Nobody wants this to be a Daily Gamer Drama Blog but jesus:
So it's Wednesday, and on Saturday I first posted about wow we had three people in the RPG world cancelled in the same week and surprise all of them were people who'd harassed me, and that I'd warned people about.
And I thought, well, that's enough of that, better post about hobgoblins or something before....oh fuck and here's another.
We can no longer do a D12 table, because that's 13:
1. Oliver Darkshire (DMsguild author--pissed of fellow members of LGBTQIA+ community by publishing a D&D book about queer villains)
2. Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Head of Community at Kickstarter)
3. Brandon Dixon (Swordsfall)
4. Adam Koebel (Dungeon World/ Streamer)
5. PH Lee (Bliss Stage, Hot Guys Making Out, storygamer)
6. Ben Chong (various "games about relationships, storygamer)
7. Sean Patrick Fannon (Savage Rifts)
8. BlackHatMatt (RPGnet moderator)
9. Tyler Carpenter (Battletech, storygamer)
10. The folks at Green Ronin (who either committed sexual misconduct or handled it poorly)
11. Shoe Skogen (my ex's friend, outed as an alleged abuser after being made an OSR discord mod as a reward for harassing me)
12. Elizabeth Sampat (storygamer, ex-girlfriend and enabler of Gamergate-related sucide Alec Holowk
13. Jared Cassady aka AuraTwilight aka Paimon Prowler (runs the OSR Discord)
At the current rate of four per week, literally all of the people who attacked me will be cancelled by the end of 2021. I believe in you.
EDIT: April 6, less than a month later--Olivia Hill and Filamena Young have been cancelled.
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I am so glad to see this happening 😂
ReplyDelete@SavageCheerleader
ReplyDeleteErased. You got asked a question and didn't answer. You're banned.
it would be more helpful if you explained what the hell some of these idiots did, since you only explain half-ish.
ReplyDeleteSo with Shoe, you explain what she did in brackets, but then you get Luke Crane or Brandon Dixson which makes it sound like Brandon got cancelled for somethign called "Swordsfall" and Luke Crane got cancelled because he worked at Kickstarter.
That being said, "please format better" might be more effort than you're willing to give these people, I really wish there was more context.
I wish you'd actually take bets, I'd throw down some cash on Cavegirl getting cancelled in the next 365 days.
@Z-CE
ReplyDeleteI figure there are only a few kinds of readers:
-Don't care what these people did
(They don't need an explanation)
-Do care what these people did, but believe me when I talk
(These people don't need an explanation, it's enough to know what everyone in this category has been aware of for some time: folks who lied about me are a fucked up hatemob.)
-Do care what these people did, but don't believe me when I talk
(These people are going to look elsewhere for an explanation anyway. Also they are not rational people and nothing on this blog is for them.)
-Do care what these people did, are on the fence about whether they believe me.
(They should probably look elsewhere for an explanation, too, since everything I say is just me talking.)
I believe you when you talk, but, and I want you to understand this isn't some attempt at a verbal trick, when someone tells me "this guy is a bad dude", I need something more than a name on a list. I'm a researcher in all things, and I've been googling since your last reply and I can't find anything on Swordsfall
ReplyDelete@z-c e
Deleteswordsfall was called out on twitter by someone named breeedo
oliver is being screamed at by other people like that
aight, I found it. Thanks man.
ReplyDeleteI am very shocked that the person who talks shit and causes problems on twitter all long and spams the crying from laughing emoji to indicate that he is, in fact, very not mad and is actually, for your information, extremely happy and fine has horrible anger and mental health problems and lashes out at people he's close to! u_u
@anon
ReplyDeleteerased. no anonymous comments
Gotta say that Darkshire's product doesn't seem bad on a read-through. Bit camp and twee, but largely harmless bit of content that seems to be relevant to recent discourse about letting gay characters be messy and villainous instead of moral exemplars. Is their inclusion on this list based on the product alone or other peoples' outrage?
ReplyDelete@kyle
Deleteother peoples out rage.
Oliver is an abuser: he joined the harassment campaign.
his fellow drama club members are mad at him for some other reason but the point is they are mad at him.
We could make a drinking game out of it. Still, I would like some posts about hobgoblins or art or architecture or something. "Abusers are mad at abusers" is entertaining, but the good stuff is entertaining and educational.
ReplyDeleteThough, frankly, so is the whole drama club.
There was also Ajey Pandey and Taylor Lane. The former was a guy who tried to get in everyone's pants by loud criticism and social media marketing. What got him was being rude to someone? That's about all I know and all that's been told. Apparently people don't need more than someone popular stating "They were abusive to me" without any backing.
ReplyDeleteThe latter was a new face who tried to market themselves well but was burnt for pissing off those few Troika-writers that act as gatekeepers.
I believe neither of the two have had remarks about you or could be considered "big deals, only joining the scene after, well-you know, but I wanted to comment to show that it continues so much faster than we could ever keep up, the machine hungers and wants more people down in the pit. Is it quarantine or is there another cause? It's accelerating so quickly.
@Sanic
ReplyDeleteThat's all true. Though AjeyPandey did join the hatemob vs me at one point and I don't know Taylor Lane but they appear on a product with Ettin, which isn't a great sign.
As for why:
I literally think that the situation has progressed to the point where they have almost no other way to express themselves other than cancellation attempts. Consider the range of tweets these folks can/will make:
-They can't do "real life funny/weird anecdote" tweets that don't have some topical point because they don't have lives. They've never talked that way--any of them. Either nothing ever happens to them at the grocery store (other than people being mean in some politically topical way) or they are too unperceptive to notice when it does.
-Personal tweets that are ignored except by friends ("Oh I hate mondays"). These earn them no clout.
-Political opinion tweets (or random media opinion tweets) are popular but if those tweets gain traction, the followers they earn are rarely game followers and so they're not customers or connections. People like Olivia Hill and Holden Shearer have been writing viral political tweets (saying the same shit as the rest of us lefties, for the most part) for years and can't translate that into sales.
-Actual game design tweets inevitably create a problem: the tweet won't get reshared unless it is STATED! IN! EXTREMIST! TERMS! in which case other game designers (the only possible audience for such tweets) get no clout from sharing it unless they are disagreeing with it (and thus can be perceived as making an original point themselves). However: they literally
literally
literally
(seriously: literally)
do not grasp the idea that you can disagree with someone and then talk to them about that disagreement and then one or both of you come to a better understanding of the subject. So disagreement is either ignored (resulting in no conversation and the tweet effectively being blocked and the life-cycle of the original game-design tweet having a life-cycle of a day at most, having not been built upon) or interpreted as harassment or a casus belli for harassment.
-"Buy My Stuff" tweets only circulate in the social circle of the original creator because none of them ever do anything original. The only showing off they can do is either in terms of "look! one more thing like the others people like me make" or "look! here are a bunch of social/political reasons to buy my thing" (all of which are the same reason to buy every other drama club member's thing:"Look at my game! It's the only game ever to exist which doesn't force you to play a homophobic Nazi colonizer!"
Also, one-by-one their usual failsafes have disappeared: it was taboo to go after queer folk and storygamers but Adam Koebel ended that taboo, it was taboo to go after people with fewer followers than you and queer women but this stuff with Taylor Lane proves they don't really care about that, it was taboo to go after POC but Brandon Dixon / Swordsfall changed that. And they've never had any taboo about going after someone because they didn't do anything: complaining about being harassed is considered harassment. This means functionally everyone is a possible target and they know it. The only thing like protection is being part of a social clique (a bit like being in prison) but the Drama Club is so averse to conversation that the cliques they form are always going to hate each other and so be as much an irritant as a protection.
It's almost impossible under these conditions for them to produce a tweet or post that:
-Reaches people who care about the subject
-Is atypical enough to strike anyone as worth resharing
-Is interesting enough to reach anyone outside their existing social circle
and
-Cannot be ALL CAPS DISAGREED WITH ON MORALPANIC GROUNDS in a way that will eventually lead to harassment by another Drama Club member
(cont'd)
ReplyDelete@Sanic
Throw into that the fact that there are fairly large swathes of the storygames crowd (Beau Sheldon et al) and OSR crowd ( Jared Sinclair et al) who will basically find a way to complain that anyone is successful if it isn't a personal friends of theirs.
So:
They have no tools to impress anyone except by pointing out their differences and no tools to overcome even minor differences (seriously the shit between Taylor Lane and the Troika harassment crew initially started because Taylor was asking if a friend could read a first draft of a game for them), so any attempt they make to be heard without starting a fight is almost impossible.
So if time is a river flowing one way, and we all are marching forward, with the flow of water, what prevents us fighting the current and staying in one place? What prevents us going backwards and looking at what has happened before? Why does no-one go sideways, towards a bank?
ReplyDeleteThe problem with all these people is their inability to conceive basic dialogue as a non-hostile, non-stressful aspect of existence. To them, arguments must be like a cage-match, something to be won, but often at the cost of injuries to themselves.
As you said above Zak, an argument or clash of ideas is essentially a way for two groups to come together and palaver, and in doing so come to a better understanding. Even in some cases, the group is able to parley because they are close! In this case, it is no longer outside groups taking on D&D as a satanic rock'n'roll cult ritual, or people ostracizing the weird kids in the cafeteria, it is currently the split and fractured factions and offshoots of one group auto-cannablizing and destabilizing any moral or objective discourse.
So the most important and salient aspect of grouping all these people in a list is that they are examples of a culture, like viziers or senators or pop stars. They come and go, and are individual examples of a group, and are often the standout driving forces.
So my question Zak, is if trying to discuss with them is pointless, and if it would be better to turn away, and seek in oneself. Maybe it is better to try to create your own group? Maybe it is best to go back to the past, and retrofit old ideas for new use, in lieu of creating systems?
Is going and reading about he sordid affairs of these listed people productive, or merely morbid curiosity? Is trying to unify these groups even possible? Is twitter the problem? If you know there is a problem is that most of the issue then dealt with?
I feel like these questions are not asked by many people, even very capable and mobile and intelligent ones, because the answers go much further than RPG discussion and development. Group dynamics are not a solved case, and trying to figure out how to best tackle such a complex and historied issue as mob mentalities or schisms may not come out of our small group of humanity.
In any case, I am glad you keep kicking, and wish your points were not so buried due to the current way people treat you. Recently Patrick Stuart had a "Good old blogs" post trying to stir up forgotten things in OSR, and guess who was the "Antimatter corpse of the fallen titan"?
It blows my mind that people can accept one side without even a single query as to the stance of the other, as if there is no reason to even think about how situations have multiple viewpoints. Some people need to read Rashomon, or read about heroin addiction before judging addicts, or in this case, think about how first impressions can be extremely misleading.
Hope some real discussion begins soon with some of these groups, and in the meantime, thanks for filling the gaping void of reason in the current climate of mob takedowns and madness.
@Benjamin Cusack
ReplyDeleteWould it be better to "create your own group"?
Short answer: No. three reasons.
1. Until they invent a second internet where you google "D&D" or "tabletop RPG" and nothing about WOTC or Critical Role or Reddit/r/RPG comes up, the power of technology will always put Drama Club members right next to their prey, forever. Because there will always be one person who is looking for the good stuff and hears about the bad things (whether they're telling the truth or not) and there will always be people looking to do bad and so goes about googling the good to find ways to create a cost to being and doing good things.
2. The Drama Club can control access to the levers of mass (or larger) communication and commercial success. Peter Adkison: GenCon. Matt Mercer: Critical Role. D&D. Polygon. DrivetrhuRPG. The Forums. etc. You can't have an audience big enough to make anything to do with RPGs worth the time without at least some access to the larger existing institutions.
3. The Drama Club's actions are, as we speak, hurting real innocent people. If people in games ignore that, then nobody else is going to come in and help them--because nobody else cares. And they will just hurt more and more people and become more and more powerful.
So what is actionable to help you.
DeleteWhat can we say when people dance around your name, when people spew vitriol in two hundred characters or less?
We can vote with our wallet, we can vote with our words, but how else can we support something so beset from every side?
It seems as if you have somehow accepted a bitter truth and refuse to fight or work your way out with response like this.
Where is the direction to go, what is the next hurdle, the next goal?
Let me just add "Creating your own group" is completely worthless.
ReplyDeleteWe make a "Zak S Design Squad" and that just gives it a name to spew narratives about.
Having a team or collection of people can be extremely formative or integral to movements and transmissions of ideas. Brian Eno terms this phenomenon "Senius" and describes it as the cultural or motivating factors that create a group from which a genius can form.
DeleteWhen the people around you help give credence, inertia, and focus, having a group can be very positive.
Now calling one band "punk" to the exclusion of others, and gatekeeping and figurehead worship are an entirely different factor.
Some of these problems occured in Zak's unfair treatment, with people getting angry at him due to their belief that he was somehow the tribal leader, when in fact he was merely the genius formed or influenced and influencing the scene in turn.
This created friction, and some people levvied this against him and used this as rationale to not take his statements as valid, completely cutting him off from making points in such an unfair way it makes me sick to my stomach.
@RalphFromTheSimpsons
ReplyDeleteYou're banned for dodging questions. https://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2021/02/to-shanna-malcolm-re-muppet-tits.html If you want to comment you have to answer them and finish the conversation you started.
Can't help but notice that Rashomon the novella is not about multiple viewpoints, Kurosawa used several of Akutagawa's works to make his film. The name and the rain came from Rashomon, but the whole "murder explained by different people with different viewpoints" came from In a Grove.
ReplyDeleteBoth are excellent stories and deserve to be read.
Also, I like the name "Zak S Design Squad".
The framing and name came from Rashomon, but in all fairness I have only read excerpts or summaries of both. Mostly out of interest garnered from the film Ghost Dog.
DeletePatrick once defined his part of the OSR as “people who cluster around zak s” and that was not a good thing: as soon as people perceive you as having power they unconsciously assume that you have responsibilities to them and they do not have responsibilities to you. (At least they reserve the right to act like they believe that--they aren't usually honest enough to come out and say it).
ReplyDeleteIt’s like they give you “status” so that they can exempt you from fairness.
So: please do not make a Zak S design squad.
Sounds reasonable. This is why clustering around an imaginary character can be better.
ReplyDelete@Benjamin Cusack
ReplyDeleteIf you do nothing else with your life, see the Kurosawa film "Ran".
I want to start with Dreams, but due to pandemic concerns, I have not seen my mother and father for a long time.
DeleteIt was one of the things we were going to do eventually, and Kurosawa seems to be essential watching for anybody who admires film.
I think once I begin, it will be like Lynch or Jim Jarmusch, and there will be no stopping till I have consumed their catalogue of work.
Thank you for the suggestion, maybe we should start there when we do meet again.
@benjamin cusack
ReplyDeleteRight now some dipshit on the internet is reading your comment and trying to figure out a way to use the fact you just used the word "genius" to define you as a slavering fanboy who could not possibly have a point.
I have looked at enough of your paintings on google images, and read enough of your books to substantively say you are "A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new discoveries or advances in a domain of knowledge".
DeleteI have yet to read some of the work, and have seen nothing in person, but just a few years ago, a large amount of the same people who would discount me now would be forced, perhaps begrudgingly, to agree.
@benjamin cusack
ReplyDeleteIt's very simple and you probably won't do it:
Contact someone else, possibly a stranger, who
is
not
me
who cares and wants things to improve, and talk to them about what you can do.
I can help, I can give information, but in the end the only way to defeat people acting in concert is to act in concert. Find someone else who cares, Ben, and decide to do something. That's step one.
@Banjamin Cusack
ReplyDeleteI hope that's true.
Can I call myself "Zak Chad Elite of the ZSDS" or would the irony value be swallowed up by the "look, a thing we can make up bullshit about", you think?
ReplyDelete@ZCE
ReplyDeleteNo offence but I honestly think you're the only person invested in whatever joke you're trying to tell with your screen name.
@zak its pretty funny
ReplyDelete@ben said
"Some of these problems occured in Zak's unfair treatment, with people getting angry at him due to their belief that he was somehow the tribal leader, when in fact he was merely the genius formed or influenced and influencing the scene in turn."
Zak already covered this. It's less than a hundred people by my estimate that basically control all the access.
@ZCE
ReplyDeleteIt's much fewer than a hundred:
-Peter Adkison at GenCon
-A handful of folks at WOTC
-Chris Allen and Shannon Appelcline at RPGnet
-Morrus at EnWorld
-The Ennies people
-DriveThruRPG/Stever Wieck
-Polygon's one (?) tabletop journalist
-Matt Mercer of Critical Role
-Luke Crane at Kickstarter
-The heads of Fantasy Flight, Free League, Evil Hat, Paizo
-------
a tad lower down, there are people who are more activist and have slightly less power but use what influence they have more extensively:
-Vincent Baker with his massive indie cred, and his wife Meguey, Ben Milton with his popular YouTube channel
-Heads of the OSR Discord, the main Reddits
-Anyone with more than 2000 followers who hasn't been cancelled yet
Only a little lower, you have groups of people who act so much in lockstep and with so much groupthink that they function as a powerful person for the purposes of hurting people:
-Something Awful refugees ( Kai Tave, Chris Longhurst/ Potatocubed, Neko Ewen / Ewen Cluney, Freyja Katra, Ettin, Pharniel, etc.)
-Troika/Mothership/Bastionland circle osr trolls: Joe DiSimone, Brian Yaksha, Evlyn M, Jared Sinclair, etc.
-Jessica Hammer, Crystal Frasier, and the women associated with Story Games who kind of accept everything they say without fact-checking
This conversation didn't include me, but I'm willing to listen anyway and pursue all this further. I have questions.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, when you listed a bunch of people who matter and have power, I picture just randomly emailing Chris Perkins or Matthew Mercer and saying, "Hey, you don't know me, and I mean nothing to you, and you have a massive social-media-based popularity contest to constantly be winning against cancel culture, but I want to talk to you about how Zak Smith was unfairly cancelled and what we can do to rectify the situation." I'm going to be honest - yes, I'm assuming an answer before I ask the question, but I imagine I'm blocked/muted/whatever-the-option-is and they never bother even responding. If I just send a bunch of links of your "proof," they've either already read it and don't care, or they're simply not interested in reading to begin with. Again, I'm assuming, but I also think I've seen it happen enough that I have little doubt.
I don't have twitter or facebook accounts, and have only been on discord a couple times. I use reddit, but from what I've seen right now, the second "Zak S" is mentioned in the subreddits that matter (OSR, RPG, etc), those threads & posts tend to be outright deleted. And I've seen your defenders banned from those subreddits for speaking out for you. I imagine the same thing happens in discords as well?
So with that being said, how do the doors get opened? I don't mean this facetiously, and I don't believe I'm being dense - I just don't know what the actual avenues are for righting the wrongs and finding middle grounds with the people who matter and have completely shut their ears and minds? You have no reason to believe or trust me as a random dude on the internet, but if you're willing to talk further and give some advice, I'm willing to try harder than I have previously.
@Jared Walker
ReplyDeleteIf you're serious, email me. zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm
@A Ste RAW maynn
ReplyDeleteErased--no misinformation allowed. Aside from anything else, they all made false accusations against me.
If you can prove otherwise, ok. Otherwise you're banned until you apologize for trying to spread misnformation.
@amogus
ReplyDeletePandemic.
New Tactic
ReplyDeleteEncourage them to Cancel more people. Eventually they will run out. There will be more canceled people than un canceled.
So work hard to help them double the list.
you should start reviewing people's work
ReplyDelete@FRED
ReplyDeleteyou seem to have the strange idea that being cancelled as a concept bothers these people. most of them dont view it as a career ending consequence and none of them faced consequences as harsh as zak did
afaik shoe, adam, brandon can all still go to gen con and weren't publicly denounced by the billionaire(millionaire?) that runs and owns it.
having to go "im sowy :)" on twitter or not being a discord mod anymore? thats nothing. I'm sure zak would take the "cancelings" these shitheads got over the complete and total career and reputational demolition he got
the system was designed to utterly destroy some people, and its proponents are fine with being in the hot seat for a week every now and then
@amog
ReplyDeleteWhy?
because you're smart but you can explain complex ideas well
ReplyDelete@amogus
ReplyDeletelooking at the evidence I’m pretty sure I’ve never successfully explained anything to anyone on this blog
^ actual lol
ReplyDeletewhat would i know, im just a cumbrain anyway
ReplyDelete@amogus
DeletePenrith or the Lake District?
are you trying to dox me? i live in london, lol, your digital forensics person is not good
ReplyDelete@amogus
ReplyDeleteI thought you said you were a Cumbrian.
whats your opinion on using dangerous lunatic conspiracy theories as worldbuilding tools?
ReplyDeleteflat-earthers explaining why there are seasons even though the earth "doesnt revolve around the sun" are pretty good fantasy material
@zak-chad elite
ReplyDeletewhatever works for you
I have to read through enough conspiracy theories as it is just to prepare court documents. It really saps the appetite for poorly-written, un-factcheked, antisemitic gibberish.
hows that going beeteedubs?
ReplyDelete@z-c-e
ReplyDeletenot bad at all, just slow. lots of waiting.
hypothetically you win your case against mandy, she was found to have not told the truth etc
ReplyDeleteare you gonna ""forgive"" people that apologize once the evidence is backed up by a (lets say dismissed with prejudice) court position, or are you full on steamroller destroy destroy at this point?
I'm hoping you dont wuss out and do number 2, but I know this shit be exhausting
@Z-C-E
ReplyDeleteI have always said--about everything--that I'd be happy to forgive people who apologize publicly and take steps to undo the harm they've done.
Nobody ever takes me up on it, and I don't think it's for practical reasons.
After 12 years of watching gamers get caught online lying about very obvious things over and over (Ash Kreider: Vin Diesel isn't white) and refusing to apologize without -tremendous- legal ( Ettin / Paul Matijevic ), professional (Rob Donoghue apologizing for endorsing the Vampire thing because Kenneth Hite called him up and said what the fuck are you doing? ) or social ( Paolo Greco temporarily apologizing for being a troll ) pressure it's clear to me that, basically, these folks see their lives as -already determined- and so any hypothetical improvement that might come from changing is basically unimaginable to them.
Like, look at like the Troika Trolls:
Here are guys who might want to be writers, and yet they know that for the rest of their lives any audience they might have for projects in the future only grow out of a bunch of shitheads who have burned every bridge with anyone who fact-checks. They don't -have- anything else besides whatever they're making games in order to run away from and the tiny shitty patch of hate they farm with their conspiracy theories.
In the saddest sense of the phrase -they only have each other- which means their really is no reason to change or be better. They'd have to be forgiven by not just me, but by any sane editor or publisher or partner or internet creative type that can see that they spent at least five years just hurting innocent people for fun.
So you point out a mistake and they do a quick calculation "What does apologizing get me?" only one thing: the knowledge they did the right thing. What does it lose them:
-They lose friends because the friends feel betrayed that they've moved over to fact-based reality from being a Troika Troll
-They lose other friends and audience because their brand was hatespeech and now they can't do it
-They lose connection to the only thing they've ever planted that grew
And, aside from that, NO-ONE in the drama club has ever shown an ability to change their mind based on new information. Or even old information.
It would be nice, bit they won't do it. It would require intelligence or empathy and they have proved repeatedly they don't have those things.
yeah thats fair. I followed err, one of the troika people, axes and orcs. that lasted maybe a week because everytime they popped up on my timeline it was just pure, crystallized seething. the guy couldnt talk about like, coffee without just ranting tweet after tweet after tweet about how much he "fucking hated" this coffee. nonstop. scream scream scream. It was so STRANGE to me. I still dont really get it but I have avoided the Troika Trolls since
ReplyDeletewhoops pressed enter to autofill my name but that happened instead. I'm "za"
ReplyDelete@z-c-e
ReplyDeleteThat whole clique began with something called the "Mongrel Banquet Club" on Google + . What was that? Here's a SELF-description from Beloch Shrike / linkskywalker / Nick WS Whelan:
"The Mongrel Banquet Club is a shitposting group. It's full of a bunch of OSR people who like to post jokes about poops and farts. We also gossip a lot. If you're in the OSR, and not in the MBC, somebody has probably mentioned that one time you acted like a dick to them in a Hangouts game."
So this is a group of people who, self-consciously, decided, on Day One that when they had issues with someone on the elfgame internet they would...
...not talk to the person they had beef with like a grown-up is supposed to
...not just drop it
...not talk to their real friends and loved ones irl about it
...but instead just sit around grousing about it in a private group with people they never met off the internet.
That was their -starting place- refusing to even try to fix anything. This whole shitscape they made is just a logical extension of that: agree with me, good, don't? You're lost to humanity.
That's the reason surreal in-jokes have become pretty much their only currency outside of hateposts--its the only thing they can say that doesn't bring up -differences- and they can't have a conversation about differences. If you don't know what someone's saying or if they're serious or not you're relieved of the obligation to see if it's true or not.
i just googled who the f this nick whelan guy is and from a couple hours of research he seems to like burning bridges
ReplyDeletecant help a guy who does that.
i've only burnt two bridges in my life, one was an ex-girlfriend who I caught cheating because I left work early to find out why she'd stolen my bank card and and 5k from my account. Can't trust thieves - you might think different but once you fuck someone that hard that's it.
the other guy technically burned bridges with me. he was removed from a dnd game for using racist language, decided I was the person complaining (and...not the asian girl in our game....nope gotta be the white guy) and cut all ties with me. He did reach out a few years later but nah, you made your choice(his facebook was still filled to the absolute brim with slurs too)
@Z-C-E
ReplyDeleteHe came out -very- fast and aggressive when the smear campaign started. I don't really know what his specific beef was, he was fine before--other than being in the Mongrel group.
Jumping back in to add two people not on the list who have been handed the shitstick recently. First is Dennis Detwiller. His thing was arguing that freelancers complaining about bad pay shouldn't be freelancers or something like that. I missed it but it got people angry obviously. He still has more followers than the rest of them combined (I don't actually know who he is).
ReplyDeleteSecond person was Skerples just today. One guy got really mad for how he handled the KS of their last book (to stay anonymous they had a manager stand in to do all the finance-aspect). Them trying to hurdle Skerples into a bad spot shows how important it is to have good infosec. If Skerples had their name and location out there you know there'd be so much trouble but this way there won't ever be more than a few weird tweets. It also irks me they use male-pronouns exclusively when you don't even know that much.
They did all this judging about the KS without actually asking any of the people involved. It seems to be mostly pent-up anger due to Skerples saying Troika is mostly ok and not the bee's knees.
Just wanted to add this because those two peeps technically still fall under the cancel-attempts for March alone but not necessarily as anything more than attempts. Beware the ides of march.
@Sanic
ReplyDeleteMore information:
Dennis Detwiller
He is a longtime industry hack who worked on Cthulhu-related things who is apparently very easily led. We've had very little interaction other than a few years ago someone lied about something I said and he repeated it credulously and I had to correct him on twitter--It was like "Hi, i'm right here, if you have an issue with me, just say something". He then jumped on the smear campaign train after the accusations against me.
What happened with him was:
-a guy named Graeme Barber aka Panzer Lion aka POCgamer (who also took part int he smear campaign) wrote something for an official D&D/Hasbro/WOTC project called Candlekeep (something). He's usually an indie rpg guy (iirc) and recently ascended to offical D&D. Barber complained about how he was edited at WOTC in the final product, saying it made his material seem racist.
-He got lots of support on twitter.
-Detwiller subtweeted from Jaded RPG Veteran pov that being edited is part of the devil's bargain of working w/big companies and it's not good for a body's career to complain about it.
-Detwiller got attacked on twitter.
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Re:
Skerples
Skerples is a 4chan person and longtime harasser. They also have an RPG blog and stay anonymous. They claimed, to me, that -I- was the reason they was anonymous, claiming their 4chan friends had told them I would do bad things to them and then said I did not do those things.
Skerples also jumped on the smear campaign, I don't know why.
Jared Sinclair aka Infinite Mao, head of the Troika Trolls on twitter, decided he was angry today that Skerples was anonymous--specifically to the people they worked with on twitter.
While fellow Troika Troll Michael T Lombardi aka trebuchetops pretended to rationally talk to Skerples about the trust issues involved, Jared just went on twitter saying shit like "Fuck Skerples".
Oddly, nobody int he conversation, including Skerples went "If you had an issue with me, why not just come to me instead of just writing 'Fuck Skerples' all over twitter"
Which
seems
like
the
obvious?
first
step?
But seriously the idea of coming to someone you have a problem with -yet again- seems 100% off the table.
Kinda cute that Mao got politely told by skerps's contributors to fuck off. Guess they were off their meds that morning
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