Smear Math for Morons

 One very weird thing I've noticed when people discuss the smear campaign is people saying these two thing, often in the same breath:

• lol Zak is so cancelled we sure destroyed his life lmao!
• lol Zak is suing people saying he lost millions, what an idiot lmao!

Now, if you're not a moron (and it should go without saying that anyone participating in the smear is a moron) you'll realize these are basically opposite statements.

If you smear someone and so completely destroy anybody's ability to earn a living doing their job as long as there's an internet, you've likely cost them over a million dollars. That's not about me specifically, that's anyone.

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The math:

Let's say you, like me, live in California.

Minimum wage is 16$ per hour.

That's 128$ per day.

That's 3,840$ per month.

That's 46,080$ per year.

Assuming the person lives a minimum of 30 more years and (like most artists) never retires, that's 1,382,400$.

That's assuming no inflation and just using minimum wage--and I did make more than minimum wage.

(Just for the development of I Am The Weapon alone, I was making 3000$ per month before the smear. If that less-than-minimum-wage figure seems high remember I'm contracted for all the writing and all the illustration. If you would like the documentation on that--just ask. This is also in every court record. I also had two projects in development with LotFP at the time--Bards and Violence in the Nympharium. Both of those included a cash advance and then I make a percentage after. Or ignore all these numbers and look at how much the artists and writers make on literally any mid-tier indie RPG kickstarter.)

Now, I am publishing again and so that income's not all lost, but that's only after having successfully sued three people who smeared me.

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And here's probably the main thing seem to forget or not realize:

RPGs isn't my main job, I've never claimed it was. I am a painter. I paint paintings for a living that people are supposed to buy. That is my job and was long before any game stuff I did ever existed.

Just because the people who smeared me were themselves in RPGs doesn't mean that I only lost RPG work. You'd have to have brain damage to think that only people in games noticed your smear campaign. All that work disappeared as well.

This is all in the article Dr Weisman wrote (missing audio here).

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And, of course, on top of that, destroying someone's reputation doesn't just destroy their income, it destroys their entire life.

And the non-monetary damage to their life is undeniably worse than the loss of income.

Since death is preferable to my current situation, if you're me, basically this cost me however much my entire life is worth. That's a price higher than any dollar amount. The only reason I am sticking around is the very slim hope it gets undone.

Again: this isn't special. I assume you think your life is worth a lot to you, too. If someone offered you a million dollars to die, you probably wouldn't take that deal.

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There are a lot of things that are really obvious about the situation the hatemob created that seem to be lost on everyone talking about it online, this about money is just one of them. But it fits in a blog entry so there you go.

If you lie about someone being a felon and put it all over the internet and that person's entire life is working in public, you did way more than a million dollars worth of damage.

It's not about me being special, that's just life.

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