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Top Comments: Stranger Than Fiction [1]

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Date: 2023-01-18  

Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

As with Daily Kos, there are online writers’ communities where people interact and form friendships, but don’t necessarily ever meet in person. In 2020, members of online writing group The Ward were shocked to hear of the death of romance writer Susan Meachen. On her Facebook page, someone who identified herself as Meachen’s daughter said that Meachen had been driven to suicide by online bullying. At her “daughter’s” encouragement, people bought Meachen’s most recent book. Her friends helped edit two of her books for posthumous publication. Other writers who’d known her memorialized her in a story collection with an anti-bullying message, and held a fundraising auction to help her family with funeral costs. Meachen also had a sideline designing book covers, and clients who inquired about covers they’d paid for were told off by the “daughter.”

Then things got really weird.

On January 3, an online post, purportedly from Meachen, revealed that she was alive. “Let the fun begin!” Her explanation for faking her death was vague: “My family was in a bad place and did what they thought was best for me.” With some digging, the other members of The Ward identified an account that they now believe she used as a sockpuppet during the time she was “dead.” It appears she also had a TikTok under her real name, and posted to it during the same period.

From there, things get murky. Upstream Reviews published an interview with someone claiming to be Meachen, in which she dismissed the idea of returning the money donated for her “funeral.” She went on to claim that people expressing outrage at her deception are in essence wishing she really had died (and therefore “bullying”). The interview provoked understandable anger. But then Upstream Reviews was contacted by someone else claiming to be Meachen, who said the person they’d interviewed wasn’t her. Unable to determine who was telling the truth, they deleted the interview section from their article.

Now, interviewed along with her husband, they’re saying she survived a suicide attempt, and her husband claims he was the one who decided on the faked-death story because he thought the online drama was endangering her fragile mental health. Which still doesn’t explain why they would have used the story about being “driven to suicide because of bullying,” which led to guilt and accusations among the other community members.

I’m not sure if this is really a story about mental illness, or if it’s all a grift. But I’m pretty sure I know what the plot of her next book will be.

On to Top Comments!

From inkstainedwretch:

Captain Frogbert had had this comment on OK Dodo's diary "Large anti-tank rifle found in luggage at San Antonio International Airport." My occasional remarks about ammosexuals have a heavier usage of swear words.

Top mojo, courtesy of mik:

Picture quilt, created by jotter, brought back by elfling & the help desk:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/1/18/2146214/-Top-Comments-Stranger-Than-Fiction

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