@Lowtax, what exactly WAS the dynamics in your relationshio with shmorky? I'd ask about SA Moderators too, such as Abe, but i realized this isnt the SA thread in general
100% honest: when he was animating and drawing shit on the forums like around 2002, I thought he was funny and creative. I would chat with him on AIM or ICQ or whatever the fuck we used back then, but it was just a superficial friendship (we spoke of nothing of substance, just made fun of shit or whatever). After a while, I learned he didn't have a steady job, and since he had a sense of humor at that time and wasn't completely nuts, I offered to pay him to do the Flash Tub, because I liked the stuff he made on the forums and I also felt bad that he was unemployed and living with a woman addicted to WoW who let her many, many cats urinate on his clothing.
Eventually he told me he couldn't stand to live in Philadelphia anymore because of the mean ol pissin' cat Warcraft broad (shmorky's always the victim here), so I felt bad once again and, since I considered him a friend, offered him a job doing the Flash Tub in the office here in Bumfuck, Missouri. At least that way he could afford his own place and, I guess, be in control of choosing which cat pisses on his shirts. The day he arrived, I literally had to take all his clothes to the dry cleaners because the cat piss odor was making me physically ill.
Anyway, things were good for a few years. I could joke around him and we had a similar sense of humor. I enjoyed watching bad movies and playing games and writing scripts for Flash Tubs with him, because he could come up with some great stuff. The closest he got to my kids was when he was teaching them how to draw cartoons and helping them with art in the main entryway of the office, which I could see at all times.
But then he slowly started falling apart mentally. I don't know if he was going through depression and reverting to the "real" shmorky, but he stopped joking around. Everything was serious. His voice began to rise in pitch. He became more and more involved with tumblr. He wouldn't stop talking about gender. He would get mad and slam the door on me when I would claim "gender DOES exist, either you got a weiner or a pokey hole" and he'd get flustered and storm out. He began wearing YarnWig. He began stuffing himself with paper towels. He began wearing a girdle. He began wearing a cape. He began wearing makeup. Then that psycho bitch he was engaged to came into town and things got even worse.
I had to bail her out of jail at 3:00 AM because she assaulted him after the cops pulled her over for suspected drunken driving. According to shmorky, "she just tapped me with two fingers and that was all," but shmorky has a unique ability to see the world through a completely different set of lens than the rest of us. There were FIVE cop cars there. They handcuffed her. She began screaming that they were anti-semitic and her family was all lawyers and she was going to sue for $80 million. When the bail bondswoman came, she couldn't understand a word shmorky said because of his fucked up squeaky ass voice, so I had to act as a translator while she stifled a laugh the entire time.
This was pretty much the beginning of the end. I let his girlfriend use one of the work computers as long as she shut the door so I wouldn't have to fucking listen to Pink Floyd, and later on I looked through her browsing history and found a shitload of google searches for "Jon Benet Ramsey conspiracy" and "snuff photos" and "Jews involved with 9/11." She had saved a folder of crime scene corpses, which was a real treat to discover. She apparently also was (and is) addicted to "kratom," which I had never heard of in my life. She would order packages of it overseas and get it shipped anonymously and unmarked to the office, which I did not know about until I opened the package and thought it was really shitty cooking spices. She would repeatedly ask me where to buy weed in this town, and I would say I don't know because I don't smoke weed.
So I couldn't stand shmorky or his gf anymore and let him / her / it / whatever go. A few days later, I found a printout she made, a letter to the local police department, saying she has PTSD because of her arrest, and she had never been so traumatized before in her life except when 9/11 happened (?!?!?). For proof, she included a photo of her arms, which were covered in knife cuts every which direction, everywhere. To the best of my knowledge, she did not win the lawsuit.
If I remember anything else, I'll post it later, but I've spent too much time on this now and my daughter has the whooping cough, so I don't want to be negligent dad here.