[English] Talking With Zak S. Instead Of Gossiping About Him
Dear Zak,
Dear Fellow Disputorians,
Dear Lurkers, Witch-Hunters and Snitches from other communities,
After a long time of consideration, James Raggis New Year Video and a discussion currently underway elsewhere, I revoke my former stance on Zak S. and hereby open up this thread to invite him to speak for himself.
Openly inviting him to be a part of this community if he chooses to.
I do not speak for the community here, as everyone speaks for himself. The same goes for the following, those are my thoughts alone. The opinions of others here will differ greatly.
The reasons for my invitation are two-fold: To amend for my passivity during the days of the witch hunt, and to counter-act the culture of authoritarianism that creeps through the culture of the German online gaming discussion. And since this place always welcomed outcasts from other places, be it because they have been considered "rude" or "politically extreme", or used CAPITAL LETTERS or had dyslexia and a taste for supervillains, I feel it is the consequential thing to do.
I have my own view of what happened between Zak and Mandy (that, two persons with distinct personality traits came together, and had a falling out that could have been expected), but in no way should that have been the basis for a widespread exclusion of him.
The purge was not justified, and we all behaved like cowardly chickens, hiding in the shadows, fearing la terreur would demand our heads next. Casting our own shards into the urn.
And whether we like him or not, we should have behaved differently, should have shown the virtues and granted the freedoms we demand for ourselves. And thus, we must place us at risk to grant protection against these progroms.
Jeff Rients lived up to that standard and nearly got destroyed.
No one here stood up to defend him when he stood up for someone else.
Those were not our best hours in showing our Zivilcourage.
Yet, I believe the author of my copy of Vornheim is dead or buried deep underground.
Because authoritarianism kills creativity. It breeds gatekeepers, censors, witch hunters and informers, fearful subjects to rule over. It kills inspiration, fantasy, initiative, trust and courage.
It destroys links between people who would otherwise have stimulated each other with ideas and new ways to think. It destroys the courage to cross boundaries, and makes worlds smaller. It destroys the joy of life. Especially if you fight these wars, you become another person. Your mind warps, you react differently to other people. People turn away from you because of this, and you even become more embittered and hardened. Killing more of the inner child that creates imaginary worlds.
We took part in this, by looking away, silently withdrawing, cutting links to him.
"First, they came for the communists ..." also applies here.
I apologize for being a part of all of this.
That, and inviting you to this place is all I can really do.
But what you make of it is your thing.
Sincerely
The Ogre
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I believe I hit the "reply" button.
Let's take some stuff in order:
- What happened between Mandy and I is something nobody here should have a strong or public opinion on--at least without talking to the dozens of people available online who knew her while we were together and who have come forward to testify. Mandy clinically lost her connection to reality--that has been very well-documented and backed up by documents, doctors and literally every friend who knew her more than a few months. You can think what you want, but the second you write it in public your responsibilities vastly change.
- As for creativity dying on account of conflict, this is more poetry than reality. In the last 4 years I've made dozens of paintings, 3 screenplays, and written more RPG material than I ever did before and probably more than most people in the industry--hundreds of pages of art and writing. If you liked Vornheim then, well, it's hard to imagine there would be nothing to interest you in Cube World. Same guy, same art, same sensibility, same setting even. The only thing that's lessened is my desire to share this work -for free- with the community, because I like the community lot less than I used to--and for reasons you sketched out pretty well in your message above.
- Nevertheless, I deeply appreciate that you've done what hundreds of people didn't do: Ask questions, answer questions, admit when you're wrong, and change your behavior.
- Many people have written to apologize for what they did or didn't do 4 years ago. When I say that a private apology is not much good after to a public attack, they run away. So: you're better than most people.
- If anyone has any questions, you should ask.
Welcome, Zak!
Kudos to Oger for approaching Zak about coming here. I am genuinely surprised, and positively.
On strong and public opinion regarding your (Zak) relationship to your ex and the aftermath, I will claim for myself that I did not express one (others might prove me wrong - I did not take the time to re-read the two[?] threads I participated in covering the topic, so I might misremember or have repressed the memory). My stance was (and basically still is) that I was not there (and did no additional research other than reading some of the original claims when they were initially made and reading Zaks [counter-]stance and documentation), thus cannot know what happened, but could broadly imagine either version to be true in the end ("artist abuses spouse" and "[ex-]spouse abuses/slanders artist" both sound about equally believable when you are not putting in the research).
What I did express an opinion on was the community and industry reaction. I did - and do - that in the context of the German rpg sphere, though, as I am currently not an active part of any English speaking forums, servers or other platforms (and have not been for years - perhaps with the exception of blogging in English sometimes, but then basically noone outside of Germany reads that blog). Although I also admit on not having been overly vocal even in German.
Disclosure: I suggested several times to invite Zak for an interview (we do English language interviews on the podcast), but there was pushback (not naming names) for exactly the reason of fear of being taken into Sippenhaft, so I did not insist (though the idea was floated several times and not just by myself).
PS: I did not realize we have such restrictive rules. Didn't the missing moderation/rules use to be one of the avenues of attack on the Disputorium and its incarnations?
Hi, welcome Zak!
I am on record for having a laissez-faire, old europe style, towards the private lives and political views of artists and authors.
That is, I might find private lives and or politics shady, or even abhorrent, but their works should be able to be at least looked at, should be able to be discussed on their own merits.
And Maze of the Blue Medusa does have some proper merit! And I have not seen anything vile in there.
I have my red lines, of course.
An example would be the Appendix N-book Jeffro guy. He ist a vile anti-semite that puts his Anti-semitism via warping perceptions on Appendix N into the OSR.
Why does this feel like a reckoning somehow ... or maybe more like Festivus? Anyway...
Thank you Oger for inviting Zak and welcome Zak!
Oger, you speak of Zivilcourage and how you feel that you and others have failed to live up to this standard. I won't judge others but I will judge myself: There is a thread here that discusses the witch hunt for Zak and Jeff on this forum (https://pesa-nexus.de/forum/topic/zak-s-drama/) and I went back to read it.
I think I did...okay-ish? I hindsight, I find the framing ("drama") a bit distasteful, but I see how an attempt at levity can work as a coping mechanism. Reading and thinking about it, I realized the thing I hate most about hate mobs in general and how they terrorized Zak in particular, is their insistence on moral purity, rigidity and authority while being intellectually dishonest. Maybe I should have been more vocal, used more platforms to argue the point. I would like to think I have been vocal about this point in general (to my detriment in the Tanelorn for example). I have not been particularly vocal about either Jeff's nor Zak's plight, because I have been self-censoring to a degree out of fear/cowardice but also because I don't think of myself as an ...advocate if that makes sense. Short tangent about the cowardice: When Mandy's allegations first came up, I interacted briefly with Zak and others on Twitter, mostly taking Zak seriously and asking questions IIRC. This led to me being placed on a public Twitter list ("rape apologists" or something in that vein) by some random internet person. I then deleted my Twitter account. No punchline.
@ Zak: I am glad you accepted.
My questions would be:
- Are you still an active gamer? Do you play or DM/GM on a regular base?
- Which games beyond D&D you have played or GM`d?
- What would be your publishing plans/ creative ideas for the future, provided you can or want to give it a higher priority?
@ Blut_und_Glas:
Yes, we have those rules here, but as I understand it, it is the bare minimum legally required to operate the forum. And then, there are those rules and then there are different forum cultures. Lack of moderation and some technical features (like, the absence of PMs) makes certain social dynamics we see in other places more difficult. And it keeps people away primarily interested in maintaining, controlling or initiating those dynamics (instead of being primarily interested in creative work and/or roleplaying games).
Zitat von Hasran am 28. Januar 2023, 12:29 UhrOger, you speak of Zivilcourage and how you feel that you and others have failed to live up to this standard. I won't judge others but I will judge myself: There is a thread here that discusses the witch hunt for Zak and Jeff on this forum (https://pesa-nexus.de/forum/topic/zak-s-drama/) and I went back to read it.
For the record and the english speaking audience as well as Zak, I shall repeat what I had as a distilled position in that thread:
"My impression is that Zak is probably a manipulative asshole in many ways [...]
It appears that the Zak hatred, which was already there BEFORE, did also resonate with some anti-Semitism. Cryptically in most cases (imagined on my part? such as allusions to his rich dad etc) and openly on YDIS. Be that as it may: For those who hate Zak professionally, the ongoing scandal is of course a free pass, but that doesn't make their pathological hatred any better, I'm completely with Lacan/Žižek."
"The first wave of hatred against Zak came from evangelical-leaning US-Midwestern people who found his liberal lifestyle condemnable and disgusting.
To a lesser extent, Carcosa man Geoff McKinney got it. Anti-intellectual and illiberal, most of the criticism came from the (3/4/5) D&D and Red Box (Dragonsfoot) mainstream.
Then it was hip for left-liberals like WotCs from Seattle to court Zak to show Red America how open you are.
Now Zak is through with both tribes, donkeys and elephants.
He lived by the hype, he dies by the hype, my pity is zero.
But the Zak haters, I find them scarier in society as a whole than the fact that a single visual artist has an non-bourgeois lifestyle and a tyrannical, manipulative personality. Because there is a scary 'will to annihilate' him, see Lacan/Zizek."
-First: I have been dealing with this specific version of online harassment for a long time. A very common and bizarre defense people give of their behavior is that it just isn't their personal style to behave better. A bit like saying "You kicked that puppy?" "Well yeah, I'm not really a do-gooder kind of guy, you know?" as if they were expressing a preference in t-shirt color.
People's lives (not just mine) have been destroyed by this and gamers are (strangely) the ones able to do anything about it. In the face of stakes like that, the idea that personal taste in how anyone enjoys talking is a factor is not understandable to me. When the stakes are high I don't really care what your favorite color is--helping people's more important than that.
There are legitimate reasons to do nothing (fear, executive dysfunction, ignorance) but just not being into that kind of thing is not, to me, one of them.
Der OGer's questions:
- Are you still an active gamer? Do you play or DM/GM on a regular base?
Yes. I run games regularly and I have a monday night game with James Raggi and Jeff Rients. Jeff is the GM.
- Which games beyond D&D you have played or GM`d?
A lot? I mean I wrote a blog about it since 2009, it would be hard to list them all. They generally fall into a few categories:
-Games that were popular during the RPG boom
-Games that I played after starting my blog just because someone I knew wanted to try them
-Games I played because work
- What would be your publishing plans/ creative ideas for the future, provided you can or want to give it a higher priority?
More Cube World stuff (that is : the D&D and LotFP content I've been doing all along), more Demon City (the horror game I did that just came out), and finish I Am The Weapon (the superhero game that got cancelled when the accusations came out)--it's mostly done but no pictures yet.
This is addressing some shit from the old threads you have here:
Just_Flo
*Regarding legal action)
"Hopefully it ends before either of you harm the other or yourself."
This is gross.
We're not children fighting over a ball in a playground. My ex is a mentally ill person who did a fucked up thing. The idea that the conflict is "drama" that should simply "stop" is a luxury only an observer who dehumanized the people involved could take--this is a situation where a person did a bad thing and there needs to be some kind of solution. As importantly: there need to be consequences for all the people in the RPG community who dogpiled or else this will happen again and again.
If someone stabs your dog while a crowd cheers, you don't go "Oh I hope you two resolve your differences". You do whatever it takes to make sure the stabber and the crowd never do it again.
Erik Erikson
"Zak won't get far in Canada. They're very progressive and they put a lot of emphasis on women's rights."
Well, its been 4 years. Is that "far" enough?
Mandy tried to get the case dismissed and the judge (a woman, and a progrsssive) did not dismiss it.
Canada is very progressive, so they understand falsely accused people have rights.
So, I do't know who Erik is on this forum to you: but you should stop trusting their analysis because they were completely wrong.
ghoul
"
After Wizard Jeff has been silent for so long, he now sits down in the middle of the shitstorm:
https://jrients.blogspot.com/2019/12/re-zak.html
High INT, low WIS?
"
Jeff did the right thing.
Jeff did the right thing because he understood that's more important than being popular with a bunch of gamers online, not because he was so unwise he didn't know the gamers would be mad.
BoyScout
"In any case, the comment function has exploded. I think Zak must have been annoyed by his "friend's" blog post."
Of course I wasn't.
And if you were wondering, why wouldn't you just ask me?
Hasran
"
"There is a reason he's been blacklisted by WotC, by DrivethruRPG, and by the Ennies. This isn't out of nowhere."
That was my favorite quote so far. Confirmation bias at its finest.
"
Glad people are seeing that for what it is.
People have (unsuccessfully) tried to argue in court that blacklistings prove the allegations. They then get stuck with the problem that the origin sources of the blacklistings are unreliable people.
For example:
One defendant tried to argue that because I was banned from RPGnet this meant I was a troll. It was easy to then point out that the person who banned me (Ettin) got sued successfully because they lied about abuse, successfully, and had to apologize.
The ogre
"
Unwise, unnecessary? hmmm I would imagine when the "I think about suicide every day" tweet came, Jeff felt emotionally compelled to fly the flag. I think few people can completely escape the pull of such a statement when you're somehow close.
Which in turn shows how manipulative Zak is.
"
So:
I tell the truth and it's "manipulative".
Maybe you've changed your mind about this, but, really: a person in my position can't win.
-If I say everything is fine for me, then harassers will portray me as a person experiencing no harm causing trouble for other people by suing
-If I point out how incredibly destructive this has been, then I will be accused of playing for sympathy.
I hope you are a different and better person now than when you wrote that.
Settembrini
"I think I know that Zak is probably an asshole in many ways. I"
If you think that, in all the years we've interacted you've literally never come to me with any issue you had.
Which is fucked up.
You might go "Well I don't care that you're an asshole"
Great: then don't say it in public.
If you want to publicly voice a judgment on someone--have a reason.
This matters because the casual defense "He was an asshole anyway" is used against every falsely accused person by accusers and bystanders trying to retroactively explain their behavior.
So while it may seem a small thing to you, to the victim it's a huge part of why the problem is occurring.
My reason was that I wanted to make clear that I do not and did not condone many of your behaviours (which I called manipulative), online. Main example being the calls for people to do X so that you reveal Y and the like. Also your earlier calls for banning and ostracizing other people from their livelihoods, before it hit yourselves.
That being said, and that was also the context from the post in the thread, I have great concern for the the actions of your enemies. So much will to annihilate and erase. And I noted and highlighted how at the start conservatives hated you for reason X and then US-style liberals hated you for the Mandy affair.
Many people seemed ghoulishly glad when people found enough. That was quite disconcerting.
Simply: you're wrong and that attitude created this problem.
A lot of people in the online RPG community did fucked up things (including, I notice, you--you claim I lied and sockpuppeted in an earlier thread. No confrontation, no ability to defend myself, no question).
They do these things they would never do in real life to a person at a table with them for one reason:
There are no consequences for them.
If everyone who had been proven to do these things since 2009 had experienced real consequences, none of this would have happened. The online harassers who spread the claim wouldn't have been able to operate. Everyone would be fine. There'd be a social understanding that you can't just claim people did shit or deserved to be treated poorly without proof and confronting the victim.
Consequences are good when they're deserved.
Consequences are bad when they're not.
Therefore the utmost attention needs to be paid to finding out if someone's done anything wrong before taking any action.
This isn't a complicated moral code or very original on my part, but it seems very hard for gamers to understand.
Without that, it's basically all 4chan all the time.
The reason it's like this is 2fold:
Extremely online people like gathering social clout by snarking about people.
Extremely online people are very often actual nerds with a genuine and irrational fear of confrontation (even when that confrontation will have no consequences other than making them look stupid or dishonest to the 3d6 people reading that they will never meet).
So: sniping about people who aren't around is a fun activity for people.
Realizing this will have consequences for the victims is (ewwww) responsibility and isn't fun, so they make up all kinds of mental gymnastics to excuse themselves.
When you do that: you are the problem.
The second you voice an issue and it isn't first of all directly to the gamer you have an issue with all this shit is your fault.
And, lastly, digging back into y'alls old threads it's clear it's hopeless here. They are full of unquestioned trash.
-
The standard tack people now take is to point out either:
1-how unpopular it is to do the right thing. (Like "Well that attitude is why nobody likes you")
2-how unfun it is ("But i don't want to run around fact-checking stuff I read it's not fun")
3-or suggest its hard to find the truth in a dispute (which it almost never is in RPG online disputes, because at least one party will refuse to participate in the process of fact-finding and evidence, which invalidates their POV right away).
None of those change the fact it's the right thing to do.