:12 contacted never told never ever got an inkling that there was something wrong so if there was anything that ever went 57:18 wrong between my relationship with john or howard or anyone back in connecticut it's on their side they let it built up 57:25 they let the resentment build up on their side without ever speaking up and i hate to say it but in real life if 57:31 you're mature if you are a man oh great speak up about 57:36 an issue you will not let it linger and resent and build and fester into some kind of a negative thing where you don't 57:42 want to talk to someone again and then you're going to even at some points talk [ __ ] about them and stuff see i would never do that because i have no reason 57:48 to talk [ __ ] about people who i have always had a great relationship with so for me i have no clue if there's any 57:54 negativity any resentment i have no idea and i'm still in the dark to this day now before we continue 58:00 wow wow wow wow 58:09 wow this is how you don't talk about your friends right 58:16 holy [ __ ] what a stupid [ __ ] [ __ ] up messed up 58:21 undefendable thing to say okay now the yes i didn't really know exactly 58:29 what had happened behind the scenes yes i felt like there was a lot of passive aggression 58:35 against me from john and howard and particularly john again howard interjecting himself into the situation 58:41 here but it was primarily john because he was ghosting me not responding to anything so obviously 58:47 there's an issue wow what a great idea why don't you say 58:52 that they're not real men that'll get on their good sides 59:00 right i will talk about this further later in the video why it all came to a head at this 59:06 particular date why it all happened this way i will reveal later on when we get 59:11 to some other subjects stuff that was going on behind the scenes that made me act like a complete and 59:17 utter [ __ ] [ __ ] all right not act like a complete and utter [ __ ] [ __ ] i was a complete and utter 59:23 [ __ ] [ __ ] on this date and time making this video this never should have happened 59:29 you know i wish we could erase this kind of [ __ ] dumb [ __ ] from the internet but then here's 59:34 the thing if you deny history you don't learn from it so 59:40 i felt like if john immediately in this this video was gonna say this is a [ __ ] up thing phil did i had to show 59:46 you exactly what i did and how [ __ ] up it was it wouldn't have been fair to just assume let's see i look at this 59:52 today i'm embarrassed i'm [ __ ] sad i'm really upset with myself that this 59:58 is the kind of way that i used to behave back and i was so hyper defensive about everything right 1:00:03 that i would literally just sit there and [ __ ] talk dumb 1:00:09 [ __ ] to try to make it so that i look good that is the worst possible thing you can [ __ ] do especially with for 1:00:15 friends man like what did you what i think was gonna happen here i'll tell actually i do know 1:00:21 what i thought was gonna happen and again we're gonna talk about that later in the video but this is indefensible 1:00:26 okay right like i look at this now jeez i mean there's 1:00:31 not even is there a single perspective you can take that you can say oh this was okay no i don't think so at least 1:00:37 now i can say that i don't think so that was just [ __ ] stupid [ __ ] now let's get back to john and howard so 1:00:44 that's when people ask me straight up what's what's up with john rambo i said ask john rambo because i have no clue 1:00:51 i'm literally in the dark i was never nothing was ever brought up and unless 1:00:57 john kept mailing me letters and they went to a dead address but he didn't realize it so i didn't know he had a problem with me no obviously i'm just being silly no it just never happened so 1:01:04 i have no idea i'm literally in the dark that's the bottom line that's the whole situation there is no situation i don't 1:01:09 know and it's a shame it's a shame because it was that was a long-standing relationship that i had you know the mid-2000s i met john and with a street 1:01:16 fighter or us just doing other stuff on youtube i always had a blast with him so i don't know what his problem is 1:01:22 and i have no control over it he doesn't talk to me anymore he won't really respond if i text him or call him i 1:01:27 don't get anything back so from my situation from my perspective it's it's not even a relationship anymore it's 1:01:33 over and it's 100 on him because i had nothing to do with it 1:01:38 there you go yeah so you know there you go 1:01:45 and there you go people really want to know why we don't do anything with him anymore 1:01:50 and himself oddly is saying that he wants to know why you know but that video that he put out 1:01:57 i think is a perfect example of why now now okay fair enough touche he's right but from 1:02:04 my perspective okay but they weren't talking to me for an 1:02:10 extended period before that video came out okay and yes absolutely i've i fell 1:02:16 into the trap of being goaded by the public goated by the internet to keep talking about it talking about it but 1:02:22 that right there that video not who would be surprised to say that ended a friendship no one but up to that 1:02:29 point again i was never really told about issues the issues they're 1:02:35 about to bring up 99 of them i'm not even aware of or we talked about them already and we're already hashed out so 1:02:40 i didn't know that these were lingering issues and things adding up for reasons why they wouldn't want to talk to me or be my friend anymore okay so 1:02:47 he says oddly enough phil doesn't know why we don't want to be his friend no not oddly enough they 1:02:53 never said anything they never said phil listen your behavior is toxic your behavior is detrimental to 1:03:00 us and our well-being and we would like to not be your friend anymore if you're going to continue this way that conversation never happened 1:03:07 so when that conversation never happened the resentment built up inside of me and prompted me to do something like that 1:03:12 stupid video basically saying why won't you just tell me what's wrong so we can address it right it's called passive 1:03:20 aggression you're not actively being aggressive with someone you're being passively aggressive with them by not 1:03:26 talking to me by not responding excuse me to my attempts at communication by saying that you were 1:03:32 going to be in my content and then oh can't do it i still can't do it another reason i can't do it i can't do it and 1:03:38 now i'm the one with the public face to the public getting all the requests where's john ramble why isn't he in your content 1:03:44 what's going on right that's passive aggression against me 1:03:50 okay i'm not saying that they were wrong to do it i'm just saying that's what happened and because they said nothing 1:03:56 it boiled to a point where people absolutely demanded answers personally i was ready to move on from 1:04:02 it but people were all over me every day about this so it kind of boiled to that point where finally i'm doing an ask the king and i 1:04:08 basically made that that segment that should never have been made completely incorrect that i did that okay 1:04:15 you know if so if you really like examine it it's a video he puts out on thanksgiving 1:04:20 day which i don't really understand and last year thanksgiving you decided 1:04:26 to unfollow me okay now here's where the timeline already is skewed 1:04:31 he just started a video that's basically going to explain the things that i did that were messed up okay 1:04:36 that caused them to not want to be my friend anymore let's start with the video he just made on thanksgiving oh wait let's talk about 1:04:42 last thanksgiving wait what but you didn't can we get to the video about thanksgiving no he goes back a time of year and this is this this video is very 1:04:49 confusing because he does this a lot they jump around the timeline and it's like so 1:04:55 what in what order did this happen did this piss you off first that led to this or did this happen or this 1:05:01 i'll do my best i really will but this is the first instance and it keeps happening that they jump all around so 1:05:07 now we're going back in time thanksgiving 2014 okay here we go 1:05:13 some issues so something with thanksgiving i don't know if he's eating something that doesn't agree with him maybe he needs to follow 1:05:20 your turkey recipe yeah it really i i think for me it really started with that because 1:05:26 not only did he unfollow like he the way i noticed it was when i was on twitter he i looked at his people that he was 1:05:33 following and he unfollowed both of us 1:05:38 the way i noticed it is that i was on twitter and i just happened to be looking at the 1:05:45 people that phil was following on twitter and i noticed that he had unfollowed 1:05:50 both of us huh that's confusing 1:05:56 so you just randomly go to app they call me dsp and look at who i follow randomly 1:06:05 and noticed uh no 1:06:10 i don't do you do that do you go to someone's twitter profile and just check who they're following constantly and 1:06:15 like see you know that's confusing to me i know exactly what happened i unfollowed them and the internet 1:06:22 trolls messaged them about it likely spamming their comments leaving 1:06:28 tweets on their twitter accounts etc etc and it bothered them so then they went 1:06:33 and looked and noticed oh phil unfollowed us on thanksgiving now we're getting harassed by a bunch of people on 1:06:38 the internet about it and that's not fair okay so fair enough okay 1:06:44 here's the deal on that is this is kind of a 1:06:51 pattern where i do something that you would think 1:06:57 unfollowing someone on twitter anyone doesn't matter if it's your friend a celebrity 1:07:04 one of my viewers you know would have zero impact on anyone right 1:07:09 but in the scheme of things when you are online stalked by people 24 7. 1:07:15 like seriously if i misspell a word on my on a forum post or something they'll call it out 1:07:21 something as innocuous is that oh they'll never do anything there's a negative repercussion no matter what okay 1:07:27 so was it was this oh my god phil is doing a horrible thing he's unfollowing his 1:07:32 friends on twitter what a huge dramat no i never ever thought of it like that you 1:07:38 can argue oh maybe it's passive aggression or whatever i never thought of it like that it's actually directly addressed 1:07:45 in this video later on the whole situation around it which we'll get to that when we get to it but 1:07:52 basically to me i wasn't thinking of it like that and by the way i didn't just unfollow rambo and 1:07:59 howard i unfollowed a bunch of stuff that day um i remember sitting down and 1:08:04 i was getting bombarded with negativity about them for not being on john rambo's 1:08:10 thanksgiving show and with that he addresses that later so i don't want to jump the gun on that but i was being bombarded by a bunch of negativity both 1:08:16 from my viewers and trolls why aren't you on john rambo's thanksgiving show you're always on john rambo's thanksgiving show i don't understand and 1:08:23 so i was getting bombarded in all kinds of [ __ ] all over the place on social media uh in the comments of my videos 1:08:29 about this to the point where i was like you know this is so [ __ ] stupid and frustrating i don't want to deal with 1:08:36 this dumb [ __ ] this is so stupid and i went on twitter that day and i was like this social media thing is [ __ ] dumb 1:08:42 i'm so annoyed at it because people can spam me about [ __ ] like this who cares you know what to my knowledge 1:08:48 there was no animosity between us for me not being on this show so not only did i unfollow john and howard 1:08:54 i unfollowed a bunch of other [ __ ] because my at that point i remember i was looking at my twitter feed and here i am i'm trying to follow news i'm 1:09:00 trying to follow gaming trends i'm trying to follow [ __ ] going on the internet and i got a million posts about john rambo and howard and how john rambo 1:09:08 didn't have phil on his thanksgiving show what what you know wow phil must be a real piece of [ __ ] and he really must 1:09:14 have insulted john behind the scenes i'm like i don't want to do any of this at all i want none of the i won't be 1:09:20 involved in any of this [ __ ] toxic nonsense so i followed them but there was other people too there were people who i've been following who were also in 1:09:27 on that and i unfollowed them but there was other [ __ ] too that i followed that day i just remember that that thanksgiving i was sitting 1:09:34 around you know having a personal day kind of relaxing his dad didn't make a lot of content and i'm just gonna go randomly out you 1:09:41 know on twitter and see what's going on see what's going on in the world and obviously a bunch of toxic dumb [ __ ] 1:09:46 about me not being on john rambo's thanksgiving special now i don't deal with this unfollow and follow everything just 1:09:52 unfollow all of it [ __ ] this i don't want to follow any of it anymore okay what happens 1:09:59 i get made to be like a villain for unfollowing people on twitter that it's 1:10:04 to me like when you say that to someone you're a bad person because you unfollowed someone on twitter 1:10:13 do you want to talk about first world problems if being unfollowed by someone on 1:10:19 twitter is a problem for you that's a pretty good problem to have i think if that's a 1:10:25 problem for you oh god i was unfollowed by someone on twitter all right i i don't ever look at who 1:10:32 follows me who doesn't follow me i couldn't give two flaming shits about any of that it means nothing to me it 1:10:38 never has it never will okay so this part like you want to say phil made 1:10:44 a video out of turn speaking up saying messed up stuff 100 i'm gonna agree with 1:10:49 you when you say wow phil did a really awful thing he unfollowed me on twitter i'm gonna say what the [ __ ] are you 1:10:55 talking about like what i'm sorry that one does that one i don't get that one throws me for a 1:11:02 loop all right that that's an issue for anyone being unfollowed on twitter now 1:11:07 being harassed by trolls about it i can understand but you notice that's not what was said here howard's like oh i 1:11:14 noticed it when i was just casually checking who was following me on twitter and phil had unfollowed what 1:11:20 like no that's not i know what happened they got harassed and this is another as i said this is a running theme 1:11:27 because these guys are friends of mine in real life and are associated with me and make content with me they are now 1:11:33 the subject of the ire and the focus of thousands of internet trolls 1:11:39 at a moment's notice they do something and they're criticized they're slammed on for it i do something they're criticized you know they get attacked 1:11:44 that's not fair no they should not be it be bothered on thanksgiving 1:11:51 because someone unfollowed them on twitter on thanksgiving day that should be the last thing they're contacted 1:11:56 about that should be the last thing they're bothered with but this is a you're going to find it the trolling 1:12:03 gets both sides me and them it leads both of us to kind of do stupid [ __ ] i feel um 1:12:10 and this is one of the situations where i just think this is completely off base at all that this is something that was even even an issue someone unfollowed me 1:12:17 on twitter and a troll messaged me and told me [ __ ] them block them immediately don't deal with them why are you 1:12:23 addressing it's nonsense it's internet nonsense just it's it's it should not be bothering you and i i'm sad to know 1:12:30 years later that dumb [ __ ] like this that i you know who would have thought i didn't think that on following someone 1:12:35 would be something that would have affected them and it did that's [ __ ] terrible that it did i never intended for that okay 1:12:43 and there was there was no real really no rhyme or reason to it which i i thought was i think that was the first shot i just 1:12:49 explained the rhyme of reasons honestly there's weird stuff like yeah especially when you work and you work hard and 1:12:54 stuff you look forward to certain days off and like thanksgiving is a certain day like with your family and whatnot 1:13:00 um and then like just and to do these things on thanksgiving it sounds silly 1:13:06 it is just a day but you're showing no concern like for the other person 1:13:11 you know what i mean like you're going to cause [ __ ] like suddenly you get inundated with messages so here we go 1:13:18 it's thanksgiving i want to spend a day with my family and friends but i'm inundated with messages so ignore them 1:13:24 i get messages every day from a million different sources and if it's [ __ ] i ignore it now i'm 1:13:32 much better at doing this today back then not so much admittedly this kind of [ __ ] would get to me but it's 1:13:38 thanksgiving you're spending it with your family your friends you're having a meal you're sitting down why are you on the internet 1:13:44 reading messages about people saying that phil unfollowed you on twitter that you know like what 1:13:50 why is it it doesn't make any sense again these guys sadly were bombarded 1:13:55 with trolling and didn't know how to handle it they weren't like me they weren't they unlike me they didn't have this public face where constantly they 1:14:03 were attacked in a negative way in fact i would say probably the years that i moved and everything that was when the negativity started with my trolls would 1:14:09 go after them as a way to get at me and they just couldn't take it and again 1:14:15 that's that's bad it's nothing i intended it's nothing i wanted to happen i'm very 1:14:21 sorry that it happened but sadly that's something that i couldn't have helped you know what i'm saying like no matter what these idiots we're gonna go after 1:14:28 these guys and that sucks to know that just because they were my friends because we made content together you know they're gonna 1:14:35 get attacked for stupid [ __ ] like that you know no i didn't want them to be bombarded on 1:14:41 thanksgiving with messages about twitter at the same time they shouldn't have cared like you ignore that [ __ ] when the 1:14:47 moment you give attention to a troll is the moment that that troll feels recognition for what they've done and now continues to troll the best thing 1:14:54 they could have said what [ __ ] what is this dumb [ __ ] delete everything block every [ __ ] and move on with my life 1:14:59 don't pay any heed to this if i had entertained every troll that ever harassed me [ __ ] like this i would i 1:15:05 would be in a house you know but again this is my fault this is directly my fault it's me my internet presence my 1:15:12 friendship with them that's causing them to be harassed and this is the kind of [ __ ] that i don't know i don't know that 1:15:18 these guys are being harassed because i unfollowed them on twitter if that were the case i never would have followed them on twitter to begin with seriously 1:15:24 if i knew he was going to do that kind of [ __ ] [ __ ] twitter who gives about [ __ ] twitter you know but 1:15:29 sadly it happened okay if you don't know why you're trying to enjoy a day with your family 1:15:36 yeah you know what i'm saying no no i i i understand completely i just 1:15:41 uh uh yeah there's a lot of there's going to be a lot of things talked about you know and 1:15:48 again we're not here and we just want to reiterate this we are not here to defame anyone 1:15:54 this is just to let people know our side of the story because people have a tendency to just 1:16:01 uh view one thing and not look at it from another way and trying to understand the other party's uh 1:16:07 viewer and i'm not england i agree with howard okay 1:16:14 absolutely they have the right to make a video that's not defamatory 1:16:21 and give their side of the story good please do because they weren't 1:16:26 giving me their side of the story right they weren't they weren't speaking to me at all so by all means do that okay 1:16:32 however as you will see as we get further and further into this video we delve from the realm of the public to 1:16:39 the private there's many things discussed in this video that 1:16:44 have absolutely nothing to do with the public um and every once in a while the public 1:16:50 would try to pry into our private arrangements or whatever and a lot of times i was the one who misspoke 1:16:56 and brought that stuff to the public and shouldn't have done that okay at the very same time 1:17:02 there's definitely some stuff in this video that they made that i would feel is completely hitting below the belt 1:17:08 and in in fact there is one segment 1:17:17 that i can't believe they made there is one segment in this video that is incredibly hurtful to me and i don't 1:17:22 know how i'm gonna get through it publicly with you guys because it's really [ __ ] up like beyond belief [ __ ] up 1:17:28 like we're going to get to it we're i'm not going to skip it we're going to do it okay 1:17:34 um but that's he said oh we're not here to defame him 1:17:39 okay fine but understand that when you made this video it doesn't matter what your intentions 1:17:46 were that's exactly what's going to happen okay when you're going to make a video 1:17:51 instead of addressing it with the person privately you are going public with information 1:17:57 that is defamation it doesn't matter what your intentions were oh i just want 1:18:02 to stick up for myself fine and you have the right to do that but you're also defaming the person at the same time and 1:18:10 absolutely that's what happened is this video was viewed as here's the evidence from all the years that we said that 1:18:16 phil's a piece of [ __ ] and fills a scumbag and fills an [ __ ] here's the definitive evidence even his closest 1:18:22 friends hate him and that's exactly how this video was presented on the internet for many many years 1:18:27 and again i knew that if i responded to this video 1:18:34 all right it would just hurt these guys at that time they had internet presences and everything and i didn't want to do that 1:18:41 at the time okay now's different times past they don't have internet presence anymore they 1:18:46 don't really care about it they moved on thank god i'm happy for them i hope they have great lives outside the internet but to this day i am the one who gets 1:18:54 questioned about this every single day why they make this video is what they said true yadda yadda and 1:18:59 again some of the stuff in here absolutely i will fess up to there's some stuff 1:19:05 there's one segment that i feel is so below the bell so actually like 1:19:10 ridiculously [ __ ] up and off base that i don't even know how to respond to it 1:19:17 but we'll get to that like i don't know about you i'm not angry with the guy uh we've said before publicly like we wish 1:19:23 him the best don't wish for many ill you know i hope he like makes a ton of cash and uh his great life man you know yeah 1:19:31 um why why would i not feel that way what what is it how does that affect me 1:19:36 yeah and and going back to what we were saying there's a weird running pattern in this video as well 1:19:42 where john basically says i just wish everyone the best everyone rich and famous and make money and do well how does that affect me 1:19:48 he doesn't say it about me it's just about others too we're gonna get that's coming up actually but let's continue before i 1:19:55 don't we don't make my i don't make money off of this and i don't know about you john but it's not something that bothers me it's 1:20:01 just something i enjoy doing yeah man until this point which is a good uh 1:20:07 gee it's been like been a long time until this point we've not said anything against him 1:20:12 because like i said i wish for the best i don't want to hurt him and saying anything negative about him i feel could 1:20:18 hurt his livelihood and uh the other thing is there's a lot of history there's a lot of good times 1:20:25 man there's a lot of really good times and uh you kind of uh you'll piss on a lot of 1:20:31 that stuff by doing this and then i feel like things should be kept in-house amongst friends 1:20:37 you know a circle of trust amongst friends however do you believe in such things with people no i i believe i wholeheartedly believe 1:20:44 in that and that's why i'm a little ticked off about this because 1:20:50 howard why are you ticked off howard how are you involved howard hello howard 1:20:57 you're not even in this this is between me and john when i again when i moved 1:21:03 it was about me and john having an ongoing relationship me and john having content we were gonna make together and 1:21:09 still be friends and contact and all of that howard was not in our circle of friends 1:21:14 howard was friends with john but he was not a direct friend of mine 1:21:21 who we even discussed having any kind of ongoing uh relations of any sort seriously like 1:21:28 there was none of that and again i think people assumed this from this here you go 1:21:34 here's the example a picture of the three of us together from a video we made a picture from the three of us 1:21:40 together from a video we made and you would see this on the internet and you would think oh you know howard is 1:21:46 massively involved in this howard is not massively involved in this in any way this is me and john's relationship and 1:21:52 howard interjecting himself into this situation likely for the purposes of this video 1:22:00 to try to accentuate reasons why they had a falling out with me because 1:22:05 quite frankly there's several times here you will see another running pattern in this video 1:22:10 howard seems to get very upset with me over things he gets very very over the top 1:22:17 uh extrapolating exponentially angry 1:22:23 okay and that's fine if you know if he feels that i wronged him but this is supposed to be in 1:22:29 reference to why is john not phil's friend anymore why is 1:22:35 john not showing up in phil's content that was the discussion when this video came out it was all of a sudden it's 1:22:40 john and howard wait what what are you talking about why are you in this video really if he could have made his own 1:22:46 video but it's like double piling on 1:22:51 oh this is so the circle of friends the circle of trust yes between me and john correct correct 1:22:57 when did i even ever publicly talk about howard go ahead and you know maybe i'm wrong and you can you can call me on 1:23:04 this i want you to call me on this go back and look during 1:23:09 that time frame of me moving in 2014 and in 2015 and trying to talk to john get 1:23:15 an answer from john right where did i even talk about it it was me 1:23:21 always me and john so this is like weird that this video is john and howard 1:23:27 reacts to phil or response to phil phil wasn't talking about howard phil wasn't looking to have content with 1:23:34 howard phil wasn't looking to to have an ongoing friendship with howard he was our street fighter buddy who we brought 1:23:39 in for certain projects and events and you know parties and things and basically and again i'll tell you this 1:23:45 it's we're going to get to this point we basically kind of had a falling out at the end of when i moved all right 1:23:51 and i never expected to even talk to the guy ever again that's me being real talk with you guys like i never thought that 1:23:56 he would ever want to talk to me again i really didn't have a desire to talk to him again because of the way that things 1:24:02 went down at that last event that we did together and that's gonna be pulled out here and extrapolated upon 1:24:08 later on in this video because he brings it up okay um 1:24:14 so again it's weird to me and by the way i'm not trying to dump on howard i'm just saying this is weird that when this 1:24:20 video came out we were like wow howard is really mean to you how how again like what are you talking about howard like i never heard a 1:24:27 negative word from howard i'm i'm serious about this now never did howard call me and say i'm mad at you never did 1:24:34 howard text me and say why did you do that never in person did howard say man you did something [ __ ] up any 1:24:39 complaint i ever heard was from john and it was always an issue john had with me it was never oh howard is mad at me 1:24:46 this is literally the first time that i heard everything from howard was this video okay so let's make that clear 1:24:53 this whole situation was between me and john not howard and it's weird that he interjects himself so often 1:24:59 apparently into this when he was not involved he just wasn't every once in a while 1:25:04 he'd be in it and it's just so odd to me that it that this was put out like this okay 1:25:10 okay by the way i need to split the park soon probably another 10 minutes you know 1:25:15 it's one of those things where like you know you can't even trust him in terms of like sending a message 1:25:23 like a text message because you don't know if that's gonna get publicly put on like youtube howard hello howard you 1:25:29 never sent me a text message outside of one or two which will be addressed in this video okay 1:25:34 um we never had conversation like that behind the scenes ever i never revealed a text from yours ever published this is 1:25:40 all john he's literally talking and projecting john in what he's saying as if it happened to him it didn't this is john 1:25:47 he's talking about john we would text back and forth john was the one who i should not have and i revealed some 1:25:53 private information on one of my stream not howard but he's talking like it's him it's not this is a complete risk 1:26:00 representation of the situation that happened to try to make me look worse and i don't appreciate it i just don't 1:26:06 you can say i'm bad because i did bad things and here's the bad things he's saying i did things to him that never happened okay 1:26:13 or if he's gonna make a video about it because it's something you know if i send you a message i don't expect you to 1:26:18 the next day or two days later or whatever make a you know during your regular vlogs you 1:26:23 go ahead and you publicly read the message that happened once with john yeah that's a great point because like 1:26:29 what we're going to be doing today is kind of maybe revealing some things and that's i've kind of really held 1:26:35 against doing that because it doesn't make you such a hypocrite to be doing the same thing that uh has 1:26:41 caused you pain or caused you you know to be pissed off now you guys might give them a hard time 1:26:47 for this you may not you say well it's true they were angry at phil for doing this right then why did they make the video 1:26:54 okay there's a lot of theories on this they're they're what they say out right in the video 1:27:00 is the reason they're doing this is to save face to easily protect themselves because i said a lot of things that are false and they want to clear the air and 1:27:06 defend themselves and you'll see by the end of the video they they seem 1:27:12 to say that they want me to contact them about this to hash it out okay 1:27:17 but again the video has a lot of stuff in it that's not true 1:27:23 or half truth the whole how this howard stuff is wrong okay that again there's one thing in this video that is so 1:27:29 hurtful to me to this day that i still i'm gonna have a hard time getting through it today okay and they know that it's not that they 1:27:35 didn't know they knew that that was going to hurt me and that's why they included that in the 1:27:41 video okay this you could as much as you could say this is for them to defend themselves 1:27:47 all right from my perspective i feel like this is a final goodbye like 1:27:53 this is them saying to me listen we tried to ghost you for a year man 1:27:58 you're not getting the picture here's our side of the story stop bothering us we don't retire to you the toxicity of 1:28:04 your trolls is ruining our lives the [ __ ] you're saying is hurting us just [ __ ] move on and leave us alone 1:28:11 that's how i i take this to this day when i watch this i still feel that way maybe you guys will watch it and feel 1:28:17 different but again you don't understand the perspective that i have because you haven't heard it yet you're going to 1:28:23 hear it okay all right um but it gets to play like enough is 1:28:29 enough matt this points really jumped the shark and uh things have got to be put out there man 1:28:36 sadly yeah yeah um and the thing that the thing that's like 1:28:42 that's another thing to sad about it is no one listens to this kind of stuff and then 1:28:47 or let's just let him talk about us or let's talk about him and then goes oh these guys are [ __ ] cool you know 1:28:53 what i mean yeah it's disgusting stuff it's sad it's not you're not creating content it's freaking garbage content 1:28:59 uh for the barbecue barrel man and it's what it is but you get dragged into it why do you 1:29:05 think why do you think i avoided doing this for six and a half years right for as many people that are watching 1:29:10 this right now and just want to have clarity on what happened how the hell did this friendship fall apart there's another 1:29:16 half of the people here who are just drama hound idiots who just want to [ __ ] laugh at the situation and make fun of us and say oh phil's a scumbag 1:29:22 and this and that it's [ __ ] up he's right this is not there's no winners in a situation like this there's just never 1:29:29 is all right that's why i'm trying to approach it from a point of view to let you guys know i 1:29:36 know i was wrong with the stuff that i did but i also do have to call out the things in here that are pretty ridiculously unfair 1:29:42 of which we will address and we've already started you know so 1:29:48 you know getting back to his video it's really full of what's 1:29:54 as i said it's an example of the problem itself you know it's it's full of what's been a long history of him saying things publicly 1:30:00 out of turn exaggerating things and or saying just saying [ __ ] that's not uh just not true 1:30:07 yeah okay we're just put the video here okay by the way now we're gonna make headway 1:30:12 because i don't have to give that giant half an hour to 45 minutes of you know backstory we're gonna start 1:30:18 making big progress in the video but i want to split it i don't have a seven hour video so for the purposes of youtube if you're watching this on 1:30:24 demand on youtube there's gonna be more parts coming if you're watching this on stream just stay put i'm about to just split the part 1:30:30 here we go

pt2

0:00 ladies and gentlemen welcome back to dsp reacts to the john and rambo response video from 2015. 0:07 so far uh we haven't gotten too far into it but that's because i talked a lot but now we're gonna get heavily into it alright 0:13 if you have not seen part one already i strongly recommend you go check it out first or else you're gonna have no idea what's going on that has all the 0:20 references you need to get up to this point um thank you for watching there's no monetization on this video at all of any 0:26 form if you see it it's not me someone claimed the video i'm not doing that okay let's continue here we go 0:32 about me about others man so and uh again people get pissed listening 0:38 to this as a consolation prize if you really think about it if you're a fan of phil's you have to 0:44 agree that i did and i know you did to extend everything you could to help him over 0:50 the years you know and so much so so that to this day he makes money 0:56 off of videos that we're in to this day every day yeah whether it's you know 10 cents 1:01 whether it's 10 bucks whatever the hell it is he's making money off you know off the work we did for him every single day 1:08 mm-hmm he's still finding new ways to monetize us well not today based on that 1:13 not today john maybe maybe up to this point but not today if i was gonna do this react there was no way i was gonna monetize it um for good reason like i 1:21 said that's the major point he says no not monetizing this whatsoever and uh 1:27 it's too important it's too important to monetize it really is okay 1:32 you know and uh other things that go on yeah by the way again running theme 1:38 money oh i don't care about the money it's not about the money but then they keep bringing up money being monetized we'll 1:44 talk about that because john will directly address it later so it's weird that it's an ongoing issue if there's no 1:50 issue okay oops and then i i think i i really think 1:56 that like uh [Music] it really it really it's really like a 2:02 testament as to what what he held our friendships for because it feels it seems that the money was more important 2:08 than us being his friend yeah i mean that's how you feel yeah i'm sad that they feel i'm really 2:14 sad that they feel that way i really really really really really really am sad that they feel that way because as i 2:19 said over the years to you guys to me it was like we were friends we would hang out we 2:27 were gonna hang out regardless and have fun so if you could put a silly camera down 2:32 and record what you're doing and make money doing it why not right like to me 2:37 i was doing youtube as a hobby for two and a half years before i could even put ads on my videos and make a living doing it right 2:43 john was in my content before i could monetize it we were having fun already 2:49 so to me it was like let's hang out let's have a good time together hey by the way we can make money doing it why the [ __ ] not right 2:56 to them it seems to be like that's that's not a case um 3:02 that because there was money involved that that wasn't like friends hanging out to me it was the entire time we did 3:07 project seven was it work yes but was it a bunch of friends working together having a shitload of fun doing it hell 3:12 yes that was a really cool experience so what's the issue with the money-making 3:19 part of it that i didn't understand um and again never brought up it wasn't 3:24 like they complained and said phil you know we really don't have enough stuff that happens without the cameras 3:31 on phil would be great if we could hang out today and he didn't record and by the way that did happen a lot you know we 3:38 went to a convention i wasn't recording every moment that we were there uh when we went over the howard's house 3:44 to play super turbo frequently because he had cabinets there he recorded and broadcast all of that 3:50 not me i didn't record while we were there at all usually um that was just me having fun with 3:55 those guys okay so it wasn't like every single interaction i had with 4:01 these guys the camera was on they definitely are saying that in this video many times that wasn't the case but 4:08 that's definitely like how they're spinning it whenever john rambo came over to do a weekly co-op with me which we 4:14 would do smart guys our wrestling commentary show and then we would actually do gameplay co-op we would have 4:20 like an hour to two hours of conversation before we ever even took a camera out just shooting the [ __ ] 4:27 hanging out having a good time talking about our lives right like i said i felt like i was actually 4:33 really close friends with john rambo i don't know if he felt the same way you know or that it was reciprocated but 4:38 i felt that way for sure like he was the guy who 4:44 uh i i kind of opened up to about stuff was that on camera no 4:50 a lot of stuff was on camera but that was the fun part was let's play games and dick around let's talk about wrestling and make a buck on it but not 4:58 not the other stuff and there there's private conversations we had over the years that none of us have 5:04 ever talked about publicly you know private [ __ ] about me and him about him and we would never talk about that publicly like we were friends to me when 5:11 they say oh you know it was only about the money for phil that gets to me badly that that 5:17 hurts because that's not the case with john with howard again we never had that close 5:22 personal friendship he would come over to be in other co-op [ __ ] we were doing or project seven but how john i don't 5:29 know how he could possibly say that really that's really hurtful to me for them to say something like that when 5:34 john and i i feel did have a real friendship we were hanging out playing street fighter together before i ever turned on a camera for youtube from 2006 5:42 2007 2008 2009 how can you say we didn't have a friendship and it was only about the money 5:47 when we had that friendship way before youtube was a thing that blows my mind you can watch go 5:54 watch the videos that are out there but understand that there's history behind it that you didn't know you know and it 5:59 seems like he's just saying oh we were only friends during the youtube years that's completely false 6:05 it's completely false all right but what i will say is this when i became a full-time youtuber i 6:11 became a workaholic and i worked my ass off constantly making videos seven days a week i did 6:18 not have a day off when i started monetizing my videos on youtube in 2011 2012 it was mr no days off i'm just here 6:26 to pump out videos for the internet and make money on right that was my life i loved it i loved gaming and everything 6:32 but that was absolutely positively my life um 6:37 was there time that i made to hang out with these guys outside of that every once in a while if i went over to play 6:43 super turbo at howard's house we were all there together or going to a convention we went to several 6:48 conventions and events together and even though yes i filmed there the vast majority of the time that i spent at 6:53 those events was not filming it was spending time hanging out with these guys okay so 6:58 again this is i feel a misrepresentation of the situation 7:04 absolutely there was a ridiculous amount of filming and monetization of the time we spent together but there was definitely friendship behind there as 7:10 well again howard whatever say whatever you want we weren't close friends john 7:16 we were and that's incredibly hurtful to me that he says this like all we ever did was record and make videos together 7:21 and make money that wasn't the case at all um and sadly after i moved it just got worse because now he's not there to be 7:28 in person with and have the conversation so instead it became text messages back and forth and he didn't like that he 7:34 wanted me to call him and i really couldn't and we'll talk about that because he's going to bring that up later specifically and 7:39 we'll address it at that point why there were no phone calls between us after i moved right we'll get to that but anyway 7:46 let's continue now because they're going to get to a certain point that's that's how i feel because 7:52 you know i i don't know there's like a whole bunch of things that we got to talk about and i don't want to go ahead and go out of turn all right i got you 8:00 we'll try to keep this uh you know keep this railing here yeah um in that video uh 8:07 he says this is the thanksgiving video i'm talking about he she just watched she says they talked 8:12 [ __ ] about me i don't know if you caught that part i didn't say that you could go back in 8:17 this very video or there actually was part one i didn't say that what i said was you know if you and this was me 8:24 being very stupid essentially what i was saying was don't be passive aggressive if you have an issue with someone 8:30 come out and say it don't talk [ __ ] don't hide the truth i never 8:36 said that they did talk [ __ ] about me okay i never actually outright say that in the video can you say that i insinuated it yes can 8:43 you say that i said it no because i never said it what i was saying was i'm not the kind of person who would do that that's actually how i phrased that i 8:48 said i wouldn't talk [ __ ] i wouldn't do that if i have an issue with someone i tell them to their face about it okay 8:55 that's the point i was making in that video however john did talk [ __ ] about me and we're 9:01 about to watch it because he glosses over it in this video um 9:06 without actually showing the actual evidence of like what he's talking about and now you're gonna see it because by 9:12 the way this is really where this video is where the big problem started with my trolls getting interjected into the 9:18 situation it was this very video you guys are about to see that started all the problems with the 9:24 trolls harassing us on both sides let's do it and i'm not exactly sure what that is in 9:31 reference to now there was a video i put out paymenton's 9:37 parody right yep my name is john 9:42 and i'm special because i upload videos to the internet but being so important does have its 9:49 dark side in fact it means that my life is much more difficult than everyone else's 9:56 while you're following the average path of working a traditional job attending school or perhaps both 10:03 i'm following my dreams and busting my ass talking over video games posting 10:09 breakfast pics and vlogging about movies that i hate creative things and as we all know 10:17 creativity is fueled by pure cash this is why i've opened a payment tons account it's an 10:24 internet website that allows people like me to receive lots of creativity from 10:30 people like you simply log in and transfer the entirety of your bank account into my payments 10:37 account i won't even get out of bed for less than 50 and then together we'll make sure that the world well my world is a much more 10:46 creative place 11:02 i'm not sure where we talk [ __ ] about him i mean we made that payment tons parody 11:09 that says darkseid in it but i'm not sure 11:16 where we talk [ __ ] about it okay now for the record i think this is funny i do i laugh at 11:22 this i think this is [ __ ] hilarious this is a razzing okay but this is a 11:28 razzing that happens okay in early 2015. it might have been late 11:33 2014 but i'm pretty sure it was early 2015. this happened on john rambo's podcast this is opening a cold open to 11:40 his podcast okay at the time no and now i know it was early 2015 because that's when i opened 11:46 my patreon so it was early 2015. at this point a year it's almost a year has happened 11:54 okay almost a year has happened all right or since i moved i've been trying to to have constant 12:00 contact with john and have conversation figure out what's going on with him is he okay figure out where we're gonna make content and 12:08 every time that i texted him i felt like he felt like i was always about asking about videos or content and that wasn't 12:13 the case i never felt like every time that i would reach out to john it was about let's make videos let's make videos i was genuinely interested in how 12:19 he was doing and everything that because he was in a very stressful time where he was making schnozmann a whole bunch and 12:24 a lot of other stuff was going on he actually talks about this in this video so it's okay for me to say this is not private he already talks about it in 12:31 this video okay so this was the time frame like mid to late 2014 early 2015 john stops directly 12:39 responding to me he stops responding to my text and everything okay people are constantly 12:44 asking me phil what is going on with you and john why you know are you gonna do content with 12:51 him is he talking what's going on all right i should have said [ __ ] off none of your business that's what okay maybe not [ __ ] 12:56 off that's kind of harsh maybe i should have said none of your business don't ask me that question it's between me and john but instead i would constantly oh i 13:04 don't know everything's fine maybe we're going to do content later this year i'll let you know oh and then sometimes i would sadly reveal information if john 13:12 did text me back i would say something out of turn i shouldn't have said that was private my fault all that i'll take responsibility for okay 13:20 john's not talking to me actively at all everyone suspects there's an issue there but i'm not being 13:26 truthful truth is i don't know what the issue is but he's not talking to me anymore 13:32 after months of not talking to me he puts this out so what do you think the people on the internet think this is this is even if 13:38 he's saying it's not about me even though it says dark side in it it's about me okay 13:43 what do you think people think wow john out of nowhere out of left field 13:49 just slammed phil phil hasn't said anything bad or insulting about john 13:56 but john just slammed him wow he fired the first shot and that's the 14:01 funny part is they said in this video phil fired the first shot okay me unfollowing them on thanksgiving 14:09 was firing the first shot according to howard um no i was not trying to hurt them by 14:16 unfollowing them on thanksgiving this is a direct intentional concerted effort a produced segment of a 14:24 show slamming me for opening a patreon has my name in it you can't dispute it's 14:30 about me sorry you just can't okay now the funny part is 14:36 in that thanksgiving video that i made in 2015 i never said that they talk [ __ ] about me i said if i was someone in a 14:43 situation that had an issue i would be public about it confront someone to their face about it and not talk [ __ ] i 14:49 never said they did they did but i never said they did all of a 14:54 sudden they're bringing it up in this video they're even referencing this payment on segment why 14:59 because either one of two things they're feeling guilty because john made 15:04 the segment and it absolutely was about me so this is a way for them to try to deflect that and say it wasn't or because everyone construed it as thus 15:12 and messaged the [ __ ] out of them saying why did you make this about phil when he hasn't said anything negative about you 15:18 why are you slamming him in this video i don't understand okay now personally 15:23 i didn't take this as a direct insult and they're actually going to talk about that so let's continue let's switch back over 15:29 here okay here we go 15:37 and it's a parody man i've done parodies in the past just to give you it's a parody that has 15:42 my name in it if it has someone's name in it it's not a parody a parody is a caricature of a 15:47 person making fun of something not so you directly reference my name so it is actually a slam on me it's not perry 15:54 a parody would have been you know a cartoonish content creator who isn't me but maybe could be construed as me you 16:01 said dark side in the video that's not a parody anymore you've you've passed the realm of parody when you name dropped 16:06 someone yeah okay the whole idea i've done parodies about machinima i did a youtube parody where youtube was 16:12 a uh a talking uh vagina a vagina robot 16:18 that ran youtube his parodies in the past machinima the partner network that everyone knew that 16:25 i was with for the longest period of time youtube the website that i put videos on 16:30 for a living you see the running pattern here oh i've done parodies in the past oh by the way every parody just happens 16:36 to also be related to phil what a cowinky dink right what a shocking coincidence that they all 16:43 actually are related to things that have to do with phil those others didn't name drop me though 16:48 this one did okay doing gamestop you know etc etc 16:54 comes out man oh and you you missed that he said gamestop etc etc he did do a parody on 17:02 game stop game gamestop unfairly fired him because he was in my videos 17:08 we were at a tournament way back when i think it was i want to say 2009-2010 we're at a street fighter tournament 17:14 together i'm filming he's working for game stop and in the video we're in a different game store 17:20 and he's basically saying things like this is the best game store they use that video my video as grounds 17:25 to terminate him now it's completely wrong shouldn't have ever happened they were in the wrong for doing that he made a 17:31 giant later on he he talked all about this in his podcast and he did a big parody segment about gamestop okay so 17:39 what does he do parodies about things that he feel have wronged him or things that that you know 17:45 are bad in relation to him and all of it has to do with me somehow right okay people get a little crazy about it 17:52 so two weeks later you know you and i were doing the show and we explained it wasn't singling him 17:58 out you know how's my name uh it was about many many things and not necessarily in a hateful manner 18:05 like i think you could make fun of something that i agree with and uh really not feel negatively about it at 18:11 all actually completely agree yeah like saturday live you know phil hartman would uh 18:16 addresses bill clinton i don't think he wanted to assassinate the president very very bad analogy 18:23 okay because he's saying phil hartman impersonates bill clinton he doesn't want to assassinate the president true that's 18:30 absolutely true um but in this case this was a different situation no one was asking bill hartman 18:38 hey bill hartman didn't you just have a friendship with with bill clinton phil hartman excuse me did you have a friendship with bill clinton and you're 18:44 not talking to him anymore even though he keeps saying he wants to talk to you you're ghosting him and now all of a 18:49 sudden you drop this video on him there's a difference it's context the context is there's a sketch comedy 18:55 show at night that makes fun of everything equal and isn't ill ill-intentioned at all versus someone who everyone wants to know why you're 19:01 not talking to phil you won't tell phil or anyone else and now you make a video that can be construed as a negative 19:06 video about phil it's a completely different situation that he fails to really understand 19:13 why it was construed by the internet like that again i don't think it was actually intended 19:19 all right as a video to be hurtful to me i think he thought it was funny i think it's funny but you have to put it in 19:26 context of the time if he had released that video two years prior when we were still active friends and he was in my content 19:32 or whatever that would have been different this is a situation where he's ghosting me he's not in my content like he said he would be and then he puts 19:38 that out of course the internet is going to say that's a hit piece on phil why'd you do it 19:43 and he got harassed for it basically he got a lot of trolling for it at that time okay 19:49 right yeah it's having a good time with something and that was really my uh what was it 19:55 about man now was he like an inspiration for the character 20:00 that i was portraying in that too yeah sure to an extent you know 20:05 but again not in a malicious uh hateful way i believe that he's having some fun with something 20:10 um but it's not again i think it's hard to say it's directly about one person 20:17 except this is dark side in it yeah it was a whole thing the whole thing was about that the pay me 20:22 or pay me wow patreon uh uh website and now here comes howard 20:28 with a little segment i like to call howard deflect 20:36 because this is going to happen many many times during this video let's see how howard can deflect this one off of 20:42 them doing something wrong what people do and you know and then what it is too it's it's when you look at it it's it's 20:49 it's to basically shed light on some of the negativity that that revolves around that site and not only that side but 20:55 kickstarter look at all the shenanigans that has gone that has transpired in the past like few years where people like 21:03 raise up all this money promising a product and then and then basically everyone's sol they they took the money 21:10 and people are [ __ ] you know look at what happened with you know look at the disaster that uh 21:16 inafune is going out with that uh mighty number nine that's still not out yeah i uh waiting for that one you know 21:23 hopefully come soon [Music] howard feels that a pay me tons parody 21:30 about patreon the content of which directly name drops me makes fun of someone who basically is 21:37 a content creator who does video content like playing games commenting over food etc and asking for monetary compensation 21:44 for said work is the equivalent of a kickstarter campaign where a company does not provide a 21:51 product for a contractual basis that is agreed to instead campaign for 21:56 fundraising patreon is not kickstarter they're not even close to being the same 22:02 all right he brings up a game in a funes mighty number nine which did eventually come 22:07 out did live up to all expectations of course at this point it didn't so he didn't know that that was going to 22:13 happen but he's essentially saying if you have a patreon you are taking someone's money and running and never 22:20 producing said content that you promised to produce that's what he's saying okay 22:26 that pay me tons segment was made in early 2015 there was no controversy around my patreon at that point 22:33 this video was made later on in 2015 after that it happened okay you want to know the skinny on that 22:39 again you can go watch me referring to the down the rabbit hole video dark side phil we go into that whole patreon 22:45 situation okay so over the course of the year that this is out they changed the narrative oh this 22:51 wasn't about us just making fun of filmmaking content you see this is us criticizing kickstarter as a whole and 22:57 seeing that people aren't living up to the the goals that they're promising or whatever which is actually 23:03 incidentally one of the controversies that i was embroiled in at the time with patreon okay 23:08 so it's he's completely deflecting my name is in the parody you can't deny 23:16 it's about me if they had not put darkseid in there you can argue that my name darkseid is in the parody it's 23:22 about me directly personally do i think that it was an actual meaningful meaning a mean insult no people told me about 23:30 this i watched it back myself and i responded publicly and said i don't think that's an insult towards me it's 23:35 kind of a funny joke yeah it's razzing me but they're not directly insulting me in this video i don't believe it is okay 23:42 so if that's the case why are they bringing it up in their video right i outright said it's not an insult 23:49 i didn't say in my thanksgiving 2015 video that they had talked [ __ ] about me i said if i was someone who had an issue 23:55 with someone else i would say it to their face and i would not talk [ __ ] or anything like that i'm telling you what 24:00 i wouldn't do if i were in their situation i didn't say they did it you could say that i insinuated it but i 24:06 never said it they are actually in my opinion guilty 24:12 they're feeling guilty that they made that or john feels guilty that he made that and to the point where so many 24:18 people contacted him saying you know that's kind of mean spirited you made that about phil at a time when you were kind of not talking to him and you were 24:23 supposed to be in his content and you're not this is kind of messed up you did it and he's got this underlying guilt that he made it and now he has to talk about 24:30 it to defend himself in this video when i never brought it up i i again i outright said he'll even say 24:35 this i outright said it's not about me he's not insulting me so why john are you bringing it up in this video then i 24:41 don't understand and then why did you have howard deflect the whole situation so it was about kickstarter 24:46 patreon is not kickstarter they're two completely separate businesses with different intentions it's not even equivalent it's like apples and oranges 24:54 massive deflection and an epic fail of a deflection right there so people make promises and they don't 25:01 you know go through with them and that's basically what the parody was about you know yeah because i mean you know you're 25:06 here nothing to do with people that use it or not you know i really honestly if everyone on there hope you 25:12 like everyone gets a million dollars a month yeah like what it doesn't again it doesn't affect me in any john 25:19 if you say things like i hope that everyone out there makes a million dollars a month it doesn't affect me then why are you saying it if it doesn't 25:26 affect you why are you saying it because it affects you listen i'm guilty of this too why do i sometimes name drop other 25:33 content creators that are bigger and more successful than me because i'm jealous that's why 25:38 yes i'm jealous of pewdiepie yes i'm jealous of markiplier they're rich 25:44 i'm not i'm jealous of them why do you think i bring them up right 25:49 you can why would you even have a parody of that in your show unless you're somehow affected by it and 25:56 feel that it's meaningful to you it's a false narrative he is affected by 26:01 this money was a factor or else none of this [ __ ] would have been brought up ever if it really didn't bother him he 26:07 wouldn't make the parody about it he's trying to bring light a humorous light to something that he feels maybe is kind 26:13 of wrong not outright hurtful or criminal but wrong he doesn't agree that people make content and have 26:19 a patreon so people can support it with finances like that he doesn't agree with that that's why he made 26:25 that clip don't then say oh it doesn't affect me i hope you're all rich no you wouldn't 26:31 have made the clip if it didn't affect you it's complete [ __ ] i know because i'm a bullshitter too and i've done it over the years with these other 26:38 guys yes you are a hundred percent you're affected by this or you wouldn't have made it it's just it's cause and 26:43 effect man way um but again my main thing was like looking 26:48 around youtube and seeing that no one has done a parody of this which is interesting no one could no one 26:55 ever made a parody of patreon according to john here okay because you know people want to have one they don't want 27:01 to make fun of it or something or you know are they we call the hypocrite if they have one or something 27:07 so i felt like oh i could get away i could get a way of making fun of this thing 27:13 because i'm not looking to really make money on this or really have the option 27:18 i'm not really looking to make money or i don't really have the option it's all 27:24 in the way he says it it's not that he doesn't wish that he could make money he doesn't have the 27:30 option to do it and that's why he's making parodies about patreon people trying to make a 27:35 living doing it he doesn't feel he'll he could be successful doing it he says it right there 27:42 yeah so i put it out and here's a little secret for you i don't really matter that much 27:47 on youtube it's not a video that got a billion views here we go now he's now he's downplaying himself on you oh i'm 27:53 not popular on youtube this is again going with his narrative i can't make a living doing it it's okay for me to make the parody he's punching up essentially 27:59 is what he's saying i can make that parody because i'm punching up true but you're punching up 28:05 at me who's supposed to be your friend right you're what you my name is in the video you're punching up at someone 28:11 who's your friend you're punching up at someone who why did i open the patreon because i was having financial difficulties at the 28:17 time and by making that parody you're you wanna say who shot the first shot i mean okay maybe you say unfollowing 28:23 someone on twitter is shooting the first shot i say this is the first 28:30 this is the first outright kind of aggressiveness when you use passive aggressive it's still 28:36 aggressiveness towards me from john okay can you really say it affected you in a 28:42 negative way yes and despite all that yes i was mass messaged by people constantly phil why 28:49 did john insult you phil are you weird john insulted you here here it is they're tweeting me they were emailing 28:54 me it was on my video comments it was on my stream comments it was everywhere i went john hates you 29:00 and it was toxic [ __ ] and it made me feel like [ __ ] not that jon made it but that everyone was harassing me about it 29:06 yes it did absolutely positively negatively affect me again 2015 was one of the worst years of my 29:12 life all this negative [ __ ] was piling up this was just the cherry on top of the [ __ ] sunday all this other [ __ ] 29:19 going on do i really need someone who's supposed to be my friend piling on as well of course not but it happened 29:26 we came out and said it wasn't directly about him we wished him the very best and uh just super not be part of his 29:33 stuff no that didn't happen we said it wasn't about him we wish him 29:38 the very best and said we're not going to be a part of his stuff that never happened did they say it wasn't about me yes did 29:45 they ever say all right we're all right saying to the public we're not going to be a part of phil's stuff no 29:50 that was part of the problem that they never did that they were doing that and they'll actually admit this later on in the 29:55 video they were doing this behind the scenes they were talking to people in person that they ran into and people were like 30:01 hey whatever happened to you and and phil you're going to do anything with them and john would basically tell no we don't associate with him anymore but 30:07 they didn't tell me again it's it's the passive aggressiveness and it's not it's it's 30:14 being half truthful yes they did tell people we're not going to associate but not publicly so 30:19 everyone was constantly pounding me with requests as to why aren't you doing something with john what's going on with 30:24 john and i had no answers how was that so i don't see how that's talking [ __ ] 30:30 about we're talking [ __ ] about him on top of that after the paintings video came out he publicly said 30:38 if john does a skit making fun of patreon it doesn't mean he's talking [ __ ] about me 30:44 absolutely correctly i'd like to know yeah where was the [ __ ] talk right it's like 30:50 one of those things where i didn't but i didn't say you should i should you should talk to me i never said it we just watched the video i said if i was 30:56 in that situation i wouldn't [ __ ] talk i didn't say you did you can say there's an insinuation there but that's a jump 31:02 and i wasn't saying that they had [ __ ] talked to me um they are feeling guilty about this payment on this video 31:08 all year long because people said hey you basically insulted phil with this and now they're projecting that on to me 31:14 when i didn't say something that i that they're saying i said you see um i outright said that they didn't insult me 31:19 so why is this even an issue and why is this being discussed i have no idea just put say something in a video it's 31:25 like oh they talk [ __ ] but you have no didn't say they told you this so people just kind of go oh they talk 31:31 [ __ ] they mostly must have done it but i didn't say that and you know it's just one of those things that 31:37 people like i feel bad because he doesn't know how to 31:45 uh let go of things i guess people like you know and this happens with anything 31:51 you know people jam you with stuff yep unlike twitter and they prod you and prod you and you to try to get a 31:57 response out of it and he fell right into the shenanigans yeah you know what and we're falling into it right now 32:03 because honestly i think he's going through it right now too because he he 32:08 he threw a shot and then we're we didn't want to throw the shot 32:15 but now we have to throw the shot yeah it's weird it's weird timing why why did you pick that day at that time 32:22 you know so it's weird because now i don't even know what they're talking about are they talking about when i unfollowed them on 32:28 twitter in 2014 are they talking about the video i put out in my holiday ask 32:35 the king that i always do on thanksgiving in 2015. i actually have no idea which which they're even talking about because again already they've 32:41 already jumped from 2015 to 2014 to the payments segment it's where's the timeline what are they even talking 32:47 about i don't know i actually have no idea okay um but i agree with howard 32:54 i have always been terrible at damage control i have always had an issue where 33:00 if i get attacked from multiple directions and back then it was way worse by the way today we got our [ __ ] 33:05 under control right we do today you got a ton of people in the in the chat being dicks to me right now i'm not 33:12 paying any attention i don't care it doesn't bother me anymore you know but back then if people came on me at 33:18 twitter at me you know came at me and my my video comments came at me in my stream chat on my forums i 33:25 fell for it hook line and [ __ ] sinker [ __ ] singer bro i just 33:30 jumped like a big fish here's always a worm ah i eat that [ __ ] i fell for it all the time i always took the bait i 33:38 always got angry this is what people were doing they were troll beating me constantly ultimate taking of the bait i was such 33:44 an idiot and i would get upset about [ __ ] for no [ __ ] reason that i never should have got upset about i let these trolls get to me that is why for sure 33:53 that is why things got so bad with the internet and me with this is how you don't plays and 33:58 [ __ ] like the worst that we get the more we get to fill in the better reaction we get and howard 100 correct here all 34:06 right i was the public-facing figure not them did they have their own 34:11 internet [ __ ] going on yes but i was the one who made a living on the internet so i was the one who saw it every single 34:18 day every video every stream every comment everywhere where's where's john what's going on with john why isn't john 34:24 in the video why isn't he making the videos with you what did you do to john why why phil why did you ruin john's 34:30 friendship with you and i'm like what the [ __ ] man so then i would say dumb [ __ ] i would i 34:35 would completely say dumb [ __ ] that was out of turn that was insulting that was dumb that was revealing private 34:41 information and it's all wrong i have no defense against that at all zero i did 34:47 it it's wrong they're gonna bring up instances of it can't defend it all right at least today if you haven't 34:54 noticed we do have things better under control when it comes to things comments on the streams and things like that it's 34:59 not a constant toxic universe anymore the i would argue that the universe of 35:05 dark side phil at one point was a very toxic place to be we have definitely improved that 35:11 over the years okay but no i can't defend it howard 35:17 absolutely correct in this statement i was completely guilty of this [ __ ] it's not like we did the show through on 35:23 wednesday i mean we're like talking [ __ ] or or there's anything that's to do with them it's like it's it's a it's a vet 35:29 it's a attempted trolling yeah it's uh let me say something 35:35 hopefully they'll respond then i could come back with something else and i create a whole situation of drama around 35:40 that's not true you know and uh i think this is what he wanted us to do this is why i haven't done this 35:46 uh ever until now despite him you know running me down on his forums on twitter and just talking 35:53 about that you know and like try to do stuff on the sneak but i catch wind of all this stuff man 35:59 people send me all this stuff yeah i don't i don't look at it but 36:05 with things like this happen i'll go through and see what's going down so 36:11 he's saying there's a campaign against him like i was constantly trying to like talk [ __ ] about him and bring him down and stuff 36:16 again that wasn't the intention but again it's trollbeat trolls baiting me into saying dumb [ __ ] or trying to get 36:22 emotion out of me right about the situation specifically he doesn't bring up any specifics so i 36:27 can't directly react to what he's saying and say oh here's what i meant or whatever so i don't know i could confirm what happened happened on twitter 36:33 happened on my phone with my forums my god there was like two or three [ __ ] on my forums who would constantly pelt 36:38 me with [ __ ] about this and try to get this out and i would fall for it every 36:43 time i typed a paragraph that fell for oh my god i did it again i did it again but here's the thing he's trying to kind 36:50 of say that like i'm doing it behind the scenes everything i did was public my forums are public you can see them right now i 36:56 didn't delete the posts my twitter's public my videos are public everything's public it's not like phil is trying to 37:03 do a underhanded backstabbing campaign where he's bad-mouthing john behind the scenes and [ __ ] i did it in 37:09 public i mean maybe that's even worse right but it seems like he's trying to say like oh i got wind of it no john you got 37:14 wind of it because my trolls baited me and then they sent you my responses they did it on purpose it was a concerted campaign they tried 37:22 to get me to react badly so that you would see me react badly and be angry with me 37:28 i mean i fell for it and then you did too you know this was absolutely them trying 37:34 to create friction between us and i was guilty because i was the one with the public face again i was the one who got 37:40 attacked with it every day how are you gonna reach john hit him with a video comment tweet him he doesn't even check his twitter that often you don't have 37:46 other ways i had to be public every day it was my job he didn't have to okay but in reality i'm guilty of this 37:53 you know again i fess up to it but absolutely john bit hook line and sinker too with 37:58 the trolls sam that he's oh i got wind of it how did you get wind of it because the troll sent it to you dude i mean how 38:04 did you not realize who it was they were getting me to say stupid [ __ ] so that they could show it to you and you'd be that mad at me that was the point that 38:10 was what they were intending to do to begin with you see okay let's continue 38:16 um you know it's an attempt to it's an attempt to get something going oh and by the way he 38:23 says this is an attempt to get something going the reason he he's talking like this and the reason he made that thanksgiving video that we watched at 38:29 the very beginning is because he wants to say something that will say something then he'll say something it'll be drama going back and forth for for attention 38:35 on the internet wrong all right i'm going to reveal this later uh in depth but the reason that i did that in that 38:42 thanksgiving video was because i needed to prompt an action because in my life i had a lot of [ __ ] up stuff going on 38:48 this was one of them i was actually having a lot of problems behind the scenes mentally because of what a bad 38:53 year it was for me um we'll talk more about that because there's a specific segment of this video that addresses things you're like i 38:59 don't understand and when i explain you'll understand um but i never in my wildest dreams expected 39:08 they were gonna do a public video like this first of all howard at all how it has nothing to do with it but john um i 39:14 never expected it i thought this would be the straw that broke the camel's back 39:20 that he would either call me or start responding to my texts again and say 39:26 what was going on because again he had been ghosting me essentially for almost a year at this point when i made that 39:31 thanksgiving video 2015. okay so that's what i thought i thought all right if there really is an issue which 39:37 he always said there was never an issue he never said there was an issue he would ongoing tell me oh god all right 39:43 everybody okay that's the wrong video i guess we gotta get out of there there we go 39:51 try it i would now we're at the end of the video anyway he would outright tell me 39:57 when he did respond there was no issue don't worry there's no issue if there is an issue we're going to work it out i'm 40:02 going to be in your content this thing's on my side and yada yada that kind of [ __ ] and then 40:08 um he just stopped responding entirely when he stops responding entirely it's like 40:15 like dude come on at least be honest or truthful or upfront and transparent with me you know um 40:21 and he wouldn't be he would just ghost me so i thought making that thanksgiving video would prompt him to finally reach 40:27 out and even if it was phil i've had enough okay i seriously had enough about with 40:33 you i don't ever want to be your friend again at least if he had done that there would have been closure 40:38 okay that's what i was looking for closure because there was it was open-ended and people were constantly hounding me about this and wouldn't 40:45 leave it alone and i was like the only way i'm ever gonna get closure is to force the hand 40:50 is that [ __ ] up yes is that wrong 40:56 yes it is i shouldn't have ever done that's [ __ ] up to put him in that stressful situation 41:01 um that he was in because of me absolutely that was wrong to do and i shouldn't have done it but i did it 41:08 because a lot of things going on in my life that will be explained later in the video now i gotta find where we are 41:15 option yep so i put it out and here's a little secret for you 41:21 i don't really matter that now here we go 41:26 it's like it's it's a it's a it's a attempted trolling here we are 41:31 yeah it's uh let me say something hopefully they'll respond i didn't want to respond 41:37 i just wanted him to respond to me in general been a year since he was talking to me you know i just wanted anything i 41:42 think this is what he wanted us to do this is why i haven't done this uh ever until now 41:49 despite him you know running me down on his forums on twitter and his chat you know we already did this like try to do 41:55 stuff on the sneak but i catch wind of all this stuff man people send me all this stuff 42:01 yeah i don't i don't look at it but with things like this happen i'll go through and see what's going down 42:08 um you know it's an attempt to it's an attempt to get something going 42:14 yeah and he falls victim to it on a consistent basis yeah and he doesn't he 42:19 has an issue like a really big issue with damage control yeah he doesn't know how to 42:24 ignore things i agree here 100 this is why we're in the situation that we're in now is because of that 42:30 yeah you know there was no need for him to make to address this he could have just 42:36 let it go and that was it but we'll talk 42:42 three months after we last spoke about him in a po in a positive way that we spoke about him 42:47 let's choose just three months randomly and say some stuff and that but again that was three months 42:53 john didn't ever think about me hear about me i was getting a constant my trolls were 42:59 all over me constantly about it man phil you really [ __ ] up that relationship with rambo because that was a good thing 43:04 you got going he was your friend and look what you did now like what are you talking about you don't know anything there's no public information about this at all but that's what i got every day 43:11 you know um and it it just festered and it got toxic inside of me that i felt like [ __ ] 43:18 over this all right and again why did i why did this come up it was ask the king 43:23 on thanksgiving that's my thanksgiving thing that i do every year i don't know if i specifically do it anymore seven eight years later but you 43:30 know i used to do it every thanksgiving at the holiday ask the king and it's a question that came up and i felt that this would actually 43:35 give it closure because from my end it was it was one of two things was gonna happen either 43:41 they ignore it completely they never respond in which case i say that was my last word on the subject never talking about it ever again or they respond 43:47 behind the scenes i find out what's actually going on maybe we have a resolution we work things out and we're friends again or maybe not and if not at 43:54 least there's closure closure is better than than nothing in my opinion like that's what was my 44:00 mindset back then was even if the closure is a negative closure and this is the end and this is john saying i hate you don't ever talk to me ever 44:06 again you're a scumbag i'd rather have that than oh i just ghost you forever and who knows what happened right so 44:13 in reality what happened was i got my answers just not in the way that i was expecting and it blew up completely in my face 44:20 because now everyone publicly thought that i was a scoundrel a scumbag a piece of garbage because of this video 44:25 um again i'm not going to dispute there's things i've done wrong all right 44:31 let's continue then not only that every single time we've been out in the field and people have asked us about him all 44:38 we do is we don't associate with him anymore but we wish him the best of luck remember that guy that we met at the 44:44 youtube studios yeah yeah the same question that we said we always give the same answer 44:50 yeah man we're not they would go out in public and tell people we don't associate with 44:57 phil anymore we wish him the best but they wouldn't tell me they're telling other people 45:02 but not me so again i'm the one left with the public face to the to the internet 45:08 thousands of people who want answers i have none and they won't give me the answer but they'll tell someone at the youtube studios oh we're done with phil 45:15 we're not going to deal with him anymore how about me you know i'm here to bash anybody but at the same 45:22 time we're not here to take [ __ ] from anybody either yeah there's enough is enough and uh we 45:28 always talk about it you know as i always say hopefully we don't have to do this 45:33 yeah we talk about this it's disgusting it's sad but uh here we are man so yeah and again i'm 45:40 gonna like spill this out this isn't an attack this isn't like just an attack like this 45:45 is all the [ __ ] that went down there's things that are out there that he put out there these other people believe 45:52 that are not true yeah so i have to defend all right he's going to bring up the subject of money 45:58 now um he's right but it's because all right i'm not even gonna get ahead 46:04 i'll let him talk and then we'll we'll address it okay um so really my last feelings on the 46:09 subject of because now they're gonna move on my last feelings on the subject of the the thanksgiving 2015 ask the 46:15 king which is how this hole started all right i was completely in the wrong for saying what i said 46:20 um and doing that at the same time they had been ghosting me for about a year the only contact i 46:26 have with them is them is john making a payment tons parody that essentially has my name in it so it is a slam against me 46:32 even though i thought it was funny still slam against me and everyone sees it like that all right they continue to ignore me for the rest of the year all 46:39 the viewers and fans are asking why i don't know but they're telling everyone publicly 46:44 that they run into oh we don't associate with phil anymore we don't like him uh you know but we wish him the best i 46:50 don't know that right things are just getting worse and worse for me in 2015. again piling on of 46:55 [ __ ] the deep the ddosing the swatting my relationship falling apart my youtube channel 47:01 uh getting destroyed and this was just the other [ __ ] up thing behind everything you know what 47:07 i'm saying um and it just kept festering to the point 47:12 where i wanted a closure and what i did got a closure but sadly it was a public closure i just 47:18 wanted them to say hey enough is enough we don't want to be your friend anymore leave us alone which 47:23 they never did and they still didn't because in this video they don't say that either although obviously if you make a 47:29 90-minute negative video about someone that's pretty much what you're saying okay myself we have to dispel some things so 47:35 i want to get into a couple things here man here we go so the first one i want to talk about 47:40 which is disgusting man is money okay you ever told like you shouldn't talk 47:46 about money ever oh yeah all the time all the time yeah this is not me complaining about it 47:52 every day honestly from my side of things i know some other people uh in our in our circle uh don't agree 47:59 but uh i believe i was treated fairly with with money but the problem is info that's been 48:06 presented to you is not exactly true so it's something okay john feels that he was treated fairly 48:12 with money but people in their circle don't agree who what are you talking about 48:18 this is about you and me this isn't about people in your circle and what did you tell them so you told 48:24 people in your circle what money you were making in our videos other people knew okay 48:29 it wasn't just me on one side he was telling people all around him what kind of money he was 48:34 making apparently and they said it wasn't enough so there's the seed of oh you're not 48:40 half you shouldn't be happy with that you should have more right um again john said earlier this isn't about 48:47 money i don't care what everyone else makes around me out you know he says here phil treated me fairly with money 48:52 but now he's about to have a whole segment about money 48:58 so why if you feel you're you're treated fairly right why are you doing a segment about money he says oh because there's 49:04 some misinformation even if there was misinformation who cares you were treated fairly with money how is this an 49:09 issue right and then he says the circle of friends i i again when i watch this video and i've 49:16 watched it many many times over the years this is a seven-year-old video there is this 49:21 reference to a circle of people behind the scenes who are basically what sounds to me they're poisoning the well 49:28 they're looking at the situation as outsiders right and they're telling john 49:33 hey john you were treated badly this was bad why would you know meanwhile john and i are 49:40 having a blast we're making content we're making money we're having a good time together there's no there's no ill will there 49:45 all right but who what is this circle of friends telling you you didn't make enough money 49:50 why are you listening to them if you feel like you did right this comes up later there's other topics where they start saying oh you 49:56 know people in our friends circle said this and that what why why is why is this in disgust in 50:02 your friends circle this is you and me our friendship our business relationship why is this being poisoned by others 50:08 this is weird to me to hear him say it like this it's very telling that there's other stuff going on 50:14 that you don't know about until this videos comes out okay anyway let's see what john has to say about money which 50:20 he said you shouldn't talk about that he says quite often john got 50 percent got half 50:26 of everything that i made that we made together or videos i was in with him right 50:31 and again howard like why is this something that's said publicly this should have come up with any kind 50:37 of there is there there is no reason to say this unless he's a he's lying or b he's trying to 50:44 save face i'm trying to save face because at this time again when did i start talking about that [ __ ] publicly 50:51 2014 2015 because people started again maybe mostly trolls but people saying 50:56 phil why is john on your content phil john said he would be in your content and he's ignoring you why did you not 51:02 pay him and that was a big thing people always wanted to make it about money when john never had an issue with money never once did he say to me i'm not 51:08 getting paid enough for my work um and so i never thought it was an issue 51:13 now i have no idea when 51:20 i started talking about it publicly nor do i know the context because i couldn't 51:26 find it i'm sure people will find it now and that's fine because i'm going to tell you i know i said it i know that i 51:31 said this that i paid john 50 i know i should should i have said that probably not at the same time 51:38 do you feel that if you were getting paid 50 of the money being made on a project that's a co-op is that enough 51:45 right i'm trying to be fair um people were constantly attacking me telling me that i was not paying john 51:52 like this was an ongoing thing with my trolls that phil was a scumbag who ripped off john and never paid him or 51:58 didn't pay him enough and he was pocketing all the money and being the big guy who was rich and everything and john was getting nothing and i was 52:04 basically using his work and profiting off of it and all that and it couldn't have been further from the truth 52:10 as we're about to discuss but this became a common mean much like all the memes about me today that are stupid 52:15 [ __ ] the more that people say something the more they will believe it whether or not there's any evidence at all there 52:22 was no evidence of any of this because john never talked about it publicly nor did i so there's no way they could say that but that was their that was their 52:29 line of reasoning is that oh phil doesn't pay john okay so one day i'm sure i got annoyed like like 52:36 howard says i take the troll bait i got annoyed and on a stream i say listen i was fair i paid john 50 52:43 was it a lie no it was saving face howard is correct i was trying to save face i was trying to justify that you 52:50 can't tell me the reason john doesn't want to be in my stuff today's money he was always paid fairly i shouldn't have 52:56 done that another mistake i made or so there is no reason to even address 53:01 anything about money publicly on a youtube youtube video yeah this was done way before there was any kind of pr for 53:08 before there's major problems just something's thrown out like oh look i'm a great guy i'm giving him half the money yeah 53:13 um it's not exactly the truth okay so he starts doing youtube stuff in 2008 53:20 i do here's some of it you know i start doing videos with him that's street fighter vlog we've been hanging out for a couple years before that playing games 53:25 so just kind of transition into never to be playing games but recording games you know um 53:31 and i did this stuff for from 2008 we started youtube i did this for probably a couple years for nothing 53:39 he says he did it for a couple years for nothing that's correct any videos that he appeared in before i was able to monetize those videos he didn't get paid 53:45 for i was only able to monetize the gameplay videos in early 2011 when i got partnered with machinima so any videos 53:51 he appears in prior to that he didn't get paid for also i didn't get paid for them either 53:57 i was on with machinima a few years later and i had to come to him and ask because 54:04 we're still doing videos since you're getting something for this do you feel that i should get a 54:09 percentage of that for my efforts on here right mm-hmm so we make an agreement 54:17 by the way he says i had to come to him and ask he says it like i was he was doing these videos for an 54:22 extended period of time and i was not paying him and then he had to ask for the money no once i got partnered it was 54:28 pretty quick i don't i can't exactly tell you when i could tell you it was relatively quickly after i got partnered 54:34 he was regularly doing the co-op with me and then we started seeing the results oh the views were good there's money 54:39 coming in and they say hey can i get paid for that i said absolutely you are 100 entitled to getting paid you're part 54:45 of this content it wasn't like oh i did it for months and months and i had to then ask him and beg him for money 54:51 that's not what happened the way he says that makes it sound like that and that's not what happened at all 54:58 the [ __ ] which will be basically half of the month 55:04 half of the months co-op income so what happens is he takes out taxes 55:09 from that amount um and cuts it in half of that 55:14 but for instance like if it's march and we do videos in march 55:20 i will get a percentage of what was made in march that does not include residuals like for 55:28 months coming up like for instance if those videos make more money in april or or uh june or july 55:35 okay like that doesn't include that so whatever was made in april for that month that's 55:40 what i would get it does not include streams or whatever other money comes in right 55:45 yeah this will for a little while okay so let's address this because this is the part one then there's a part two 55:52 to it where the agreement changed okay here's the full story for context i was working with machinima 55:59 as a partnered member and that means that i would put out videos dependent on the views the videos got i would make a 56:05 flat rate of money per number of views on a video machinima would keep all the ad revenue 56:11 and give me that flat rate most cases they were making more money on the ad revenue than what they were 56:16 paying me that's how they made their profits and they made a living basically they were making the money on the ads i 56:22 was getting the flat rate payments okay so john is correct what we would do we would do a month of content okay now by 56:29 the way people seem to have this very weird conception or notion 56:35 that youtube is this big corporate entity that runs crazy amounts of 56:41 tracking and reports and has all this data that is completely false okay especially back then we're talking like 56:46 2011. here's how i got paid and here's how i figured out any data i got paid by a 56:53 paypal payment one lump sum a month [Music] there you go there's your money okay what is this is this 57:00 revenue from one channel other channels all channels oh that's just all your revenue so i don't even know the money coming in 57:07 what's it from is it from dsp gaming i had other channels running or is it from the other channel i don't know here it is lump sum 57:13 okay so how do i figure out what made what especially back then there was no way to 57:18 figure that out on youtube there was no analytics tab on youtube it didn't exist 57:23 there was no way to figure out how much money a video made okay what you would have to do is manually sort videos and 57:29 start counting views and [ __ ] so it was a nightmare i was like dude with the amount of co-op videos we're 57:34 pumping out right we're doing every week we're doing a co-op that's what 20 30 videos plus smart guys 57:40 like we're talking we'd have to track 100 more videos a month to figure out what we're making on these specific 57:46 videos so i started contacting machinima behind the scenes 57:52 and i made a request of them that they thought was ridiculously outlandish i said hey guys you're the ones who have 57:59 all the data you're the partner network you're tracking videos you have access to all that data 58:04 can you on a monthly basis start sending me reports on 58:10 videos and you know can i use those reports to pay well here's what i told them which 58:17 is kind of stupid i said i need these reports to pay my employees i got some people here working with me 58:23 and i have an agreement a business agreement with them okay and i need to be able to pay them if i 58:29 don't know what videos they're making i can't pay them so machinima on a monthly basis starts sending me reports 58:36 that are the most stupidly ludicrous reports i've ever seen is it a excel file that i can sort and search 58:44 and and do stuff with right is there anything that i can do anything with actively no it's a [ __ ] pdf file 58:50 uneditable unsortable it's just like as if someone right now handed you a piece of paper with printed text on it that's 58:56 what they're sending me okay so here's what we would do we would wait for a month to 59:02 pass okay and the next month we would sit down when 59:08 they send me the monthly report and we would say what were the co-ops we did last month and we would figure it out okay here's 59:14 what we did and we would i would i would not john i would go there line by line 59:20 and count up the amount of money that those videos made because that's exactly what the report was what what we 59:26 were what i was paid for that video by machinima that month so i would go through all of that and 59:33 sort it myself add it up subtract taxes which we knew what the taxes were i know what i was paying my tax guy and 59:38 everything you know for the taxes here's the profits and i'll cut it right down the middle 50 59:45 and i would give that to john on a monthly basis okay now he's absolutely correct there was no residuals paid okay 59:52 and there was a reason for that it was actually a discussion that we had it wasn't like oh we never talked about it or whatever we did have a residuals 59:59 discussion he said is there any way to figure out residuals i said well john the only way we can figure out residuals 1:00:04 is literally if every month not only am i going to sit down and look at the new 1:00:10 videos we make but now i have to request reports on previous months from 1:00:15 machinima and i have to sit down here and crunch those numbers too and we did this actually once and found 1:00:21 out that the residuals unless it was a giant playthrough the residuals were 1:00:26 essentially nothing all right a few dollars okay now 1:00:32 you might say well it's a few dollars is a few dollars right i mean hell it feels if he's coming over your house every week and doing co-op what's fair is fair 1:00:38 pay him what your own we had this conversation and the conversation was okay well 1:00:44 we're gonna do this co-op content but also there's gonna be things that come up right sometimes we're gonna do other 1:00:50 things we're gonna go on trips we're gonna do this we're gonna do that and not to say that it was 1:00:56 a contract we made we didn't this contract was never by the way no contract was ever made between us 1:01:01 there was no written contract he didn't sign i didn't sign this was just our agreement that we did we just did it we were friends we didn't think that 1:01:08 anything could could go wrong and my god if any ladies and gentlemen please listen to me no really 1:01:14 please listen to me right now okay if i can give you one piece of advice 1:01:20 out of this whole situation this whole [ __ ] up situation this is it right now this moment 1:01:25 stamp clip this part okay it doesn't matter if you're friends with someone if you are entering a business 1:01:32 arrangement with someone you must document it and you must have a contract period 1:01:38 because this is not the first or last time that an entire friendship has been 1:01:43 negatively affected and in some cases torn apart by a business relationship all right 1:01:49 i know examples of this for example screwattack.com which doesn't exist anymore was a very prominent website on 1:01:56 the internet for people who made content about video games there was two guys who were in charge stuttering craig and handsome tom sadly 1:02:03 the same thing happened with them to happen with me and rambo where they had kind of agreements they they weren't necessarily contract and then after 1:02:09 years of working on this content together they had a massive disagreement of falling out they split and now they hate each other essentially 1:02:15 okay it's [ __ ] up they were like the closest guys you know and 1:02:21 the public saw that unfold saw them have their relationship be broken fractured and split over the business 1:02:27 you know i don't necessarily think that's exactly what happened here i think that's one of the factors obviously john would not be bringing 1:02:32 this up if it wasn't a factor right he'd be ignoring it it's a factor to him or he's not going to address it but 1:02:38 we didn't ever have a contract so he can say all of this and i can say all of this 1:02:44 but there's no evidence of any of it right it's all hearsay all i can tell you is i'm corroborating what he's saying yes it's true there 1:02:50 were no residuals why was there no residuals because there was no way to figure them out there was no oh can i 1:02:56 have someone take data from youtube and crunch a spreadsheet and figure out this 1:03:01 and this and actually pay him what we had was kind of an unspoken agreement okay 1:03:06 um and the unspoken agreement was that for the extra stuff here's the thing on 1:03:12 youtube how it works when you first upload a video to youtube especially back then maybe today it's a little different back then you would upload a 1:03:17 new video to youtube that video will get a ton of break hot new ads on it you make tons of money on the ads 1:03:23 as soon as that went away the ads would stop running and you make almost nothing on the video so a video is not monetized 1:03:29 you make no no money on it so we would do a play through a hot new co-op play through the first few weeks we'd make 1:03:34 tons of money all right after that the next month two months almost nothing because the ads aren't running on it 1:03:39 anymore those ads are now running on all your hottest new uploads okay always why do you think i pump out so 1:03:44 much content right now if i were to not make any new content this month i would make almost nothing on ads on youtube 1:03:50 that's how it's always worked okay don't care what anyone else wants to tell you in my experience that's always been the case 1:03:56 so we had a situation here where i would have loved to pay him residuals 1:04:02 but we didn't know how to figure it out without an insane amount of number crunching and work for what essentially was going to amount to very little 1:04:08 all right so the unspoken rule i mean it wasn't that we put it down on writing but we talked 1:04:14 about it is all right well there's going to be situations where we're going to go on trips right i'm going to 1:04:20 arrange for us to go to a convention i'm going to arrange for us to go on on a trip that i'm gonna vlog or whatever and 1:04:26 the arrangement was that even though he wasn't getting paid any residuals for the content i would try to pay for as 1:04:33 much of that as possible whether it was a hotel room whether it was gas for his car because he was driving but i would pay for the gas whether it was plane 1:04:40 tickets in some cases that was kind of the rule that we had i had i was the one making the money here right i would pay 1:04:46 him fifty percent of the co-op income and anything else that came of it would be in another form and maybe intangible 1:04:52 form but you'll be able to go on trips and stuff like that's how what the agreement was okay um 1:04:58 he never complained he never had a problem with it whatsoever and this started 1:05:03 essentially in early 2011 when i was partnered with machinima i can't tell you the exact date but i 1:05:09 believe it was about mid to late 2013 when this changed and he's going to 1:05:15 reveal how it changed all right right now so let's continue 1:05:20 again not exactly 50 if you throw it out there but this goes on for a little while then he 1:05:25 says to me machinima isn't sending me reports anymore so i have no idea 1:05:32 i have no idea of the the amount of money that we're making on the co-op i have no way of figuring it out 1:05:37 so i can i can no longer figure out this percentage that we agreed on 1:05:42 so i basically just go okay listen [Music] throw me one hundred dollars every time 1:05:50 i come down i'm gonna let him talk okay say the whole thing and the way i come to this number is because 1:05:57 round trip is about two and a half hours of driving right i'm there the entire day and uh i 1:06:04 have to buy a meal at some point so give me a hundred bucks to kind of 1:06:10 cover my expense you also have to consider you know these are days like i'm not going to work 1:06:16 because my job and i'm an independent contractor so i'm not going to work these days 1:06:23 so if you really do the math uh with gas and food and uh weird tear in your car you know 100 every time you 1:06:29 come you're not exactly profiting there and including not going to or working at 1:06:36 a job which will actually make you more money than this you know yeah so just to flat out say you got 50 1:06:43 percent it's that's far from true it's far from the truth here 1:06:49 like it's ha i guess it's half truth it's a half truth is that what you would say yeah it's a half truth you know 1:06:55 um so when people want to throw their stuff out there man all like you went to conventions and uh we paid for things 1:07:02 again like you going to conventions you got to take time from work because i'm not getting paid for work 1:07:08 um and we went to convention so he's got an injury this is a back injury 1:07:15 so i would go and i would carry things i would film things i did all the driving as you know 1:07:24 and do whatever i could to help i was i was coming as not it's not just like hey phil take me 1:07:30 on this trip and i'll [ __ ] around and i'll sit by the pool you know as uh you know came as basically to assist him 1:07:38 in his business as he likes to call it right a lot of passive aggressive stuff 1:07:45 and what all that stuff he just said a lot of passive aggressive stuff the business as he likes to call it 1:07:51 um oh he has a back injury or so he says his back right 1:07:57 yeah i all i mean everything there everything i ever said was true i had a 1:08:02 back injury it was severe um the thing is i'm very very good at hiding pain 1:08:08 right you guys couldn't tell my videos back then half the time when i was sitting around making a vlog i wasn't 1:08:14 shooting pain up my leg numbness uh it was bad all right um 1:08:19 i had a business i was paying taxes i was doing everything like you have to do with the business but it's funny all these 1:08:25 insinuations right oh yeah what he calls a business ah that back injury he has and stuff 1:08:31 that's basically what he's saying by saying that stuff like that okay um 1:08:36 now i will 100 percent confirm everything he just said yes what happened was in late 1:08:42 20 i want to say it was late 2013 i can't confirm that but after over two years of me paying him that 50 cut our 1:08:48 arrangement changed now just to give you guys a little bit of perspective okay 1:08:55 one month okay he we're texting back and forth i 1:09:01 believe and john's like hey i'm just curious did machinima send you the report 1:09:06 because actually i'm kind of hard up this month i need some help can i get the money a little early i was like yeah no problem man let's try to figure this 1:09:13 out so i got i get the report out and i'm doing it it was like the middle of the night okay i'm doing it 1:09:19 and i don't know i [ __ ] up all right i don't know if we just had a 1:09:26 really really good month that month i can't remember but i remember doing it in the middle of the night 1:09:31 and it was like an exorbitant amount of money for both of us split down the middle it was like a ridiculous amount 1:09:38 for a co-op it was the most we had ever made on a co-op by far by like i'm not kidding like double all right 1:09:43 and i'm looking at it and i'm like could this be real did i [ __ ] up so i'm 1:09:49 doing i mean it's the middle of the night i'm tired i'm [ __ ] it i'm probably [ __ ] it up who cares right i'm doing the math again i do it again 1:09:56 it's the same i was like so i don't think i [ __ ] up i just think something happened maybe maybe that particular 1:10:02 play through got giant ads on youtube for some reason giant views for some reason i don't know what it was you know 1:10:08 i don't know why there was a time when we did it might have been no i don't know if it was but i know that we did a 1:10:13 family guy play through and that playthrough had inflated views and we got overpaid for it but i don't know if that was it but anyway 1:10:20 there's this one time where he really needed the money and i said okay i'm going to send it to you okay so i send 1:10:27 it to him all right five minutes pass i get a frantic phone call 1:10:34 he goes phil i think you made a horrible mistake 1:10:39 he goes i think you sent me too much money this is ridiculous there's no way i was like 1:10:44 no john i just did the math like three times and that's really you know 1:10:50 what you're owed for this month's work he goes no he's like there's no way 1:10:55 he goes there's no way that that's that's the amount i was like no it really is and and he's 1:11:01 like i i feel guilty taking this much for the work for the playthroughs we did this month you know 1:11:07 and what we're doing we're [ __ ] around we're sitting around playing video games he's like we made this much money i was like john listen 1:11:14 i want you to know something i don't even care if i [ __ ] up i make good money here you know not only are we 1:11:19 doing this co-op that's making crazy money because these were the great years of youtube when ad revenue was rolling i told you how much money i used to make 1:11:25 back then insane amounts and i said there's so much i'm making dude i don't care just keep it i don't even care if i 1:11:31 [ __ ] it up just keep it you need it dude i'm your friend i know this is kind of [ __ ] up that it's a 1:11:37 business relationship we even have to talk about it just keep it and he was happy you know so to me when he's when 1:11:43 he's bringing this [ __ ] up in a video like this it's like it couldn't have been further 1:11:49 further from the truth of this he's making it sound like it wasn't a good situation it was a crazy good 1:11:55 situation man he was so happy doing that co-op i know he was we had so much fun and he was 1:12:00 actually able to do things financially because he was making good money doing it you know 1:12:06 and i it just it really irks me it really irks me that he even talked about this in the video when he says oh i was 1:12:12 i was treated fairly but now i'm going to talk about this for a long time like i wasn't okay now the second half he's talking about 1:12:19 the hundred dollars a week okay so in late 2013 i think i can't confirm this i don't 1:12:25 have the data anymore um machinima tells me they can't send me the reports anymore 1:12:32 they don't give me a justification as to why they just say they can't they also told me no one else under the partner 1:12:38 network made those requests i was the only person asking for that data and they don't have to provide it so this is just one of the many cases 1:12:46 over the years where machinima's attitude towards me completely changed for no seemingly good reason they were we had a good relationship they were 1:12:52 sending me these reports all along no problem all of a sudden oh we can't do that why is he being so demanding of us 1:12:57 that he wants this data so they wouldn't give it to me anymore okay so 1:13:03 if you don't have the raw data all you can do is guess based off of views on youtube which is not reliable 1:13:09 um and we were trying to guess how much money videos are making or whatever and 1:13:15 john after like a month of trying to guess and and you know having difficulty doing it said all right forget it he's 1:13:22 like here's what we're gonna do just pay me a hundred dollars a week and i even said to him i said you sure that's what you want 1:13:28 i i in my head i had a ballpark number i wanted to pay him around 250 a week to come do what he did because it was smart 1:13:34 guys the commentary show and it was all the co-op we were doing and i 1:13:39 knew that he was driving i knew it was gas cost involved both ways he lived in new york new york the state i live in 1:13:45 connecticut there's exorbitant amounts of gas cost there probably he was paying 20 30 i would think every couple of 1:13:51 weeks for gas just for the trip okay um so 1:13:56 i wanted to pay him more that was the ballpark i remember i had in my head was around 250 a week okay 1:14:04 and he said no i just want the hundred all right that's our agreement we're 1:14:09 gonna do 100. by the way i never offered him the 250. i got to clarify because now it's not now i'm misconstruing it in a wrong way [ __ ] bad on you phil bad 1:14:16 phil i got to call myself out on [ __ ] from now on bad phil i didn't offer him 1:14:21 the 250. i asked him what he wanted and he said 100. the 250 was a number in my 1:14:26 mind i never said it i feel bad now because i said that that's a lie that didn't happen he wanted a hundred i said 1:14:34 i will give you what you want okay i should have paid him more i didn't okay 1:14:39 so from like late 2013 up until the time when i moved in 1:14:46 mid-2014 he was getting paid about a hundred dollars a week for the stuff that we were doing keep in 1:14:51 mind that all those other things like he just mentioned behind the scenes conventions 1:14:56 i paid for the hotel rooms i paid for gas to driving to those when we went just just to give you some perspective 1:15:05 we went to e3 together in 2012. right i basically bullshitted machinima 1:15:12 and i told machinima listen i need john to come with me to e3 because i need a cameraman because i 1:15:18 have a debilitating back injury now did i have a debilitating back injury yes 1:15:24 did i need john to come to e3 with me to film and carry my [ __ ] no i could have 1:15:29 done that myself i bullshitted machinima to get him into e3 1:15:34 i paid for his plane ticket myself because machinima would not pay for it 1:15:40 they said all they would do is they would get him a pass so i paid for his plane ticket to and from okay 1:15:47 um we went to to wrestlemania 1:15:52 okay we knew going to wrestlemania in 2013 would not garner a lot of content for 1:15:58 the internet because wwe was classically infamous for claiming content 1:16:04 that you put out there from any of their live events so i knew that even if i recorded 1:16:10 footage at wrestlemania that it wouldn't make money it wasn't in my 1:16:16 mind that was not a business trip that was a fun trip for friends okay i paid 1:16:21 for the gas he drove i paid for the hotel room i paid for the wrestlemania tickets those were over one thousand 1:16:28 dollar each wrestlemania tickets okay i didn't care this was fun stuff i was 1:16:33 doing with my friend i wanted him to be along for the ride with me okay i didn't want him to feel 1:16:39 left out because i was the one with his name on the channel i wanted him to come with me and share 1:16:45 these experiences with me the wrestlemania trip was not a business trip at all it was a friend trip for us 1:16:52 to go experience wrestlemania together and sure on the back end come back and do a smart guys about it right but it 1:16:58 absolutely positively was not that and he's saying every trip we ever went on he was my 1:17:04 work guy carrying my stuff and filming that is completely false the only trip 1:17:09 ever that happened was e3 do you want to know why that happened to e3 because we had to [ __ ] machinima to get him his 1:17:16 pass so they needed to see him following me along carrying my bags and equipment they needed to see him recording some 1:17:22 stuff that i was doing so that he we wouldn't get in trouble for getting him into e3 okay outside of that 1:17:29 it's actually completely untrue whenever we went to a convention john could do whatever he wanted i mean yeah he would 1:17:35 be on the panel that we did at the convention to promote his own content that he was doing on his channel whether 1:17:40 it was his podcast or schnauz being a hole i didn't demand that when he came to a 1:17:46 convention he could only talk about our our content that wasn't the intention was to he could get free promotion for 1:17:52 his own stuff i got his foot in the door of all these conventions and onto these 1:17:57 panels to promote his content okay there was a a convention we went to screw attack 1:18:03 gaming convention in 2013 okay i think it was 2013 i'm pretty sure it was 1:18:09 during this convention i think i interacted with john rambo a grand 1:18:15 total of two hours it was probably when we arrived said hello saw each other at the table that we had 1:18:21 there a few times and then when we were leaving we didn't have the same hotel room at that point i was with my ex we 1:18:27 had our room and he had his own room with howard okay and oj um 1:18:33 i was in doing my own content i was filming everything myself everything that was filmed for 1:18:38 the iron man of gaming competition i filmed okay yet he was there i got him in he had a table 1:18:45 he was had he had a panel with me like you know what i'm saying like he went and made so much content for his 1:18:51 own channel in this video he acts like oh you got to understand that even though the money 1:18:56 was good and people could justify that the money maybe even when it wasn't good will feel paid for all those conventions 1:19:02 and things well i was working the whole time that's a lie he worked definitely during e3 1:19:08 and everything else was us having fun as friends okay everything else was you know like i said that wrestlemania trip 1:19:14 it was zero work there was no work it was fun so he is spinning 1:19:20 this in a way that's com all right not completely untrue because there's one time when he actually did do a 1:19:26 significant amount of work because he because we had to or else machinima and i said hey what do you [ __ ] lie to us about this guy you 1:19:32 know filming for you or whatever i told him he was my cameraman and i needed that because i had a back injury right 1:19:37 outside of that he it was always friendship it was about friendship me paying for everything 1:19:43 because i was the one making all the money on the channel and friendship so that he could come with me this statement he's making here 1:19:49 is incredibly hurtful to me incredibly because it couldn't be further from the truth at least from my perspective maybe 1:19:54 that's how he saw it but that wasn't what was happening um i can't believe he says this 1:20:00 really i can't oh every trip that we went was full work for me and i was taking days off of work dude it was just 1:20:05 hanging out and i paid for everything because you were taking time off of work to do it you were you wanted to go you 1:20:10 agreed to all of it like why is this an issue later right 1:20:17 anyway that's all i have to say about that i'm really i'm actually really hurt by that statement that he makes there 1:20:23 because that really makes it feel like all those times we had together that were friendly and i was doing my best to 1:20:28 make sure that he could share in the fun of everything that i was doing as a result of being a youtuber that he would be part of it because i 1:20:34 want him to be part of it because he was my best friend at the time i really felt like this is like him just saying none of that mattered at all none of it ever 1:20:40 mattered it was all [ __ ] he didn't care and i don't i don't believe that i think that this is 1:20:46 a video of him trying to like i said along with howard create kind of hit piece against me and this is 1:20:52 a messed up situation where he's trying to downplay all the great times we had that we're not about being monetized 1:20:58 we're not about him filming doing work for me it was about us being friends and me paying for those fun times to happen 1:21:03 and he's like oh that's not a factor okay you know whatever you can believe me you can disagree with me and not 1:21:10 believe me i don't care i'm just getting it off my chest okay so again it's not me 1:21:15 that wasn't me complaining about like i should have gotten this i should have gotten that because he never does it's just like again it gets out there he got 1:21:23 half of what's made but there's many more details in there that uh 1:21:29 you know are not are not given one final thing about it because they're gonna move on and start talking about project seven now i believe 1:21:35 um by the end those last few months that i was in connecticut and i was paying him the 1:21:41 hundred dollars not that this even matters but um just doing basic math okay our co-op 1:21:47 stuff had completely fallen off we basically had done all the big games there wasn't many big games coming out we were just weekly doing co-op and 1:21:53 between smart guys and uh you know the co-op stuff we were doing and the money that those videos 1:21:59 were essentially making from machinima i was paying him more that hundred dollars i was paying him a 1:22:05 week was actually more than what was being made on the videos 1:22:10 so he was coming over and we were doing content for the sake of just keeping doing content and having 1:22:16 fun and i was paying him more money than i was that i was making i was losing money on the co-op for about two three months 1:22:22 there at the end there roughly okay um all you gotta do is look at the decline of my channel over the years and you'll 1:22:27 see the viewers go boo all the way down and yeah those views monstrously declined on that stuff 1:22:33 around 2014 um but i wanted it to keep going 1:22:39 and that's why i kept paying them let's get it's this man i'll spend all day on this probably here we go 1:22:44 this topic try to keep it down as much as we can well we gotta touch on project seven 1:22:51 because again there's things said publicly that kind of need to be uh you know 1:22:56 addressed so project seven man the version we were involved in 1:23:02 oh tell us a little bit like how it started howard max these are your those are your guys actually guess what 1:23:08 the food is here early it says order complete oh 1:23:14 yeah it just got delivered so i guess we're taking a break a really early break because i ordered 1:23:21 the food to show up at like 4 4 30. it's 3 51 it's already here so 1:23:26 i guess let's do let's just uh end the video if you're watching this on demand on youtube apologies because i 1:23:32 was not expecting to end it there but it's actually time to end this portion of the video and it will be 1:23:38 further apart so go check them out thanks

pt3

0:00 hello everyone this is part three of dsp reacts to the john and howard response video from november of 2015. if you 0:07 haven't seen the first two parts man lengthy pretty detailed going through a lot of stuff i strongly 0:13 recommend you go check them out here on this channel before you watch this part this part will be starting off to deal 0:18 with project seven and then moving on to other uh topics as well but we're gonna go ahead and uh 0:26 let's get started you guys ready here we go what the 0:31 hell yeah the very change of this thing well basically we got together and like 0:38 how do you know how do you know audrey and paul andre and paul are childhood friends of mine we grew up together yeah 0:45 and basically paul as we got older paul ended up going to like a film school and andre as well so 0:52 andre went to a film school in california paul went to a film school in new york and um 0:58 right around the time like i had lost contact with with them and then like one day i ended up showing up to um 1:05 i just met them you know i go to church with them and everything else i just showed up at the church and we were talking or 1:11 whatever and he uh they were you know we're talking about youtube and stuff and you know i i made mention about you know that i started 1:17 doing youtube stuff and uh you know talked about a little about you guys you and phil and you know they 1:23 were interested so prior to me introducing so that's andre up top and that's paul down below 1:30 andre primarily um um the vast 1:36 majority of the workload of the video editing while paul was more of the guy who set 1:42 up the shots he was the guy who had the physical camera the lighting the audio like the microphone he was the one 1:48 who did that stuff okay so together they formed a group called respect the pact 1:54 it was a youtube channel and these guys had been making edited style uh content 2:01 uh for about a year they had two videos that got very popular one was real life pacman where it was basically andre 2:08 being chased around by a bunch of ghosts as he followed 3d dots down an actual 2:14 filmed like sidewalk and then he would grab a power pellet and he chased the ghost like he was pac-man okay it was a 2:20 second video and that video was real-life street fighter like what they 2:26 did is they they put all these effects over like like people i don't remember if it 2:31 was them or not but it was like real-life street fighter with with the energy bars and fireballs and things it was really well done so they had a 2:38 little bit of traction all right on youtube but what it was was they were trying to 2:44 break out they were wondering if maybe they could actually turn their hobby into maybe something that would be popular get them some income etc 2:51 and as howard's about to outline well they were friends with howard howard 2:57 knowing me and he had started doing stuff on youtube as a result of being in my stuff there was interest to see howard do stuff with him and his family 3:04 so he started putting videos on youtube and then they spoke with him and then basically put two and two and two and two and two and two together next thing 3:10 you know we're all wrapped up in a project together so here we go introducing you guys to them i did a 3:15 couple of videos with them under uh uh i think was it respect the pact at the time or yeah 3:20 i was the name of the channel i remember like i remember i remembered okay yeah i remember you came to me 3:26 and you go i got these two guys or my friends yeah you know grew up together what not 3:32 um they want to make some videos are you interested in doing anything with them 3:37 and then i go don't think about it i go let's bring filling on this 3:43 yeah do you remember do you remember that yeah but it i think when we yeah so when we 3:48 initially initially was like let's do something with these guys and i was like let's get let's bring fill in on it 3:54 my buddy you know that gets me when he says then he was like i guess when he says that when he 3:59 calls me his buddy because that's exactly how it was it was like we had this fondness to each other and 4:05 how it all fell apart [ __ ] up um but yeah i had nothing to do with the initial 4:10 contact or idea uh when it came to uh doing anything edited style at all 4:17 remember i was just a guy who was pumping out raw unedited gameplay content and every once in a while like a 4:22 video review or a vlog that was it i didn't have any kind of high level expertise in video editing filmmaking 4:28 and nor did i really aspire to do anything like that it was actually john rambo and howard who approached me 4:36 to be involved in a project with these guys because they felt i had internet clout i had a following and hey we get 4:42 these guys involved with something on your channel and it gets popular maybe it can rub off on them and they'll get something out of it which is what 4:47 they're looking to do they would like to maybe long term do something on youtube that's profitable for them okay and it wind up 4:54 being the project yeah because that was like he did pro he started project seven one like 2009 5:01 it was really i don't know yeah maybe i think it was like a year before and then we said oh let's you know why don't we 5:06 just reboot it yeah so that's a really really short version what happened is in 2009 i was [ __ ] around on youtube 5:12 doing shitty edited videos like skits and stuff just experimenting and i had a series called project seven that was 5:18 supposed to be me playing final fantasy vii but i was kidnapped and forced to play it by a character called death face 5:23 i'm not going to get into the ins and outs of that doesn't matter okay there's nothing to do with this really but when these guys approached me all right john 5:31 and howard approached me and said hey we got this team of guys call respect to pac there there they want to do these edited videos what do you think we could 5:37 do and i said well you know out of all the things that i've ever done 5:42 that might make sense to do an edited style i wanted to do a highly edited series called project seven but i didn't 5:48 have the know-how or the expertise i dumped it after like three videos i didn't even bother with it anymore um 5:53 and i feel like maybe that could be something we bring back but let's do something completely different right instead of it being the original idea 6:00 for project seven we stuck playing a video game like final fantasy vii that i apparently i don't like and you know 6:05 let's do something different a different premise let's get us all involved with just being me let's have all of us be in 6:10 it as characters that way we all feel you know like we're all part of this project together um 6:16 and that's really how it hit off was we wanted to do something we didn't know what it was going to be i said hey i got 6:22 this thing on the shelf for like two three years i haven't touched that i always wanted to do but i didn't have the expertise to do it myself maybe this 6:28 is the opportunity to do it and that's how the idea started okay so i was in a process of that and 6:35 you know they were they were on board everybody was on board we were having a great time you know yeah it was it was a great time and honestly like it it was 6:43 like an experience um i agree not just the videos themselves but the experience of doing it 6:49 uh was like a real big thing for me man like i learned a lot from audrey and paul and i kind of 6:54 got the bug to like oh [ __ ] i want to make like movies and and stuff like that you know um thanks to thanks to those guys to see 7:01 what they were doing um so it was a great experience in that end 7:06 uh there was a then it all kind of started to slowly erode away 7:11 yeah apart man i'd say would really punch me in the face man that's what it basically was 7:18 right before episode three is gonna come out uh you know doing my thing this is gonna be 7:24 a common theme on this on this recording here or i'm just kind of doing my thing doing 7:30 what i got to do in my daily life and i start getting messages from people and i go what the hell is this 7:36 trolls the trolls it's messages from trolls who are trying to goad each other into doing 7:42 stuff and even back then because this is 2012 to clarify the issues that we have are from like 2014-2015 this is back in 7:48 2012 as far back as them internet trolls were trying to pit us against each other 7:54 and get us to say dumb [ __ ] against each other and get us to insult each other and get it you know it's always been a 7:59 preeminent thing on the internet since i've been making content that trolls are trying to [ __ ] around and trying to 8:05 interject and trying to get us to kind of be at odds when we're really not you know um 8:10 and so there's a situation that's going to come up right now that's a direct result of internet trolling so here we go 8:18 so before episode right before episode 3 comes out phil puts out a video here it 8:23 is he's talking about uh 2012 whatever man and he basically is this is something he 8:29 often says he says like he'll like set it up i don't mean to i don't mean to bad mouth don't take this the wrong way 8:34 he says i don't mean to bad mouth john rambo don't take this the wrong way 8:40 and proceeds to talk about me um talking about how john was given the best lines 8:46 and we gave him things to do because basically he's upset that people were in the comments saying that uh oh 8:54 john you know john's the best part of this or things like that you know um so he makes the video saying 9:00 he john was given things to do he's given the best lines one thing i would like to say which really pisses me off oh god all right 9:07 hold on this audio is bad you can tell this is like like april and for some reason the audio is terrible on this 9:13 camera oh god that was loud and annoying right [ __ ] um it didn't sound like that to me before 9:18 i guess i'll doubt i did this how did it sound to you guys terrible right that was bad um 9:24 anyway i'm gonna play it and this video is not defensible this video is me once 9:31 again along with what howard said earlier on me falling for 9:37 trolls trying to trick me into saying and doing stupid [ __ ] what happened was this was actually a calculated attack to try to get me to 9:43 say something dumb about john i know for a fact i found out later on it was all orchestrated they were literally trying 9:49 to go to me repeatedly in video comments on my forums they were all trying to say this [ __ ] to get me to 9:56 basically piss off rambo okay and i fell for it hook line 10:03 and sinker 100 it's my fault i'm embarrassed at what you're about to watch i will explain afterward what i 10:09 intended to say but look at what i actually said here we go not me trying to bad mouth john rambo in any way but 10:17 in project seven the series so far we john rambo's character in the series 10:22 gets a lot of the funny parts he's supposed to be like the deadpan comic that all of a sudden does crazy [ __ ] or 10:28 does silly stuff and it comes out really funny and i want to let everyone know that we've been seeing comments on the 10:33 videos that are kind of stupid uninformed and disheartening things like oh dsp sucks and howard sucks in this 10:39 series it's all about john rambo john rambo john rambo you know and that's true a lot of the funny stuff was given 10:44 to john rambo but here's the deal we all write the episode just last week 10:50 myself howard and john ramble got together here in my condo and we all collectively together put it together 10:56 and wrote all of episode 4 of project seven okay it's a group effort and it evolves over 11:04 time in fact a lot of the funniest stuff kind of just becomes improv stuff that we didn't there's a scene in episode three that you're gonna see you're gonna 11:11 piss your [ __ ] pants laughing when you watch it i [ __ ] you not and you're gonna know what scene it is when you see it and 11:16 it was completely improv by powered by oj by a couple different people on the 11:22 [ __ ] spot so for people to say oh this one person is completely the funniest person you're a complete 11:28 [ __ ] idiot you don't understand the creative process of how this stuff comes together the fact that we all put our heads together and and write it it's 11:36 this it's actually insulting for you to say one particular person is the best person in the series when we all write 11:41 the series case in point in this teaser trailer there's a funny scene featuring john rambo and everyone sits the best 11:47 part of the trailer and i even saw a comment saying wow this is this is rebel's the funniest thing guess what i 11:54 wrote that scene it was my idea to put that scene in there i have no problem that it was john rambo acting it out in 12:00 fact for a lot of the project seven series i've kind of been on the back burner i've been the character that drives the story meaning oh i'm 12:07 kidnapped uh oh now i'm emotional because i've lost my gaming powers uh oh you know i'm kind of a tool to get the 12:14 story moving but i haven't really been at the forefront i haven't been the leader of the guys or anything like that as of yet that will change in future 12:21 episodes as you're gonna see but for now i'm doing the role that i need 12:27 to do in these episodes i don't need to be absolutely [ __ ] laugh out loud hilarious john rambo's had lots of opportunities to be laughing hilarious 12:33 so far and so he comes across as maybe the funniest character it's a difference between between saying john rambo is the 12:40 funniest character in this series versus oh john rambo is the only good thing about this year because then you have no 12:46 idea how the series works how creative process works and you're insulting everyone else who works on the [ __ ] 12:52 episodes so shut your [ __ ] miles or get blocked 12:57 okay uh let's unpack that a bit okay first of all 13:03 why did i make that if you take a look it was the week in preview for those who don't know the weekend preview used to be a weekly 13:09 series that i would do that would explain what else is coming up that week gameplay-wise and if there 13:16 was anything else like a special event a trailer an episode of project seven 13:21 a review i would tell you in the week in preview this is when it's what's coming then later on i phased it out because 13:28 now i do a daily schedule every day up on twitter and my channel page you don't need a video to tell me we'll tell you what you're doing for the next week okay 13:37 why am i doing ranting about this in the week in preview right because i got baited trolls orchestrated a situation on my 13:45 forums um where basically what they did is they went in there and basically started making posts on 13:51 purpose to try to piss me off and i fell for it hook line and sinker the posts were things such as 13:58 project seven sucks and you go to read it and it's like wow this entire show is trash the 14:05 effects are trash the jokes are trash the acting is trash the editing is trash 14:10 trash trash trash and then they would literally say oh but john rambo is really really good in it if john rambo 14:16 weren't in it there'd be absolutely nothing good about this show whatsoever okay 14:22 so it wasn't one post it wasn't too it was like a whole thread of these idiots coming over on my forums baiting the 14:29 [ __ ] out of me could i have ignored it [ __ ] yes i could have just said ban and close why did i why 14:36 back then i was so easy to goad into doing something stupid okay 14:43 this is only one of many examples all right so here's 14:49 here's what i was trying to say or what i should have said or just never said at all and versus what i said what i was 14:55 trying to get across here is that project seven very much was a group effort amongst all of our friends you 15:01 know including respect to pact and all of them everyone put a lot of time and effort into those shows okay everyone 15:08 and i was actually offended not necessarily as much for me but more 15:15 for respect to pact in general because respect the pact was working a lot of time and effort on these shows like tons 15:22 of time i knew they were working dozens of hours or more a week sometimes editing these things and getting it together 15:28 and it was actually really starting to piss me off it's one thing to see it once twice there's threads of this on my 15:34 forums about it i'm like these people are just dicks because these guys are busting their ass to try to get these 15:40 episodes out and here's some oh the editing sucks everything sucks john ramble's funny everything sucks all 15:47 right now in particular again it is true that the john rambo character portrayed 15:52 in the show is not completely written by john rambo i will tell you this a lot of 15:58 it was okay not every single scene but a lot of those scenes were written directly by john rambo and 16:05 john rambo had a lot of creative control not only over his character but a lot of input on 16:11 the other characters in the show as well i will today publicly say this 16:16 i feel that john was the best writer on the show i feel that john was the biggest creative creative influence on the show 16:23 and i feel like the show would have never been anywhere as near as funny if funny at all if it weren't for john rambo his input was insanely key and 16:30 probably he had some of the best writing if not the best writing in the entire show 16:36 if you don't believe me go watch his own show sanja man and hole punch which was the next project he 16:43 worked on after project seven nd prematurely um he wrote that thing 16:49 himself he directed it himself that's a show 100 rambo and friends but mostly 16:56 him and that show is only about 47 48 times better than project seven i 17:04 would say okay when it comes to the writing i'm emphasizing the writing because i'm not trying to downplay what respect the pack did with project seven 17:09 the effects and [ __ ] in that show are way better than the show deserves okay but the point i'm making here is 17:16 john absolutely is insanely creative and i've said it before and i'll say it again i 17:21 feel like he's not only so creative he's way more creative than i've ever been and i wish that he would have been 17:26 successful with his creative ventures and what i mean by that is i wish more people would have watched them i wish that he would have maybe gotten popular 17:33 for them and i wish that he would have actually been able to make a living doing it because you could tell he loves it you could tell that's passion for him 17:39 he loved doing filmmaking things but by doing that he took away from the things 17:46 that were you know part of his real life which which actually he kind of addresses later on in this very video 17:52 okay so again i'm not spoiling i'm not revealing anything eventually he ran himself into the ground working on shots being a hole punch because he wasn't 17:58 making any money doing it okay so i made this video insanely stupidly 18:05 instead of saying that right i say oh you know 18:11 everyone says john's the funniest thing but we all wrote those scenes for john and by the way there's a particular 18:16 scene with john that i wrote i wrote that scene so there's no way you could say that that was just john because i was involved in 18:23 that um there was absolutely no reason 18:29 at all for me to say any of those things at all i could have should have ignored the trolls i never ever ever ever ever 18:36 ever ever ever should have said any of that stuff there was no point to it who was i fighting a 18:42 bunch of trolls on my [ __ ] forums who cares it was a waste of my time if i'm gonna argue with the trolls on the forums whatever why did i say in a video 18:49 to my public audience that was just stupid and wrong and dumb and not even correct okay so just clearing the air 18:57 john you could have considered him kind of the head writer of project seven even 19:02 though we all collectively had a major part of that process okay um there was other parts that other people 19:08 had the heavy workload for example the filmmaking the editing that was all respect to pack for me i was the promo 19:14 man i was the one who took the footage and i made promo trailers 19:19 out of it i pushed it on my channel i heavily advertised it to my audience i was the one to sell the product to a 19:25 viewing audience you see we all had a role to play in this um 19:30 but undoubtedly i was feeling very insecure i was feeling attacked like 19:36 basically people were saying everything you're doing is [ __ ] you know except for the parts with rainbow and i'm like yeah but the parts 19:41 that rambo in them we all kind of worked on too so when you say everything [ __ ] except for those parts well those parts 19:46 were a collective effort so the thing is the way i say it not that i outright say 19:54 john didn't do these parts but john took it that way like john saw him that video and said phil is 20:01 basically in this video saying that i didn't do any of those things and that's untrue i 20:06 basically did the scene that he's talking about oh and he'll say he's going to bring it up all right he's 20:11 going to bring it up so let me press play and then i'll see if i want to have any further comments but i just want to clear the air 20:16 completely bad video should have never made it my fault i shouldn't be better by the dumb [ __ ] trolls i mean i'm 20:21 really stupid uh that i did that and this was actually in reality 20:27 this event of me making that stupid video was the first time john rambo ever got pissed off at 20:33 me ever and he's going to talk about that so here we go so ladies and gentlemen it's a flat out lie 20:41 yeah flat out lie uh you know he goes on to talk about slow 20:47 referencing out that same video he talks about a scene that he came up with he goes 20:53 he's like there's a part of the trailer everyone loves with john i came up with that and it's interesting because 20:59 you know the sentence before that he's talking about how it's a group effort yeah and then he says that he he came up 21:04 with with them with the lines or whatever the next sentence is i came up with that yeah which is which is nonsense and and 21:10 and like you said going back to what you were saying john this is a common theme because again instead of addressing this 21:16 you know between amongst ourselves he addresses it publicly which makes it 21:21 even worse he's right because here's the deal i fell like i was again i was the front man i 21:28 was the one representing the project 7 to the public the project 7 didn't get uploaded to 21:33 john's channel to howard's channel didn't go to respect the pax channel it went to mine so for me i'm the i'm the front man i'm 21:39 the guy who's supposed to be the pr guy i'm supposed to be dealing with this [ __ ] i don't want to bother them with it 21:45 why do they need to be inundated with this [ __ ] right they have their own lives this is my job it's not theirs 21:50 they're the ones who are taking time away from their their busy lives to work on this project and then they want to go back to their lives they don't want to 21:55 be bothered with the trolls the [ __ ] so i felt the responsibility to be the man to handle it and then i botched it 22:01 completely by doing [ __ ] like that okay by the way the scenes that they're talking about uh are the scenes where 22:07 john rambo in project seven i think episode three acts like rambo the character from the movies he's stabbing 22:13 viciously enemies he's going oh with the guns shooting everywhere okay now 22:20 those scenes i was the one who suggested let's have a montage of scenes where 22:26 john is acting like rambo from the movie but then 22:31 john took it and ran with it and he's the one who kind of brainstormed the ideas we all had input don't get me wrong we all had input but john was the 22:37 one who brainstormed those ideas into what that montage became okay so 22:43 the way that i say oh i i came up with that scene well i came up with the concept that doesn't mean that i wrote 22:48 it planned it all out filmed it i had nothing to do with that i just said hey let's do that as the idea you see i i 22:56 again i was feeling insecure i was feeling attacked i was feeling like this is something that i it was my baby 23:01 because it's under my channel right it is it's my project i mean yeah they're all involved for sure 23:07 so you can see it's their project too it's our project but at the same time it's on my channel so i'm responsible to 23:12 deal with all this horse [ __ ] that's going on and i i did it horribly i did absolutely terribly not you know 23:20 that's all let's go yeah he doesn't get there's no call to me there's no no conversation then what 23:26 about it hey uh you know people are saying this [ __ ] um maybe you could say something or if 23:31 there's a way to to say it differently or is there something honestly it's not something that even needs to be really 23:36 addressed at all that's right ross g says you outright say i wrote that scene but now you're saying you didn't because 23:42 i because i did not write the details of it i wrote the concept there's a verse concept versus actual detail the concept 23:48 i came up with let's have john be like john rambo and do a montage of [ __ ] and then john did it all thought of all the 23:54 ideas and all the intricacies i probably had input a little bit in it but he made it come to light the difference between 24:00 saying i have an idea and versus the person who actually makes the idea happen you see so that's the truth of it obviously people 24:06 say i like this aspect of this show that you want me to watch yeah um 24:12 but he talks about a scene in the trailer that he came up with i came up with that 24:17 it's basically the the part where i'm shooting the gun like rambo does it's not exactly a genius idea and uh 24:24 you know i think several people suggested it um and when it was actually filmed 24:30 it's not like he he's not like he was directing the i wasn't i wasn't actually i don't think i was even in there 24:35 okay it was you know it was something i did you know to put a frank you know 24:41 um there's a lot of ad libbing in project seven and there was a lot of trust it's 24:47 like if you okay the scene is john rambo acts like john rambo and goes crazy i trust john rambo to figure it out cause 24:53 he's smart he's an intelligent guy and he's he's creative he's gonna figure it out i didn't direct him i wasn't the 24:59 director there was no director of project seven we all did it together like there was no oh i'm head director 25:05 and this was the guy who did it we all helped each other to get through it and kind that's well i'll be honest that's why a lot of times the shots look like 25:11 [ __ ] because there's no director saying do this do this do this it's all of us just kind of doing it on the fly um 25:18 so he did that completely by himself i didn't tell him oh just do it this way or do it that way and he'd shot it a few different times you know it was paul 25:25 recording and he did a few different times to get the shot so me saying i wrote that well i didn't 25:30 write it i thought of the eye concept and then he ran with it and basically did the rest of it about 25:37 seeing that oh the scene where uh he's like there's a scene in this episode that a lot of 25:44 people put together john wasn't involved in it didn't say that that's false he says oh there's a senior episode that 25:49 people put together john wasn't involved in it didn't say that at all i said there's a scene in this episode that's put together primarily by howard and oj 25:56 and a few other people it's the scene they're going to show it's howard and oj acting it out and then john had input in 26:02 it i never said john wasn't involved in it at all he puts those words in my mouth because he's angry at me for 26:08 basically apparently saying that he wasn't a good part of the series or didn't have as much influence as he did 26:14 that didn't happen so i hate to say but this is also kind of a theme in this video that they did about 26:20 me they take one thing that outright is undeniably true yes i outright shouldn't 26:25 have made that video i outright said things in the video that were factually untrue then they spin it and say that i said something i didn't say i never said 26:32 john wasn't involved in that scene i said it was primarily howard and oj and he was i said other people implying yeah 26:37 he was involved too so was paul filming it so was probably andre okay um 26:44 they already did this previously they said oh phil said he that we talk [ __ ] about him no i didn't i said a bunch of 26:49 dumb [ __ ] i shouldn't have said but i never said you talk [ __ ] about me and then your whole segment about it that i said you 26:55 talk [ __ ] about me i never said that so this is a theme with this video is say a bunch of stuff that's true but 27:01 then all of a sudden throw [ __ ] out there that's not to kind of corroborate what we're saying didn't have to do that 27:06 they had enough i i [ __ ] up enough they didn't have to throw other [ __ ] on top of other [ __ ] 27:11 when already there's a pile of [ __ ] you know doji other people put it together of 27:16 course it was the the great scene where you uh was it you shoot the gentleman and then you say you didn't watch the scenes yeah 27:22 okay um in all honesty you know it was put together by you o.j and me 27:31 yeah and adrian paul filmed and directed it so basically everyone was involved in putting that together but him 27:39 i was there watching the whole thing i just didn't have any real input it's just 27:44 it's just mind-boggling why why he would do these things publicly 27:49 yeah it's one thing i mean because i'm an idiot because i'm a sucker because i fell for the troll [ __ ] over and 27:55 over and over back then they really got to me they made me feel insecure they made me feel like [ __ ] they made me feel 28:00 like everything i did was a waste of time they were telling me it publicly all the time they were making this is how you don't play saying all the 28:06 content you ever made in game gaming is worthless you're a terrible content creator you don't deserve success and it 28:12 got to me and i made tons of mistakes like that that's this is one case there was tons of videos this is the only one 28:17 that they're involved in there's tons of cases where you can see phil got baited again phil got baited again it happened all the time back then all of this is 28:24 true like he said let's say every word he said is true even then it's [ __ ] up to be saying this to be saying this 28:30 right not only should you have said it not only are you saying it but it's also a lie yeah 28:36 i should have never said anything with anything and most of it is half truths or possibilities 28:42 on that specific episode what did i do why did i deserve to be treated like that okay 28:48 i show up i do the very best i can i try very very hard to do my best 28:54 i brought oj into this i brought chap into this those are that's people that i went to high school 29:00 with i go back a long time chap is a professional actor uh he played the gaseous uh snake 29:05 gentleman i brought them in tried my very best and 29:10 why did why is this why is this stuff said why is this happening right it's all pissed off man at this point 29:17 and he should and it was stupid why am i talking about this i think i talked to you first i think i was ready to be done with the whole thing 29:23 yeah and i think that was that was one of the uh uh breaking points for the show to start 29:28 ending was it was that and it was it was that and then and then after that 29:34 it wrote it from there and then the erosion was started getting substantially worse because he saw people say oh john's the best at 29:41 whatever yeah and that that made him so upset yeah oh i have no i you know no i'm angry 29:46 no i was angry because they were downplaying everyone else and basically saying the entire show was [ __ ] which it wasn't 29:52 um i was angry because i felt like it's particularly respect the pact was being disrespected with the things that the 29:58 trolls were saying but i shouldn't have said anything she just [ __ ] who cares about them the show had good viewership if you look the show 30:05 had hundreds of thousands of views at the time which is big for my channel back then so i don't know why 30:10 i even said a word i got baited again but no i wasn't trying to downplay or insult rambo at all although some people 30:16 definitely said it came out like that and in addition here we go again right what happened the trolls messaged john 30:22 hey john did you hear what phil said because they had it worked they tricked me i said stupid [ __ ] in the video here 30:27 you go send it right to john and john looks at and says what the [ __ ] is this [ __ ] what is this [ __ ] what is wrong 30:33 with phil why is he such an idiot now i have to slap him okay he didn't say that but he didn't call me he's going to talk 30:39 about that and what's funny is i think people were trolling because i and i think he made statements like in 30:45 the past about it yeah a little bit but not to like this degree where you're stupid you know pisses me off when you 30:51 say that you shouldn't say john's the best or something so people start doing it like out of spite just to [ __ ] with you he's right 30:56 you know what i mean yeah they might not even necessarily think that they're just let me just write this because i know what makes him upset and then he he buys 31:02 right into all that correct yeah 100 so at this point i'm really really pissed off 31:08 so i call him i call him immediately and i [ __ ] have it out with him dude i tell him he 31:13 should have feeling about it and i'm pissed off so i mean i mean this stuff i know this 31:19 isn't a joking manner i know this isn't a joking manner okay but i'm just gonna say this i'm not kidding if he had 31:26 walked into my place and slapped my face i would have been like shocked but i would have been not been angry 31:32 because i mean he was a really close friend of mine you know what i mean like he was basically my closest friend at the time and if he was so upset that he 31:38 felt like it was that much of an insult that i was saying this [ __ ] up stuff i wouldn't have wronged it i wouldn't have felt wronged by him if he punched me in 31:45 the face i would have been like more upset that i have set him to that point than him striking me in the face 31:51 that's that's the kind of friendship i felt we had you know i felt like there's something really wrong he'll tell me so 31:56 here we go his credit he apologizes profusely says to me that he's he felt 32:01 insecure or he is insecure he shouldn't have said it he just got really frustrated 32:07 um with what they were saying he just couldn't take it anymore and he had to say something and he 32:12 exploded so he apologizes to me and i accept it um but he never actually says anything 32:18 publicly there's no public apology there's no clarification about you know what he said how it 32:25 wasn't exactly the truth yep and then what basically happens is there's people that 32:30 are his fans and a lot of them not very bright let's be honest here 32:35 and uh they start shooting on me you know they come to me and they shoot on me 32:42 because they think oh [ __ ] you know that's what that's what phil wants me to do right 32:48 wrong it's the trolls the same people who go to me go to rambo harass him right this is not 32:56 my fans doing this i wouldn't have ever ever ever told my fans to go do anything like that at all 33:01 ever and there's been people who've been outright wronged me on the internet like outright did dastardly [ __ ] up really nasty 33:08 [ __ ] when did i ever tell them to go do anything never now what he's saying is oh well phil's fans aren't very bright 33:16 so when he makes that video and he doesn't publicly denounce what he said they go and attack me it's not my fans 33:21 dude those are the trolls those are the trolls that the same people who are harassing me are now harassing you and 33:28 if anything again i'm sad that they did that because he didn't deserve that at 33:33 all he did not deserve that in any way shape or form to have trolls coming after him just because he was involved 33:38 in my content it's [ __ ] up that these years see before this year before project seven 33:44 i would say that john and howard particularly john howard again wasn't really involved in much of my stuff but 33:50 john was insulated from a lot of that toxicity and negativity of the internet he didn't have a lot of that rolling 33:56 over to him in fact most people praised him constantly for his work in my co-op 34:02 stuff for his vlogging for the stuff he was doing on his own channel they loved it then all of a sudden in 2012 when 34:08 this is how you don't play hit ah well now let's harass the [ __ ] out of everybody including everyone around phil 34:14 and everyone involved with him his family members his friends his co-worker everyone involved anything harass harass 34:20 harass so he's thinking oh phil apologize to me this is great what happens he's still 34:27 getting attacked for it people are saying wow you're you know you you're you you uh 34:33 you really didn't do that much at project seven i don't even know what they said to him cause he never told me that part so i don't know what pete trolls are 34:38 saying to him i have no clue i don't know who's going and harassing him or whatever certainly i didn't say any if 34:43 you look again in that video did i negatively say that john was taking credit for anything that he said you 34:49 know no i never said oh john's overly taking credit for things not at all that wasn't the point of me even trying to make that video um so i have no idea 34:56 what they said to him he didn't deserve anything he should have been quiet and you know i wish they never contacted him 35:02 now he says i never said anything public he's correct until today i never talked about this why because again i'm the 35:08 front man i'm the public-facing figure i want all that that vitriol and [ __ ] tossed at me 35:14 so i think if i say anything further i already made a stupid video that got us all into trouble all right right like 35:20 everyone already i look bad and i said something in that video too that actually pisses me off today i said oh 35:25 we've been looking at the comments and we we think this that was me not we that was me i was misrepresenting all of us 35:31 as a group in that video okay completely wrong to do that um 35:37 and we i had this conversation with john he was incredibly pissed at me we hashed it 35:42 out by the end of the conversation everything was fine it was water under the bridge everything's fine no 35:47 lingering issues he here's how we ended the conversation okay 35:53 let's don't ever address it ever again don't if you see criticism come in for the series ignore it if you see anything 35:58 coming just ignore it that's what we agree so why if that was our agreement just ignore it ignore the trolls ignore all 36:04 of it why after the fact would i have gone public and talked about it again it would have actually gone against what 36:09 we agreed to our agreement was just don't talk about it ever again it's [ __ ] stupid you're why are you giving attention to trolls just ignore it you 36:16 know john's right let's do that so then why would i go publicly and say oh by the way let's talk about that subject again 36:22 that wasn't what we he told me not to essentially he's like don't dress it again but now here we are years later and he says oh well phil should have 36:28 publicly went forward and said something well why because he got harassed after the fact so in hi again hindsight's 20 36:34 20. maybe the better thing to do would have been going public and said listen the whole thing's blown out of proportion i [ __ ] up 36:40 sorry about that uh you know but we agreed not to and so then he got harassed for it and now he 36:46 feels bad about it years later like i was hiding the truth from the public no so we agreed not to talk about it again 36:51 so i didn't and then now you're mad at me three years later because you got her asked for it online you could be mad at me for 36:58 being harassed but don't be mad at me for not doing something that we agreed i'm not gonna do you know okay yeah 37:04 he wants me to do that and again why did i deserve why did i 37:09 deserve that he didn't it was my trolls it wasn't my fans it was my trolls going after him so continue with project seven 37:14 man so you said it started to fall apart at that point what do you think happened 37:20 started to fall apart and what was basically happening was these guys were working 50 60 hours a 37:28 week on getting this [ __ ] edited to try to pump it out with these 37:33 unrealistic timelines so naturally what's going to happen is people are just going to get 37:40 burnt out which which ended up happening couple that with the fact 37:46 and and again we don't want to say we don't want to talk too much about it but couple that with the fact with money 37:52 you know these guys are putting all this time and effort into it into this [ __ ] thing 37:58 and what do they get gugatz that's what they got because you think about it right 38:04 you would think oh he you know because people are when i say this people are going to come back and say well you know 38:11 phil promoted their channel and that's all they wanted no no no here's the here's the bottom line right 38:18 you would think out of the kindness of your heart you would go ahead damn and these guys are putting all this time and effort in 38:24 this thing kindness is just what's fair is fair what's fair it's fair let me let me throw him a couple of bones 38:29 whatever the case may be throw him some money here and there some some percentage of the profits and this and 38:35 that so what is what ends up happening john and i are talking about this okay so before they get up because 38:41 they're gonna get ahead of themselves to another portion of this so now i have to tell you guys the whole story which you know really is no one's 38:47 business but they're the ones who brought it up not me um as you know we never publicly really talked about the 38:53 behind-the-scenes situation of project seven outside of respect to pack couldn't do it anymore and i didn't find 38:58 a suitable replacement and therefore that was the end of the show period in this video for the first time ever they reveal oh well the reason that the 39:05 show ended is because respect the pack wasn't getting paid okay completely false it really is utterly 39:11 completely 100 false i hate to say it this is 100 baloney um so allow me to 39:17 explain the whole situation of what really happened okay when 39:22 john and howard presented to me the idea that we're gonna do a creative show with these guys we met them we had a whole meeting 39:28 um at a starbucks we sat down for hours hashing out idea after idea of how this 39:33 would go and all this stuff all right and i remember in that initial meeting 39:38 what we started talking about was eventually how do we figure out who makes what how is it going to go 39:45 and all of that now again here we go ladies and gentlemen clip this 39:51 same as before if you're going to do business with friends doesn't matter how much friendly 39:57 you are with them or how long you've known them you have to have a contract in place if you don't you will always have bad 40:04 feelings afterward period okay i wish i made a contract with respect to 40:10 pact with these guys about this show because all this has ever done is led to 40:15 problems and as much as i look back fondly on the time that we worked on the show it ends result with so much drama 40:23 so much [ __ ] and apparently something i never knew this was a key factor in them 40:28 basically not wanting to be my friend anymore which i never knew i didn't know about any of what they're about to discuss until they made this video it 40:35 was never brought up with me it was never fully discussed at all never it was never a topic of discussion ever so 40:40 if you don't tell me i don't know this is if three years later after this this project ends now you 40:46 make a video exposing the truth of project seven but you never no one ever said this to me at all 40:52 during the entire time this is going down okay now let's talk i'll tell you the truth of how everything 40:58 went down with our arrangements we all met at the starbucks and it was 41:03 like a 2-3 hour meeting all right and we were talking about what what idea do we wanna do oh let's do project seven let's 41:09 reboot it oh what's the idea oh i know i lost my gaming powers like we kind of brainstormed all that on the fly 41:15 so right up then and there we started talking about money 41:20 now not that it was a huge topic of discussion because none of us were looking to make a fortune on the 41:26 show in fact the initial discussion was even if it becomes popular on youtube great but how do these shows really take 41:33 off and i started telling them about my experience knowing of other content creators who had made fun internet shows and it's not 41:40 the show on the internet making the money it's all the [ __ ] that comes after the merchandise the dvd sales getting it 41:48 syndicated on other channel networks and [ __ ] that's where the money is it's not the initial oh i ran the show on my 41:54 channel it got so and so views it's everything that comes after going to a circuit of 42:00 conventions and when you're in those conventions you have a panel to promote your next project that will make you more money and then you sell merchandise 42:06 tie-ins and things that's that's where you make money on these projects okay it's not about oh i got a hundred 42:11 thousand views on the video and i made a hundred dollars of profit on ads or whatever that's nothing that's that's 42:17 [ __ ] nothing change right you're talking big picture you want to get a web series that gets the maybe we made 42:23 project seven and it gets the attention all right of everyone around on the internet wow 42:30 it's a good series and all of a sudden machinima wants to pick the series up and produce a new series and pay us to 42:35 do it and now you know what i'm saying like this is what happens you get all these oh sponsorship sponsors want to 42:40 come in and run their project products on the show and [ __ ] like that that's how it works okay so i explained this to 42:46 all of them up front and i'm like you know and and by the way everyone's in agreement everyone's kind of like 42:52 that makes sense um so you know even though yes maybe some point down 42:57 the road all right we'll talk about oh let's divvy up revenue if there was ad 43:02 revenue on the videos we don't know if there will be if it'll even be popular let's talk about merchandise sales dvd 43:08 sales the whole intention was let's just get together let's make this thing let's [ __ ] around 43:14 with it let's put it out there on the internet and see if it gets popular if it does great then we'll talk long term 43:20 about money we'll talk about splitting [ __ ] up the whole idea was we were going to sell t-shirts and dvds that was 43:25 really like once season one is done which season one just so everyone knows was supposed to be six episodes five 43:30 story based episodes and then a christmas special and then that was supposed to become a dvd set that we were gonna start producing and selling 43:36 for profit on the internet get the word out there and then season two would be hyped up and sell a lot more on all of 43:42 that okay there you go 43:48 so that was the agreement we came to now respect the fact respect the fact 43:54 respect the pact specifically when we first met said to me up front in 43:59 the meeting in front of everyone we're not doing this for the money we're not looking to make a dollar on this series 44:05 what we want is we want our channel respect the pact to get attention from the series we want promotion we also 44:12 want to see if we can start monetizing our own content because as i said they had already made two very popular videos the real life pac-man and the street 44:18 fighter video they weren't getting anything out of those they wanted to get into a partnership 44:24 network but their channel was very small no one knew about it they wanted to be noticed okay 44:29 so we agreed that what i would do is do everything i possibly could to get their 44:36 channel noticed to give them credit for the work and also one thing that's never 44:41 brought up whatsoever in this video whatsoever which is absolutely ridiculous that they left it out because it's completely unfair 44:46 i got respect the pact partnered with machinima so they could monetize their videos at the time it was not easy to 44:54 get a channel into any kind of of a partnership because you had to have a qualifying criteria you had to have a 44:59 certain number of subscribers a certain number of viewers essentia because back then the partnerships on 45:05 youtube were all managed partnerships meaning that company is vouching for you and your content that you're not going 45:11 to violate the youtube terms of service you're not going to steal copywritten content they're vouching for you to put ads on the videos and they get the 45:17 revenue and you get paid a flat rate so they wanted their channel to be monetized that was the agreement we had 45:24 let's get respect the pact monetized now we'll make project seven for you we won't even care about the money you make 45:31 on it because we're going to try to make our own videos on our own channel that are going to start bringing us in revenue and our own revenue streams in 45:37 in tandem with that let's go ahead and you you promote our content on our channel and we'll make money on our own 45:44 [ __ ] and we can do our own stuff later on but we can have this nice collaboration with you getting us the attention we want on the back end we'll 45:50 talk about maybe selling dvds in merch and then later down the line we'll talk further that was the entire conversation 45:56 we had okay go look they were partnered at that time 46:01 with machinima because of me i went behind the scenes and i talked to my contacts at machinima and i said hey 46:06 guys here's a great group of guys i'm working with on a project they're really trustworthy they got great content check 46:12 out their two popular videos they did because of me they got a partnership all right now i can't tell you how much money they 46:18 made on their own videos or their partnership i have no idea i'm not you know where i don't know i don't even know what kind of a partnership they got 46:24 was it the same as mine was it less i know it wasn't more but i don't know what it was right i have no clue um i 46:31 can't even you know i can't they couldn't contractually they probably couldn't even talk about it but that's what happened so they're making they're 46:37 now able to monetize the videos on respect to pack i'm promoting respect to pact in all the project seven content 46:43 and frequently if they had a new project or something that they wanted to be mentioned i would mention it if they asked me to do that okay 46:50 that's what was going on now as for rainbow and howard we never had a discussion about what 46:56 they were gonna make because again we were friends right so here's what we'll do we'll make the show we'll promote it 47:03 we'll go to we'll go to conventions to to premiere the episode we'll attempt to maybe sell some merch along the way and 47:08 then when season one is done we'll make these dvds we'll pump them out the whole idea here was that i was gonna finance 47:14 it all like i was gonna pay for everything so if the episodes made any money that money was gonna be reinvested 47:20 into the show making merch like making the shirts making the dvds that's where the money was supposed to go that was 47:26 profit on the show it was never oh well we made an episode and now there's five of us involved in making the episode so 47:32 you take the actual money you made from machinima on that episode you divide by five and everyone gets paid that was 47:37 literally never once discussed ever when we were talking and developing 47:43 project seven not once so for them to start this conversation here 47:48 saying basically oh respect to pac didn't get anything respected got exactly what they wanted literally to 47:54 the t of what they asked for that's what they wanted and they got it now they're gonna talk in this video about how that 48:00 falls apart all right and i will add more to that because just so you guys know to prepare for today i went through 48:07 every email i ever had with respect to pac i'm not going to read those emails on this this stream that would be you 48:13 know wrong i'm going to paraphrase as best i can but i'm going to tell you exactly what happened from what they 48:18 were telling me okay let's continue and john 48:26 says i'm gonna talk to him so what does john say john goes up to and says dude you know throw him some money man these 48:31 guys if you throw them some money they'll continue if not they're going to stop yeah and that's a great point cause like any time there is a problem i 48:37 always do address it right to his face it's always done that's true so which is no which is that being said what does he 48:44 say yes i forgot to change the camera thank you okay let's continue has the audacity to 48:51 say oh um they didn't i i told them or i asked them if they wanted money and they 48:57 and they denied it that's a [ __ ] load of [ __ ] by the way okay timeline's wrong 49:02 he's saying all this happened first wrong what happened the timeline's right he's going to now go into what happened 49:07 before this because again this whole video of the timeline is so skewed you can't make heads or tails of what they're saying he's saying that they 49:14 wanted money so john came to me and asked me to pay them and i said no that never happened okay not once that's 49:20 completely untrue it's a completely different sequence of events they decided not to be part of the show first 49:26 and outright said we're done they literally sent me an email that says i read it last night 49:32 it said we are done we don't want to be part of the show anymore for personal reasons they said some of it is because 49:39 our channel respect the pact which was partnered at that point with machinima was not getting the views and attention 49:45 and making the money that they had hoped it was going to do by being involved with this project that was one factor 49:51 but then they also say in the same email there's also other personal reasons 49:56 keeping us from continuing with this project so the email the way it's written is stating 50:02 we quit we can't continue yes a portion of that is because we weren't making enough 50:07 money on our channel but also we have other personal stuff going on behind the scenes we'd rather not discuss publicly 50:13 there's absolutely no way to continue okay then john comes to me 50:18 a few days later when we're doing our co-op session he says why don't you throw the guys some money i said 50:23 here's the email they don't want money they outright say write in the email they can't continue 50:29 because of personal reasons so if i now contact them and say let's talk money 50:34 they're going to be like did you read the [ __ ] email we said we can't do it because of personal reasons like you know now the truth of the matter is i 50:41 did arrange a meeting with them anyway i did i arranged a meeting with them we were going to sit down and still talk 50:47 about whatever was going on because i said listen i wish you guys the best and i want you to know something i appreciate all the work you put into 50:54 this series if we have this meeting it's not going to be me pressuring you to come back if you want to talk about that 50:59 that's something but i would much rather say hey let's just have a conversation and we even if it's goodbye forever have 51:05 a nice life at least we have the conversation all right here's what happened we had this the meeting scheduled at the same starbucks of the 51:12 initial top a place we had met and i got the shits i ate leftover pizza and i was 51:17 crabbing my brains out that day so i had to cancel and then i never rescheduled because 51:24 all right you wanna know the truth i knew they were already done with the show for good i knew they weren't gonna come back to it and i have i have some 51:30 reasons i can tell you this um but i can't tell you yet because i want them to say it first okay so let me go 51:38 ahead and press play and i will i will get to this in a second because i talk to them afterwards 51:44 all right so so probably show us a lot of work for 51:49 them i don't think it was much work for us uh display what phil would have talked about how hard the day was no it 51:55 wasn't it wasn't hard it wasn't hard for us it was hard for them yeah i mean it was one day one day of filming uh yeah 52:01 maybe it was hardest for them by far and i can vouch for this from someone who's done video editing before not to the 52:08 extent that they do not even close even me doing a stupid uh edited review of 52:13 like a video game like a game review okay like the old hateful truth those could take days to edit and then you 52:20 think it's all good you render it and you go to watch the finished product and it's [ __ ] and you're like i [ __ ] it up i gotta do it all over again can you 52:26 imagine how long it took for them to do those edited shots with the effects and things i howard's saying oh maybe it took him 52:31 50 60 hours a week i believe it i 100 [ __ ] believe that fully 52:37 respected pack put the most work into the show i put the second most work into the show 52:42 not because i wrote it because i didn't we did it together and a lot of that was john but i was the one who had to 52:49 promote the show who had to upload the show who had to push the show who had to advertise the show who had to work with 52:55 machinima to get the show shown on machinima channels which we're not even talking about in this video but i got the show trying to get syndicated on 53:02 machinima and stuff like that i was doing all that legwork with the show so even though i didn't do as much work 53:08 producing the show like like actually writing or filming i was doing all the leg work to get it out there so i did 53:14 the second most work on the show now these guys are like oh our roles were easy i'm glad they feel that way 53:21 my role wasn't easy and neither was respect to pacs okay they said oh it was a day of filming no 53:26 no no for me it was a day of filming constant uploading editing re-editing 53:32 the trailers pushing them mentioning it constantly in all of my content working with machinima to get it on their their 53:39 networks and all of that it was a lot of work it was and keep in mind that every time that i took time out to work on 53:45 project seven i wasn't making game play that was my most profitable product which we're going to talk about in a moment because they're going to start 53:50 talking money and how much i made on it and this is going to give everyone a big laugh so let's continue 53:56 seven hours and one day and then you go home and you're done yeah before you continue 54:01 john just just to give you uh guys an idea of how long it takes to do things the the one of the scenes that we did in 54:09 that part three was a bullet scene where we're firing bullets 54:14 they told me it took them four four to five hours to do that just that scene and that scene was what five 54:20 seconds five times yeah trust me i know i believe i believe that too i know about 54:25 that uh so it gets to a point where it's a lot of work for these guys 54:31 they feel like they're not getting anything back uh and 54:36 they're not getting credit they're not getting you know oh no no not anyone getting credit they outright say in 54:42 their email to me oh we know we're getting the credit and we know you're doing everything you can to promote our stuff we're just not getting enough 54:47 notoriety and enough money out of our own stuff for this to continue that's what they said it was nothing about 54:52 credit they love the amount of credit they were getting monetize things nothing okay 54:59 something happened andre had basically a big life-changing thing 55:04 he's having a kid okay audrey's gonna have a kid so 55:11 they basically say look we can't we can't do this anymore we can't do the product seven anymore 55:17 it's just not uh it's not worth our time and we got other stuff we got to do so i had a conversation with a coward 55:23 side a conversation with fellow so listen you have to make it work there wild man throw the money and i'm not saying throw 55:29 them like thousands of dollars there's already been at this point there was already four episodes that had come out 55:34 right yeah cause we did four four episodes had come out so i said listen just divvy up the money there's five people 55:42 in this there's only five people the crew and the whole the whole cast okay yeah the video's made a lot of money if you 55:48 if you uh look at the views the amount of views he gets paid on views it's like two dollars for every thousand 55:54 views that he gets so simply you know figure out how much you 55:59 made off all these videos i know that phil sp phil spent a lot of money on props and stuff so subtract all 56:05 the costs that's fair right subtract all your costs then you have a number and then 56:10 split it the five ways and throw them the cash and off you know offer that to them 56:16 there's no guarantee that they're going to you know continue with the series but hey man at least try 56:23 and it's that's that's fair his response they don't want money they don't want they don't want any 56:30 money after this based on what he says they told him that yeah and then i asked him about it and 56:36 they said he didn't even he didn't even talk to them and this is what i mean 56:44 can pull up the email right now but like i said i'm not gonna do that i could literally pull up the email they wrote 56:49 to me and said we are not continuing with the series yes the money and the notoriety was a factor but it's personal reasons that we cannot continue yahweh 56:56 says andre's having a kid i knew that because they told me they 57:01 probably shouldn't have they told me that and i was like all right if he's having a kid how the [ __ ] is he gonna 57:06 have 50 60 hours a week to work on our show and hold down a job to pay to raise this kid i get it 57:12 all right now you let me get this straight you want me to seem like a pushy jerk 57:20 and go to them after they outright said we basically quit here's the email in writing we're doing it on purpose they didn't call me and have a conversation 57:27 they wrote in an email on purpose so it was in writing we quit okay now you want me to go back to them and 57:33 try to be pushy and be like well what if i give you some money when you keep playing you keep doing it you keep doing it no he's having a kid 57:39 i don't want to bother him anymore at this point when i when this was what i was told i said all right forget it i 57:45 will look for someone else and in fact there were two candidates 57:50 that i had to work on this one of them was actually someone who i had gone to high school with at one point 57:56 and my dad was friendly with his family and he was a professional video editor and filmmaker and i was someone who i 58:02 was talking with about this behind the scenes and i was going to contact him and start making offers 58:08 um and then what ended up happening was this happened they quit or whatever and 58:14 within a couple of months i started getting all this toxicity and negativity about project seven everyone 58:20 guessing that oh the series ended because you [ __ ] it up or this happened or that happened i was like now wait a minute maybe it's not the best 58:26 idea then maybe if we're gonna do something new and fresh we should do something new and fresh with someone into a new group um 58:32 rather than start worrying about you know continuing project seven in general okay 58:39 but then something else happened okay in early 2013 i started deciding that i wanted to move out of connecticut i said 58:45 i don't want to start in a giant creative endeavor all right that's going to be an overreaching thing that's going 58:52 to take months and months to work on if it's my intention that within the next year to two years i want to leave connecticut because i don't like living 58:58 here okay i determined hey i can do what i do anywhere in the country why am i going to live here so the whole thing 59:04 fell apart and i just said forget it and we never i never did it ever again all i did was i just worked on my own edited content from then on or excuse my own 59:10 gameplay content from then on if there was something that i edited myself that was it i never had any kind of a collaboration like this ever again 59:17 because of pretty much the way it went down okay now again i have the email i read it do you 59:24 want me to be pushy to these guys and try to force them to be part of the project again by offering them money 59:30 that would seem pretty [ __ ] up in my book like i think that would be terrible thing to do they're telling me that we don't want to be involved anymore 59:37 you know i didn't tell me andre is going to have a kid they told me that andre's having a kid so how the [ __ ] is he going to work on the show anymore he's the one 59:43 doing all the editing right so that was the end of it for me now you want to talk money this is so this 59:50 in my opinion is so [ __ ] up these guys don't know anything about the money made on videos on 59:56 youtube when it comes to what i was making on machinima they don't know anything about what i spent i never 1:00:01 wanted to talk about this now i have to because he's gonna he's gonna bring it up right there mr mr smiley up there 1:00:07 howard he's gonna bring it up next in the video he's gonna start talking about t-shirts 1:00:13 all right oh boy now i'm going to start to get upset about these [ __ ] t-shirts i wish we 1:00:20 could go back into if i could build a time machine right now okay and it i could make a delorean time 1:00:27 machine i would get in there with doc brown we would go back in time to the moment when i was on vista print 1:00:34 clicking make these shirts and i would destroy my computer i would take a 1:00:39 sledgehammer and smash my computer into pieces in front of me and say i'm from 1:00:44 the future [ __ ] don't do it you [ __ ] idiot these t-shirts will haunt you forever and then i would jump into 1:00:50 delorean and lee 1:00:56 i can't believe the trouble these [ __ ] t-shirts have given me over the years all right 1:01:04 now let's talk quickly about the money involved with project seven okay 1:01:10 i financed all the props okay except for the ones that were brought in 1:01:18 by respect to pax a few prop guns they already had from other shoots they were filmmakers okay they had this stuff um 1:01:25 i financed anything that had to do with the marketing of the show 1:01:32 and or merchandise me that was me spending that money okay 1:01:38 i also financed a bunch of props that were never used all right because we had 1:01:44 plans to make all these episodes we had talked it out this was a done thing we liked doing the show after one or two 1:01:50 episodes we liked doing the show everything was good right and 1:01:56 you know so i started buying stuff for the show in advance okay so first of all let's talk profits and 1:02:03 money on the videos okay it's impossible to go back in time right now and see in 2012 how many views these 1:02:11 videos had i particularly remember the first video probably had around 100 000 views the second video did way better 1:02:17 than that i believe it topped 200 thousand the third video we got [ __ ] youtube had a bug a glitch 1:02:24 that screwed everyone's video views up within about a 24 to 48 hour period and 1:02:29 episode three when i uploaded it had more likes more comments and more engagement 1:02:34 on the video than the first two episodes [ __ ] combined but it claimed it only had like 51 000 views when it was sky 1:02:42 sky high the most viewed video ever like of the series it didn't make any sense at all okay it we got screwed over royally on 1:02:50 that and i got paid based on views not ad revenue so we got [ __ ] in the butt on that episode okay 1:02:57 and then lastly there was the fourth video which was the final episode if i 1:03:02 remember if i remember correctly that year when all was said and done if you add all the views together for all 1:03:10 the different videos it was probably a couple million views if that 1:03:16 maybe if that okay maybe less again i can't tell you i'm guesstimating all right 1:03:23 so if you do the math subtracting taxes and all of that i can 1:03:29 guesstimate that the project seven videos on youtube made anywhere between 1:03:35 1 000 to maybe upwards of like say 2 000 of 1:03:41 traffic if that again we're we're we're high balling it okay well let's highball it and say it was 2 000 1:03:47 that those videos made total okay fair enough 1:03:54 nothing to shake a stick at 2 000 bucks is a lot of money right okay now 1:04:00 what did i spend on project seven well you could argue that every day that i worked on project seven push project 1:04:06 seven i didn't make other content that i could have been making right i could have been making videos that were going to make tons of money okay and i didn't 1:04:13 that i'm not even factoring in here forget that throw that away strike that from the record that's not 1:04:18 even a consideration here okay what did i actually spend money on right i bought props in episode three of 1:04:26 project seven you will actually see a large gun that's from gears of war that gun alone is around 300 bucks okay 1:04:33 um i bought a ton of other props like all the wardrobe and things that you see in that 1:04:38 episode i bought it's all on all me um bringing it in that was a couple 1:04:43 hundred bucks all in all um episode four some of that not all of it 1:04:49 i bought not all some okay um i don't even know how much that was quite 1:04:55 frankly i have no no concept in my head i don't remember anymore um 1:05:01 what did i spend money on outside of the episodes 1:05:06 i me phil spent 900 on t-shirts me 1:05:11 okay clear that up because he's going to bring it up and i'm going to clear it up this is a [ __ ] story that he's telling all right completely wrong the 1:05:18 way he tells it and i'm pissed off at it because these shirts have haunted me for ages okay 1:05:23 i spent 900 on t-shirts project seven t-shirts the intention was we were going to travel to conventions and sell them 1:05:30 in person as we premiered the episodes at conventions and we were also going to sell them through john rambo's website which he was already selling other 1:05:36 merchandise through to represent his podcast okay so literally we weren't going to get any 1:05:42 extra cost to sell these things it was only going to happen naturally but there was an investment back then there was no 1:05:47 teespring there weren't these websites that make t-shirts on the fly you had to buy the t-shirts first 1:05:53 all right in order to actually sell them i spent 900 on those shirts myself before anyone 1:06:00 else was involved investing money i bought them it was after the fact that howard here got involved and we'll talk 1:06:06 about that in a minute because he's going to bring it up all right so now just do the math in your head 900 for t-shirts uh 300 for the gun a couple 1:06:14 hundred dollars for wait a minute we're already like fifteen hundred dollars all right oh by the way 1:06:20 i also invested in a ton of other props you guys have never [ __ ] seen because we were supposed to keep doing this 1:06:26 series i bought a big ass assault rifle from mass effect 1:06:32 a mass effect replica assault rifle it lights up it makes [ __ ] noise it was going to be excellent for the sci-fi 1:06:38 episode we were going to do we were going to do a whole episode based on sci-fi characters parodies of star wars parodies of mass effect was at its 1:06:44 height of popularity back then okay i don't even want to tell you how much that one was that was the most expensive 1:06:51 thing i bought and that was exclusively supposed to be for this series what am i going to do with a [ __ ] gun it's supposed to be for the show okay 1:06:58 so all these these costs involve all right all of them and you want me to be real about how 1:07:04 much money project seven made okay project seven made anywhere between a 1:07:11 thousand to two thousand dollars in ad revenue profit from machinima's payments to me and project seven made me a grand 1:07:17 total of about negative a thousand dollars i lost money on project seven 1:07:22 it was a piss away project for me it was i want to do something creatively different i want to do it with my 1:07:28 friends i feel like this will be something fun to do and we'll all have a great time doing it 1:07:34 hey if we end up making money in the long term on it great that really wasn't the intention 1:07:39 to begin with it was supposed to be a fun project i do with my friends and then if we again we find a way to 1:07:44 monetize it in the long term great apparently these guys came into it with way different expectations okay however 1:07:52 the key to this story is coming up in just a moment let me change the battery the key to this story is coming up and 1:07:58 it reveals everything and this is a telling factor in this video that if you 1:08:03 don't have a frame of reference you won't get it but i'm about to reveal it so let me go swap the battery quickly 1:08:20 you know keep in mind other things i just didn't i didn't talk about is the conventions we went to two separate conventions that i got us into to 1:08:27 advertise project seven i paid for hotel rooms and [ __ ] for that you know i mean i could keep going on and on and on about this the money factor of their 1:08:34 video is so ludicrous and stupid because it's so fake you want to talk about phil spoke out of turn and said [ __ ] up 1:08:40 things on the internet about us great you want to say money was a factor you're out your [ __ ] mind it just never was i was the one always spending 1:08:48 and always doing everything and these guys were looking to make like a fortune i guess on this [ __ ] or something i don't know but again 1:08:54 i'm telling you from my perspective this was never an issue it was never brought up it was never addressed it was never yell i would never no one ever got in my 1:09:00 face about any of this everything was fine they kept showing up they kept doing co-op with me they kept doing all this stuff why would you do that if 1:09:07 you're mad at someone because you think they owe you money right it doesn't make any sense at all 1:09:12 anyway let's continue because we're getting to the meat of the matter right now let me swap back over 1:09:17 we're almost done with project seven thankfully let's continue there's no conversation 1:09:22 right so and then this is the so so what people you got what everyone has to realize is this is 1:09:29 this is like a whole bunch of things that has happened in the past that just it just irritates people because now 1:09:35 what ends up happening is it's like do you value money more than our friendship because if that's the case then why am i 1:09:42 talking about right you know what is he talking about do you value money more than our 1:09:48 friendship i wasn't making money on project seven and i also paid your way to go to conventions and 1:09:54 [ __ ] like what are you talking about again he's like oh on top of all of that 1:10:00 there also should have been more money coming our way like what the [ __ ] is he talking about like 1:10:06 when did i ever pick money over friendship ever and by the way it's funny because 1:10:11 there's parts coming up here where they're gonna say oh well you know i need money and then uh phil did phil gave me money so here we go let me ask 1:10:17 you did you get anything out of the project seven first of all let's yeah we're gonna talk about that not i didn't 1:10:23 get [ __ ] out of project seven so no one got paid now here's the thing i got paid 1:10:29 john got paid i got my percentage yeah there was a there at that time period 1:10:34 there's a point where my car had broken down and i needed to get actually i bought yeah i got a used car 1:10:41 i bought another car at that time so i go phil listen i'm not coming your house because i can't i have no car 1:10:46 uh if you want me to come throw me my percentage from the project seven and i'll use that cash towards a new car 1:10:53 and so i got my money but there's you know three other people you guys that got zero that god 1:11:01 john rambo did not get paid for project seven this is a a lie however 1:11:07 it's my fault because i was trying to be a nice guy and a good friend so during the whole time we're doing 1:11:12 project seven john comes to me one week well doesn't come to me he calls me one week and he says i got bad news he goes 1:11:18 my car broke down and i don't have any money to fix it 1:11:24 i need a new car essentially i don't know if it was he needed a new car he just needed money to fix i don't even remember what it was okay i don't 1:11:31 but essentially he came to me and listen i i need help right now i need money and 1:11:37 i i don't like asking for money but and i know we didn't talk about 1:11:43 getting paid for project seven but could you could you give me the money that maybe if we were to break it down 1:11:49 what we made on views and i'm hearing him all i'm hearing is he needs help i don't even care 1:11:55 his justification my friend needs help he knows i have money he [ __ ] knows how to make big money you know making 1:12:01 videos on youtube and my friend needs help he doesn't want to ask for help because he feels like 1:12:07 that would be wrong to do so he's justifying it by saying all right i need help but can you pay it as like a 1:12:14 percentage of the profits of project seven i didn't have the heart to tell john rambo that 1:12:19 project seven lost me money what was i gonna say i can't pay you john because project seven lost me money i don't i 1:12:26 made like lost money on this project so there's nothing to give you sorry you have no car now no here's what i did i 1:12:32 said okay john i will i'll do that for you and i pretended to make calculations that 1:12:38 didn't exist and then i sent him the money he wanted i don't even remember how much it was i know it wasn't a lot it was probably you know hundreds of 1:12:44 dollars i don't know i don't remember i don't remember these things i just sent him money because i wanted to help my 1:12:49 friend it had nothing to do with the profits of project 7 at all that's how he spun it 1:12:54 but he didn't know that there were no prophets and i was lying to him basically saying here's your cut there 1:13:01 was no cut all right so again he i i did something 1:13:06 well i thought i was helping my friend i'm doing the right thing here right i want to tell him there's no money in this project and that it's basically a 1:13:12 friend project that's it um i'm gonna help him out years later this is his evidence 1:13:20 to say that i was let you know why did i pay him and not others like this is a bad thing that i did i held up my friend 1:13:27 and i get crucified for it years later you know what i'm saying like this whole project 17 was nothing but [ __ ] 1:13:32 trouble for me for what i just wanted to have fun with my friends i thought we were going to do a fun project together and all i get is 1:13:38 is get you know attached for it it's it's excruciatingly exhausting because this is you guys 1:13:43 going to understand something maybe for some of you this is the first time you're hearing it this is something that i went through for years and year we're going to get to 1:13:51 the shirts now oh my god we're going to talk about the t-shirts okay the [ __ ] t-shirts 1:13:59 foreign says why not tell them the truth because john was the kind of person he wouldn't have taken the money then i would have said i lost money on the 1:14:04 project i don't you know and he would have said well then all right i'm sorry i called you he wouldn't have taken it i wanted him 1:14:10 to get a new car or fix this car whatever it was i don't want to [ __ ] have the guy with no ride that's [ __ ] up not only is he doing work for me with 1:14:17 co-op he has a job he has a life outside of that he needs to go to it his car probably broke down because of me you 1:14:23 understand that he's driving his car from new york to connecticut and back once a week to do co-op with me it's 1:14:28 probably why his car is busted i feel kind of responsible for that i want to help my friend 1:14:36 okay let's get to the shirts let's get this out now whatever for my from my end it's 1:14:41 whatever but this this is what burns me okay 1:14:46 we in the middle of this whole project seventh thing we all you myself and phil 1:14:52 came up with the idea let's make t-shirts right so yes and actually it was in the initial meeting that we had at starbucks 1:14:59 we brainstormed we will make t-shirts together and eventually sell them as well as we said we will sell dvds long 1:15:05 term what do we hold on hit the brakes for one second because we're talking about money and we should have gotten money yeah like you say it's 1:15:10 not about the money it's like what's fair it's what's fair yeah like like you want that job i got a job 1:15:16 those guys are like no one's homeless here no one's like uh destitute or we're like oh man project seven we 1:15:22 need to make this to pay our bills or we need to make videos to pay our bills it's nothing to do with that like we 1:15:28 don't necessarily need the money okay um and again it's not millions of dollars here it's just 1:15:33 it's whatever is fair but it's rare because as friends you would expect to 1:15:38 be treated with respect and oh you did you tried hard on this but this is your cut here's the thing since we're our 1:15:44 team as you said and we all did it together and you know it's not one person uh it should be fair it should be 1:15:51 divvied up to add on to what you were saying so what's fair okay so what's fair did they 1:15:57 really want me to divvy up negative a thousand dollars and give them bills each for 200 bucks 1:16:04 you know and you can argue all right well phil you invested all that money but that's on you fair enough 1:16:11 if any of them came to me and said hey we'd like to get paid we need the money 1:16:17 i would say okay and i would have paid them and it would have been out of my pocket out of the videos that i made had nothing to do with project seven i still 1:16:23 would have paid them okay i did that with john there's your evidence right there john just said i did it 1:16:29 i would have done that with any of them so what's fair well it earned nothing it lost money but if 1:16:35 you want to get paid for it let me know i'll pay anyway no one ever did besides john that one time he wanted money for the car 1:16:41 no one else ever said a word to me about it respect the pact wrote me an email saying we quit and it's not about the 1:16:48 money it's a personal issue i don't get it i'm really lost here 1:16:54 i'm definitely utterly lost i i just don't understand it and maybe it's me i don't know maybe i'm just an idiot let's 1:17:01 continue okay to add on to that so what happens right 1:17:06 we go ahead he doesn't we don't get our cut which is whatever at this point but 1:17:13 we start showing up to your house and what do we see the guy starts buying figurines 1:17:19 starts buying all this ridiculous [ __ ] that there's no need to buy he then we show up to his house one day 1:17:25 and what does he have in a [ __ ] driveway a bmw so how the [ __ ] do you think i feel and how do you think these 1:17:31 guys feel after the fact was there is that is there anything 1:17:37 you know do you do not understand how this burns people when they put all their freaking hard work into this and 1:17:43 you're making all the money in the glory and none of us ain't making [ __ ] yeah it's it's more about yeah it's more 1:17:48 about respect and view it's about respect man you have no respect for your friends for your family you don't give a 1:17:55 [ __ ] about anybody but yourself i have no respect for my friends and my family 1:18:02 i don't care about anyone but myself it's interesting it's very interesting that he would say 1:18:09 that okay now i've already revealed to you guys 1:18:14 that project seven lost me money so these guys are coming to my house right to film project seven john's 1:18:21 coming to my house every week to do co-op and absolutely my house is filling up with stupid statues and dumb 1:18:26 [ __ ] and today i've already told you guys a million times i was frivolously spending my youtube money on junk that i 1:18:32 didn't need and long term it was a waste of time and money i never should have done it i know that now back then i thought oh it's a new prop for a video 1:18:38 or something i was justifying it in a really stupid way okay the bmw part i never owned the bmw i 1:18:44 leased it we could talk about this until till we're blue in the face it doesn't matter there's neither here nor there the issue is they're showing up to my 1:18:50 house and there's stuff in the house i'm spending money but i'm not paying them for their work 1:18:56 okay the stuff in my house is stuff that i bought with the other 1:19:02 time that i'm making videos on youtube you know how i worked seven days a week 1:19:08 with no time off at all for like three [ __ ] years 1:19:13 you know how later on these guys will kind of complain and say that everything that i ever did was about money 1:19:19 well it's because i was constantly making content videos for the internet i had this workaholic nature 1:19:25 right and yes absolutely that's a problem maybe i should have had time for personal stuff maybe i should have made 1:19:31 more time for my friends maybe i should have had a separation to have a personal life along with 1:19:37 a public life i did not do that okay for three years three [ __ ] years 1:19:44 that i was monetizing those videos hardcore i didn't even have a day off once 1:19:49 not even a day off a week it was just videos videos videos videos videos videos videos okay 1:19:56 it's like howard somehow forgets that i have a channel 1:20:02 that brings in you know millions of views a month he forgets that there's insane amounts 1:20:07 of other content on all i was doing was project seven according to this guy you know like essentially what he's saying is 1:20:14 we need money but we won't say it we never asked for it 1:20:19 you should have just given us money because you were making money i wasn't making money on project seven i was 1:20:25 making money on literally everything else that i was putting on the internet i was losing money on project seven but 1:20:30 he wants money so howard asked me for money 1:20:35 say i would like to be paid for project seven i would say well we never talked about it it never was supposed to be a 1:20:41 concern or an issue but that's how you feel fine john did he got paid 1:20:46 respective pack told me we didn't want the money we're quitting because we have personal reasons if they had said hey 1:20:52 phil we want money they would have got paid right it's ridiculous you want money 1:20:57 i'll give you money from what i'm earning outside of project seven i'm okay with that you guys put a lot of work into the series great i understand 1:21:03 that but you're asking for money that doesn't exist you weren't entitled to because we 1:21:09 didn't have an agreement in place about that so why would i just start giving you money it didn't make any sense the 1:21:15 money was coming on the back end if we continued with the the series there would have been dvd sales there would 1:21:20 have been t-shirt sales which we're gonna talk about in a minute don't worry and then he's like he's coming in to my 1:21:26 house looking at statues in the car and he's pissed at me you're pissed at me for what did you not see my channel my 1:21:32 channels at that point i had multiple youtube channels millions upon millions of millions of views not project seven 1:21:37 views all my other content was making those views it's ludicrous what he's saying here 1:21:45 it's absolutely ludicrous what he's saying here okay and then he oh you have no respect for your friends or your 1:21:51 family why because i bought statues with my money that i earned with my videos what the [ __ ] are you talking about oh 1:21:56 by the way we're going to another convention next week that i arranged for and i'm paying for the hotel room and the gas for so oh you'll come into that 1:22:03 right like what the [ __ ] anyway it's pretty obvious i don't think 1:22:09 that i even have to say the word people in the stream chat have already said about a million times what actually happened in this situation okay 1:22:16 now please for the love of god let's get to the [ __ ] t-shirts that's the you know and maybe that's not 1:22:22 even true maybe it's not true but that's how it comes off so yeah and that's what you see there 1:22:27 howard goes to the extreme phil has no respect for his friends or his family and then john says oh that's probably not true but that's how it comes off 1:22:33 wait what who who's poisoning the well which is the theme we've been talking 1:22:39 about there's a circle of friends someone's poisoning the well yeah i wonder people you know what i mean yeah 1:22:45 um and you're not how do you think people feel thinking about other you're not thinking about others and how it you know affects them you know nobody no 1:22:52 it's the thing is is nobody's jealous nobody's nothing it's when people make money one person makes money off the 1:22:58 back of everybody else and on top of your putting videos out there we go i did that yeah uh i came up with that and it's like no 1:23:05 you didn't so you know now they mixed the two things was it about money or is it about who could who did the credit now they're 1:23:10 mixing the issues and that's where again they do this change the timeline mix the issues now you're confused oh well if 1:23:15 this one thing happened then the money thing is true you can't you have two different issues with me than have the two different 1:23:21 issues don't say oh they're the same issue they're not he's mixing the two to try to make me look even worse um 1:23:27 i wasn't making money on a project they want money from it i'll give it to you anyway just tell me you want it no we won't do that though so it's it's a 1:23:34 history of passive aggressiveness it's over the years these guys had issues that they had with me they didn't tell 1:23:39 me or if they did tell me we hashed it out and immediately were supposed to be okay they said they were fine next thing 1:23:44 i know they still hate me behind my scenes but how do i know that they never said anything you know and again i'm not 1:23:51 trying to say i'm innocent i'm not i made a lot of [ __ ] mistakes this money issue is [ __ ] this never was 1:23:56 an issue they easily could have been resolved this is something that they created they created the issue 1:24:03 behind the scenes and then they just propagated this negativity with all of their circle of friends circle of friends whatever that means they just 1:24:09 kept circling around with hatred and and bad feelings and never told me i can't 1:24:15 do things that i'm i i can't fix an issue i don't know exist 1:24:21 i'm not psychic they wanted me to be psychic they wanted me to be like oh phil is filthy rich and he's just gonna 1:24:27 start throwing money left and right all over the place because we worked on a project with him like no 1:24:32 no that's not how all right let's continue these guys worked hard to put that together worked 1:24:38 hard to put that together you're gonna actually come up with that all right so let's get back to the shirts thing finally the shirts i want to get this 1:24:45 out of the way before i split the party get together oh and we decide let's you know let's let's make t-shirts you know 1:24:51 so we all put money together and i'm gonna throw out the figure it was about 900 i just said that okay 1:24:59 three hundred dollars per person we put wrong nine hundred dollars here's what happened we met at the cafe we had the 1:25:06 ideas right we did the initial filming we met at the cafe again had more ideas for episode two during the initial work on 1:25:13 episode one all of a sudden respect the pack sends me these logos i didn't ask for them they just sent them to me i 1:25:19 said what are these they said oh these are these are the t-shirt logos that howard wants 1:25:25 what oh these are the t-shirt logos that howard's talking to them about making 1:25:30 because we're going to sell t-shirts huh we didn't even discuss this we didn't have any any ideas for logos nothing 1:25:38 he was behind the scenes talking to respect the fact about making these shirts and then he basically told them to make 1:25:45 them so they sent these to me right here's here's some 1:25:51 some t-shirt designs that you guys can sell i didn't even know they were doing this i had no clue they were making 1:25:56 these logos not pictured here there's four or five of them another one is me holding the xbox 360 controller upside 1:26:03 down like this looking like a buffoon you know there's a few different designs i purposely said no we're going to do 1:26:09 shirts let's go with the designs that have all of us or our character that we created together death face actually it's not true i created that face for 1:26:15 the original project 7 but then we redesigned him for project 7 the reboot and that was the work of all of us but i 1:26:21 said i want we're going to sell merch it's going to be merch that's all of us together it's not going to be just me on 1:26:27 the shirt i want it to kind of be all of us collectively because it's all of our work together right 1:26:32 so i get these logos from respect to pact i 1:26:37 was tasked with figuring out where to make sure it's not them i was my job to do this so i'm looking all over the 1:26:43 internet and actually respect the path that said you know i heard there's a sale at this place called vistaprint now incidentally i bought uh business cards 1:26:50 from vista paper for i like the quality of their work so i went ahead and i went to vistaprint i've created 1:26:58 the shirts myself with the logos that were made by respect to pact i 1:27:05 bought the shirts okay i did 900 out of my pocket went to the 1:27:10 shirts okay the shirts show up they look all right they're not great they're as you can see they're not full 1:27:16 color shirts back then they didn't do full color shirts again this was before tea spray um 1:27:21 and so these shirts are at my place and we determine what we're going to do is john's going to try to sell these on 1:27:26 his website where he's already selling t-shirts for his show uh john represents the show it's his 1:27:32 podcast but we're also going to take these t-shirts along with us to conventions okay 1:27:38 to sell so at the time there's a discussion all right well phil already bought the shirt so who wants in i already bought 1:27:45 them who wants in on this investment that i've already fronted all the money for howard says i want and i'll pay 300 1:27:52 john says i can't do that i can't afford it so john was never involved with the shirts the 1:27:58 money making of the shirts or anything like that it was only howard who had invested this 300 1:28:03 okay so essentially it was a 600 300 i was 1:28:09 gonna get two thirds of the profit howard was going to get a third of course keep in mind 1:28:15 i'm still paying for all kinds of trips and things so it's it's a wash i don't really care about the profits from the shirts i just wanted something to sell 1:28:21 so we could have something tangible the fans could have because they like the series right okay let's continue 1:28:26 the money together then we start figuring out we go to these conventions we do this this and that the t-shirts aren't selling so whatever we're gonna 1:28:33 take i'm gonna cut my losses i don't give a [ __ ] right you heard what he just said the t-shirts aren't selling all right 1:28:40 whatever i'm gonna cut my losses i don't give a [ __ ] so that's the end of the story right there's no more t-shirts involved that's it that's the end 1:28:46 [Laughter] comes up to us we're talking about it he's saying we're not making any money 1:28:52 we sold only a few t-shirts because when you when you thought about it once you sold the t-shirts you were going to make a decent amount of profit 1:28:59 so we're not making any money so we're just going to have to cut our losses whatever at that point i i accept that 1:29:05 now he leaves here he leaves connecticut and he moves to seattle 1:29:11 he gets to seattle he starts doing this project 7 reboot thing that he's doing 1:29:16 making videos doing all this stuff then i start finding out that he's reselling t-shirts 1:29:22 this is by the way this is all wrong not even correct uh order of anything 1:29:28 um not even close to what really happened what we have on the screen right here which you probably cannot read 1:29:35 is what was actually on my patreon at the time pledge 100 or more per month patreons or patrons who donate 100 or 1:29:42 more a month will receive one of the remaining project seven t-shirts from their liberty run in 2012 supplies and pictures are very limited so the first 1:29:49 come first sir okay and i said free shipping worldwide 1:29:54 um and then a personalized video i will autograph the shirt yada yada yada okay 1:30:00 a bunch of stuff was included it was a patron perk that you could get a t-shirt along with it originally it was a 1:30:05 hundred dollars later on it was lowered to dramatically less to 20 i believe it was either 20 or 30. in which case i was 1:30:11 losing money i'm not kidding again here we go again me losing money i was had these shirts up as a patreon per and the 1:30:18 cost to ship them worldwide which was supposed to be included with the cost of the prayer was more than the cost of the shirt so you have people people pledging 1:30:24 20 30 and it was costing me 40 50 to ship it worldwide so i stopped doing that too i actually just stopped doing 1:30:29 it entirely i said i'm not going to do this anymore with the shirts i'm taking it off because it's it's actually a loss okay so these are like the haunted 1:30:36 shirts you can't make money on them you got friends who are pissed about them 1:30:41 right now i'll tell you the full story because this is this isn't true yet let's keep going because because they're going to continue and i'm going to tell 1:30:46 you the true story because this is all [ __ ] what he's saying right now is completely false let's continue and or he's giving them out 1:30:53 it was a for his patreon for a patreon as far as i understand i could be wrong here so if i'm wrong please correct me 1:30:59 yeah anyone out there but for his patreon patreon 1:31:04 it's uh you give a certain amount of money i think maybe it's 40 or 50 bucks then you will get 1:31:11 the one of the shirts yep um but the problem is he doesn't actually own the shirts false absolutely 1:31:18 he doesn't own the shirts completely so he's giving them out now false and this is why they're telling the whole story out of order i do own 1:31:24 the shirts because howard did get paid for them you'll find out how in a moment because he's going to talk about it but 1:31:30 they're purposely telling the story out of order to make me look bad and then they try to fix it after the fact but it 1:31:36 doesn't make sense because the story is already told the damage is already done when you watch this video wow phil stole 1:31:42 those shirts and sold them later on for profit but he didn't own them all actually i did and you'll find out how 1:31:47 in a moment how do i don't know if he finished giving him out or if he managed to sell all of them or if he sold them 1:31:52 or whatever the case may be but when i start hearing about stuff like that or i see videos of him posting that stuff 1:31:58 naturally what do you think is going to happen i'm going to get irritated beyond belief now i don't want to go i'm not 1:32:04 going to go into it because because now if i if i go into what i'm going to go into it's going to derail everything all right hold on hold on so 1:32:12 okay listen so he's taking shirts that your face is on the shirt yeah 1:32:20 he has to physically look at your face as he packages the shirt i did not design the logo howard 1:32:28 talks to respect to the pact to have those logos designed and then mail it as he goes to mail it 1:32:34 and never for a second thinks wait a minute this person paid for a percentage of the 1:32:40 shirt yep and on top of that the logos the the actual shirts were 1:32:46 made by andre he's not getting anything the shirts were not made by andre they were made by me financed by me the logos were made by 1:32:53 andre that is correct nope um at one point the shirts were in 1:32:58 oj's house and oj and oj was the one that was packing it and sending it to the people 1:33:04 there was a point where that maybe we only maybe sold one maybe one or two so i don't want to go nuts with that but 1:33:10 yeah at one point oj did was actually uh he was actually you know he had them 1:33:15 physically he had them in his basement for months and i think at one point phil just should throw them out and we didn't we didn't do it um 1:33:22 i was like no i don't throw mad maybe you could just give them away i was like give them away like it's you know as a prize or something someday you know 1:33:29 so when he moved he asked for them back and i was like that is 1 million percent false and in fact that 1:33:37 might actually be the one lie that john tells in this whole video because pretty much 1:33:43 everything john says is pretty factual or at least half truths in this case that's a lie 1:33:48 we'll talk about it so i got him from john picked him up brought him to his house i didn't really think about it 1:33:54 um and then yeah here you go so now he's actually using them 1:34:00 uh as an incentive to give him money or whatever the hell it is you know and i'm sure his response will be 1:34:06 something like i don't i don't remember that you paid or uh 1:34:11 i don't know are you never maybe you'll say you never brought it up to me that you but you shouldn't have to you know what i mean yeah you shouldn't have to 1:34:18 now you really shouldn't have to call him and go phil give me the money from my 1:34:24 percentage of the shirt yeah now the way the way that i look at it for 1:34:29 now with this it's a wash and this is why it's a wash actually it's not really a watch when i look at it like this 1:34:36 because of what he had told me and this is goes back to what i was just we were talking about before about him detracting statements right 1:34:43 so let's rewind before project seven okay so now they just told a story 1:34:50 of how i essentially stole a bunch of shirts that i didn't own moved across the country and started selling them 1:34:56 to make profit that's what they just said i mean in other words in a summary right i'm not making that up that's what 1:35:01 they're accusing me of howard is now going to explain in the same video how he doesn't own the shirts 1:35:08 and has no stake to them i don't understand how people didn't understand this but maybe it's because he told it 1:35:13 out of sequence he's literally going to explain to you why he has no stake in the shirts 1:35:18 anymore only he tells it in a very exaggerated way like he tends to do everything so maybe that's why you guys 1:35:24 didn't understand so i'm going to let him finish and then i'm going to actually tell you the entirety of the story of what really happened with these 1:35:29 shirts so what do we do we start playing st right start buying the cabs so you and i 1:35:35 and just just to throw this information out there the way this thing started was john and i decided to buy a cab right 1:35:42 the cab shows up in the middle of this right he he comes phil shows up and he's like 1:35:48 yeah i gotta oh no we're at his house and we're looking at some of his stuff and i found a super turbo board he has a 1:35:53 blue one so we're like oh you know i didn't know he had a super turbo board and this and 1:35:59 that and he goes ah i don't even know if this thing works anymore so we plug it in we go to the house we bring it over to the house we plug it in 1:36:05 it's dead right so super so cps2 has a battery the battery dies the board dies 1:36:12 so he goes to me he's like man i can't really do anything with it you can keep it if you can fix it just keep it right 1:36:17 so what do i do i got a friend of mine who lives in manchester right he goes i call him up i met him online a bill and 1:36:24 bill goes yeah just come by i'll revive the board right so i throw him like four like it was 1:36:30 like 30 or 40 bucks right he goes revives the boards for me rewrites the eproms get gets rid of the battery board 1:36:35 works fine right so one day he comes up and we start playing st i said oh i managed to get 1:36:41 that board up and running all right so when are you gonna give it back to me you just told me you're gonna give me the [ __ ] board 1:36:47 what do you mean give it back to you what are you out of your mind i just 1:36:52 paid 40 dollars to revive this and you think i'm going to give it back to you okay so and then this is when this i'm going 1:36:58 to say right after what happens the t-shirt thing happens yeah so you know what i say [ __ ] i ain't giving you 1:37:03 [ __ ] back so i'm keeping a board right for the t-shirt for the 300 that you owe me in [ __ ] t-shirts 1:37:10 huh there you go all right there you go okay 1:37:15 time for the real story in the real order that happened okay so years ago we were all playing super 1:37:20 turbo together and one day john howard over my house i don't remember for what probably a co-op or something howard's 1:37:27 looking all over my house don't ask me why and he finds a super turbo board under my bed it was in a plastic box what excuse me a 1:37:33 cardboard box what's a super turbo board he doesn't explain a super turbo board is 1:37:39 a game cartridge think of when you have a super nintendo you put in a game cartridge a genesis you put in a game cartridge okay 1:37:45 but it's for an arcade game a arcade game game cartridge is giant it's huge it's like like this one this 1:37:52 tall this wide and it plugs into a board with [ __ ] transistors and [ __ ] all sticking out that's how you would swap 1:37:58 games in arcades you pop this board off put a different board on and i have a different game playing on that cabinet 1:38:03 okay why the hell did i have a super turbo board under my bed because i was a 1:38:08 tournament organizer on the east coast of the united states in the late 2000s and i ran a few tournaments where we needed super turbo boards for them and i 1:38:15 bought those boards off of ebay and used them in a tournament okay so one day john john howard over my 1:38:21 house howard's snooping around finds this board under my bed he says what the hell is this doing here are you gonna never use it i said no probably not he 1:38:28 said does it work i said i don't know can i have it sure why not take it i don't care 1:38:34 what the why give a [ __ ] about right take it it's useless it's under my bed i'm not gonna run any more street fighter tournaments go ahead take it 1:38:40 okay i don't know anything about him restoring the board or anything till like later we start going over his house 1:38:46 apparently the board's restored he says we can use it i think we might have played on it a few times on his cabinet i'm not sure i don't care have the board 1:38:53 i don't care you're my friend i'm never gonna use it's under my bed collecting [ __ ] dust bunnies take it okay 1:38:59 phil wants it back no i don't want to what do i want the board back for i don't have a cabinet what the [ __ ] do 1:39:05 i want a super turbo board back for okay i'm never gonna use it it's sitting under my bed collecting dust bunnies you 1:39:11 recharge the battery you're using it in your house on a cabinet why would i ask for the board back i don't remember 1:39:17 asking for the board back if i did i would think it would have been in a joking manner but apparently howard 1:39:22 hates my gut so much he doesn't understand that okay um but i didn't want a super turbo board back from this 1:39:28 guy he essentially just had it for free okay years later the project 7 thing happens 1:39:35 i spent 900 on shirts he later on throws in his 300 says he wants in on the 1:39:40 investment all right john and oj have the shirts they're at oj's house john's trying to sell them on his 1:39:46 website no one's buying them they sold like one or two shirts so when we went to conventions they would bring the 1:39:52 shirts along to the convention we would sell them at the conventions we sold a few shirts what did they never mention 1:39:57 oh i paid howard for the money of the t-shirts at the conventions absolutely i did we split the money split it everyone got a 1:40:04 cut okay everyone made their money on the shirts for what we sold at conventions never explained never never 1:40:09 elaborated on in this video right never happened sure so after all our convention runs are 1:40:15 done because project seven's done now we got a [ __ ] thing full of shirts that are worthless they're sitting in oj's 1:40:20 basement john says to me what should we do with these shirts i said throw them out i outright told him this i said john 1:40:27 throw them out don't even we don't want to deal with these ever again trust me on this throw the shirts out 1:40:33 they're worthless okay okay 1:40:38 one day before i'm moving out of connecticut john comes over to 1:40:44 help me pack up for the move and what does he bring with him the [ __ ] shirts 1:40:50 he plops them down on my floor and says oh here's your shirts back i said what the [ __ ] is this 1:40:56 he goes it's your shirts i said i don't want these i told you to throw these out like last year two years ago what are they oh they were just 1:41:03 sitting in oj's basement for years oh why okay 1:41:08 so what am i supposed to do with these now right now i i don't want them but they're in 1:41:14 with all my moving [ __ ] right because he brought him over during my move so guess what happens i accidentally moved 1:41:21 them with my [ __ ] i didn't actually mean to but you know you're marking like 100 boxes to move and [ __ ] you're putting 1:41:27 stickers on it i'm not thinking come to find out i'm not kidding 1:41:32 that box of shirts that i already paid 900 for and i'm never getting my money back for 1:41:38 cost me about another 75 to move across the country yes no exaggeration the 1:41:44 company ripped me off that was moving my [ __ ] across the country and charged me an exorbitant amount of money for boxes 1:41:51 and so i ended up paying more money to move them to washington okay 1:41:56 so now i'm sitting here in washington now in the meantime in the interim of that 1:42:03 howard says to me one day because i'm moving right i'm moving across the country he goes you know 1:42:09 i still got your super turbo board and just so you know you know you never 1:42:16 paid me for the 300 for the shirts that never sold but it was a wash it's okay but in exchange for that i'm gonna keep 1:42:22 your super turbo board because we use it we got it on my cabinet we use it so i'm just gonna keep that and i said that 1:42:28 sounds like a great idea now we don't have to worry about oh money owed and [ __ ] between friends when i move you 1:42:33 keep the board i keep the shirts it's a wash right 1:42:38 there you go that was what happened it wasn't oh he's 1:42:43 secretly keeping the board to spite me he asked me if he could keep i said yes 1:42:49 you can have it i already gave it to you years ago you've been using it all along why would i want the board back like why 1:42:55 was it why would phil want a [ __ ] super turbo board bat i don't have a cabinet it's a worthless piece for me 1:43:01 you know what i mean like it doesn't make sense to say that i would want it back and oh i really got him i really poked at him by keeping his board 1:43:08 because he owed me money no no howard that never happened you are so 1:43:14 he has this like weird notion in his mind that he's like a badass and he's like sticking it to everyone around him 1:43:20 who's wronged him and all this stuff never happened man never he's in person 1:43:26 howard is the nicest person you will ever meet but it seems to me like behind your back he's probably one of the meanest dudes 1:43:32 like i can't believe the [ __ ] he's saying in this video that's blatantly lies okay blatantly lies so let's let's 1:43:38 recap one more time i paid 900 for the shirts he wanted in on them and picked 300 later after i had already financed 1:43:46 the shirts okay then he got paid for all the shirts that had ever sold 1:43:51 so he got his cut of the shirts that sold at conventions and things he got paid for those i wanted the shirts thrown out they were 1:43:58 brought to my house against my will okay i paid 75 more dollars to have the 1:44:04 shirts moved across the country so there's even more money invested in these shirts now if i don't own them yet how much more do i have to spend on them 1:44:11 right then on top of that he tells me i'm keeping your super turbo 1:44:16 board to pay for the shirts okay keep it so we're even steven where the [ __ ] does this story come from 1:44:24 right i'll tell you where the story comes from the trolls because as guilty as i always was of 1:44:31 buying into the troll [ __ ] they were just as guilty when i started putting up those shirts 1:44:36 on my patreon which i owned once twice over paid the [ __ ] out of them at this 1:44:42 point okay trolls start oh but you don't own those 1:44:48 those those shirts don't just have your face on them there's johnny howard on it don't you feel bad selling those shirts 1:44:54 on patreon which i wasn't selling them they were patron perks okay they weren't 1:44:59 actual outright sale i wasn't selling a t-shirt on the internet okay 1:45:05 but there you go like oh don't you think that you know that's messed up no it's not 1:45:12 messed up it's ah i own the shirts way way over over the cost of what they 1:45:17 should have been to begin with okay and it's ludicrous this guy was paid he got he's keeping my 1:45:23 super turbo board i challenge you now to go look on the internet and find a super turbo board they're not even available 1:45:28 anymore they're collectors items they go for a ridiculous amount of money way more than 300 1:45:33 and he has this board in his possession today okay i don't want to hear this [ __ ] it is it's [ __ ] it's it's 1:45:39 it's petty it's a ridiculous thing you want to say phil [ __ ] up project seven because he 1:45:46 was talking [ __ ] publicly about he wrote it all fact that's a fact maybe not in so so many of 1:45:53 those words but that's a fact phil did not directly pay us for project seven that's a fact except for rambo who got 1:45:59 paid even though there was no money i paid him to basically get a car it's a fact phil sold shirts he didn't fully own 1:46:06 that is a bold faced [ __ ] lie that is 100 fake he made it up because 1:46:13 he wanted to razz me he wanted to get me they were upset with the fact that over the years they didn't like me anymore 1:46:19 they had this built up resentment i had a shirt with their faces on it i owned them fully but he wanted to say oh phil 1:46:26 is such a jerk he owed me money i didn't know him [ __ ] i still don't owe you [ __ ] okay you're out of your mind you're this 1:46:32 guy again why is he in this [ __ ] video this video was supposed to be the friendship of me and john rambo and he 1:46:39 has fully interjected himself into this situation as a third party that was barely involved in the issues between me 1:46:46 and john rambo yet he's the one narrating he's the one telling the story like what is going on here 1:46:52 you have no idea when i first watched this video how [ __ ] up it was i was like what is this [ __ ] i can't even 1:46:57 believe this is on the internet like this like what the [ __ ] anyway 1:47:04 that's the end of project seven they're gonna move on to other stuff so let's split the part hoo boy okay

pt4

0:00 all right everyone i'm back my blood pressure's high i'm a little upset about that last part no kidding 0:06 right let's continue um if you have not watched the first three parts i strongly recommend you do that 0:13 entire last part was about project seven now we're past that we continue on let's continue on 0:21 that's the thing like you shouldn't have to go to your friend consistently and and bring up like why did you say this 0:27 please give me the money well me this isn't fair you know it puts you in a terrible position 0:33 to have to keep doing that and uh it's tough but then it gets to a point where you just get irritated because the guy 0:39 don't give a [ __ ] about you or anyone else that's what's irritating the most man 0:45 so again this is some addressing things that have been said publicly and uh giving you my side 0:52 uh some other things happened over the years man i'll get into this quickly some things started going down man more 0:58 of him again like i said earlier exaggerating things put words in my mouth what not 1:04 so there's a situation that goes down where it evolves of all things howard 1:11 burial party okay i i'm just gonna let this entire story play 1:17 100 of this story is true i am 100 guilty so i can sit back and relax and 1:23 shake my head at what a [ __ ] [ __ ] i was ready the velvee mario party so people were going out there and saying 1:30 you know because we're doing a lot of co-ops they're like we want to see you play mario party with john we want john and phil to play 1:36 mario party please play it phil decides he wants to play with his girlfriend 1:42 which is perfectly fine i i really don't care it's perfectly cool and just to put it 1:49 out there i have no problem with his girlfriend i've met her a couple times 1:55 she was very nice to me i got nothing bad to say she's cool people 2:00 to me okay that's my ex i've been out of the picture for many many many years 2:06 it's all we got to say about it let's continue hey whatever so 2:12 he uh he wants to play with his girlfriend he makes a video where he says 2:18 that john doesn't want to play mario party john likes gritty mature type games 2:26 he doesn't want to play that i'm going to play it with my girlfriend 2:32 it's flat out lie was up for playing whatever he wanted to play especially if people 2:38 wanted us to play it and you know to prove my statements correct 2:45 um and to support them look at the stuff that we did play so much crazy stuff all the connect games 2:50 kung fu riders whatever else man whatever he wanted to do whatever the people wanted us to do 2:56 i would certainly do it oh yeah i i could take i could do a testament today because you and i played 3:02 some really shitty games man and it's hard to dispute that so i draw the line of mario party bought it which is fine 3:08 yeah um so what happens is he says oh john doesn't want to play that you know and this is something people are asking 3:13 for so what happens the common theme people get pissed at me and i start getting on why i'm going about my 3:19 business during the day i start getting messages and people are pissy oh it's not mature enough for you 3:25 you piece big nose piece of [ __ ] maybe not exactly that but along those 3:31 lines man [ __ ] up that's what he was getting again i bring this up to his attention because he wants to talk about how you know you're 3:37 supposed to say things that you feel if you're a man and whatnot so as i've already given you several examples 3:42 here's another one and i uh i tell him what's up he apologizes 3:48 just like the several times before that and it starts to click you know if someone just keeps saying sorry when 3:54 they do something uh they're not really apologizing right if just if apologizing isn't just 4:00 words it's i will not do this thing again so 4:07 again the timeline is skewed okay because the way this video was presented 4:13 was phil made a video about us on thanksgiving right 4:20 phil made uh unfollowed us on thanksgiving the year before uh phil 4:25 did something wrong with project seven he spoke out of turn saying that i didn't write the series 4:30 and he apologized profusely for that okay phil 4:37 said that respect to pac didn't want money okay 4:42 right well i mean i'm going in order now that was just discussed in the video okay 4:47 so now he says the next situation where there was a real issue between me and phil 4:52 was that he wanted he lied about mario party okay he's right 100 correct i lied i 5:00 made it up all right i mean do you want the justification there is none my ex wanted 5:06 to play mario party with me and everyone wanted me to play it with rambo but my ex wanted to play it so we played it and 5:11 i lied that's it stupid bad dumb you know 5:17 and he took the haiti for he did he got harassment online that he was the reason why we weren't playing mario party together which is [ __ ] okay 5:24 so this is the second time in our history together 5:30 that john confronts me about something you know he says why did you say why are you saying these things to which i 5:36 apologize to him i said no you know you're right this is me being stupid being again insecure on the internet 5:43 having a face to the public you know this is the second time first time i eventually said you weren't as big a 5:48 part of project seven as you were i shouldn't have ever made that video this time i'm lying about 5:53 you know mario part okay so i was friends with john 5:58 since the mid-2000s up until at this point that's like 2013 6:03 maybe 2014 but i think this was 2013. in the entire time we're friends there's two times 6:09 that john is mad at me for something each time he addresses it i apologize i admit i 6:15 did wrong and we apparently got over it right like again 6:21 did john say man that's the last straw you're a dick i'm not going to come over and do co-op with you anymore we're not going to do smart guys we're going to 6:26 not be friends ever again no that didn't happen life continued we buried the hatchet 6:32 right we did so he's bringing these up in the video 6:38 but we were fine so how is this anything to do 6:44 with the fact that you ghosted me for a year and a half and then kept changing your tune when it 6:49 came to making content with me but then wouldn't tell anyone on the internet but me making me the guy who has to tell 6:55 everyone everything you're saying because you won't tell anyone you're silent on the matter publicly right 7:00 um i don't get it the whole the whole point here is you know he's his oh he's 7:06 he's making mistakes and apologizing if he keeps apologizing it doesn't make any any it's not truthful he's just saying 7:12 it okay but then fine then why didn't the relationship been there what are you talking about if you didn't trust me 7:17 then why did the relationship continue on and why do we have a friendship for another two plus years it doesn't make sense you 7:23 know what i'm saying these were things that were were done and handled but apparently not on mine they were because 7:30 he told me they were i can only know as much as he tells me again i'm not psychic there's another theme in this 7:35 i'm not psychic it's like i was supposed to be psychic and know this and that about this and that when no one said a word to me right 7:42 i'm not a psychic i didn't know that he was still pissed about that we talked about it apparently it's done but now oh 7:47 i still i can't trust him oh but i was still his friend and still did co-op i still got took a paycheck we still went on trips like huh 7:54 what is i don't get it it's that again very confusing to me all right let's continue 8:00 because i feel bad about it um if you keep doing the thing or not it's not actually an apology 8:07 do you what do you think about that no i agree with you a hundred percent and it just it seems as if it's like 8:13 uh keep doing it twice so far twice he wants to do something over a decade long friendship and or 8:20 uh somebody keeps like i i was telling you man he falls right victim to it all the time somebody keeps prodding him 8:26 social media or whatever he's right x y z and he falls right into the trap yeah and it happens all every single time he 8:33 could have just been up front and said well i want to play mario party with my girlfriend and that's it but he wants 8:38 but he wants to look 8:46 i don't know about that he did not say that i'm not saying that just jumping there but uh yeah that's exactly what it 8:52 is you know yeah oh here's my here's my scapegoat that i could get out of this situation 8:57 because if i if if i play with her people are going to thumb down the video or something or be mad that john's not 9:02 there so he didn't want to play yeah uh let's get into some stuff here 9:10 basically from when he moved in the thanksgiving video that he put out his timeline is completely [ __ ] 9:16 he talks about how we had plans in the fall he was gonna move he moved in june 9:23 and john and i had plans in the fall we were to start doing stuff now on this same channel that he's 9:30 saying these things on there's videos from that time period he's talking about doing stuff 9:35 in that summer so his timeline is screwed man 9:40 yeah but the timeline he's talking about is the the newly established timeline like 9:45 again okay i guess i gotta go through this quickly when i moved out here the whole intention was that within a few weeks maybe a month we were going to 9:51 start doing content together again over the internet a digital version of our our commentary show smart guys over 9:57 skype and maybe co-op 10:03 who said gamepl i can't do it okay so he's talking about a video from thanksgiving of 2015. that's the 10:10 abridged or the excuse me the amended timeline the amended timeline was he told me we could do stuff in the fall so 10:16 that's why i said in the video from 2015 well the idea was we're going to go out there and play in 2015. 10:21 right i'm just doing giving the amended timeline based on what he told me so why is this an issue he's like oh here's 10:26 evidence that phil's lying in the video that's not a lie that's what you changed the timeline to this is a year and a 10:31 half later of course i'm going to tell people what the current timeline was not the original one that got changed what 10:36 are you talking about john this is not true there's no there's no plan to wait till the fall or anything like that 10:42 basically what he said was after he moved in a couple weeks we'll start doing things 10:47 so he moves things i actually go there and help them move some stuff out 10:53 um and okay let's get into this so no i'm not upset that he moved okay and i'm angry or jealous or 11:01 something or i i got left behind or something like that uh if someone's moving 11:07 by the way i've said this to him i've said this publicly on the show before he moved he was on the show with 11:12 me if someone is moving or making a change in their life because they feel it will 11:17 improve their life i support that 100 percent just like i've always supported him 100 11:25 you know or anyone man howie if you told me you're moving to iceland tomorrow because it's gonna give you a better 11:31 life i'm gonna be over there helping you pack dude cool you know how could you feel otherwise 11:39 and that's that's my take on that man have you had friends that have you had friends that moved away did you do you hate them for doing 11:46 that no still talk to them and and everything else and you know going back you know i wanted to touch a little bit 11:53 on that whole moving thing you know i i was a little upset i i was very upset at the fact that that he 12:00 he he sent me a text message like last minute asking me to do like a 12:05 co-op okay he's gonna get into this story which i forgot this is i didn't even realize this was next i thought it 12:10 was a different thing coming up um the only reason john talked about that in that segment is because um i brought 12:18 it up in that thanksgiving video that we watched the very beginning of this and i you know in that video i said i 12:23 don't know maybe he's resentful that i moved i don't know i literally say it's all 12:28 me guessing because john hasn't said a word to me about why he won't talk to me anymore okay so he's only directly addressing what i 12:34 suggested and saying it's not true however i will direct your attention i don't 12:40 have it in this video and i should have i'll direct your attention to the final podcast that i ever appeared on when i 12:46 lived in connecticut all right it was a goodbye show either a segment goodbye phil or whatever i don't know when the 12:51 show was but in that segment basically we have a really good heartfelt segment that wishes me the 12:56 best is him and oj me all talking oj is his friend um who he did the podcast with and we had a 13:03 great conversation and i got off the show okay and that was it for me 13:08 i started getting messages later that night people are like phil or not later that because he didn't 13:15 do the show live he did it um he uploaded it to youtube after the fact so whenever i went live i start getting 13:20 messages from my fans some of my fans and actually a couple of my moderators again and they go phil are you aware 13:26 that john when you left the show said this i was like what what'd he say he basically made a joke with oj his 13:34 friend that now oj's not going to abandon him is he and they said even though it came off or he spun it as joke 13:40 it was very creepy and people actually took it as like even though he did not right say it that it kind of had a no 13:46 again a nugget of truth in it that he really was sad that you were moving away and that was his way to kind of say it 13:52 um and i'm like no i didn't hear that i watched it back 13:57 i was like he did say it he like literally everything on the show up to that point he's like happy for you 14:03 everything's good and as soon as i'm off the show he says to his friend hey so you're not abandoning me now are you it's like wait what 14:10 huh it kind of almost negates the whole segment of the show all right so that's why i always had this this bug in the 14:16 back of my head wondering was there resentment that i left connecticut and there was no more in-person co-op there 14:22 was no more traveling for for events or anything right all in a way when i moved 14:27 okay that's just a guess he says no i believe it i do but that's why i brought it up 14:32 in the thanksgiving video and that's why he's addressing it here now we're going to talk about 14:38 here we go again something else with howard i don't know why howard is involved this is supposed to be a video about me and my relationship with john 14:45 right but here we go another howard segment and uh 14:51 let's do it here we go ready put them 14:57 and basically actually let me let me retract on that 15:03 basically i think what ended up happening was i got caught like he sent me a text message i agree to it 15:08 and i think i got caught in like a jam with something 15:14 and i told him i'm like dude i don't know if i'm gonna be able to make it you know i got some stuff going on 15:19 and this and that and basically he gives he makes me feel like [ __ ] 15:26 because he writes back he goes well if you don't show up it just basically solidifies the fact that we're not friends wow and uh dude he made me feel 15:33 like [ __ ] like seriously like [ __ ] yeah so what i said was i i you know i was something i had to do with jasmine i 15:39 told jasmine i go listen i'm just gonna go you know i'm gonna end up going just saying the guy's leaving and uh you know whatever so we go 15:48 you know we do our playthrough or whatever right so he goes ahead after after the fact never 15:56 sends me a text message doesn't call me doesn't ask me how i'm doing from when he moves from when he moves so 16:02 from that from that point i sent him a couple of text messages here and there 16:08 and uh i'm gonna go into something john because this this basically goes in line into 16:14 what what we were talking about yep so i send them text messages some random 16:20 ones you know merry christmas happy thanksgiving doesn't reply back so i thought that he changed his number okay so he moves in june yeah you never hear 16:27 you never hear from him again basically so i never hear from him again so okay 16:32 let's talk again we already talked about this in this this react all right i did not have 16:38 a close personal friendship with howard the communications i had with howard were like hey are we gonna do project 16:44 seven are we working on that or are we gonna go to a convention together let's convene on that let's talk about that um 16:51 when we first had started being friendly he would invite me over to his home to play super turbo with everybody else 16:58 okay i think what happened was during the course of project seven howard started to hate me okay he just hated my 17:05 guts he was mad that i was making so much money and they didn't make anything on project seven he was mad that 17:10 apparently i owed him money for the shirts he was mad about a lot of things i got the feeling there's a lot of resentment there and he was just he 17:15 basically was very angry that you know i don't know maybe i had things he didn't have who knows i don't know because he 17:21 never told me okay what i noticed was a pattern of increasingly 17:27 bad negative behavior towards me uh starting with the adjournment of project seven in late 2012 even though 17:33 we did continue to travel and do other things okay um definitely 17:39 one thing i noticed was he basically like like when he was having to get together for super turbo 17:45 okay he used to text me about it and say phil i'm having to get together super turbo on such a such a date i hope you 17:50 can come blah blah blah all of a sudden he stopped texting me entirely okay anything like that it was 17:57 john who would contact me and say hey phil just so you know we're all going over howard's uh on saturday for super 18:03 turbo you could come too i was like but he didn't like he didn't invite me no you're invited oh okay and i would go 18:09 over and it would be fine i would show up you know it's not like he was like what the [ __ ] are you doing here you know 18:14 apparently i was invited i don't know now in retrospect i almost wonder if i wasn't you know i almost wonder if actually 18:21 because now you think back like i said hindsight's 20 20 i wonder if he really didn't want me there you know and it was 18:27 john who was like dude why are you being like this howard like dude he didn't do nothing wrong what are you talking about 18:33 you know he let him you know he's a super turtle players renowned we're gonna learn from him we play with him he's a nice guy you know what are you 18:39 doing why are you being like this who knows i don't know right but again i stopped getting the direct messages and 18:46 invites from him it was always like through rambo again we did not have direct friendly 18:52 conversation rambo every week we had friend friendly interactions and conversations his friends he was come over to do co-op we'd have that hour two 18:58 hours before we even started recording to talk about personal [ __ ] okay i never had that with howard ever only when we 19:04 were over at his place to do something to film to play super turbo whatever that's when we had our interactions okay 19:13 in the end of the time that i was in connecticut howard and other people in the super 19:18 turbo community were going to tournaments and stuff themselves and not inviting me anymore like i i you know 19:25 didn't even know they were going and then i would hear through john oh they're going to the tournament this weekend i was like they are i didn't 19:30 know anything about it so i essentially i know what happened he really got upset with me 19:36 over the project 17 he never said a word and he became passive aggressive instead 19:41 of oh let's hash it out he didn't care he basically saw me maybe he was a toxic influence in his life who knows now 19:49 along these lines at the same time this is all happening howard was infamously known as the guy that when you invite 19:55 him for something or he says he's going to do something he cancels okay not just me saying this everyone 20:01 says this at this time i don't know what was going on with his personal life or whatever but he would frequently say yes 20:07 i'm going to be there yes i'm going to do that yes i will be involved and then he cancels at the last minute okay 20:14 he had done this to rambo frequently when rambo was trying to film shawn's man in hole punch 20:19 where he's like oh we're gonna do scenes today cancel okay so this is this is a running thing 20:24 john and i would talk about this all the time the job was an infamous or howard was an infamous canceler and we didn't know 20:30 what was going on okay all you can do is speculate maybe he has something to do with his personal life his girlfriend or who knows i don't know i don't care i 20:36 just you know if you try to get howard involved and oh there's a three-player game coming up should we invite howard 20:42 to play and john be like i don't know man you don't know if he's going to show up or not like you know you're right we don't even know if he's going to show up 20:48 or not i don't know so do we invite him or not okay so again now in retrospect maybe he 20:56 canceled me tons because he didn't like me i don't know i think that's what it probably was i'm just speculating he never told me okay 21:02 so after all this time finally it's time for me to move we're mid mid 21:09 2014 and i had told everyone about the final party for weeks on end every i was 21:15 bringing back people who hadn't been in my place in years people from the old school days of me playing well versus 21:20 capcom too i hadn't seen in years you know this is a big to-do a big shabang i 21:25 wanted everyone there who wanted to hang out with me for a final time because it was a way for me to say hey come on over we're going to party i'll pay for it 21:31 food want booze we'll have games we'll have a great old time okay was there recording during that yes 21:39 absolutely there was was it meant to be oh this is a giant co-op gameplay event no it was not that was 21:47 not what it was supposed to be now howard here references two completely different events as one 21:54 he's saying there was a final co-op event or whatever but then he's talking about 21:59 uh you know like the final the final party he's going away forever or whatever they're two completely different events 22:06 okay but he's referencing them as one i don't know how he got them confused apparently he did okay so 22:12 we were supposed to have two events one was going to be a final co-op where howard and john were 22:18 going to come back and we were going to do co-op game play along with our friend joe 22:24 of the mario and sonic olympic games play through this was agreed to weeks in advance this was not supposed 22:31 to be my go away party okay it wasn't this is agreed to like this is going to happen one of the you know big 22:36 playthrough final big co-op shebang or whatever okay so he agrees to it all right now john 22:43 says uh i don't know phil i don't know about this you know he does this all the time he says he's gonna 22:49 show up he's not gonna show up last minute within 24 hours of this 22:55 event supposed to be happening all right he tries to cancel 23:01 does he have like oh now by the way it's fully known i'm moving this is it this 23:07 is the last thing we will be involved in together this is the last hurrah the goodbye 23:13 phil thanks for everything have a good life in washington we'll you know hopefully we'll talk or whatever when you move or 23:18 whatever so fine okay he tries to cancel he texts me and says 23:25 oh i got caught up with something i'm doing with my girlfriend i can't i can't come i was like dude i knew this was gonna happen 23:31 so i texted him and i said howard now this is me paraphrasing i don't have 23:36 the text anymore it's basically howard i'm going to be honest with you all right i don't know if you got a problem 23:42 with me or not i don't understand what's going on i definitely have noticed a change in attitude towards me 23:47 these last few years all right i don't really don't know it's personal issue with you on your side if 23:52 i did something wrong i have no idea i wish i knew okay but 23:57 this is literally the last time that you can spend with me before i move 24:03 we may never even see each other in person again i mean john and i have plans to do 24:08 cooperative [ __ ] we don't so this is it this is like the goodbye celebration for us to do his final cool playthrough 24:15 it'll last in history forever you know for you to cancel like this last minute 24:22 it's not like oh ahead of time he said no he can't do it last minute within the 24 hours of it 24:27 happening saying he can't come i get the feeling that there's there's an issue here i say 24:32 so what you're essentially saying is whatever this thing is that you're doing with your girlfriend i don't know if it's important or not if it's important 24:38 fine tell me that say this is a really important event i need to be with it with my girl or whatever if that's what 24:43 it is it's what you're telling me here okay i'll accept it but but 24:49 if this is just you dodging me like think about how messed up that is like 24:55 this is you essentially saying you don't value all the years of friendship that we've had anymore even if you don't even 25:02 like me anymore just to show up for one last time to say goodbye like you wouldn't even have give him that you 25:08 know what i mean is it a guilt trip [ __ ] yeah it is [ __ ] yes it is i guilt-tripped him 25:15 because i couldn't believe that someone who i supposedly was friendly with all these years we've done 25:20 all this work together we had all these fun times together outside of the work as super turbo players as street fighter 25:26 players as friends i thought okay i thought that this would have been 25:31 something meaningful to him this is the last chance you will ever see me possibly and you're telling me you can't 25:39 show up within 24 hours when you said you would already be here because you have to do something with 25:44 your girlfriend don't you think she'll understand to say my friend's moving away permanently i'd like to do this 25:50 with so here is it howard didn't want to say no because he thought that i would then 25:56 probably publicly say to my audience howard doesn't want to come he didn't want to deal with the repercussions of that right he didn't so 26:03 he lied he said he wanted to come until the very last minute and then he felt oh i'm just going to cancel on him again 26:08 like i always do and i called him out on his [ __ ] for once and i said no you're lying you don't have anything to 26:15 do with your girl you don't i know it i know you're full of it so it's that simple you're you're lying to 26:21 me i'm not dumb so if you ever cherished our friendship you'll actually come and say goodbye or 26:28 else don't come in which case i know that you don't like me anymore okay 26:33 he showed up we did the playthrough he said nope no complaints when he showed up right nothing again this guy 26:41 is like it seems to me like this guy is behind the scenes of anything he will talk [ __ ] about you he 26:48 will [ __ ] do whatever but when it comes to being presented with the person you have a problem with or the issue 26:54 is nothing right i just i couldn't believe it man i really couldn't believe the way he was behaving near the end there it was out 27:00 of control all right so he he's presenting it to me 27:08 as a as a playing lie you know oh i i'll make it i'll come i'll come i'll come last minute oh i can't come 27:14 you're lying you just you didn't want to come to begin with or or else you know like why did you lie 27:20 to me for the whole time i would have just told everyone no howard isn't coming big deal you know i would have been sad 27:26 because i like the guy i like the fact he's funny as hell i like the fact that um he adds something to a room with his 27:33 comedy with his with his personality um he gameplay is funny too and look at that last playthrough we did together it 27:39 was hilarious he did funny things with john dancing around the room and [ __ ] it was funny as [ __ ] right but 27:44 it's pretty messed up that he acted like that and basically was passive aggressive to me for about two years 27:50 since project seven ended increasingly more and more and more all right and you know now he's a hard ass right oh i 27:56 demanded that i keep a super turbo board to pay for the shirts that didn't happen oh you know i couldn't go to his final 28:03 gathering ever and he didn't understand no how would you lied to me you said you were coming and then you 28:09 canceled last minute for something arbitrary it's the last time you're ever going to see me if i'm your friend you would come you know it's ridiculous 28:17 anyone who's a friend of with someone would say what is he talking about here he can't go to the last time he's ever 28:22 gonna see this guy ever maybe in life he can't make it oh okay well your car exploded right your house 28:29 burned down or you know someone's in the hospital oh no i got caught up i gotta do something with my girl oh 28:36 that's that's like teenager [ __ ] that's what you know that's [ __ ] that you tell someone you don't care about them at all some dumb 28:41 [ __ ] excuse you make you know the dog get my [ __ ] homework oh my girl said something what are you 28:47 talking about man i'm not stupid i'm not born yesterday and it really pissed me off so 28:52 yeah that was lastly the last real interaction that i had with howard he came we did the co-op 28:59 playthrough great done over with okay so i move across the country 29:04 all right and let's see was i actively talking with howard via text before i moved no he was already 29:11 treating treating me badly he didn't want to talk no more he wasn't telling me about gatherings he tried to to cancel on our last if you know 29:18 meeting ever so am i going to be talking with the guy friendly constantly anything text calls of course not this 29:25 is the last guy who wants to deal with me he made that clear with his actions you know i figured it out 29:31 so he claims oh i was texting him no he wasn't it wasn't he he was group texting 29:36 me you know when you group all your friends together oh happy happy holidays everyone and this group he wasn't 29:42 directly texting me about anything at all it was only just like arbitrary group text for holidays and things like 29:48 that i was not just him there was tons of people who i had who was doing that kind of stuff from back home he was only one of many i didn't respond to any of 29:54 them it wasn't like i was ghosting howard and purposely uh not responding to that stuff it was 30:03 you know it's it you can tell when someone's being real with you and someone's completely faking 30:08 right and he was just doing it to save faces oh i don't have a problem with phil look he's on the group text that i sent out 30:14 everybody but he wasn't talking with me otherwise i wasn't talking with him so that that relationship is done the 30:21 relationship again that i had was with rambo we had plant we were talking we were friendly we were gonna do content 30:26 together right so the whole thing here with howard makes no sense yet again he keeps taking 30:32 control of this video he keeps acting like all this stuff is about him it was never about him ever and never the issue 30:38 was never with howard it was with rambo ghosting me that was the issue i wasn't desperately trying to reach out to 30:44 howard and i couldn't get a good anything out of him that never it wasn't the case at all okay 30:51 now i believe they're about to get into the thing that i warned you guys about at 30:56 the beginning i said there's a segment coming up that is incredibly personally hurtful to me all right 31:03 i think i'm just going to let this play for a long time we've got the segment they're going to talk there's going to be a video i'm going to talk then 31:09 they're going to talk i'm going to let it go and then at the end i'm going to pause 31:15 i don't even know how i'm going to react i don't i've seen this a million times and i still don't know how i'm going to react to this segment i hope i don't 31:21 punch a hole in my wall i hope i don't cry you know it's [ __ ] it's [ __ ] up beyond belief 31:26 this next part really i can't believe it that it exists okay of all the things you're gonna say about me this is the 31:33 one that's the tipping point for me okay i'm just gonna let it roll let's do it guys and like i said i don't think i'm 31:39 gonna have much to say let's just go oh 31:44 after him saying to you if you don't come here then you're solidifying that we're not friends we're not friends 31:50 and he doesn't there's no there's no communication at all so december 29th 31:57 rolls around last year yeah and i get in 2014 and i get a message 32:04 from chris and a few other people i gotta clarify chris is one of our 32:09 street fighter friends from new york and basically saying a few other people this is our circle of street fighter player 32:15 friends he's talking about the two that scott passed away yeah i started getting messages uh from chris you 32:22 called me as well yeah so you should set it up because it has to do with the street fighter community has to do with the street 32:28 fighter community which is a group of people like and we don't talk every day to everybody yeah but it's a group of 32:33 people that uh is kind of like a brotherhood if you will 32:39 might sound silly but that's what it is a brotherhood of people i spent a lot of time together uh 32:44 playing games and and traveling and whatnot um and when something like this happens 32:50 everyone contacts each other and we talk about it and we talk about it so one of the brothers has fallen 32:56 yeah so basically scott and some what some what people fail to 33:02 realize is scott is scott is a very old school player old school player in a sense the guy was 33:08 playing since like world warrior and he's a he's the true [ __ ] road 33:13 warrior true og true og to the point that just to throw this out there if you guys if if anybody that's on this video 33:20 ever goes and looks this up the video of 33:25 daigo going from the first time diego ever showed up in the u.s and this was for a an alpha 3 33:32 tournament in the 90s alpha 3 or alpha i think it was alpha 3. and he flies from japan and the japanese 33:38 media are following him around and this is when he was going to play in this tournament and he fought his his opponent was alex when alex via 33:45 was in his like teens okay in the video if you look in the video [ __ ] scott's there now scott [ __ ] 33:52 went from connecticut to [ __ ] california to play alpha 3. okay he's a 33:57 [ __ ] og yeah he doesn't play anymore but you got to give the guy respect for 34:02 the accomplishments that he made he made in the street fighter community for for for the area that we live in okay you 34:07 know so the guy passes away right so what do i do i send him a message and 34:13 you're the only one by the way because i wasn't going to contact phil because i wasn't uh talking to him at this point 34:18 yeah we also want to talk to him but howard here who hasn't heard from phil uh in at that point many months since he 34:25 moved you decide i'll be the one to tell phil yeah so i send him a message and i 34:31 go i didn't say anything high or anything like that the only thing because the last time i did that he didn't reply back to me i said hey scott 34:37 passed away that's all i wrote doesn't reply back to me then this is 34:42 what [ __ ] burns me okay this [ __ ] [ __ ] burns the [ __ ] out of me what 34:48 does the guy do a week or two later makes a video about scott passing away so let's actually 34:54 start with this is the video so let's watch the video so you heard what they had to say so far 35:02 this is the video and by the way this is a segment of a podcast that i used to do called hate live it's probably the worst 35:09 named podcast in history obviously it's not about hate but we're not gonna get into that today 35:16 we can talk you what again you want to go watch the down the rabbit hole dark side phil it explains that moniker is 35:21 not what you think if this is the first time you're ever hearing about it all right but 35:26 this is a segment of a two plus hour podcast that i'm doing 35:31 all right this is not a separate video this is not a special event or anything like that this is just one segment of a 35:39 podcast a variety show that i used to hold on the internet here we go 35:44 uh a segment that uh i wanted to take some personal time here uh to talk a little bit about a friend 35:50 of mine someone who i mentioned previously on hate live podcast all right his name was scott hovinissian 35:56 uh in the street fighter community he was actually uh went by the nickname vincent del pino 36:02 and he was first of all much older than pretty much anyone who back in connecticut when we were 36:08 originally kind of coming up and playing street fighter he was about maybe i say 10 years older if not a little bit even 36:14 older than that than most of us and he is known as one of the people who was kind of around the street fighter 36:21 community uh in its very early grass roots so we're talking when street fighter 2 was first taking off he would 36:27 be the guy that would fly out to chicago and had friends out in that area who held a tournament called midwest 36:34 championships and he was a best or not best friend but a very close friend of jason wilson who is one of the most 36:40 known most renowned uh tournament organizers for street fighter okay in the in the whole country 36:46 and uh and so basically scott was very ingrained and involved in the 36:52 grassroots street fighter community before it blew up before it became this oh it's digital now and everyone plays everyone online it was more about the 36:59 in-person arcade experience and i remember when i was growing up uh when i was growing up in the 90s 37:05 playing street fighter in arcades uh i had a friend of mine named t carter who also i've talked about uh on the podcast 37:12 before who befriended this guy scott i guess what happened was that scott had uh kind of 37:18 uh started going to local arcades and seeing gee what's the local talent like in connecticut he was one of the guys who traveled out of the state to play 37:24 classic street fighter okay but at the same time he basically uh wanted to see what the local flavor was 37:30 like who's good locally is there anywhere locally people who may be able to stand up to people outside of the 37:36 state in a competitive nature again keep in mind everything was very small there's maybe two three major tournaments in the entirety of the 37:42 united states in the 90s okay and uh 37:47 and so uh he i remember apparently befriended my friend t 37:54 and had seen he gone to our local arcade which was uh located actually in bridgeport connecticut 38:00 and he went into our local arcade and watched t playing street fighter and was like wow this kid is really good and i 38:06 think that you know looking at his skill level the amount of stuff that he's pulling off that he figured out by himself keep in mind again this is 38:11 before the internet right before everything was completely public on the internet um 38:18 he said basically wow you know this kid could maybe hold stand up to to others and could possibly even you know be a 38:24 tournament level competitor and he was the person who kind of uh 38:29 convinced t come with me this justice even if it turns out to be nothing come with me this once to the midwest championships i 38:36 want to see if you came out to a tournament and played people from all around the country how you would do 38:41 and he actually from to understand he paid t's way uh to go out to the midwest 38:47 championships and uh t ended up winning the very first ever street fighter alpha 3 tournament 38:54 ever held in the united states it was held in at midwest championships on arcade cabinets they had gotten 39:00 advanced copies that you couldn't get anywhere else in the country jason wilson got his hand on advanced copies of street fighter alpha 3 and t ended up 39:07 winning the whole tournament to which he got a lot of uh respect and renown in the mainstream fighter community they were like wow you know that's pretty 39:14 awesome that this kid this is an unknown player comes out from nowhere and ends up you know winning this major 39:20 tournament and so when t came back from that event he told me all about it or whatever he's like you got to start 39:25 going to tournaments i was like how did you even know about this i don't you know again no internet right the internet that existed was so basic you 39:31 didn't know about tournaments and stuff he's like oh this new friend that i made scott you know he's the one who who took 39:36 me out there and you should really meet him i remember that t and i went to scott's house this one time and we 39:42 walked inside of scott's house and like i said he's an older guy he's about 10 15 years maybe older than us so we're 39:47 talking like probably at that time he was in his late 20s maybe even early 30s i don't know i'm not 100 i never really asked him how old he was because i 39:53 didn't give [ __ ] and we go in his house and he has an arcade cabinet in his freaking house 39:58 he's like yeah i play on this all the time i play super turbo yeah he was a super turbo player of all things the game that i'm really good at and i love 40:04 it's my favorite game was his favorite game he was always really good with zang yi and scott was a quirky guy first of all 40:11 he's short right he was about i probably i'd probably say he was maybe about 40:16 mid mid five feet to six feet tall so he's much shorter than me so probably mid five maybe five five six five seven 40:22 something like that and he had a long long brown hair that he always tied back in a ponytail he looked like the guy 40:28 literally looked like a grunge rocker from like the 1980s and maybe even early 90s is kind of how he dressed all right 40:34 a lot of fun he was always kind of like an outdoorsy guy he always had a job where he was either hands-on you know 40:40 the kind of guy that would either be fixing arcade cabinets so he's covered in like oil and [ __ ] and transistors or he at one point he was a landscaper then 40:46 he was into electronics and speakers so he was that kind of a guy who said like tools around or whatever so i go in his 40:51 house he has a freaking street fighter cabinet set up there and we sit standing there playing street fighter for hours which is out of control over the years 40:58 you know i got to know him a little better and he always wanted me to travel he's always trying to convince me to travel and go to these tournaments to which i was like i don't know i don't 41:05 know and then eventually i did eventually i started traveling i went to the east coast championships and he was there with us and we went to many 41:10 tournaments and stuff together and then after that kind of died out i'd probably say around maybe 41:16 2002-ish uh i took a step back because that was the time when i was just finishing college and i was in middle of college 41:23 into finishing college and i really wanted to uh find a job that i could keep and i wanted to basically pay my 41:29 bills down so that i could get my own place and move out of my parents house and at that point i'd say probably around 2002 to maybe 2004 or five even 41:38 though i played street fighter it was more of a casual thing and i stopped really going to tournaments and stuff but 41:43 i lost track of contact with him during that period of time um 41:49 and scott is he was a unique personality let me explain he was the kind of guy that he could get along with anyone he 41:55 would joke around about stuff he would be kind of like always the jokes they're always trying to be funny you ever watch when i when i 42:02 do a play through or even sometimes when i'm just having a casual conversation or a vlog and i go oh you're a dick man you 42:08 guys are a bunch of dicks man he used to do that all the time and he was hilarious he was just bust out with that 42:13 in the middle of a conversation and you laugh and he was a little bit of a weird guy i'm not gonna lie my dad knew him 42:18 because again when i was going to the arcade my dad was like giving me rides to the arcade this is before i went when i was a young teenager i didn't have a 42:24 car or anything and scott would be there playing games and hanging out with t my dad was like he's kind of a weirdo but 42:31 he was a fun weirdo and that was the thing later on years later flash flash forward to the late 90s early 2000s when 42:37 we were traveling and going to tournaments together scott would have this truck all right he would actually have like a suv truck and in the truck he would have 42:45 multiple tvs keep in mind before games were portable before even flat screen tvs existed he would have big tube tvs 42:52 and game systems hooked up in the truck into his power adapter so that we could place street fighter to and from the way 42:59 to a street fighter tournament in the back of his truck that's the kind of guy that scott was it was pretty wild um 43:06 the stuff that he that he uh you know he came up with pretty pretty pretty 43:12 insane i actually if you want to hear the story a testament to how funny scott was of a guy uh go back to the the 43:19 episode of hate live where i talked about ecc stories and if you remember i talked about how in our hotel room at 43:25 one one time we were at the east coast championships uh i had my laptop and i had a giant beastly alienware laptop i 43:32 mean this thing was like literally like this thick it was in it here we go a ridiculous amount it was super heavy right 43:38 and i guess i had had some porn or something on there that i hadn't deleted and he went 43:44 he starts looking on my laptop because i had it in the hotel room it's my fault right it's my laptop i shouldn't have that [ __ ] in there in the hotel room for 43:50 everyone to use and he finally started playing it for everyone he goes hey everyone take them over here and take a look at this giant black meat and people 43:57 like what and they run over it's like you're pouring with a black dude banging some some white chick or something it's like that was i mean he caught me out 44:03 for having on the laptop and everyone was having a good laugh and i remember there was this time when uh we were all asleep in the hotel room and he everyone 44:09 was like trying to pass out and they were all joking around having fun i was serious because i i was super serious and i really wanted to do well at the 44:15 tournament the next day while everyone else there was really there to have fun and uh we were all trying to go asleep 44:20 in the hotel room there's like maybe 10 of us all crammed into this hotel room and scott was sleeping under the sink 44:25 like in the side room and he would go oh yeah oh yeah and he would just start thumping so it sounded like he was whacking off 44:31 and everyone would crack up and i was all pissed no i need my sleep everyone quiet i need to sleep and you know i was 44:37 being an uptight idiot back then but i now now i can look back and i can laugh and say that's some pretty funny stuff 44:43 um but yeah he was a character he was if anything the best way to describe scott 44:49 is that he was a character and i really i don't know what happened what the situation is 44:54 because like i said i haven't met scott or i haven't met scott i haven't seen scott in over a decade i mean it's not 44:59 been that long i hadn't seen the guy i hadn't heard about his health you know i've been involved with street fighter so it's not like i've heard much about 45:05 him or seen him or anything and uh i do remember at one point and this was 45:11 pretty bad a bad situation is that probably the early 2000s 45:16 i heard that scott had gotten sick like really sick and no one would really talk about what 45:21 it was and then all of a sudden like two months after you heard he got sick he said oh here's scott's home he wants us all to 45:27 go over there we went over there and half of his face was paralyzed and just basically like 45:34 this like he couldn't even move it come to find out as i told you this guy he always did 45:39 physical things he was a landscaper he got bitten by a deer tick and got lyme disease didn't know it was lyme disease 45:46 didn't get diagnosed by the doctor properly and ended up having a stroke so this guy's whole side of his body and 45:52 face had basically screwed up during this stroke but after a few years he rehabilitated it and he ended up being 45:58 going back and being you know full capacity and and living a full life i know that he had a a family and i had 46:04 kids and i really like i said it's been over a decade this is what happened you're friendly with people because of a 46:10 certain thing like street fighter and then you kind of fall out of touch with them and really i haven't heard from scott 46:15 in a long long time and then all of a sudden this week i kind of got a few messages from people like howard and a 46:21 few other people back home who knew scott who kind of texted me and said phil i don't know if you heard but scott passed away 46:27 and i'm like damn you know i don't know what it was from and that's 46:33 is it a shock yeah but at the same time i i i haven't seen the guy in so long i 46:38 mean anything could have happened you know what i mean like anything could have happened who knows what happened to the poor guy but to lose someone like 46:46 that i mean he literally was the guy who motivated people in connecticut to get off their butts and get out of the local 46:52 arcades and said you got to get out there and you got to try to play the other competition because it's a lot of fun to travel and to meet people and 46:58 i'll be honest a lot of the times you guys have heard me gripe and and and complain about street fighter and i 47:03 admit i openly admit uh that a lot of the time uh when i talk about street fighter it 47:10 kind of has a negative association with it because i'm like damn i spent a lot of time a lot of money a lot of resources of my 47:17 life traveling to play street fighter and what did i really get for it and you can say you could be like that you could be 47:22 negative like that all right but at the same time i like to maybe take a positive spin at it and say well 47:30 no not really because if i never played street fighter i would never have gotten the confidence to do the kind of stuff 47:36 that i did to stand on an arcade cabinet in front of a hundred hundreds of people playing a game in person i was on stage 47:41 evolution in front of thousands of people in the finals of super turbo and if i hadn't done that stuff would i ever 47:47 have had the balls to turn on a camera in front of me and talk to it and record myself and do all the stuff that i do 47:52 today that i've been able to do for a living since 2011. you know what i mean in a large capacity i really think that 47:58 becoming a competitive street fighter player gave me the confidence to do the other things in life that i ended up becoming successful at so if it wasn't 48:05 for scott motivating all of the state of connecticut and really giving us the initial push to leave the state of 48:11 connecticut and go and go to go to new jersey and go to chicago and travel and meet people from all over i never would 48:18 have met half the people i met in my life i never would have seen half the stuff that i've seen in my life i never would have experienced a lot of the fun 48:23 things that i've done in my life and i may not even be here this podcast itself may be owed to the direct actions of 48:30 scott hobanisian and you say to yourself wow the chain reaction the domino effect 48:35 that you can see from a simple little action like don't stand here and play street fighter leave the state and go 48:41 play street fighter somewhere else yeah that actually could have in a way led to where i am today so i'm incredibly 48:47 grateful scott hovinissian was an amazing character he was a fun guy uh again spearheaded the connecticut street 48:54 fighter community uh may he rest in peace i hope that you know obviously that his family and everyone 49:01 uh my condolences are with you and uh and that's it 49:06 okay dude don't [ __ ] publicize somebody's death are you [ __ ] serious 49:13 you don't do that man the bigger issue is like he never said anything back to you he doesn't say anything back to me 49:19 but dude oh thanks for the information i'll put this video but i'm not gonna say nothing to you not only that what does he do he 49:26 brings up t right now t at the time was like one of the greatest street fighter players in 49:31 in in our area if he could if he was alive he probably would have been one of the top players 49:36 in the country okay and he starts [ __ ] talking about this guy right so what does that what does 49:42 that do naturally in our circle of friends everybody is [ __ ] fuming because there was no need to bring up 49:50 t there was no need to bring up sky there's no need to bring up people's deaths and publicize and make money off 49:55 of it there's no need for that man and he did 50:01 you have no respect for people that are alive that for [ __ ] people that are dead you 50:06 don't give a [ __ ] about anybody but yourself 50:12 so there you go 50:31 i thought a long time about how i was gonna respond to this part 50:40 rather than directly respond to it i think what i like to do is 50:48 um i'd like to tell you a story 50:56 quick one about me growing up in connecticut and 51:04 you know going to arcades and having that first real feeling like 51:12 like belonging in a group because when i was young i didn't feel 51:18 that way it felt like i was kind of like an outcast uh where i grew up 51:24 when i went to arcades to play video games i kind of felt like because i had some skill that like 51:31 i finally kind of belonged somewhere you know like we all liked street fighter and we were we were all competing against each other and all that 51:38 i never thought that like playing street fighter was gonna change my life how crazy right 51:45 and it did in a really good way in the long run 51:51 okay in the long run i think what i said there at the end of the video still stands true today that 51:56 if it wasn't for me going to an arcade and playing street fighter and then being convinced by the people 52:02 there to go out and do other things that might like oh go play in another state and do this and do that that really was the formative 52:09 time for me to be a person who was more outgoing i was an introvert when i was a kid okay 52:14 and it was going to arcades and playing street fighter that kind of gave me that feeling of wow 52:20 people like me because i have skill and street fighter and stuff you know and 52:26 t carter was my rival at my local arcade what's your game in bridgeport connecticut 52:33 and we grew up playing street fighter together over the years every version okay 52:39 i told a heartfelt story in that video that tribute to scott about how scott introduced t 52:46 to competitive street fighter and then t introduced me okay 52:52 and it changed my life it really did i 52:58 started traveling i started being more outgoing meeting people having good relationships even though we've already gone around about the trolling topic of 53:05 how bad that was when i was in competitive street fighter as well that's the other video that's the down the rabbit hole video about me if you want to look at that react i explained 53:12 that in full um but that was you know i really look back 53:17 at that time so positively i do scott was such a unique dude she was 53:22 such a unique guy and they're not with us anymore 53:28 and that's not fair 53:35 there were positive influences on this planet 53:41 and they're not with us anymore that's that's life man the best of us get taken way too early 53:49 and the rest of us are just stuck here right 53:58 previous to me making this video about scott i tried to make a video about scott let me clarify 54:04 that that's a segment of a podcast that i did one segment okay was the podcast 54:11 monetized of course it was everything that i put out was monetized at that time is my time and my living 54:16 okay i wasn't doing interactive streams with contributions during them at that time everything at 54:21 that point was was ad revenue that's harming my life my living okay i paid for everything 54:28 and basically 54:33 i wanted to do a tribute to him in the best way that i could knowing that well that my audience was not going 54:39 to know who he was right um and i did the same thing with t by the 54:46 way and we i don't have that for you i don't want to play that for you 54:52 that's already been that's not the subject matter of this video that we're reacting to today okay 54:58 um but basically i did a t tribute and in the t 55:04 tribute this is something people always wanted me to talk about on my podcast about my past and stories about my past 55:10 and in the past someone because i i was known on youtube obviously i was a known youtuber and 55:16 people knew from over the years me talking about my old formative day as a street fighter that i was friends with this this kid t carter before he had 55:22 passed someone came to me one day at a tour at another tournament excuse me i think it 55:28 was a convention it could have been a tournament and they handed me a packet of photos the packet of photos was his personal 55:34 packing he said phil i want you to have this i said what is this he goes 55:40 you know these are pictures of tea and actually scott's in a couple of them too and he says these are pictures that i 55:46 want you to have because you are known on youtube and he says t 55:54 t was such a beautiful guy you know you know i'm not talking about his looks you know his personality he was outgoing he 56:00 was vibrant he was full of energy he was the nicest guy he had a passion for street fighter he was the best player in 56:05 connecticut the entire time he was alive he was the best player in connecticut okay 56:10 he said i'd like you to have these pictures because i know you were a friend with team and you have the ability on youtube you 56:17 have the the reach the clout you can share his story with people on the internet so you know 56:23 not only a lot of people know about tea because he didn't get to live that long 56:29 and you can you can be the person to tell his story so i did 56:36 i made a video on a podcast just like that and i had scanned the pictures into my 56:41 computer okay and i shared it with the world the podcast doesn't get a lot of views 56:48 okay the podcast maybe got 10 000 maybe 20 000 views tops 56:54 okay i thought i did a good job doing a tribute to tea 56:59 all right and i did as best i could now i'm gonna tell you guys something 57:06 that nobody knows 57:11 i was haunted by t's death for a very long time i actually feel like it was one of the 57:17 reasons why i originally had depression because it happened to me at a time in my life when my god i hadn't dealt with 57:24 death or loss and although everyone in connecticut was hurting at the time when he died 57:33 i played myself for it i don't know if i ever told this story before to anyone 57:40 but the day when t died i met him at the mall before 57:47 he was murdered and he was saying to me oh we're going to go over someone's house and we're going to play some games or whatever and 57:53 i had a car by the way at the time i had a car and 57:59 he basically offered hey you want to come with us or whatever and i was like no i i couldn't or whatever 58:06 i actually don't remember the specific and he was like all right cool because 58:12 because i was thinking maybe i could get a ride with you if you could drive drive us over there whatever 58:18 and uh i was like no i can't do it i'm busy or whatever you know who knows there's a kid who 58:23 i've seen a million times before i'm gonna see him a million times again in my life right 58:30 that day he was walking home from playing street fighter at this kid's house 58:36 and a gang member decided to shoot him for no reason i guess you know there's all kinds of guesses and i 58:43 guess the rumor that hit the streets was that this gang member this is their initiation oh prove that you're hard 58:49 enough to be part of our gang by just murdering someone in the [ __ ] street walking home you got shot 58:56 okay and i blame myself because i said if i had hung out with t that day and i had 59:02 driven him to his friend's house i could have driven him home and maybe he wouldn't have got shot now 59:08 of course that's ridiculous i didn't shoot the kid right we all know we're all rational people who were rational adults but this is what happens in your 59:14 [ __ ] head okay and he was my best street fighter friend at the time 59:20 um we were rivals i always said like i was i was ken and he was ryu because he was the better one out of the two right 59:28 and basically this was a major problem in my head it [ __ ] me up for a very long 59:33 time to the point where until i [ __ ] moved out of connecticut all right 59:39 until i moved out of connecticut it was haunting me it was causing me mental problems 59:45 before i moved out of connecticut i drove to his grave and couldn't get out 59:50 of the car i didn't say goodbye before i left 59:56 because i couldn't do it because i was too [ __ ] weak because i was so haunted at losing this guy and this was many years later he 1:00:02 died in the late 90s this was 2014 and i couldn't do it okay 1:00:10 so when i made that tribute about tea all right 1:00:15 i was trying to make up for it i was trying to be like i was so sorry that i couldn't say goodbye to because i 1:00:21 wasn't bad enough to do it and i wanted to make a tribute video about it and i thought i was doing the right thing 1:00:27 i thought better for more people on this planet to know about t than less all right 1:00:33 okay when i made that that tribute to t in that hate 1:00:39 live podcast okay i received more hate 1:00:45 towards me than i i i think i'd ever dealt with before in my life 1:00:52 my trolls basically spun it and said you have monetized your friend's death 1:00:57 you are scum you're a piece of [ __ ] all right 1:01:02 i actually had a couple people who reached out to me after i did that tribute to t and said phil 1:01:08 thank you because we knew tea back in the day and seeing those pictures put a smile on our face and we remembered him 1:01:14 okay and i was really nice of you to do it that way because you didn't have to you know and you know now more people know 1:01:22 t's story so people who knew t were contacting me and thanking me all 1:01:27 right now you say i monetize someone's debt right 1:01:33 i don't know how worse you could be of a person to say something like that all right 1:01:39 so here we are years later 1:01:44 all right and howard who i have not spoken with 1:01:50 since i moved all he's doing is sending me these arbitrary group texts to everyone oh merry christmas happy 1:01:56 holidays this and that happy thanksgiving yadda yadda right i know it's all [ __ ] 1:02:02 because we already talked about i don't even have to re-explore it we just talked about all that i felt like that he had this resentment towards me for 1:02:08 years and years before i moved and all of that okay so howard the end of 2014 sends me a text 1:02:17 okay scott passed away that's it that's all the text says okay 1:02:23 let's say hi how you doing this is scott passed away all right howard 1:02:30 thinks that i take that piece of information to go make a monetized video 1:02:35 for personal gain that's what he's saying literally in this video okay that's what he's saying and it's what he 1:02:41 just said okay all right just to reiterate here this video we just watched the hate live 1:02:47 podcast got 11 000 views on youtube okay i don't even make two dollars per thousand views anymore on youtube at 1:02:54 this point all right arguably this video maybe made uh i don't know 1:03:01 10 bucks no exaggeration probably 10 15 tops for the entire podcast the two hour video 1:03:07 the video is a two plus hour podcast this is one segment of said podcast okay 1:03:14 so you know he feels that i monetized 1:03:21 the death scott and that i'm a horrible person because i did it okay 1:03:27 and he says to reiterate oh not just me it's everyone in our friend 1:03:34 group everyone back home my nep my nose is disgusting please let 1:03:40 me let me blow my nose quickly before i continue because this is gross okay 1:03:53 oh man oh 1:04:02 yuck 1:04:23 okay that's better 1:04:29 now we can continue okay howard says everyone back home hates me 1:04:35 too for doing it because i brought up scott i brought up t i publicized scott's death 1:04:43 i'm a horrible person who only cares about himself again multiple times he's already said this in this video 1:04:49 okay now you guys just saw the podcast segment right 1:04:56 and you saw it it's in context now okay so 1:05:02 you didn't if you were just watching this video all right if you were just watching this video 1:05:08 with no context provided what would you think this is hypothetical you don't have to 1:05:13 answer me i'm just saying thing in your head if you didn't know the context 1:05:19 okay what would you think what was the video what what did i say oh my goodness right 1:05:26 here's what i think if i didn't see the context i would have thought 1:05:32 i made a video talking like sensationalized video an expose on how my friend scott has 1:05:39 passed away sensationalizing it talking about how he passed which i don't do in the video by 1:05:44 the way um i mean [ __ ] he says i monetized it you 1:05:51 think the way he's saying it i created t-shirts on the internet with 1:05:57 scott's face on them saying r.i.p scott you know street fighter legend forever 1:06:04 and i was selling these shirts with his face on him on the internet making monstrous profits and 1:06:09 using his lightness and [ __ ] about being a horrible scumbag person making 1:06:14 tons of money right um 1:06:20 wow i monetized scott's debt i had already gotten [ __ ] 1:06:25 from making the tribute about tea in a previous podcast so you might say to yourself 1:06:33 why would phil if i already got that hate if he already got all that [ __ ] tossed 1:06:38 his way why would he make a second podcast when scott passed away 1:06:44 someone who was very much in that close circle of friends all right 1:06:49 in order to you know get you know he's gonna get the same he knows he's gonna get the same 1:06:55 [ __ ] the same trolls are gonna say the same thing the same people are gonna do the same thing and they're going to say it's the second time he did it right 1:07:02 sorry i got post nasal drip okay why did i do it because i don't care about what they say 1:07:08 i care about scott i want more people to know about scott i 1:07:13 care about the memory of scott one of the most awesome people i met in the street fighter community the guy who 1:07:19 i literally say in that video if it weren't for him actually saying hey phil 1:07:26 stop playing street fighter in connecticut go to eight on the break in donald new jersey and play street 1:07:31 fighter there if i if he had never said that to me and i never listened to him likely i never would have 1:07:37 started playing competitive street fighter and traveling i never would have gotten the confidence i had to be in front of people i never would have been 1:07:44 able to do things that i did in my work life and my personal life i never would have ever placed it evo i never would 1:07:49 have turned on a camera and talked to it i never would have live streamed i never would have done any of these things 1:07:57 excuse me ever any of them if it wasn't 1:08:02 for scott okay now were there ads on that podcast of course 1:08:09 there were there's ads on every video i had i was still partnered with machinima at the time and so all the videos that i had had 1:08:15 those ads on them you know um and 1:08:23 i could have removed the ads all right personally i i just don't see 1:08:29 i'm gonna be honest here i don't see the big deal when you're doing a two hour podcast a three hour podcast and you're doing one 1:08:35 tribute segment to someone all right does that mean that the whole thing has 1:08:40 to be you know demonetized and you can argue either way that's up to you you can 1:08:45 argue that that's fine you can say yes it should be all right my my take on it 1:08:50 is if you're gonna do that then separate that portion and make a whole video just 1:08:56 about that tribute and then demonetize that tribute all right but 1:09:01 take a look at shows and by the way this is not an equivalent comparison but take a look at like the oscars every year at 1:09:06 the oscars there's a big tribute segment all the big people you know all the prominent actors we have lost this year 1:09:14 right and they run they run the segments a big tribute a well well to do shows all their great roles or whatever okay 1:09:21 is the oscars demonetized do they say well because we're doing a tribute 1:09:27 on our show today of those who we lost this year we care about a lot we miss we're not going to have any advertisers 1:09:32 on the show i'm not aware of that happening okay um 1:09:38 at all okay so 1:09:43 i'm just that's the only comparison i can really make all right internet content creation is a new thing for everybody all right 1:09:50 but for me i'm doing a two or three hour podcast that's the segment i put out 1:09:58 that was it you saw it word for word that wasn't edited that's the segment excuse me 1:10:04 howard comes out in this video tells me that basically i'm an awful person who 1:10:09 only cares about himself i i publicized and monetized scott's debt 1:10:17 that's only i was publicizing the death of a friend right um 1:10:23 really i i and again i wasn't breaking the bank i 1:10:28 didn't make a ton of money it was 11 000 views on that video so maybe i made 10 bucks 1:10:33 15 maybe at the time who knows i don't care um that wasn't what it was about okay it 1:10:40 was one segment a tribute show and i'd much rather would have people know about scott than not which is why that was in that show you 1:10:46 understand um so the the the actual truthful part about 1:10:54 this is that howard says or the reason i think howard bring this up he's upset with me 1:11:00 because he sent me a text to say scott passed away i didn't respond to him because i wasn't responding to anything 1:11:05 from him because he'd been a jackass to me to end there before i moved um 1:11:11 excuse me and basically 1:11:17 he's personally insulted at that okay now 1:11:23 howard was not the first person to text me about scott's death howard has a very over inflated sense of 1:11:29 importance in my life okay he does i had already received two other texts 1:11:35 about scott's death from people previously in the street fighter community who knew scott way better than 1:11:40 howard did i knew scott way better than howard did alright i was there in the formative 1:11:46 years of street fighter in connecticut i was in the arcades with team scott i was traveling to tournaments with scott back 1:11:51 in the day ecc and all of that i spent way more time with scott than 1:11:57 howard ever did okay for him to basically say something like 1:12:02 this you would think oh this was a friend and we all were equally spending time with this guy and was our old buddy 1:12:08 he was my old buddy he wasn't howard's old buddy he didn't know him from back in the day howard didn't know scott 1:12:16 all right in any kind of a major capacity until much later he knew of him but was howard over scott's house 1:12:22 playing street fighter on a cabinet with t no he was not he was never invited he wasn't going to the tournaments with us 1:12:29 okay howard has absolutely no right 1:12:35 to make claim to the rights to say i had the right to tell you about someone's passing 1:12:41 and because you didn't respond to me about it you're an [ __ ] 1:12:46 okay he doesn't all right i already heard about scott's passing from several other people who 1:12:52 knew scott way better than howard howard was essentially passing info through the grapevine late 1:12:59 all right and then takes it upon himself to actually be upset because apparently he didn't get credit for it 1:13:05 right he didn't get credit for it even though in that video i actually said if you didn't pay 1:13:11 attention to it howard texted me and said that scott had passed away and i said and others because it's true 1:13:16 others you wouldn't know the others you guys don't know the others there's old-school people from the street fighter community uh you wouldn't know 1:13:21 them why would i mention them in the video okay so 1:13:27 to me this is the ultimate hit below the bell 1:13:33 this is if you want to say all the things i already said about the video up to this point were completely 100 true 1:13:38 i don't know how you can actually defend this part of the video this is insanely 1:13:44 hurtful to me this is actually like i'm not kidding now all right i'm not exaggerating 1:13:50 i don't want to be friends with howard ever again after this portion of the 1:13:56 video in fact i would rather never speak with him ever again i 1:14:01 refuse to have any kind of a relationship with someone who has such a aggrandized self of self 1:14:08 importance to think that this guy was the exclusive person who could tell me that a friend 1:14:13 of mine from back in the day had passed away and that because i didn't personally contact him after the fact and say oh 1:14:20 thank you so much for the information and then slammed me in a video publicly 1:14:27 stating that i publicized and 1:14:32 monetized his death all right there's 1:14:38 exaggeration and then there's malicious intent 1:14:43 all right that's malicious intent right there that's the actual 1:14:50 textbook example of internet defamation 1:14:55 you've seen it you can't that is it you can actually clip that portion of the video there 1:15:01 after seeing the context you click that say defamation that's exactly what that is all right 1:15:09 so i have absolutely positively no desire whatsoever 1:15:14 to ever speak to this man again all right and i didn't besides one more time i did speak to him 1:15:21 one other time all right after this very hurtful well i take that back it was before this 1:15:26 never mind i got i even i got the timeline confused i did speak to him one more time before 1:15:31 this video had come out and his intentions were not clear i didn't know this okay i figured he's being mean to 1:15:37 me in connecticut he's gonna ditch me for my last event but i didn't know that his feelings were this deep rooted at 1:15:42 the time all right now we know from this portion of the video now i 1:15:49 hate to say it john is involved in this i'm shocked i'm appalled 1:15:54 john had gripes against me but the fact that he's going along with this [ __ ] 1:16:02 you know john knows me john knows the kind of guy i am we spent tons of time together for him to even go 1:16:08 along with this and include this in the video i don't even know what to say you know 1:16:14 what i'm saying like you're gonna have gripes against me things i did wrong over the years you could argue about money you can argue 1:16:19 about anything but this is blatant character assassination this is we hate you we never want to deal with you ever 1:16:26 again now if someone said something like this about you especially because i'm was always a 1:16:34 closer friend to scott than they ever were i knew him before they did i spent more time with him than they ever did i knew more about him than they ever did 1:16:41 but somehow they're going to tell me that i don't have the right to do a tribute to my friend and share my memories with him on the 1:16:47 internet i don't deserve that i don't have the right to do that right that's what they're saying in this video okay 1:16:53 so if someone did that to you would you ever want to be friends with them ever again ever 1:16:59 would you even want to speak to them again would you have any desire to reach out to them and try to mend a friendship 1:17:05 or would you be like okay well that's that's it you know that's the straw that broke the camel's 1:17:11 bed this this is the portion of this video and by the way there's a [ __ ] hour left how 1:17:17 this is the portion of the video that for me is the end of everything 1:17:22 right why you know i don't who even cares what else they say in the rest of the video because i can tell you we will we'll go through it real quick but i 1:17:29 guarantee you nothing that they say after this all right is ever going to top this this is the 1:17:35 worst thing you can basically say about me besides maybe i'm a murderer okay or a rapist or something that i'm a 1:17:40 horrible person who would disrespect and monetize the memory of my friend and you know 1:17:46 what i'm saying it's ludicrous i would also like to know 1:17:52 who all these people are back home who hate me too because funny none of them said that to me either right these 1:17:57 [ __ ] people on the internet who just want to you know propagate this negative [ __ ] with each other and [ __ ] oh 1:18:02 yeah we all hate phil because now because he moved away and everything who are you why where where does this toxicity come 1:18:09 from and how the [ __ ] do you get on with your life if this is the kind of [ __ ] the circle 1:18:16 of hate that you have here for me right oh we all we no one's gonna talk to him 1:18:22 anymore we weren't talking to him no one wants anything to do with that guy right 1:18:28 like holy [ __ ] man i just do you think i want to go back to 1:18:34 connecticut and rekindle my friendship with my street fighter buddies 1:18:41 so anyway let's continue and see what else is in this video 1:18:47 this is what i i dude if one of my friends died i wouldn't be making a video about it i wouldn't be publicizing 1:18:53 their death you wouldn't do a tribute it's terrible man terrible that's um okay it's dirty 1:18:59 business man it's dirty it's dirty after that after that i sti i don't 1:19:04 [ __ ] talk how is it for you it was that was it for me man that was it for me okay 1:19:10 yeah that'll do it i'm sorry for being so angry about it 1:19:16 but this burns me man because it's it's things like this that we should have we should even be avoiding 1:19:25 um and like his whole thing will be to retort to you 1:19:31 his response will be that oh you should have told me that you're yeah 1:19:37 it's like it's against respect to the apology thing it's you could tell someone so many times 1:19:42 right and they apologize but they keep doing the same behavior over and over at a certain point you realize this is who 1:19:49 they are they're not going to they don't they're not really apologizing they're not really going to change 1:19:56 no this is how it is and you have to make the decision like do i want this in my life or not you know 1:20:01 which effects is which is affecting you and in a negative way yeah it's a it affected all of us in a 1:20:07 negative way and i'm at a point in my life i'll be completely honest how did making a tribute to my my friend who 1:20:13 passed away affect you so poorly howard i'd love to hear that because he won't say that 1:20:19 he'll just say did how how did i ruin your life by making a tribute to scott a heartfelt tribute 1:20:25 you are a f that's what you were i'm getting older and i'm starting to 1:20:30 realize things more and more and and one of the things that i cherish in my life now are the people that are 1:20:36 around me man absolutely i mean what else is that is what i cherish 1:20:41 i don't care about games i don't care about you know about what i have that doesn't 1:20:47 if you had millions of dollars right now but you had no one around you had no family or friends 1:20:53 but you had all the money what is that a good life no it's not i 1:20:58 don't know what are they talking about this whole video it's not about money 1:21:04 it's not about the money but money money money gets brought up constantly and now i'm literally referenced as the guy 1:21:12 surrounded by money but has no friends and would you be happy if you were in 1:21:17 that same position like phil like they literally just compared me that's that's me again that's the same 1:21:23 as pay me tons they said dark side in the payments on this video they literally just said phil is the guy with 1:21:29 all this money who moved across the country and now he's by himself and he's completely 1:21:35 alone and we wouldn't be happy if we had that all right 1:21:40 they literally just said it all right but again it's not about money it's not about jealousy it's nothing 1:21:46 about that because phil just kept speaking out of turn nasty things about us absolutely this video has nothing to 1:21:52 do with money even though we've mentioned it 72 times so far right it's not 1:21:59 yeah he moves away which like you said at this point you know it's your decision we support you you know 1:22:05 absolutely hope you hope you do well in your in your endeavors i hope everyone does well but what hap what happens he 1:22:11 leaves and he doesn't contact us and only wrong contacted rambo not you 1:22:17 because i didn't want to speak with your ass he's in he and and i hate to say this it feels like the only way reason 1:22:22 he contacted you john i get contacted so i'm not going to say you were you were not 1:22:28 but why does he contact you it's not because he wants to see how you're doing it's to do play through so he can make 1:22:35 money yeah so going back to his thanksgiving video 1:22:41 he uh he says there's a lot of rumors about why we're not doing stuff and uh because it's definitely not about 1:22:47 the money it's not about me revealing something personal it's definitely not that okay this will be the final segment i 1:22:53 will not be pausing as much in this final segment because i need to finish this it's getting super duper late so let's do it

pt5

0:00 all right everyone this is the last video of the dsp reacts to the john and howard expose 0:05 or response video whatever you want to call it at this point at this point i don't know what you would even categorize it 0:10 as now that you've seen it with my responses let's finish it it could possibly be 0:17 that i just moved and they they're resentful about that yeah so it could be that one i guess because that doesn't 0:22 make him look bad in any way you know that's funny so anyway he moves 0:29 what he told me is a couple weeks he's like when he settles he's gonna contact me we start doing stuff so a couple weeks go by he starts 0:36 contacting me about things um and quite frankly he's being uh pushy 0:42 about about a little bit i need to you know let's do it what do you want to do this weekend what time this weekend is 0:48 like just getting really kind of hammering out a date kind of pressuring 0:53 and i think one week we even had a date to uh to record something but uh i canceled on him 1:01 um because i was going through a very difficult period at this point and i want i had every intention 1:08 and desire to uh do stuff with him at this point um 1:13 i had basically destroyed myself however as you know i talked to you about it um and that's not me complaining 1:20 because being a man if you're talking about being a man i feel like being a man is you make choices and then you deal with the consequences 1:27 right you don't run to complain online or cry about what the world owes you all these things 1:33 you deal with what you got to deal with man and again what is he speaking of i don't know when did i run to the 1:38 internet and complain and cry about all these things that the world owes me things take a look back and tell me 1:45 moments where i insulted rambo and said that people would ask me constantly where's 1:50 rambo didn't rambo say he was going to be in your stuff have you talked to rambo and i was trying to talk to john at the time and he was 1:57 basically trying to talk to me as much as he could but you could tell that the guy was hurt you definitely could i'm 2:02 not going to reveal anything private that we talked about because there is a few private things that we did discuss via text um 2:08 but i knew that that shah's made a hole punch had basically put him in a really bad way all the work he put in time he 2:14 put into it basically over exerted himself he said so as much on the internet already 2:20 um and people were constantly pinging me where's john why isn't in your content 2:25 i'd be like he just said he can't do it now we'll do it later we got plans we're excited we're gonna do it in the future 2:30 and it was just basically delay after delay after delay it wasn't like oh he cancelled once he 2:36 canceled twice he delayed it was just endless oh no i swear we will do it no i swear we will do it uh i swear we will 2:42 do it to the point where venom came i can't do it anymore basically don't bother me about it maybe one day we'll 2:48 get to it okay and that's where it was left where on earth is there were you're 2:53 entitled to anything what are you talking about i never said i'm owed john to be in my content that was never a 2:59 discussion or thing i said but here's what's going on the entire time that i've moved now you have this mysterious 3:07 circle of friends behind the scenes who are basically as i said poisoning the well oh phil's a scumbag phil owes 3:13 everyone money phil did this phil did that phil publicized the death of a friend and filled the dissident man john 3:19 you don't want to be doing stuff with phil you don't want to be associated with that look at all the negativity on the 3:25 internet about him now you know he's getting true this is how he don't plays out the ass he's getting this he's getting that happening to him don't deal 3:32 with phil anymore and that's what i feel happened and that's my speculation purely i think that john at first had 3:38 every intention of doing [ __ ] with me but as the year unfolded of 2014 and i had moved and he was completely burned 3:44 out he realized all the toxicity and [ __ ] that was thrown against me by internet trolls and then the people back home somehow got soured likely because 3:51 of a certain gentleman on the screen right here who was part of that uh and he just didn't want to deal with that [ __ ] anymore did he ever tell me that no 3:59 should have okay but he never did he just kept goading me out like leaving me on voting me on so there were situations where we 4:05 had conversations and i revealed information i should not have reading from texts and things because i was the one with the public face i was the one 4:13 with the business i was the one with the youtube channel i was the one who every day had to answer to the public where's john rambo i don't know he won't tell me 4:21 and you know i i definitely screwed up i should have never revealed anything 4:26 private i should have never gone that far that is completely utterly my fault 4:32 so i usually had a lot obviously had a lot a lot happening i had really run myself into the ground uh 4:39 sacrificing a lot of things uh part you know doing his content too 4:45 i was working on the episode uh strong's manhole put you episode nine uh there's a lot of work 4:51 i was doing doing stuff with phil as well uh i had already moved we're talking about 4:57 months after my move we hadn't we weren't doing anything together this is false he was doing stuff earlier in the year with me and previous to that but he 5:03 was not involved with any of my stuff after i moved that was all on him i don't know what he's talking about right now that was the issue he said he was 5:09 going to be in my stuff and he wasn't he just kept saying no i can't do it no i can't do it i have no clue what he's talking about and like i said my job is 5:15 i'm an independent contractor i work in real estate uh you have to like go out on your own and do things to 5:22 find work like you don't just get you don't just show up for eight hours and you get the check 5:28 you know that's how it works yeah i wasn't doing i wasn't doing a lot of real life things because i was sacrificing 5:35 to make to make something i believed in and had desired to do that was my own choice okay not complaining about it i'm being 5:42 told by nate oh he's referencing before i moved so he changed the timeline again we're talking about after the move that's what we were discussing after the 5:48 move he didn't want to deal with me he was saying he was burnt out he couldn't do anything now you're saying what he's talking about before the move wait what 5:53 again what's with this timeline in this video you can't you can't jump forward back forward back nothing that makes any 5:59 sense that so now he's referencing something else completely unrelated what is going on is what i mean like it's 6:04 it's definitely uh something meant to to defame me but just watching it trying to understand logically doesn't make sense 6:11 so okay he jumped back why what what's going on why are we back in the past now i don't get it bob's in a bad spot i had it was winding 6:19 down i had to start figuring out real life things so i basically told them listen 6:25 when i when i uh i need to finish this episode it's almost done 6:32 okay i need to figure some things out when i'm done i'll contact you and we can do things okay 6:38 i actually didn't do my own show you know the show i didn't do it for all of july because i was 6:44 doing precisely that i was trying to figure things out and i didn't do much of anything else i 6:49 was working on my stuff man getting things done so i'm finally done with the episode in 6:54 august august 13th it comes out which is a wednesday and i'm pretty burned i said i 7:00 immediately decided i'm going to go on a vacation for a couple days so i go to twitter 7:06 and i say you know thanks everyone for watching the episode i'm going into the woods for a while 7:11 i'll be back soon i went to bear mountain howard have you ever been yes i have you have yes i have so i went 7:18 to beer mountain i camped out in the woods i unplugged everything there's no phones nothing 7:24 okay uh kind of like detox man staring at a computer screen for at that point a long time 7:31 i never know about this i did this again this year i do this every year now okay 7:36 um so i didn't put a message i didn't contact him and say oh the you know the episode's up because like i said there 7:42 was an agreement that we talked about where i said when i'm ready to do stuff i will let you know it should be soon 7:48 but the episode comes out i put on twitter i'm going away he notices while i'm going he notices the episode comes out so along the way 7:55 he starts throwing me messages again i'm not around to respond to them 8:00 so that weekend he makes a video one of his videos that he puts out he says i've been trying to reach john 8:06 but he won't respond to me that's the rough plan for this week now you may be saying what's going on this weekend phil because you've been 8:12 dragging us along every week what's going on with john rambo and with smart guys and this new show that you guys 8:18 were going to do we'd really be interested to know what's going on and is it going to return in particular right now as i stream and film this 8:25 video summerslam is on uh television and as you can see i'm not watching it right 8:30 so people might be saying gee what's going on with pro wrestling what's going on with smart guys so this is exactly what was happening is 8:38 john kept telling me he's gonna do stuff with me so i told my audience yeah john says he's gonna do stuff we'll do it 8:43 eventually i'll let you know when we have details and then john would not talk to me or not respond or not want to 8:49 talk about it all right and so then my audience says what's going on there's a big wrestling event 8:55 coming up are you guys going to do smart guys i don't know john hasn't contacted me or said anything so i'm assuming no 9:01 but this was just an ongoing thing it was just month after month it was oh we're going to do it oh time passes 9:07 hasn't happened oh sorry about that phil we'll uh we'll do it in the future when i'm ready uh maybe two weeks two weeks 9:13 passes oh doesn't happen yet you know could i have handled it better with my audience [ __ ] yes i should have just 9:19 said to everyone listen guys this is between me and john we gotta hash it out we don't have any details when we have 9:25 details we'll tell you for me i was the kind of person who was trying to be 100 transparent with my audience 9:31 which is a horrible idea i know that now i know you can only share limited information the more you share the worse 9:38 it gets because people always try to twist [ __ ] against you so if i promise people john said he's coming back right 9:43 after sean's been in a hole punch that's what he told me and then shaw's made a hole punch comes out and there's no john 9:49 guess who they come to me not john me phil where's john phil you said john was 9:55 going to do oh god here we go again it was just an endless string of this that happened since i 10:02 moved month after month after month that year and 10:07 every time i opened my big mouth about it in a video like that it just got worse because more people say ah 10:14 see john doesn't want to be in phil's content john's avoiding phil and all of that was it true was it not i don't know 10:20 i can only know what john told me he told me no it was all personal stuff he's saying as much in this video but this is the thing it just got worse and 10:26 worse and worse to the point where it was constant hounding about john rambo where is he 10:31 why is he why is he ghosting you or whatever okay um our conversations between us you know 10:37 started off friendly and then after a while i think what it was every time that i said hello to him he felt i was 10:42 going to ask about a show again which in reality here you know to give you a very very brief background all right 10:50 john and i mostly never talked on the phone it was mostly in person he would come over to do co-op with me once a week and that was the time when we had 10:56 our conversations and our friendship essentially was the hour or two before we recorded stuff okay we had that 11:01 personal time every time he came over when i moved under the impression we were gonna have that didn't happen 11:07 that's my fault i am stupid i didn't realize there's a giant time zone difference so as i'm streaming and doing 11:13 content all right i'm basically working all day every day and i don't have time to call him because guess what my free 11:18 time is after my streams guess what time my streams end nine ten o'clock that's the time that is over there midnight do 11:24 you think john rambo would like to talk to me at one 1am to talk about issues or anything i don't think so i don't 11:31 think he wants to shoot the [ __ ] at 1am so i screwed up and moving across the country i thought 11:37 we were going to be able to maintain that kind of camaraderie and friendship and we couldn't and that's on me i moved i didn't think about the time zone 11:42 difference and i had to work so much to make ends meet and pay for all the stuff out here i didn't have days off i just 11:48 didn't have anything you know i really didn't so now what happened i start texting him instead and at first he starts he's 11:56 responding and we're having conversations about stuff but then he starts stops responding to the text and 12:01 i realize i think he's upset that i'm not calling him or we're not having conversations or whatever there's not much i can do about that to me at the 12:07 time i was like dude what is this guy's problem with texting like texting is cool because you can respond whenever you have a free moment a lot of the 12:13 times i didn't even know when i was gonna have a free moment during the day but john was always under the impression i was gonna call him and have these long 12:18 drawn out verbal conversations which was what we would do normally when we had those two hours before we filmed so in 12:25 actuality if everything had gone according to plan and we did actually start making content 12:31 when john had said we originally were going to uh you know we're gonna get on a skype call we're gonna do smart guys well the 12:36 first hour we would just talk and shoot the [ __ ] and catch up and then we do the show that didn't happen because we didn't do it you see 12:42 so we never caught up and the only time that i really had time for [ __ ] like that even beforehand when i was in 12:48 connecticut was when i made time because john was coming over to do a date with me day co-op and then we would have our our friendship all right this is 12:56 basically completely different situations you know john has a separate life john has a 13:02 separate job john has everything separate my work was my life you know and even more so when i when i 13:09 moved across the country i screwed everything up because i was overextended i spent too much money and 13:15 i had to work so much i had no free time besides late at night so that was the end of time to talk to john rambo 13:20 besides texting so he hated the texting i know for a fact he mentions it he's oh why couldn't he just call me because all 13:26 i could do was text because the only time i had free was late late at night because i was working all day that's my fault again it's my fault but that's 13:33 what happened and so yeah it sucks i should basically what i should have said at this point this is 13:39 2014 was guys i don't know even when i'm doing anything with john just stop [ __ ] bothering me about it i love to 13:44 do it can't i'll let you know if anything happens instead it was just keep leading people on keep going with it 13:51 keep letting the trolls get to me about it and it just got worse and worse okay well i'm very honestly gonna tell you 13:58 um very honestly gonna tell you that uh 14:05 this past week john rambo finally after years released the final episode of 14:10 shana's man in hole punch it's literally feature length it's like the length of a whole real movie that you would go see 14:16 at the movie theater all right in my opinion probably one of the best independently created series one of the 14:24 best independently shot things i've ever seen in my life yet keep in mind that john rambo 14:30 filmed this wrote this did all the music did all the editing himself 14:35 can you tell that i was very apologetic for what i had said about project seven years before that i always felt really bad that i basically downplayed john's 14:42 involvement when he did chasm in a hole punch i always tried to blow that that show up and say how good it was i always wanted 14:48 to make sure that he was emphasized as a great content creator and a great director and all of that because i felt so guilty about the [ __ ] that i had said 14:54 about project 7 in 2012 which we already covered it's just a tremendous undertaking that he pulled this off with 15:01 the ending that it has everything it was great i loved it and i watched it and i tried to tweet out i hope if you guys 15:06 have not checked out schnauz been a hole punch yet that is john rambo's independent series and i hope you will 15:12 because it's really well done and it's funny and it's intelligent and you just 15:17 gotta check it out i mean someone who puts that much time and effort it deserves more attention than it's getting right he started this two years 15:23 ago and the first few episodes we're getting tens of thousands if not the first episode i think at this point has 30 000 views and the guy put so much 15:31 work into the ending and because what's been going on with youtube you've seen everyone's viewership and following 15:36 is dwindling uh unless you're some huge youtuber and so unfortunately he's putting all this time and effort in and 15:42 it really deserves more attention than it's getting so please check it out if you like my content you're gonna love this it's better than my content in my 15:49 opinion when it comes to anything that i could script or write or do you should check it out okay 15:55 but that being said he released that this week and then after that he pretty much just kind of disappeared he actually only 16:01 tweeted a couple times he and and i watched the episode actually on thursday of this week and i texted him i said 16:08 john great job what a great conclusion to the show looked really good what do you think about smart guys 16:13 because summerslam's this sunday so doing it next week might be the perfect time because we could recap summerslam 16:18 and kind of jump into fresh okay so yeah i text him what do i say i'm talking about work 16:24 i guess this is my fault it is i guess it is i'm talking about can we do a show can we do a show 16:30 at this point he's so burned out he doesn't want to talk to me anymore you know what i mean again the circle of friends back home or poisoning the well 16:36 and basically telling you oh you don't do nothing with philly rip this all off he's a scumbag he's doing this he's doing that why are you still dealing with him and 16:42 then i keep you know asking hey are we ever going to talk i wanted to actually get on a skype call with him just to have time to talk with him personally 16:48 but you know he didn't understand that he thought it was just oh we're just going to do the show you see and you know what i didn't say that and that's 16:54 my fault too a lot of things i [ __ ] up he didn't respond so at this point i don't know what's 17:00 going on with john uh he tweeted yesterday that he's going away for a few 17:06 days but he'll be back for his show on wednesday i don't even know what that means does that mean that like he's turning off everything turning off his 17:12 [ __ ] internet and his phone and he just wants to be apparently yes he went to this bare mountain right that's what 17:19 i don't know does it mean that he's not interested in doing smart guys i don't know i'm not the guy to ask that's the thing 17:25 i don't know what's going on with john and uh he hasn't responded so for me 17:30 i know that if i didn't want to be bothered and i didn't respond to something i wouldn't like it to keep being pestered you know exactly what i 17:37 already passed the [ __ ] out of it for when he contacts me and says i'd like to do smart guys again and i'd like 17:42 to do our new show great but if he doesn't i mean that's good i guess be on his shoulders we haven't had a conversation about it or anything he 17:48 just didn't respond when i tried to contact him this week so it's all lays basically on john right now and when he 17:55 feels that i guess he's rested enough or relaxed enough or in a position where he can jump back in and do some stuff with 18:01 me great but until then i don't know it all rests on him so that's really the 18:06 situation going on you know real talk and i'm not saying that's a negative or positive it's nothing it's just real 18:12 talk that's what's going on and i'm waiting to hear back from john and when i hear from him i'll let you know what he says all right but as of right now 18:19 until i hear from john it's going to be business as usual saturdays is going to be one game play stream because 18:25 saturday's the day when i only do a half day of work so that i can go do stuff with liana so it is what it is if he's 18:30 ready to come back great if not i don't know so i'll let you know yes this is absolutely this is an example of me 18:37 pressuring him someone just said absolutely this is the kind of pressure because it wasn't just me texting him 18:42 but then i would say [ __ ] like that in my videos and he would feel even more pressure like if he doesn't want to be in my stuff 18:48 and then i say that in a video why would he want to be in my stuff right so yeah i'm back 18:55 for my trip i got messages from him i got messages from other people saying why the [ __ ] won't you talk to phil 19:01 phil's upset and uh i'm kind of pissed about that howard 19:09 yeah it should be so i'm kind of pissed about this i don't contact i basically say look i'm going 19:15 to keep holding him to what i said weeks ago which is when i'm ready i'm going to i'm going to do stuff 19:20 i will contact him um following week i get more messages 19:26 uh they mostly are like how are you doing and then as soon as you say go then immediately goes right into the videos 19:33 you know what i mean like that kind of thing it's like it's like a setup and then videos videos are we going to make the videos let's do some videos i need 19:39 to tell people when we're making the videos let's do some videos i don't respond to these messages 19:46 because like i said i'm in kind of a bad spot the episode had come out now i'm kind of like all this time is kind of freed up 19:53 so i'm piecing my life back together putting things back together and i got things going on that actually matter 19:58 beyond making videos with him okay so i eventually get 20:04 vid a message from him in the middle of the night howard and i wake it wakes me up because 20:13 i'm sleeping and i'm pissed off because i have to work the next morning so i believe i respond i woke up pissed off 20:21 go back to sleep i remember waking up the next morning and very quickly responding to this 20:26 in a very nondescript um text response which was 20:32 basically you know please count me out for a while i'm looking to move 20:37 i need to i'm trying to get money together to move youtube isn't going to help with that which is in reference to doing stuff 20:43 with him okay because my stuff that i was doing isn't monetized and i'm not looking to 20:50 you know i wasn't looking to make money with that as my creative outlet and i said i'm around 20:56 most nights please call me okay so howard i'm thinking the next day 21:02 phil will call right yeah because i basically expressed i'm having a tough time and i said please 21:08 call me so i'm thinking the next day is i'll get a call and we'll talk about things what i would have told them was 21:14 hey man maybe i need maybe uh two or three months to get my stuff together 21:19 to get you know healthier and uh actually go to work and undo some damage 21:24 which is again i did by choice i'm not complaining yeah but instead what happens howard as 21:30 i'm going about my business the next day i get a text from the area of lord 21:37 and uh he says sorry to hear uh about what happened 21:42 and i go what do you what do you mean you're sorry you hear that you're leaving youtube 21:47 i start getting other tweets from different various people with similar sentiments 21:54 so what the hell's going on here so i go go right to his channel and i see that phil did not actually 22:00 call me instead made a video a monetized video by the way 22:05 where he publicly reads the text out loud all right now the next thing that was a common question that people have 22:11 been asking me for weeks and i finally have a definitive update for you on this one is in regards to john rambo 22:18 as you know just gonna let it run you're gonna let it roll let's get major progress before i say anything john rambo and i when i lived in connecticut 22:25 pretty much almost every week he was about three weeks out of the month we'd do co-op gameplay on a saturday we'd do 22:30 our podcast called smart guys we would do live wrestling commentary on everything that's been going on over the 22:35 course of that particular week in the wwe and sometimes in tna and even ring of honor and other stuff 22:41 um and we had plans that we were going to start a new show once i moved to the 22:47 state of washington where it would be like a coast to coast show where i talk about stuff on the west coast he talks about stuff on the east coast and we 22:53 kind of you know communicate once a week doing that and everyone's been how cool would that show have been and we did it 22:59 like every week or every few weeks we're talking about different coastal things imagine talking about all the [ __ ] that 23:04 happened during you know the trump administration talk about all the [ __ ] that happened during covent that would have been an 23:10 amazing show i feel what a lost opportunity there saying what's been going on with this 23:15 what is going on with with rambo it's now been two months you've lived in washington you haven't done a smart guys 23:21 and i've been trying my best to keep you guys in the know and informed on what's going on you know john was very 23:26 inundated with work and working on his show schnaaz manning hole punch and finally the final episode of shana's 23:32 manhole punch was released last week too much acclaim it's one of the best uh internet-based things i think i've ever 23:38 seen in my life it's really well done especially for keeping in mind that john did 99 of the work himself the filming 23:44 the writing the editing really did everything himself the music [ __ ] and i didn't hear back from him after 23:51 that i texted him and congratulated him on the show and i said it's great you know what are you what are you thinking for our stuff now when can we get 23:57 started up so i hadn't heard from him finally last night i'll be honest with you guys i was feeling kind of 24:03 not frustrated but almost worried that something had happened where he was pissed at me or something that he wasn't 24:08 responding to anything that i was sending him uh and so i went ahead and i texted him again i'm gonna you know i told you guys 24:15 i'm the realest person on the internet i got nothing to hide i'm going to tell you exactly what we talked about oh my god 24:22 text and basically i said uh here you go i said hey john i hope you're doing well haven't heard from you 24:28 recently i'd like to catch up with you you know off camera don't worry about any filming i just want to hear how 24:34 you're doing i we haven't talked in a while and it feels weird to me i knew you had schnazzle going on but when you didn't respond at all to my text last 24:40 week it felt like something may be wrong just let me know no pressure i want to know where we standing at you're okay 24:46 and then john did respond this morning and he said hey you're gonna have to count me out for a while i need to get 24:52 my money together so that i can move to a better place youtube stuff isn't going to help me with that i'm around most 24:57 nights if you ever want to call so i did respond to him and i said all right in the next couple days i'll try to squeeze in a time when i can call i know there's 25:03 a big time zone difference but the bottom line is it sounds to me like john is just not interested in doing anything 25:08 on youtube right now um and i'm gonna be i'm gonna talk a little bit right now because 25:15 i'm gonna be honest with everybody i think uh that john 25:21 uh does not get the credit that he deserves i think that john rambo in particular uh actually 25:29 puts in an incredible amount of work ethic effort and time into his work that 25:36 people don't understand i think that john unfortunately uh didn't get 25:43 as much of anywhere near anything out of the stuff that he put into youtube like i did all right so let me give you a 25:49 quick bit of history back when i started on youtube on a whim you know i started doing gameplay or 25:54 whatever and i had this huge jump in popularity because no one was doing game play on youtube like i was everyone was 26:00 either doing professional level walkthroughs or they weren't doing live commentary or it was all nothing like 26:06 raw unedited real game play like i was doing on youtube i was the only person doing it 26:12 like that at the time and it became hugely popular and then that in that particular year 26:18 uh we were heavily into street fighter we were playing street fighter 4 uh years passing after that into you know 26:24 20 2009 2010 john and i started doing co-op of gameplay and stuff like that 26:29 and so john that year actually qualified to go to 26:34 uh super battle opera in japan and at super bottle opera you know he he 26:39 documented everything he went and he videotaped everything and because he had a following of people who knew who he 26:44 was from my content he made his own youtube channel john rambo presents he documented his whole trip to japan and 26:50 it was huge like popular as hell people watched the hell out of the videos they're like wow john we love your footage would you consider doing 26:56 gameplay of your own would you consider doing projects of your own and so at that time john did a few things he 27:02 started a series called games the series where he was just playing random games at a gaming store where he knew the 27:08 employees there um and also with his other friends off-camera friends who people didn't know were doing 27:13 co-commentary with him and uh then after a while he decided he didn't want to do that that he'd prefer to just do 27:18 gameplay with me and he went in his own direction on his channel and he started doing things such as the show which is 27:24 his weekly podcast with with oj where for about two hours the two of them shoot the [ __ ] they talk about different 27:30 topics they have do comedy skits they have guests they play music they do all kinds of stuff it's a two-hour variety 27:35 show that i'm very much a huge fan of and it's funny because when the show started 27:40 we're talking some two to three years ago now it was just a podcast meaning there was 27:46 no video it was like just audio you could listen to it as an audio show and they would put up pictures and stuff 27:51 that would go through but it wasn't anything you needed to see you could literally just listen to the show and be doing other stuff and you missed nothing 27:57 over the years john rambo's the show has progressed so exponentially like 28:04 from having from being just a podcast to having all kinds of interactive art and things going on to then having guests on 28:10 the show to then having video and it became a skyped call pop i feel like i'm doing a [ __ ] another 28:16 tribute right what the [ __ ] am i doing here i'm like i'm i'm basically saying goodbye 28:22 john rambo like are you shocked that people contacted rambo and said hey rambo you're never making content ever 28:28 again i'm sorry to hear you're leaving in the internet like what the [ __ ] was i doing podcast where you could see 28:35 video call and see people live on the show to having all this video packages and things put into it and then of 28:41 course john in 2012 when we were working on our own video series called project 28:47 seven john was inspired creatively to do his own thing called schnozmann and hole punch which is this show that he's been 28:53 working on for two years and finally uh you know reached completion this past week and uh it was a lot of effort and 28:59 work and i'm going to say this i am angry because john does not get the viewership he 29:05 deserves i love his content i think that the show and in addition to that schnauz man a whole punch and anything that he 29:11 puts out on that channel is great it's gold it's like it's not i would not miss it i watch everything that he puts out 29:17 on there just like i would watch every episode of a popular television show or every episode of or even following a 29:23 funny comedian and what work they work on he's quality stuff is that good now keep in mind he's an individual he's 29:30 independent he doesn't have studio backing him with millions of dollars so he can have crazy special effects and 29:35 all that he learned everything on the fly and he does it himself and the thing that pisses me off is if you consistently look at john's content over 29:42 the past several years the stuff that he puts out on youtube it's gotten exponentially better and his views have 29:49 gotten exponentially worse when he started with the show which was just a audio podcast that thing was getting 29:55 tens of thousands of views now he struggles to even get a couple thousand views on his part why would i say this 30:02 right i'm burying him i'm basically saying he's unsuccessful 30:08 this is the same [ __ ] that review tech usa ended up doing to me eventually on his channel and i was like dude don't 30:15 you understand even if it's well intentioned that this just hurts things it makes people talk [ __ ] and have drama 30:20 podcast i don't know why nothing's changed the quality has gone up not down 30:26 yet somehow the interest has waned and a lot of people say to me phil your content well you know you could say a 30:32 hundred things about me that i'm an [ __ ] i'm a hypocrite people hate oh i'll say that it's right there campaign against me and yada yada yeah my views 30:39 have gone down but not to the point where it's like i get 10 of what i used to and john unfortunately that's what's 30:45 happened to him it's [ __ ] what the hell happened over there i have no idea i've never seen anything where he 30:51 attacked a fan or there was an argument or he did something wrong it just seems for whatever reason people gravitated 30:57 away from his youtube channel and over the years he's put so much work into the 31:02 stuff that he's done i know for a fact that he put a good six [ __ ] months of 31:07 work into the final episode of schnozmann a hole punch and right now you go over there and of course was he 31:13 expecting a ton of views no what i would say is it's a success in regards to the people that watched it loved it 31:19 so if a couple thousand people watch it and love it i guess you know mission accomplished but i know for a fact 31:26 that's his heart soul money and time that was invested in that thing and he even knew so much so that it was at this 31:34 point just for the artistic vision and not for the fact that he was going to get anything monetarily out of it he didn't even monetize the final episode 31:40 of shana's man in hole punch so he knew from the get-go that the series over two years had declined in viewership so much 31:46 that it wasn't going to be getting anything significant he didn't even bother putting ads on it because he didn't want the artistic vision ruined 31:52 by ads [ __ ] popping up all over his work this is basically the nicest drag 31:58 ever i'm dragging him through dirt mud [ __ ] feces 32:03 and but i'm being nice about it i'm still dragging him though so john is a hard worker tribute's a dragon 32:11 and i really feel that i don't know from what the cause was that all of a sudden his viewership you know declined like it 32:18 did over the past couple of years and i don't think he gets the credit that he deserves and i feel bad when i get a text like that that basically he's 32:23 saying he's giving up on youtube except for i know he's gonna continue to do his podcast the show but basically that he 32:28 doesn't want to do anything on youtube he has to focus on real life work to save up money and be able to move that 32:34 pisses me off i hate that because that means that's a creative vision that's been crushed you know here's 32:40 someone who's a very creative person who i know if he had the means to do it that he could make epic series for the 32:46 internet and he can't do it now he has to go focus on nine to five job because he needs to save up his money and that 32:53 it's so disappointing especially because i'm such a good friend of his that that is the situation and all i can say is 32:59 that um you know from my standpoint and my perspective work-wise it's is it a 33:05 disappointment that john's not going to be in my content anymore or at least for the foreseeable future yes absolutely 33:11 but at the same time i'm an adult and i realize that this is john's life and it's serious business and that if he if 33:17 that's his his uh decision i absolutely one million percent respect it and i say good luck to him and i hope 33:24 that you know he has massive success with whatever he's doing so that he can actually you know start making some 33:29 money because youtube didn't pan out and that he can do stuff you know in his life to improve his his life 33:36 situation i am the exception to the rule i am the lucky one i am the one out of 33:41 the million who tried to make it big on youtube oh i take that back i didn't try to make it big on youtube i just tried 33:47 to get anything going on youtube that could possibly work as a hobby it blew up and because it blew up at one time 33:54 and i was the popular thing i'm able to make a living doing it today even though i'm not the popular thing anymore i 33:59 still have enough that i can make a living but i'm the exception right i'm the lucky one and it sucks 34:04 that someone like john who has all that creativity it didn't work out for him and it's [ __ ] and i hate a world 34:10 where that's not fair you know what i mean it's not fair it's not [ __ ] fair and i can understand there's a lot of 34:16 people that are frustrated that just like john who you have creative talent and you can't make it big on youtube and 34:21 i understand because it's [ __ ] it's not fair it's kind of like perfect timing you know 34:26 what i mean and uh it's perfect timing and look of the draw and it really i was the lucky 34:32 one and uh millions of people are not and that's very frustrating to me 34:37 because as you know john was an integral part of my work john is my friend i loved having work and friendship 34:42 involved because it really was a great thing but i knew when i was making this move to washington that it had to be 34:47 done it was going to be a massive positive so far there has been a massive positive and uh if anything one major negative 34:55 right now is that unfortunately i'm not going to be able to do stuff with john um from time to time i'm going to give 35:00 him a call i'm going gonna try to give him a call in the next couple of days hopefully we can catch up find out what the heck is going on with him and this 35:06 was the situation where i basically realized i just can't call a guy i never had free time except nights late nights 35:12 you know um he'd be like oh just call me at night i'm always streaming couldn't not be streaming because i had 35:18 to pay the bills you know i put myself in that situation it's my fault but even i say in a video and then i 35:23 didn't do it because i couldn't because i was stupid but you know if you want to keep in touch with john definitely check out his youtube channel john rambo 35:29 presents uh where he's gonna be uploading weekly his podcast and all that stuff is gonna be continuing on over there and i hope 35:35 again i wish him the best and i hope that stuff works out for him and i'm gonna be keeping in touch with him privately offline i know this is a huge 35:42 change for everybody because we were all expecting you know this wasn't something that john and i discussed before it was a completely different story and 35:48 apparently there was this epiphany in the past two months where he just realized that he can't do youtube stuff anymore 35:54 you know that's life it is what it is so you know i just got to move ahead and 35:59 no hard feelings whatsoever to anybody seriously how could i possibly have hard feelings 36:04 for a guy who supported me who was there for me we had a working friendship and a great business relationship for several 36:10 years and it was only that i chose to actively move how could i be upset that he is moving on and doesn't want to be 36:17 involved with that youtube related content anymore i mean i would be such an incredible egomaniac selfish [ __ ] 36:24 you know what i mean and uh i'm not you know i like i said i love the guy i wish him the best and i hope this stuff works 36:30 out for him so there you go you know what i mean there you go 36:36 um that's that's the definitive answer and if anything changes like he said count 36:41 me out for now he didn't say count me out forever there's a possibility that maybe in the future there'll be big 36:46 stuff coming up maybe you know john's in a better situation in a year's time and he wants to do a big play 36:52 through with me or he wants to come back and do smart guys great but i'm not gonna push the issue i'm not 36:58 gonna harass the poor guy and say oh you're gonna be my content gonna be my content i'm just gonna leave it as it is 37:04 and when john you know makes a decision that maybe he wants to come back he can now unfortunately what this means is 37:09 what's going to happen to smart guys right because this is what everyone phil 37:15 wins the next smart guys once again i don't know now because smart guys integrated from day one it was me and 37:21 john right and we worked well off of each other i had one perspective he had another a lot of times we had varying 37:27 perspectives we had different opinions on what was going on and it was good the way that we played off of each other in 37:32 that show and would it even be worth it to continue that show when it's only one person you 37:39 know what i mean now there is obviously uh a possibility to [Music] 37:45 continue the show and maybe find people who are interested in pro wrestling who want to give their takes on what's been 37:51 going on we can maybe have special guests that we rotate through but i don't want to do that 37:57 without having input from people who have been fans of smart guys for years i would be an [ __ ] i'm just gonna 38:03 change it [ __ ] it i want to hear everyone's feedback what do you think would it be better as a show that i continue by myself would it be better as 38:09 a show where i have guests who maybe are rotating co-hosts on the show would it be better if maybe i've tried to find a 38:16 one person who could be a co-host permanently or is that it should i just retire the show completely and just 38:22 continue on as you guys know for the past two months on saturdays i'm just doing one gameplay streams we should i 38:27 just do that instead so i would definitely like to hear your opinions on all that stuff uh whether it's 38:34 on twitter at they call me dsp whether it's in the comments of this video please go ahead and submit me all that 38:39 and let me know i will mull it over it's i'm not going to promise anyone smart guys is returning soon because i want to think about it for a while and in 38:46 particular with this hardcore gaming season coming up i may be so inundated with stuff anyway maybe this was the right time for this to happen but i'd 38:52 like to hear your opinion and feedback okay so i cancelled it because ultimately 38:59 i felt that the show had no purpose without john that show was not just me it was me and john without john it 39:06 wasn't smart guys anymore i dabbled with the idea that maybe i would just do a new show i i just ended it 39:12 and you know at that point i didn't have any more pressure to really watch pro wrestling but i did i continued to watch it for several years but yeah i mean is 39:20 there anything defensible in that i mean i could have literally said hey guys so i heard from john and we're not going to 39:26 be doing anything for a while if ever i'll let you know if it ever changes none of your business why it's none of 39:31 your business seriously but back then again i was so mr ultra mr transparent i 39:36 got to share everything with everyone i got to document everything keep in mind i was filming all over my house i was filming all over everywhere i went i was 39:43 an idiot now that's completely different like today i would just say the [ __ ] off 39:48 none of your business man stop getting in our business you know do i want to do content with john yes but we're not too 39:54 bad i'll let you know everyone we are and deal with it right but i was i wasn't like that back then i wasn't i i 40:00 didn't have boundaries so john texts me saying personal [ __ ] i read it like an [ __ ] and then i bury 40:07 him for like 40 minutes i bury the guy oh his content's good but no one watches 40:12 it it's a shame i mean in one way i'm eluding basically it's the youtube algorithm the youtube algorithm used to pick up content and 40:18 push it and and it would be popular and then youtube algorithm changed and just like my channel his channel had been suffering too 40:24 um but i don't say any of that again you have to understand that when you're gonna say negative [ __ ] about someone or 40:30 something it's going to just be tossed at them and that's exactly what what reviewtech did to me for years he would 40:36 make videos oh dsp gaming is failing look the views are going down phil has to make drastic action now or he'll go 40:41 out of business i like dude rich why'd you make that [ __ ] video don't you understand that when you make that video 40:46 people now will come and laugh at me and deride me and do nasty things towards me and say oh what did you you know i 40:52 didn't understand that but i think i was a [ __ ] idiot now i get it but this is like you know six seven seven years later eight years later 40:59 older and wiser now but back then that was the dumbest thing i could have possibly done in the situation i was completely in the wrong every reason 41:06 he goes out to give me a bunch of compliments and then kind of buries me after that which is a weird mixture of i 41:12 didn't like to do sometimes it was it was a happy birthday it's like it's okay if i speak negatively because i complimented 41:18 you first you're great but you're still familiar exactly he does the same thing where he goes i'm 41:23 going to be honest with everyone you know that the usual spiel he talks about how john john's giving up 41:30 on youtube he doesn't want to do stuff he doesn't want to do stuff on youtube anymore um he kind of applies like i'm upset about 41:36 views i'm like enough credit reviews or money and um you know very far from my feelings on 41:42 things that's awesome i don't think i ever it's very hard to make the argument that 41:48 i tried to make a living on youtube or i try to make money on youtube okay the stuff i put out 41:55 is not going to reach a lot of people it's not really 42:00 possible you know it's a two-hour two-hour podcast which is weird 42:07 it's a web series that's weird it's it's very different than obtaining a video game that millions of 42:13 people know about it's advertised and doing a play through you know people could find you in a search 42:19 and like for my stuff i know what the ceiling is like the first the first time i was a whole bunch episode however is like 20 42:25 000 views yeah that's my ceiling it's not two hundred thousand two million twenty thousand i then spent the next three 42:32 years making more of those knowing what that ceiling is not there's never a 42:37 uh goal to get fame or uh or money it's like this is what i like 42:42 to do this is what i want to make you know the show we've done look you know 42:48 almost 200 episodes we know what the ceiling is yeah exactly so i get all these you know all these 42:54 questions for people saying you know i always liked your content to hear you're leaving you know wow 42:59 in the same video he talks about how he's the exception you know i'm the one in the million 43:05 that could that can do this that could make it well congratulations man you know again i don't we don't make the same 43:10 type of content and uh refers to himself as the realest realest [ __ ] on the internet 43:16 his [ __ ] misinformation what he could have just called 43:22 and by the way howie he has never actually called me to this day which is 43:29 15 months later well maybe 13 months he's never actually called 43:35 yeah and in this video he said i'm going to call him he's never actually called me 43:42 yeah now you know now do you do you want i don't know i just i just 43:48 why don't we why don't you roll into the the next the next bit all right hold on so yeah 43:54 i feel like as a friend you would call and you and you say you know what's going on is there something i could do to help you out which is what 44:01 uh which is what you did we talked right yeah and you would check 44:06 yeah maybe once a week just to see how he's done i would tell you like yeah this is 44:11 what's going on and you know yeah it's not like that's not that you could fix the situation i'm looking for someone to be like i'm gonna fix your problems it's 44:18 um you know talking it out right lynch let you know i support you that kind of 44:24 thing yeah um so that's that and and uh 44:31 i want to talk about this he'll often say i'm the realist i'm the most you know here's honestly this 44:38 here's the truth of the matter when people do that they're usually doing it for a reason it's usually 44:43 because they're not telling the truth that's false um for me i have a lot of 44:48 mannerisms and things that i say in my dialect you know talking to people on the internet every single day all day 44:54 long for 14 years um when i say oh the truth of the matter or the bottom line is or 45:00 i'll be honest with you right now what i'm doing is trying to emphasize that what i'm about to say has weight or 45:06 importance okay you know maybe i'm [ __ ] around right before that making a joke cracking 45:12 you know making a stupid comment laughing dick you know being being silly but i'm trying to tell you okay the silliness is over i'm about to talk 45:18 about something that's kind of important so listen up that's what i mean when i say that and it's a quick way to say 45:23 that without having to say oh by the way guys i'm about to drop all the levity in syria to be serious right now so listen 45:29 up i just say hey the truth of the matter is or hey uh you know you put the important here's what's 45:34 important listen you know yeah but he is taking it like every time i say that something it's something 45:40 a lie that's ridiculous that's again negativity toxicity that's seeped into his opinion 45:48 of me thinking that because i say those things all the time in my dialect it means that i'm always lying 45:53 couldn't be further from the truth but he feels that way at this point you see 45:59 so i have no defense at all i never should have read the text i never should have made a basically a burial segment 46:05 in that podcast about i love his content but it doesn't get attention um i did make it sound like he was 46:11 retiring from the internet although oddly enough i say he's still doing his own show so how is he retiring from the 46:16 internet if he's still doing his own show i like even i don't make sense i'm listening back to myself and i don't make sense in that clip uh it's a very 46:24 very bad clip that's why i put [ __ ] over it because that's probably out of all the things i did in this video probably the worst thing 46:30 okay if every time you spoke and you go you know here's the honest truth of it let me let 46:37 me be honest with you for a second i'm the most honest i'm the realist 46:43 that's a warning sign yeah a big one because why are you why do you feel the need to say that 46:48 because i'm joking half the time when i'm talking with you i'm trying to make levity on my streams 46:53 i want you to know that i'm doing saying something that i feel is important or truthful at that point i'm not being a dick or a jokester you know teasing 47:00 anyone or you know making a dumb comment about a game it's something important that's why i do that to em to break it 47:05 up it's not like in the middle of a conversation i would just say that thanksgiving video he talks about i have no idea what i did wrong 47:12 i i i didn't do anything wrong if you go to that video from august where he's uh reading my text 47:19 there's random people in the comments man and it's on twitter and whatnot 47:25 that don't know phil personally don't know me personally well before there's a problem that 47:31 there's an obvious problem between us publicly there's people that 47:36 are saying maybe you shouldn't have maybe you shouldn't read someone's text out loud like that 47:43 yeah so there's amongst other comments like you know you're a piece of [ __ ] you ruined your own life and john rambo's 47:50 you know a million other insulting things you can only at that point you can only take 47:55 comments seriously to a certain extent i'm not saying the comments weren't correct they were but i wasn't actively reading my comments 48:02 for anything of any intelligence it was basically a lot of toxicity and trolling there i didn't really pay attention people 48:09 that will watch and immediately immediately go why are you reading so much text out loud 48:16 obviously it's a private message why are you doing that well here we are all these months later 48:22 and he still has no idea but random people can can figure it out uh 48:28 immediately after watching the video yep no 48:35 so that was pretty much it that kind of broke the back right there man because again 48:41 you had to pull the stuff in the past which many times sang thinks publicly that's that's uh 48:47 so anything public about me that's not true and then and then saying please don't do that and here we go like the 48:52 biggest infraction of all my opinions it's a big thing for me see your letter mace mace was a longtime fan watching 48:57 this all day he has to go we're in the home stretch i'm done with in less than like 20 minutes would be done i mean i trust you know because how do you how do 49:03 you really be friends with someone you can't trust them how do you tell them things part of part of a friendship is kind of 49:08 like the intimacy of it you know what i mean yeah to share things about your feelings your family or whatever hell 49:16 that's kind of gone it's gone right there man so i don't respond to i don't say anything publicly 49:21 my reaction's basically like all right he said he's gonna call me in that video he actually says he's gonna call me 49:26 let's see if he calls again i i could not call and that's my fault my 49:32 lifestyle was wake up record record record broadcast broadcast upload record record broadcast broadcast 49:38 oh i have free time at 10 at night which is 1am his time so i can't call him i 49:44 texted and he didn't like the texts he wanted a personal call i did not give him a personal call i just texted and he 49:50 didn't like that and ignored my texts so in the interim 49:56 i'm going to roll into this one uh in the middle of this he starts sending 50:02 text messages first he starts with john and starts sending john these text messages 50:09 like in the middle of the night so now when you do the math this is 2015 now this is much later and again this is why 50:15 the timeline is skewed he makes it sound like oh this is happening right now in 2014. nope this is 2015. 2015 was the 50:22 worst year of my life at this point besides maybe uh late 2000's when i was feeling almost 50:28 suicidal um everything was falling apart at the seams my channel was being 50:33 insanely destroyed by trolls fake copyright strikes i was being ddosed i got swatted 50:38 um my personal life was falling apart here uh with my significant other i was feeling awful and this would have 50:45 absolutely been a time in my life when i would absolutely would have loved to have some friends to talk about it but i was have now been ghosted by john rambo 50:52 not howard because i talked to howard but i've been ghosted by john rambo ever since that late 2014 50:58 situation i had not heard from him since then i did try from time to time to reach out to him and say hey i hope you're doing well this and that and he 51:04 just completely ignored me outright okay so what they're about to reveal 51:10 is truthful information i'll explain what's going on for the first time after they are done talking about it 51:16 that's right john starts getting text messages at 5 five six o'clock in the morning that 51:22 means it's like two o'clock in the morning there so now when you start reading them you 51:28 start looking at it and it doesn't make any sense why he's even texting and and it's not even coherent so you 51:35 start wondering if the guy was like if he's been drinking and texting 51:41 yeah it's weird it's really weird so basically i called john up 51:47 and john you know john goes yeah he's texting me 51:53 it's really weird and he keeps texting me and i'm not responding back and you know 51:58 and it and like when he texts like he's sending these messages like he does feel 52:04 sorry on one end but at the but but then he says something that like later that contradicts it completely 52:13 so what happened there you just go to the point where like this is not a good this is not good to have in my life yeah 52:21 yeah it doesn't mean it doesn't mean you hate the person it doesn't mean that you wish the mill it's like 52:26 you hope they could fix whatever they got going on yeah but they're just doing too much damage to you and themselves 52:32 you know yeah and then you look at it and you're like there's no consistency to what 52:38 there's no rhyme or reason no consistency to what he does so and then john goes like just get ready because you're probably going to get a text 52:44 message so few weeks ago what does he do he texts me yeah and he's and it's weird because he 52:50 starts off with like i uh hey i heard you hate me now yeah 52:57 i haven't talked to you in a while i hear you and john both hate me now no one ever i haven't talked to this guy 53:03 and like like is there something telling him the wrong things i don't know i have maybe i think there is i have yes 53:11 all right you ready for the explanation it's not good it's terrible uh i was depressed as [ __ ] that year 53:18 everything was falling apart around me i was actually afraid i was gonna lose everything i thought that my youtube channel was going to basically be shut 53:24 down or i was going to have such a loss of monetization on my youtube channel that i was going to not be able to pay 53:30 for anything i was not going to be able to for my home i was not going to be able to pay for anything at all and like i said at the same time with 53:36 all the horrible things that were happening to me that year my personal relationship also had fallen apart at 53:42 the seams and late 2015 into say the first half of 2016 53:50 uh was a very tumultuous time with so much [ __ ] going on behind the scenes uh that a lot of people don't even know 53:55 about we're not gonna get into that some of that is addressed in the down the rabbit hole react that i've already done 54:01 but essentially uh i was really really really [ __ ] up in the head at this point i was heavily drinking all the 54:07 time at night i would basically do a full day of content on the internet for you guys and then i would drink myself 54:14 to sleep because i was [ __ ] up i was depressed as [ __ ] i didn't think there was any way 54:19 i was going to get out of it there's no light at the end of the tunnel i wasn't enjoying what i was doing for a job anymore i was jaded i was i was just i 54:25 hated everything around me essentially at that point um and then yeah some late nights i'm not 54:31 kidding i know this sounds [ __ ] pathetic as [ __ ] because it is there were some late nights when i would get drunk and i would start reminiscing 54:36 about the past i would start reminiscing about the times when i would do co-op with john uh or we would do smart guys and so i 54:42 would actually be drinking like crazy and then watch our old content together 54:49 and be depressed as [ __ ] and fall asleep watching it okay playthroughs and everything you know um 54:56 and then it got to the point where what happens when you're a drunken depressed idiot mess i i already had 55:02 done this before in my life and uh here i am doing it again in 2015 55:07 uh i start sending out texts and [ __ ] at night in the middle of the night when i shouldn't be everyone's asleep i'm drunk as [ __ ] i'm stupid i'm sending 55:13 out these tags oh my god john i'm so sorry i hope we can make up i don't know what happened if i did anything the [ __ ] 55:18 [ __ ] over your life or whatever i hope that you'll forgive me you know [ __ ] like that pathetic [ __ ] it 55:24 is pathetic it's it's is it really an attempt for me to reach out to him and mend our relationship 55:29 probably not it's [ __ ] me being depressed in the booze it's not genuine it's [ __ ] me feeling bad 55:36 all right and there's no excuse for it it's disgusting actually i'm actually very upset with myself 55:42 that i did it um and it happened for a while it wasn't just like oh it happened once or twice it was like over the course of months i know i kept texting 55:48 john like that sometimes at night um i know he was very upset and he probably i was so shocked he didn't block my number 55:55 seriously i'm shocked and like blocked the [ __ ] how's he how are you putting up with this and again he never responded 56:00 so it wasn't like hey [ __ ] face stop doing this you stole my ass like what are you doing i don't [ __ ] want text 56:06 from you anymore it's not bothering me this is nothing silence and speaking into the void all right 56:12 which i don't know how much you guys know this but when you're depressed and you're not getting any response it just makes you feel worse and by the way this 56:19 is not blaming them this is me this is all on me not them this is them a hundred percent and this eventually led 56:25 to self-destruction and the culmination of what happened they're making this video because what they're talking about 56:31 when i texted howard out of nowhere i didn't texted the guy said i [ __ ] move 56:38 so i texted him say hey i heard you guys hate me oh that is true i did hear that they hated me so after 56:43 all this time that this was happening all right and i was getting more and more increasingly 56:48 depressed as you saw i would occasionally i would talk about them in my videos and i believe it was a stream or something that i had mentioned them 56:55 i get an email from someone stating hey phil just so you know i know that you're so 57:01 you know upset about howard and john not howard just john not talking to you so i just 57:07 want to let you know that i ran into them i was at a youtube thing in new york i think it was one of 57:12 their their studio things and i guess john and howard were there together they were filming 57:17 now being a fan of you i walked up to them and i approached them and i wanted to introduce myself and said hey i love your stuff 57:24 by the way what's going on with you and phil you know phil now before it says like almost you know half a year hasn't 57:29 heard from anyone what's going on to which they responded to the person and said 57:34 we don't want to associate with phil anymore you know all the [ __ ] going on with him all the drama going on with him 57:41 um you know we have some impersonal issues with him that we don't want to discuss with you but we want nothing to do with 57:48 him so we wish him the best but we want nothing to do with it now they said as much in this very video 57:54 they actually revealed this that they had said that to people at events just like this okay 58:00 so one of those people told me that this is what happened and here i am the whole 58:06 time i'm in the dark they're not you know again john had never responded since like the fall of 2014 58:12 uh in any way shape or form not returning texts or anything um and what i hear is that they hate me now 58:18 basically you know i heard that i heard they hate me now oh wow that really made me feel good in 58:25 2015 right when i already was at my one of my lowest points of my life i was depressed and drinking so it just 58:31 exacerbated the whole situation okay so again this is nothing to do with them 58:36 doing anything wrong but you know they have the right to shut off down shut down the the friendship they have the right to not talk to me uh 2015 was an 58:43 awful awful year for me and i was a drunken depressed [ __ ] mess 58:49 now when you are a depressed mess i talked about this a bit in my of all things my reaction to the 58:55 wings of redemption down the rabbit hole video that was over a month ago you can watch that right here on the channel if 59:00 you like and i talked about when you were depressed sometimes you do things 59:07 for no logical reason only because you know that doing those things will destroy 59:14 something and feed further into your depression all right this has happened to me many 59:20 times over my life where i get so depressed about something that i then 59:25 purposely do things to ruin a friendship to ruin a relationship even further than it's 59:31 already been damaged um there's people who literally out of the blue i decided i would just not speak to them ever again 59:38 this was very early on when i was like in my early 20s um oh well i'll never speak to that person ever again [ __ ] 59:43 them there's people who've been nothing but nice to me in my life and i shut them out okay 59:48 and again this is not me justifying it it's wrong to do this but 59:55 i've done it many times in my life whenever i feel depressed this seems to happen it's a running pattern with me 1:00:00 and alcohol okay i get very bad when i get depressed and drunk i do stupid [ __ ] okay so all that being said 1:00:07 um i was at a point in 2015 where i was at such a low i was 1:00:13 at that point and so i decided since these guys are not going to talk to me i've now found out that they hate 1:00:19 my guts from someone who has talked to them in person and they have not told me this up front i will force them to 1:00:25 and then at least we will have closure right so i forced their hand i started 1:00:30 talking about them in videos there was the thanksgiving ask the king where someone directly asked that was the very beginning of this whole event where i 1:00:37 came out said what i said on purpose is a calculated 1:00:42 move to force them to react but i was thinking 1:00:47 they would react to me and say hey phil in private 1:00:53 shut the [ __ ] up we had enough of your [ __ ] we don't want to be friends with you we've moved on leave us alone i 1:01:00 fully expected that's what was going to happen i thought maybe on a shock shocking whim perhaps 1:01:06 they would say oh well we're sorry about all this let's let's work it out i didn't think that was 1:01:11 going to happen i thought it was going to be the le the former it was going to be destroy everything burn it all down 1:01:18 that's what depression does man um it makes you want to destroy it all and then say [ __ ] it all i don't care 1:01:23 after the fact that everything's destroyed i was already feeling like [ __ ] why not to destroy everything around me too right so that's why 1:01:30 i acted like that um and it's it's incredibly embarrassing it was all public too it wasn't even like 1:01:36 oh you know there's a public [ __ ] i was saying on my podcast public [ __ ] that i was seeing my videos and then behind the scenes i'm texting drunk texting these 1:01:43 guys [ __ ] and i know they didn't believe me i'm not stupid but you know it's out of 1:01:50 control okay all right i've been talking to this guy since he left the day that he left that was the 1:01:56 last time he i talked to him yeah it was uh rewinding a bit so after he does the video with the text message and all that 1:02:03 yeah um he did a pre-stream like the following weekend where uh he says like stuff with john it 1:02:10 kind of becomes stale anyway it was basically an attempt to be like the entire thing was basically like to 1:02:15 write me out you know for no reason because like if you just called i would have told them hey man give me give me like a month or two 1:02:23 um but it was an attempt to kind of write like we don't need to john anymore he's he's a [ __ ] he's a [ __ ] loser 1:02:29 he's got all problems and you know we don't need them we're going to keep going with watch my stuff 1:02:34 um got very defensive like almost like i was doing something wrong to him 1:02:40 when i really wasn't yeah i did not wrong he wronged him but no he was he wasn't doing anything wrong 1:02:46 in regards to he didn't want to be in my content um he was doing the right thing for himself i just wish that he would have 1:02:52 said it instead of saying i'm going to be in your content it's coming no really it's going to happen and he kept leading 1:02:58 me on leading me on leading me on it's kind of like the same deal with howard before i left connecticut he would say i'm gonna i'm gonna be at your event no 1:03:04 i'm gonna be at your event no i'm gonna be at your event within 24 hours of the event i'm canceling my girl says we're busy like what 1:03:11 and i felt like that's essentially john was now pulling a howard on me he had become 1:03:16 that thing that he and i had talked about that was bad in the past you know um 1:03:22 i wish he did that differently i wish he at least would have been honest with me all right and i don't feel like he was 1:03:28 being honest or transparent with me at the time i feel like he just didn't want to be in my stuff yes there was personal 1:03:33 [ __ ] going on in his life but also now we know there was this stuff going on back in connecticut people didn't like 1:03:38 me there was poison there uh you know being spread around about me um about completely unrelated issues and 1:03:46 definitely all that being said um 1:03:51 this is a situation that i wish went down completely differently and it didn't you know and then i could do about it now 1:03:58 but uh it's it's done you know he's right in saying he didn't do anything wrong in 1:04:03 regards to not wanting to be in my content i just wish that he had been completely transparent with me about it and it probably would have avoided a lot 1:04:09 of these issues but the issues were created by me after the fact by not being able to do his content um 1:04:16 there's a video man that somebody said that somebody uh sent to me okay which was taken from one of his streams 1:04:22 dude so he basically was talking about me uh 1:04:27 around this time period it was like august or september and he's going off about how john uh lives with his parents 1:04:34 john lives in the middle of nowhere he's got all these problems and as usual yeah it's like like what i'm saying like we 1:04:40 don't need that [ __ ] loser around here you know he didn't specifically say the loser part but he'd say 1:04:45 the other stuff didn't say anything like that at all here's the thing he doesn't uh he doesn't know anything about 1:04:52 um my house who i live with um he has never been 1:04:58 to my home he's never uh expressed interest in in doing that he doesn't really know who's in my life or anything 1:05:04 about the situation and you guys saying things like that on a public stream 1:05:11 someone's supposed to be your friend um so i contacted him after this 1:05:16 immediately i just sent him a text message because he wants to say that other than yeah the timeline is skewed i can't 1:05:22 remember exactly when this was but this was definitely in that time frame of me doing [ __ ] up stuff on my streams 1:05:28 uh in regards to rambo because he wasn't really giving me transparent information or responding that much 1:05:34 um again it was me trying to justify a reason why he's not going to be in my content well he's got personal issues at 1:05:40 home uh he's got to handle those this whole youtube thing isn't his focus 1:05:45 but why am i saying [ __ ] like even if it was true or not because i'll be honest with you now oh i said it i'll be honest 1:05:51 with you so that means obviously that i'm lying now um no from my recollection 1:05:57 that was factual information the [ __ ] that i said from my recollection we had had behind the scenes conversations like 1:06:04 that and i was revealing that information to the public which i shouldn't have done he's saying 1:06:10 oh we never even talked about that he's making it up i i swear we did talk about that 1:06:16 if you text okay um i wouldn't just pull something out of my butt like that out of nowhere um 1:06:24 in regards to not never been to his house um but he told me all about it in the past i knew 1:06:30 what area of new york he lived in i knew about who he was living with um 1:06:35 and all of that because we talked about it so it's funny because he's basically saying here oh he didn't know anything about that maybe maybe 1:06:41 it really was true and he's trying to like defend himself here to say oh it wasn't real because he's afraid of doxing and [ __ ] i don't know you know 1:06:47 what the [ __ ] i said back then to the best of my knowledge was truthful it was just wrong to say completely wrong to say it he's sharing personal 1:06:53 information about me why the [ __ ] am i reading that and talking about that on my streams you know again the timeline's [ __ ] because i think this already had 1:07:00 happened previous to the thanksgiving thing but now he's bringing this up again expressed any problems or um i 1:07:06 don't i don't ever heard of any problems of john having with me so i sent him a texas i called wind that 1:07:12 you're uh saying very private things by the way you know not true things lies 1:07:18 about me uh in one of your streams i expect that you will not be 1:07:24 posting that to youtube i hope that you will not be uploading that to youtube 1:07:29 so he did not he didn't respond and i do not believe that um you did i 1:07:35 don't think he did actually post it you know it was one of those like pre-stream things a well again it's like 1:07:42 what what is going on here man yeah the next time i hear from from um 1:07:49 yeah he asks uh would you like to be on hate live what you're telling i can't do 1:07:54 he gets kind of frustrated about it and i kind of listen to him i'm doing my own show this week like i can i'm not available to do that you know it's 1:08:00 especially like every interaction has eventually do with videos and stuff man you talked about the thanksgiving video 1:08:06 talks about like we were talking about shows and stuff it'll be a message like uh 1:08:11 hey you're watching gotham and i'll be like yeah it's pretty pretty decent and then it'll just immediately turn 1:08:17 into uh yeah let's record this weekend see he felt that way but that's not what was happening i was trying to reach out 1:08:23 to him and be a friend and talk via text i couldn't call him i just couldn't i didn't have the time until super late at 1:08:29 night to be doing that kind of stuff but i was watching the show we both like comics let's talk about gotham we talk 1:08:35 back and forth about it you know for a bit things we like because we didn't like 1:08:40 and i say oh by the way you know any chance that we're going to do anything soon because i'd like to actually you 1:08:46 know again my my frame of mind because i'd like to actually talk with you uh you know on a time that i could take out 1:08:51 of a day make work out of it so i can have time to talk with you beforehand this is again what we used to do when you would come on saturdays for co-op 1:08:58 the first hour or two of us doing it wasn't doing it it was just talking about fun stuff having our friendly 1:09:05 interactions then we would turn on the cameras and start recording the content i wanted that back 1:09:10 he just wanted me to call him outside of all of that stuff okay 1:09:16 again workaholic bad bad way to go about having friends when all you're doing is work work work and all your interactions 1:09:22 with them is work work work right um and it's easy to say well phil you could 1:09:27 have just dropped everything and called him i mean you're right i could have absolutely you're right but i you know 1:09:34 at that point in my life i was separated from that life i had a new life here in 1:09:39 washington state i was fully focused on the things going on here which weren't great in 2015 2014 they were much better 1:09:46 um but you're right there's no i mean the excuse here the only excuse that i can 1:09:51 make is not really excuse me explanation is when you're separated physically from the that from something 1:09:58 from from the person all right it's not out of sight i don't mind because i still remembered him and i wanted to do that but i wanted to talk 1:10:03 to him i wanted to hang out with him i wanted to make content with him over the internet but it wasn't any it wasn't as easy as okay my saturday is that he's 1:10:10 driving over we do it it was man so now we got to try to like schedule in when we can both do it over 1:10:16 the internet makes it more complicated my schedule already i'm working all day every day and just barely making enough 1:10:22 money to make ends meet at that point and because i got myself into so much 1:10:27 debt and [ __ ] um so it was like yeah i mean yeah i could take time out and call them and 1:10:33 have a conversation on the phone um but i don't know if it's necessarily gonna lead to anything better you know 1:10:40 and a friendship you know i don't even have time for the friendship i wanted to have the work happen so i could cut the 1:10:46 time out of the work to have the friendship continue i know this is completely wrong everyone's probably like what the [ __ ] you call your friends 1:10:52 you hang out with your friend that's how it was in my mind it was oh work work work so have the scheduled work and cut out a 1:11:00 section of the work to be friends and then do the work after you know that's how it always was and it's [ __ ] up 1:11:05 completely [ __ ] up especially because again before i became a full-time youtuber who monetized my videos i did spend time with john we went to 1:11:11 tournaments we did all kinds of fun stuff together that nothing to do with making videos for youtube and that went away when i became a full-time youtuber 1:11:18 my fault he's right 100 percent here yeah you know i was like it's like what what 1:11:23 are you thinking man there's not many and i'll admit there's many texts he says which i just don't respond to 1:11:28 because how do you trust it man yeah how do you trust this is it gonna 1:11:34 become uh something that's i gotta talk about in the video now 1:11:41 [Music] and that's one of the reasons why i was reluctant to why why i didn't reply to 1:11:47 that text message because i i looked at it and said well if john went through this this nonsense with him with him 1:11:53 going ahead and posting these text messages on on or reading these things on his vlogs then what what's it to what's it 1:12:01 going to keep him from doing it with me well if you respond it becomes like oh howard's talking to me what the [ __ ] 1:12:07 john's yeah so why why even put myself in that predicament that's why i didn't even bother texting him attacking him back i 1:12:13 just left it left it like that but and then like i said he goes writes his text messages 1:12:19 sends text messages to john then sends me a text message and then what does he do right after he goes ahead 1:12:25 he and he posts a video yeah this was maybe uh two weeks ago two weeks ago and then what does he do started this week 1:12:32 that was the first thing they post this video on thanksgiving so yeah two weeks ago we got we both got texture like the 1:12:37 middle of the middle of the freaking night while we were in the middle of the night i got this it was like five it was like 4 30 in the 1:12:43 no it was 5 30 in the morning so that was like i think it was like three in the morning over there two in the morning yeah so 1:12:49 i look at it and i and i talked to john and i said you know i i really think he's drinking he basically these texts 1:12:55 i'm not going to go work for work because this would happen to me i'm not going to do that but he basically expressed that he wants to 1:13:01 kind of work things out yeah um but 1:13:06 he really does because you saw what he did uh on thanksgiving 1:13:12 so it's basically like an ultimatum kind of thing like if you don't [ __ ] talk to me respond to me right now that i'm gonna 1:13:18 go publicly and and try to [ __ ] you you know i mean he wasn't trying to [ __ ] you it was true 1:13:23 again he's right he was basically like you've been ghosting me for a year i'm depressed as [ __ ] i want to destroy 1:13:30 everything around me i want an answer you know is anything ever going to change or is it always just going to be 1:13:36 you know you ghost me forever and it worked 1:13:42 destroyed everything it worked man it destroyed absolutely positively everything about this 1:13:48 relationship there was no way you know after they made this video that this was going 1:13:53 to continue which is odd because we're at the end of the video and wait till you hear how they end it 1:13:58 it's baffling to me so let's finish this publicly yeah so you're not really 1:14:04 apologetic if you're doing that you're not really trying to make things right and you're really not hurt by the by the 1:14:10 situation okay and like if if you and i had a problem 1:14:16 howie but you never know i know right um 1:14:22 and i feel really bad that you're not speaking to me i'm probably not going to make the 1:14:28 things worse no i'm saying feel like you're you know whatever he said the insults that he said in a public video 1:14:35 yeah and it's almost like he's always got to try to save face he's always i'm the winner there's no winner in this situation man 1:14:41 no and i didn't think there was going to be a win again they are off base here there's no winner here i wasn't trying to be oh i'm the 1:14:48 guy that is the winner here i knew there was going to be a culmination and an explosion i thought it was going to be 1:14:54 they contact me behind the scenes say [ __ ] off never again stop contacting us block block block 1:14:59 or wow all right let's finally hash it out ignore you know johnny i thought it was 1:15:04 going to be john saying i know what you do for a year but let's figure it out one or the other i thought it was going to be the former i thought it was gonna 1:15:09 be [ __ ] you block block block i had no idea they were going to make a public video like this at all because again 1:15:16 ninety percent of the [ __ ] in this video it's the first time i'm hearing it i didn't know there was a resentment about project seven i don't know there was 1:15:21 resentment about all these things that happened over the years it's his first time hearing it and it blew my mind and made me 1:15:26 you know feel like [ __ ] but we'll talk about this in a second we'll address that personally versus 1:15:33 doing it the way he does and and personally i'll be completely honest with you john i really think 1:15:39 that he watches too much uh wwe because it feels like no i'm not 1:15:45 lying dude it feels like it really feels like he tries to make his channel like 1:15:51 that where it's full of drama when it's all drama just to try to create controversy my channel is all drama has 1:15:58 he ever even watched the [ __ ] channel i played video games 1:16:03 constantly the vlogging was the rare [ __ ] he he's acting like i'm keemstar like what is he talking about here 1:16:10 it doesn't even make any sense at all what he's saying is completely nonsensical stuff mercy so that he can 1:16:15 get more views yeah we're feeding into it right now create controversy 1:16:20 like i said you still you still find ways to monetize yourself for this time but yeah let's bring up that so uh wwe 1:16:26 smart guys man people people often ask them like are you doing smart guys you know just throw me under the bus 1:16:32 like uh it's up to josh 100 on him if we'll do it 1:16:37 uh i got some text from him from last summer where he's basically like 1:16:44 let me know when you want to do smart guys so i'll start watching wrestling again 1:16:49 so what that says to me is like you're not really a fan of it you don't really watch it 1:16:56 you will watch it if you could make a video about it and you're gonna make a video about it because you want to 1:17:02 monetize video so at this point when you get to this ear at the end of it now and you're like so 1:17:09 everything now is is everything i do is wrong everything's evil right there's no no jokes anymore 1:17:15 again this is the well's been poisoned so anything phil does is the mindset he's only in it for the money he doesn't 1:17:21 care about anyone but himself everything is evil everything's bad so there's a running joke that we used to 1:17:27 make when we did smart guys that wrestling sucks like most pro wrestling was bad i mean there's a few rare times 1:17:32 when the cm punk plot line happened to me like that but in general that the wrestling was dragging was quite bad it 1:17:38 wasn't as good as the stuff that used to be on tv it's a running joke that you know it's bad okay now 1:17:47 when he contacts me about where we're talking about this it's a joke oh you know i'll start watching wrestling again 1:17:53 once uh you know we're gonna do the show i just moved all right i hadn't been actively 1:17:58 watching wrestling because i haven't been actively doing anything and falling back into my habits all right but i was still following i 1:18:04 still knew what was going on in wrestling i was you know reading stuff online you know social media and the like and i was eventually going to get 1:18:09 back into it i feel like a great way to get full-fledged back into it after not being you know attached to it for a 1:18:15 couple months would be for the show it was a joke oh yeah i'm not watching it yeah we'll watch it again when we're 1:18:20 going to make the shirts you know sucks or whatever now this couldn't be further from the truth allow me to flip this a 1:18:25 little bit i don't really like doing this but this is at this point john i think at the end of the video 1:18:31 here he just starts throwing hail mary's what's the last few things i could say bad about phil all right 1:18:37 during the course that we were making smart guys all right i was watching everything i was watching 1:18:44 www every program on wwe including raw smackdown you know and other formative shows 1:18:50 that were coming out at that time plus impact wrestling every week i was watching impact wrestling 1:18:56 john didn't like 90 of the wrestling so every once in a while he'd watch a 1:19:02 ring of honor show and bring that to the table for the most part he'd come in 1:19:07 and after maybe just a few months of doing the show expressed to me that he didn't like the wrestling stuff anymore 1:19:12 um he wanted to keep doing the show and talk about it but he said so just so you know i'm going to come in and i'm not going to know anything about the shows 1:19:18 because i didn't watch them but what we're going to do is we're going to open up i had an ipad at the time we'll open up 1:19:23 your ipad and it will use this app to go through the results of the show so even 1:19:28 though i didn't watch any of the wrestling you can go through it because you watched it and as you're talking 1:19:33 about it i'll give you what i think about what happened on the show but i haven't watched it right 1:19:38 so kind of funny you know the whole time we're doing smart guys arguably half the time like 1:19:44 the second half we were doing the show he wasn't watching wrestling he was basically having me talk about what 1:19:50 happened going through results and giving my opinion on it because i had watched it and then he would chime in 1:19:56 all right we wouldn't know that he was good at bullshitting i guess all right but here we are years later 1:20:02 the show's retired we want to restart it i make a joking comment oh we'll start watching it again now you know i haven't 1:20:08 watched it in a while wrestling sucks oh see phil only watched wrestling because he would monetize it 1:20:14 dude we were we were making a show together monetizing and you didn't watch it so what are you talking about like 1:20:22 completely hypocritical there and that irks me because that's a particular situation where i was really carrying 1:20:27 the workload for that show and he was just riding along and now here it is years later oh what's the 1:20:34 last few darts we can throw at phil at the end oh he made a joke about wrestling that means he only monetizes 1:20:40 wrestling he doesn't watch it outside of it sure whatever you say john so it's just really weird you know like 1:20:47 like i'll start watching when you when you let me know that uh we're gonna do the show otherwise i don't [ __ ] i'm not gonna [ __ ] look at it you know 1:20:54 i don't know um let's go thanksgiving last year man i'm just trying we only got maybe a couple 1:21:00 things here left just to get out of here there's really nothing left they're just going to reiterate the entire day if i remember correctly yeah um 1:21:07 because life is good man if you let life be good there's a lot of great things you could be doing with yourself oh 1:21:12 exactly um so yeah on the thanksgiving video that he put out this year he talks about how 1:21:18 last year he was not invited on the black friday show that we did for uh 2014. 1:21:23 uh you know never mind the fact that oj wasn't actually there either does that mean that you know i hate oj 1:21:30 it was just you and i actually yep um and he also doesn't bring up the fact 1:21:35 that last year on thanksgiving he is when he decided to unfollow me on on twitter 1:21:42 um which again like you today you just with your family and and friends and whatnot we've already 1:21:47 addressed all of this but in quick summary every year he had me on his thanksgiving show to talk about black friday deals 1:21:53 and it was me and first it was me and howard then it ended up being o.j some of the years this particular year 1:21:59 2014 when i had moved again he's not talking to me at all he's basically ghosting me at this point uh 1:22:06 he says he's going to be in my content when he's ready i'm thinking well he's doing his content maybe he'll want me to be on his show all i did was send him a 1:22:13 text saying hey i'm available if you want me to to be on the show that was it there was no hounding there was nothing 1:22:19 no pestering or anything like that um and then people asked me after the fact of course what are people going to do 1:22:25 well phil we were watching this thanksgiving show and you weren't on it you're always on it don't you think that's a bad sign phil and against the 1:22:30 trolls i mean that's a bad sign don't you think that means that he doesn't like you you see and you know what they're trying to ah no big deal well 1:22:37 that's no big deal then man following you on twitter should also be no big deal right if you always have me on a 1:22:42 show you actively don't ask me to be on a show for the first time in many years all right and that doesn't mean anything 1:22:49 that doesn't mean anything if i'm casually unfollowing you on twitter if my trolls contact me and say ha ha you 1:22:54 weren't on rambo show because he hates you then you should also ignore when they say ha ha phil and followed you on twitter it goes both ways but this 1:23:01 entire video is oh everything phil does is wrong right but when we have the same reactions to stupid arbitrary [ __ ] 1:23:09 that shouldn't matter and trolls contact us it's awful for us you see and again that's my fault because 1:23:15 i am the one who has the internet finally makes a living it's those trolls that are doing the same thing to both of us they would never have been trolled if 1:23:21 they were never involved with my content to begin with and causes me to get a bunch of shitty 1:23:26 messages just like this year because you get a bunch of shitty messages and cause problems you know 1:23:33 that you drama that you don't need man that you're not looking for and don't deserve really 1:23:39 so there's something out there where people will be like people are saying john unfollowed phil on youtube 1:23:44 but the fact of the matter is he was never i never actually uh i never actually followed him in the 1:23:50 first place so i didn't unfollow him i also didn't follow oj and howard 1:23:57 i didn't follow any of you guys on youtube you know um so and then so i didn't actually 1:24:03 follow him and then consciously unfollow him um that's like very fourth grade 1:24:09 uh nonsense which he has done he doesn't follow i i still follow him on twitter actually because i'm not going to go through the 1:24:15 trouble of unfollowing someone like him the trouble of again following and 1:24:20 unfollowing someone on twitter the fact that this has any bearing on anyone's life is preposterous to me it's stupid 1:24:26 if someone care oh why did you unfollow [ __ ] you are you even asking me go get the hell out of here you [ __ ] idiot 1:24:31 just that that's crazy to me that this was an issue to them third grade uh but here's unfollowed all of us in 1:24:37 all things yeah okay wow he like i said he he threw the 1:24:42 first stone so now he's wondering why we don't talk to him and then you know when you start 1:24:48 looking at some of this the underlying issues you'll realize why it's a freaking circus man it's a circus 1:24:54 um he's doing the patreon he talked about the shirts yeah he says we're just kind of empty 1:25:00 emptying the the barrel here empty the barrel yeah it's already two hours a couple months ago 1:25:06 keep going maybe it was uh september of uh maybe september august of uh 2015 this year 1:25:13 he uh he put out a montage of a co-op a co-op playthrough that we 1:25:20 did and put ads on there hello again everyone darkseid phil here 1:25:25 and welcome to the best and worst of dsp classics where we turn back the clock and take another look at some of the 1:25:31 most classic old funny and weird playthroughs that i've done in my years on youtube the patrons 1:25:38 have spoken and this time we'll be checking out a little game called tv superstars um and it's pretty obvious that like i 1:25:45 don't want to do anything with you or be associated with you and then just let me put out a video 1:25:51 that's got john in it so i could put ads on it wow you know 1:25:56 why why would you why would you well i could see why you would do it but 1:26:01 again like there's obviously some problems with the relationship why do you uh think that's a good idea 1:26:07 wow no top other one wow i mean do i really have to address it 1:26:12 do i should i address that is there a point i mean we already talked about all of our arrangements over the years 1:26:19 you know he got paid for that work at the time very generously for it okay 1:26:25 there were never residual agreements there never will be residual agreements i can't even figure out residuals to this day i can't figure out residuals on 1:26:31 that stuff um it's my content i own it i have the 1:26:36 right to use that forever in perpetuity i own the rights to that the video is it in good taste 1:26:42 well if i was doing a whole oh let's do a ginormous project with four million parts that's gonna bring me in big bucks 1:26:48 and it's gonna be all about the best of john rambo okay maybe that would be considered bad taste 1:26:54 when i'm doing a project on patreon and the viewers themselves 1:27:00 say we loved those days back in the day that's old-school dsp and rambo can we 1:27:06 do like a montage of the best stuff from back then right what is wrong with that 1:27:11 well it was monetized so in john's eyes anything monetized with him on it is bad 1:27:17 patreon is bad anything bad anything is bad anything 1:27:22 with money bad but again we're getting into the video this isn't about money right this is 1:27:27 never this video is not about money however this is never number 114 times that we've mentioned money and we're 1:27:32 still mentioning at the end of the video it's not about money even though he was paid for those videos right this is like 1:27:38 this is my argument all the time that i paid you a licensing fee to play your 1:27:44 video game okay i paid the fee now i'm doing a let's play of it you claim my 1:27:49 video for music i paid the fee to use the content in your game all 1:27:54 right you've already been paid for that now i'm able to use it forever get it 1:28:00 same thing here he got paid for the videos he received compensation that was the 1:28:05 agreement we had there was no future agreements or anything about anything else in the future how 1:28:11 can you then say how dare you ever ever use this this content ever again in anything ever like i have to erase any 1:28:18 interaction i ever had with rambo and howard off the internet no it happened it's all there it's 1:28:24 documented it will stay there forever i will make two pennies every year 1:28:29 on all the content we did because like i said the old videos don't get monetized they don't get ads they don't i make 1:28:34 almost nothing on the ancient videos it's the new stuff that i constantly pump out that makes the ad revenue not 1:28:40 ancient videos you know it just doesn't exist it's just a myth a myth of youtube 1:28:45 that the old videos are getting tons of ad revenue they don't get the same ads on them as the new videos it's [ __ ] 1:28:51 so he'd think oh in perpetuity we'll always be making a living off of the content we didn't know ain't nothing on it it's ridiculous it's a it's a 1:28:57 horrible argument from someone who doesn't understand the way youtube works and someone who doesn't have a leg to stand on in that argument because i paid 1:29:04 him for his work what he wanted by the way like he thought it was too much at the time as we've already discussed okay talks about 1:29:10 behind my back uh on his forum or uh or elsewhere i was always catching wind of it man people 1:29:15 already talked about that we already talked about that and i guess the point where uh it's too much man 1:29:22 yeah and then you figure if you don't because then what happens is people you don't go ahead and address it and we're 1:29:28 trying to avoid addressing this for a long time but like i said he goes and makes a 1:29:34 video and then he starts with the [ __ ] again with you know making a video trying to 1:29:40 and and he and like like i said all the time and a lot of other people say he's terrible at damage control 1:29:46 and sometimes when he addresses things it makes it much better even worse than what it really was 1:29:52 and obviously and i think like i think we probably didn't even have to do this yeah because what someone says like it's 1:29:59 it's 100 on their side i did nothing wrong like no one no one believes that 1:30:04 no no no yeah exactly maybe most people are like smart enough to be like wait a second that's uh 1:30:11 really yeah like these other people just lost their we just lost our minds and became these [ __ ] heinous 1:30:17 villains and uh you know uh it's usually not how the real world works man yeah maybe you're maybe you're 1:30:23 out some of that wwe thing right but not the same i think i might i think i'm going to heal in real life yeah and i i like that 1:30:30 street fighter you can tell even from the beginning you know why like even from his name 1:30:36 like the king of hate this is so [ __ ] howard knows what the king of hate means he was there 1:30:43 during the entire time when i was the king of haitian street fighter he knew what it meant he's completely lying to 1:30:48 his audience at this point to try to make points that don't make any sense he knows that the king of hate is not that 1:30:53 i'm a hateful person on people on the internet he's being a jackass here he enjoys that he lives by that and it's 1:31:00 like you know i understand if it's like a facade for like youtube or you know whatever the case may be but like when 1:31:05 you're when you're doing these things in real life to people that are close to you and you start questioning whether or 1:31:10 not you know yeah you know if it's a facade or if it's the real you yeah look man didn't they he didn't kill anybody no he didn't 1:31:17 um he doesn't deserve to be put in prison or something or uh crucified or anything like that i have no hatred 1:31:23 towards him i wish him the very very best i feel like everything we addressed here today it's just stuff that's been put 1:31:30 out there that uh needed to get the other side of it um you know a lot of misinformation 1:31:37 and that stuff that'll piss you off man people say things about you that aren't true enough times um 1:31:43 you know you gotta get your story out dude i think i think there's people out there probably still won't believe or will deny with things that were said 1:31:50 here today yeah and it's not gonna matter anyways because no matter how you look at it 1:31:56 uh you know you got to live by that philosophy opinions are like [ __ ] everyone has one 1:32:02 and and that's what's going to end up happening you know anything that we talk about today it's going to get misconstrued in some way shape or form 1:32:08 so it goes you know um yeah fun things to do 1:32:14 like life is pretty simple man like i know you you kind of i think you kind of cracked the code you know you go to your job you do the 1:32:20 best you can you go to your job and maybe you don't like your job that much but 1:32:26 everything leads to something else what's he talking about what i mean what does this have to do with whatever you may work out there 1:32:32 you're learning some something um you may not may not realize that 1:32:38 but you're getting something out of it you're getting experience life experience that you could apply to something else and i think life is kind 1:32:44 of like a ladder you keep trying to climb um to greater heights you know 1:32:49 um oh yeah and then when you're off time you don't spend your time uh shooting on 1:32:54 other people you don't spend your time uh being angry about things or feeling like the world owes you stuff you spend your 1:33:00 time let's talk about something you might enjoy with people that you enjoy being around so this is this is the big 1:33:05 summary this is the end of the video this is how they end the video basically this is the dump this is pull the lever 1:33:11 dump it on him this is a full-on projection this is who they feel i am as a person do they watch my content 1:33:17 obviously not if they did they would know that's not what it was but that's what they feel yeah and it's very simple 1:33:23 you don't need millions of dollars my friends uh you don't need the money use your uh you know the views of the money that's 1:33:29 not what it's about yeah last time and like i said i i live by that the last time i checked youtube 1:33:34 doesn't sign my checks so you know to me it doesn't really would you really want okay would you really want them to would you want to talk 1:33:41 i personally wouldn't because i i i can't i can't deal with that 1:33:47 it's constantly having a you know and like i said i i'm gonna give credit where credit is due 1:33:52 and i'll be completely honest with you i'm i'm very impressed at how successful he has gotten oh 1:33:59 absolutely he's a very successful person for what he has done you know in the past five six years and he was a pioneer 1:34:05 in the beginning you know i'm not gonna say that he wasn't you know absolutely but i think he's stuck in a rut there's 1:34:11 a lot of let's players and it's hard to compete now unless you you do things differently and i think he's in a he's 1:34:17 in a really bad spot and that's why he's trying to reach out to us but he doesn't know how to reach out he does it in a negative way and it 1:34:24 really just pretty much uh too much damage has been done too much damage has been done and it continues being and the 1:34:29 damage continues because he doesn't know how to divert the damage yeah he just he just adds to it but i do i do care about 1:34:37 him and i hope he does those great things yeah i i'm hoping i hope he could um 1:34:42 if he isn't sure of uh i don't really know honestly if he's in a tough spot 1:34:47 um emotionally or whatever which i was income wise i hope you could turn around i think you can it wasn't about the 1:34:53 income it was about the emotion like i said i was incredibly depressed [ __ ] up in the head and 1:35:00 got absolutely no kind of positive reaction understanding or anything from these 1:35:06 guys nor maybe should i have because again we haven't been talking and everything but still you know it's funny because they're 1:35:12 individually like gee maybe someone is messaging us in the middle of the morning you're either drunk and 1:35:17 depressed and maybe we should like reach out yeah let's make a video about them for 1:35:22 90 minutes that'll help the situation yeah do it yeah um and i'll be i just want to throw 1:35:27 this out there and this is for this is for john and myself this is the last time we were going to 1:35:33 address this okay i am not going to continue doing this he says one thing we say another i'm not going to do this 1:35:38 this is the first and the last time i'm going to address this all right i might we'll see 1:35:44 yeah but you're done you're done i'm pretty much done because it's 1:35:51 you know what all right hold i'll say this okay i'll say this 1:35:58 so instead of to fill instead of making a monetized response video or trying to 1:36:05 you know post something on your forum or maybe i won't see it or something like that um 1:36:10 we're trying to try to make profit off any of this do what you said you were going to do 1:36:16 back in august 2014 give me an actual call give me the call that you promised that you were going to 1:36:22 do give give both of us the call okay sure yeah give the call i'll be happy to talk 1:36:28 to you give both of us the call why would i call howard i'm still i'm still confused 1:36:34 no give a both of us the call no i still want the call i mean i hate your guts and everything like i've explained in this video but please give me the call 1:36:40 too i need the attention whatever you want to talk about okay yeah um 1:36:46 and then that's that man that's that and uh people want to come here and uh 1:36:52 well you can come here and do whatever you want i realize this is a bootleg challenge put it together but if 1:36:57 you want to if you want to shoot on me and you know and if you you know people out there if you guys want to shoot on me 1:37:03 and say like you your views are [ __ ] whatever you want to say man my channel is me having fun with my 1:37:09 friends i don't put ads on my stuff because i don't have to i don't ask the audience for anything 1:37:17 um except to hopefully have a good time and have a great time doing what i do 1:37:23 so please again tell me that i'm not successful 1:37:30 okay tell me i'm not successful or you could just you know do the usual thing and say your big nose piece of 1:37:35 [ __ ] but you know that's true that part is true you juno's bastard 1:37:43 just calm down buddy is that the end of this thing this atrocity 1:37:49 yep that's it okay adios everybody yep okay so that's the end that's the very 1:37:55 last second i didn't leave anything else out okay so here's the epilogue because of course everyone wants to know what 1:38:01 happened how did what happened when this was released how did this affect me how did it all end all right so this was 1:38:08 released i finally take this off thank god this was released three days after my thanksgiving vlog 1:38:15 it was released like i said on that uncanny not men channel why they had to make a new channel to put this up i have 1:38:20 no idea apparently within you know a day or so of it being released not only was the 1:38:26 video deleted the channel was too okay completely deleted from the internet but the internet doesn't forget and 1:38:32 immediately it had been ripped archived and reposted all over the internet so even though the original is not intact 1:38:39 this still is has been all over the internet all right so what happened 1:38:45 i got contacted by everybody 1:38:50 by my fans by my haters long time friends like the every lord all reached out to me 1:38:56 saying damn phil wow uh don't know if you're aware 1:39:02 but you know apparently your former friends have put out a hit piece against you and 1:39:08 we have no idea if it's real or not or true or not we're not really not but we don't know what they're saying is true or not but my god 1:39:14 some of the things they say in this video are pretty damning um to the point where it really feels like 1:39:20 character assassination but if it's true obviously you're pretty [ __ ] that's probably the end of your career on the internet all right so bad 1:39:26 um so is it true or not a lot of people ask me that i said i'm not even going to answer 1:39:31 that i don't know i didn't watch it you know yet at that time 1:39:38 so you know certain people start telling me what's in the video i didn't watch it yet certain people start telling me what's in the video and they say 1:39:46 basically not only did they have issues with project seven but they had issues with your way you talked about scott 1:39:53 they literally say in the video um you know horrible things about you 1:39:59 saying you're drunk basically of course they didn't say that they said that's what they think that you're drunk that you're an abusive friend all this 1:40:06 stuff and i was like wait a minute what do you mean oh well they said that you called them in the middle of the night or not called 1:40:12 them excuse me texted them in the middle of the night it sounded like you were drunk and i was like oh [ __ ] 1:40:18 i was like you know it's one thing they put a video out and they're going to say phil's a jerk or whatever it's another 1:40:24 thing they're now telling the internet oh so phil's a depressed drunk you know which is essentially what you can piece 1:40:30 together from that video all right now i said what do i do about this 1:40:35 so well i could address it publicly or i could take action immediately to make sure 1:40:41 that the [ __ ] up things that i'm doing when i'm drunk don't happen again all right so what did i do deleted 1:40:47 not only their numbers from my phone i deleted the entire history of us ever talking 1:40:53 right emails deleted it all because i knew that when you're depressed and drunk you always want to 1:41:00 go back to that [ __ ] because it's happened to me before i deleted it all there's nothing there's no history left 1:41:06 it's gone from my phone from everything my emails gone nothing there's no correspondence 1:41:11 left between me and them all deleted basically within a day i got rid of it all because i didn't want 1:41:18 to have a chance that i would get drunk and depressed again and reach out to them again because they made it pretty abundantly clear in this video they 1:41:25 didn't ever want to hear from me again at least that's the way that i take when someone's saying to you um 1:41:31 you monetized the death of your friend and you publicized their death 1:41:36 you didn't pass what you owed us you constantly said nasty things about us and we 1:41:43 basically have had it um you know you're you're drunk you're you're you're texting us at night doing 1:41:49 all this [ __ ] up stuff when you you know again i didn't watch the video yet these are people telling me this 1:41:55 so my initial reaction is i guess i guess i don't want a chance ever 1:42:02 doing that again so i deleted it all so as of that moment which is probably like the day after they released the video 1:42:09 um i never i had no chance to ever reach out to them because i didn't have their 1:42:14 their contact information i deleted it completely okay i don't have it anymore um which is a good thing 1:42:20 i feel i feel is the right thing to do because if i had become drunk again and did something stupid like i 1:42:26 was depressed who knows what it would have been at that point right um so that was that and that was done as i 1:42:33 told you i did not actually watch the recording until months and months if 1:42:39 not like a year later i'm trying to actually remember all right and at that point like i deleted everything 1:42:45 and you know in my mind i'm thinking if these guys ever want to talk to me again they'll reach out to me 1:42:50 and they'll talk to me they have my information i'm the public figure here i'm the one who has a 1:42:56 youtube channel a twitch channel i don't know if i was doing youtube twitch at the time but you know what i'm saying a twitter uh they have they still 1:43:03 have they knew my address you know they still had my my cell phone number if they had a desire to ever 1:43:09 reach out and talk to me ever again they could have all right what's funny is in this video 1:43:15 you've seen it now in its entirety all right the things they've said about me the accusations they've made i've fessed up 1:43:21 to the things that i feel i did there's a lot of things in this video that are completely either misconstrued or 1:43:27 actually completely exaggerated to a point of absurdity the fact that they would say i publicized 1:43:33 and profited off of scott's death is probably one of the most insulting things anyone could ever say to anyone 1:43:39 and one that is said about me i don't have a desire to ever talk to you ever again okay that was that's of all the 1:43:45 things you can say in this video fine that's the one that's like you can't come back from that you know what i'm 1:43:50 saying when i actually finally watched this video and i saw the malicious way that 1:43:56 howard was saying stuff like that i was like that is it i i don't i never ever will want to speak with this man ever 1:44:01 again in my life i wish him the best i hope he has a great life but if anything what does this show me is a pattern of behavior 1:44:07 of someone who when they're in your face they're friendly to you they claim they like you they want to be in stuff with 1:44:13 you content they want to go on trips but then all of a sudden behind your back they're constantly saying bad things 1:44:18 about you they're saying this and that about you oh you should have paid you didn't pay oh you should have done this you didn't do this you're a bad friend 1:44:25 you're this you're that you're publicizing that you're doing that what wow and never once was that ever brought up 1:44:30 to me ever howard not once ever said a word to me negatively never 1:44:35 okay rambo did a few times like i said probably twice when i was in connecticut 1:44:41 each time we had the conversation i'm sorry i screwed up he forgave me we moved on positively with our lives we 1:44:47 kept having a relationship where we'd make content together we'd have fun together i paid for all the you know the 1:44:53 trip [ __ ] and all that um for most of the time not 100 of the time but most of the time it has 1:44:58 something to do with you know cost of gas hotel room or whatever getting access to the events that was me it all 1:45:04 continued after these conversations we had that were oh you did something wrong okay i'm sorry i i really bad i was insecure i 1:45:12 screwed up all right i forgive you great let's keep going right let's have a fun life together here's friends so 1:45:19 the fact that you know i move and it seemed like the moment i moved that was the end the moment i moved the attitudes changed right moment 1:45:27 i [ __ ] moved it was oh there's another reason why we can't why i can't do this there's another reason there's 1:45:32 another reason now i'm not even going to give you the reason anymore it's not going to respond to you anymore and we've already gone through this so you 1:45:38 know the situation i was in the wrong a lot but this is not a situation that was 1:45:43 one-sided this is a situation that was kind of two-sided and it seems to me that now that you watch this in its 1:45:48 entirety you get the frames of reference what you see happen it was a combination of many different factors including 1:45:53 trolling uh to both of us on both sides i could handle the trolling even though i very 1:45:59 frequently mismanaged it and said dumb [ __ ] because of it i carried on they could not they were 1:46:05 feeling so hurt by the troll oh your fans your misguided fans came and insulted me they were my fans those are 1:46:11 the same trolls that troll me on a daily basis but you for some reason thought right that they were my fans they're not these 1:46:18 are the same people they orchestrated [ __ ] to make us get out of each other's throats because they like seeing good 1:46:23 things end right these miserable fuck-tard people who just want to end good things on the internet because they 1:46:29 can't they get a good flex out of it they feel good about themselves when they ruin something good for someone else and that was a major factor over 1:46:36 the years about that okay um and you even say at the end of all of 1:46:42 this you might say well phil would you ever talk to john and howard ever again howard no i'm done there's 1:46:47 zero chance i would ever want to speak another word to that guy after what he said in this video it's ridiculous he interjected himself into this video to 1:46:53 begin with he was not the subject matter the subject matter was supposed to be the friendship between me and john that 1:46:58 ended when i moved for some odd reason that now has been extrapolated upon in this video right why is howard in his 1:47:05 video howard doesn't like me for various reasons you can agree with them you can disagree with them maybe you agree with 1:47:11 some you disagree with others why is he in this video the problem was me and rambo it always was we were the ones who 1:47:18 were gonna have that extended friendship after i moved how the [ __ ] is he in here what does he have to do with any of this 1:47:24 and he's the one who says the most inflammatory things in this video when he was never part of the equation 1:47:29 ever he acts like he is he's not all right it's ridiculous the extent that he's in here as an 1:47:35 instigator and and the things that he's saying about me i want nothing to do with this 1:47:40 guy i hope he has a great life i hope he has a great family with kids and all that i have no idea i don't follow the guy i have no clue i hope he's happy all 1:47:46 right i really do i just want nothing to do with him ever again after this now rambo here's the thing 1:47:54 you know i really did love the guy when we were friends all right i did absolutely positively 100 i loved the 1:47:59 guy he was one of my closest friends at the time when i moved it all ended it just did like we never were the same after i 1:48:06 moved in fact i never even felt like we had a meaningful friend-like conversation after we moved 1:48:12 after i moved okay so to me that friendship ended in 2014. it's not 2022. the guy has no internet 1:48:19 presence anymore all right i know nothing about it i hope that he's having a good life i do i hope he's having a 1:48:24 good life and he's safe somewhere all right however 1:48:29 what could possibly come from me you know talking to rambo at this point in my life let's be honest all right let's be 1:48:35 honest we're disconnected for how many years um 1:48:40 if anything what i've learned is sadly when it comes to me 1:48:47 no matter what the negativity ends up rubbing off right can we agree there like even if i'm well 1:48:54 intentioned even if i don't want anything bad to happen whether it's trolls whether it's something else negative it always seems 1:49:00 to rub off all right i'm gonna be honest with you guys again another thing that i've never really revealed you may notice and by the way this person i'm 1:49:06 about to mention is going to be shocked because he didn't know i was going to bring him up in this video i have a person who i've done co-op with 1:49:12 over the years by name brian okay he actually was a friend of rambo and howard he was in chasman a whole punch 1:49:18 as an actor over the years we've done cooperative gameplay okay and 1:49:24 he over the years has always expressed a desire to do more co-op with me 1:49:30 all right he's been friendly to me behind the scenes i have been called to him and i don't 1:49:35 talk to him that much and this is why right i don't want to engage with a 1:49:41 close relationship or friendship with someone outside of maybe every once in a while you get a little bit of co-op or a 1:49:47 little bit of interaction and that's friendly stuff i don't want to engage in this kind of friendship 1:49:52 again because of this because i never once had any issue 1:49:58 with these guys in person and the few times that there were we hashed it out but look what happened even with all the 1:50:05 well intentions in the world right look what happened right it [ __ ] exploded 1:50:10 it got toxic [ __ ] for everyone not just me for them too i'm sure on their end 1:50:15 they were constantly being bombarded with toxicity and [ __ ] up stings you know what i'm saying um 1:50:21 and in that regard i don't ever want that to happen to anyone else ever again you 1:50:26 know what i'm saying i don't even i feel like even with the best of intentions even if i had a friendship again with 1:50:32 someone like that it would just go toxic again i really feel this and i know that's [ __ ] up because you know brian's a really good 1:50:39 guy he's a nice guy he's friendly every once in a while he hits me up with like a text he's like what's going on i 1:50:45 want you know i want to do some you know let's talk or just be friends or do you want to do a co-op or whatever 1:50:50 and i know he feels that i ghost him i don't talk to him a lot that's on 1:50:55 purpose i feel like i almost feel like you know like how can i say it like i'm i'm poison 1:51:01 you know if i try to be friendly with someone for any extended period of time it's just gonna be bad for them you know 1:51:07 it's [ __ ] up to think that way i know but i do i've got this stigma stuck in my head 1:51:13 about this that this will always happen in my life um you know what i'm saying 1:51:19 uh i feel like any kind of interaction that i ever would have with rambo 1:51:25 would just be bad for him that he's probably out there having a good life he's probably off there having a great time 1:51:31 and i hope i want him to have a great life and a happy life and a family whatever he wants i want to have success i want to 1:51:37 have notoriety i want him to love life all right because we had those years together when he was loving life when we 1:51:43 were together and we were doing fun stuff together i know for a fact because he told me you know 1:51:48 um there was always [ __ ] up stuff that was happening kind of in our personal lives but we were together doing co-op 1:51:54 or traveling for a trip we were having a good time together that was the highlight right so i said to them it 1:52:00 seemed like it was business to me that was fun to me that was the fun [ __ ] the fact that i made a dollar doing it was 1:52:05 hilarious i'm on the phone with my friends we're making money doing this is ridiculous how it's like the best of all 1:52:10 situations the best of all worlds you know what i'm saying um and now i look back at that fondly but i 1:52:17 don't think it'll ever happen again you know what i'm saying right now i'm a very different guy now by the way i make different content okay for a different 1:52:23 kind of audience i am married happily married i live across the country all right i'm 1:52:29 separate i'm in a situation now where i'm able to successfully make content that doesn't need to have that anymore i 1:52:35 don't rely on someone else to be a part of my content to have that you know there's no possibility toxicity to come 1:52:40 over why doesn't phil do online co-op with his viewers this is why toxicity the trolls getting involved [ __ ] 1:52:45 things up for everyone why do i not have any friends outside of my wife because this is why the toxicity why does my 1:52:52 wife and i having private life that isn't publicized on the internet this is why do you see this is something that's 1:52:59 happened to me over and over and over in my life now since i became a youtuber i'm seeing this happen with you my closest of friends who are supposed to 1:53:05 be you know the biggest the biggest friends of my life and live what happened so how can i 1:53:11 say that that would not happen again if i were to invite other people into my life as friends right 1:53:18 so that's why and oh yeah you know do i have time for friends in reality i don't have a lot of time for friends either i 1:53:24 wouldn't really have much or any time for friends if anything i want to spend more time with my wife to begin with anyway but 1:53:29 i don't even get past that first step you know what i'm saying 1:53:35 i don't even get past that first devil oh let's go past the step of oh we did a co-op together online and we had some 1:53:40 fun playing apex legends or whatever let's now extend that to personal life have personal conversations i don't want 1:53:45 to go there i just don't because it's toxic [ __ ] and i'm afraid i am afraid but for what's to stop history from 1:53:51 repeating itself i'm in a good place right now personally in my life i'm happy with my life i wish i had more time to spend with my family i just 1:53:58 spent 12 hours on a stream i'm sure my wife is furious with me because i'm pretty sure she didn't expect me to be 1:54:03 on here as long as i was okay um 1:54:08 if anything what i will leave you guys with is is this all right some advice things that i've learned 1:54:15 the first life lesson that i learned out of all of this all right is 1:54:20 if you're going to mix business with friendship you absolutely positively must have a contract doesn't matter how 1:54:27 friendly you are with the people it does not matter how much you think you're different from 1:54:34 other stories you've heard like i knew about the screw attack story with stuttering craig and handsome tom and 1:54:39 how their friendship had fallen apart that'll never happen to us apparently that's exactly what happened to us we were no better we were no 1:54:44 smarter we fell right down the same the same hole the same problems so no matter what 1:54:50 have a contract in place so that way everyone knows what's going on and there's no unreasonable expectations 1:54:56 down the line what's fair is fair they said a million times what's fair to me is what we agreed to and you guys wanted 1:55:02 and never asked for anything more not oh phil's some crazy philanthropist who's gonna start pulling out lots of money 1:55:07 out of his pockets and tossing it in the air which by the way i kind of did whenever we went on trips and [ __ ] and i was paying for stuff and 1:55:13 everything um i thought everything was good you know again wasn't told otherwise um 1:55:20 another life lesson for everyone out there okay um jeez hold on 1:55:34 separate your private life from your public life even if you're an internet content 1:55:39 creator you have to have a separation you can't have every moment of your life documented and put on the internet 1:55:46 and if you have a friendship that's based around things that are only public it's not really a friendship okay with 1:55:52 john i absolutely had moments that we had private stuff behind the scenes with 1:55:58 howard that was never the case we almost never had anything unless we were making content or whatever for the internet going to a street fighter tournament 1:56:03 you know that was our interaction that's not a real friendship okay you should absolutely have a separation 1:56:09 between the public and the private because when you only have everything public facing on the internet all right 1:56:16 you that's that's when it all goes wrong you have to have actual you know relationships and understandings behind 1:56:22 the scenes or else it's not really a relationship in my opinion okay um 1:56:28 lastly the last thing i leave you with my longest stream ever all right 1:56:34 never be afraid to be upfront and honest with someone about anything okay never 1:56:40 same thing that i said in my video from 2015 sorry i still believe in it today if you have an issue issue with someone 1:56:46 excuse me i just belch um tell them be upfront and honest and transparent 1:56:52 about it don't let it stir don't let it fester you know with john he did bring up things from time to time with me that 1:56:58 was good howard that never happened he never said a word to me negative but then he says all this [ __ ] behind my back apparently 1:57:04 again the circle of friends that hate me and then he's involved in the video even though he's not even my friend like what 1:57:09 the [ __ ] is this right um don't be afraid to be honest and up 1:57:15 front if you are honest and upfront with someone about an issue and they're angry with you because you were 1:57:21 all right that's not someone who who respects you right that's not a friend a friend should be 1:57:27 appreciative of a fact that you want to address issues and get them worked out a friend should be someone who's not offended when you bring up their 1:57:34 shortcomings because you want them to understand that you want them to be better okay i wasn't like that with them because 1:57:40 when john brushed [ __ ] up every time i was like oh my god that feeling might i can't believe i [ __ ] pissed off john he's the one person i never never want 1:57:47 to piss off on this planet and i did because i [ __ ] up and i did stupid [ __ ] you know um i was never angry that 1:57:53 john ever brought up something to me that that he called me out for i was happy that he did all right i let him 1:57:59 down as a friend over the years and that's sad to me you know and 1:58:04 i think at this point like i said this is it for me um i'm not bringing this up again we've covered it for 12 1:58:11 [ __ ] hours well i guess it was about more like 10 hours i'm done with this [ __ ] all right i'm not talking to howard 1:58:16 ever again maybe at some crazy random chance at one point in the future 1:58:23 i will talk to ha to rambo excuse me um but at this point in my life i've moved on i don't think anything good could 1:58:29 ever come of it being honest if you call me right now i'd be like i don't think i want to answer that phone because the 1:58:34 moment i answer it the toxic [ __ ] starts coming through the lines again and i don't want him to be touched by that i'm sure he has a great life at this point 1:58:41 you know away from all that [ __ ] he doesn't want to be wrapped up in that [ __ ] again i want i want him to be happy and separated from 1:58:47 this toxic [ __ ] that has become my life you know what i'm saying so i hope this is the end of it you have 1:58:54 questions moving forward while john at howard watch this that's it done with it that you moved on 1:59:00 completely not even a topic of discussion for me all right i'm a different person now it's a different 1:59:05 life and uh i hope that at least some of you learned something out of me doing this 1:59:12 maybe this will help you to stop for making the same exact mistakes that i made over time i'm not a perfect guy not even close to 1:59:18 being a perfect guy i made tons of mistakes i'm very regretful of the fact that these guys were hurt by me and it's 1:59:24 sad the way it ended but you know that's life i think seven years later 1:59:30 probably all happy how our lives went i know i am i hope they are 1:59:36 and that's that okay guys that is it holy [ __ ] like i told you guys i need a 1:59:43 break from drama i'm not doing this [ __ ] for a long time that was too long i'm done we're ending 1:59:48 it right now thank you for watching whether you watched on stream you watched on demand on youtube i hope that you learned 1:59:54 something peace [ __ ] out jesus christ 2:00:00 what i just click i don't know what i just clicked i clicked the wrong damn

[caxde]

closeness | Steve Harrington x reader

summary you're Hopper's daughter and after the events of the Starcourt mall, and him being pressumed dead, you deal with guilt and grieve, for better or worse, your best friend Steve is dealing with the same thing.

word count: 3.9k (first steve fic i post hope u like it)

warnings fem!reader, angst! (kinda a lot I was in a mood), fluff, hurt/comfort, mutual pining, yearning etc, slowburn bestfriends to lovers, idiots in love!!!, sharing a bed trope, it has some pretty negative self talk and allusion to an anxiety attack...so yeah. english is not my first language so I apologise if there’s some mistakes, not proof read!!

The nights have been lonely lately. 

You did have the option to go far away and escape this town, but when the time came, you were incapable of doing so. 

Here, everything reminded, echoed in a way your father. So it came to no surprise that you stayed back, and Jane had left. 

And yes, of course saying goodbye hurt like a bitch and opened up all types of wounds that you had stitched together, but, you had to. She would be safer in California, miles and miles away from this god-forsaken town. 

And yes, the weather didn’t help. Late November and the cabin was surrounded by snow, cold and quiet. Nothing else but you. Not even the usual chirping of birds that accompanied you throughout spring and autumn were here anymore. So you felt that, alone. 

You knew you weren’t actually alone, but having to ask for help or company felt like a chore that you had no energy to complete, so you rested there. In the middle of your living room, with the fire barely hanging on, the T.V turned off, and no lights shining onto you. It’s not like you liked the darkness, or that it didn’t bother you, you just wanted to lay in it and its familiarity. Swallowed by it almost. 

No chatty banter with him. Not even the smell of his gross cooking filling the air. You hadn’t cooked in your kitchen for months. 

It was expected. Everybody told you that grief is a process and that you can’t rush through it, but… You didn’t feel like that. 

You felt as if all the grief that you felt for him was just all the love you still have for him, that you didn’t get to express, or show and don’t know where to really put it now. Robin suggested getting a dog, and you did laugh at the idea, not because you found it ridiculous or weird, but because you were struggling to take care of yourself, how could you ever take care of another living thing? 

You were spiraling pretty bad, and you did want to call someone, anyone really. It didn’t matter as long as they could hold you and tell you that you weren’t insane for holding onto hope, or believing that maybe he was really alive, or that it was okay not to be okay, that you would get through it and that you are still deserving of love and affection. But you didn’t want to burden anyone. 

Though his name came into your mind. 

As a whisper almost. 

And as fate had it, the phone started to ring, pulling you away from that circle of self-doubt or self-hate? You weren’t even sure anymore. 

So you stand up, pulling yourself together, wiping the tears that started to form in your eyes but hadn’t had the courage to jump out of them. You picked it up, waiting to hear someone’s voice. 

“Hello?” Your voice cracked, you hadn’t spoken in what felt like days.

“Hey Hopper, it’s me.” You winced as you heard your father’s last name, but a soft smile contradicted it, it was Steve’s voice after all. 

“Hey Steve…” You whispered, really trying to hold yourself together now. “Um… what… what’d you want?” You said as you failed to stop the last tear from dropping. 

“I was just checking in… Hadn’t heard from you in a while…” He admits, his voice soft-spoken and calm, you could feel his eyebrows raising and furrowing in his forehead. 

“You called me yesterday…” You said, with a chuckle, trying to hide the fact that you were about to break down and cry. 

“Yeah, well… Something told me you…” He stopped for a second. Your hand grabbing your cheeks tight, hoping that if you had enough strength you would stop crying and would be able to have a normal conversation, not worrying him. “Hey…” He said softly, with a whisper of a voice. “Were you- are you crying?” That was enough for you to actually fall to your knees, hugging yourself as you crumbled. 

“Yeah…” You manage to say, not being able to say anything else, whimpers and fast breathing invading your body. 

“Be there in five.” His voice said, not mean, but harsh. Decided, and yes, worried. 

You tried to say anything to him, something that would make him not worry and not come over here, but it was useless, he had already hung up. 

And you just laid there, in your hard-wood floors, trying to hold your body as you searched for comfort, not really sure if you had the strength to get back up. 

It was all my fault. Itwas all my fault. Itwasall my fault. Itwasallmy fault. Itwasallmyfault. 

Your brain screams at you as you remember your father going down, and Joyce’s face when she had to tell you. 

You don’t know how long it took, or for that matter, how long you had stayed clawing your floor trying to composure yourself. But Steve came through the door. 

He came directly to you and said nothing. He just held you, as you just wept. Eternally grateful for him, but at the same time, incredibly embarrassed that he had to see you like that. 

“I’m sorry.” You managed to whisper, your voice higher than ever before, your eyes burning from the tears. 

You felt the grip of his fingers grow deeper into your skin. 

“Don’t be.” He said, as he played with your hair. “I’m here.” He remained you. 

You nodded, and let your body relax at those words, your head hitting his chest, him just holding you more and more tightly, reassuring you, comforting you. 

“You’re staying at mine from now on.” He declares. His voice, serious, and clear. He grabbed your face, cupping it in between his hands. “You don’t bother. You need to get out of here. And I want you there, okay?” He answers before you can even say nothing to him. You nod, with a shy thank you smile. He nodded as he left a kiss in the crown of your head. 

He stayed in the ground with you until your breathing returned to normal, and you could actually talk without hiccups. He had no rush in making sure you were okay. 

Once you were capable of standing up, he guided you to the sofa, and made you wait there, as he went into your room and packed the essentials. He told you when you tried to tell him off, that he knew it would be easier if he did it now. That you could come tomorrow and grab what you actually wanted or needed. And yeah, he was right. Because he always is when it comes to you. 

-

“D’you need anything?” You ask as you see him getting ready to leave. 

“Oh um… No, think we’re good.” He says as he scans the fridge once again. Coffee pot still hot. 

You give him one of your funny looks, judging him as he runs his fingers through his hair. You leave your chair and walk right next to him, as you eye the mostly empty fridge, his hand still holding the door. 

“Dude, do you really wanna have soup for dinner, again?” You ask him, eyebrows lifted, sarcasm in your voice.

“Well, no. Not really.” He admits, closing the door. Walking back to his mug, raising it to his lips. “But you don’t have to go and get anything, I can do it.” He says, eyes lost on the maroon liquid. 

“Oh, c’mon. I’m the one invading your house, let me do something!” You demand of him, almost begging. 

He nods as he leaves to grab his brown worn-out jacket. Your eyes are set on him, the way he moves, ever so easily, confident in everything he does, even if that is just his routine, you’re amazed by the way his arms glide through the sleeves, and how his head lifts up, hair bouncing, defying gravity all the same. 

His eyes meet yours for just a second. 

“You don’t have to do anything in return you know? I like having you around.” He reassures you. Hands in his pocket, you nod with a polite smile back. He copies your body language, relaxed. “Be back at 8, ‘kay?” 

“Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” 

Even if he isn’t conscient of it, you catch him muttering under his breath as the entrance door opens. 

“I always worry ‘bout you.” 

Be as it may, it makes you smile. Not really sure why it would, it still does. 

So as you lay in his kitchen, you begin to do what you’ve taken as your routine since he invaded you to live in his house a few weeks ago. You clean the dishes from the night before, and sort out what needs to be sorted out. Laundry and bathroom today. 

You spend a quiet morning doing so, not haunted my memories, not a devastating inner monologue, just that. Stillness and calmness. And it seems as though the weather accompanies you today, with an unusually warm sunlight that crawls through the windows, a promise that today won’t be as freezing as the rest of December has been. 

So you decide that today’s a good day to walk around Hawkins. 

You’ve been borrowing his old walkman, with the stuck mix-tape that Dustin had gifted him god knows when. You put his headphones on your head, and as you press play, you move through his empty house, crawling to the bedroom that he had for visitors. And you do find yourself thinking how strange it is, such a big house, and yet it’s always empty except for him. An absent father, and an out-of-the-map mother. 

Maybe he needed your company just as much as you needed his. 

You smile to yourself at that thought, and how perfect it would be if that was the case. 

When you look at the mirror, you feel as if you're missing something, not quite sure what it might be, you spin around your room, walls still white, you spot a vivid yellow jumper on your floor. So you grab it and put it on, smelling Steve as it lays on top of your body, you’re ready to leave. 

-

“Thank you” He muttered as he finished his last bite. You had decided to eat on the couch, eyes darted at the T.V. 

“Don’t mention it.” You say as you let your plate rest on the coffee table, grabbing your cup of water in the same motion. “I should be thanking you” 

“What for?” He demands, looking at you through his brows, unsure. 

“Letting me stay here. Y’know, everything…” You let out, avoiding his gaze as you darted around the room. 

“How long have we known each other?” He asks all of a sudden, his left hand stroking his face as his eyes finally connect to yours, shocked in response to his question. 

“I dunno, seems like I knew you since I was born” You say, sincerely, your face and body relaxing at him, as his right hand readjust a wisp of your hair that wasn’t quite in place. 

“Exactly. So stop bullshiting me!” He exclaims. You flinch in show of his response, not really sure what to do next, he readjusts himself. Leg climbing up the sofa, his arm resting in it. Pulling closer to you. “I’ve known you my whole life, so please, please don’t lie to me.” He begs, as one of his hands catches yours, in a plea of sincerity and vulnerability. 

“I’m not…” You try to say, as you catch your voice barely coming out of your body, tears bubbling up as your vision gets blurry. A feeling of heaviness invading your chest. Your hand that rested free on the back of the couch is now wiping the beginnings of the tears away, your mouth tasting salty already. 

“But… You are… You can tell me…” He whispers back, the grip he has in your hand growing stronger, his eyes shooting compassion and begging for you to trust in him, to let yourself be seen by him. 

“I just… It’s my fault…” You mutter, as you finally let your walls down, crumbling down, not physically, but you could feel the silent tears not waiting for you to wipe them, as they escape with no order. 

“It wasn’t.” He answers back. 

“It feels like it…” Your voice barely audible, you see his head getting closer so he could hear you. 

“I know it does, but everything that happened… Yeah, it sucks but… Y’know, you’re alive.” Your face flinches at that, yes you are alive but for all that it’s worth, he isn’t and if you had to put words into what you were actually feeling it would be survivors guilt. “And you deserve to be…” He finishes, with his free hand, he pushes hair away from your face, and leaves it there, in the back of it, stroking your hair, hoping he can give you some sort of reassurance. He does. 

“I don't… Not more than he did…” You try to argue. To  no avail, you can see Steve crumbling down, his body moving closer to you now, holding your gaze up to meet his eyes. 

“I think he would think otherwise.” He tells you, as his thumb wipes some of the tears away, soft eyes looking at you, with a sideways smile. 

“Yeah, and he’d be a dick about it..” You whisper, making you both laugh. 

“Oh absolutely he would.” He says, laying your head in his shoulder, as he rests his head on yours, holding you sideways. 

Intimacy growing between the both of you, you enjoy that moment of stillness and quiet. 

-

You usually weren’t able to fall asleep until later in the night, meaning that usually, the sun could be seen waking up when you went down, finding comfort in knowing that sunshine was coming. 

So, as a consequence, you had a habit of saying goodnight to Steve at around ten o’clock at night, when he went upstairs to his bed. You would catch one of the books that his father had laying about and bring it with you, in the room next to him, sharing nothing else but quiet and a wall. 

So you sat down, back to the wall, resting on top of the comfortable and cold bed. Having decided to finally read Pride & Prejudice, you moved your hair out of your way, pulling it up in a ponytail. Still wearing Steve’s yellow sweater, you removed your pants, resting the book in your bare legs, you started to read. 

Before you knew it, you were immersed in it, reading. 

“Chapter 12 

In consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the next morning to their mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for them in the course of the day. But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which would exactly finish Jane’s week, could not bring herself to receive them with pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at least not to Elizabeth’s wishes, for she was impatient to get home…”

Steve’s screaming snapped you out of the world you had immersed yourself in. 

You dropped the book and were rapidly moving across your room, opening his door wide. You find him, his head resting in his hand, chest moving rapidly as he had trouble breathing. His eyes move at you for a moment, though he wants to, and you can tell, he’s not capable of saying anything to you. 

So you don’t say anything. 

Nor did you think about what you were doing. 

Your body just found its way to his, holding him, just like he had hours before. You could feel him leaning his weight into you, his body exhausted and crumbling into yours, so you did what he did for you. You held him, no questions asked. No demands. 

His chest, you could see, was back to its normal rhythm, though you had become distracted by the fact that he wasn’t wearing any shirt or nothing to that matter, but some old pyjama pants. 

His head rested in your shoulder this time, and his lips whispered into your ear, so soft and so deep that it sent tingles to your whole body as he spoke. 

“I’m better… I…” 

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me…” You finish for him, as your hand finds itself lost into his hair, something that you never dared to do before. 

You could feel him smiling, as he nodded, hair tickling your cheek as he did so. The warmth between the two of you growing, with a need of touch that you both had met in this moment. 

“I don’t have to leave if you don’t want me to.” You whisper to him. Your head looking down at him, his brown eyes were still shining, even at the dead of night. But then again, they always did when he looked at you. 

So, with no words needed, he opened his side of the blanket and you crawled inside. His body was holding you tight, just as you did to him. Your head in his chest, his hands in your hair. You hadn’t slept that quickly or comfortably in a long time. And neither had he. 

-

It became a routine. 

Nighttime fell on the Harrignton household, and he would head upstairs first, you would follow his steps half an hour later, book in hand. He would rest his head on your chest covered by one of his old shirts while you read. Once you felt his body relax, you would close the book and let him hold you, the nightstand light turned off. 

He woke up first, and he would always leave a sleepy kiss on your shoulder while he mumbled a good morning. He’d go down and you would creep out of the sheets when the smell of coffee travelled its way to you. 

And you would share a quiet morning. 

It felt nice. It felt good. It felt right. 

But you could also tell that it was screwing with your head. 

You had caught his hands caressing your skin more and more lately, and the places he touched would burn with a strange mix of desire and need, expressing themselves in warmth. You saw his eyes darting to your lips when you were speaking to him. His going-out-to-work hugs would last more and more, and they left no space between your bodies. 

You weren’t free of guilt either. 

Your hands now had the habit of searching for him in the middle of the night. Your lips searched for his shoulder to leave a kiss on them every time he turned around in his sleep, craving to hear him let a soft moan out. And everytime he was standing in the kitchen you would hug him from behind, your arms holding tight as your hands played with his shirt. 

You realized in the middle of the day, that you were indeed falling madly in love with him. 

So, on that night, when he came home, you looked at him like you never had before. 

Your breath got caught up for a second too long. Your eyes shined bright every time you dared to look back at him. Your cheeks grew pink and warm when he hugged you as soon as he came from outside, even if his clothes were cold, you didn’t feel it, your body burning up in new discovered feelings. 

You grew nervous and fidgety, craving his closeness. Feeling somehow guilty of what your heart felt, scared shitless of what this all could mean. 

And you didn’t know this, but he was just as nervous this evening. 

So when he caught you picking at your skin, he didn’t warn you before grabbing your hand. 

You were once again in his bed. Book closed in your chest. His face close to yours, his eyes looking softly at you, begging for you to say what was on your mind, his lips slightly parted. 

“What’s wrong?” He asked, his voice sounded tired, as if he had been but a moment away from falling asleep. As he grabbed the ends of your fingers, you saw how truely close his lips were to them. When he saw you growing quiet, staring at him with doe-like eyes, he pulled himself closer to you. Your body is completely touching him. 

“C’mon, you can tell me… I.. I’m here…I’m your friend…”

You let out a soft laughter, and didn’t really think before speaking. 

“But you're not…” You whisper to him. His eyes take offence at this, his body moving forwards from you as you tell him that. 

“What do you mean?” He begged, his voice barely audible, but broken. 

“Friends don’t do this… Steve I…” You were getting flustered, his hands still wrapped around your fingers. 

“Whaddumean?” He asked, all in one phrase. 

“Friends don’t… This!” You say as you point at both of you, he shaked his head, not really following you. “Friends don’t sleep together, they don’t cuddle, they don’t kiss you good morning and good night, they don’t…” You can see him getting slightly offended at the words that you're saying to him. 

“Look, you can’t leave! You were the one that said that-” You had to cut him off. You didn’t like him getting flustered or mad about something that was not what you meant. 

“I don’t wanna leave! I want to stay like this! I want… you” You say, your eyes completely sincere, your shoulders relaxed, begging him to understand what you were trying to say to him without actually having to say it outloud. 

“Then what do you mean we’re not…” He’s getting frustrated, hands in his hair, scratching in anger, in misunderstanding. 

“Goddammit Steve!” You yell to him, throwing the blanket off of you, to his body. Your chest goes up and down rapidly. “I love you!” You yell to him, your cheeks warm and red, tears of nervousness in the corners of your eyes. 

“I love you too but… I don’t- I’m not following.” He said, in his most honest, lost voice. His body closer to yours again, begging to understand what was going on. 

“Steve…” You whisper. “I… I mean, that, I’m in love with you…” 

As soon as your words reach him, you can see the way the light lights up in his head, as he understands what you mean. So he does what he’s been dreaming about for so long. 

His left hand grabs your cheek, and as your eyes meet, he holds you like this for a moment, foreheads touching, both of your eyes closing. Your heart is beating faster than ever. And he finally closes the distance. 

Your lips finally touch. In need to finally feel the way he feels, his other hand getting lost in the back of your neck, playing with your hair, as he holds you closer and closer. No rush between you, your arms hold him, getting lost in the back of his neck. Needing him like you’ve never needed him before. Your tongues touch as the kiss deepens. You're both smiling as you do so. 

“I guess we’re not friends.” He whispers an inch away from your lips, kissing you again. Making you laugh in between kisses. 

“I guess not.” You say as you continue. Kissing him. His lips. His neck. Messing with his hair as much as you can, enjoying the way his body fitted against yours. 

“I’m in love with you too.” He admits later in the night, as he spoons you, whispering it in your ear, as he turns you around to kiss you again. 

You didn’t sleep that night, for a good reason this time. 

-

if you enjoyed (i I really hope you did), please reblog! i promise it makes a difference

-

<3

[a-small-batch-of-dragons]

Saved

Prompt: Hello! I very much enjoy all of your Sanders Sides fics. I am a Roman Stan first and foremost and you do his angst a delicious service. 

I was wondering, (if you have the time &/or energy) if you would be for writing a Roman, who instead of just turning into a small child (I love that fic btw), he (they) also turn into a girl. Because in Roman's sweet mind, Princes (and Princesses) save the day but only princesses get saved from the big bad in the end. (Not exactly but unfortunately there's more evidence for than against.) So, when Roman feels overwhelmed and upset and horrid, welcome the little princess, except no one knows because how silly, how selfish, how childish to turn into a little girl because that's the only way you think anyone will hold you and protect you and save you, even from yourself? 

If you like the idea, could you maybe include C!Thomas who keeps seeing her out of the corner of his eye and freaking out because why is there a small child in his house?! 

Thanks!

Hope you're having a great November! - anon

Read on Ao3

Warnings: sad roman hours, but that's about it

Pairings: gen

Word Count: 3842

It isn’t uncommon for some of the Imagination’s creations to get loose in the rest of the Mindscape, so when Thomas catches sight of a little girl in a sparkly dress near the window, he doesn’t pay her much mind. 

At least at first. But then she keeps showing up, and no one seems to be able to understand why. Remus says as long as they bring her back to the Imagination, everything should be fine, but then why does she keep appearing?

And where is Roman?

It isn’t uncommon for some of the Imagination’s creations to get loose in the rest of the Mindscape, so when Thomas catches sight of a little girl in a sparkly dress near the window, he doesn’t pay her much mind. Odds are she’s simply wandered a bit far away from the door on accident and Roman or Remus will be along to fetch her any moment. 

But then he takes another step closer and she startles terribly, almost falling over. Her eyes go wide and she brings her hands up to shield herself. 

“Hey, whoa, I’m sorry,” Thomas says quickly, crouching down, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m not gonna hurt you, see? I’m just over here.”

The little girl lowers her hands slowly, eyeing him warily as she presses herself against the wall. 

“See?” He waves. “It’s only me. I’m just a—well, I’m just a person. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

When she doesn’t seem to move anymore, he sits, crossing his legs. 

“Are you lost?” She glances at the window. “Did you want to look outside?”

“Mhm.”

“Are your parents anywhere nearby? Do you know?”

“They’re not here.”

“Okay. Do you need help finding them?”

“No.”

This isn’t getting them anywhere. Thomas glances over his shoulder. Where are the twins?

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, don’t cry,” he says when he looks back to see her eyes welling up with tears, “it’s okay, I—um, oh, god, I’m not good at this.”

Patton. Patton’s good at this. Let’s get Patton here. 

“Thomas? What’s going on, I heard—oh, hey.”

Thank God. Patton’s voice softens immediately upon seeing the crying child and he’s crouching down too, holding his arms out. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” he murmurs, “are you okay? Are you scared?”

The little girl nods, still tucked against the wall. Patton makes a sympathetic noise. 

“Do you need help, sweetheart? Can you tell us what’s going on?”

“’M scared.”

“I’m sorry you’re scared. Do you want a hug?”

The little girl scrambles up and into his arms, letting him scoop her into a cuddle and tuck her head under his chin. He lets out more soothing noises as he rubs her back, rocking her slightly back and forth. 

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“R-Rose.”

“Rose? That’s a very pretty name,” he says, pulling back to wipe the tears from her cheeks, “just like your dress. That’s a very sparkly dress, sweetheart, I like it a lot.”

Watery giggles clear the rest of the tears from her eyes as Patton picks her up. 

“Did you get lost, sweetheart? Do you need to go back to the Imagination?”

Rose nods, fingers curling shyly into Patton’s shirt. 

“Can I carry you there? Yeah? Okay, let’s go.”

Rose looks over Patton’s shoulder at Thomas as they walk off. Thomas waves and she waves back. 

Huh.

2.

When Thomas sees the little girl by the window again, he coughs before he gets too close. 

“Rose, right?”

“Yeah.” She shifts a bit, adjusts her sparkly dress before looking at the window. “‘M Rose.”

“Are you lost again?”

“No. I like looking out the window.”

“Can I come sit with you?”

“Uh-huh.”

Thomas sits next to her, catching sight of a crown sitting next to her that he doesn’t remember seeing before. “Is that yours?”

“The crown? Mhm, ’s mine.”

“Are you a princess?”

Rose glances at him, then back out the window. “I guess.”

He frowns. “Do you…does that make you sad? Being a princess?”

“Why does the sky do that?”

“Huh?” He looks out the window. “Do what?”

“Change colors like that when the sun goes down.” Rose points at the reds and yellows at the horizon, moving her fingers slowly up to the darkening sky. “Why do they do that?”

“Well, it’s because—uh, actually, let’s ask one of my friends.”

“Thomas?” Logan rises up behind them. “You called?”

“Can you explain why the sky changes colors when the sun sets? Rose is curious.”

It’s a wonderful thing, he decides, to watch Logan’s eyes brighten at the thought of teaching someone something new. 

“Well,” he says, taking a seat next to them, “light from the sun is made up of many different colors. All the colors of the rainbow.”

“Is that why rainbows happen when it rains?”

“Yes. The water from the rain acts as a prism, which is something that splits light into all its different colors.”

“But how does it tell the colors apart?”

“Every color of the rainbow has a different wavelength, do you know what that means?” Logan holds out his hand and produces a slinky. “Here, take one end of this.”

Rose takes the slinky and Logan stretches it out, explaining what wavelengths are by wiggling one end of the slinky up and down so it makes a wave. 

“So all of light has a wavelength?”

“Each color has its own wavelength, that’s right. When they have to travel through something, the wavelengths can get split up. That’s why rainbows form.”

“But it’s not traveling through anything when the sun sets, it’s just going through the sky.”

“What’s the sky made of?”

Rose frowns. “Nothing?”

“Not quite. It’s made up of air, lots of air molecules.” Logan lifts his hand and taps different points on the window. “And so when the light hits all the different molecules, it scatters.”

“Like a pinball machine?” 

Logan chuckles. “Yes, Rose, like a pinball machine. And when that happens during the day, the blue and green light scatters the most because their wavelength is the shortest.”

“Is that why the sky’s blue?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Logan points at the sun disappearing below the horizon. “And so when the sun goes down, all the blue and green light goes away very quickly, which means that we see the red and yellow light.”

Rose looks out the window again, tracing the path Logan drew with his fingers. “So red takes the longest?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Rose grows quiet, leaning against Logan’s shoulder. He glances at Thomas—who’s just been sitting here, dude—and sighs, resigning himself to being a pillow for a while. It’s not that bad when you get used to it. 

“You’re falling asleep, Rose,” he points out softly when the sky’s darkened fully, “shall we take you back to the Imagination?”

Rose mumbles sleepily but lets Logan pick her up and carry her off, waving at Thomas again. Thomas waves back, glancing out the window as they leave. 

Logan’s explanation means that all the other colors are always there, they’re just never seen until the sun goes down. He’s not quite sure how he feels about that. 

Or why Rose seemed to care so much. 

3.

He doesn’t see Rose for a while, not until the next big thunderstorm.

He walks past the window to see one of the curtains trembling and he sighs, already reaching out for Virgil. 

“Hey, Thomas, what’s up?”

Thomas nods to the shaking curtain. “I think one of the Imagination’s people is here. Her name’s Rose, she’s a princess, I think she’s scared.”

Virgil glances over and bites back a curse. “Have you been able to get ahold of Roman or Remus?”

“You’re the best at dealing with scared people.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I…can’t tell if that was sincere or not.”

“Yeah, neither can I.” Virgil crouches down near the bundle of fabric, voice gentling to a low rumble. “Hey, Princess, you in there?”

A soft squeak. 

“It’s okay, Princess, I’m not gonna hurt you. My name’s Virgil, what’s your name?”

“R-Rose.”

“Hi, Rose, it’s nice to meet you. Hey, hey,” he murmurs when another crash of thunder makes her squeak, “it’s okay, Princess, you just listen to me, okay? I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere.”

“O-okay.”

“I’ve never met a princess before,” he says softly, “I think that’s really neat.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yeah. Princesses are…real cool.” He makes a face that makes Thomas bite back a laugh. “I like all their stories. There are so many stories about princesses, they’re all people can talk about. I think they’re super interesting.”

A little head peeks out from under the curtain. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Princess. Do you have a favorite princess story?”

“…Cinderella.”

“‘Cinderella?’ That’s a good one, I like that one too. I like hearing about all the magic where the pumpkin gets turned into a chariot.”

“…I like the end.”

“The end?” Bit by bit, Virgil coaxes Rose out of the curtain and into the lea of him where she doesn’t have to see the storm. “What about the ending’s your favorite?”

“She gets saved,” Rose says, toying with her dress that looks a bit less sparkly in the stormy light, “an’—an’ that’s okay.”

“It’s okay that she gets saved?” Rose nods. “Why’s that your favorite bit?”

Rose opens her mouth to answer when there’s another flash. She squeaks, lunging forward to wrap her arms around Virgil. 

“Whoa, whoa, hey, shh, Princess, it’s okay, I gotcha. You’re doing great.” He rubs her back. “Why don’t you finish what you were telling me about Cinderella?”

But Rose isn’t talking anymore, quivering like a leaf in Virgil’s arms. He rocks her back and forth in his lap, shooting concerned glances at Thomas who has just accepted he’s going to be mostly useless right now. 

“Hey,” he tries again, “let’s get you back home, okay? I’m sure there’s a lot of people there that’d be willing to help you. Is that okay? It’s probably not storming there either.”

Rose sniffles as Virgil slowly stands up, carrying her off down the hall. As they pass Thomas, Rose reaches out and clutches the fabric of his shirt for a moment. He awkwardly pats her hand and she lets go. 

He glances out the window before drawing the curtains, wondering what she could’ve meant by it’s okay that she’s saved.

4.

When he gets to the window again, he is expecting to see Rose. 

He is not expecting to see Janus already there, sprawled out in the sunlight and a nervous little princess a few feet away. 

“Well,” Janus hisses, drawing himself up, “what have we here? A little morsel, wandered too far from home?”

Part of Thomas wants to step forward, tell Janus to knock it off, not to scare her, but Rose doesn’t seem all that scared. So he hovers in the hallway, ready to step in if he has to. 

“Foolish little princess,” Janus hisses, doing his very best impression of a Disney villain, “don’t you know it’s dangerous to explore on your own?”

“I’ve been here before,” Rose says, crossing her arms and stamping her foot, “and you’ve never been here.”

“Mm, or have I?” Janus moves a bit closer, arms reaching out for her. “Maybe I’ve been here the whole time and you just haven’t seen me.”

“N-no, I would notice you.”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” she says, firmer this time, “I would notice you. You’re big and yellow and black and I would see you.”

Janus chuckles. “Clever little princess. Tell me, what brings you all the way out here?”

“I sit here. I like to look out of the window.”

“Oh? And what do you do? Survey your kingdom?”

“This isn’t my kingdom.”

“No?” Janus curls up lazily, still inching towards her. “Then where is your kingdom? How can you be a princess without a kingdom?”

“I have one,” Rose insists, “it just isn’t here.”

“Mm. It’s trouble for a princess to leave her kingdom without a knight or a guard,” Janus says, kneeling up to loom over her a bit. “Who knows what could happen, especially when she wanders into a snake’s den?”

“Why did you come here?”

“For the sunlight, little princess, and for you.”

Rose squeals as he playfully wraps his arms around her—no, Thomas doesn’t understand why he has six arms if he’s a snake—and pulls her into his lap. “Why do you want sunlight?”

“Snakes are cold, little princess, and sunlight is so warm.” He hisses gently in her ear to make her giggle. “And so are you. Snakes steal heat, little princess, maybe I should steal some from you.”

“N-no,” she giggles, “it’s my heat, you can’t take it! It’s mine!”

“Oh, but I can, little princess, I can steal your heat from you right now.”

Thomas watches somewhat spellbound as Janus gently tickles Rose until she’s laughing properly, all fear gone as they sit together in the sunlight. When she bats at his hands he stops, cuddling her to his chest and sighing contentedly. 

“Thank you for your heat, little princess,” he murmurs, kissing her cheek, “see? It’s not so bad.”

Rose lets out a squeaky little yawn and curls up, letting him hold her. 

“Why don’t we have a nap,” he suggests, adjusting his position to lean against the wall, still in the sunlight, “hmm? Will you nap in the sunlight with me?”

“Mhm.”

“That’s a good little princess.”

When Rose is asleep, little snores filling the hallway, Janus glances over at Thomas who shrugs. 

“How long has she been…coming here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do the twins know?”

Thomas frowns. “You know what? I don’t actually think I’ve seen them since she started showing up.”

Janus hums. “That’s not ideal. I’ve spoken to Remus recently, I’ll ask him what he knows.”

Rose stirs in his lap and they quiet, waiting until she falls back asleep. 

“You got her?”

“Yes. I’ll bring her back to the Imagination when she wakes.”

5.

“Will you read with me?”

Thomas blinks in surprise when Rose holds out a book. He takes it carefully and sits down, opening it and propping it on his lap so she can see. “What do you want to read?”

“Can we read the story about The Paperbag Princess?”

“Sure. Do you want to read?”

“Mhm.”

They turn to the page with the title. Rose reaches out and underlines the words with her finger as they go. They read through the first few pages before she stops. 

“How big do you think that paper bag is?”

“Well, it’s big enough for her to wear it like a dress, so pretty big.”

“Where do you get paper bags that big? What do you carry in them?”

“Maybe she got it at the store. To carry her groceries in.”

“Hm.”

They keep reading. They get to the bit about the dragon fight and Rose pauses, looking at the dragon. 

“Why did the dragon not just eat the prince? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”

“Maybe this dragon’s different.”

Rose’s face pinches a little as they keep going, finally getting to the part about the prince being disappointed with what the Paperbag Princess looks like. 

“…that’s not very nice of him.”

“No, it isn’t.” Thomas shifts to ease a cramp in his leg. “I think he should’ve said thank you.”

“I think he should’ve saved himself.”

Thomas looks up at her. “What makes you say that?”

“He’s the prince. Princes aren’t supposed to need saving. Princesses are.”

Now, we don’t have time to unpack all of that… “This princess didn’t need saving, did she?”

Rose chews on her lip. “No…I guess not.”

“So maybe this prince did need saving.”

“But he’s not happy about being saved. Only princesses are ever happy about being saved. Princes don’t get saved, not like princesses do. People only like it when the prince saves himself. We’re not supposed to like when the princess saves the prince or when the prince gets saved by someone else. ‘Cause he’s always awful when he gets saved.”

Thomas looks at Rose for a long moment. Then he carefully closes the book and sets it aside, resting his hand on her shoulder. 

“What’s wrong, Rose?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re upset, I can tell. What’s going on?”

She glances at the book again. “I’m a princess. I’m supposed to be saved.”

“That’s not all princesses can do, they can save things too. Even themselves.”

“But princes don’t get saved,” she says, still frowning, “they—they don’t get protected. They’re supposed to do the protecting. That doesn’t seem fair.”

“No,” Thomas agrees, “no, I suppose not.”

Where is this going?

But Rose doesn’t say anything else, just burrows into his arms and wraps her arms around his neck. She’s silent as they sit there, not saying a word for what feels like hours. When she does finally move again, she just picks up the book and turns, walking down the hall without another word. 

Thomas stares after her and can’t help but feel like he’s missed something very important. 

+1. 

It’s the first time he’s managed to coax Rose away from the window, taking her hand and walking her downstairs to the living room where the others are gathered. Each of them waves, Patton smiling and crouching down to give her a hug. 

“Are you going to have the meeting with us too?”

“Mhm.”

“Don’t feel as though you need to say anything,” Logan assures, “we’ll be more than happy for just your company.”

“We’ll behave, Princess, promise.”

Thomas ruffles her hair as she stands next to him. “Do we know where the others are?”

“I haven’t seen Roman yet this morning, but Remus is on his way.”

Thomas opens his mouth again when Rose suddenly clutches his pant leg. “Hey, what’s going on?”

No sooner has he asked does Remus appear, grinning at all of them startling at his appearance. “What’s got you all looking like a kraken just bit your butts?”

His eyes fall on Rose and he freezes. 

“Behave, Remus,” Janus says lowly, “she’s from the Imagination. Don’t scare her.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Patton coos, “he won’t hurt you. He just looks a little scary.”

Rose cowers behind Thomas’s leg, refusing to budge even as they assure her it’s okay, Remus won’t hurt her. 

“Tell her, Remus,” Virgil says, elbowing him, “tell her you’re not gonna hurt her.”

Remus doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even move, still staring at Rose like his eyes are about to fall out of his head.

“…Ro?”

Rose peeks out at him, one eye watching as he lowers himself to the ground, snapping his fingers and changing into a uniform of some sort, still black and green but different. 

“It’s okay, Ro,” he says hoarsely, “it’s okay.”

Rose wails, tearing herself from Thomas’s side and throwing herself at Remus who catches her and pulls her into his lap, curling around her protectively. He nuzzles her hair and strokes the back of her head, letting her cry into his chest. 

The rest of them watch, thunderstruck. 

“It’s okay, Roro,” Remus keeps mumbling, “it’s okay. I gotcha, Roro, you’re okay.”

“‘Roro?’” Virgil glances at the others. “But that’s what he calls…”

The realization hits them all at the same time. 

The princess, worrying about the color red, being so scared of each of them but still coming back to the same place, who saves the prince?

Thomas looks at the little girl in Remus’s arms. 

Oh. 

Oh. 

Oh, no. 

“Roman,” he says weakly, “Rose is Roman.”

Remus glances up at them. “What happened,” he growls, still holding Roman tight to his chest, “why did this happen?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says weakly, “she just—he just—Roman just showed up like this one day and I…none of us knew what to do.”

“Why did Roman become a princess?”

“Because princesses get saved,” Logan says, shock giving way to horrified resignation, “princesses are…protected, comforted…they’re the ones who get saved, not the princes.”

Patton makes a noise of dismay and Virgil bites back a curse. “Roman thought this was the only way we would care?”

“It was,” Janus hisses, slowly crouching too, “because we saw a princess in need of rescuing and…didn’t question it.”

Thomas crouches too, watching Remus murmur something in Roman’s ear. “Remus, can Roman…turn back?”

“I’m not sure Roman wants to turn back right now.” 

“What can we do, then?”

“Right now?” Remus looks down. “What do you need, Roro?”

Arms tighten on Remus as he pulls away and he quickly comes back, hugging Roman to his chest and standing up. 

“It’s cuddle time,” he announces, “all of you move it.”

A mattress forms in the middle of the living room and the others quickly make sure the blankets and pillows have been moved as Remus sits down, still cradling Roman in his lap. Thomas sits next to him, smiling when Roman peeks out to look at him. 

“Hey, Roman,” he murmurs, smiling when Roman looks at him a little more, “you wanna cuddle?”

Roman nods and he opens his arms, letting the little one crawl from Remus into his lap. He can feel the weight of Remus’s stare on the side of his face and he takes care to be extra gentle as he lies down, Roman on his chest. 

“Get in here, the rest of you.”

“We’re coming.”

“Remus,” he hears Logan say quietly, “can you…explain a bit more later?”

“If Roro says it’s okay.”

“Lift your head,” Patton says, slipping a pillow behind his neck, “there.”

“I’ll keep watch,” Virgil says, perching on the edge of the mattress, “for Roman’s sake.”

Remus nods approvingly, holding Roman’s hand as it reaches out for him. “Go to sleep, Roro, we can figure everything else out later.”

Thomas glances down at Roman, whose other hand has twisted shyly into his shirt. He cards his fingers through Roman’s hair. 

“You can sleep if you want,” he whispers, “you’re safe now.”

Later, when the sky is dark and the lights have long faded, Thomas wakes when the weight on his chest suddenly increases. He tries to sit up without disturbing the snores and whistles he can hear around him, looking down. 

Roman, the Roman they know, is asleep, head pillowed on his chest, hand still intertwined with Remus’s. 

Guess the prince got saved this time too. 

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