Satine Phoenix and Jamison Stone

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chuckdee

chuckdee

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Shamelessly pulled from another post and I couldn't be futzed to file off the serial numbers:

A lot has been happening of late, revolving around Satine Phoenix and Jamison Stone. I have no knowledge of the truth or otherwise, I am just reporting on the stories that are running rampant on the internet.

It started with Tweets about "gaslighting", bad treatment and paying contributors late.



Backed up by: https://twitter.com/thepatedwards/status/1534594849411850240...

Which resulted in https://twitter.com/miss_jess03/status/1534572319687180293?s...

Jamison Stone has now resigned as CEO of Apotheosis Studios: https://www.tenkarstavern.com/2022/06/jamison-stone-has-resi...

Yesterday a lawsuit came into the light:

and the whole thing has been summed up with direct links here: https://www.studlystone.com/

They seem to be going the whole "It was all Jamison's fault", which is an interesting strategy considering the fact that most of the following is Satine's.

One bit which I found quite amazing:

“You are clearly young and inexperienced. I am educating you. Education can be painful when you let your ego get in the way. Be happy I am not punishing you for your lack of experience or charging you for my education--my rates are much higher than yours.”
 
Brock Savage said:
Can anyone provide a TLDR for those of us too busy or lazy to deep dive into the material right now?
Click to expand...
Small fish in a small pond became bigish fish in a small pond that grew to a large pond but still not a lake. That immense power went to some heads and they behaved badly.
You could ignore the whole thing if you don't do streaming and your life won't be impacted. Not that it doesn't have life lessons or include bad behaviour but I suspect at this point in most of our lives we've seen it before and know it shouldn't happen


How's that for a summary?
 
Brock Savage said:
Can anyone provide a TLDR for those of us too busy or lazy to deep dive into the material right now?
Click to expand...
Satine and Jamison have been acting like knobheads and think they're some kind of elfgame celebrity.

They're shit employers and coworkers and allegedly have ripped people off money.

Jameson thinks he's some kind of new age guru so you should suck his cock.

How the fuck is Jamison a real name? It's a surname, surely.
 
I backed a couple of the products from Apotheosis Studios and they are really well done. These two are the faces, but one writer said that one of them wasn't even involved when they started, and the others influence was negative to say the least.
 
Black Leaf said:
Also, for all Jamison's "I am a nerd who LIFTS" branding I've seen photos and I reckon I could take him.
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I could also take him... to a bed and breakfast! YouKnowWhatI'mSayingYouKnowWhatImSaying!
I keed I keed!
Not that there is anything wrong with that!
... Oh life in 2022 is so complicated...
 
Neon said:
I could also take him... to a bed and breakfast! YouKnowWhatI'mSayingYouKnowWhatImSaying!
I keed I keed!
Not that there is anything wrong with that!
... Oh life in 2022 is so complicated...
Click to expand...
I believe that Jamison shares a similar view to Peep Show Mark:

""She's got the magical combo of beauty and low self-esteem!""

Peep Show.png

Apparently Satine also thinks that telling people they should get plastic surgery is suitable dinner conversation. I get the impression that while they are bad people, their malignity is more than matched by their utter stupidity.

They had a cunning masterplan to blame it all on Jamison, because Satine's brand is a lot bigger than his. So they posted it to their discord, where it was near instantly leaked. We are not dealing with Ozymandias here. We're not even dealing with Squirrel Girl.
 
chuckdee said:
I backed a couple of the products from Apotheosis Studios and they are really well done. These two are the faces, but one writer said that one of them wasn't even involved when they started, and the others influence was negative to say the least.
Click to expand...
Such is the way with these things. The "big" people make mistakes and the little people pay.
 
Ah, the ugly duckling syndrome!

As for the rest, I have no idea who either of these people are. I remember seeing her interview someone a long time ago for some dnd product, but that's where my knowledge of them ends.

I'm pretty much turned off by our culture's obsession with celebrity (both entertainment and sport) and tribalism so I actively tune all that out. With the exception of occassionally hopping on a thread to make a d!ck joke.

Simple things amuse simple minds, they say.... Whatever that means.
 
I had no idea who the hell these people were, and now I'm glad for that.

Honestly, when I saw the thread title, I assumed they were porn stars or something based on the names.
 
Black Leaf said:
""She's got the magical combo of beauty and low self-esteem!""
Click to expand...
And though got her start on Zak S's latter production "I Hit It With My Axe", it's predecessor that she was on at times, Playing D&D with Pornstars, shows her cause célèbre. Geeks and porn are a big cross-section.
 
Dyrnwyn said:
Honestly, when I saw the thread title, I assumed they were porn stars or something based on the names.
Click to expand...
See my cross-posted response - you're not off in your estimation...
 
Somewhere I saw them refer to themselves as “community leaders” and I am baffled as to what the hell that even means.
 
I knew a "community leader" when I was growing up; they did stuff like try and get kids into work and off drugs. I have no idea what it would involve in this context.
 
Rob Necronomicon said:
Given the fact that she's a self-proclaimed 'community leader' and wants to give back to the community, she only charges you $200 to sit at her table.

How noble of her.

No gods. No masters.
Click to expand...
I'll let you play wargames with me for a mere $100.
 
Brock Savage said:
Can anyone provide a TLDR for those of us too busy or lazy to deep dive into the material right now?
Click to expand...

I had no idea who these people were until two days ago, but apparently Time magazine called Satine "The Queen of D&D" (because, fuck you Penny Williams I guess...). She's a former porn star who got into D&D via Zak S (Spider-sense starting to buzz), then worked with James Desborough until she started getting popular as a livestreamer/cosplayer and disavowed him (Spider-sense tingling), then positioned herself as a "Hobby Influencer" (her words). Jamison Stone, Zak S look-alike and the Tom Arnold to Satine's Rosanne first got into hot water when a tattoo artist took to Twitter to publish an email exchange where he was berated by Stone after being hired for a gig for not submitting a professional contract.

Despite being the icebreaker of this controversy, it's kind of a nothing-complaint. Stone was a bit rude, but the guy complainig was obviously to blame and it all would've been a nothingburger IMO, but this was enough to incite many more people to suddenly come forward with horror stories of dealing with Stone and Satine and the last few days have been a rabbithole of the awfulness of dealing with two narcissistic pricks.

Most of the complaints revolve around how they treat freelancers who work for them - as in, not paying them on time or for the agreed upon amount. Apparently, they offer to pay "by the word" but only after final edit, meaning Stone goes in and edits out any parts he doen't like, and changes the wording, and any word he takes out or changes, they don't pay for. Bullshit like that.

Then there was the story of the group that hired the pair to promote their stuff at a con and they acted like total prima-donna Hollywood celebs, demanding the people who hired them act like their lackeys, and instead of promoting their stuff like they were hired to do, spent the entire con on self-promotion while insulting their hosts and making stupid demands like "we won't wear these official shirts with your company' logo that we agreed to wear because they aren't black and sleeveless, a random condition we told no one about before" etc.

Then the really creepy stuff about Stone started coming out, like him trying to start a cult, trying to play self-help guru, and, of course, propositioning women sexually during business meetings and then insulting them after any sort of rejection. Typical predator stuff.

So basically, two folks that anyone could take a glance at and think "oh, those look like douchebags" turn out to, in fact, be douchebags.

So far, the backlash has caused Stone to step down a CEO from their company, Apotheosis (if you've never heard of them that's because they've never done anything), which is meaningless as he still is the majority owner of the corportion, and Satine published an online general apology with the promise of more specific apologies to come. The pair are being sued, and have generally been "cancelled", with many stepping forward to say they won't work with them again, and TBP getting their usual 5 Minutes of Hate in.

The thing is, I don't know why we are discussing them here, as they've never contributed anything to the hobby, except an (as yet) unfulfilled D&D 5hit edition KS project that is pretty much all freelancer contributions. They aren't creators, they don't make games, they don't actually play games, they just show up at cons and do livestream rehearsed RPGS in the style of Critical Role. I mean, even if none of the other stuff came forward, I would have dimissed them as parasites on the hobby, jumping onto a fad to try and get their 5 minutes.
 
Black Leaf said:
I'll let you play wargames with me for a mere $100.
Click to expand...
You laugh but paying to play certain sorts of wargames makes more sense to me than people who pay RPG GMs (and that seems to be a growing Thing).

Seriously, if someone had a cool Gettysburg layout with a bunch of already built and painted units, and sculpted terrain on par with my own limited skills or better, I'd at least consider paying to play a game with that stuff and some buddies. It almost certainly would be vastly less expensive and time-consuming than organizing the same people to start a whole new period in perhaps a whole new scale (and then most of my people aren't minis hobbyists anyway, so there's that aspect too...).
 
My favourite part is when Jamison Stone takes the cute freelancer out into the woods for a "business picnic" and asks if they want to "explore each other's bodies". This is the D&D I remember! This is the first edition shit! Guisarme-Voulge!
 
DeadBob said:
You laugh but paying to play certain sorts of wargames makes more sense to me than people who pay RPG GMs (and that seems to be a growing Thing).

Seriously, if someone had a cool Gettysburg layout with a bunch of already built and painted units, and sculpted terrain on par with my own limited skills or better, I'd at least consider paying to play a game with that stuff and some buddies. It almost certainly would be vastly less expensive and time-consuming than organizing the same people to start a whole new period in perhaps a whole new scale (and then most of my people aren't minis hobbyists anyway, so there's that aspect too...).
Click to expand...
That’s basically what I do when I go to HMGS conventions, pay other people to play with their cool wargame minis.
 
TristramEvans said:
The thing is, I don't know why we are discussing them here, as they've never contributed anything to the hobby, except an (as yet) unfulfilled D&D 5hit edition KS project that is pretty much all freelancer contributions. They aren't creators, they don't make games, they don't actually play games, they just show up at cons and do livestream rehearsed RPGS in the style of Critical Role. I mean, even if none of the other stuff came forward, I would have dimissed them a parasites on the hobby, jumping onto a fad to try and get their 5 minutes.
Click to expand...
this is the only reason i hopped in here. they've done nothing for the hobby, they aren't making a game. this is gaming "celebrity" gossip. I'd hope we are better than this.
 
Realistically I think celebrity GMs and streamers are part of the modern hobby, whether we like it or not. (And I do think "ripped off freelancers" in particular is the kind of thing that needs airing).
 
DeadBob said:
You laugh but paying to play certain sorts of wargames makes more sense to me than people who pay RPG GMs (and that seems to be a growing Thing).
Click to expand...
Sure, I'd happily pay some screen monkey to run a game for my friends and I to our exact specifications.
 
Rob Necronomicon said:
That's a bargain compared with our illustrious community leader. ;)
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Absolutely.... As a freelancer, I know exactly what it's like to be ripped off. So yeah, it definitely needs to be said. That's why I always ask for 50% upfront nowadays. Because if they decide not to pay you at least you've got something for your time.
 
Rob Necronomicon said:
Absolutely.... As a freelancer, I know exactly what it's like to be ripped off. So yeah, it definitely needs to be said. That's why I always ask for 50% upfront nowadays. Because if they decide not to pay you at least you've got something for your time.
Click to expand...
As someone who's done commercial copywriting I'm always utterly horrified by the fact the RPG industry are still paying by word.
 
It is what it is, but unfortunately what it is is a deep dive into the weirdness that our hobby has become since the 5e explosion and the nu-internet happened. It's worthy of discussion, even if that discussion is a) Don't join D&D cults and b) Don't pay $200 for a one-shot when I can offer the same service for $199.99.
 
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