Here’s some information about Flight Rising for people who don’t know it and may want to factor it into their decisions.
One of the founding admins of Flight Rising is a man named Darren Hill, who goes by Akiri on the website. Darren Hill was, from 2012 to May 2020, a cop. (The date is June 5, 2020 as of posting.) This knowledge is publicly available on a Polygon.com article about Flight Rising and Akiri’s LinkedIn (a public website for learning about people’s employment history where the information is supplied by the people themselves). I have not linked the LinkedIn itself, just a screenshot of the relevant employment information, but it can be verified on LinkedIn by searching for Stormlight Workshop, LLC, the owning company of Flight Rising. He is quoted as saying “I can’t be law enforcement on the side and be a professional in the video game industry, but I can be a professional in law enforcement and do video games on the side, so it’s the way it had to work out.” (source). He was a sheriff’s deputy at the time of the Flight Rising Polygon article, and then a detective at the sheriff’s office until 2020. A couple other news articles exist detailing cases that he worked on in 2018 and 2019, but I will not link them here as they are not relevant beyond proving where and when he was on the force.
In addition, in 2014, Akiri posted anti-Black rhetoric on his personal Facebook page, and displayed “thin blue line” imagery there. His personal views have been unavailable since that time. This is something that was not addressed by Stormlight Workshop at the time, either on their social media or on the Flight Rising website.
Finally, on June 3, 2020, Aequorin replied to a comment on a Tumblr post to say that Akiri left his job to focus full-time on Flight Rising. There is no reason to not believe this information, since it is corroborated by his employment record on LinkedIn having an end date of May 2020, but there is still reason to make sure people are aware that Akiri was, until extremely recently, a member of the police force.
