Content Warning: Pre-coffee navel gazing.
A couple of interesting posts this past week on the subject of James,
Grognardia and Dwimmermount and how much a reputation can take before it is trashed beyond repair.
The posts are here and you can read them at your leisure if you haven't already.
Let's use Gorgonlilk's term and say this is the post Grognardia era. What does that mean (whether true or not, or descriptive or not) to the OSR blog reader in general?
Well. We certainly have lost a voice, a cheerleader as it were.
And he was very vocal.
Here is something I found interesting, The
daily visits to Grognardia are still about 1000 a day. Not too shabby for a site that has not been updated since November really (and one post in December).
Many people came to his site and then found the rest of this corner of the internet, but now I feel that many are going to his site only out of morbid curiosity.
On one hand really, he is only late on a project. If that were a crime then 80% of the gaming industry would be guilty of that. On the other hand though he is on the line for nearly $50k, no communication and no paid free-lancers. Which is some cases could be a crime. While I have seen people and companies come back from worse PR problems, it hasn't been very many.
In those cases there is a lot of goodwill usually between the person/company and the community. I think that the goodwill is being burned up here.
I don't know. What do you all think? Can James still pull himself out of the abyss and comeback?
Is there an OSR Oprah he can go to, sound contrite and get forgiveness?
