For all your Andy-related info-dumping needs. If there's information you'd like to archive, please post it here, and feel free to link to it from the main post if you'd like to discuss it.
As a pre-exposure and (though to a lesser degree) post-exposure DAYD nonnie, I'd gladly answer anything about that time period that I can recall.
As for Danaoffthedancefloor... she's probably example #1 that I would give to people who think that no real emotional harm can come from getting involved with Andy. Definitely not the only example I could give but... definitely one of the most upsetting and raw.
Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
Did you go to the DAYDcon at the end of 2009?
Were you still around when Abbey published her blog including her "Letter to the DAYDians" in 2011? How was that received in the inner circle/justified by Andy?
No, I didn't go to the DAYDcon in 2009. IIRC, DAYDcon actually occurred after the big reveal, so even if I had wanted to go before (and to be honest? part of me did! Andy was fun in a way, even when you knew he was full of shit!), I was too apprehensive to go after. From what I can tell, everyone had a good time having snowball fights, making stew, talking DAYD long into the night. They had fun. Andy was fun.
Unfortunately, I don't know personally how people who were still deep in DAYDverse took the Letter to the DAYDians. I was almost entirely gone by that point. I was, afaik, the person who explicitly asked Abbey to address the DAYDians, since I'd seen evidence of the obvious horrorshow that the Trail of Tears hike was going to be, but I wasn't speaking with Andy or any other DAYDians by that point in time.
BUT Turimel does have a post on her LJ that somehow got hold of a Skype conversation in the DAYD community, and it looks like it's from right around the same time. A little earlier in 2011 than Abbey's "Letter," so it's not in reaction to that specifically, but it is directly addressing all of the wank in Andy's words. Warning as always for transfail on Turimel's blog, but if you want to see just how brainwashed some of the true believer fans were, this isn't one to miss.
http://turimel.livejournal.com/105515.html
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike? What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy? I don't mean share anything that may cause any member of her family pain if they chanced upon it, I mean more concerning Andy's describing her as "a close friend" just after she was killed, but has over time become Andy's "life partner"?
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike?
My disclaimer for this is that in the post-reveal period leading up to Brittany's murder, I was involved very minimally in DAYDverse things. I (like a good number of people, I suspect) saw the news about Brittany's murder when Andy posted it on LJ and Facebook, which I browsed pretty casually, and I initially thought for sure that it was fake. Until the story was corroborated in the media, I assumed that this was typical Andy: a grand story of woe involving someone with a tragic past, the assumption of a new identity, and the chance to turn a real person into a writing exercise and a talking point, as he frequently did. Of course, tragically, I was wrong this time.
The Trail of Tears hike rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons, first of which was the purple prose that Andy wrote as a eulogy for Brittany. I just mentioned that Andy uses people he knows as writing exercises, to the point where it sometimes feels like he takes a kernel of their realities and then embellishes and ups the drama and (lately) deepens the social justice hook that will let him reel other people in. There were details of the sort of abuse that Brittany allegedly suffered at her partner's hands that I'm hesitant to mention because they were extremely graphic... but I'll say that, knowing Andy, I doubted those allegations because they were so graphic. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but... I knew that Brittany really had been murdered. I didn't know if I could buy everything that Andy wrote about her in his eulogy post, and the fact that he used that post as a launch point for the ToT hike bothered me. Andy also mentioned (in a chat, I think, or on his LJ or Facebook) that Brittany's family had barred him from her funeral, which was a major red flag. Families don't bar their daughter's friend (especially a friend who was injured in the same shooting) from her funeral unless there's something really wrong.
It also didn't sit well with me that Andy suddenly became the authority on intimate partner violence, to the point where he could essentially go on tour evangelizing (after putting all his followers to work setting things up for him, of course). I doubted the motives and lgitimacy of the "It's About Power" campaign, which Andy talked about getting true blue charity status for, and knew 100% that it would be abandoned once he'd used it to get all of the hike swag sponsored. Totally right about that.
Also, as other people have pointed out (and as you say above), the "lover/life parter" definition evolved over time. It felt like Andy was deifying Brittany in some way, which I can understand from anyone who is grieving a friend or family member who dies tragically. But... it was just that as Brittany evolved from being a follower to an acolyte to a favored friend to a special friend to a soulmate to a life partner, it seemed more and more clear to me that Andy was manipulating her memory for his own gain, knowing damn well that nobody could question him about what he was saying because, well... Brittany really was dead, and Andy really was wounded, and you're a big asshole if you question his grieving process.
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy?
I didn't know Brittany well, but we did overlap in DAYDverse so I definitely knew of her, read her stories, etc. I knew that she was one of Andy's fiercest fans, and I knew that around the time of the reveal, she was emerging as one of the clear favorites. TBH, and not to speak crap about the dead, but here goes, Brittany set off some of my alarm bells in the same way that Dana Off the Dancefloor does: too willing to pretend along with Andy, to do things like adopt new accents, get sucked into crazy stories, do his bidding, etc. Ceirdwenfc has mentioned publically that Brittany and she didn't start out on the best terms. This was because Brittany was aggressively asserting herself for Andy's attention, driving a wedge (intentionally or not, I don't know for sure) between Andy and Ceirdwen. (And Ceirdwen, though I really do think she's a nice person, does not respond well to being separated from Andy.) It was also because Brittany was the one who most encouraged Andy in the Undead Shaman Wizard Eating Your Children saga that splashed Ceirdwen and her kids all over people's blogs.
That's pretty much all I remember about Brittany. One of her younger brothers was a DAYDian too... she went on a hike up the west coast with Andy at one point... that' sabout it.
What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
I think that it was 2 couples and 1 couple that didn't work out:
* Welsh Guy, American Girl (Married after the ToT Hike) * American Couple (I think married in Vegas shortly after DAYDcon.) * American Girl (minor!!), Kiwi Guy (There was a big plan to marry them off to each other, but it fell through. This was so fucked up.)
The first two couples, afaik, are still married, and neither couple is on good terms with Andy. Recently, someone found blog entries from the woman from the first couple, detailing how badly Andy had messed her up on the hike. She's since moved or deleted. I don't blame her.
I don't know what the deal is with Andy and match-making, but Abbey says that it goes way back. If I have to guess, I think it's probably that Andy knows that matchmaking gives him the abilioty to be a puppeteer and to get himself actively entwined in two people's lives and then to pull away quickly if he feels like it once they're together. It also gives him the chance to prove a point through the people involved in the couples. In the DAYD cases, in no telling order, the points he tried to make had to do with disability, self-esteem, distance being no obstacle, the power of shared struggle to unite strangers... I guess he's a Romantic in a weird way!
The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel? Because a relatively recent spin on their relationship is Andy claiming it was Brittany who was the first person who realised his channelling was a symptom of his mental illness and encouraged him to get help in 2009 but they put it off because they couldn't afford it. But then there's the Undead Shaman emails which gives the impression she really believed it and also recently Andy said when defending himself against the Finelookingcat sexual assault allegations that for his birthday in 2010 he was ensconced away in a bedroom somewhere with Brittany and a couple of other DAYDians in one of the astral plane battles or something. I always had the impression she died still fully believing in Andy's powers, which of course he's now contradicting with the whole "Brittany wasn't an enabler, she could see I was mentally ill" angle.
Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?
Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?
"The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel?"
From what I could tell? Yes. Brittany frequently wrote about spirituality (something that Andy began to talk about more and more frequently when he was trying to reel Brittany in), and it seemed to me that she really did believe that Andy could channel. From how involved Brittany was in the Undead Shaman Wizard thing, but also from how she seemed to eat up the Skype chat channeling and to vocally back up Andy's claims that this was a spiritual thing and that you were simply intolerant or close-minded if you didn't believe that Andy could 100% actualfax bring Colin Creevy and Terry Boot out of him, she seemed to buy it.
Maybe this really was part of her spirituality. Maybe she came to believe it out of a necessity to get herself close (closest) to Andy. Maybe she evolved her perspective through more time with Andy and eventually did counsel him that this business was mentally ill and that he needed help. I'm not sure. I doubt the last possibility, though. Andy's "Brittany was my mental health savior" line reeks of post-murder revision to me.
The other, more sinister possibility is that Brittany was just as calculating and manipulative as Andy was and consciously voiced her belief in his channelling abilities so that she could lean on them later, when convenient for her. I believe it's been brought up before how interesting it was that when everything was going to shit, Brittany and Andy made Ceirdwen (Brittany's only real competition at the time for Andy's right-hand woman) and her family the focal point of their ridiculous attempts at obfuscation via astral plane happenings. I haven't completely worked out what I feel about this theory (I watched the USW thing unfold when everyone else on the web did, so I don't really have much more "insider" information on that horrorshow), but if Abbey's history with Andy is to be believed, I sort of think that this reading is too cynical. Maybe Brittany was conniving from the very getgo. But I think it's more probable that as she fell more and more into Andy's orbit, it got harder and harder to separate herself from his lies.
"Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?"
I saw a post here recently claiming that Ceirdwen didn't know about the channelling. AFAIK, this is completely untrue: I was aware of the channeling at least as far as it happened in the Skype chat (the "Room of Requirement"), which Ceirdwen was an active part of and witness to. IIRC, she didn't lap it up the way Andy's newer sycophants did, so I'm not sure what she thought of it privately, but she definitely witnessed it as it was happening. Very possibly there was more, weirder, and more dangerous channelling talk going on in other forums that Ceirdwen wasn't aware of, but she knew that Andy was claiming that his characters were literally speaking through him. She did know.
"Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?"
OK, what's so distasteful about the fact Cfc knew about Andy's channelling is this: she bangs on and on about how Abbey being older than Andy and her being married and owning a house and having a degree in psychology and gender studies Abbey should have realised that Andy was a mixed-up, gender-confused obviously mentally ill teenager and Abbey should have got him help rather than enabling that mental illness by believing everything he claimed.
So if it's true that Cfc was aware of Andy's channelling how come she, with her much larger 17 year age gap and her whatever degree it is she has (something about homeschooling?), she didn't realise he was obviously mentally ill rather than believing everything he claimed? Because in order to have been his friend from the very beginning of DAYD, since early 2008 she's going to have to have been witness to lie after lie after lie after reframing after reimagining after no-this-time-it's-the-truth-for-reals-I-promise. She's going to have to have believed all those ridiculously grandiose cutting-off-baby's-arms-in-Africa stories, believed that the stupidly macho Irish version of Andy Blake was a real person rather than a hodge podge of exaggerated fiction, she would have had to lived through the whole Andy Blake/Amy Player reveal, actually believed that Amy Player was Andy's mentally ill twin sister and believed he could channel his Harry Potter characters, yet...it's only since Andy's officially made mental illness and schizophrenia part of his narrative publicly that she's all "I knew he was mentally ill all along and any decent person would have seen the same and got him help rather than flown him across state for sex" and come down hard on Abbey about her believing Andy rather than recognising him as ill. And this is only a very recent stance, since 2012. So how come between the years of 2008-2011 Cfc didn't realise Andy was ill when he was obviously exhibiting behaviour that is now part of the mental illness narrative with the channelling? It just doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny at all.
Unfortunately, this is going to be another one of those times when I've got to disappoint people. Sorry, nonnnie! I very vaguely remember there being a loyalty oath, but I don't remember it or its details clearly enough to feel comfortable writing about it. (I'm not out to sensationalize stuff that I don't completely remember!) There was definitely a chain of command that people took seriously, but I don't know if that was because of an oath or because people just got really wrapped up in Andy's games.
***This part may be lacking certain comments found at the FFA link, because it's difficult to parse from the conversation who is DAYD!anon and who isn't. I've only included comments that I'm pretty certain are from them.***
Oh god a genuine pre-exposure DAYDian! I have so many questions I don't know where to start! Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
AYRT
I'm going to start with a copy/paste of myself from one of the older threads that I just got around to now:
I'd heard about VB in a vague, Whisper Down the Lane way before (the big reveal), but I'd never heard enough to connect the dots even when I was actively interacting with Andy and the DAYDverse. I knew that he was lying about some things from the getgo (vague but fatal heart condition? seen dozens of friends brutally murdered? obviously fake Irish accent? fought on both sides of the Troubles? looked into a little African child's eyes to reassure him that it would be OK as he cauterized a post-field-amputation limb? Suuure...) but thought that he was nice enough until the DAYD character channeling started and everything took a turn for the really fantastically insane and asinine.
As you can see from above, whose examples are all things I absolutely, no doubt in my mind recall Andy saying, the things that Andy claimed about himself in the early DAYD days weren't just implausible. They were so obviously lies that to see people around him openly believing in them could very easily make you feel like either you were the only sober person in a room full of kids tripping out of their minds or that you were the one with tenuous grips on reality. But people did believe him. Some people believed him extremely vocally and went out of their ways to voice their belief in him, particularly when the claims were bogus beyond belief. If you've ever seen the Skype conversation that Turimel somehow got her hands on, you'll see for yourself people totally eating up the story about Amy Player being Andy's mentally ill twin sister.
In the case of the story about cauterizing the amputated limb of that little black baby in an African warzone, you would expect rational, adult people (and though the DAYDverse crew was a high percentage of teens, there were absolutely adults in there also) to call BS immediately, but nobody did. Andy got his asspats and his oohing and aahing from the group, with people wondering how he had the strength to do something like that, reminding him that he was probably that little boy's savior, etc.
Other claims that I know for sure Andy made, in addition to the ones that everyone has heard about the IRA, the bar fight that got him a claymore scar across his chest, the evil twin, the Undead Shaman Wizard, etc. (I'm not going to list anything that I can't say for certain that he claimed.):
* I can perform a field tracheotomy with a drinking straw, and I've had to do it. * I've seen dozens of people murdered before my eyes. * I was the first male born in seven generations of women, so it's really no surprise to my family that I have psychic capabilities. * I traveled the world almost entirely for free, partially by stowing away on cargo ships. You can travel anywhere if you're resourceful enough! * I fucked ((I don't remember the number, but something obscene, high double digits)) women by the time I was 18. (He shared things like this a lot, and back then (before he became ~enlightened~it was always "fucking," not "making love" or even "having sex." Women were dainty damsels and the essence of mother earth on one hand and conquests to be notched on bedposts at the same time. Other details about his sexual exploits include fucking a married women in the kitchen while her little children played in the other room.) * I work at a Starbucks where professors from the nearby university come in and chat with me in Ancient Greek. * When I was at work today, a coloratura soprano with a world-class opera company came into the shop and sang an aria to pay for her drink. * I just know things about people. For instance, when I was little, I blurted out that the pastor of our church was cheating on his wife (I'd just had a feeling about it), and it turned out that I was right. I ruined him. This is part of why my mother hates me. * The reason I can't write or read "Gaelic" is because I was never schooled a day in my life. I learned to speak it because it was the only language my grandfather used with me, but I'm illiterate and really just going by sound. So if the "Gaelic" dialogue in my "novels" isn't totally right, remember that it's because everything I know, I taught myself.
I guess some of those aren't that interesting, but they do illustrate a point: Andy lies (or at least he did) about everything. From the massive (his evil twin sister) to the totally mundane. He can't just work at Starbucks... he has to work at a Starbucks where colorful characters waltz in and out singing arias. He can't just be perceptive... he has to be psychic.
Speaking of psychic: if the character channelling was supposed to be a secret, it was the worst kept secret ever. I was definitely not in the innermost inner circle (which at the time had a military structure: Andy was the "Fearless Leader," and he designated the most loyal DAYDians as explicit military ranks), and I saw the channelling on clear display. In Skype group chats, DAYD characters would "come through" Andy and talk with the group. Colin Creevy was a big one, and so was a character (whose name I now forget) who was a budding chef. Michael Corner and Terry Boot also came in to talk to everyone. It seemed to differ slightly from the channeling that Abbey described, since Andy here was presenting things more like he was a medium. He knew that he was having characters speak through him. People could request that a certain character stopped by. It 100% was not an issue of alters, at least as Andy presented it. It was totally conscious and deliberate.
Andy framed the channeling in terms of belief, almost religious belief. If you didn't believe that he was bringing the voices and spirits of real people (real people. not characters. not fictional people. real people who existed on other planes of reality) out through him, if you dismissed it as nonsense, then you were clearly a small-minded person with no appreciation for all of the mysteries of the universe. How can you know that ghosts don't walk among us? How do you know that there isn't a pantheon of gods who weave themselves into our lives? How do you know that this DAYD Hogwarts student isn't actually typing into Andy's computer, giving you a recipe that he Creole grandmother held dear to her? You can't know. And if you pretend that you can, well then you're arrogant, simple-minded, and dull.
And like I said. People at it up. "Is Colin here tonight?" "Hold on. Let me get him." Etc.
After he was exposed... boy, I barely even remember. I was so shocked by the evil twin sister thing and the fact that people believed it to even register much of what Andy was saying. He made himself kind of scarce and closed ranks, at which point I was not among any kind of inner circle at all, and pretty soon after, I lost touch with everyone from the DAYD days, though I occasionally do look into some of their posts and sigh.
Thank you so much for sharing. I'm curious if he ever got called out for his lies what his response was - i.e., did someone ever challenge him on the fake accent or the IRA connections or the having been to Africa?
You're welcome! I always see people saying that there's this big black hole from the early DAYD days, and I thought maybe I could shed some light.
If people did call Andy out on the whoppers, I never saw it happen. The thing was? He had an answer to everything. I'm sure he could have told you exactly why he'd been in an African warzone, and he did tell the Podcast interviewers why his accent might have been a bit different (short version: he was raised in America, so his accent was 80% Belfast, 20% Virginia. How exotic!). I do vaguely remember someone questioning the Irish language text that he used either in one of his stories or in an LJ icon, and he did have an answer for that, too: short version, as described above, he was illiterate, since he'd grown up speaking the language but not being taught how to read or write it, and there are so many regional dialects of the language that nobody could possibly tell him he was wrong unless they knew every bit of slang from every corner of Ireland.
And if you already believe him, it's not hard at all to believe that.
You say that there was a military hierachy to the inner circle, can you share which of the well known DAYDians were involved in that and what their "rank" was? I'm imagining Cfc would be Andy's second-in-command or something.
Ooh, sorry Nonnie, but I think I'm going to have to let you down on this one. I remember clearly that the ranks were the ones he used for the characters in DAYD (first and second lieutenants for each house based on how people self-identified or how he identified them) and that many people referred to Andy as "Fearless Leader," "Commander," and "Sir" and waited for his permission to do or say things. I think that Ceirdwen existed outside of this military-style ranking system in her role as mod of the LJ, but I could be wrong about that. In terms of who was in what role, that's lost to memory. I could take a few guesses, but TBH, the ones that I might remember aren't well-known DAYDians. In fact, if I'm thinking of the right people, several of them were driven out hard when Andy tired of them. That was later, though.
In terms of Ceirdwen... I worry for her and have for a long time. She probably doesn't remember me, but we talked a few times back in the chat, and watching her blog to make sure that she's OK is pretty much my main link to DAYD and Andy at this point in time. I know that she's a grown woman who can make her own decisions about things, but I also know that her life seems to revolve to a scary degree around Andy and that her moods and state of mind (which she blogs about or vagueblogs about frequently) really do seem to be intimately tied up with how he's treating her at a given time period. (And often... he's not treating her particularly well. Andy is really good at hurting people through ignoring them.)
Wow, what an amazing infodump! Thanks DAYDian nonny! My question is: how many people did he actually hurt and do you know if any of them are doing ok nowadays? Because that's who I always think about the most.
You're welcome! Ha ha ha, it feels good to get some of this out in a weird way.
In terms of who Andy hurt... that's really a question, isn't it? I guess it all depends on what kind of hurt we're talking about. Andy hurt my feelings by not being there for me in something when I thought he'd be there (as he's done to countless people... he has an uncanny habit of losing his phone or getting locked out of his email when he knows that people need him) but I'd like to think that I've gone on with my life without his shadow hanging over me. But people like Abbey know too well that he can do a lot more damage than hurt feelings and making people feel left out. I'm esp. worried about two long-term DAYDians (both have been discussed on FFA) who seem scarily codependent in their relationships with him... I wouldn't be beyond believing that one of them would be honest to goodness suicidal if he ever succeeded in removing himself from their life. I pray that never happens.
There are at least four people (the husbands and wives of two separate DAYDian couples) who used to be very close with Andy and now do not speak with him, afaik. The A's had their names dragged through the mud (by Andy, who'd hardcore glommed onto them) shortly after they were married, though I don't remember enough about what exactly he said to feel comfrotable elaborating. At least one half of the K's wrote about how much Andy messed her up, but she's removed these posts. On a better note, though, I htink that both of these couples are pretty happily married and doing OK for themselves now, several years out.
There was another girl who was desperate for Andy's attention who he doted on for a while and then dumped, and when she didn't take the hint, he vilified her to the group, too, and basically ensured that nobody would make her welcome. I think that a friend was also forced out with her. A boy too, who was let down more slowly by Andy but who was equally desperate for attention from Andy and, iirc, fell really, really depressed when it was withdrawn. I don't know how either of them are doing now, but I do remember thinking that the boy had rebounded. I don't know for sure.
There's another guy (a bit older) who I would have described as outright sycophantic and who was one of the people Andy cut off cold "for his mental health." I thought for sure that this man would go to pieces over it, but recent events seem to say that not only did he manage OK, but he no longer idolizes Andy and even resents Andy's behavior toward him and others during the DAYD years. Very surprising, but some of the best news that I've seen come out of this most recent Andy wank.
So many people bailed after the reveal, and I have no way of knowing how many of them were hurt. It's a lot. Not trying to be dramatic, but it's probably way more than I'm aware of. For now, I don't know... Andy is a human being who should have the privilege of having friends, but I can't help but to worry over the people who get too close to him. He's done significant damage in SPN. He'll do it wherever he moves next too.
I think it's obvious to everyone who the co-dependant potentially-suicidal-if-Andy-dropped-her DAYDian is and I'm aware of who the 2 married couples are. Does the outright sycophantic older guy's surname beginning with M? Because I think I may know who he is too, though the rest are a mystery.
It's interesting that in those texts he sent to Agentsex talking about the number of people he'd abused, he said it was 4 in LoTR fandom and 11 DAYDians. I bet he's only counting those he got deeply involved in the whole channelling thing and it wouldn't even occur to him to include those he hurt by he lavishing attention on and then withdrawing it.
What's the significant damage he's done in SPN? Do you mean stuff like Profound Radio disbanding and the whole Gishwes implosion or something else?
Yes, the outright sycophantic older guy's surname does begin with an M. I imagine you know who he is, and like I said, he reemerged recently and seemed to have cooled significantly toward Andy. FWIW, I believe we've figured out that this guy is one of Andy's chatters in Turimel's Skype conversation, the one who is most vocally jumping to elevate Andy and tear down the claims against him.
The rest are mysteries and are probably going to remain mysteries (even I can only vaguely remember the name of one of the girls, though I know who the rest are) because they, afaik, didn't make it to the Tumblr stage of DAYDverse, having been cast out and demonized before the switch from LJ to Skype to Facebook to Tumblr really happened.
It's interesting that in those texts he sent to Agentsex talking about the number of people he'd abused, he said it was 4 in LoTR fandom and 11 DAYDians.
In LoTR alone, there's Abbey, Turimel, Little Sam, Diamond, Bob... I'm already at 5, and Andy's involvement in that mess was way before my time and way outside my perspective. I can recall above 11 in DAYDverse without even thinking about it and without counting Brittany or her DAYDian brother (the six people involved in the couples, plus D, B, L, L2 (moniker), L3 (moniker), D, T).
To be honest...? I best that those 4 people and 11 people figures are typical of Andy's strategy to give (fake) specifics in order to lend himself an air of believably. He once wrote: "I've seen 37 friends die violently. I've been shot 4 times." Both of which are clearly BS. But by giving concrete numbers, he sounds like he's more rooted in the truth than he actually is.
I bet he's only counting those he got deeply involved in the whole channelling thing and it wouldn't even occur to him to include those he hurt by he lavishing attention on and then withdrawing it.
Ding ding, I think you're probably exactly right here. Remembering that people are only worthwhile to Andy if they can somehow serve him, I would be shocked if he was counting the people who helped him and encouraged him and thought they'd befriended him only to be cut off when he got bored of them.
- DAYD Nonnie
Was Brittany's DAYDian brother aware of the channelling aspect? Are he and Andy still in contact? Coz I'm wondering how that fitted in to the whole family hating Andy and banning him from the funeral.
I believe that he was around for some of the channeling. That said, he was MUCH less involved in the community as a whole than Brittany was, and I wouldn't want to say with certainty that the brother was in the Skype chat when the characters were "coming through."
AFAIK, Andy does not have any more contact with anyone in Brittany's family, including this brother.
As a former insider, can you shed any light on how accurate this (http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/97483.html?thread=478396619#cmt478396619) analysis of the CFC situation is? I'd really appreciate you insight.
Tea Blogger
As far as I know (and it's very much secondhand, because I have never been at a Posse event) they're actually pleased that he has friends over. I think maybe it looks normal and is therefore reassuring? But nothing about "Mom, I'm having a clingy 47 year old who cries a lot over" looks good, I guess.
Out of curiosity, do you know if CFC's conversion to Catholicism has anything to do with Andy? Abbey has said that when she left him, he was trying to get her involved with the Catholic Church. (http://kqcrazytrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/why-i-dont-believe-in-god-concluded-2/#more-1144)
Tea Blogger
According to the post made around the time by him, he was baptized Catholic and that was apparently good enough for the Church. I'm Catholic, but have never been to a baptism for an adult, so I don't know if that's the case, but it's plausible I suppose. It's just strange to me that she would have him when he's not even a practising Catholic, but that might be more because she's so reliant on him for her emotional stability. It is amusing to me that he's on Catholic when it's useful to him in this situation and in his appropriating of the Troubles.
Hang on...when you say that there's a lot of projection going on in regards to Cfc's attitude towards Abbey's relationship with Andy are you suggesting that Cfc's feelings for Andy are romantic/that she might have a crush on him?
OH GOD, NO. I mean, I seriously hope not, and did not mean to suggest that! I just meant she's accusing Abbey of taking advantage of a mentally ill, much younger person--when anyone looking closely could accuse CFC of doing the same thing, only financially/emotionally and not sexually.
These two posts are especially odd, now that I know that CFC and Brittany were never really friends. And note that in the first one, CFC describes Brittany as Andy's "roommate" and "friend"! One would think that if they were really life partners, Andy's bestest best friend would have known about it.
Tea Blogger
Just as a disclaimer... CFC and Brittany weren't friends during the time that *I* was active. Like I said, it's possible that their relationship evolved and mended some given enough time elapsed since the Shaman Wizard blow-up, which (rightfully) Ceirdwen was furious and frightened about. But given that Andy and Brittany were bouncing all over the place in the year or two between the die-down of the reveal and Brittany's murder and that Andy has a pretty hard time attending to someone (CFC) when he's actively wrapping himself around someone else (Brittany), I speculatively doubt that they were ever really close.
I don't mean to imply that Brittany died as CFC's mortal enemy... Not at all. I *do* question the framing of their relationship after Brittany's death, and it still does make me scratch my head to read CFC's tea journalings in light of that.
I would tend to doubt that they were actually friends. It seems like CFC was *trying*, probably because she was afraid of losing Andy. She was even planning a visit to California to stay with them--but she's said in some of her posts on that blog that their closeness and "good times" developed only after Brittany's death.
This is precisely it.
- DAYD Nonnie
Brittany was arguably more than complicit in (she was actually in a big way the driving force behind) the Undead Shaman Wizard wank
So this would suggest that, in answer to a question asked up-thread, Brittany *did* believe in the channeling, and Andy's recent claims that she was the first to identify his "delusions" as such were, in fact BS?
As far as I can tell.
Brittany was the one who was relaying the exchange about the Undead Shaman Wizard between idiomagic and Andy. So... At least at that point In time, either (1) she believed that Andy was in communication with entities on the Astral Plane and that by relaying his messages, she was joining in the effort to save CFC's kids, (2) she and Andy were fucking with people/were having a breakdown and trying to create a distraction after the big reveal, or (3) she knew that Andy was exhibiting symptoms of severe mental illness but went along with his claims for some reason. I think that (2) is too cynical and that (3), based on the behavior that I did see from Brittany re: Andy and his claims, is unlikely.
- DAYD Nonnie
DAYD nonnie...would you consider going on record at all?
Hmmm.
As much as I'd like to give more worth to my comments by signing my name or old Skype moniker or LJ, I'm not sure whether or not Andy ever knew my full name (or if he would still remember it if he did), but on the off chance that he did, I don't want to be in a place to find out if he or his followers would mess with me. Maybe that's paranoid, but... it's Andy. I also definitely don't have the time or level of interest needed to run a Tumblr about this kind of stuff... I'll leave that to the people who are already doing a great job exposing some of the crazier stuff that's gone on with Andy past and present. And people would whole heartedly agree.
I'm trying to be as credible as possible by only commenting on things that I know I remember and, when I speculate, to speculate from my own perspective as someone who was watching things go down. But having said that, if anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer. :)
"Yet what you seem to be suggesting from the DAYDian channelling days is someone could simply ask to speak to a certain character and Andy would "channel" them upon request and he'd be totally aware of what was going on and what was being said while channelling the character and therefore wouldn't need the infodump after the character had left. "
You're 100% right here. This is exactly how the channelling worked in the DAYDian days, at least in the big Skype chat group. Have you ever seen the times on Tumblr where Andy will solicit questions about DAYD characters and then will answer them in asks? It was exactly like that, except in the first person rather than the third. So someone would ask for Colin, he would "come out," they'd ask him "How do you feel about your past infatuation over Harry?" and "Colin" would respond "You know, it's a little bit embarrassing in hindsight, but I don't regret being enthusiastic about someone like Harry. I'm proud to be a fan!" or whatever. It would be the exact same thing on Tumblr, only the question would be "How did Colin feel about..." and the response "You know, it's a little bit embarrassing in hindsight, but he doesn't regret..." Etc.
Andy remembered everything, to the point where, preemptively, like he needed to prevent anyone from calling him out for BS, he'd intersperse these episodes with lectures (from he himself, Andy, not a character) about how spirit channelling is considered sacred in other cultures, how we can't begin to know the mysteries of the universe, that according to multiverse theories and certain spiritualists, there are worlds in which Colin Creevy is real and where this recipe for Gumbo came not from a fictional DAYD character's fictional grandmother, but from a very real DAYD person's very real grandmother living in Louisiana.
Totally not in line with the type of channelling that Abbey experienced, when others would take over and Andy would be absent, claiming no knowledge of the intrusion or memory of that other's being there. And not the type of channelling that he's describing in his mental illness posts, where he talks about losing huge chunks of his life because "Andy" wasn't there.
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Non-Hike DAYDIAN Q&A, part 1
(Anonymous) 2015-04-15 09:50 pm (UTC)(link)http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/97974.html?thread=480802230#cmt480802230
As a pre-exposure and (though to a lesser degree) post-exposure DAYD nonnie, I'd gladly answer anything about that time period that I can recall.
As for Danaoffthedancefloor... she's probably example #1 that I would give to people who think that no real emotional harm can come from getting involved with Andy. Definitely not the only example I could give but... definitely one of the most upsetting and raw.
Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
Did you go to the DAYDcon at the end of 2009?
Were you still around when Abbey published her blog including her "Letter to the DAYDians" in 2011? How was that received in the inner circle/justified by Andy?
No, I didn't go to the DAYDcon in 2009. IIRC, DAYDcon actually occurred after the big reveal, so even if I had wanted to go before (and to be honest? part of me did! Andy was fun in a way, even when you knew he was full of shit!), I was too apprehensive to go after. From what I can tell, everyone had a good time having snowball fights, making stew, talking DAYD long into the night. They had fun. Andy was fun.
Unfortunately, I don't know personally how people who were still deep in DAYDverse took the Letter to the DAYDians. I was almost entirely gone by that point. I was, afaik, the person who explicitly asked Abbey to address the DAYDians, since I'd seen evidence of the obvious horrorshow that the Trail of Tears hike was going to be, but I wasn't speaking with Andy or any other DAYDians by that point in time.
BUT Turimel does have a post on her LJ that somehow got hold of a Skype conversation in the DAYD community, and it looks like it's from right around the same time. A little earlier in 2011 than Abbey's "Letter," so it's not in reaction to that specifically, but it is directly addressing all of the wank in Andy's words. Warning as always for transfail on Turimel's blog, but if you want to see just how brainwashed some of the true believer fans were, this isn't one to miss.
http://turimel.livejournal.com/105515.html
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike? What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy? I don't mean share anything that may cause any member of her family pain if they chanced upon it, I mean more concerning Andy's describing her as "a close friend" just after she was killed, but has over time become Andy's "life partner"?
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike?
My disclaimer for this is that in the post-reveal period leading up to Brittany's murder, I was involved very minimally in DAYDverse things. I (like a good number of people, I suspect) saw the news about Brittany's murder when Andy posted it on LJ and Facebook, which I browsed pretty casually, and I initially thought for sure that it was fake. Until the story was corroborated in the media, I assumed that this was typical Andy: a grand story of woe involving someone with a tragic past, the assumption of a new identity, and the chance to turn a real person into a writing exercise and a talking point, as he frequently did. Of course, tragically, I was wrong this time.
The Trail of Tears hike rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons, first of which was the purple prose that Andy wrote as a eulogy for Brittany. I just mentioned that Andy uses people he knows as writing exercises, to the point where it sometimes feels like he takes a kernel of their realities and then embellishes and ups the drama and (lately) deepens the social justice hook that will let him reel other people in. There were details of the sort of abuse that Brittany allegedly suffered at her partner's hands that I'm hesitant to mention because they were extremely graphic... but I'll say that, knowing Andy, I doubted those allegations because they were so graphic. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but... I knew that Brittany really had been murdered. I didn't know if I could buy everything that Andy wrote about her in his eulogy post, and the fact that he used that post as a launch point for the ToT hike bothered me. Andy also mentioned (in a chat, I think, or on his LJ or Facebook) that Brittany's family had barred him from her funeral, which was a major red flag. Families don't bar their daughter's friend (especially a friend who was injured in the same shooting) from her funeral unless there's something really wrong.
It also didn't sit well with me that Andy suddenly became the authority on intimate partner violence, to the point where he could essentially go on tour evangelizing (after putting all his followers to work setting things up for him, of course). I doubted the motives and lgitimacy of the "It's About Power" campaign, which Andy talked about getting true blue charity status for, and knew 100% that it would be abandoned once he'd used it to get all of the hike swag sponsored. Totally right about that.
Also, as other people have pointed out (and as you say above), the "lover/life parter" definition evolved over time. It felt like Andy was deifying Brittany in some way, which I can understand from anyone who is grieving a friend or family member who dies tragically. But... it was just that as Brittany evolved from being a follower to an acolyte to a favored friend to a special friend to a soulmate to a life partner, it seemed more and more clear to me that Andy was manipulating her memory for his own gain, knowing damn well that nobody could question him about what he was saying because, well... Brittany really was dead, and Andy really was wounded, and you're a big asshole if you question his grieving process.
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy?
I didn't know Brittany well, but we did overlap in DAYDverse so I definitely knew of her, read her stories, etc. I knew that she was one of Andy's fiercest fans, and I knew that around the time of the reveal, she was emerging as one of the clear favorites. TBH, and not to speak crap about the dead, but here goes, Brittany set off some of my alarm bells in the same way that Dana Off the Dancefloor does: too willing to pretend along with Andy, to do things like adopt new accents, get sucked into crazy stories, do his bidding, etc. Ceirdwenfc has mentioned publically that Brittany and she didn't start out on the best terms. This was because Brittany was aggressively asserting herself for Andy's attention, driving a wedge (intentionally or not, I don't know for sure) between Andy and Ceirdwen. (And Ceirdwen, though I really do think she's a nice person, does not respond well to being separated from Andy.) It was also because Brittany was the one who most encouraged Andy in the Undead Shaman Wizard Eating Your Children saga that splashed Ceirdwen and her kids all over people's blogs.
That's pretty much all I remember about Brittany. One of her younger brothers was a DAYDian too... she went on a hike up the west coast with Andy at one point... that' sabout it.
What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
I think that it was 2 couples and 1 couple that didn't work out:
* Welsh Guy, American Girl (Married after the ToT Hike)
* American Couple (I think married in Vegas shortly after DAYDcon.)
* American Girl (minor!!), Kiwi Guy (There was a big plan to marry them off to each other, but it fell through. This was so fucked up.)
The first two couples, afaik, are still married, and neither couple is on good terms with Andy. Recently, someone found blog entries from the woman from the first couple, detailing how badly Andy had messed her up on the hike. She's since moved or deleted. I don't blame her.
I don't know what the deal is with Andy and match-making, but Abbey says that it goes way back. If I have to guess, I think it's probably that Andy knows that matchmaking gives him the abilioty to be a puppeteer and to get himself actively entwined in two people's lives and then to pull away quickly if he feels like it once they're together. It also gives him the chance to prove a point through the people involved in the couples. In the DAYD cases, in no telling order, the points he tried to make had to do with disability, self-esteem, distance being no obstacle, the power of shared struggle to unite strangers... I guess he's a Romantic in a weird way!
The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel? Because a relatively recent spin on their relationship is Andy claiming it was Brittany who was the first person who realised his channelling was a symptom of his mental illness and encouraged him to get help in 2009 but they put it off because they couldn't afford it. But then there's the Undead Shaman emails which gives the impression she really believed it and also recently Andy said when defending himself against the Finelookingcat sexual assault allegations that for his birthday in 2010 he was ensconced away in a bedroom somewhere with Brittany and a couple of other DAYDians in one of the astral plane battles or something. I always had the impression she died still fully believing in Andy's powers, which of course he's now contradicting with the whole "Brittany wasn't an enabler, she could see I was mentally ill" angle.
Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?
Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?
"The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel?"
From what I could tell? Yes. Brittany frequently wrote about spirituality (something that Andy began to talk about more and more frequently when he was trying to reel Brittany in), and it seemed to me that she really did believe that Andy could channel. From how involved Brittany was in the Undead Shaman Wizard thing, but also from how she seemed to eat up the Skype chat channeling and to vocally back up Andy's claims that this was a spiritual thing and that you were simply intolerant or close-minded if you didn't believe that Andy could 100% actualfax bring Colin Creevy and Terry Boot out of him, she seemed to buy it.
Maybe this really was part of her spirituality. Maybe she came to believe it out of a necessity to get herself close (closest) to Andy. Maybe she evolved her perspective through more time with Andy and eventually did counsel him that this business was mentally ill and that he needed help. I'm not sure. I doubt the last possibility, though. Andy's "Brittany was my mental health savior" line reeks of post-murder revision to me.
The other, more sinister possibility is that Brittany was just as calculating and manipulative as Andy was and consciously voiced her belief in his channelling abilities so that she could lean on them later, when convenient for her. I believe it's been brought up before how interesting it was that when everything was going to shit, Brittany and Andy made Ceirdwen (Brittany's only real competition at the time for Andy's right-hand woman) and her family the focal point of their ridiculous attempts at obfuscation via astral plane happenings. I haven't completely worked out what I feel about this theory (I watched the USW thing unfold when everyone else on the web did, so I don't really have much more "insider" information on that horrorshow), but if Abbey's history with Andy is to be believed, I sort of think that this reading is too cynical. Maybe Brittany was conniving from the very getgo. But I think it's more probable that as she fell more and more into Andy's orbit, it got harder and harder to separate herself from his lies.
"Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?"
I saw a post here recently claiming that Ceirdwen didn't know about the channelling. AFAIK, this is completely untrue: I was aware of the channeling at least as far as it happened in the Skype chat (the "Room of Requirement"), which Ceirdwen was an active part of and witness to. IIRC, she didn't lap it up the way Andy's newer sycophants did, so I'm not sure what she thought of it privately, but she definitely witnessed it as it was happening. Very possibly there was more, weirder, and more dangerous channelling talk going on in other forums that Ceirdwen wasn't aware of, but she knew that Andy was claiming that his characters were literally speaking through him. She did know.
"Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?"
OK, what's so distasteful about the fact Cfc knew about Andy's channelling is this: she bangs on and on about how Abbey being older than Andy and her being married and owning a house and having a degree in psychology and gender studies Abbey should have realised that Andy was a mixed-up, gender-confused obviously mentally ill teenager and Abbey should have got him help rather than enabling that mental illness by believing everything he claimed.
So if it's true that Cfc was aware of Andy's channelling how come she, with her much larger 17 year age gap and her whatever degree it is she has (something about homeschooling?), she didn't realise he was obviously mentally ill rather than believing everything he claimed? Because in order to have been his friend from the very beginning of DAYD, since early 2008 she's going to have to have been witness to lie after lie after lie after reframing after reimagining after no-this-time-it's-the-truth-for-reals-I-promise. She's going to have to have believed all those ridiculously grandiose cutting-off-baby's-arms-in-Africa stories, believed that the stupidly macho Irish version of Andy Blake was a real person rather than a hodge podge of exaggerated fiction, she would have had to lived through the whole Andy Blake/Amy Player reveal, actually believed that Amy Player was Andy's mentally ill twin sister and believed he could channel his Harry Potter characters, yet...it's only since Andy's officially made mental illness and schizophrenia part of his narrative publicly that she's all "I knew he was mentally ill all along and any decent person would have seen the same and got him help rather than flown him across state for sex" and come down hard on Abbey about her believing Andy rather than recognising him as ill. And this is only a very recent stance, since 2012. So how come between the years of 2008-2011 Cfc didn't realise Andy was ill when he was obviously exhibiting behaviour that is now part of the mental illness narrative with the channelling? It just doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny at all.
Unfortunately, this is going to be another one of those times when I've got to disappoint people. Sorry, nonnnie! I very vaguely remember there being a loyalty oath, but I don't remember it or its details clearly enough to feel comfortable writing about it. (I'm not out to sensationalize stuff that I don't completely remember!) There was definitely a chain of command that people took seriously, but I don't know if that was because of an oath or because people just got really wrapped up in Andy's games.
Non-Hike DAYDIAN Q&A, part 2
(Anonymous) 2015-04-15 10:10 pm (UTC)(link)Oh god a genuine pre-exposure DAYDian! I have so many questions I don't know where to start! Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
AYRT
I'm going to start with a copy/paste of myself from one of the older threads that I just got around to now:
I'd heard about VB in a vague, Whisper Down the Lane way before (the big reveal), but I'd never heard enough to connect the dots even when I was actively interacting with Andy and the DAYDverse. I knew that he was lying about some things from the getgo (vague but fatal heart condition? seen dozens of friends brutally murdered? obviously fake Irish accent? fought on both sides of the Troubles? looked into a little African child's eyes to reassure him that it would be OK as he cauterized a post-field-amputation limb? Suuure...) but thought that he was nice enough until the DAYD character channeling started and everything took a turn for the really fantastically insane and asinine.
As you can see from above, whose examples are all things I absolutely, no doubt in my mind recall Andy saying, the things that Andy claimed about himself in the early DAYD days weren't just implausible. They were so obviously lies that to see people around him openly believing in them could very easily make you feel like either you were the only sober person in a room full of kids tripping out of their minds or that you were the one with tenuous grips on reality. But people did believe him. Some people believed him extremely vocally and went out of their ways to voice their belief in him, particularly when the claims were bogus beyond belief. If you've ever seen the Skype conversation that Turimel somehow got her hands on, you'll see for yourself people totally eating up the story about Amy Player being Andy's mentally ill twin sister.
In the case of the story about cauterizing the amputated limb of that little black baby in an African warzone, you would expect rational, adult people (and though the DAYDverse crew was a high percentage of teens, there were absolutely adults in there also) to call BS immediately, but nobody did. Andy got his asspats and his oohing and aahing from the group, with people wondering how he had the strength to do something like that, reminding him that he was probably that little boy's savior, etc.
Other claims that I know for sure Andy made, in addition to the ones that everyone has heard about the IRA, the bar fight that got him a claymore scar across his chest, the evil twin, the Undead Shaman Wizard, etc. (I'm not going to list anything that I can't say for certain that he claimed.):
* I can perform a field tracheotomy with a drinking straw, and I've had to do it.
* I've seen dozens of people murdered before my eyes.
* I was the first male born in seven generations of women, so it's really no surprise to my family that I have psychic capabilities.
* I traveled the world almost entirely for free, partially by stowing away on cargo ships. You can travel anywhere if you're resourceful enough!
* I fucked ((I don't remember the number, but something obscene, high double digits)) women by the time I was 18. (He shared things like this a lot, and back then (before he became ~enlightened~it was always "fucking," not "making love" or even "having sex." Women were dainty damsels and the essence of mother earth on one hand and conquests to be notched on bedposts at the same time. Other details about his sexual exploits include fucking a married women in the kitchen while her little children played in the other room.)
* I work at a Starbucks where professors from the nearby university come in and chat with me in Ancient Greek.
* When I was at work today, a coloratura soprano with a world-class opera company came into the shop and sang an aria to pay for her drink.
* I just know things about people. For instance, when I was little, I blurted out that the pastor of our church was cheating on his wife (I'd just had a feeling about it), and it turned out that I was right. I ruined him. This is part of why my mother hates me.
* The reason I can't write or read "Gaelic" is because I was never schooled a day in my life. I learned to speak it because it was the only language my grandfather used with me, but I'm illiterate and really just going by sound. So if the "Gaelic" dialogue in my "novels" isn't totally right, remember that it's because everything I know, I taught myself.
I guess some of those aren't that interesting, but they do illustrate a point: Andy lies (or at least he did) about everything. From the massive (his evil twin sister) to the totally mundane. He can't just work at Starbucks... he has to work at a Starbucks where colorful characters waltz in and out singing arias. He can't just be perceptive... he has to be psychic.
Speaking of psychic: if the character channelling was supposed to be a secret, it was the worst kept secret ever. I was definitely not in the innermost inner circle (which at the time had a military structure: Andy was the "Fearless Leader," and he designated the most loyal DAYDians as explicit military ranks), and I saw the channelling on clear display. In Skype group chats, DAYD characters would "come through" Andy and talk with the group. Colin Creevy was a big one, and so was a character (whose name I now forget) who was a budding chef. Michael Corner and Terry Boot also came in to talk to everyone. It seemed to differ slightly from the channeling that Abbey described, since Andy here was presenting things more like he was a medium. He knew that he was having characters speak through him. People could request that a certain character stopped by. It 100% was not an issue of alters, at least as Andy presented it. It was totally conscious and deliberate.
Andy framed the channeling in terms of belief, almost religious belief. If you didn't believe that he was bringing the voices and spirits of real people (real people. not characters. not fictional people. real people who existed on other planes of reality) out through him, if you dismissed it as nonsense, then you were clearly a small-minded person with no appreciation for all of the mysteries of the universe. How can you know that ghosts don't walk among us? How do you know that there isn't a pantheon of gods who weave themselves into our lives? How do you know that this DAYD Hogwarts student isn't actually typing into Andy's computer, giving you a recipe that he Creole grandmother held dear to her? You can't know. And if you pretend that you can, well then you're arrogant, simple-minded, and dull.
And like I said. People at it up. "Is Colin here tonight?" "Hold on. Let me get him." Etc.
After he was exposed... boy, I barely even remember. I was so shocked by the evil twin sister thing and the fact that people believed it to even register much of what Andy was saying. He made himself kind of scarce and closed ranks, at which point I was not among any kind of inner circle at all, and pretty soon after, I lost touch with everyone from the DAYD days, though I occasionally do look into some of their posts and sigh.
Thank you so much for sharing. I'm curious if he ever got called out for his lies what his response was - i.e., did someone ever challenge him on the fake accent or the IRA connections or the having been to Africa?
You're welcome! I always see people saying that there's this big black hole from the early DAYD days, and I thought maybe I could shed some light.
If people did call Andy out on the whoppers, I never saw it happen. The thing was? He had an answer to everything. I'm sure he could have told you exactly why he'd been in an African warzone, and he did tell the Podcast interviewers why his accent might have been a bit different (short version: he was raised in America, so his accent was 80% Belfast, 20% Virginia. How exotic!). I do vaguely remember someone questioning the Irish language text that he used either in one of his stories or in an LJ icon, and he did have an answer for that, too: short version, as described above, he was illiterate, since he'd grown up speaking the language but not being taught how to read or write it, and there are so many regional dialects of the language that nobody could possibly tell him he was wrong unless they knew every bit of slang from every corner of Ireland.
And if you already believe him, it's not hard at all to believe that.
You say that there was a military hierachy to the inner circle, can you share which of the well known DAYDians were involved in that and what their "rank" was? I'm imagining Cfc would be Andy's second-in-command or something.
Ooh, sorry Nonnie, but I think I'm going to have to let you down on this one. I remember clearly that the ranks were the ones he used for the characters in DAYD (first and second lieutenants for each house based on how people self-identified or how he identified them) and that many people referred to Andy as "Fearless Leader," "Commander," and "Sir" and waited for his permission to do or say things. I think that Ceirdwen existed outside of this military-style ranking system in her role as mod of the LJ, but I could be wrong about that. In terms of who was in what role, that's lost to memory. I could take a few guesses, but TBH, the ones that I might remember aren't well-known DAYDians. In fact, if I'm thinking of the right people, several of them were driven out hard when Andy tired of them. That was later, though.
In terms of Ceirdwen... I worry for her and have for a long time. She probably doesn't remember me, but we talked a few times back in the chat, and watching her blog to make sure that she's OK is pretty much my main link to DAYD and Andy at this point in time. I know that she's a grown woman who can make her own decisions about things, but I also know that her life seems to revolve to a scary degree around Andy and that her moods and state of mind (which she blogs about or vagueblogs about frequently) really do seem to be intimately tied up with how he's treating her at a given time period. (And often... he's not treating her particularly well. Andy is really good at hurting people through ignoring them.)
Wow, what an amazing infodump! Thanks DAYDian nonny! My question is: how many people did he actually hurt and do you know if any of them are doing ok nowadays? Because that's who I always think about the most.
You're welcome! Ha ha ha, it feels good to get some of this out in a weird way.
In terms of who Andy hurt... that's really a question, isn't it? I guess it all depends on what kind of hurt we're talking about. Andy hurt my feelings by not being there for me in something when I thought he'd be there (as he's done to countless people... he has an uncanny habit of losing his phone or getting locked out of his email when he knows that people need him) but I'd like to think that I've gone on with my life without his shadow hanging over me. But people like Abbey know too well that he can do a lot more damage than hurt feelings and making people feel left out. I'm esp. worried about two long-term DAYDians (both have been discussed on FFA) who seem scarily codependent in their relationships with him... I wouldn't be beyond believing that one of them would be honest to goodness suicidal if he ever succeeded in removing himself from their life. I pray that never happens.
There are at least four people (the husbands and wives of two separate DAYDian couples) who used to be very close with Andy and now do not speak with him, afaik. The A's had their names dragged through the mud (by Andy, who'd hardcore glommed onto them) shortly after they were married, though I don't remember enough about what exactly he said to feel comfrotable elaborating. At least one half of the K's wrote about how much Andy messed her up, but she's removed these posts. On a better note, though, I htink that both of these couples are pretty happily married and doing OK for themselves now, several years out.
There was another girl who was desperate for Andy's attention who he doted on for a while and then dumped, and when she didn't take the hint, he vilified her to the group, too, and basically ensured that nobody would make her welcome. I think that a friend was also forced out with her. A boy too, who was let down more slowly by Andy but who was equally desperate for attention from Andy and, iirc, fell really, really depressed when it was withdrawn. I don't know how either of them are doing now, but I do remember thinking that the boy had rebounded. I don't know for sure.
There's another guy (a bit older) who I would have described as outright sycophantic and who was one of the people Andy cut off cold "for his mental health." I thought for sure that this man would go to pieces over it, but recent events seem to say that not only did he manage OK, but he no longer idolizes Andy and even resents Andy's behavior toward him and others during the DAYD years. Very surprising, but some of the best news that I've seen come out of this most recent Andy wank.
So many people bailed after the reveal, and I have no way of knowing how many of them were hurt. It's a lot. Not trying to be dramatic, but it's probably way more than I'm aware of. For now, I don't know... Andy is a human being who should have the privilege of having friends, but I can't help but to worry over the people who get too close to him. He's done significant damage in SPN. He'll do it wherever he moves next too.
Non-Hike DAYDIAN Q&A, part 3
(Anonymous) 2015-04-15 10:27 pm (UTC)(link)It's interesting that in those texts he sent to Agentsex talking about the number of people he'd abused, he said it was 4 in LoTR fandom and 11 DAYDians. I bet he's only counting those he got deeply involved in the whole channelling thing and it wouldn't even occur to him to include those he hurt by he lavishing attention on and then withdrawing it.
What's the significant damage he's done in SPN? Do you mean stuff like Profound Radio disbanding and the whole Gishwes implosion or something else?
Yes, the outright sycophantic older guy's surname does begin with an M. I imagine you know who he is, and like I said, he reemerged recently and seemed to have cooled significantly toward Andy. FWIW, I believe we've figured out that this guy is one of Andy's chatters in Turimel's Skype conversation, the one who is most vocally jumping to elevate Andy and tear down the claims against him.
The rest are mysteries and are probably going to remain mysteries (even I can only vaguely remember the name of one of the girls, though I know who the rest are) because they, afaik, didn't make it to the Tumblr stage of DAYDverse, having been cast out and demonized before the switch from LJ to Skype to Facebook to Tumblr really happened.
It's interesting that in those texts he sent to Agentsex talking about the number of people he'd abused, he said it was 4 in LoTR fandom and 11 DAYDians.
In LoTR alone, there's Abbey, Turimel, Little Sam, Diamond, Bob... I'm already at 5, and Andy's involvement in that mess was way before my time and way outside my perspective. I can recall above 11 in DAYDverse without even thinking about it and without counting Brittany or her DAYDian brother (the six people involved in the couples, plus D, B, L, L2 (moniker), L3 (moniker), D, T).
To be honest...? I best that those 4 people and 11 people figures are typical of Andy's strategy to give (fake) specifics in order to lend himself an air of believably. He once wrote: "I've seen 37 friends die violently. I've been shot 4 times." Both of which are clearly BS. But by giving concrete numbers, he sounds like he's more rooted in the truth than he actually is.
I bet he's only counting those he got deeply involved in the whole channelling thing and it wouldn't even occur to him to include those he hurt by he lavishing attention on and then withdrawing it.
Ding ding, I think you're probably exactly right here. Remembering that people are only worthwhile to Andy if they can somehow serve him, I would be shocked if he was counting the people who helped him and encouraged him and thought they'd befriended him only to be cut off when he got bored of them.
- DAYD Nonnie
Was Brittany's DAYDian brother aware of the channelling aspect? Are he and Andy still in contact? Coz I'm wondering how that fitted in to the whole family hating Andy and banning him from the funeral.
I believe that he was around for some of the channeling. That said, he was MUCH less involved in the community as a whole than Brittany was, and I wouldn't want to say with certainty that the brother was in the Skype chat when the characters were "coming through."
AFAIK, Andy does not have any more contact with anyone in Brittany's family, including this brother.
As a former insider, can you shed any light on how accurate this (http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/97483.html?thread=478396619#cmt478396619) analysis of the CFC situation is? I'd really appreciate you insight.
Tea Blogger
As far as I know (and it's very much secondhand, because I have never been at a Posse event) they're actually pleased that he has friends over. I think maybe it looks normal and is therefore reassuring?
But nothing about "Mom, I'm having a clingy 47 year old who cries a lot over" looks good, I guess.
Out of curiosity, do you know if CFC's conversion to Catholicism has anything to do with Andy? Abbey has said that when she left him, he was trying to get her involved with the Catholic Church. (http://kqcrazytrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/why-i-dont-believe-in-god-concluded-2/#more-1144)
Tea Blogger
According to the post made around the time by him, he was baptized Catholic and that was apparently good enough for the Church. I'm Catholic, but have never been to a baptism for an adult, so I don't know if that's the case, but it's plausible I suppose. It's just strange to me that she would have him when he's not even a practising Catholic, but that might be more because she's so reliant on him for her emotional stability. It is amusing to me that he's on Catholic when it's useful to him in this situation and in his appropriating of the Troubles.
Hang on...when you say that there's a lot of projection going on in regards to Cfc's attitude towards Abbey's relationship with Andy are you suggesting that Cfc's feelings for Andy are romantic/that she might have a crush on him?
OH GOD, NO. I mean, I seriously hope not, and did not mean to suggest that! I just meant she's accusing Abbey of taking advantage of a mentally ill, much younger person--when anyone looking closely could accuse CFC of doing the same thing, only financially/emotionally and not sexually.
https://griffinsandgingersnaps.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/tea-with-brittany-4-real-chai/
https://griffinsandgingersnaps.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/a-ceramic-cup/
These two posts are especially odd, now that I know that CFC and Brittany were never really friends. And note that in the first one, CFC describes Brittany as Andy's "roommate" and "friend"! One would think that if they were really life partners, Andy's bestest best friend would have known about it.
Tea Blogger
Just as a disclaimer... CFC and Brittany weren't friends during the time that *I* was active. Like I said, it's possible that their relationship evolved and mended some given enough time elapsed since the Shaman Wizard blow-up, which (rightfully) Ceirdwen was furious and frightened about. But given that Andy and Brittany were bouncing all over the place in the year or two between the die-down of the reveal and Brittany's murder and that Andy has a pretty hard time attending to someone (CFC) when he's actively wrapping himself around someone else (Brittany), I speculatively doubt that they were ever really close.
I don't mean to imply that Brittany died as CFC's mortal enemy... Not at all. I *do* question the framing of their relationship after Brittany's death, and it still does make me scratch my head to read CFC's tea journalings in light of that.
I would tend to doubt that they were actually friends. It seems like CFC was *trying*, probably because she was afraid of losing Andy. She was even planning a visit to California to stay with them--but she's said in some of her posts on that blog that their closeness and "good times" developed only after Brittany's death.
This is precisely it.
- DAYD Nonnie
Brittany was arguably more than complicit in (she was actually in a big way the driving force behind) the Undead Shaman Wizard wank
So this would suggest that, in answer to a question asked up-thread, Brittany *did* believe in the channeling, and Andy's recent claims that she was the first to identify his "delusions" as such were, in fact BS?
As far as I can tell.
Brittany was the one who was relaying the exchange about the Undead Shaman Wizard between idiomagic and Andy. So... At least at that point In time, either (1) she believed that Andy was in communication with entities on the Astral Plane and that by relaying his messages, she was joining in the effort to save CFC's kids, (2) she and Andy were fucking with people/were having a breakdown and trying to create a distraction after the big reveal, or (3) she knew that Andy was exhibiting symptoms of severe mental illness but went along with his claims for some reason. I think that (2) is too cynical and that (3), based on the behavior that I did see from Brittany re: Andy and his claims, is unlikely.
- DAYD Nonnie
DAYD nonnie...would you consider going on record at all?
Hmmm.
As much as I'd like to give more worth to my comments by signing my name or old Skype moniker or LJ, I'm not sure whether or not Andy ever knew my full name (or if he would still remember it if he did), but on the off chance that he did, I don't want to be in a place to find out if he or his followers would mess with me. Maybe that's paranoid, but... it's Andy. I also definitely don't have the time or level of interest needed to run a Tumblr about this kind of stuff... I'll leave that to the people who are already doing a great job exposing some of the crazier stuff that's gone on with Andy past and present. And people would whole heartedly agree.
I'm trying to be as credible as possible by only commenting on things that I know I remember and, when I speculate, to speculate from my own perspective as someone who was watching things go down. But having said that, if anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer. :)
"Yet what you seem to be suggesting from the DAYDian channelling days is someone could simply ask to speak to a certain character and Andy would "channel" them upon request and he'd be totally aware of what was going on and what was being said while channelling the character and therefore wouldn't need the infodump after the character had left. "
You're 100% right here. This is exactly how the channelling worked in the DAYDian days, at least in the big Skype chat group. Have you ever seen the times on Tumblr where Andy will solicit questions about DAYD characters and then will answer them in asks? It was exactly like that, except in the first person rather than the third. So someone would ask for Colin, he would "come out," they'd ask him "How do you feel about your past infatuation over Harry?" and "Colin" would respond "You know, it's a little bit embarrassing in hindsight, but I don't regret being enthusiastic about someone like Harry. I'm proud to be a fan!" or whatever. It would be the exact same thing on Tumblr, only the question would be "How did Colin feel about..." and the response "You know, it's a little bit embarrassing in hindsight, but he doesn't regret..." Etc.
Andy remembered everything, to the point where, preemptively, like he needed to prevent anyone from calling him out for BS, he'd intersperse these episodes with lectures (from he himself, Andy, not a character) about how spirit channelling is considered sacred in other cultures, how we can't begin to know the mysteries of the universe, that according to multiverse theories and certain spiritualists, there are worlds in which Colin Creevy is real and where this recipe for Gumbo came not from a fictional DAYD character's fictional grandmother, but from a very real DAYD person's very real grandmother living in Louisiana.
Totally not in line with the type of channelling that Abbey experienced, when others would take over and Andy would be absent, claiming no knowledge of the intrusion or memory of that other's being there. And not the type of channelling that he's describing in his mental illness posts, where he talks about losing huge chunks of his life because "Andy" wasn't there.