Are we certain this isn’t a Weekend at Bernie’s situation?

OR ELSE!

Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you’d have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you’re either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren’t.

Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can’t tell if they’re available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about “proper” etiquette. It’s probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don’t mean much.

I do this to my mom as a way to be very low-contact with her. It’s a huge relief.

I used to love texting when it was only a handful of friends but these days I hate the pressure of it being ever-present in my pocket and the social expectation to answer in a relatively timely manner. (This has led me to being a horrible texter, sorry everyone.)

I miss the old days of AOL instant messenger. Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.

It’s definitely just me, but I think every event like this is just for consumers that don’t know any better.

You’re against performing arts/live shows and think people who enjoy them are suckers? That truly is a wild take.

L-O-fucking L. You can’t make this shit up, it’s so stupid.

Zootopia. No idea how I know that.

But he said he never heard of it!!!

For real, that’s phrasing is so ridiculous as to be hilarious if we weren’t staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Yeah, and she was a full-fledged adult in her 30s onward to these things, not like a 4-year-old who wasn’t aware of what was going on around them.

That was the sentence that made me double check the source to make sure it wasn’t satire… The nerve of this fucking guy!

Yes, it also leads to people like me feeling like they need to go down a rabbit hole for 5 hours before they’re “allowed” to ask. Then, upon finally asking, they come to find out the answer was quick and simple and they could have saved many hours.

This is such a problem for me. Hot damn do I envy people who don’t let the fear of seeming stupid keep them from just asking the damn question.

I saw one quote praising his “deep sense of empathy” and claiming he had a “clear passion for improving access to care” …lol. I took a screenshot because of just how absurd that is. I mean, I expected plenty empty talk about what a great guy he is, but COME ON. At least try to make it sound grounded in reality.

This is a complicated topic for me. I’m 35 so my experience is obviously different than today, but I self-harmed from age 12 into my 20s. Finding community and understanding in self-harm & mental illness-focused communities was transformative for me, especially in my younger teens. Many days/months/years this community felt like the only reason I was still hanging on.

Obviously I am not in favor of the “encouragement” of self-harm, but I also wonder how much nuance is applied when categorizing content as such. For example, is someone who posts about how badly they want to self-harm “encouraging” this? Or are they just seeking support? Idk. I have no answers. I just think about how even bleaker my teens would have felt had I not found my pockets of community on the early internet. On the other hand, sometimes I do wonder if we subconsciously egged each other on. Perhaps the trajectory of my mental health journey would have been different had I not found them. That’s not something I can ever be sure about, but I think given my home life and all the things I was going through already, if anything, my mental illness might have just manifested itself in a different way, like through substance abuse issues or an eating disorder or something. (And to be clear, I was hurting myself before I found the community, so it might have just been business as usual.) Like I said, I don’t have any answers, it just feels more nuanced to me, as someone who has lived some version of this.

It was being auctioned for the victims but there was also the real risk that a supporter would win who would let him he continue on business as usual. So definitely money well spent.

One thing the headlines aren’t mentioning is that the families actually even helped fund a portion of the Onion’s bid.

In order to make the bid work, a lawyer representing the families told CNN that the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.