Wednesday's Most Active Threads

I woke up this morning feeling really good, sort of had an extra spring in my step, and thought to myself, "I'm going to kill it today". Then I sat down at my computer, pulled up the list of yesterday's most active threads and there, right at the top, was a thread about Meghan Markle. More specifically, a thread titled, "Meghan Markle Pink Short Suit at Lakers Game" and posted in the "Beauty and Fashion" forum. So, this is why I got out of bed this morning? To write about Meghan's clothes? What is there to say? Meghan wore a suit. It was pink. She was at a basketball game and the suit got wrinkled. She also rolled up her sleeves. Apparently having wrinkled clothes and rolled up sleeves are major fashion faux pas (I say as I look at my wrinkled shirt and rolled up sleeves). I know nothing of fashion, but my intuition suggests that Washington, DC is not on the cutting edge of fashion trends. Similarly, I suspect that Los Angeles is light years ahead of us. So, when posters started complaining that Meghan's outfit was out-of-date and more fitting for the 90s, I remembered the one rule of fashion that I ever learned. "Keep your old clothes because they will eventually be in fashion again". Sure enough, it turns out that our future is going to look a lot like Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman". Surprisingly, this thread stayed pretty much on topic. Only toward the end did it start to diverge into the sort of Royal Family in-fighting that characterizes most of these threads. Of course, Meghan and her outfit had both their fans and their detractors. To her credit, the original poster was definitely a fan. But, other than the wrinkles and rolled-up sleeves, most of what posters thought was wrong with the outfit turned out to have been choices made by the designer. Perhaps Meghan didn't wear it well, but she wore it correctly. Given the number of posters insisting that the suit represents the current style, I suspect that a year from now DC will be filled with women dressed in colorful boxy shorts with blazers draped over them like a towel hanging from a bed post. There will be one group that will conspicuously stand out by not adhering to the trend: the Meghan haters for whom the look as been forever ruined.

The next most active thread was posted in the "Off-Topic" forum and titled, "Recurring characters of DCUM, as written by a DCUM veteran". A common genre of posts on DCUM involves threads that reminisce about past DCUM topics. This thread is another of that variety. Initially, I thought these threads were sort of fun, but year after year of the same stories being repeated makes me feel like DCUM has been taken over by everyone's grandfathers. The strange thing about this thread is that I've only heard of one of the posters described by the original poster and I am not even that familiar with that one. So, while the original poster may not win any awards for originality as far as the topic goes, she at least managed to find fairly obscure subjects to discuss. Most of the posts continue sort of in that vein, not really describing the "DCUM All-Stars", but really minor characters that probably have only stood out to the person posting about them. Some of those responding couldn't even be bothered to list a specific poster but simply described an entire class of people (e.g. posters who do x or y). Because much of my efforts on the website are devoted to combatting trolls, my list of recurring characters involves them. At the top of the list is the so-called "Famous Troll" who posts about Ikea and Russian music and a host of other topics. She will be thrilled to be mentioned here because she likes being "famous". Next is the poster I've dubbed the "Del Ray Troll" who apparently has a history of being banned from forums and rotates between posting racist missives often employing the "n-word", complaining about Alexandria schools, and discussing real estate and home improvement. He keeps predicting that I will be sued for removing his posts. Another poster to whom I refer to as the "Anxiety Poster" because the poster is constantly worried about having just potentially contracted a possibly deadly condition is only marginally a troll. This is the sort of poster who stubs his toe, is certain that it will require amputation, goes to a doctor and comes back worried about gangrene, and starts planing his funeral. But three days later he is back to normal. I wouldn't care about this poster except that he is fixated on crime or any other transgression committed by Black people. He is absolutely obsessed with posting about the most obscure crimes committed by anyone who is Black. He doesn't appear to have any interest in crimes committed by White people, however. One other bizarre poster, who was actually mentioned in this thread, is the parent/student at Columbia University or other Ivy League school who either hates school or has not lived up to her parent's expectations depending on the viewpoint from which the story is being told. On a fairly regular basis, this poster is either threatening suicide or the withdrawal of financial support for the child's college, again, depending on the guise in which the poster is writing.

The next most active thread was the one about MCPS students wearing the shirts of colleges at which they were admitted that was included in yesterday's blog post. While that's obviously a topic of immense importance, I'll skip it for today. The next two threads were tied, so I'll start with one titled, "Friend issue, help me speak up" and posted in the "Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)" forum. The original poster describes having made friends with another mom back when their now 11-year-old sons were in preschool. In addition to the two moms becoming friends, the boys became best friends, and their husbands became friends. Some time ago, the friend and her husband separated and then the friend ended her friendship with the original poster. In addition, according to the original poster's telling, the other parent manipulated a conflict between their sons which ended their friendship. The original poster's son is upset that he lost his friend, a situation complicated by the fact that they see each other at an activity in which they both participate. The original poster asks for advice about what she can say to the other parent. She was originally hurt, but is now angry. Almost universally, the advice from those who respond is to let it go and that nothing good would come from a confrontation. But, as often is the case on DCUM, posters go beyond the original topic which, again, was simply advice about what to say to the other parent. Posters could not restrain themselves from analyzing who was to blame for the other parent ending their friendship. Some guessed that the original poster had sided with the husband in his separation from her friend. The original poster insisted that was not the case, but did confide that the other mother was furious that the original poster's husband had continued to get together with the other father and the original poster had not told her friend about it. This opened a whole can of worms with some posters insisting that the original poster was clearly to blame for the friendship ending. The rest of the thread is mostly just a debate about whether or not the original poster did anything wrong. I'm sure the original poster regrets starting this thread which has probably made her feel worse than she did to begin with.

Tied with the last thread in terms of activity was a thread posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum titled, "Universities Ranked By Earnings Data: CS Graduates". The original poster lists data provided by the Department of Education to place universities into three categories based on the earnings of graduates from the schools' computer science programs. The three categories represent only the upper echelon of earnings. Most of the top schools are the ususal suspects that posters in the forum would expect to see there. In some cases, posters were surprised that a college was in an unexpected category. Several posters nitpicked the data which they believe to have some shortcomings due to what it represents. For instance, the data only involves information about students who received federal financial aid. There is some speculation that leaving out students who didn't receive such assistance may have negatively impacted the data's usefulness. Threads such as this always attract posters who insist that the quality of a university is mostly immaterial and demand that everyone read "Dale and Kruger". Such a poster responds in this thread and advises that everyone ignore this data. As such, most of the discussion in this thread is devoted to arguing over the quality of the data as well as the validity of Dale and Kruger's findings. Several posters take the opportunity to bring up schools they think are either over or under rated and compare them to this list. Many posters dispute the findings or downplay their importance.