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!
Last month, I celebrated my 11th year as a member of Daily Kos. For many of those years, I still mostly lurked. I read a ton and gave out a few 4 ratings though most of them were either 2’s or 3’s in the early days before we switched over. I have never given out a 0 or a HR since I became a trusted user (happened twice since I took a long commenting break in the middle before I starting writing diaries).
A few years ago I found the Top Comments community. I won’t bring up how that happened because it involves one of the more sordid times in Daily Kos history. (For you newbies, there have been many of those in the last 11 years.) After becoming a frequent commenter here at Top Comments, I was encouraged to write a diary. With the help and encouragement of brillig, BeninSC, and everyone else at Top Comments at the time, I posted my first diary in Dec of 2012. It was on two topics close to my heart: wine and hockey. It recounted a recent trip I had taken up to Niagara, Ont to go wine tasting and watch hockey with my sister. You can read that diary here. Unfortunately most of the pictures are gone :(
After writing that diary, I became a full fledged member of Top Comments. I write on a number of topics though pretty much all of them are close to my heart or involve local politics, usually on the County or Town level where I live. I also tend to sometimes sign up and forget to write a diary and have to rush an open thread. A lesson to all you procrastinators out there.
Almost all of my diaries are long-winded. This is an unfortunate skill I picked up as an honor student in high school. I did well to mitigate it in college with the help of my English and Humanities professors, but it still lingers. I have major trouble editing myself though people do say I bring a lot of knowledge to the table. I often hear from people how much they learn from my diaries, which always makes me happy.
It’s been about six months since I last wrote a diary and I haven’t been commenting much on Daily Kos either. Part of the reason is I’ve been busy with work and life, and part is because I haven’t really felt like doing much writing. While there have been some really good things going on politically, it’s still a tough environment and my hockey team has basically had its worst season in my lifetime. I won’t into the gory details there, but suffice to say, all of my friends want to burn the general manager in effigy.
I guess what I am trying to say is it may be time to move on. Life takes you in so many different directions; you never know where you are going to end up at any point in time. I never really liked sports growing up and now I am die0hard hockey fan. I planned to be a marine biologist my whole childhood and ended up becoming an accountant and owning a business. Now I want to further my studies in improvisation. Who knows what is around the next corner for me?
I enjoyed every minute of writing here and making so many cool friends. I’ve been fortunate to meet some of them in person here in NY and around the east coast. Hopefully, one day I’ll get to meet everyone in person. Thanks for treating me well and making feel like a part of your family.
Diarist reserves all rights to his original writing only. Community material is not covered by this ©
Oh yeah. Happy April Fools Day everyone!!! I’m not actually leaving. Think of this as my welcome back diary. Hope everyone had a great whatever holiday they celebrate unless, like me, they don’t celebrate any of them. In that case I hope you had a good weekend.
Now onto the Top’s!
TOP COMMENTS for April 1, 2018
From Alice Olson: (first submission. YAY!)
flylooper's comment to Hunter's FP piece on Trump's Easter Sunday rant against immigrant children captures perfectly what I (and I'm certain many others) have been thinking these past few months.
From your, for the second year in a row, sneaky diarist:
jqjacobs give Flynn Jr. a huge burn with this comment.
TOP MOJO for April 1, 2018
Tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on FAQing Top Mojo.
TOP PICTURES for April 1, 2018
Top Pictures for Sept 22, 2017. Click any picture to be taken to the full comment or picture. Thank you jotter!