Well fuck, it’s been crazy over the last few days. The whole week can get fucked… I’m so thank­ful for Embyr help­ing keep me sane. Lets start with how the past week­end. Sat­ur­day I did­n’t real­ly want to wake up, noth­ing over­ly strange there the bed was com­fort­able and I did­n’t have any­thing I absolute­ly need­ed to do that day so I glad­ly just flopped and veg­ged for a while. Em sug­gest­ed we watch a few movies togeth­er, and we did that. At this point, every­thing was going pret­ty good. Three movies while we just chilled, relaxed, and enjoyed each oth­er’s com­pa­ny. We then start­ed binge watch­ing Star Trek Low­er Decks and casu­al­ly dis­cussing this issue we had with a “friend” of ours. I’ll get into that in a moment. It was 2 — 3 AM by the time we stopped watch­ing for the night and the con­ver­sa­tion about the “friend” got set aside until the next day. Sun­day, we spoke a bit more about the issue and this is where things start to get a lit­tle messed up.

This “friend” is some­one I’ve known for like a decade. We nev­er were all that close before, but we’d occa­sion­al­ly game, chat voice, even met up at con­ven­tions and social gath­er­ings years ago. I intro­duced them to Embyr a lit­tle more than two years ago as a poten­tial client, as Embyr takes com­mis­sions for art­work and they had an inter­est in art. Back then, every­thing seemed to be okay. They were at times a bit clingy but we tried to help them with that and includ­ed them in some of the activ­i­ties we did togeth­er, things like movies and games and just group chats. A few months in, get­ting close to a year, they changed med­ica­tion or some­thing and became rather demand­ing about cer­tain wants from the friend­ship. Things like being jeal­ous of art Embyr made for me and the friend need­ing some­thing exact­ly like it for them­self. And want­i­ng some adult ori­ent­ed art with some of Embyr’s char­ac­ters and some fur­ry dra­ma where they want­ed their char­ac­ter to have a some type of a rela­tion­ship with Embyr’s char­ac­ter, noth­ing IRL, at least if there was that inten­tion it was nev­er let on… Either way Embyr was uncom­fort­able with it, under­stand­ably, and she said she was fine hav­ing the con­nec­tion with anoth­er one of her char­ac­ters just not the one they were inter­est­ed in. They refused and put the whole friend­ship on the line, say­ing if it was­n’t accept­ed, they would end the friend­ship. We did­n’t cave. They left and cut con­tact, but they did­n’t com­plete­ly. They still inter­act­ed with Embyr’s social media and art and we had to block them… Short­ly after that I received a rather harsh mes­sage from them and lat­er they made some posts on their own social media men­tion­ing my name in an effort to get atten­tion. lat­er we received an apol­o­gy from this per­son with the expla­na­tion about their meds hav­ing been changed… Embyr and I dis­cussed it and we set some con­di­tions up before we would agree to wel­come them back into our per­son­al space. It took a bit, and after a pub­lic apol­o­gy from this per­son we did agree to start includ­ing them in things again. This went pret­ty well for over a year before things start­ed to get a lit­tle unusu­al again, this time how­ev­er they seemed they were more inter­est­ed in me at least as far as art goes, but some things that were said sug­gest­ed they want­ed more yet adamant­ly denied it. Their unusu­al behav­iour got to a point where anoth­er mutu­al friend of ours, that they also had an inter­est in that they admit­ted was an IRL desire, got to the point where they cut con­tact com­plete­ly. This lead to an emo­tion­al break­down for the per­son myself and Embyr tried to help them deal with this. It got to the point we end­ed up speak­ing with this per­son­’s moth­er because they could­n’t prop­er­ly cope. They got more clingy with me. They claimed they weren’t inter­est­ed, but some of the things said relat­ed to the art Embyr cre­at­ed relat­ed to my and her char­ac­ters had this per­son becom­ing extreme­ly jeal­ous that they could­n’t have some­thing sim­i­lar. I can go on for quite a while about the dif­fer­ent things this per­son did, but ulti­mate­ly we had start­ed to dis­tance our­selves from them more and more and it came to a head this past Sun­day. Giv­en the lan­guage this per­son had used in the and the jeal­ousy expressed about Embyr hav­ing things, they could­n’t the idea of this per­son want­i­ng some sex­u­al and gay when its known I do not have an inter­est or desire for such things. I make excep­tions for Embyr, but giv­en the things said, it was pret­ty clear to us there was some oth­er desires there, and it made us uncom­fort­able. Em expressed to them our bound­aries and that the idea for art they want to buy was­n’t accept­able and that we could dis­cuss some­thing else. They came back with the claim they did­n’t under­stand. The more we tried to explain, the more the mood changed, and the jeal­ousy showed. Com­ments about how they want­ed some­thing “spe­cial”. Before the end of the night they had left Embyr’s dis­cord serv­er and about an hour lat­er sent a mes­sage ask­ing to be let back in… By this time I had already got to bed for the night. Em told them she had to think about it and start­ed typ­ing up her thoughts and feel­ings on the sub­ject par­tic­u­lar that her bound­aries weren’t being respect­ed. The per­son­’s moth­er joined in on the con­ver­sa­tion dur­ing the night while I was asleep try­ing to jus­ti­fy the request… the per­son the moth­er was defend­ing is in thi­er mid 30s…The next day, Mon­day after work. Embyr approached them on the sub­ject and we tried to be as respect­ful as pos­si­ble, giv­en the cir­cum­stances, that there is a prob­lem that needs to be addressed. They can be a part of the solu­tion if they are will­ing to dis­cuss things oth­er­wise we’ll be tak­ing steps to pro­tect our­selves which could lead to com­plete­ly cut­ting con­tact. Em shared the details from her thoughts of the pre­vi­ous day, where she was very clear about each of her con­cerns. There was legit­i­mate­ly a fair bit, but each point was rea­son­able and valid. After a few min­utes, they sim­ply replied that they think it’s just best if they walk away and did. No apol­o­gy, not any con­sid­er­a­tion about how we were try­ing to rem­e­dy this. I’m not upset by this to be hon­est. If they can’t han­dle being told no, then this real­ly is for the best… I’m just dis­ap­point­ed Em did­n’t get an apol­o­gy. The more we look at every­thing, the more creepy it is. I’d not be the least sur­prised if they read this blog post.

As bizarre as all of that was, the week got even more fucked up… Yes­ter­day, when reboot­ing my lap­top to fix a sound issue, it report­ed that the CPU was changed. It was­n’t. I tried to pow­er cycle it and it would­n’t pow­er on… Well, fuck… again. Luck­i­ly the lap­top is still under war­ran­ty but I had to scram­ble to get anoth­er com­put­er up and run­ning for my work, my old lap­top that if you touch the pow­er cord it will loose con­nec­tion… I man­aged to get every­thing up and run­ning and onl be a cou­ple of min­utes late for my meet­ing. I was­n’t at my usu­al desk with the temp sys­tem I had set up and dialed into the meet­ing on my cell phone. Try­ing to turn on speak­er phone did­n’t work. It was muf­fled and bro­ken, so I was left hav­ing to hold the phone, which was get­ting rather hot up to my ear. As some of you may know when a phone gets hot the bat­tery pow­er decreas­es more quick­ly than usu­al.. with­in a few min­utes my phone that was just over 50% at the start of the meet­ing went dead… I quick­ly scram­bled to get back into the meet­ing on my oth­er phone, know­ing I’d have to move the lap­top lat­er, and threw my cell on the charg­er. That went okay. The next meet­ing went okay after that and I then tried to make some calls to get my lap­top ser­viced. I was­n’t going to attempt any self repairs for some­thing that was still cov­ered by war­ran­ty… The pow­er failed… It was storm­ing pret­ty well out­side. I called the office from my par­tial­ly charged cell and they told me to take the rest of the day off. With­in a cou­ple of min­utes, my phone goes with a tor­na­do warn­ing for my cov­er­age area… The day was over­whelm­ing, but I got through it thanks to Embyr. I should get my lap­top back in about two weeks. It’s almost the week­end. I just need to push through a lit­tle longer.