At one point on re-AOL, I had to give staff members what amounted to sensitivity training because some of them had conveniently forgotten how to deal with or speak to an autistic person even though they had been able to do it just fine until it benefited them more to play stupid — now, bear in mind, this wasn’t all of staff members, some of them were better than others, and the ones that I knew were neurodiverse didn’t give me a problem… but I shouldn’t have had to do their job to them explaining this sort of thing to them like they were five. This should never have become a thing to begin with. I was complaining about the fact that I had to do it with my friend Andy when it was happening, and he was agreeing with me on the fundamental concept of “this should not have ever become a thing to begin with”. He can attest to those conversations.

Also, take two: it is extremely bad praxis for a man to unload on a woman like a crazed, unhinged lunatic. This goes out to one person in particular. I shouldn’t have to explain to you that trying to talk yourself up to make yourself sound, or look, more demeaning and threatening should not be a thing that men do in 2022. But at any rate, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back with me as it related to this project. More than one person caused more than one of these problems at times, even though I’m not attempting to paint the project as a whole with too broad of a paintbrush. But there was always one person… involved with them (don’t tell me how little, or how much, I should reveal about my children unless you are a Twitch Affiliate or Twitch Partner), and I have the bad habit of putting up with things that I shouldn’t put up with for longer periods of time. And then, of course, when I finally do say something about it to more than one person at a time — that, or a carefully curated, filtered social media post — people that haven’t been privy to those exchanges think that I am blowing up over nothing. (“Nothing.”) It’s almost always the neurotypicals, too…

You’re no better than any of the people that you claim to have more morals than, and that’s the truth.

Someone who has known that this has been a problem for months, who has been close to me for awhile now, suggested that I mention it here in my blog “because then at least you know they’ll read it”. Although I liked every other aspect of the re-AOL experience, one of the ones that I tried as hard as I could to shy away from was the idea of meeting up with other people in person — it’s just not something that I feel comfortable doing during the pandemic (even if it is TwitchCon or VidCon), but it’s also not something that I feel comfortable doing in the absence of verified security if it isn’t an actual thing like TwitchCon and VidCon are. For the most part, when I’ve explained this to people they’ve been content with my explanation and have made it clear that they’re not going to try to wheedle me into changing my mind. (Some of them let me know that they’d like to know if I change my mind on any of the above points. I thank them for being considerate.)

…except for people in re-AOL who were that excited to put together a meetup for all of us.

Or as I guess I should be saying, “all of us”.

The first few times that it was mentioned, I kind of played along with it as a re-AOL staff member because I didn’t want anyone to think that members weren’t allowed to do this on their off time, with their own money, themselves if they wanted, and I felt like aggressively distancing myself from the project might send off the wrong message. I recieved some advice on the matter, letting me know that it was alright to continue to show support for the idea, encourage people to get this off of the ground and attend it if they wanted to do that, but also make it clear that I myself would not be attending and that I didn’t want people trying to get me to change my mind on that when my mind had already been made up. But that wasn’t the way the message came across, even though I tried as hard as I possibly could to show support for the idea while making it known that I didn’t want to partake in, or attend, it myself. I began feeling like the goal was to get me to change my mind on attending, and that the people who wanted me to do this were the very same people who were willing to push my boundaries and make me feel uncomfortable doing something that I had up until that point enjoyed. Friends of mine who knew about my involvement in the project knew that I was at a crossroads enjoying the project and my contributions to it but, at the same time, not feeling comfortable feeling like I was being pushed into something that I didn’t want to do and wasn’t going to do.

It took a few months of me thinking about how I should approach it because I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater if I could just get people to lay off about that, but then I realized: if people were already having a hard time putting up with clear boundaries of mine, it was never going to get any better.

I don’t think continuing to have anything to do with re-AOL is going to benefit me in any way if I’m going to have to continue to “evade” these conversations by pretending to be away from the computer or too busy to check Discord on my phone whenever they come up. This isn’t benefiting me in any way at this point now.

Developers and programmers (I do the front desk sort of stuff in the Discord chat, and in re-AOL chatrooms when I see that there’s a need for it, like helping people download and install the client, answering questions, getting answers to questions, facilitating conversation, the whole nine) have been working on some back-end fixes to problems like “hanging SNs” — where, after disconnecting, it would still say that you “were logged in”, which a mod could fix by booting your screen name off so that you could actually log in yourself — and the occasional doubling up of screen names in the People In Room list. We still have… screen names that do that, but the things I’ve mentioned are already happening less than they were, which is awesome! And there’s the occasional “missing line”, where when someone tries to send something to a re-AOL chat it just doesn’t send, but that’s happening less than it was. (Later, we’re going to get Slingo and Splatterball!)

This is the fun of alpha testing, though. And programming during the alpha stage, too. We squash bugs.