We plan to throw the families a few more thoughts and prayers, and for a nice touch add some good marble. We don’t have to do the marble, it’s expensive, but we’ll do it anyway because we’re Good Christians. And after that I don’t want to hear another goddamned word out of the families, got it?
The woman who is now running for mayor in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, was featured prominently in a Washington Post article a couple months ago regarding lack of police accountability and what the families are trying to do about it. She’s already done far more personally than any of the Republicans involved up the political chain. If she wins, Uvalde will be better for it.
Well worth the read but intense, so be forewarned.
Caring for a family member is an incredibly hard, immersive, 24/7 experience (as you know) but then when they die suddenly and with no warning, emotionally it’s like going from the fires of hell into a barren snowy tundra with ZERO transition: one second it’s everything all the time, and then nothing at all.
If your entire world feels surreal right now, that’s absolutely normal. And I totally understand how going through all that just to have your hand plunged into bodily fluids that are also death related would just be waaaaaay too fucking much for your brain to handle.
And it is, but only for now. You will adapt, and faster than you think.
But there’s a way you can help the process. In the meantime, whenever that thought comes up (and it will, as you know) I’d like you to try a two part experiment.
The first part is to visually push it farther and farther away from you. Don’t try to stop it or push it out altogether; that gives it more power. But what you CAN do is change it and make it more emotionally neutral. Right now you’re remembering as though it is happening now, today, which is part of the pain, but you can change that part of it too. So when the visual comes up, as soon as you remember that it is a memory, visualize it farther away from yourself, as though you are watching yourself discover the bag from across the room. Don’t try to stop it, just change the point from where you are looking at it in your mind’s eye. You can also try framing it externally, as though you were watching it on a television screen, or from outside a window looking in. But whatever way works for you, place the visual away from yourself.
The second part is to match it at the same time with a thought that brings you some relief, like reminding yourself that he’s not tormented anymore, or knowing that you honorably completed your filial duty, or knowing that your care allowed him to pass at home in his own bed instead of in an institution, or recognizing that it was your privilege to be the first one to care for his body when he passed and to have the honor of cleaning his last mess, for all the times you were a kid and he lovingly cleaned yours (if he did).
Obviously I’m just guessing here, but you get the idea. I’m throwing these ideas out because they are what would occur to me (I’m proud of you for all of them!) but they might not work for you. Either way, you get the gist. So you pick something that has meaning to YOU, something that elevates this memory from the place where the paramedics left it under the bed and allows your brain to incorporate it into the loving relationship you had with him. Pick such a thought now, so it’s ready for you when you need it.
So the next time you remember this ugly scene, visually place it across the room, watching yourself discover the bag from a distance, and use that moment to also remember who you are to him, what you were to each other, and how that experience of finding the bag, though unpleasant, was also a deeply loving act on your part, a task that you discharged honorably and with dignity even though you didn’t ask for it, and how it means that now you can both rest easy.
Do this every time you remember, for as long as the memory is upsetting. The power of it should fade rapidly, along with the deep unpleasantness of it.
Give it a shot, it should help. If you ever need to chat hit my DMs; I’ve been there. In the meantime I’m wishing you peace.
You’re quite welcome. Expect it to feel surreal and foggy for a while, though it should begin to get a bit better in a week or so as your brain slowly adapts to the New Normal. Those intrusive memories of the bag are just your brain looking for resolution to what was a compound trauma; by rearranging the memory AND linking it with a resolving cognition, you don’t change or undo it, you just give your brain something with which to say oh, okay, guess I can file that now. “Hack” is exactly the right word.
You woke up to find your life just as completely cratered as if it had been hit by a meteor, so don’t expect a quick return to normalcy. It’s going to feel very surreal and “not right” for a while, though that too will lessen each day. You already know from your grandmother, but it will come in waves. All you can do is ride them out with as much self-care and self-kindness as you can muster.
Just take it day by day, speak kindly to yourself, don’t make big decisions, and let the days and hours fill themselves with normal living. It WILL be normal, soon enough. And you WILL be fine, in time.
But right now your brain is still staring blankly at that crater going WTF??? so be understanding of your own needs.
Thank you for letting me know it helped. Someday you’ll be telling someone else how to walk this path yourself. I wish you all the best.
There are three main good faith issues with respect to the API changes.
Hardly. First, there is zero good faith, and the proof is all around you. Whether you choose to be a sealion about it or not, like with the transcripts of Christian Selig’s interactions with Steve Huffman, the January promise to 3PA devs that API status would remain unchanged, the “landed gentry” cracks, the killing of the antispam bots and other moderator tools that were built outside Reddit because Reddit never would, the open lies to and about mods and subs participating in the protests, the shitty and inadequate kludged-together “mod tools” Reddit has shat out over the last three weeks with nothing but promises to replace the rest, and ALLLLLLL the broken promises not just over the years, but over the last month, the proof of zero good faith is all around you . . . and exists in countless iterations and interactions that Reddit can no longer control. But here you are, trying just the same.
And those zero-faith situations, forgetting everything else and speaking solely in regard to the API defrauding of 3rd part app devs, FAR outnumber this arbitrary “three” you pulled out of your ass. Why you even bothered, I have no idea.
Someone else brought up the Rif profitsharing that Spez put an end to several years ago which flatly puts the lie to your claim about ads, but another big one, the one that was the decider for me personally, that you didn’t even touch was how the exorbitant API pricing affected the disabled and visually impaired users of Reddit, not just the blind but anyone needing assistive technology or the help of the Transcribers of Reddit, etc, and how to this day none of the YEARS of empty promises of accessibility have ever been fulfilled by Reddit, Inc or its board.
Many of us know what goes into a site that is actually committed to accessibility. Reddit doesn’t even come close. I don’t want anything to do with a company or a community that “otherizes” its less mainstream users, or makes life even harder for those who need a little more help than average to do well. But don’t take my word for it. Take theirs:
the kind of people who fondly remember when Reddit hosted racist groups
Reddit, and /u/spez, have actively embraced and protected everything from r/jailbait to r/fatpeoplehate to r/coontown to r/T_D. Are you forgetting which sub Spez was editing comments in back in 2016, and why? It was T_D, and he was there as an active participant. If Reddit was ever a “roach motel,” it was because admin failed to act on the COUNTLESS times hate and bad actors were called to their attention, and still does to this day. It is not only extremely disingenuous, but outright insulting, that you would throw out that shredded rag of lies as another “good faith issue” when the truth is that historically, across the board, Reddit has done absolutely nothing to stop hate and illegal acts (like CSAM) UNTIL it was called out in the media, and that is their practice even now. Why does anyone need to remember anything? No need, it’s all STILL there, and will never not be there until Reddit gets called out on it . . . again.
“Three main good faith issues,” ha. Dude, you moderate 39 subs. I’ve read a number of your posts on the moderator subs spouting known and provable falsehoods about the recent actions of Reddit, you’ve made it easy for anyone wanting to check the veracity of that statement by using the same username on both sites, and to be absolutely, brutally blunt about this: even if there were in some alternate universe a “good faith” argument to be made on behalf of the recent words and actions of Reddit, Inc. you are not the one to make it.
crisis krī′sĭsnoun A crucial or decisive point or situation, especially a difficult or unstable situation involving an impending change.
Interesting choice of words there. It’s a crisis because Reddit fraudulently and deliberately made it one, and destroyed a lot of people’s work created over a lot of years in doing so. Not just devs and their employees, but good mods and most importantly, users.
Every single dishonest point you raise is something addressed during a working relationship, not after. And since when is Reddit legally responsible for what any third party has done with its access to the data from the very beginning (clue: it’s not).
3PA devs tried to work with Reddit, were led to believe the relationship was satisfactory, and then had it all pulled out from under them with less than 30 days notice.
There are so many untruths in your reply it’s not worth bothering with; it’s a list of squirrels. “Squirrel!”
Yeah, no. And of course, you didn’t touch on any of the real issues, at all, not even to lie about them, so thank you for that tacit acknowledgement anyway.
In short, “where’s the fettucine?”
Gone. Enjoy your fake MDAUs and your spambots.
I get accused of being a “Powermod” because I do a lot of grunt moderation work on a lot of large, active subreddits – and network with a lot of other moderators who are accused of being “powermods”. Most of what I do is “serious” about moderation, and I’m considered the “knurd” of the group.
LOL. I had a look over in r/ModSupport where you spend a good bit of your time. Among the sea of new scabs who don’t know how to sticky a comment, some real gems popped up:
If you like. But I’m not the one chasing after those who left Reddit with a pack of lies and an agenda to sell; I’m just one of those looking at it, and you, in the rearview.
Which is to point out that you are here, in an “ex-pat” Lemmy community dedicated to the subject of Reddit, spouting provable falsehoods to those who have already left Reddit as though it makes any difference at all. Reddit is in its death throes and I’m not coming back.
Project all you like, but I didn’t come to Reddit to falsely defend Lemmy to you. The reality of Reddit’s actions speaks for itself. And at this point in my life, living in my shoes is a privilege and an honor. I rest easy. Have a nice day.
“Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks…But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.”
Create the communities you want to see here and treat them as completely separate entities, with their own userbase, content, etc. You’ll be the only one posting at first, but if there’s interest it’ll catch on.
You’ve already gone above and beyond by inviting the Reddit mods, and I admire your sense of ethics, but no need to sweat further. In the end, ethically speaking, mods don’t “own” a community, much less the intellectual concept behind a given community; they just start it hoping others will join up. So you’re stealing nothing by creating your own elsewhere. That’s what Lemmy is about, anyway. And if those mods or sub participants ever decide to leave Reddit and they don’t like what you’re doing, any one of them can create their own instance and start again just like you did.
Again, I massively respect your conscience in this. I feel like I’ve seen a unicorn in the wild, lol. But you’re good. Go forth and create the communities you want to see.
I want to be a mod because I just fucking love bootlicking. Can’t get enough of that sweet sweet leather. I don’t have any mod experience, but I once smeared my own shit on the wall of a bathroom in a truck stop in kentucky, if that helps.
People are downvoting you but that actually happened a few years ago in 2009 when State Farm wanted to pull out of Florida after the state refused their proposed rate hike: among other disincentives, Florida said uh uh, you don’t get to pull out of homeowners and still sell auto insurance. It worked, State Farm stayed.
I’m surprised I’m not hearing this talked about more because locally it was huge at the time. I no longer live in Florida but the back and forth between insurers and the state has been going on since Hurricane Andrew.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee moved forward a bill called the Cooper Davis Act that would make tech companies report users suspected of criminal drug activity to the DEA....
I guess it’s self explanatory but I keep seeing all this stuff about how everyone is moving from Reddit to lemmy and I’m wondering if anyone knows if that’s really what’s happening. If you have numbers that’s even better....
Would you happen to know of a good step-by-step guide on how to create a new community?
There’s a niche sub on Reddit I have not seen yet here and I would not mind having a go at recreating it, I’m just having a hard time figuring out what the steps are because the information is in different places. So if anyone can point me in the right direction I’d truly appreciate it.
As an aside and since you’re here, I’d like to mention how you nailed it with how you foresaw, prepared, and executed your sub move to Lemmy while admin weaselly went about their weak plays in your direction, forever making noises about wanting it shut down and then frantically backpedaling and changing course every few days when you finally did.
Watching them was like watching a hooked flounder flip about in the bottom of your boat as you continued to sail the high seas. Absolute masterclass in strategy.
Haven’t read your blog post yet, but knowing what you’ve already done tells me it’s likely to be a good read.
Mother of Uvalde victim runs for mayor in special election approved by the city (abcnews.go.com)
Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives? (www.pcmag.com)
A writeup in PCMag!
My dad just died a few minutes ago, and the paramedics left a mess hidden under his bed.
My father just died in his sleep. He had passed by the time the paramedics arrived....
STOP saying “fuck u/spez” START saying “FIRE STEVE HUFFMAN”
“fuck u/spez” means absolutely nothing to anyone who isn’t familiar with Reddit, it’s just noise....
I noticed that the nice messages for spez in other languages doesnt get censored, so i have an idea
What if we start insulting spez in other languages, for example, “spez gonorrea hijueputa” instead of just “fuck spez”
No apologies as Reddit halfheartedly tries to repair ties with moderators (arstechnica.com)
“Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks…But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.”
The /r/ShittyLifeProTips moderation team has been destroyed. Reddit admins publicly solicit the community for replacements. (www.reddit.com)
For those that don’t want to go to reddit: i.imgur.com/1Rk2FqQ.jpeg...
Woman suing Texas over abortion ban vomits on the stand in emotional reaction during dramatic hearing (www.nbcnews.com)
Three plaintiffs testified about the trauma they experienced carrying nonviable pregnancies.
AAA pulls back from offering insurance in Florida, following Farmers (www.cbsnews.com)
More insurance companies are fleeing the state because of the growing threat from natural disasters.
U.S. Legislators Vote Forward Bill That Would Turn Tech Platforms Into DEA Narcs (gizmodo.com)
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee moved forward a bill called the Cooper Davis Act that would make tech companies report users suspected of criminal drug activity to the DEA....
Twitter now blocking all DMs from non-Twitter Blue subscribers by default (mashable.com)
Is it really a mass exodus? And is it really a mass exodus to lemmy?
I guess it’s self explanatory but I keep seeing all this stuff about how everyone is moving from Reddit to lemmy and I’m wondering if anyone knows if that’s really what’s happening. If you have numbers that’s even better....
Meta will kill small instances! Please read.
I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight....