Disclaimer- Just a heads up, this is on my personal profile for a reason. I respect the Jungle and the rules we created as a community. So I've posted this here to be able to speak freely.. this is likely to be a very personal post. I will be making another thread in the Jungle to discuss more of the direction of the community there, but I want to respect the fact that these are 2 very different conversations to have.

I also just realized it's my cake day which seems poetic, as I am celebrating many good things not only in my life right now, but also what lies ahead for the community as a whole! And I ask that no matter your opinion going into this, please hear me out with an open mind.. as someone who has truly loved, nurtured, and cared for this community from the beginning. I've put so much heart into this, I appreciate the opportunity to speak about all this without reserve.

With that out of the way..

In spite of the many mistakes I've made along the way, I've always tried to stand for transparency and integrity. Even when falling short, it's best to be honest. To be honest is to be honorable, and that's all I've ever wanted to be for this community. So I am going to speak very honestly, as I have come to see things today. You may not agree with my findings but please know I've come to this point after extensive consideration. And as many of you know, I don't like engaging opportunists, so the careful thought I've put into this cannot be understated.

Although altruistic in intent, that thoughtless judgment on everyone being a potential opportunist cast an ever-widening net that started preventing me from seeing the forest for the trees. I admittedly became very jaded over the last several months or so (if not before) from the constant vigilance against shills, bots, and grifters-not to mention the never-ending parade of hate and harassment. Everyone became the enemy and that's a hard mentality to get out of. I will be the first to admit I even had serious doubts about the intentions of some of the people I'll be mentioning here. That perhaps they were involved for self gain all along. I shared that opinion with some of you privately. I had serious doubts.

But especially after one of my closest, most-trusted allies, u/BodySurfDan moved on from moderation, I really felt moved to re-evaluate everything I believed to be true up to that point. Dan encouraged me to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and so I cleared the slate and looked at things with a fresh perspective.

So I have been admittedly pretty quiet lately. Just active in the mod que every day and taking a more quiet approach to the Jungle. In that time I hit the reset button in my mind and decided to figure out.. what's next?

A Little History

I came to GME pretty lacking in investment literacy. Long before GME (i.e. during the Pandemic) I, like many others, perused Wall Street Bets and Seeking Alpha-type sites as an investing noob with a small chunk of change to grow, looking for where to start. I didn't want to trust a Financial Advisor when I knew I was smart enough to figure it out myself. Stocks, options.. I wanted to learn it all. And then I started reading more and more about GME and short interest. By mid-January with RC signing on the BoD of Gamestop, I decided that GME was the play and my husband and I YOLO'd it all- we bought shares from January 18th to the week following. At a cost basis <$70, we were riding the rocket and ready for the moon!

record screech

Then the buy button was removed, the price crashed, GME talk was banned on WSB leading to the great ape migration to r/GME, and the community was effectively born.

Superstonk

I became a mod on Superstonk on 4/20/2021. (That was not long after I shared the recorded phone call and company information of the people trying to pay me to shill tickers on reddit.) Although I had never moderated an online space before, I was really eager to learn and take on the role! I had already grown to love this crazy community and was excited to get to be so involved. I started writing the Superstonk Daily the following week, and wrote a daily DD for the next 2-3 months. Gosh that was sooo muucchh woorrkk every day but honestly I loved every second of it!! A lot of community was built in the comments of the daily, and I really enjoyed being the flairy!

During that time on Superstonk, I got to know my then-fellow mod u/Stonku2. He easily became one of my closest peers on the mod team, as we were not only a synergetic pair, we were also among the most active. Our first interaction was me sharing the full video of the shill job phone call with him for verification. And from there on, a ground of mutual respect was laid. Without him, none of the AMAs held in this community would have ever happened. No Dr. T, no Carl Hagberg, no Wes Christian, no Dave Lauer, no Lucy Komisar.... NONE. The dude is humble af but seriously, 100% it's because of that one person that those interviews happened and we learned from the professionals as much as we have. Without him and these introductions, safe to say I would never have looked into DRS either.

As mentioned, it was also through Stonku2 that we met u/DLauer. My first messages with him were getting in contact for the AMA and I'm not gonna' lie, I was a skeptic from the moment we considered him to interview. The Citadel background, the fact that the Marc Cohodes drama was stirring at the time... many things made me side-eye this new HFT guy, and I remained skeptical and inquisitive of him. That skepticism remained until fairly recently, in spite of the fact that he never really proved himself to be anything besides a pretty reliable source of information. And like I said, I've been looking for a reason to think otherwise just because there are so many wolves in sheeps' apes' skin.

Regardless of perceived intention, these 2 people created deeply meaningful contributions to the community.

In the Jungle...

Moving to the Jungle was a necessary growing pain for the whole community, and without it we probably wouldn't have had the space to objectively discuss things like potential shills and DRS. In spite of the fact that admin likes to shit in our banana cheerios, it's home. And through the ups and downs, I was so grateful to be able to bring BodySurfDan on board because he was literally the only person in the reddit world that I felt I could actually trust fully (having met briefly in person at the SHM helped) and he's such a genuine dude, you can't fake that kind of realness. That made a serious impression on me and having his help was the key to making the Jungle what it has become. His unique music and lyrical talent really inspires a lot of us and provides a dope-ass drum beat to march to. Not to mention how he came in clutch when admin was breathing down our necks demanding more mods.

Before he left as Jungle mod, we spent months researching different reddit alternatives. Mastadon, Aether, .win, a bunch of others I can't remember.. (Fucking USENET ffs) but nothing fit. We discussed many as a community but nothing ever seemed viable enough to use. To this day I've yet to be able to find a good reddit alternative with an easily digestible interface. We also discussed the platform Dave and Stonku2 were working on, but I'll admit I shut the idea down before looking into what they were really about. The last thing I wanted to do was promote something- in fact I made serious rules in the Jungle against it. And that has been my soapbox since... probably to a fault, possibly even standing in the way of the evolution of our corner of this movement. Dan later let me know about an opportunity he had to educate a broader audience with his music, and as excited as I was behind the scenes for him, it resulted in some conflict in the community (nobody's fault, it happens. Still loads of respect between us.)

The M(e)n behind the curtain

After Dan left, I really took it to heart- I needed to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I needed to shake out the FUD and figure out up from down for myself. Make sure no one was in my ear from any side. That's how you effectively and intuitively moderate- you verify and then apply that knowledge without bias. Up to this point, I had really only been going on gut feelings and experience regarding Dave's project. But I trusted Dan (I still do, but I used to too :)) and if he thought Dave and Alex's project was promising for the community-at-large, then it was worth further investigation on my part. I had admittedly removed their posting approval for a short time... because I went off the deep end of jaded-ness and wrote them and their project off. That was remedied in short order, and in retrospect I found that I didn't really give them an opportunity to speak on their project without automatically looking at dollar signs.

So Dave hopped back in to the Jungle and was more than happy to do a (very open and honest) AMA. Really I was just giving him an opportunity to speak just like we did with gherkinit and millertime and the others who had outside "projects", so it felt democratic and just to allow him the opportunity to do the same in the Jungle and speak for himself before making a decision like approval status. But my impression about him, his intentions, his projects.. began to shift. He answered questions directly like about the counter-pieces written about him and the company.. He held nothing back and I was surprised to learn much of what I did. It led me to wanting to learn more about this project, so I arranged a time to talk directly to him and just clear the air.

We had a zoom call and I got an opportunity to feel out his intentions. I had only spoken briefly to him before here and there about the AMA so it was also a sort of re-introduction. I felt that he was nothing but genuine, real, and honest when we talked. And I felt comfortable telling him how skeptical I was of him. That conversation is what pretty much put that skepticism to bed, and brought me to the path I'm on now.

As we discussed his company and projects, he informed me of everything I wanted to know about the financials. Yes it was funded largely-in-part by apes and the community we have here. It also employs majority members of the Community. Developers and designers and creative talent from around the world- almost all apes- are who get paid from that fund that the community invested into. And most interestingly to me, Alex and Dave have literally not taken a single paycheck from this project.

another record screech

Bro I've been so skeptical about these dudes and they aren't even getting paid 😭

I felt like an asshole for some of my theories about their intentions. I apologized to Dave and he was so freaking humble about it. Top notch.

-Me fully retracting my previous qualms and ill-perceived notions of them.-

That's when the conversation shifted to what was happening with their projects. Their activism and what's being built to cater to the community and provide a service. Meeting with Gary freaking Gensler to express retail's disdain for the current market conditions. I got hyped. Like, in a way I haven't been since we blew up the DRS movement and it became a worldwide phenomenon. After being kind of burnt out on all the skepticism, it was nice to have fresh wind in the sails and see opportunities to create effective change in the future. I took a chance and decided to continue to learn more about their projects.

So.. what's next?

Over the last week, not only have I gone from skepticism to support, I have decided that I want to be involved in these projects. Not just as Pinkcats... but the person behind this screen. I'm a wife, mom (with a ridiculously supportive husband!), caretaker, and wear many other hats. And up until this point, I have worked countless hours to build a community here on reddit, both on Superstonk and the Jungle.. and given so much of myself in the process. My heart is here. It's in this movement. I'm not rich by any means. I've worked hard to keep a stoic front to run this community justly, but I'm just a girl from middle-of-nowhere USA with a MOASS dream like the rest of you. And a want to create effective change for those around us. To leave this world, this country, this market.. better than we found it. And I truly don't think that stops with just GME and in a subreddit.

I won't go so far as to doxx myself here and now, but I will say I've doxxed myself to Dave and Stonk. That's how much I have grown to respect and trust what they are doing, and how serious I am about thinking this is the natural evolution of this movement- to funnel our efforts into effective action and change. I'm not here to talk about the project exactly, but I will say that after all I've seen and been through, I think this is the real deal. So I have carefully considered providing consulting services to help develop the Terminal into what, in my experience, a community platform should be.

I want to help make a better reddit! With hookers and blow no bots and DRS!!!

I've never been paid for anything related to GME in my life, and I never intended to. But I cannot pass up the unique opportunity to not only continue to do what I've grown to love, and use my experience to build a community platform from scratch, but to also provide for my family in doing so, without wearing myself so thin. If you have ever appreciated my involvement in this community, I trust that you will respect this opportunity to create something great and also be able to invest in GME again. We should all be so lucky as to be paid to do something we love.

For some reason we- myself included- have considered reddit the moral high ground in this equation, but I tell you this as someone who has worked for a year and a half for a billion dollar company for free and at their ever-pressing mercy.. moderating is a draining job. Especially in communities as volatile as these and with admin's forced involvement and censorship.. not to mention the amount of bots and shills taking over the entire website, reports on every.single.post.. and admin complaining about the mod-que piling up (which is probably the intention). Paying into the award system that's on the same side as the crooks we're fighting.. vs. working with an advocacy team that has meetings with the SEC demanding change. Without my jaded goggles on, it's an easy answer to me where I want to spend a lot of my time and energy moving forward.

If you made it this far, thank you

As for how this changes the Jungle community and reddit, I don't know. I'm willing to stay involved running the jungle to the extent the community decides. As much as I know I will continue to try to see things objectively, I realize that I am subjectively biased now. I have a vested interest in Urvin's success, and I will always keep that disclaimer apparent as long as it is applicable. I've never been dishonest to you guys and I don't plan to start now.

Some people might call this a FUD piece, some might say I planned this all along. So be it. I've dealt with haters and threats and runic glory up to this point and it hasn't stopped me. All I can say is it's not FUD, and certainly not planned. But it is what I feel is best moving forward for creating a community space beyond reddit, as well as being what's best personally for my family. There are some things I'd like to keep private, especially pertaining to my identity and what's planned for me at Urvin, but I am happy to answer genuine questions. I am in no way restricted on what I can say here outside of my own discretion (and obviously proprietary knowledge), and my voice will not be stifled in any way moving forward. I am still at liberty to speak freely. I will say I am a contractor and not an employee of the company.

If nothing else, I ask that you respect the irl decision I have made to do something I'm genuinely excited and passionate about, and I appreciate your support. My main objectives moving forward in this project are helping to develop an ideal community from the ground up on both the public side and the admin side, as well as continuing my ever-vigilant campaign for Direct Registration. And just nurturing the community I've grown to love so very much.

MOASS is not something we can control the timing of. But we can control whether our voices are heard to create effective change in our markets, and create a better solution to the problems we've uncovered. All while still holding GME.

None of this changes the DD, and I'll always be invested in the one true stock, and DRS'ed. Viva la GMErica!!! 🏴‍☠️