I was asked to speak about my experiences with Chris (Kirbopher) Niosi, and honestly I really feel like my side of this isn't a big deal, but I stand by the victims and want to weigh in on ~the Kirb experience~ for their sake.
As a lot of you know I spoke with Psyguy like... every day for years. Kirb was part of Psy's little friend circle and thus, Kirb was often dragged into our Skype calls (which eventually became the Whachow podcast on the side). Kirb and I were not very close ourselves, I was honestly too annoyed by him and didn't feel much connection outside of what Psy pushed us to share on the daily. Not to be mean, but we just had different interests.
Kirb seemed nice but he was, for lack of a better way to put it, extremely annoying and often self-absorbed. He couldn't stop turning the conversations into his own stuff, usually voice acting, anime, Egoraptor (he admired him), or whatever he was animating at the time.
I have nothing wrong with someone enjoying things, but these things were brought up at bad times, often interrupting and ignoring other important conversations. He later blamed this on a disorder, which, again, fine. But it was still hard on us and he made little effort to work on it.
At the time I was unknowingly having cat allergies, and was having near-constant migraines, bouncing between different medications and living in constant agony because my doctors never thought to check for sinus symptoms. I almost went to the hospital various times (stopped by my family's lack of money for the ER) and spent a lot of my time in the dark, away from bright lights and loud noises. Some days I couldn't bare to be on Skype because even the slightest distortion from a cheap microphone or the smallest clip in audio would be like an ice pick to the head. Everyone in our group was aware of this. Including Kirb.
Many times over the course of a few years, Kirb would no short of deep-throat his mic to make a sudden, annoying noise into it to... I don't know... startle us? Get attention? Again, he blamed this on his disorder, but he still made no effort at the time to work on it.
Every. Time. This. Happened. I was in pain. And I would often yell at him, flip out, drop the call, etc. Psy yelled at him as well. I think everyone did at some point. Nothing changed the fact that he just didn't seem to care that this habit of his was painful to me and annoying to everyone else in the calls.
He's since apologized many times so this feels moot to bring up, sadly. We're talking like 10 years ago. But years of my life were spent dealing with this regularly and I feel it needs to be brought up.
There was also the flash animation that was popular on Newgrounds for a while which included a brief cameo of my character, Filthy, involved in a "tuba" joke. Kirb has acknowledged this as well, and insists he didn't know the actual reason for the inside joke. Unfortunately I feel this is false, as Psy LOVED this joke and loved telling people about it at my expense.
The joke is awkward to talk about now, but essentially when Psy and I were briefly dating (before just being friends for a few more years) we did meet up in person and we had some pretty lackluster sex. Psy then joked to the friend group that trying to figure out how to get me off was "like trying to play the tuba". I tried laughing it off at the time but it was still extremely uncomfortable, but sadly at the time I lacked any self-confidence and took it. These days it's honestly laughable, as it was literally Psy admitting that he has no idea how to please someone. What a self-own. (Hopefully some day he looks up what a clitoris is, for the sake of anybody who sadly may date him in the future.)
Anyways, I'm pretty certain Kirb actually knew the relevance of this inside joke. I don't know how he wouldn't, given his constant presence in our little friend circle and Skype calls. Maybe I'm wrong and he genuinely was excluded from the joke somehow... yet still using it...? I just don't buy it.
Either way, apologies have been made on his end for it, and it's whatever. But I feel like for clarification, and filling in a blank or two, I needed to speak up about it all.
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I no longer use tumblr, and have since moved to twitter.
https://twitter.com/filthy_animal
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