Chronamut: The Struggle Against All Odds

It all began with an accident.

2001-2002

Let us rewind back to 2001/2002. I was in my final year of high school. We were in computer class, and we needed to make a project for school that showcased the school with virtual reality. It was actually really cool. Our one group member was a genius, and really did some pioneering stuff. We downloaded this program called Fruity Loops 3, but none of us could really figure it out, and so we scrapped it in favour of some royalty-free samples.

2003

Fast forward to 2003. I decided to once again try this weird Fruity Loops program. I butchered some melodies with the preset samples and produced some cringe-worthy music. I decided to submit it to a site called Newgrounds—whose "audio portal" was just starting out.

2004

2004 rolled around and I really focused on music making. My one friend introduced me to Soundfonts, and then to VSTS and VSTIS, and so I worked hard at making music. I got better, but my music was LOUD, and the mastering, well, that didn't really exist at all. I worked in open access at my college or on my laptop and belted out song after song. I think I made something like 200 songs alone in 2004. It started out horrible and got better and better. By the end of 2004, things were sounding pretty great.

2005-2006

My music dominated the charts. I stuck to genres like video game remixes and covers, trance and techno, and even some classical and industrial—I was kind of all over the place. I was most known for my VG mixes though. I spent so much time making songs in 2004, that when 2005 and 2006 rolled around, I was in my glory—the peak of my musical career on Newgrounds. I had an ear for mastering and I could do it fairly well—but I also realized my mastering skills were limited to the knowledge I had at the time, and that was fine.

Later, 2004-2006 was about the time I really got KNOWN on the site—people wanted to collab with me, interview me, I was all over the charts, and people valued my input. They would send me songs to listen to they had made to see if they were mastered properly, and we had rooms like the Newgrounds audio irc and the forums to goof around with.

The Audio Forums and Denvish

Well, we all had a mod that controlled the audio forums that we all loved—his name was Denvish. He was fair and loved so much they even had a day to celebrate him—Denvish day. We were all happy and everything was run fairly.

Well, one day, Denvish decided to retire—he was moving on to new things... and this left a vacuum—obviously, some of us wanted to be mods, but Newgrounds didn't like people asking to be mods. They had to decide for themselves who got to be a mod. Sooo there was a vacuum as to who modded the audio forum with mods from other forums popping their heads in every now and then.

Well, I tend to be a bit of a maverick and I like goofiness, so I kind of took matters into my own hands. If there was a thread that was off the rails, we would pull it down. We called it "forgey"—going into it and simply talking about other subjects until it devolved out of control—not the most mature—but it was the primordial soup of the internet and we were all having fun.

Rucklo is made the new Mod

I had many fellow Newgrounders I respected and loved‚most were around the same time I had joined the site (2003-2004), and we kind of became the pillars of the audio portal. ParagonX9, Dreamscaper, XBrav, ChronoNomad, FlashBurn, B0UNC3, ZeRo-BaSs, RageVII, Dimrain47, Rucklo, to name a few, and me, Chronamut.

Well, the forums decided to make Rucklo the new mod of the audio forum, someone who had participated in our silly shenanigans. At first, all was good, but like in most instances, power slowly corrupts the mind, and makes one think they are above other people.

Rucklo vs. Chronamut

Rucklo and I started with minor disputes that elevated. He was resentful that I didn't fall in line and I was resentful that he was clamping down on me, and possibly even that he was made a mod over me.

Rucklo tried to clamp down on the forgeys, but things had gotten too out of hand and the populace had turned into an angry, Roman mob, turning on him for daring to interfere with their fun. Rucklo resented me for creating that chaos, but to please the masses, made it that one day a year people could make a thread where all sorts of craziness could occur, hosted by a different person every year—the forgeyfests—and they lasted for quite a while and the masses were placated, if for a time.

Rucklo learned to resent me more and more, and would provide harsher and harsher punishments on me for not "being the example I should be as a oldtime user"—I just wanted to have fun, on a site that was meant to be about entertainment.

2007: Trouble on the Horizon

2007 rolls around, and I am starting to wane—I don't really feel challenged as much on Newgrounds anymore, so I start to submit less music. They have a redesign, which changes the structure of the audio portal, and things don't feel quite the same. Lots of new users though, and so Newgrounds decided to introduce "tank awards" for prominent members of the audio portal.

Well, everyone loves trophies—especially real life trophies, so, of course, I jockeyed for it—but without as much music that year, many felt I didn't deserve it, but my fanbase at that point was rabid—thousands of users strong, which was pretty big back then. Well, audio mods now exist on the site to manage the audio submissions, and they didn't take too kindly to me lording over things, and this is where resentment amongst the lower mods started to fester as well. I battled mightily with one, Maestrorage, for a while, and then we decided to have an audio meetup.

2008—Audio Meetup

So a bunch of us decided to get together in real life in Toronto to have a good time. One of the members, MilkmanDan, was here from out west and wanted people to stop on by if we did. It just so happened that I live in Hamilton, 45 mins south of Toronto, and Maestrorage lived in Toronto, so we both ended up going. Once getting to know me in real life, his perception of me softened, and we became good friends after that.

My musical enthusiasm continued to wane, so I sort of semi-retired from making music, and focused more on making art—my primary enjoyment.

2009—The audio portal starts to wane

So it's around this time that the audio portal and forum starts to wane. People leave for places like YouTube, and Newgrounds starts losing its grip on the global entertainment market online. Not as many people are coming, and things begin to get a little less fun. I join YouTube as well, which seemed a novelty at the time, and threw some songs up, not thinking much of it and never really focused on it. I, thus, decide to venture into what was called the general forums, a place of much hostility and chaos, to try to see if I can branch out in the site.

I get VERY popular there, and the rest of the mods start to take notice, and predictably, get annoyed when others listen to me over them. I join their chats, and all is well and fun, for a time.

2010—Insubordination

The audio chat I run, one of the users, a new user named mich, is a new, up-and-coming artist. I make him a moderator in the room, and he starts to become self-righteous, trying to demand I run things certain ways. I don't take too kindly to that and so I un-moderate him. He responds by making his own room and stealing half my users. I never really do recover from this, as the audio users have started to decline.

I also helped run a room on another server that was a general room for Newgrounds. I decide to shut down my room and open a new room that is generally for all users, while directing users from the old room to my new room.

I made a post for it in the general forums, as the forum advertising the old audio chat in the audio forums was shut down. They didn't believe in having multiple chatroom threads. During this time, many users entered my room, many of them spammy, malicious, or just plain dumb. I had to make a rule of no users under 16, and I banned a great many people.

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Well the people from the chats in general, once they learned I made a new room, thought I was trying to replace their chats and that's when things got ugly. They spammed my room and got nasty to me—complained to the staff I was running things like a nazi when it was actually them that were misbehaving, causing the staff to sit in on the room to make sure people behaved; which, of course, they did when they saw the staff in there, but didn't when they were not there. So this is when the staff started to resent me.

Official Chat

Newgrounds had not had an official chat for quite some time, as people had abused it in the past. So I was trying to model mine as the official chat, but I wanted it ON Newgrounds. I figured if I could code an interface in flash, I could link it to irc and post it on Newgrounds for people to use. A similar chat had existed before that was a radio chat—you could listen to music from the site while talking and it was really cool—but the creator didn't upkeep it.

Turns out there were security measures in irc itself to prevent flash from connecting, which provided a big roadblock to this. At the same time the staff were working on a solution themselves...

2011: Break from Newgrounds & Contests

So around 2011, I decided to run audio contests for the users of Newgrounds, with prizes awarded by the site—winning forum signatures, front-page posting on the site where millions of people would see the songs, and money awarded to the winners that they could use on the Newgrounds online store. I ran it for 24 consecutive months, and they were a huge hit.

However, the audio mods had been running their own contests off and on, but they were very sporadic. The user who started up my contests with me also felt that it would be primarily his to run, but I told him he would be helping me... well, he didn't take that very well, but still helped me in running it. Thus, both he and the audio mods started to resent me, even taunting and threatening me.

At the same time, I largely left Newgrounds. I was getting tired of the negative behaviour and needed to purify myself. A friend Jordan, who led a series called Spirit Science wanted me to come onboard and help him, as we were both spiritualists, so I did. I became the admin of his site and hired moderators to help me while he went off gallavanting around the world.

Well, he came back and learned that I had run things MY way, not HIS, and decided to clamp down on me and erase a bunch of stuff I did. This went on over and over for a while, and between that, dealing with hostile users who felt I existed purely to serve them, breaking up fights, and everything else, I eventually got tired and left; but not without taking half the userbase with me and forming my own spiritual group on Facebook—source. It was a huge success, and still exists to this day.

2012: Return to Newgrounds

I had still been going to Newgrounds, but mainly just to submit music every now and then and run the contests. When I returned to Newgrounds after the debacle, I found that the staff had turned the userbase against me. I had users who were my friends now suddenly hating me. There were new people in power, and one of them particularly hated me—he was the one working on making a new chat for the site.

He didn't approve of me touting the site as the Newgrounds chat. It was also around this time that I had tried looking for people I could pay to help me out with the chat interface—little did I know, this was against Newgrounds rules. One of the mods challenged me on it and I didn't back down—so he locked my chat thread, and this was sort of the beginning of the end.

I also stopped doing the contests, as Newgrounds removed their online store so there was no real incentive to keep running it—that and people were miserable, ungrateful ingrates.

2013: Tragedy

In 2013, I was making music when suddenly my computer imploded. I could not save it and had to reformat it. I lost everything. This put a huge damper on my music making and I just had a real hard time trying to continue without all the infrastructure I had put into place. I tried to belt out some new stuff—bought some hardware—but it was never quite the same after that.

The users who had grown bitter about me making a chat to replace theirs were also getting bolder and bolder, becoming more and more hostile towards me. My reputation started to get a bit tarnished.

2014: The beginning of the end

Without any stream to bring users to my chat, I desperately looked for ways to fill it—having people adopt my sigs, making people make newsposts about it, blogging about it—and, gradually, the staff of the site grew sicker and sicker of seeing me. Eventually, the new admin posted his official chat and that was sorta that.

I also tried posting in general—my theory was that threads that were highly controversial seemed to survive the longest—so I made highly controversial threads so people would be most exposed to my sig linking to my chat. It worked, but at a cost—people became highly triggered by my viewpoints, some of them mods. This further increased the divide between me and those in power.

There were times that chat would be down though and I would try to promote it—it became a battle between the two chats though. The admin who made the chat decided to impersonate me one day in his chat to try to further damage my reputation—and was reprimanded by the site, and his hatred for me deepened.

One day, I decided to send out a big message campaign for people to join my chat—they had pretty much shut down every other avenue for me to do it, and I felt this was my last chance. I pmed hundreds of people. The next day, I tried to sign in and my account had been locked. Apparently, the admin who had fostered a deep hatred for me had had enough with me competing and decided to shut me down for good. Others tried to petition on my behalf, but nothing worked—and the staff didn't even want to have me talked about—they would scrub any reference to my name on the site.

This was a huge psychological blow for me.

2015-2018: Drifting

These years, I drifted. I wasn't allowed on the site—all alternate accounts had been either banned or locked. As I progressively used them over the years.

I branched out to Soundcloud. I really wasn't too interested in making new music, so I decided to start remastering old music—with a timespan of 11 years, making music at that point, there were a lot of songs in need of upgrading. I did this for a time and somewhat kept myself going. I also signed up to Spotify, but didn't really think much of it—just tossed an album up there and kinda forgot about it. Also focused more on YouTube videos in general. You can find those links below:

Playlist of my top songs on Spotify—waddaya know they're mostly nightcore versions of my originals—people are weird lol..

2018—Return to Newgrounds

So around 2018, one of the old school users, Quarl, is pining on Newgrounds how he missed my presence, how I might be kinda weird, but things were better when I was around. He then goes to Newgrounds HQ, and directly talks with the creator of the site, stating it's unfair to ban someone who has contributed so much to the site when the site is supposed to be "everything by everyone"—the creator, Tom, agrees to allow me to return to the site, but that I have to behave, and any step out of line will be punished, and thus lays the trap from the start.

They never unlock my main account, which you can find below:

I had made an alternate account in 2014 that I ended up using—the last one they hadn't locked. It was called IoTheEternal. So I started to submit music and art through that, and slowly notify people of my return. I also started to slowly reuse Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube—tossing up a song here and there.

I used IoTheEternal mostly for songs I had remastered over the years—and started to get popular again on the charts—but those who had liked the fact I was gone didn't like the fact I had returned, and my scores plummeted. They feared another takeover.

My absence also caused the charts to massively overgrow—without anyone to honestly vote on songs, everyone just voted up their own stuff until nothing could be seen. I petitioned to the staff to deal with this, but nothing was really done.

New Chat

It was around this time that one of my old comrades suggested I make a discord chat. I had never really used discord and was sort of biased towards irc, but knew that irc was pretty much impossible for anyone of this day and age to find appealing, so I decided to try it out.

As I messaged around, telling people I had returned under a new account, I sent them links to the chat, and slowly the numbers grew far more than they ever had on irc. Things were starting to feel normal again!

Trouble again

But the good news was not to last. The old guard had not forgotten their hatred of me, but now they were leashed by the creator of the site, so they circled, looking for ways they could get around these new rules while still exacting their revenge on me.

In order to help bring the charts back to normalcy, we, in the chat, took it upon ourselves to start voting on submissions—we had to vote a lot down unfortunately because it was just pages of 100% scores, and that doesn't help anyone. This angered those who had squatted in these giant clouds. The audio mods were made aware, and seemed to be okay with it, at first.

Some users in the chat were not so happy about it and grew resentful, relaying the info back to the staff that I was trying to manipulate events. The staff started making a case against me.

It was also this year one of the staples in my old irc room I had known for 14 years committed suicide. I had relied on him emotionally for years and this destroyed me mentally—no one I had ever known and loved had ever committed suicide before—we all took it very hard.

On Newgrounds, we actually managed to get the general score base down to about 4.6 out of 5 when Newgrounds dropped another redesign on the site.

A Meteor Strikes

On Newgrounds, there were originally twi scoring systems—one for the song itself which was 0-5 out of 5 range, and one for commenting on and reviewing the songs, which was 0-10 out of 10 range. This new redesign blew that out of the water—by removing all scores accumulated from 2003-2015, which could be anonymous, and replacing the scores with the review scores, which didn't actually contribute to the original score originally, they were just props.

This changed the entire foundation of the audio portal and flipped everything on its head. It pulled 12 years worth of songs out of the grave and if the reviews were all 10 out of 10, now we had tens of thousands of songs to try to vote down. It became impossible—the portal was now a lost cause. We silently despaired, although we still tried.

The mods nibble away

The mods, eager to take another stab at me, conspire for ways to rid themselves of me. They know they can't simply lock my account—they have been told they aren't allowed, but there is nothing from stopping them from making my life a living hell.

So they find rules they can exploit and selectively use against me. The first is in the art portal. All was fine until I tried to submit work from my old account onto my new account. I combed the rules and found nothing against this—after submitting the fifth one, all my pieces that were old were removed and I was banned from the audio portal.

Then they started to ban me on the forums simply for posting things they didn't agree with that weren't actually wrong.

The black sheep

Then a user started to severely exploit the pm system by pming hundreds of people he didn't know with generic messages to check his work out. He had been an issue in the past, with his previous account being wiped. Well, I didn't know this, so I got suckered in—some people complained about it, but I thought, "Oh, what's the harm?" But then he kept at it, and so I posted on his newsfeed that it's not cool what he's doing.

Well he went NUTS on me and made it his goal to take me down. Even going so far as to mock my appearance. The staff had to get involved, including members who hated me, and I don't think they appreciated that. But they did it. He continued to mock me forever onwards though.

NEW New Account

So, when I was looking through my old alts, I discovered that I actually still had one old collab account still existing from 2004—nothing was on it, as I had never used it, so I changed the name to chron-amut and submitted some new songs on it. Some were vgmixes, some were songs with commercial lyrics that were collabs with others. Well, the staff didn't like this and punished the collab user for collabing with me by removing one of his songs—he was crushed.

2019: Audio Exile

So more time goes by, things are a bit uneventful, until one of the audio mods notices I have done a lot of video game remixes—well, there was no rule against it back when I did them, but it seems they were trying to clamp down on songs that were covers of video game songs. I had over 320 songs on my old, locked account and 90 on my new account. When they were done, I had 90 songs left on my old account and 30 left on my new account, and all my songs removed on my new, NEW account.

I was also banned from submitting to the audio portal for three months and was un-scouted on all three accounts, so I didn't show up on the charts. I was pretty upset with this because it also meant my unlocked account was un-scouted, and you need to be able to sign into the account to accept a scout request from another person to re-scout yourself.

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Visibly upset that they had crushed now 16 years worth of work, I tried to warn others that they were going on a crusade against such things in the forums. They banned me for a month. I had a habit of switching between iotheeternal and chron-amut depending on what I needed it for—and I didn't realize I had been banned on one account so I posted on another account—I was banned on that one for posting while banned.

I had started the audio contests up due to popular demand and they had gotten quite successful again. Well, the person I had done them with before that had become disgruntled was now a mod, and well, he had a score to settle with me. He hated me from that point onwards.

The staff took this as me abusing the rules and decided to strip away more of my privileges. The disgruntled mod also put me in a spot where I couldn't run the audio contests anymore by stating he would let me know if I could run them, and then never getting back to me—the staff took to ignoring me with anything I asked them, and I felt the noose tightening.

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Then the final straw happened. The staff determined I had apparently abused too many rules over the years, none of which they specified, and decided to ban me from the audio portal altogether, after my previous three month ban was done. At this point, there was nothing I could do, and frankly nothing left on the site really keeping me there—so their tactic worked—if they couldn't lock my account, they'd simply make it so toxic for me to be there that I wouldn't want to be there. Nothing was stopping them form banning me from individual portions of the site.

Conclusion

In conclusion? Newgrounds is a terrible place, run by users with God complexes who simply want to make peoples lives a living hell so they feel better about themselves. I kinda knew this already, but I still loved the audio community—making the discord allowed me to keep my connection to them without the toxic influence of the site. I slowly peeled myself away from other toxic Newgrounds chats and communities and now I am solely focused on the audio community itself, and Soundcloud and Spotify. Mostly Spotify.

I am trying to get as much attention to my Spotify account now as I can, while slowly transitioning the songs that weren't allowed anymore on Newgrounds onto Spotify. I have had some off and on success with that—some have been denied because they thought I used samples and then realized I did not—others have simply just not worked properly and been frustrating. It is hard for me to build a community on Spotify because I didn't build it when I should have in the beginning, same with Soundcloud and YouTube—I focused mainly on Newgrounds to my ultimate detriment.

So now I am relying on people like you to help get me out there and rebuild my fanbase—hopefully you like what you hear and wish to follow me!

I will link, once more, my work below:

Newgrounds I don't even want people to associate me with anymore—as it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. All will be submitted to Soundcloud and to Spotify and all other online stores either through Dittomusic, which I use to push my music to Spotify, or Soundrop if it works better to submit my VG covers to.

Also be sure to check out my art page—it has links to basically everything I do at the bottom of it—so if I missed anything you can find it there:

Thanks for listening to my tale everybody—I just needed to get it out there—a lot of old users come back wondering what happened to me, so this will be a testament to my journey. I thank everyone who helped me along the way and stuck with me, and hope i can move forward to a brighter future!Thank you!

-shawn-