Jill, even though I’ve been here for many years, I don’t believe we have ever interacted before, but your recent postings since Katherine (Opal) passed have caused me concern.
From my readings, it’s like you’re champing at the bit to kick the boots into Opal. Now you might claim that’s not your intention, but it certainly comes across that way. I have no idea of the history between you and Opal, it might be bitter and sordid and that’s fine, but surely there’s a time and a place?
As we all know, things like memorials and funerals etc are for the living, not the dead. What Opal would or wouldn’t have wanted is totally irrelevant. What’s important is that we acknowledge her life (however crazy it was), her contributions to the amazing SDMB community (however crazy they were) and the fact that many here loved her IRL. Family members are reading these threads now, and I for one would like them to feel that Opal (Katherine) left her mark. Which she did.
You’ve got another agenda happening by the sounds of it. How about making a cup of tea (or pour a glass of quaff) and come back in a week after you’ve cooled down a bit.
'Cos at the moment you seem to be making a bit of a dick of yourself to be perfectly honest.
Eh, I don’t have much use for overly saccharine public mourning either, and tend to find threads like the current one rather eye-rolling.
But obviously lots of other people find that kind of thing helpful, not just in memorium threads but IRL funeral services. It would be pretty dickish of me to barge in and tell them they’re all mourning wrong, and I’ll show them how it’s done even if they’ve asked me to take it somewhere else. If it helps people get over a loss, more power to them.
If you find a more “warts-and-all” story telling more helpful, its easy to start your own thread. Indeed, Nzinga already started one. Its hardly “censorship” to ask you to put your comments in a different thread on the same message board.
Wow, thanks! I’m glad you are around to keep the board appraised of these important things. And here I was thinking that Opalcat was her real name! Silly me!
OpalCat is dead. OpalCat was Katherine. You may see a distinction but there isn’t one. The posters posting “shit shit shit” are expressing genuine emotion. Your posts are expressing the smugness of an internet bully who doesn’t care. Leave it alone, walk away and grow up. The thread isn’t about you.
Now you’re being silly. I think there’s a pretty large excluded middle between Hallmark Card banality and wanting to enumerate all of Opal’s faults and failings yet again, don’t you? And for most people that consists of remembering and reminiscing about the things they liked about her. Yeah, there were many things people didn’t like about Opal, but now isn’t the time to bring them up again. If you want to dig up her bones to throw stones at them under the guise of “keeping it real”, go start a Pit thread. Seriously, would you behave like this at a real life service, interrupting to demand a few more weeds to go alongside with the wreaths? Show a little more class and be quiet.
I think snark is out of place in such threads. I didn’t see anything particularly snarky with what Jill said. Have none of you been to a wake? It’s not all rending of garments. There is a lot of “She hated wakes she would have hated to be here” or “She would be the first one to be telling jokes next to the coffin.” I find that a lot more genuine than all the me too comments.
Memorials, real life or virtual, aren’t the time and place to twist the knife. It’s just basic human decency.
No matter what you might think of someone, when you dump on them in a memorial thread, you’re not hurting the subject of your snark. You’re hurting the others that choose to remember the positive things. There’s a good analogy; when you add a cup of water to a barrel of wine, the result is a barrel of wine. When you add a cup of sewage to a barrel of wine, the result is sewage.
There’s already many painfully long threads on the SDMB centered around the previous gaffes of Katherine. Those threads will probably be part of the SDMB for as long as it remains online, just like the memorial thread.
[[You’ve got another agenda happening by the sounds of it.]]
I don’t do other agendas. I can’t believe, from these responses, that any of you read my original post. Somehow - with your own agendas - you read “snarkiness” and a lot of other negativity into it. By the missreading, overreacting and/or responding based on other reactions, you’ve only turned it into something snarky and sordid.
Memorializing people is complex, and memorializing someone who was very complex is even more so. OpalCat had some serious problems and even when she was doing well, some posters found her frustrating to deal with. All of that contributes to the collective memory of her years her. Like JillGat says, OpalCat shared a great deal of herself online in a bunch of venues. But whether JillGat was being deliberately snarky or not, there’s an appropriate time and place and way to discuss the things she was bringing up. The memorial thread isn’t it.
Oh shoot, my earlier post was sent and it wouldn’t let me edit it to add more adjectives. So please accept this final masterpiece and I will be on my way!
[[You’ve got another agenda happening by the sounds of it.]]
I don’t do other agendas. I can’t believe, from these responses, that any of you read my original post in context. Somehow - with your own agendas - you’ve really blown this out of proportion. By the missreading, or just reacting to other posters’ comments, you actually have turned this into something snarky and sordid.
I have no ill feelings about OpalCat, but now I do about many of you. I think most of these posts are moronic and histrionic.
I wanted to be sure to get that in before any of you pass away and then it will be considered too snarky, out of place, disrespectful, lacking decorum, dickish, jerkish, smug, trolling, inhuman, ill becoming, deficient, offensive, sarcastic, bullying, shit talking (x7), agenda-ridden or bad behavior to say about you. (these are just the things said about me in this thread. Go to the others for more!). You drama queens need to put down your thesauruses and back slowly away.
Sure, you can blame everyone else. Or you can think, “Wow, I must be coming across very differently from how I mean to come across,” and reflect on that.
Or, y’know, you can do that.
Edit: on preview:
Is it too early to award the “Ironic post of the year” award?
Thanks for everything you said, kambuckta, but especially this reminder. I’ve been trying to keep up with and parse my responses to the now 3 threads OpalCat’s death has inspired…and this has made me realize I don’t have to hang out here to defend her or try to engage with JillGat or others who seem to be intent to make this all about themselves. Opal was judged very publicly and harassed when she was alive; of course her memorial thread wouldn’t be any different. The SDMB might be how I met her, but it certainly shouldn’t encapsulate how I remember her or be where I come to grieve her.
Serious problems? Frustrating? Flawed? The funny thing is that several of the posters, as above, managed to add negatives digs at Opal (which I never did and didn’t intend to) before going on to describe me:
Snarky (x 7), out of place, disrespectful, lacking decorum, dickish, jerkish, smug, trolling, insensitive, inhuman, ill becoming, deficient, offensive, sarcastic, bullying, condemnatory, shit talking (x3), threadshitting, agenda-ridden, bad behavior, indecent, twisting the knife, deliberately hurtful, bitter, sordid, sewage, champing at the bit to kick the boots into Opal, dig up her bones to throw stones at them under the guise of “keeping it real”, dumping on her, painful, wry, pirana pools of snark, not a member of the human race, chumming the waters.
This is all just from this thread. I have to admit now the “collector” side of me wants to fill in all the adjectives and analogies from the other threads, too. This is too much of a piece of work to let go.
It’s true that she had problems and that people were sometimes frustrated by her, and I did not intend either comment as a dig. I’m not sure where “flawed” came from, but we’re all flawed. On the other hand your comment about suicide sounded a lot like a potshot even if that is not what you intended. That’s the main issue here. If you didn’t intend to say something bad about OpalCat, you should know that it sounded negative and opened the door for criticisms that felt unseemly in a thread announcing the death of a longtime Doper. The mods were right to try to shut that down, as they did with a couple of other notes earlier in the thread. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there are some other threads where people are sharing different types of memories and you could probably participate in those.
Wow. I do believe the OP protesteth too much. I’ve never seen anyone so up in arms about not being able to “grieve” (because, it’s not about being snarky < insert 50 word essay with lots of synonyms and other assorted verbiage >, dontcha know?) the way they want to when someone else has FREAKING DIED. Just another Doper chiming in to say (amidst the very real probability that my favorable [or none at all] reputation has been harmed) that when everything looks like a nail…
I remember you as normally pretty level-headed Jill, so I hope you won’t be pissed if I say I think you should maybe step back and take another look at this without the frustration. When you posted I honestly couldn’t tell if you were snarking or not and I’ve been here a long, long time. It could have been a wry, wistful comment on Opal’s openness and love of spectacle or it could have been a mean little dig.
Obviously many/most folks took it as a mean little dig and I don’t think you should be getting your back up quite so much about that. Because IMHO little digs are in bad taste in a memorial thread and probably should be moderated. A simple “I never intended anything negative by my comment, sorry about the confusion” would have sufficed. All this drama, ironic or not, is kinda unnecessary from my POV.