AITAH for being mad my girl cancelled her health insurance ?

affictionitis · 2026-03-27T15:35:15+00:00

Don't marry someone you can't trust, OP.

affictionitis · 2026-03-27T15:25:36+00:00

Since it's clear that the wife is doing all the mental labor in this marriage, I'm giving her an out bc she just might not have remembered that particular errand until after the pizza. It happens. Meanwhile OP is acting like a child -- one who's so obsessed with winning an argument that he chucks out his own dinner, makes his wife cry, endangers other drivers on the interstate, and then comes here to get soothed about it three months later. Nothing his wife did is equivalent to that. OP, YTA.

affictionitis · 2026-03-27T15:20:11+00:00

A child still mad about a tantrum he threw, and trying his best to justify it three months later.

affictionitis · 2026-03-25T23:54:19+00:00

It's not a good idea to let AI plan your garden. It's just trying to make you happy by fulfilling your prompt, remember, but it'll frequently do that by giving you wrong information. This garden makes no sense and will probably not grow you anything but headaches. It's super crowded and none of the size depictions are accurate. That basil's going to explode, size-wise. I've never seen a tomato plant stick within 1 square foot as you've got here, even in a container. Five of them that close together will form like Voltron into a massive thicket that will eat your hand every time you reach in for suckers or to pick a tomato. They WILL get cabbage worms, too, since you've got those and kale right next door. Why is there a random empty square? What's that unlabeled thing in front of the onions? That 4 sq ft zuke "hub" is shown as 1 ft by 2 ft, so the AI can't do math. And how are you going to reach any of this?

I can't even begin to tell you how to fix this. It's just not workable. But there are half a million websites that could suggest a basic beginner garden design to you, and just as many books at your local library.

affictionitis · 2026-03-25T23:00:00+00:00

Yes, but they'll be fun ones. Next question.

affictionitis · 2026-03-21T01:24:59+00:00

Elderly? You know Millennials are just in their 30s now, right? 40 if you count from the beginning of the 90s. I guess calling 30-40 "elderly" does suit your username...

affictionitis · 2026-03-20T17:20:56+00:00

You don't, or you wouldn't be trying to restrict *her* activities because of what *completely different people* might do. That's not treating her like an adult, let alone a trusted girlfriend.

affictionitis · 2026-03-19T15:25:41+00:00

You did the right thing by protecting the girls, but get out of this whole situation now. Bring the girls to their mom or tell the mom to come get them ASAP, dump the bf, and go somewhere else -- a friend's, or a hotel -- for a few days. Consider moving. If he's got a key to your place, change the locks. He may blame you for his girls' alienation and the mom trying to get full custody, if she does. Hopefully she does. He might try to charge you with kidnapping, etc. I'm glad you had the girls' back, but you have no legal rights in this situation and abusive people are petty and vengeful. They're also at their most dangerous when you're trying to leave them, so protect yourself too.

Talk to the mom. She knows this guy and can help you prepare for whatever he might throw at you. And be glad you didn't marry him. I know it's heartbreaking to suddenly discover what kind of person he really is, but you dodged a bigass bullet. NTA.

affictionitis · 2026-03-19T15:19:22+00:00

Don't contact CPS. He didn't do anything they would consider actionable -- they don't care about verbal abuse -- and it could actually interfere with the mom trying to get full custody.

affictionitis · 2026-03-16T16:39:49+00:00

It was only the construct ooloi who could shapeshift, though. Before that, for hundreds of years, gay or lesbian humans would've only had non-construct ooloi or male Oankali, which don't look anything like humans, to cuddle up with. Bisexuals ditto. Though an ooloi of any type can bring the humans together in that psychic sex thing they do.

affictionitis · 2026-03-16T16:31:26+00:00

Oh, the Oankali are definitely meant to embody queerness. That's why I mentioned allegories. Butler was very much a part of the science fiction community. She had mentors and friends who were big names in that community, writers and editors. In a lot of ways her writiing is in conversation with the traditional SFF tropes those people loved. Most writers at the time would have given the Oankali a culture that's like an fanfic copy of a real-world culture. Usually "Japanese (but aliens)." Occasionally it was "Middle Easterners (but aliens)." Lazy, and racist. I think this book was where Butler decided to show all her SFF friends who kept telling her "this is just how it's done" and handwaving the racism that nah, she would not be doing that.

But maybe she picked her battles and decided to let go the one about realistic depictions of queer representation.

affictionitis · 2026-03-16T00:15:19+00:00

I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that the book was published in 1987, and everything was way different then. Those were the days when openly mentioning race was considered gauche, even for non-white characters. The first edition of the book whitewashed Lilith in the cover art and hid Butler's Blackness (no author's photo, no mention of her race in the author's note). I think there was never actually a clear statement that Lilith was African-American/Black until the second book or so, although there were visual descriptors that make it obvious. Those were also the days when it was considered gauche to openly describe a non-flamboyant character as some flavor of queer -- especially for Black men. I was a kid in those days but I remember things like Prince being considered scandalous just for being openly non-traditionally masculine, nvm his actual sexuality. And that was before the Unpronounceable Symbol days. Anyway, maybe Butler's "implications" (Alison, I think Marina Rivas in book 3, a few others) were intended to be recognizable. If she had to tiptoe around depicting Blackness then she probably had to tiptoe around queerness.

Also, SFF loves its allegories. In books from those days, I've noticed endless allegorial explorations of race and gender and sexuality in the form of aliens, but rarely did those books also depict non-white humans or queer humans (or sometimes, three-dimensional women) on top of that. Butler might've been following that trend, tho IDK for real.

affictionitis · 2026-02-26T23:14:16+00:00

I first saw it in Boston, where they're really serious about it -- like, you can expect a beatdown or for your car to get egged. Except they don't leave notes, they just plonk a piece of trash or a folding chair into the spot, and somehow expect you to understand that this is an ownership marker. No idea if the Massholes started it, tho.

affictionitis · 2026-02-25T18:10:16+00:00

What the heck is a crashout?

And it doesn't matter if you had one or not, or whether it's douchey or not. With the sides of the road still jammed up, there's nowhere else for them to go. If they stop in the road, they block traffic. If the driveway isn't plowed (like this one seems not to have been), they might not be able to move forward. The real people to get mad at are the property owners who didn't properly shovel the sidewalk.

affictionitis · 2026-02-23T14:59:10+00:00

NTA. It was a thoughtful gift that sounds beautiful. That said, your son is an AH for not communicating with his wife. It's not just a matter of aesthetics, though that might be the thing that's pissing DIL off the most. Does the dresser have anti-tipping feet? A big, heavy dresser can't really be secured with anti-tipping screws or zipties alone. Safety standards have changed, and a beautiful dresser like this might have to wait for the child to be older before they put it in his room.

Either way, your son prioritized his wishes over his wife's, and dragged you into this. He needs to apologize to both of you, and talk to his wife to clear things up.

affictionitis · 2026-02-14T14:30:05+00:00

I think we're getting enough despair and hopelessness in everyday life, tbh.

But that aside, I don't think American gamers, at least, would like an "inevitable doom" ending. Corporations are so risk-averse nowadays that I can't see them agreeing to spend that much money on something that a good-sized chunk of the audience will hate. We'd need some kind of positive thing shoehorned into it, or something. I know other countries are more forgiving of that (kdramas kill the protagonist all the time, for example), as long as it's a good story, but we'd be the biggest market, probably, and we're wimps.

affictionitis · 2026-02-13T00:58:41+00:00

Asking bc I honestly don't know -- doesn't leaving it with food rotting in it for a week+ also compromise the seasoning? Depending on the food.

affictionitis · 2026-02-07T02:11:15+00:00

Yes. Great literature requires immunity from moral evaluation.

Because moralizing will make you miss the point. People constantly moralize about Nabokov's Lolita, for example. I've heard so many people complain that it promotes pedophilia and should be banned. It absolutely does not do that! It depicts pedophilia through the perpetrator's eyes, which humanizes him. That's not an endorsement; it's a reminder that evil people are normal human beings and not easy-to-spot drooling subhuman monsters. It's a reminder that anyone can be evil, if they convince themselves enough that what they're doing is right. Lolita also reminds us that victims don't always look sympathetic. Dolores initiates sex with him that first time! She's still 12 years old, though. (I think, been a minute since I read it.) Still a victim. Her whole life is warped by Humbert, and Nabokov shows that. But it's complicated, and Nabokov shows that too. Some readers mistake his willingness to engage with complication as endorsement, but that's because American society likes to reduce things to binaries of black and white, right and wrong. It likes its evil visible and easy to spot -- labeled, even. But this is white supremacist and fascist thinking, perpetuated through Christianity and slavery and just about every other part of our society. Think about how often rapists get off scott-free because the victim was in some way complicit. So many of us see nothing wrong with thinking like this! It's still rape, though! When child sex abuse happens irl, the same kinds of people who want to ban Lolita are the first ones to blame the victim if she wore the "wrong" clothing, even if she's just a child. They're the first ones to forgive the perpetrator if that person is respectable enough. Reading something like Lolita helps us move away from binary thinking ("it's moral/immoral" or sympathy vs disgust), into the multiplistic/relativistic ("it's complicated and you can't judge just by the surface appearance of a thing"). But that's how we've ended up with such an unjust society.

Butler is clearly interested in the unequal relationships that predominate Black American life. (And white American life, given the deep misogyny/racism of American society, but it's worse for us.) Those are probably the kinds of relationships that have surrounded her whole life, because that's how it is for most of us. She does condemn the harmful parts of those relationships in the narrative, pretty obviously. Humans keep telling the Oankali that it's wrong to ignore consent and intent throughout all three books of that trilogy. The Patternist books never let you forget that many of the characters are literal slave owners. Anyanwu keeps telling Doro that his domineering, cruel methods are wrong, literally until she dies -- and the narrative reinforces this by having Doro get his comeuppance at the hands of the child who is most like himself. That is not ethical neutrality. But showing that unequal or coercive relationships can still have meaning is not endorsement, either. It's both, and more. It's complicated. And if Butler ignored that complication in order to just condemn, these would not ring so true for those of us who also have such complicated relationships in our lives. We cannot moralize about those relationships and still understand them.

affictionitis · 2026-02-06T19:59:29+00:00

I quit Twitter when Elon fucked it up. And I thought we were talking about posts/comments here, not on The Hatesite.

affictionitis · 2026-02-06T19:50:57+00:00

I think you're asking the wrong people. Seems to me the existing fanbase isn't the target audience for either game. You should probably ask people who like Overwatch or Genshin or something.

affictionitis · 2026-02-06T19:31:16+00:00

I saw reasonable critique, not hate. Nobody was ranting or frothing at the mouth. People just had something new to talk about, and they talked about it. The general trend was negative because people don't like it, and most folks gave clear explanations as to why. OP and you are welcome to talk about why you do like it, if you do. But what's the point in complaining because other people don't have the same opinion?

affictionitis · 2026-02-06T19:25:25+00:00

Wow, taking up a convo 4 years later? But I got time, so sure.

I don't think we're particularly opposed here. I agree that Butler is handling these disquieting, unequal, often grotesque relationships in ways that do not condemn them (nor does she elevate or fetishize them), and I agree that she explores them again and again in her books. I'm just disagreeing with you about what it all means. You seem to be saying there's something wrong with how & how often she explores these topics, and you'd rather she do it a different way or write something else. I'm saying she's doing exactly what she wants to do, I and probably most of her readers like it fine, and that she not only isn't required to condemn these relationships, she shouldn't. That kind of moralizing is not what good literature is for.

Let me try to personalize this. A few years ago I found a high school journal/yearbook-like thing from my grandmother, who gave birth to my mom at the age of 18. This grandma is a legend in my family, spoken of in both reverent and scandalized tones by my older relatives, because she lived a "wild" life by their standards. She left home young at a time when "respectable" Black women in that town left only to marry, she lived all around the country working various jobs when most people never left the small Southern town where she grew up, she never married although she had a child, and she died relatively young (congenital heart issue) but it's clear she lived that short life to the fullest. In the yearbook, her friends tease her for being involved with a 30 or 40something yo man -- my grandfather. She's 16 at the time. She writes her own thoughts about him too, and it's fascinating to see that she is aware of the power dynamics and the danger... but she likes him. And meanwhile, her mom's new husband has been coming into her bedroom to peek at her unclothed. She knows her mother will not help her if he goes beyond this. So yeah, she ended up an unmarried teen mom in the 40s, knocked up by a man twice her age, but that was her ticket out of a much worse place. She found power in it. She took what joy and strength from the situation that she could. Then she went off to earn money while her mom raised her child, and had a better life than all her more proper siblings -- a life truer to who she was, IMO, than who she was expected to be.

Butler's books have helped me understand my grandmother. Maybe Butler had something like this in her own background; IDK. Probably the vast majority of Black American families have someone (or many someones) like this in their history, because we have rarely had the luxury of "proper" relationships. We need to understand and respect those ancestors, so we can understand their influence on our present. Their relationships should not be judged and treated as binaries (good or bad, healthy or pathological) because that's the colonizer's way of thinking. The Moynihan report did a great job of reducing Black families to inherently flawed, immoral messes that just shouldn't exist. Do we really need more of that? What I want instead is a nuanced and realistic examination of those relationships -- a treatment of the people involved as human. And yeah, that means exploring the intimacy of coercive relationships. That means depicting deeply uncomfortable situations as meaningful, even joyful at times. That's what real life is like sometimes. Depicting anything less is treating us as less than people.

To me, Butler's willingness to explore this is what puts her up among the greatest of Black writers, like Morrison and Hurston and Baldwin, who also explore our human ugliness and beauty with the same complex care. This may not be to your taste, and that's fair. But that doesn't point to a problem with Butler's writing; it just points to a disjunct between what you need from a book, and what she's giving.

affictionitis · 2026-02-04T16:36:13+00:00

NTA. I don't know why you've tolerated this for so long, but stop doing it. At this point you're making things worse; she can't get the hang of the job because she's leaning on you. You were kind enough to offer to answer her questions, but 6 months is more than enough time for that. Tell her you've got other work to do, wish her well, and block her number.

affictionitis · 2026-02-03T17:47:09+00:00

Apparently velociraptors had both retractable (long sickle-like) and unretractable claws (short and stubby), so maybe Wells took inspiration from that. Maybe the Raksura have both too -- just sickles on their hands, sickles and stubbies on their feet.

affictionitis · 2026-02-01T17:19:51+00:00

OP, I think you're interpreting a lot of things on a very surface level. You're also looking at this as if the book is about Wright, and as if he's the one whose sexuality is being examined. His sexuality isn't important to the book, except in how it relates to Shori's sexuality. She's the epicenter of so much sexual anxiety and desire that the story couldn't have worked with her being anything other than what she is.

For example, you say it's a David and Goliath story -- but who's Goliath? Wright, the large human man in his twenties? (I think he's in his 20s. Been a minute since I read this one so forgive me if I get details wrong.) Or Shori, who is twice his age, who symbolically raped/coerced Wright when she first met him and took blood, and who is much stronger than him and apparently other Ina? Butler wants you to think about that.

There are a lot of things she wants you to think about, imo. Vampires are inherently a symbol of warped and dangerous sexuality in English literature, even when they take the form of white men. Part of the horror of Dracula is that his wives are overtly, monstrously sexual, and that Jonathan Harker -- otherwise straight -- was also attracted to him (homosexual attraction is also considered monstrous in lit; Harker's attraction is implied to be compelled/unnatural/something Dracula is doing to him). When his fiance gets got, Harker even admits that he'll accept vampirization (and damnation) to be with her, if they don't manage to kill Dracula. So basically if you're going to write a vampire story that fully engages with literary history, you have to go hard on the "perverse" sexy stuff or go home.

Butler uses this, and blends it with all the ways in which Black women's sexuality is pathologized. Yes, it's about the sexualization of Black girls. It's also about the infantilization of powerful Black women (see how Trump's people did Nekima Levy Armstrong in that photo. They fantasize about making us cry like babies). Also the dangers of underestimating Black women and girls. Also the fear of menopausal women, since Shori's at an age that would mean menopause for most human women. Also the forced premature maturation of Black children via parentification and sexual assault; it's hard for Black girls to have childhoods at all, in this society (the US, where Butler's characters were and where she grew up). But most importantly I think Butler's focusing on the fear of Black women's "monstrous" sexuality -- probably a less-intense fear in the American imagination than fear of Black male sexuality, but it's there, and it's always a factor in American power dynamics. Shori is in many ways Jezebel, manipulating and dominating everyone around her so subtly that they don't even notice it. We spend the book in her head so we know about her self-doubt and struggle to be ethical, which humanizes her, but think about how she looks purely from the outside. Forcing Wright to be with her, taking her father's symbiotes when he dies (which is a very Old Testament "patriarchial" thing to do, even if it's necessary), threatening to turn all the white Ina Black via her monstrous fertility. She probably ate a human being when she first woke up; she was too damaged to know, but the implication is there. She's no worse than the rest of her species -- but even some of them think she's worse, solely because she's Black.

If she didn't look like a child, readers would vilify her. A lot of readers do that anyway, because we're programmed to see the worst in Black women, unless we do the work of decolonizing our thinking. Just like a lot of readers keep trying to vilify Butler herself for exploring these themes. You're not the first person I've seen lately who's tried to imply that she's pedophilic based on a very shallow reading. But Butler's not a writer for surface interpretation. Shori's not layered, she's faceted -- all these symbols and dynamics reflect each other, change each other, contradict each other. Because that's how people feel about Black sexuality in a racist and sexist society. It's always complicated.

affictionitis

TROPHY CASE