The one poster / event that sticks out in my memory is the umkay debacle. (I may have slelled their name wrong). That was a bizzare trainwreck.
Wasn’t she the one with locked in syndrome that turned out to be fake, or someone claimed she died or some combination of those?
That reminds me of gabriela, who, IIRC, was a medical examiner that posted rather detailed medical examiner stuff. I recall her once, because of a thread here, measuring the inside dimensions of a eye socket. But she turned out to (possibly?) be a fake.
Most appropriate use of misspelling seen yet today. Congrats
My recollection is that they posted as umkay, someone with lock-in syndrome, with a Pulitzer-worthy “overcoming adversity” story that warmed the hearts of everyone on the board. Then some time passed and another poster named notokay or something like that came along to announce that umkay had died. Everyone was sad, much lamenting ensued. The board organized flowers and donations to some charity or another and was well on its way to actually getting those donations in hand when the whole scam was revealed. I don’t remember how it was revealed but it was a true train wreck.
To paraphrase (probably – can’t find the exact quote) the Perfect Master: when I butcher the language, it’s art. ::bows::
umkay was partially paralyzed, I thought? Blinky was locked-in (and genuine).
Blinkie (note the spelling) indeed was genuine. The Straight Dope’s online magazine, teemings, was being published at the time, and he told his story in it. Every fact in it could be checked against media stories about his accident, so he was proven to be the real deal. His death was likewise reported by the media as a news item–not just a standard death notice in the classifieds.
Nice guy, and a good contributor on a number of topics (unlike umkay who only wanted to talk about her disability), though it must have been difficult for him.
I looked back. She posted to the death announcement thread to say that notokay wasn’t her brother and she had no idea who it was. I do see that notokay is suspended but umkay isn’t, FWIW.
I thought there was more to it than that, but I’m almost certainly conflating umkay and blinkie. Though I thought there was a lot of questions WRT how umkay was posting replies so quickly and for some reason something about her explanation of a helper and/or speech-to-text software didn’t add up, but like I said, I fairly certain blinkie’s story is blended together in my head with umkay.
We had a quadriplegic who was a prolific poster who called foul on umkay’s posts and style. It was fascinating to watch as it unraveled.
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Looking through these, I’ve twice muttered “That’s a great line…”, only to notice that the smartypants was Younger Me.
About twenty years ago, references to the obscene acts denoted “squicking” and “felching” were much commoner than today. (I guess such references would still be rather common, in the British sense, even nowadays, come to think of it.)
I also miss Sampiro and his epic ”Mother, behold your daughter! Daughter, behold your mother! And both of you LOSE MY NUMBER!” thread. It contained such masterpieces as Hacksaw: the Musical; The Great Mr. Potato Head Bible Beatdown, and some truly moving gems.
Also, the classic bedtime tales of Rue_de_Day.