The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community

Dr Clio Belle Weisman

From the article: Having just escaped the world of incel culture I was not much interested in the kind of people that write shitty messages on Twitter because a new Star Wars character is black. At first glance that kind of harasser seemed both relatively well-understood by my field and boring. I was more interested in those who, at least on paper, were like the people around me every day and who were what the industry claimed to want to be — creative artists, writers, progressives, feminists, LGBTQ+ folk. I know why right-wingers want to hurt diverse groups of creative people, I do not have a handle on why diverse groups of creative people hurt each other. And I desperately wanted to. This article really needs to get more traction than it is.

Oh I wondered if you'd heard about the gaming clusterfuck! Note to my followers: Don't be put off by the opinions in this paragraph -- the article gets into the nitty-gritty of other people being horrible, and in one major harasser's case it shows the author switching from Believing The Woman to siding with the accused because of this case's mountain of evidence. It's like the reverse of those people who have all the right opinions on paper then are total scumbags on the personal level -- the performative male feminist etc.

I hadn't heard about this particular cluster (fuck, of people, B) previously, yet the frame is so familiar as to be almost dull: person with clout and a little integrity others wish to unthrone, cluster B ex, and at last there is a casus belli

Like I said elsewhere in the chain...I am familiar with this particular cluster, and this article is absolutely not to be trusted.

Why not, specifically?

I'll quote my other reblog:

I've never been entirely sure how much to believe against Zak. His long history of sock-puppeting, brigade-calling, and forum-thread-ruining is not controversial, I've seen him do that stuff with my own two eyes. And so have thousands of others.

But the more serious accusations often boiled down to he-said-she-said. And since he's such an asshole, plenty of people had motive to lie about him. So when people said (for example) that they got harassing emails on accounts that they only ever used to email Mike Mearls about Zak being a terrible human being, I wasn't completely sure I could believe it.

If you have your own doubts about this or that allegation, fair enough. Just know that you can't trust this article.

Also, ask yourself how much time and mental energy you want to spend untangling the Zak Lore. His general toxicity is completely uncontroversial and much of the really bad stuff has been found true in court. Given that, is it really worth the effort required to figure out which of the middleweight accusations was fair?

To be very honest, now I'm a lot more suspicious of your motivations than the article's, since that entire last paragraph is you trying to manipulate me into giving up on figuring out what is true or not because you personally think Zak Smith is a big internet meanie.

Considering all relevant interview clips are archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJAJNbF2Tg&list=PPSV

It's hard for me to "not trust" things that people involved in the situation said about the situation, with their own mouths and words, even if the presentation of one court case (out of evidently 3 total he's won so far and another that's been appealed back and forth) was dubious.

Given that he abused his girlfriend, how much time do you want to dedicate to figuring out which online insults were sent by his sockpuppets and which were "naturally occurring"?

Seriously, how much?

Five hours? Twenty? Two hundred?

I've wasted significantly too much time on this drama. I'm trying to warn you against my mistakes.

The only thing that matters to me is the truth. If, as is quite apparent from the article, multiple people have admitted to lying about him and making accusations without any real evidence, then there is clearly a big problem here. If I'm going to dislike Zak it's going to be for reasons that are true and not reasons that are false. He certainly doesn't sound like a winner, but I'm not going to let you tell me to just take everything said about him at face value just because.

So, how many hours?

If you want the truth, you can spend as much time as you want on this or any other topic. But how much of your life are you willing to spend?

This isn't a rhetorical question.

Why are you trying so hard to maneuver me into not looking into this at all? That's not a rhetorical question either.

The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community

Dr Clio Belle Weisman

From the article: Having just escaped the world of incel culture I was not much interested in the kind of people that write shitty messages on Twitter because a new Star Wars character is black. At first glance that kind of harasser seemed both relatively well-understood by my field and boring. I was more interested in those who, at least on paper, were like the people around me every day and who were what the industry claimed to want to be — creative artists, writers, progressives, feminists, LGBTQ+ folk. I know why right-wingers want to hurt diverse groups of creative people, I do not have a handle on why diverse groups of creative people hurt each other. And I desperately wanted to. This article really needs to get more traction than it is.

Oh I wondered if you'd heard about the gaming clusterfuck! Note to my followers: Don't be put off by the opinions in this paragraph -- the article gets into the nitty-gritty of other people being horrible, and in one major harasser's case it shows the author switching from Believing The Woman to siding with the accused because of this case's mountain of evidence. It's like the reverse of those people who have all the right opinions on paper then are total scumbags on the personal level -- the performative male feminist etc.

I hadn't heard about this particular cluster (fuck, of people, B) previously, yet the frame is so familiar as to be almost dull: person with clout and a little integrity others wish to unthrone, cluster B ex, and at last there is a casus belli

Like I said elsewhere in the chain...I am familiar with this particular cluster, and this article is absolutely not to be trusted.

Why not, specifically?

I'll quote my other reblog:

I've never been entirely sure how much to believe against Zak. His long history of sock-puppeting, brigade-calling, and forum-thread-ruining is not controversial, I've seen him do that stuff with my own two eyes. And so have thousands of others.

But the more serious accusations often boiled down to he-said-she-said. And since he's such an asshole, plenty of people had motive to lie about him. So when people said (for example) that they got harassing emails on accounts that they only ever used to email Mike Mearls about Zak being a terrible human being, I wasn't completely sure I could believe it.

If you have your own doubts about this or that allegation, fair enough. Just know that you can't trust this article.

Also, ask yourself how much time and mental energy you want to spend untangling the Zak Lore. His general toxicity is completely uncontroversial and much of the really bad stuff has been found true in court. Given that, is it really worth the effort required to figure out which of the middleweight accusations was fair?

To be very honest, now I'm a lot more suspicious of your motivations than the article's, since that entire last paragraph is you trying to manipulate me into giving up on figuring out what is true or not because you personally think Zak Smith is a big internet meanie.

Considering all relevant interview clips are archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJAJNbF2Tg&list=PPSV

It's hard for me to "not trust" things that people involved in the situation said about the situation, with their own mouths and words, even if the presentation of one court case (out of evidently 3 total he's won so far and another that's been appealed back and forth) was dubious.

Given that he abused his girlfriend, how much time do you want to dedicate to figuring out which online insults were sent by his sockpuppets and which were "naturally occurring"?

Seriously, how much?

Five hours? Twenty? Two hundred?

I've wasted significantly too much time on this drama. I'm trying to warn you against my mistakes.

The only thing that matters to me is the truth. If, as is quite apparent from the article, multiple people have admitted to lying about him and making accusations without any real evidence, then there is clearly a big problem here. If I'm going to dislike Zak it's going to be for reasons that are true and not reasons that are false. He certainly doesn't sound like a winner, but I'm not going to let you tell me to just take everything said about him at face value just because.

The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community

Dr Clio Belle Weisman

From the article: Having just escaped the world of incel culture I was not much interested in the kind of people that write shitty messages on Twitter because a new Star Wars character is black. At first glance that kind of harasser seemed both relatively well-understood by my field and boring. I was more interested in those who, at least on paper, were like the people around me every day and who were what the industry claimed to want to be — creative artists, writers, progressives, feminists, LGBTQ+ folk. I know why right-wingers want to hurt diverse groups of creative people, I do not have a handle on why diverse groups of creative people hurt each other. And I desperately wanted to. This article really needs to get more traction than it is.

Oh I wondered if you'd heard about the gaming clusterfuck! Note to my followers: Don't be put off by the opinions in this paragraph -- the article gets into the nitty-gritty of other people being horrible, and in one major harasser's case it shows the author switching from Believing The Woman to siding with the accused because of this case's mountain of evidence. It's like the reverse of those people who have all the right opinions on paper then are total scumbags on the personal level -- the performative male feminist etc.

I hadn't heard about this particular cluster (fuck, of people, B) previously, yet the frame is so familiar as to be almost dull: person with clout and a little integrity others wish to unthrone, cluster B ex, and at last there is a casus belli

Like I said elsewhere in the chain...I am familiar with this particular cluster, and this article is absolutely not to be trusted.

Why not, specifically?

I'll quote my other reblog:

I've never been entirely sure how much to believe against Zak. His long history of sock-puppeting, brigade-calling, and forum-thread-ruining is not controversial, I've seen him do that stuff with my own two eyes. And so have thousands of others.

But the more serious accusations often boiled down to he-said-she-said. And since he's such an asshole, plenty of people had motive to lie about him. So when people said (for example) that they got harassing emails on accounts that they only ever used to email Mike Mearls about Zak being a terrible human being, I wasn't completely sure I could believe it.

If you have your own doubts about this or that allegation, fair enough. Just know that you can't trust this article.

Also, ask yourself how much time and mental energy you want to spend untangling the Zak Lore. His general toxicity is completely uncontroversial and much of the really bad stuff has been found true in court. Given that, is it really worth the effort required to figure out which of the middleweight accusations was fair?

To be very honest, now I'm a lot more suspicious of your motivations than the article's, since that entire last paragraph is you trying to manipulate me into giving up on figuring out what is true or not because you personally think Zak Smith is a big internet meanie.

Considering all relevant interview clips are archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJAJNbF2Tg&list=PPSV

It's hard for me to "not trust" things that people involved in the situation said about the situation, with their own mouths and words, even if the presentation of one court case (out of evidently 3 total he's won so far and another that's been appealed back and forth) was dubious.

The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community

Dr Clio Belle Weisman

From the article: Having just escaped the world of incel culture I was not much interested in the kind of people that write shitty messages on Twitter because a new Star Wars character is black. At first glance that kind of harasser seemed both relatively well-understood by my field and boring. I was more interested in those who, at least on paper, were like the people around me every day and who were what the industry claimed to want to be — creative artists, writers, progressives, feminists, LGBTQ+ folk. I know why right-wingers want to hurt diverse groups of creative people, I do not have a handle on why diverse groups of creative people hurt each other. And I desperately wanted to. This article really needs to get more traction than it is.

Oh I wondered if you'd heard about the gaming clusterfuck! Note to my followers: Don't be put off by the opinions in this paragraph -- the article gets into the nitty-gritty of other people being horrible, and in one major harasser's case it shows the author switching from Believing The Woman to siding with the accused because of this case's mountain of evidence. It's like the reverse of those people who have all the right opinions on paper then are total scumbags on the personal level -- the performative male feminist etc.

I hadn't heard about this particular cluster (fuck, of people, B) previously, yet the frame is so familiar as to be almost dull: person with clout and a little integrity others wish to unthrone, cluster B ex, and at last there is a casus belli

Like I said elsewhere in the chain...I am familiar with this particular cluster, and this article is absolutely not to be trusted.

Why not, specifically?

HEY DISCORD USERS!!

unfortunately, discord continues to be the Worst Messaging Company Of All Time with its updates, and this time, its one that is not only a privacy violation, not only enabled by default, but ROLLED OUT SILENTLY, MEANING YOU MUST KNOW IT EXISTS TO TURN IT OFF.

i am talking about "clips", an exciting new feature /s that allows people to record you in voice chat without your knowledge or consent! Wow!

fortunately, you can turn this off, but its kinda shitty how they didnt tell you this existed at all, yeah?

settings > clips> the button should be clicked to turn it off

(note that it should be ON by default, you will have to click the button to turn it off)

thanks, discord, for Telling Us This Violating Setting Exists In An Update And Making Sure It Is Off By Default. /s.

reblogs are appreciated to spread the word.

how is it violating when the service which already records and transmits your voice data for other people to hear, allows other people to record the voice data it transmits to them? it's literally the function of the program.

I mean, it's not like people couldn't record voice chats externally before this was rolled out, given the ample supply of youtube videos of people in Discord chats reacting to things that have existed for years before this happened. The only real difference this makes is that it's marginally more convenient to do it now, and even that's debatable since you can just turn it off as the post describes.

@generallemarc

Reblog money luffy in the next 20 seconds or you’ll be broke for life

thinking about this scene again

reblogging this from myself because im ONCE AGAIN on a yugioh kick, and also because, this fucking post has been in my notifications for over a year, every day!!

Nyeh!

Is this the real thing or abridged?

Though the dialogue sounds like the abridge, not even LittleKuriboh can do a Joey voice like that. This is all-natural 4Kids dialogue.

If you're American and 19 million doesn't seem like a lot to you, the entire population of canada is only 38 million, so basically half of Canada would have long covid.

Honestly the CDC has been wildly wrong this entire pandemic in part because it has been putting forth extremely conservative models of risk as it's a political institution, not a science-based one, and it has to justify the regime's forced exposure/forced work mandates after dropping all COVID precautions at the behest of businesses & fascist propagandists. So if they say 19 million people with Long COVID (i'm one of them), which is almost 6% of the US population, you can be assured it's significantly higher. Long COVID is likely to be 10-30% of all people who get COVID, no matter how mild or even asymptomatic. Doctors aren't looking for, treating, or diagnosing it, either because most of them do not keep up with the COVID scientific literature. Every "wave" we get tens of millions of people infected with COVID & since immune resistance to COVID lasts about a month before most people can be reinfected, people are gettin infected roughly 3 times a year. I haven't seen credible reports of anyone living past ten or so infections but most previously "very healthy" people (recent former athletes) start dropping dead between infections 4 and 6, in large part because they refuse to rest and admit they're disabled permanently by long COVID. So they try to exercise the damage away (impossible) and die as a result. Many wind up couch or bed bound (like me). We can't afford to see doctors, or the doctors we can see don't take us seriously and chalk it up to anxiety and depression despite having alarming signs of various kinds of systemic damage. Long COVID is a catastrophe continually unfolding & killing people. It still may well kill me. It has absolutely shortened my lifespan by years, possibly decades. We won't get the full truth of the ruin of COVID until we either riot and work together to demand an end to COVID & the capitalist, fascist systems and leaders demanding its spread or in decades when it may finally peter out and people begin to look back at the wreckage. The victims of the 1918 flu who survived and were disabled were those who were blamed by WW2 era fascists & were marked for extermination. COVID is exterminating us disabled as is but for those who do manage to survive the pandemic, I am absolutely sure we face more active measures of extermination by the eugenicists whose policies created more disabled people to purge. Refusing to recognize the depth and breadth of long COVID is intentional & genocidal. We're meant to die in the dark, alone, unsupported, while the rest of y'all plod on and accept whatever lies the CDC is peddling because of regime political requirements of the moment. We went through this with HIV/AIDS and Fauci was in charge of stewarding public perception that AIDS was only a threat to a certain demographic, just as he has with COVID. Because people left us disabled behind to die, the fascists are now preparing to exterminate us queers. Show solidarity with those suffering long COVID, give us your money & time, and listen to us when we say y'all have to center COVID safety if you want to effectively organize resistance to eugenics or else you are complicit in eugenics. No one is coming to save us. we're years, likely decades, from common & affordable & accessible treatments to long COVID because it is very similar to ME/CFS, caused most often by a viral infection, and that has been deprecated for decades for the same reasons as long COVID is by doctors. So if you want to avoid long covid, or keep it from getting worse, always wear a mask in public & rest as much as possible for at least six months after getting COVID. Long COVID is a living death but ableism has made it all the worse for isolating us & ensuring we cannot get any supplies or medical care or socialization we as humans need.

Ah, okay, so just to be on the same page, we're not listening to the experts anymore?

They did a CT scan on a fish

The reason the Forgotten Realms is the most boring Dungeons & Dragons setting has very little to do with its inspirations and a whole lot to do with being fundamentally ill-matched to the circumstances of its publication. The Realms are basically a pastiche of every esoterically horny romantic fantasy setting that every B-list Mercedes Lackey wannabe ever came up with, except to keep it corporate friendly they had to take out all the femdom and dragon-fucking, and that's just not an environment in which the material can thrive. Fans keep talking about how to "save" the Forgotten Realms, but frankly, at this point the only thing that's going to save it is taking it away from Hasbro and giving it to some microscopic indie studio whose lead writer got banned from TikTok for discussing their werewolf mommy kink a little too sincerely.

"Well, ACTUALLY" yes, I'm aware that published Forgotten Realms material had greater freedom to let its freak flag fly in the 1980s and 1990s. That was two decades, three editions, and two corporate buyouts ago; circumstances were different then. Hasbro's santitised version of the Realms is the only one that most people who've gotten into the game in the last twenty years have ever seen – that's not something you can fix by giving folks a hard time for being unacquainted with material that's been out of print since 1990.

Besides, we should always be wary of nostalgia; there's plenty of stuff in the original flavour Forgotten Realms that's best left buried. We don't need to roll back the clock to 1987 horny: we need a Forgotten Realms that's 2023 horny.

Wait, do drow no longer have a matriarchy enforced by hot spider-goddess priestesses with snake-whips? And if so, how the fridge did they retcon the books about the most popular character in the setting?

Oh God it's past midnight remind me to fucking morrow and I'll complain in an explanatory manner and/or explain in a complanatory manner because it's so annoyingly dumb

Can Prokopetz do anything without including whiny sanctimonious moralizing about "NOSTALGIA BAD" and "NERDS BAD" and "EVERYTHING BAD" so on and so on?

the way disco elysium drags centrism hits different

You know, I'm starting to think Disco Elysium fans aren't really in it for the engaging gameplay or riveting storylines.

✨ The Metamorphosis of Eel ✨

@presiding-over-nothing I know you love eels!

The eel life cycle really does seem unnecessarily complicated XD

> It’s nonsensical to speak about preserving the freedom of a psychotic person! A psychotic person cannot be free because psychosis obliterates true freedom through the imposition of delusion and hallucination. […] This destroys every argument about personal freedom and choice, permanently and totally.

This is like a passage ripped from a monologue from the fascist villain of some dystopian horror story. “There is no need to preserve the freedom of the [neologistic slur for fictional underclass demographic], bc in their debasement they have no freedom to preserve in the first place.” Aristotle holding forth on the fitting position of natural slaves isn’t this blunt.

I don’t really it’s dignified to respond to this sort of statement. Once you’ve blinded yourself this totally to the natural human desire not to writhe in restless agony or lose your power of abstract thought or be restricted to life in a cage imo you’ve more or less outed yourself as an enemy of all ppl of good will; “he shows a corrupt mind.” All that’s fitting is to point and mock

It’s worth noting that Freddie De Boer is schizophrenic

He’s not saying “we need to cage up Those People” he’s saying “I would like it if I was put in cage & not let out till I’ve taken my meds, should I stop taking my meds”. 

Personally, I disagree with him, but he’s not making the argument that you’re acting like he’s making.

what? yes he is, he’s simply applying it to everyone including himself

No, it’s clearly different.

“I have experienced this. From experience, psychosis takes away all the good things that being involuntarily committed takes away, and then some. Therefore, involuntary commitment is an improvement.” is a completely reasonable argument. Not fascist, not blind, not corrupt.

If you think he’s wrong, find other medicated psychotics to survey, and determine whether this is a common view of psychosis.

Because if he’s right about the experience, he’s right about the conclusion.

Well, he is by his own admission psychotic and therefore cannot be trusted to evaluate his circumstances or experiences rationally. Given that as a psychotic individual he is taking to the public square to incite acts of extrajudicial imprisonment and violence, he should probably be forcibly prevented from accessing the internet or speaking his mind

This is not an incursion on his freedom. He already has no freedom on which to incur

I mean, presumably the assumption is that he is not currently experiencing psychosis due to treatment/medication/what-have-you, and thus that reasoning does not apply, because it’s only actually having psychotic episodes that causes the problems and not just that you’ve had psychotic episodes at all. I mean, come on.

A lot of pop social justice writing exhibits this weird combination of like, extremely aggressive tone combined with a bunch of anxious self-effacing caveats. Like someone scrunching up their face abd placing it 2in from urs to tell you they realise their understanding of the issue is inevitably infected by their own privileged biases.