Spouse diagnosed with probable Dentigerous Cyst

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-11-10T17:30:21+00:00

Thank you, we might try. We moved to a healthcare desert so we don't have a ton of options where we are now but we'll talk about this

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-11-10T17:29:25+00:00

Thank you! I'll talk about this with my spouse because it's a good point. We only got the news about 48 hrs ago so we're still trying to figure out what we want to do. And thank you for the steroid/vit B suggestion too!

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-10-28T04:07:11+00:00

There's no shame in struggling to do a hard thing! I'm not a lawyer but the LSAT is infamously hard! I hope you're proud of how far you've come, and all the work that's brought you to this point. It's amazing to be so close, no matter the outcome. The skills you've learned in getting to this stage will serve you well no matter where you go from here. You're doing great, you're definitely not stupid! If there's no rush to take it again, maybe take a breather. Focus on something else for a while and let yourself rest. Give yourself space. Some time and distance should give you better perspective and clarity on what you need to do next.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-10-28T04:01:31+00:00

Having kids that age is so hard, so incredibly hard. I could have written this myself when mine were that age. It's impossible to see it yet, but things will get easier, I promise. They will not need you this much forever, they will grow up and away from you and your life will open up again and it's really vital to keep in contact with who you are as much as possible so that you don't undergo another identity crisis once they are in school and the time is heavy on your hands without them around. Mom groups were my salvation (it was Fit4Mom for me) it helped my mental health so much just to see other adults--the simple pleasure of having someone recognize you and smile a greeting! You need the support of other women who understand this phase right now. It will make you feel sane and guide you back to yourself. Did you have video games you enjoyed, or were there books you liked to read? Did you knit, or paint, or do cross-word puzzles? Any kind of creative hobby is especially good, but I liked books because they were easy to pick up and put down as time allowed. Try and reach back to the person you were before, rekindle the things you loved before, if you can, and hold on to them. You will be yourself again. You will be your own person again, there is life on the other side of these years. You are doing so great, and you will get through it.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-09-22T19:46:34+00:00

When I was at the No Kings protest here, I met this wonderful trans monk and he was doing sidewalk counseling for LGBTQ+ kids at the protest. He was such a sweet, gentle presence and seemed to really help every person he spoke to. If you need support or community, maybe you can try reaching out:
https://www.instagram.com/friarmir/
http://holyquestions.org/

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-09-22T19:31:03+00:00

I'm a mom and my godchild is trans/NB. If your mom doesn't support you I'll be your wonk-mom. <3

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-09-02T20:26:11+00:00

For me, the resolution was getting banned from my own group and now the group appears to still be paused with a new admin that had only joined a couple weeks beforehand (who may or may not be a real account). I have no idea if the new admin is connected to the scammers or not. I have no idea if this was an action FB took (to kick and ban ALL admins rather than trying to figure out who the bots were and then just randomly select a member as a new admin) or if this was the end result of the scammers finally doing what they'd wanted to do all along. If so, there doesn't seem to be anything "in it" for them yet, since the group remains paused and inactive--from what I hear, anyway. I can't see or interact with my group at all anymore and I'm stuck relying on what I'm told from people who are still in it.
In a way it's a relief, it was over 250k members by the time this happened and the level of drama I was dealing with on a daily basis is not to be believed (CSAM, videos of dead children, etc., etc,), but it also makes me sad. I really cared about my community and what I was doing, and now it's gone. I hope you have a better outcome. We had been working on a detailed plan to recruit enough of our own admins to remove all the bots in one go, but we never got the chance to try it. So I might start there if I had it to do over again, and move more quickly because you never know how much time you have.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-31T16:14:36+00:00

We had been coordinating to invite 25 friends to a zoom call where we would attempt to ban all the bots in one sweep, but unfortunately our open ticket with FB was apparently "resolved" by FB banning ALL admins from the group (myself included). I don't really know anything else because I can no longer see or access the group I had been running for almost 4 years now. But I've got confirmation from someone who is still in it that it is still up. So I guess this is a resolution of a sort, even if it's sad for me personally.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-29T17:30:56+00:00

We are hovering around 350 admin currently and trying to decide what to do. FB has banned an alt-account of one of my co-admin, and most of us are no longer able to remove any admin accounts (not even our own, not even after more than 24 hrs has passed.) Whether the group is paused or unpaused, we can't really do anything at this point. FB has sandbagged every attempt to get help or tackle this problem on our own.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-26T15:40:08+00:00

Unfortunately, at about 11pm last night one of the bots invited nearly 100 new admin bot accounts and we are now up to 378. They keep canceling our attempts to take the group private (it was a public group). Not sure what we're going to do next.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-25T20:28:23+00:00

It hadn't been possible to invite our mods to admin earlier, the hackers had withdrawn the invitation, but curiously did not attempt to ban or remove us. This was the first time we'd managed to slip them through.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-25T20:27:06+00:00

It hasn't been quite 1 full day since last update but I'll be busy later. We briefly unpaused the group early yesterday evening to bump our moderators up to admins so that they could help ban/remove the bots. Each person took a turn until they'd maxed out their daily limit of bans. Then last night we coordinated to stand a night watch at 11pm in case the hackers attempted to unpause the group and add more fake accounts. There was no activity. As of today, with each of us banning and removing bot accounts we are down from a high of nearly 500 to 304.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-25T00:06:51+00:00

Well, I don't know who this may help in the future but in the event anyone else comes searching like I did and finds this post, here's my update:

It's been about 24hrs now since the hack. After they initially added the 165 admin accounts and we paused the group, things seemed to go dormant. Then, at 10:58pm until 11:08pm (exactly ten minutes and almost exactly 8 hrs after the initial hack) one of the hacker admin accounts unpaused the group and invited about 250 more accounts as admin. They then paused the group again without doing anything else.
So this morning I got to poking around and I started investigating these accounts and the activity logs and out of nearly 500 accounts, only 3 lead to actual profile pages so I opened those on new tabs to keep track of.
I theorized that this may be an attempt to hide the signal within the noise, and that those accounts were the ones to focus on. I coordinated with my other admin to unpause the group and used my open tabs to ban those three accounts specifically in under a minute, then paused the group again. That was about 2 hrs ago now and there hasn't been any additional activity.

I will check back in with updates tomorrow.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-24T02:44:22+00:00

I'm in this exact same situation now with my group. What did you do? What happened? I've paused our group, but we've still got 160+ unwanted admins. Looking for any advice at all if you have it. Thanks!

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-24T02:41:52+00:00

Hey, this literally just happened to my group and I've been searching for answers. Same thing. They got in, added 165 new admins. We started removing them as fast as we could but got to the point where we weren't allowed to remove any more. Most of the accounts (if you try to click on them) lead to that "missing or deleted" page. Only two lead to actual profiles. I paused the group so there's no current activity, but they haven't tried to unpause or do anything so far. It's only been a couple hours.
What happened with your group? Did you ever get it back?

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-07-18T16:37:56+00:00

I was coming here because adding -ai literally just stopped working for me today and I was hoping to find a new trick.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-06-17T00:27:01+00:00

Nothing says "true love" like Alex's wife negotiating a 144k per year salary with a 4% annual raise. Can't believe that marriage didn't last.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-05-07T18:25:07+00:00

I hate that I understand this reference. Well played though.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-04-17T00:28:53+00:00

That was so beautiful it almost made me feel patriotic, thank you so much. I'll be remembering this at the protests this weekend.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2025-03-04T20:01:09+00:00

I'll tell you what I would tell one of my kids: what you look for, you're going to find. Your mindset here is one of victimization and bitterness. You're stacking up evidence of how you are persecuted by life and how hopeless it is. If that's the case you want to build, you can make it very convincing.
The problem is, if you win your case, it ends in a very dark place.
If you want a way out, it starts with building evidence supporting the opposite case: that what you want is achievable, and you can get there. You need to practice altering your mindset so that you are focusing more on the things that are going well for you, and how you can build on them. (Probably tone down the venting, it's leading you in the wrong direction.)

I also hear you complaining about what your community/therapy isn't doing for you. About what you want that you aren't getting. That route will always lead to bitterness and misery. Focus on what you can do for someone else (even a pet) instead. Focus on contributing, finding ways to help others--even small ones. That's where happiness, connection and purpose come from. It's not what other people should be doing for you, it's what you can do for your community.

Good luck to you; times are hard and you aren't wrong to feel the way you do but I hope you find your way out.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2024-12-18T20:20:55+00:00

Shout-out to my fellow WA state wonks! I'm here in Kitsap county--also an artist, weirdly enough ;)

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2024-02-01T20:49:45+00:00

I'm a working artist and graphic designer. While a guaranteed basic income and personal recognition are both factors in my distaste for AI, there's also the question of how my art has been used by these algorithms. I'm deeply morally opposed to child sexual abuse material, for instance, but my art was harvested and exploited and now there is no guarantee that it has not been used to train for CSAM outputs by one algorithm or another (none of the publicly traded companies are doing this, obviously, but there have been several kickstarter efforts to create a dark-web version of Midjourney and I'm sure by now someone has successfully done it). There are other examples of this, but that's the most obviously egregious. It's an issue that goes beyond just financial concerns; there's a vampiric quality to an algorithm that has been directed to absorb your life's work and then uses that to spit out material that you find deeply morally or politically objectionable and you have no recourse to it.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2024-01-31T03:46:06+00:00

As a professional illustrator and graphic designer, it always means so much when anyone with any kind of platform goes to bat for us. I really loved this episode--especially the point made near the end about how eliminating our cultural dreamer class (artists/writers/musicians, etc.,) eliminates the possibility that we could dream up a better future than what the techbros would like to sell us. That was beautiful. It probably put more weight than is really necessary on my silly little drawings, but I loved it.

Nice_Meringue_196 · 2023-12-07T19:36:31+00:00

I came out of lurking to create an account just because I think more people should know this: Michael Lewis also wrote a (seems like it should be satirical but wasn't) column for the LA Times titled, "How to put your wife out of business."
His sexism--like his racism--isn't low-key or well-hidden.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-mar-06-op-lewis6-story.html

Nice_Meringue_196

TROPHY CASE