Just sitting here with a couple of meatball sandwiches wondering what it is I am going to write about. Hopefully today's post will not be quite as useless as yesterday, but I guess we will learn more as we move along.
On one hand, I can't sit here and say things are significantly better than the last time I wrote. The passage of time does help with some things, with others I am not so sure. The things where it helps a bit are things some people around these parts know something about, the things where it doesn't are things that I can't talk about here, at least not yet. And to be honest I hope they work themselves out in such a manner that I am never talking about them here.
For those things I can talk about, well let's just say there have been issues recently. Newbies to the page be warned, we are taking a trip in the Wayback machine, sans Peabody and Sherman. But many moons ago I wrote a blog entry (like I haven't done that a few times in the past) and for what I am going to talk about here you need to only focus on the first paragraph (http://mattpritt.multiply.com/journal/item/935/Summer_of_Suck). The reason I took you back there is that it was brought to my attention recently that the subject of that first paragraph actually didn't exist at all. I learned of this little bit of information only after learning recently that another person on my friends list also didn't exist. Rather they were elaborate ruses of significant complexity created by a person or persons for some unknown purpose. We aren't talking Nigerian email scam purposes here, nobody ever asked me for cash or credit card information in order to claim a non existent inheritance, so in that regard it was a no harm, no foul thing. But harm isn't simply measured in dollars or property, and while I wasn't the only one to fall victim to these elaborate hoaxes, I find that when I come back here now I am much more pensive, wondering just how much beyond this page is real at all. Perhaps nothing, maybe everything, I just don't know.
By the same token, there very well could be people who are looking at my page right now wondering the very same thing. And while I could stand here, stomping my feet, yelling to the heavens “I am real”, I can easily understand how that could still be questioned, because I am asking those questions myself when I come in here now and start reading posts. How much of this is real or believeable? How much of it is just made up for someone's own personal amusement? It makes coming in here and trying to enjoy writing and blogging more challenging than it needs to be.
Wow, and I said this wasn't going to be as bad as yesterday. It may be worse. Note to self, write the blog entry first before getting all disclaimer happy. So I won't get too far ahead of myself and say tomorrow's entry promises to be better, I have about as much chance of being correct as the weatherman has of getting the forecast right. Instead I will just say that tomorrow's blogging forecast looks to be mostly positive with a 20% chance of suck. That is as good as I can do at this point.
No that's not correct. This is just an assumption that is being made. Sure I will accept they are natural assumptions to make given the circumstances because whoever is responsible hasn't had the decency to explain their actions.
ReplyDeleteI personally find the assumptions as upsetting as the deception :(
No I get it. Yes, there was a person writing it, therefore these were the thoughts of an individual but the life and death of this person never happened. The real person continued on. The only death was of peoples trust of the actual person.
ReplyDeleteThat being said I have been involved with a discussion of a similar nature on someone else's page. It revolves around people who do not use a recent picture of themselves and wondering who they really are. Because this is online and most don't have actual contact with those they speak to there is a question of identity. Always in the past in our lives we have spoken to someone face to face. We accept people for who they are. But online gives people the opportunity to be someone they aren't. They can be prettier, thinner, even the sex they want to be rather then the gender they were born as.
I don't think you gave yourself enough credit on this blog because it is thought provoking. I am me. I have no problems showing my face around here. There are a bunch of people on Multiply who know me in person. There are some on my page I talk to in person every day and meet up with at a restaurant or something regularly. At the same time I ended up deleting someone because I couldn't stand her deception anymore. She weighed over 380 pounds yet was constantly talking about laying out in a string bikini. She even showed pictures of a string bikini on her bed. I tried to help her and got her to go hiking and change her diet and she lost 80 pounds. Still at 300 she continued the string bikini chat on her page. Guys thought she was hot. When we would go hiking she threatened me and told me I was not allowed to post pictures of her. Yet every time we went hiking she would get a really not glorious picture of me. I think my least favorite was a close up of my ASS as I was climbing up a bank and I was wearing a yellow rain coat. It looked like my ass was a size 26! Goodyear could have been printed across it. She thought it was funny. I worked on losing 10 pounds and working on my ass at the gym.
Funny I believe you are you and I know I am me. I never even questioned that one and still say one of these times I'm out in your area I'm driving a little farther west to meet you for dinner somewhere. I have no problem with people seeing me in person...ok not a close up of my ass when we get together for dinner. For that matter people here have seen pictures of me in a bikini, my naked breasts, and various other body parts. I don't think there is much doubt on me.
What's the assumption being made here? The fact is, someone claiming to be 'Rachel' fabricated the life of, not just themselves, but of a young woman called Donna, a guy called Dave, and two children ... and then they all die. How much more f**ked up as a person can you get?
ReplyDeleteI think I am borrowing from your blog. While you didn't think it was impressive I think it addresses an online community thing that is important.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough, I am making an assumption based on the evidence at hand, that being that since I was made aware of this situation apparently a dead person has come back from the grave to shut their page down. So I am left with two options, either the person behind that page isn't dead or the dead walk among us. I have to go with the more reasonable of the two explanations for sanity's sake.
ReplyDeleteI haven't made any assumption as to why someone would do such a thing, because at the end of the day for me the motive is irrelevant. Motive is the first step down the path towards justification, so it is a path I opt to rarely travel. At the end of the day I don't care why it was done, as a joke, a creative writing exercise, their mommy and daddy didn't love them enough, etc. Whatever the reason, it is just a bunch of b s that isn't going to change my opinion one way or the other.
Well, I did warn you before that I have wrote enough on this page that I have probably talked about lots of things at least once. This isn't even the first time I talked about this type of thing, though the previous time there wasn't the emotional investment that there was here. That particular time I was just talking to someone, hoping to get to know them and instead all I got were a bunch of pictures, which all turned out to be lifted from elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteWow. It makes me wonder how many people are not themselves here. That thought freaks me out more then a bit. I'm not perfect. I'm no where near perfect but I am 100% myself.
ReplyDeleteThe other time was on yahoo chat, where if you don't go in with at least a decent amount of skepticity then I can't help you. This was a little different in that it involved multiple profiles and/or personas on more than one social media platform. It was quite good in its elaborateness. But there was no endgame, no real reason to do it to begin with that I am aware of. I was only tagentially connected to the profiles, I had talked with "them" on multiple occasions and would have considered at least one of them a friend if they were actual people (as evidenced by my Summer of Suck blog), but I doubt anyone was laying awake at night wondering how they would pull the wool over my eyes in the matter, I just happened to be there as it were.
ReplyDeleteI knew someone who did the Yahoo chat thing and honestly what she was doing scared the shit out of me. She was in some of the BDSM chat rooms. I was at her house a couple times while she was online and talk about a parade of human freak show. I never did the yahoo chat thing myself. I saw what she was into and backed away. The closest I came was to a Y360 page and then I didn't have a lot of people as friends.
ReplyDeleteMy blog actually started on 360, but if it involves yahoo it usually means they will fuck it up somehow. I ended up here after being forced to find a new blogging home and que sera, sera. but yahoo chat anymore is about 75% porn bots and 20% fakes. So I wasn't surprised to find that tyhe photos I was sent there were of the lifted variety.
ReplyDeleteI still have my yahoo email address but that is it. But gee if you think that was fucked up I guess you haven't been to facebook yet today. I want to congratulate them on pissing everyone off and making it so that no one knows where anything has gone. Oh and done it with no notice!
ReplyDeleteI have been to Facebook and already sent a complaint (not that it will mean much) regarding the inane way they switched the newsfeed from that of a chronological format to basically a popularity contest.
ReplyDeletewell I can tell you that I had a password to that person's page, so it's quite reasonable that it was also given to someone(s) else.
ReplyDeleteI didn't delete btw, in case you were wondering
Granted someone else could have had the password, but then they shut it down the same time Rachel's page also disappears? If the page still being up was a problem they had better than a year to shut it down, yet chose this particular moment in time. It becomes one of those "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck" moments
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have thought you did. I know Lee still stopped by that page from time to time, I imagine you did as well (as did I for those who wish to know) even though we all knew that page wasn't going to ever have anything new on it. In that regard it was like visiting an online cemetery, except now I am led to believe it wasn't.
ReplyDelete