So I don’t waste any of your time, I will cut right to the chase and give you the announcement in short before diving deeper into it.

I am no longer pursuing content creation. Pretty crazy right? The thought? After 6 years of working at it on and off, spending countless hours editing, animating, recording, streaming, marketing, etc… The time has come for me to hang up the hat. I know this may come as a shock to some of you… some maybe not.

If you are wondering why this sudden change, here’s why. I have been pursuing streaming on and off for around 6 years now. Quite a lot of time honestly. I had an epiphany recently where I realized that I will probably never be able to be a full time content creator on Twitch/YouTube in this outlet. It honestly hit me very hard. I got extremely depressed about it and it has weighed heavy on me over the last several months as I contemplate the direction to take with everything. If you were tuned into my last stream which was Monday, you would have heard some of whats going on in my head. Now, i probably shouldn’t have really been talking about it there, but I needed to clear my head. plus, I’ve always tried to be open and honest with everyone about what’s going on with me.

So now, you may be asking, why am I doing this now? what changed in my life to push me to this point.

Well, as many of you know, I work in the film industry. Well, I have now started my own company after getting out from under a very oppressive work environment. I also have started working part time at a local news station to help make ends meet, and give me a nice fall back in case the business idea fails. Well, with all of that going on, I don’t have the time to personally dedicate to streaming and making content online in this capacity. Now I personally love doing it, don’t think I don’t and it hurts me more than you could imagine to be ‘giving up on my dream’ so to speak. Ever since I was 13, I wanted to make streaming and content creation a career, but as time as gone on, I realized I made some very big mistakes in how I made content. I won’t go into those now, but trust me I made a lot of them. And after 6 years of pouring money and time into trying to make things work and trying to make my dream a reality, I had to come to the conclusion that I don’t have the capacity to do what I envisioned by myself. With several futile attempts at getting people to help, seeing if people want to help edit videos and create other content, I had to come to the realization that there comes a time to move on to bigger and better things in life.

I will admit. I’m nervous and excited about this. I’m sad to see something I’ve invested so much effort into fade. But I know that its for the best, not only for me and my personal mental health, but for this community. It makes me sad to see the server empty and no one really chatting or hanging out or growing friendships. I’ve realized that I was the catylist to that in that the server was the ‘TA418’ community, and when im not around, the community goes silent and dies out. I fully recognize that the place the discord is in now is 100% my fault and i feel very guilty for letting it get to that point.

And trust me, this is not an easy choice. This whole things has actually… and continues to be a bit hard for me, but I know that this will help everyone and give a different feel to everything that goes on in this discord and community. Its no secret that the discord has been… dead lately.. Or for a while I guess… with the occasional chatter. Or the Minecraft server (that, yes I’m very aware) has been launched and relaunched to death because I want to start fresh with new people but I end up frustrating everyone in the process because of the progress they had made in the other world and then when I’m no longer on it, the server sits empty… trust me, I see the server logs. The one we have up currently has been pretty much empty for the last several months.

There comes a time where you have to end old things so that new things can happen. And I feel like maybe this is the direction I want to take with the community. And instead of making the community about me or ‘TA418’ as it were. Make it a guild. A place for the misfits of the world. The people that don’t fit in that need friends who are lonely, maybe struggling with depression, anxiety, or other mental challenges. Maybe its someone with a physical disability. Who knows. But I do know this, the core mission or I guess goal of what im wanting to do has never changed. Create a place for people to meet, connect, make friends, hang out, and grow as people. 

There’s been a lot going on in my life in the past 8 months. And I know that everyone here has been through a lot this year as well, so I won’t go too far into that. But I want to get back to the roots of what I feel my mission is in the online space… and that is connecting people and helping to make a safe space to foster strong relationships.

So where does that leave everything? Well… I probably won’t be streaming much. I may on occasion… idk. Maybe it’ll be a front for some other stuff in the future. I don’t really know. Same thing with my YouTube channel. It’ll be a space for me to post things that I find interesting or fun or amusing that I want to share. Now, what about the discord? Well, the discord will no longer be the hub for ‘TA418’ and instead be turned into a guild hub.. A place where anyone is welcome to hang out. Share memes, play games, talk about them and what they’re going through in life, both positive and negative. A place where I hope to have an environment that will help facilitate more friendships and bring back the family element of the community that was present in the past.

As of now, I am working with a smaller group of people to try and turn this community into something different. The discord is the first thing to change. Starting Monday, all the channels will be locked down and archived. I have a couple of people that will be working with me on the Discord server to get things organized and ready to go to create a fun space to chat, hang out, play games, share memes, talk about life, display your works of art and creativity, and more. I don’t anticipate the discord to be down for a long time, hopefully no more than a week. During that time, there will be one channel for everyone to chat and hang out and get hyped for the opening of the discord. I have lots of ideas as to where I’m going to take things in the future and some may not pan out, other may. I have no idea. A lot of this will be trial and error so please be patient with me and the team as we figure out what things to try and as we experiment.

As of now, all the roles on discord will be reset. You will have no role on the server. Once we launch the new server, you will need to agree to the rules of the guild which will then allow you to join in and begin chatting with the rest of us. All bans on the discord have been reset as we are starting with a clean slate. The discord will no longer be for me to promote my stream, videos, etc. I may post them from time to time, however, it won’t be the main focus, and no one will be pinged for those types of things. This will also allow for anyone who is interested to share their own live stream or videos that they post. This will hopefully create an environment where creators in the community can create things for the group, about the group… or just things that interest them. There are a lot of little details we will figure out over the next few months and I know we won’t always get everything right, so please, feel free to let someone on staff know if there’s an issue and we will do our best to fix it or create a solution to the problem.

Anyways, enough jabber about all the nitty gritty. We’ll be surprising you guys hopefully with some new stuff as we move forward with this move.

As always, if you have questions, please feel free to contact me in DMs. They are always open. Invite your friends as well! We welcome everyone to come and hang out and join the group.

Oh yeah… almost forgot the most important detail. I’m trying to come up with a name for the guild. I wouldn’t mind keeping it the “Freak Family” but maybe you have some better ideas? Let me know over in Discord if you do cuz I’m always down to hear them!

Thanks all for being with me the last 6 years. To those of you who are newer, I’m sorry that the time you spent a part of this community was short lived, maybe you’d want to continue in this journey with us. If not, that’s totally ok.

Anyways, I hope you guys are just as excited as I am. I can’t wait to share more ideas and things going on with you as we move forward.

Thanks for sticking by me through all of my insanities in life. From relationships, mental troubles, life getting in the way… everything. You guys honestly have meant the world to me throughout all of this and I couldn’t be more thankful to all of you for what you’ve done for not only me, but this community.

Thanks for the great 6 years. Here’s to the next 6 and beyond!

-Love TA