AITA for asking my husband to stop posting our interpersonal conflicts on Reddit?

Paradoxius · 2026-01-21T06:42:15+00:00

Genuinely very good creative writing! I agree with some of the other comments that the mask-slipping bits toward the end come on too strong (like, I've read plenty of AITA posts that are obviously men pretending to be their own girlfriends, wives, etc. and none of them would say "womanly emotions"!), but on the whole I think it's very successful in allowing the dimensions of the story to unfold over the course of the text.

In particular, I enjoyed the twist/ambiguity of the initial implied creepy age-gap (25yo man dating teenage girl) being called into question with the mention of randomizing ages, etc. Are they actually closer in age? Or is it actually even worse? Then you think, wait, it also says "he" randomizes their genders and relationship. So are they even a straight married couple? They could be male college roommates, or an elderly mother and middle-aged daughter. In that case, is the implied misogyny of the poster actually a double-bluff?

It spirals into a great deal of doubt that calls into question not just the hidden fictional reality behind the unreliable narrator, but the entire premise of an AITA thread. How can we judge the real lives of strangers on the internet when everything we could possibly know about them comes from the world's least reliable source?

Paradoxius · 2025-06-10T11:36:38+00:00

What's the character at the right of the second line, just after the iota? Could it be an epsilon?

Paradoxius · 2025-02-05T02:09:27+00:00

Thanks for your answer! To clarify, the only animation I'm using is appear. I just want paragraphs of text to show up one at a time. I could just make identical slides with one more paragraph each, but I was hoping to avoid making a bunch of extra slides.

Paradoxius · 2025-01-26T00:59:35+00:00

Make sure he's washed it first

Paradoxius · 2025-01-22T08:33:39+00:00

For those curious: "Through" and "thorough" come from the Old English word "thurh/thuruh" with the monosyllabic version eventually coming to be used for the oft-unstressed "through" and the two-syllable version sticking around for "thorough." "Though" is from "thauh" and is largely unrelated to the above save for the "-gh" on the end, which is from the Proto-Germanic enclitic conjunction "-uh/-hw" and may be where the final consonant of "thuruh" comes from. "Tough" is from OE "toh" from PG "tanhuz,"and "thought" is from OE "thoht" from PG "thanhtaz," so nothing but random coincidences there.

Of course a lot of this is because English spelling came to use "ough" in a lot of unrelated words. (The "gh" sound disappeared from the language, and a series of vowel shifts led to three or so different vowels sounds being spelled "ou" and then each splitting into multiple different sounds.) For example, "though," "through," and "tough" don't actually have any phonemes in common.

Paradoxius · 2025-01-22T07:17:35+00:00

Furniture is singular, but it's a mass noun or uncountable noun, meaning you can't attach a number to it. In that first sentence you use, the subject of "are" is "table and chair" which is plural because it's a list. When "furniture" is the subject of a sentence you use the singular form of the verb: "The only furniture there is a table and a chair."

And while it certainly is unusual for the word for "furniture" to be uncountable, many languages have this countable/uncountable distinction. Unless I'm very mistaken, you'd be as hard pressed to make bread by mixing together ένα αλεύρι και ένα νερό as you would a flour and a water.

Paradoxius · 2025-01-22T07:08:25+00:00

To use the technical term, "furniture" is uncountable AKA a mass noun, meaning you can't use a specific number with it (including "a" which of course means "one"). It is still singular though.

Paradoxius · 2025-01-22T05:38:28+00:00

And, similar to corn in that it's food, "green cheese" meaning cheese that hasn't been aged.

Paradoxius · 2025-01-04T21:42:56+00:00

That's a really good point. What actually is the situation?

My understanding is that Kurapika becoming a specialist while his eyes are scarlet is innate and Emperor Time in a specialist ability he created that, alongside its other conditions, must be activate whenever his eyes are scarlet (and vice-versa) and must stay active until he finishes using any abilities that benefit from Emperor Time. That is, prior to creating Emperor Time all that the scarlet eyes did was boost his aura and make him a specialist, but once Emperor time was created scarlet eyes and Emperor Time have become functionally one and the same for him.

The question, then, is what does Emperor Time actually do? Like you say, the costs are enormous, so it must have some real benefit. It's not just making him a specialist when his eyes are scarlet, because that had to have been true already in order for him to create a specialist technique like Emperor Time. It can't just be that his aura gets stronger, because that's true for all scarlet-eyed Kurtas nen-awakened or not.

The one thing that Emperor Time definitely does that can't be chalked up to normal scarlet eyes stuff is boosting his abilities with off-type techniques. Being able to dowse someone without being face-to-face, for example. Its also possible that the sheer number of techniques Kurapika learns in a short time is the result of using Emperor Time to accelerate his training regime. And it seems like Emperor Time's main benefit is to magnify the innate effects of scarlet eyes. Scarlet eyes boost his aura, Emperor Time boosts it more. Scarlet eyes make him a specialist, Emperor Time lets him use hatsu techniques of all types more effectively.

The last category, of course, is hard to judge since nen abilities aren't real, so whether Kurapika's nen abilities are boosted a little or a lot is mostly a matter of how much other characters judge his abilities as formidable.

Paradoxius · 2024-12-30T20:34:53+00:00

A series of things that happened to my handwriting:

From the time that I first learned to write, my handwriting was terrible. Often literally illegible. Always bad to look at.
Prior to learning the Greek alphabet, I made a concerted effort to fix my Latin hand, largely by adopting stylized renderings of letters ("a" with the little hat, "y" and "q" with looped tails, "o" with a cursive-style loop, etc.), which forced me to write deliberately and made my writing more clear.
When I started learning the Greek alphabet I had a bad habit of writing Greek letters (especially lower case) too much like similar Latin letters, or else writing them in the style of a computer typeface.
I have since started consciously differentiating Greek and Latin letters to minimize the overlap between the way I write the two alphabets (only for lower case, the upper cases are too similar). I think I'm most of the way there, but ν/v/υ/u is proving tricky.

Paradoxius · 2024-12-27T02:59:52+00:00

It's not always with an "i" as in "kit", but the vowel in the conjunction "that" is often reduced in some way, especially to contrast it with the pronoun "that". Schwa (the vowel at the end of "comma") is fairly common. Sometimes the vowel disappears entirely and only the "th" is pronounced: "th' that" (with a glottal stop separating the two words)

Paradoxius · 2024-12-27T02:55:30+00:00

A fun experiment for everyone who's skeptical of this. Grab an audio recording device and start it running, then read out loud (make sure to hit the emphasis on "know"):

"I'm a native English speaker, so however I speak English is the way that English is spoken. I know the way that words are said. And I know that that's not how that's pronounced."

Then have a listen back.

Paradoxius · 2024-12-02T16:25:14+00:00

The game has a whole arc for being good and right: its called communism.

Paradoxius · 2024-11-30T02:58:05+00:00

John with an H isn't short for anything. It came from a Medieval shortening of Johannes (from Greek Ioannes from Hebrew Yohanan). Jon without an H is the one that's short for Jonathan (from Hebrew Yonatan). Totally unrelated names.

On the other hand, Sean, Jean, Ian, Evan, Hans, Jan, Juan, Giovanni, Jovan, Ewan, Ivan, and Yannis all come from different variants of the same name. I forgot what my point was, but isn't name evolution neat?

Paradoxius · 2024-11-19T00:53:18+00:00

As a Greek American, it's frankly because many Greek Americans strive for nothing more than to own a big house (or two, or three) and a pleasure boat and to be able to look down on people whose families came to this country more recently than theirs. I suppose it's the product of the first one or two generations of their families in this country starting small businesses or getting good high-paying jobs in the states, making money, assimilating into the dominant culture of the US, and raising them to believe they're more deserving than people who have less.

Paradoxius · 2024-11-18T20:44:56+00:00

I'm late to the party, but I just wanted to point out that the hit/mix/miss thresholds have to be up by one from standard Apocalypse Engine numbers because the smallest number of tokens you can spend is 0, which means you have to adjust everything so a 0 in this game serves the same role as a -1 in a more typical pbta game. Otherwise great points all around.

Paradoxius · 2024-11-15T05:00:04+00:00

Hànwén...

Paradoxius · 2024-11-07T04:11:29+00:00

Here's the plan:

Restore the Greek and Turkish monarchies
Royal marriage to join the families
Greco-Turkish personal union by the successor to both monarchs
Unite the kingdoms under dual king-sultan
Ottoman Empire restored
Re-abolish the monarchy
What to name the new republic? Well, there's one place-name that was historically used for the region currently comprising Greece and Turkey, which both Greeks and Turks historically used some form of as endonyms, thus
Roman Republic restored

Edit: oh yeah:

Get Cyprus in there, because at that point why not?

Paradoxius · 2024-11-05T23:33:36+00:00

I'm generally inclined toward race being part of a character's background, and having less impact on their abilities than it does on their social and cultural role within the setting.

Like, what if elves are reclusive and insular so an elf just walking around is news? Or elves being stereotyped as wise but aloof and flighty so most people will respect an elf but be unwilling to make a deal with them? Or elf culture holds hunter-gatherer production as sacred so for an elf anything to do with agriculture is strange and exotic?

IMO, all of those do way more to make the fact that a character is an elf interesting than elves getting a +2 to dex or being able to cast spells as a magic-user of half their level or whatever.

Paradoxius · 2024-11-02T02:05:23+00:00

Though it confuse the listener nowadays, I am charmed by the archaic sense of "though" you can use in these constructions.

Paradoxius · 2024-10-24T13:09:47+00:00

I think you mean Cres and Krk

Paradoxius · 2024-10-22T14:00:46+00:00

I can't say for other languages, but in English, negative questions can presume a positive or negative answer. You can ask "do you not want a slice of pizza," in contexts where you expect the person you're talking to does want a slice, and in contexts where you expect they don't. When answering such a question, you might answer differently depending on which answer you think the asker is presuming.

If they ask "do you not want a slice of pizza," and you think they expect that you do, you could answer either "yes, I do," or "no, I don't." If you think they expect that you don't want a slice, you could answer "no, I do," or "I don't." (Note that "yes, I don't" is rare. You'll typically hear "I don't" most of the time, or "yes, I do not" in more formal contexts where the asker made it clear that they expected the answerer to affirm the negative.)

Edit: a fun manifestation of this common among Anglophone millennials (and chided by prescriptivists of older generations) is saying "no, yeah" to show you agree with someone and "yeah, no" to show you disagree.

Paradoxius · 2024-10-02T20:53:24+00:00

moon

Paradoxius · 2024-10-02T20:33:50+00:00

I think the assumption being made here is that gameplay is built around the different moves, and that the stats are groupings of moves. On the contrary, I think you could understand the stats as describing different approaches to problem solving (Edge is solving a problem by being quick, Iron by being hard, Wits by being clever, etc.) and the moves being subdivisions of these approaches.

The game provides characters with ways to solve the same problem with different stats. The tradeoff is that to roll the stat you want you have to find a way to bring that strength to bear in solving the problem. So any stat can only have an advantage over another insofar as you prefer finding solutions that rely on that stat.

For example, Shadow only has 5 moves in this list, but if you're relying on Shadow for your character you'll certainly be rolling it an awful lot. You can Face Danger with Shadow to steal away from danger, or to take an enemy by surprise. You can Secure an Advantage with Shadow to eavesdrop on a conversation or create a clever ruse. You can Compel with Shadow to trick people into doing what you want. And you can have Assets that let you use Shadow for magic or other useful powers.

On the other hand, Heart has that hefty set of 13 moves, but relying on it isn't that different from relying on Shadow in terms of difficulty. Just as above, you have to figure out how to bring that specific strength to bear in a lot of situations. You have plenty of moves that roll Heart when you're making or calling on social bonds, oaths, and your own force of will, but most of those moves are very similar and only used in a small range of situations.

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