Like if you wrote that in a script it'd be too on the nose.
Ah but wait...how did I get the screenshot? Because idiot still didn't believe it even after the offer to provide a photo and kept going and showed everyone...
And he was fool enough to post it, therefore providing a very handy "Exhibit A" if I ever need to prove Mandy inspired an army of losers to harass me.
And as if that wasn't stupid enough, then Alexis-- the Tao of D&D blogger--gets involved. So I post some evidence:
This keystone cops shit where a guy tries to harass me, gets harassed by someone else who was also trying to harass me because they want to say its me, who then is outed while openly saying they're harassing me, then some kind-of-respected colleague gets on and announces the entire legal and porn profession has been fooled and a witness in this case doesn't exist?
This isn't even weird. This isn't a product of what happened last year. This has been going on for ten fucking years. The people fecklessly making up shit about this were fecklessly making up shit about Vampire: The Masquerade the year before and Paolo Greco the year before that and 4e the year before that and on and on forever.
Fully-employed dipshits with total confidence in things that get disproved in less than a minute or just so dedicated to trolling they will pretend they are without a second thought. And the person who wants their colleagues to stop doing this is the bad guy?
Maybe all of this is just normal to you, but after a year of legal action I can tell you: nobody outside of the tiny bubble of online RPGs does anything but look at this shit and go "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"
-Z
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P.S. Go buy something:
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26 comments:
well, now, to be fair, you were getting harassed like this long before Mandy raised an army against you.
yeah he said that remial, read the post better
What a fucking mess... How do you feel about all this, Zac? Angry? Depressed? Indifferent? Something else? Do you feel you'll manage to prove your point in the end? Do you feel you're getting enough support from the people still reading the blog?
I mean, I as a mere onlooker of the entire affair, am flabbergasted at the amount of damage the mass can do to an individual, regardless of baselessness. I just hope that people supporting you here are enough to keep your spirits up. It seems like it is slightly picking up traction.
@EoN
You sound like you kind of care, so I hope that what I say is understood, and I'll try to be very clear:
-Of course I feel very angry. My entire life has been destroyed by a choir of evil morons who I spent ten years warning everyone about while many vocal RPG people nodded vigorously along and said "Fuck yeah Zak!" and then joined them.
-But the important thing is: My mood or "spirits" do not determine the outcomes here. I have to take certain steps to fix this stupidity and whether I have a future doesn't depend on how I -feel- it depends on whether those steps succeed. Whether fans, family, friends, lovers and professional contacts go "Keep your spirits up we love you" means absolutely nothing at all (though I want to acknowledge that they take a risk even saying that and respect it).
-What has to happen is NOT that evil people are persuaded to be good. As you can see, they like sentences staring with "Lol Zak thinks he can..." no, I do not. The people who participate in this harassment are unpersuadable: everyone who supported Adam Koebel over the years should be--and are not--going "Wow our instincts about goodness are stupid we should rely on facts instead" they are too invested in the idea of themselves as good to realize they abused someone on the internet. Shitheads from Matt Mercer to Ben Questing Beast to thedicemustroll to Gen Con are not going to suddenly wake up and grow empathy or start caring about facts, it's too uncomfortable for them.
-What has to happen is "mere onlookers" who can tell this is fucked up become as active as the bad people and then start looking at what the bad people did and do the opposite. That's it. That's the only thing that can ever make my life worth living again. I can win every court case and make lots of money on my work inside and outside RPGs but unless the people who passively watched this happen decide that either:
a) Their empathy overwhelms the pain in the ass of taking action
or
b) Their desire for that Zak Content overwhelms the pain in the ass of taking action
...this won't end well for me or for the next Tall Poppy on the internet.
So you tell me how close you are to moving beyond "mere onlooker" and I will tell you how I feel.
I completely understand what you mean and I somewhat expected to get such a reply when asking "how are you?" in a situation such as this.
From my perspective, the issue with moving beyond a mere onlooker is that there is no platform where people can be vocal to say what needs to be said. Reddit is horrible and biased, the OSR discord I heard went so far as to want to track down the person who sent you the caption of that W.person from the "contest" and then ban them. Even in the blogosphere we saw how some people became shunned when they expressed support for you (like Jeff). And not to mention Raggi and the mess he is in.
Maybe I'm being pessimistic and shortsighted, but it is obvious that being vocal gets you silenced. Like okay, sure, I can go and make a Discord account and speak up, but it would just get me kicked out... and then what? That won't change opinions. And I guess that the problem is that key figures of the community have decided to either support the mass or support themselves by going along with it or being quiet, not to lose what credibility they got.
So yes, I do care and I kind of wish I didn't because this inability to "currently" fix things is infuriating. But I will continue caring and supporting and hopefully do something more.
@EoN
There are lots of platforms where you can be vocal and say what needs to be said and there are lots of way to help even anonymously that you haven't covered there. If you want a list, email me: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm
I think I understand what you mean.
I am Italian and in addition to blogs I hardly follow the English forums. And your story is not something I've ever come across on the sites I usually frequent. but in the last month someone has come out with "Raggi is a Nazi". I replied saying a, b and c, and the claim was withdrawn. it seems to me an absolutely normal thing to do, although perhaps if I had not been registered in the forum I would not have signed up on purpose to defend you, just as I do not subscribe to all online communities looking for posts against you
This is utterly unfathomable.
@ erased anonymous
No anonymous comments
Why do you mention Dicey next to people that actually matter like Mercer or Milton, or institutions like Gen Con? You certainly didn't give a shit if he had empathy when he was ratting on people for you. Is it the taste of betrayal that hits harder on your ego? Turncoats are worse than enemy soldiers?
@FlippyFloppy
All the harassers matter--including you. Both people who think they can be abusive because they're powerful and people who think they can be abusive because they're obscure are part of the problem.
But you are demonstrating a pair of very strange and oddly-universal trait of all the harassers over the years:
1. Despite existing in an online community where they get referred to by strangers basically constantly on a variety of platforms and doing it for over a decade, pretty much every single member of the harassment mob is -absolutely shocked- when anyone they don't know uses their name.
If, for example. I type "Pastaman" here in this box, it will somehow get back to that particular Nazi that his name appeared on D&D With Pornstars. Pastaman will freak out, Pastaman's friends will begin to generate conspiracy theories about why he has been mentioned.
Despite constantly choosing to type in public, it seems it doesn't occur to these folks that what they write is read. It's wildly consistent: Sophie LaGace, a longtime freelancer who worked for Evil Het, to this day, if my name comes up will mention that I wrote her name after she smeared me, Gus L has -still not gotten over the trauma- of one time his blog was mentioned on DRagonsfoot or something by folks he didn't know.
I think it's this shock, this popping the bubble of the naive assumption that you can asl the world to read you and then only be read by your friends, that leads folks--emotionally--to think of even being mentioned as "harassment". It's not that anyone did anything to them that was across the line--they've just gotten so comfortable with the -upside- of how unimportant they are that when you remind them they can be googled and read (and are being googled and read) they just lash out.
2.
Much like thedicemustrolll himself, you are strangely imagining that to be mentioned as an example means a harasser is near the top of the list.
Despite the fact I've said repeatedly Every. Single. Person. who participated in the harassment campaign is going to have to face accountability for that, you're acting like a mere mention means something special. It doesn't.
There isn't emotion in it: they are all monsters who all did a bad thing for a bad reason. They will all be treated the same.
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And the fact that you and the people like you have these predictable, pavlovian reactions is one of the reasons that accountability will happen. You're just not thinking or capable of thought, even when all the reasoning is laid out in front of you.
@Pastaman
Erased.
You need to address questions you left unanswered in previous exchanges before being allowed to post again.
@Cavegirl and/or Cavegirl's 4chan friends:
Erased.
No racial slurs
"No racial slurs."
Yikes. I respect the decision not to host those kind of things on your blog, but personally would urge you to leave it up for people to see directly the offensive vitriol resorted to by them.
@pubby88
No-one cares, really. People have been calling me a ki*e for years and no-one's done shit about it. Chris McDowall only took action against the Nazis on the OSR discord server when it was pointed out -in public-. When the same information was emailed to him he just shrugged it off. There is no point.
Ballsy to claim there are nazis on the Mcdownall server. You got any evidence of that?
@Billygoat
Absolutely 100%.
If I post it, will you switch to an account with a posting history and acknowledge that I posted it?
Or will you ask for proof then beg off when I post it?
I would seriously, genuinely suggest getting some sort of therepy to deal with... [gestures at everything]
You've not been paying attention to the thread, bruv. We hate cavegirl now, for what should be very obvious reasons.
We hate dicey, too. Is he also one of the 4chan people? I forget.
@ThetanLevelOmega
This is a common suggestion online because:
-unsympathetic people just want to gaslight me and be like "lol zak's nutz"
and
-sympathetic people's first response to a crisis is to go "Have you contacted.....anyone but me?" (lawyer, therapist, etc) because they don't know what to do and they default to solutions that would require no work from them personally
...but the results are not what they'd expect.
I know people at a variety of levels of the mental health professions, whether the issue is new or old to them, they universally say exactly the same thing about the situation that literally every other adult who isn't an RPG dork online does:
-Mandy has said she has Borderline Personality Disorder and that makes sense because she is obviously full of shit and this is wholly typical Borderline behavior
-This online game community is -insane- and the way they dealt with this is insane and the everyday norms they follow are sociopathic
-You're doing pretty much the exact things you should be doing, including suing, since they've pretty much made a collective decision to proactively ruin your life and ignore all facts and testimony
-You don't have any symptoms of any mental illness, you're holding together better than most people would (unsurprising after what you went through with Mandy while you were together), it's just an objectively awful situation
So, if you're unsympathetic:
-Obviously fuck off you have no reason to be
And if you're sympathetic:
-Sorry, if you generally would like things to improve, you yourself should do something rather than ask me to do things.
@big ups to the 4chan massiv
Why would anyone care who you "love" or "hate" or claim to?
@ThetanLevelSincerity
Deleted
You're not allowed to lie in the comments. If you cared: you'd be taking steps to fix the situation. You're not so you must be lying.
@ThetanLevelSincerity
(deleted)
If you are taking steps to improve the situation and not just -telling me to do things-, then email me: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm and show me the proof.
There's no good reason not to do that if your intentions are sincere.
I just have to chip in on the whole BPD thing, that shit is... not healthy for anyone involved. My ex-partner has BPD and I spent a number of years with them, the relationship destroyed me, both physically and mentally. This is one of the prime reasons why I believe you Zak, because I know first hand how these people behave and what they are capable of, especially when you get on their blacklist that is fueled by unreliable, convoluted reasoning. People blatantly choosing to believe Mandy obviously do not know how a person suffering from BPD acts like. I'm not saying that BPD-diagnosed people are liars per se, but A LOT of their claims need to be taken with a grain of salt and backed up by a massive amount of hard evidence.
@Ozmandias
Erased.
First-strike personal attacks are, as always, not allowed.
If you honestly feel you have an example of me doing something wrong, post it here and your claim will be evaluated:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2019/12/speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace.html
@Ozymandias
Erased:
Dodging is not allowed. This is a place for grown-ups.
If you want to comment you need to address previous comments not just ignore what the other person in the conversation said in response to you.
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