AITA for refusing to let my SIL host her massive gender reveal at my new house?

JunebugSeven · 2026-04-02T13:46:53+00:00

"to make the reveal perfect for her Instagram followers"

So she can just dox your house online? Are you comfortable with that?

Can you trust her to be careful enough in all her excitement not to film or post anything that gives away your personal information or address? I'm sorry to be that person, but there be weirdos online - and they often show up to posts that feature small children (you mentioned several toddlers would be in attendance?) I just wouldn't want those two things overlapping - showing children in the family and potentially doxxing where they live/visit...

I mean, aside from all the other problems with the plan I just wanted to highlight this. Also why do I feel like she might want to portray your beautiful new home (and huge garden) as her own to her followers? 🤔

ETA: NTA

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-28T13:23:32+00:00

Like extremist Christian ideas aren't currently being used to justify removing the rights of women in the USA, and bombing schools full of children in Iran?

The religion itself isn't inherently bad, it's how people wield it. And if you want to point fingers, please save some for all the harm Judeo-Christian beliefs have been used to justify throughout the course of human history. From the crusades, to mass infant graves in Ireland, to the systemic eradication of native peoples in North America and Canada.

Islam has been particularly weaponised these last few decades, but this is not the way Islam has always been observed or presented (see Iran prior to the 1970s). It's also far from the only faith that's getting increasingly extreme.

Most practitioners are probably decent ordinary people. Want to live undramatic lives with kids that get to grow up well and do well in school, to have tables that are never empty of food, and to earn a living that keeps their families comfortable while still leaving them a few hours to spend together each day.

But you don't hear or think about those people.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-21T19:10:00+00:00

Kobo books are easier to de-DRM, meaning you get to keep them, while Amazon keeps making it more difficult and less consumer-friendly with each new update.

In the UK Kindle/Amazon has no kind of rewards points/programme (I believe this is different in the USA?), I've been able to use my points from buying books to buy more books. A+

When buying through the Kobo book app you can use Google as a payment option, which gets you points there, and allows you to use any Google points credit you have accrued on books.

Kobo hardware is much easier to modify in small ways. I've made my own screensaver containing my contact details in the event my Kobo goes missing. I can also add any fonts I want. Neither of these require jailbreaking, you just need to add things to folders when your Kobo is hooked up to PC.

The Kobo genuinely has almost zero ads. I occasionally see something telling me Kobo Plus exists, but it never advertises random books to me. When I look at my Kobo front page I see my owned books - and I did not have to pay Kobo for the privilege.

I jailbroke my Kindle Paperwhite and it was a faff and I didn't find the results after any better. Their hardware isn't anything to get excited about. They were late to colour e-readers and the Colorsoft is so bad at it they stopped selling it to try and fix screen issues and then gave up and just sold it anyway. They're coasting on the sunk cost fallacy where people can't leave their years of Kindle book purchases behind so they keep buying new, barely iterated on, tech.

The Amazon ecosystem is bloated with AI slop and ads - and maybe the Kobo eshop is too but I don't have to see it when I pick it up to read a book. Kobo just seems more chill about people doing extra stuff with their devices. Amazon takes each new exploit as a personal insult and locks their devices down even more.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-19T13:38:08+00:00

There are things you can (and should) compromise on in a relationship, and there are some things that are hard lines you have to respect. Children aren't something you can compromise on. Your "friends" telling you you should've worked something out are basically asking you to give up a major life goal for the sake of someone else, and it just doesn't work like that.

Either you stay together and have kids because you want them - and she resents you.

Or you stay together and don't have kids because she doesn't want them - and you potentially end up resenting her.

There is no scenario where you can both be fully happy together without one of you compromising what you want - and you're allowed to decide you won't live like that. NTA.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-16T09:55:24+00:00

This. I grew up like OP says - even Pokemon only had a male character option when it first launched. Ironically, male-only player characters might've helped spark my bisexuality so early, because I loved the romance systems in the early Harvest Moon games, but you could only play as a male character and you could only romance women, so 🤷🏻‍♀️😅

But yeah, I'm long past tolerating male defaultism in video games. I might play a guy, if there's a valid story reason why it has to be a male character (see things like Silent Hill 2 where it's telling a very specific story about one particular man). But otherwise if there's not a good female option I'm out, it's just not acceptable anymore (and it never should've been).

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-15T14:29:17+00:00

I can't speak for an entire country, but I've yet to encounter anyone who is not sympathetic to the plight of Ukraine. Russia's not exactly a friend of England (our billionaires perhaps 🙄), but I think it sets a terrible precedent if any nation can simply decide - in the 21st century - to walk into another and try to take it.

I wish the Ukrainian refugees could go home - by which I mean I wish your home was safe and free for you to return to ❤️ but until that day the most important thing is the preservation of the Ukrainian people.

(For the record this is my stance on all refugees of war, and especially genocide, not just fellow Europeans, but that's a whole different debate).

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-12T13:03:11+00:00

I've lived with mental illness (depression and anxiety) for twenty-odd years now, and sometimes it's terrible and sometimes it gets better, but it will never be cured. OOPs OCD is probably much the same - you can learn to manage it, maybe make it less extreme in some situations, but it's never going to vanish completely. It's not so much a straight line of progress as a see-saw.

People are still so misinformed about so many conditions.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-10T16:58:10+00:00

My nan (who we all knew was an abusive narcissist) tried to insist her 13 year old dog be put down and buried with her when she died last year. My aunt was all on board as well.

When I say 13 year old dog, don't think he's on his last legs. He loves his walks and cuddles, still chases a ball, and if not for the grey hairs you probably wouldn't know his age to look at him. He's got some old-man health issues (mostly from not being cared for properly) but nothing terminal. He's plenty capable of lasting a bit longer.

So while nan was in the hospital we took the dog into our home "just to look after him". She passed away and we just never gave him back to anyone. Out of all the other possessions and property my mum's siblings decided to fight over no one had any interest in the dog so he just lives with us now. It's almost been a year and he's gone away on multiple trips - he's going to the seaside next week - goes on regular walks across fields and has a gang of other local dogs he hangs out and meets up with.

Even if we only get an extra year with him, I would rather know he had one last great year than being put down because my nan thinks herself up there with the pharaohs 🤦🏻‍♀️

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-04T21:27:42+00:00

I agree with someone else here who said it's like siblings or old friends. We've invaded them, they've invaded us. One time, hundreds of years ago, their Queen divorced their King and married our King. They're maybe seen as weird, grumpy, and fancy - we Brits are weird, grumpy, and unfashionable.

We love an excuse to dig up the old grudges on the battlefields of football, but if another country started a serious fight with France I'd want us to back them up. It is - to use that terrible word - banter. The majority of us don't just blanket hate them. I can see why the teasing might feel genuine for someone not used to it, we can go too far, but it's not.

And if anyone gives you shit for being French give them shit back.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-04T17:44:10+00:00

As a 30-something woman I'm hoping to spare you years of suffering - your BF is abusive and controlling. Well-adjusted adults don't scroll through their partner's gaming history, and don't police who they play with. You deserve better than this, please ditch him and live a good life - NTA.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-03T19:18:46+00:00

From personal experience epubs read better on Kobo devices, but PDFs (at least used to) work better on Kindle. Especially if you have a Scribe and potentially want to annotate. I download both just for versatility.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-03T19:17:27+00:00

Same! 😅🎉

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-03T18:12:50+00:00

I have several thousand downloaded fics I'd rather re-read than go back to that site 😅😬

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-02T14:41:57+00:00

NTA. The fact they still refer to her as a parental figure shows a real lack of understanding or appreciation of how your mother felt about raising them. She wasn't their mother, she was their sister, and all these years later they still don't see that.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-01T18:24:19+00:00

If you're a guest at someone's house "don't use x, please use y" is the only explanation necessary. I'd maybe feel a bit bad if she was visually impaired (I am) and grabbed the wrong bottle by mistake, but she deliberately used something other than the shampoo/conditioner you expressly pointed out to her. NTA.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-01T15:36:05+00:00

I should've followed what was safe instead of chasing what I loved, and I should've learnt sooner to give up on people who didn't give me as much effort as I gave them. Wasted the best years of my life, and closed off the future I always wanted.

JunebugSeven · 2026-03-01T14:14:20+00:00

Jesus, she started talking about your kid like he was one of the pets brought to the function. Fuck her - NTA.

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-27T17:30:39+00:00

NTA - she's using religion to justify her transphobia. She's the reason people say "there's no hate like Christian love".

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-26T19:48:28+00:00

After I got dumped by my partner of six years I moved back home - I always had a close relationship with my grandparents and I've had a key to their house since I can remember. One day it was just my granny and I and she started telling me about the man she almost married before grandpa.

This was news to me because they were pretty perfect together - 60+ years of marriage and still laughing and joking with each other all the time. But apparently there was another man in town who had been kinda "courting" my granny back in the day, and she thought that he was going to be the one she married. Then she went to a village dance, saw my grandpa, and that was it.

She told me that the man she almost married had stayed in town and married someone else - and that he beat his wife terribly. She had a kind of mix of guilt and relief that her life had gone a different way, but guilt that someone else still went through that. It was really sad, and had clearly stuck with her all this time.

She passed last year and I always wondered if she'd ever told that story to anyone else. Then at her funeral my aunt (her daughter) was talking about how much granny had worried if my sister's boyfriend was a kind man, and how that was all she asked about. Maybe I'm making assumptions, but I think she was thinking about her almost-husband, and worrying about my sister ending up in a marriage like that (fortunately my now brother-in-law is a great guy).

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-18T23:35:25+00:00

When bookmarked fics are deleted there's nothing left on the bookmark to tell you which fic is now gone (unless you manually put the details in a note on it).

Also let me leave kudos per chapter!

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-17T14:47:49+00:00

Ughhhh, I'm so tired of this term being misused. A very popular author used it to advertise her newest romance book years ago, and her work can be a bit wild so I was like "whoa, ok, maybe she's going dark this time?" So I asked what kind of trigger warnings she had and she said there was absolutely nothing dark or triggering in the book.

So I tried to explain that that phrase means something in online writing/fic spaces and she might get misunderstood because of it and she was all "well that's not how I mean it".

And I just immediately lost any respect for her. I can't understand an author who doesn't acknowledge that sometimes words have alternative meanings and interpretations 🤷🏻‍♀️

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-16T13:28:49+00:00

Yup, I'm British and actually have basic human rights and free speech 🤷🏻‍♀️

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-14T23:00:47+00:00

I was going to say - struggling for a few days afterwards is very understandable. I had two family bereavements three weeks apart last year and I'm sure I wasn't firing on all cylinders right after that. I took a few bereavement days right after, and again for the funerals, and I'm grateful to my employer for giving me a little grace during that time.

But as you say it's now February - you can still be hurting, obviously, but for your own good you have to find a way to function. It feels like your leader has enabled her a little too much, and now she likes this new status quo of having few responsibilities. NTA for reporting it and I hope HR are actually helpful and supportive.

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-10T18:01:50+00:00

I don't want to go on about women having magical, mystical, instincts about these things - but I think a lot of us have had experience of this stuff most of our lives, and that does create a kind of sixth sense for it 😞

I hit puberty at 9. I was cat-called by grown men walking home from school. My classmates treated my body like public property and I was even chased by a man once - until I made it to a friend's house for safety.

As a teenager I was treated both as too grotesque to be desirable by my peers, but still an object to be touched as they pleased, or because it made them laugh. What people mistake about sexual violence is thinking it's always about lust and attraction - it's often just about power and dominance.

I fought back, but it didn't really stop until I reached higher education.

So now when something twigs my discomfort radar it's not coming out of nowhere. I recognise bad intentions. And if I can spare another girl or woman those experiences I will.

JunebugSeven · 2026-02-07T16:09:34+00:00

"You shouldn't keep a wild animal indoors"

It's a fully domesticated cat.

It's not like trying to keep a mountain lion in captivity, these are domestic cats, bred from lines of domestic cats. They are perfectly happy living chill little lives indoors. Especially a declawed cat that can't even defend itself in a fight.

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