Ticks (ticks!DTNUV4cBL6)

• Very possibly Archduke
• “That guy who trolled Archduke.”
• Creator or at least a fan of washed-out minimalist b&w photography
• Possibly an anime fan
• Possibly an anime hater
• Possibly Canadian
• Possibly an American from the Washington DC/Baltimore area
• Definitely knows how to use proxies
• Possibly South American
• Possibly female
• Claims to have been hospitalized for mental issues
• Possibly named Emily
• More likely male
• Probably named Robert
• Did I mention this is probably Archduke?
• Probably Shii
• Two purported photos posted to /jp/; none topless so who cares…¹⁾
• Mostly disappeared around late 2013

Serious Business

• A rumor flew that ticks was dead in March of 2015. Well, flew as much as anything does on our board, so actually more “plopped like cow shit.”
• The evidence provided for this was the following: (This space left intentionally blank)

Actual investigation and actual wild conjecture

• There was an ongoing discussion on /jp/ regarding the possibility that ticks and Archduke were the same person. Specifically, Archduke created ticks in order to have a female persona with which to better scam lonely people.
• Ticks and Tokiko appear in a number of archived flamewars, which is convenient for the one-in-the-same theory. They seem pretty good at coordinating their posting habits. On the other hand, Tokiko has plenty of (at least ticks-related-)drama-free threads all to himself. Ticks-exclusive threads are (slightly) rarer animals…
• It's unlikely that one person generated as much content as was produced between these two. Of course, feel free to argue that they were both just shitpost/repost masters and mostly generated empty fluff. There really isn't all that much material to analyze, it turns out.
• Ticks followed Tokiko to Rizon when he made that move, which is pretty suspicious, or maybe it's just a little stalker-ish. Ticks continued to post here and there while Tokiko tried to go mainstream. Predictably, Ticks followed suit (sort of, read on).
• There is far more evidence for Archduke's ongoing existence than there is for ticks'. However, ticks appears to be alive and well, operating under an entirely different name of late. We'll fail to mention what it is, because it would result in a clusterfuck as everything on social media always does. If you were only interested in dead or not, then you can stop here because ticks, or at least the performer formerly known as ticks, is alive.
• Ticks as an e-entity or whatever made its first verified appearance in Q4 2009 (Citation not posted here because I don't want to be mean to strangers. Today, anyway). At this point in history, Archduke was a zygote or less. There's evidence (or really, more his personal boasting) that he would have been capable of planning this far ahead, but you can take anything he says with a grain of salt so large you could carve a three-bedroom house from it…
• 2012-2013 was a big time for the online presences of both Archduke and Ticks and both of their activities skyrocketed in this time, parallel to one another. Ticks' presence was arguably of far greater quality and far more prolific, where Archduke's was entirely me-too and had all the hallmarks of his famously short attention span. So I guess, it was more a Cessna paralleling a 737. If anything, Archduke would be ticks' creation, not the other way around. However, our best friend Archduke has been posting as himself on open channels, so he's a real person too…

Go ticks hunting and you'll run across this picture a lot…

Nothing here is conclusive, but these sites were linked to this person…?

• http://cerealexperiments.com - Imageboard with an emphasis on Lain, blog, etc. Defunct by Q1 2015?
• http://www.truneet.com - Blog/tumblr thing. Defunct by Q4 2015?
• http://www.frideynight.com - Was supposed to be an experimental imageboard? Still there as of Q1 2016. Auto-load audio. Be warned.