A little more information from someone who worked there for a long time.

whoof.....that stings

I'd been wanting to go to MAG for years...it's like the one convention close enough to me to be worth it and relevant to my interests with lots of regular guests I'd've loved to meet

never got the chance.

Welp.

YIKES.

anyone else getting major MikeZ vibes here

Dunno anything about MikeZ, but it reminds me a lot of The Gathering (a Gargoyles Convention) last years when it was taken over by two people who apparently ran it to the ground and ignored all the complaints about themselves

oh hmmmm, this was a con that was in my periphery (i've always been a katsucon person who couldnt afford both and mag fell through) but this is... a Lot

that's basically what MikeZ did to Lab Zero

when the rest of the studio tried to confront him about being a sleazeball he brushed them off, so they all quit en masse

oh man... i heard nothing but good things about MAGfest, so this is really depressing

dukevendetta: god I can only imagine. Tell your friends I am rooting for them

a response... this situation has been brought up as an example to discuss in a "how do you handle things like this?" way in some con runner circles. Some people are openly discussing their policies, which is good, and some claiming to be employed by MAG have asked for discussions to stop, which feels counterproductive to me.

I'm offering the link merely as a point of information... nothing more. Personally, abusive boards are bad and the letters in the response link sound very "we're gonna take our toys and go home... good luck playing your game without us..."

I know people who love MAGfest and this is gonna hurt the community... it's a shame this is happening and that people felt so blocked by management that they had to drag this out publicly.

When the board gets like this at a con, it's a bad thing.

I read through a bunch of the gDrive letters and also the response Santa gundam posted and I cannot for the life of me tell what actually happened

But it sounds rough, and it's sad that the con wont continue on as it has been

(also in the Response they use the phrase Moral Authority a couple of times and - again, having no idea what is even happening or who is on what "side" - that makes me incredibly leery)

washbear: why does "moral authority" make you leery?

I mean that as a genuine question

LMFAO! After the stuff I heard about this con, i'm not surprised.

and it'll continue to slog forward, because ~magfest woo!~ and people will continue to go.

it's a convention that gets talked about quite a bit among Katsu staff, namely because every time they have something happen, they flip it around and point fingers at us as if WE somehow did whatever it was that occurred.

KabochaKitsune: oh, mostly it puts me in mind of the comics code authority

Or any media-grading entity that's rating things based on morality (aka, none of them gays or women having agency and such)

Like I'm not saying that's how it's being used here, just that's my immediate association with anybody who tries to declare a moral authority

ffft

i will say that you KNOW something sinister is going down when NDAs are being pressured on people

that's a fair kneejerk to have, but it does read to me like they're using the dictionary definition of trustworthiness to make moral/good decisions

i.e. the board lost any cred they may have had to be trusted to make good, good-faith decisions, by way of being reprehensible

(I say that as paraphrase of the doc, not as an opinion with any authority or firsthand knowledge myself)

Yeah that makes sense. I have None experience with anybody actually involved so I don't at all know how they write

the phrase "restorative justice" sounds off to me, too... like, anything with the word "justice" in it to me sounds like swift and harsh punishment lately, sometimes without a full picture behind what's going on... I'm a little wary of that, too

yeah, like... I don't have a horse in this race because I'm not a MAGfest person, but there's a lot of really emotional language flying around and it makes things more confusing

Yeah. I've never been. I have a lot of friends who go and who've tried to get me to go, but I'm not really a party con person.

"Restorative justice" is the ideal of repairing harm caused by crime, i.e. if you steal $350 from someone, restorative justice is you paying them back the $350

There's a lot of debate, mostly among progressive organizations, about how to apply that to less literal harm like emotional damage

What it sounds like in this context is "instead of firing the shitheads we tried to get them to fix the problems they caused and then shockingly they did not do any such thing."

makes sense then

thank you

yeah restorative justice is a pre-existing term for exactly the opposite of swift and harsh punishment it's like 'well you did something wrong? sounds like it is time for you to make it up to whoever you hurt!' and it's actually really interesting to look into and study (first nations communities use it a lot) but

...coming from incarcerated people, restorative justice is a joke when the one who committed the act has no desire to acknowledge nor make amends, so seeking it is a lost cause.

because you can't force a person to feel that they did something wrong when they themselves refuse to believe that they have.

and it's not that they think their actions were right but they believe their actions to have been Justified so therefore what they did was not in fact a crime or did not cause the damage that the victim believes it did

MAGFest Update — Super Magfest An update on the situation (a good one)!

oh wow

good!!

there is hope!

ceo still sitting it seems?