public apology

To Mirrored (and to a lesser extent, the speedrun community):

January 2013, the night of my Wind Waker run for charity, a lot went wrong. What went wrong resulted in you disappearing from the community for a long time. You showed up briefly, but you probably didn't feel welcome or enthusiastic to continue participating with speedrunning.

This could have been avoided if I had communicated with you before the event on how we should handle the commentary. I feel awful about it. After my run I went back to my room in tears thinking about the ramifications about what just happened. I was also angry and wrote some things that I regret. I should have taken the time to cool down. That week in general was really bad for me (some people were harassing me via the phone as they had gotten my cellphone #) and that night pushed me over the edge.

I'm sorry I never talked to you about what happened as I think we both suffered from it. Unfortunately due to my popularity at the time a number of people rushed to defend my actions while vilifying yours. This must have been extremely shitty for you, much worse than it was on me. It must have been especially awful after you had spent so much effort preparing for AGDQ, making the triforce prize, etc.

In the past, some people were hating on you because of your streams making mistake logs out of my runs (which were very helpful and interesting), or other parts of your stream personality (wearing a suit, whistling, etc). These are stupid reasons to hate somebody and I never saw negativity in having a personality. Sadly this community definitely has people who will jump on people in a negative way due to things like this (I remember MC Gamer had a rocky start as people were trying to hate on him at first). Sadly this attitude is still around today and I'm not really sure what I can do against it.

I am not a perfect person and what happened in January hugely reflects that. I feel like I am extremely polarizing in fact. People pick sides. People will either hate me or mindlessly defend me. It is a stressful existence to be in sometimes. I've learned to deal with this over the last 9 months, but it has been hard. One of my best friends ended up feeling a large amount of animosity towards me partially due to the amount of people mindlessly defending me. A lot has happened.

I realize this is perhaps way too late and you are simply gone from the community, though I think I've seen your IRC bot around a bit. If you are still out there I hope you read this and even if you don't want to come back I hope you understand that I mishandled the situation and you shouldn't feel guilt about it. A lack of communication was the true issue at hand, and I had been off hanging out with other people during the week and so we never properly organized anything.

I still absolutely love what I do and I want to continue to stream and run games. I've been trying to just forget this entire mishap ever happened but I felt the need to address it both publicly and directly to you. Maybe now we can forgive and forget.

- Cosmo Wright