So, this has been formulating for a long time. Since last December and probably earlier. There were warning signs, of course, but it’s easy to dismiss things when it involves friends.

It’s not so easy when it involves you.

First things first, this isn’t really an attack. It’s more of an attempt to explain why seeing his name mentioned favorably by other critics makes my stomach churn. What this should hopefully serve as is a warning: Ian Miles Cheong (AKA Stillgray and Sol Invictus) is untrustworthy, irresponsible and someone I hope to never work with professionally. It’s highly unlikely that anything you read from him is an original thought. In all likeliness, it was taken from something said elsewhere like Reddit.

Don’t believe me? Try this out for size as a small sample of what happens daily. Ian responds to something Rob Zacny says on Twitter and then reposts Zacny’s idea to Reddit. Check out the underlined timestamps. (EDIT: And when he gets called on it, this is exactly what happens. It’s as if it never happened. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.)

Before last September, I might have considered Ian a friend. We spoke via AIM, Twitter and even played a game or two together. We had fun. Then some stuff went down and, in two unrelated incidents, he did some creepy things to Rhea and trolled The Border House. But still, these were things that did not happen to me. I had no proof, really, and it only made me cautious.

After Rhea took over at Hellmode, I threw my hat in the ring as a possible editor. Our styles are pretty different but work well together, we decided, and so went for it. She removed every trace she could of Ian being on the site. It should be a measure of her integrity that she left every last one of his pieces and bylines, though.

I even approached Ian and told him I’d be taking over the reins. He said he appreciated the forethought I’d shown and was, seemingly, happy to see me step in. After all, we’d been pals and he recognized my skill. That’s what he said, anyway.

Come December, I wrote my first and currently only piece for Hellmode. We watched as the number of hits went up. In my excitement, I jumped the gun and submitted to some of the aggregators at weird times and thus didn’t hit that fabled sweet spot. Even so, it was a moderate success. I was glad to have proven myself on the first go.

In order to keep tabs on traffic, Ian and Rhea had installed a piece of software called Mint. Essentially, it gives a rather detailed breakdown of traffic stats. When I first took over, they were filled with all of the data since Hellmode’s launch. It was impressive to look back at some of their more popular articles and compare them to my single post. I wanted those numbers.

It was at this point that things got a little strange. A few days later, I couldn’t get in to view the Mint statistics. I asked Rhea if she’d changed the password; she hadn’t. So I asked the only other person who had access to it: Ian.

See, Ian had initially set everything up in his name. Mint license, ad revenue, domain hosting… it was all Ian’s. He footed the bill on the original Mint license but everything else was out of pocket for Rhea. So when she took over, she had the domain hosting switched to her name and had just recently went through the ordeal of confirming with the ad agency that Ian should no longer be receiving anything made off Hellmode. He wasn’t too happy about this.

When confronted, he first seemed to insist that he’d done nothing at all. I pressed a little harder. He admitted that he had revoked the license. I immediately became suspicious because the login screen was still present. I asked time and time again if he had just changed the password. He insisted that he had not. I emailed Shaun Inman, the developer behind Mint, in an attempt to sort it all out.

Being that I wasn’t the owner of the license, nothing could really be done about it. I tried to confirm that if the login screen was present then there would be no issue and it was just a matter of the password but couldn’t pin anything down. During this, I found out that all the logs were gone even if the license were to be returned. I eventually told Ian to keep the license and I’d purchase another.

It was then that the Mint screen changed. It no longer wanted a password; it asked if I had a license to install. To this day, I believe this meant that Ian was lying. It’s so easy to believe that actions were misinterpreted by other people but quite hard to deny the truth when presented with it.

There’s more that I could share. This is just one example of many that are in a similar vein. I’d rather leave it here, though, as there’s been enough drama involving Hellmode for one lifetime. Possibly several.

Since December, we’ve purchased a new Mint license. I’ve removed Ian as a friend from every account I have. Rhea has been working on a redesign and making sure Ian no longer has access to anything on the site.

Things are moving along. We’ll be back, folks.