Gossip forums and weird neighbors

So about 2 weeks ago a subreddit for gossip on our local influencers opened. It uses the same name the original gossip section on our biggest forum uses (chicken coop!) and so far it's been really fun. It gained so many posts in a short period of time, people yearn for the gossip. So far there hasn't been any intensely enforced rules so it feels like a FFA, with repetitive threads and everything that comes with it. But I don't mind it, it makes the whole thing more fun and chaotic. It got me reminiscing of the ask.fm era of the croatian Internet. I have a hard time putting it in a certain time period but I guess it would be somewhere from around 2010 until 2014-ish? Before ask.fm we had formspring which was mostly used by true emos, then they hopped to ask.fm right as it came out and the normies joined them. Back then, the biggest baddies had a massive ask.fm following, and they'd get hundreds of asks daily. You'd know they were baddies if they had multiple FAQs pinned. I followed a couple of regional ones which consisted of a girl with a typical scene kid username that worked at a night-time tarot show, a ballet dancer faux lesbian ana-chan that bragged about being half Russian and her mom being a gynecologist which made her a gynecologist by proxy, and the last one was a true tumblr hipster english lit and movie fan (her favourite movie being of course - Pulp Fiction). Ahhh those were the times.

I was most surprised when somebody made a thread asking about them, and I had to go around and dig myself too. Since the ask.fm kids were basically proto instagram influencers a lot of them transitioned into the IG influencing era very effortlessly, but the semi-emo group (everyone referred to them as emos, no they weren't really) I followed didn't experience the same success. The first one kind of fell into irrelevance regarding her online activities and while she's lazily doing some influencer content she's not really fully into it. She completely bimbofied herself and is going with some alien elf princess shtick. Very outdated, feels like she never really caught up with trends. The second one is a true disaster, and her cowish tendencies gathered her a massive hate following on twitter, among other places. I mentioned she liked to larp as a lesbian, and she was pretty consistent with it for a couple of years. I remember her listing all of her gay friends and favourite gay bars in Belgrade and where all the gays hang out... Then suddenly she starts posting about having a boyfriend who abused her and who she ended up having a child with. In hindsight she was always absolutely nuts, but when I first encountered her online I was impressed and frightened by her sheer vocabulary and falsely projected intelligence. Once her bf saga began I stopped following her because she became boring, and I had no idea what kind of horrors befell her until I randomly remembered her one day during the pandemic. That's when I found out that she had basically been lying about everything related to her life, she was neither well educated nor rich, her family is not at all what she had made them out to be, it also appears she had lost the custody to her son but it's not confirmed. Then two weeks ago I checked up on her again, she had an unironic fake crutches phase, she's dying of some terminal illness every two weeks but amidst dying in horrible pains she manages to post some body checking semi-nudes... All very fun for people that follow her I bet. One of my tattoo artists is following her on instagram and I can't help but wonder... did we both follow her back in 2011!! The third one disappeared early on, as early as 2015 I think. She was the one I was interested in the most, because she might have been studying the same thing I planned on studying in uni. I actually don't remember. She got some kind of a scholarship to go to England, and she never came back. She deleted her social media pretty soon after as well, so it's obvious she was the most stable one lmao.

Now another hot piece of gossip I had discovered is related to that one ex-lj lolita turned local food influencer I talked about before. Turns out, her father was a businessman and the right hand man of the politician that basically sold off our oil industry for pennies - which was largely done with the help of her father... So not only is she loaded, she's related to one of the most despicable men in the country. I'm personally affected by this because my whole family from both sides have lived from being factory workers in that industry at some point, and my dad in particular lost his job because of this. I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, no wonder she had money to be a classic lolita in a post war eastern euro country in like, 2006. On the other hand, I also have a crazy politician in my family, but not nearly as influential nor closely related, so I weirdly get the feeling of not wanting to be associated with that. But it feels weird she never brought it up........ Especially because this... blood money... probably affects her day to day life. Maybe I'm being weird about this... it's not like she has to justify herself but at the same time....................... it feels kind of icky! It's too complicated and this is why I don't like to invest myself into online personalities. Sigh!

Ok enough gossip of faraway people. Let's gossip about someone that lives 5 meters away from me. My neighbors!!!! I live in a split apartment. The other apartment changed tenants multiple times (to be exact, 3) since I've been here, and for some reason every time the tenants are weird as hell. I'm not sure what it is, my husband and I say hi to the whole building and I literally know exactly where who lives, we say hi to each other on the street and I even chit chatted with some of my neighbors. I'm not overly social, but hey I exist. But whoever is bound to be our apartment neighbour, is always somebody that hides from all that is living, and you can hardly ever see them exit the house, and if they do they'll never say hi to you. Our last batch of neighbors has been the strangest one. It's a couple, similar in age to me and my husband. They seem to have the same night shift job, judging by their extremely dirty work boots which they leave in our shared entrance along with tons of mud they NEVER clean!!! Which is interesting, a couple that works in construction... The isolation in our building is amazing, so we can never hear a peep from them. However, they're never present... anywhere... We can never catch them outside. I think I saw the woman maybe 2-3 times in more than a year, and we literally share the apartment door! I saw the guy a couple times more than her but he never says hi, he probably doesn't even know I'm his neighbor. Here's the crazy part, a couple days ago I'm opening the doors to my apartment and I hear a BABY!!! THEY HAD A BABY?!?!? I didn't even know she was pregnant and we live 2 meters away!!! LMAO!!