There are Two Loren Colemans Options

[FrankTrollman]

So Loren Coleman contacted me with a request that I think is pretty reasonable. So I'm passing it on to the dumpshock community. The fact is, there are two people who are in the public eye to one degree or another who are named Loren Coleman. And neither one of them likes it when they are mistaken for the other. This got touched on in the original thread directly, but nearly two thousand posts later and some sub thread lockages, this statement is hard to find. So here we go:

The ongoing discussion about Loren Coleman, who is amongst the slightly less than ten owners of InMediaRes LLC (due to some shady ownership transfer documents, it's not clear that anyone knows exactly how many owners IMR has), is in all cases the person we are talking about on this board and during the ongoing scandal involving Catalyst Game Labs (an imprint of IMR) and their refusal to pay contracted royalties and wages to creditor companies and their employees. He has been writing licensed fiction since 1997, and his wikipedia entry lists him as Loren L. Coleman.

This in no way refers to the Cryptozoologist named Loren Coleman. There has been some confusion about this, in no way helped by the fact that the Loren Coleman we are talking about in this ongoing scandal is listed in his bio at Fantastic Fiction as having contributed to a book entitled "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters," while the cryptozoologist Loren Coleman appears to be the person who actually wrote that book. The cryptozoologist was born in 1947 and studies zoology and anthropology, and does investigations into rare creatures and urban legends. He is, completely irrelevant to the ongoing travails of Shadowrun, Battletech, Cthulhutech, and Eclipse Phase. The cryptozoologist from Virginia at no point voluntarily withheld royalty payments to WildFire LLC, Posthuman Studios, or Topps Inc., nor did he ever have any such royalty payments to make. He did not voluntarily decline to write checks to his employees in contravention of their contracts, nor does he have freelance employees whom he is required to pay. He did not take unscheduled cash withdrawals from a company in which he is only part owner, nor did he sell the same portions of a company he was part owner in to more than one person and pocket the difference.

Indeed, if anyone from here is sending nasty grams to Loren Coleman, the cryptozoologist from Virginia over this unfolding crisis, they need to stop doing that. Because he is a different person. The cryptozoologist lives in Portland, Maine. The man at the center of a web of corruption inside Catalyst Game Labs lives in Washington State. The cryptozoologist used to do anthropology at Brandeis, the guy who took investment money to start Holostreets and then never authorized payment to a programmer to make that happen was in the United States Navy. They are, and always have been, completely different people.

-Frank