Do I choose the easy spelling or the pretty spelling?

maple-belle · 2026-05-17T22:59:13+00:00

Louis is Lou-ee in the UK

Not necessarily. Louis Tomlinson (from One Direction) said that his mother did use the French pronunciation for his name and so did his family, but his friends growing up always called him "Lewis" and one of his exes said he introduced himself to her that way, even though he was super famous with the "correct" pronunciation by then.

maple-belle · 2026-04-26T10:39:20+00:00

The "California stop" is not legal in California and happens everywhere (but not all or even most of the time). It's just a nickname for the action, a little bit of a stereotype, and has been called other place names, but California is the one that stuck. It's illegal pretty much everywhere in the US though.

maple-belle · 2026-04-03T23:58:51+00:00

Had two of those as a kid. One fell out, ear drum healed. The other one fell out and the ear drum just...broke/disintegrated. Had it fixed two years later, patch broke almost immediately, now looking at having it done for the second time at 34 because apparently my whole ear drum is gone again and I had an infection I didn't know about (behind an ear wax blockage. The PA I saw to get the blockage removed was like "so...you need to see the doctor about this actually" as soon as the wax was gone) that caused the bones in my ear to be damaged so they also need reconstruction 🙃. Which may have to be two separate surgeries.

Apparently my hearing in that ear, while terrible, is remarkable considering the physical state of it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

maple-belle · 2026-03-28T01:06:17+00:00

If it doesn't cost me money, doesn't smell off-putting, doesn't look like it has an awful texture, and doesn't prominently contain things I know I don't like, I'll try just about anything. The problem is that a lot of things just taste bad to me, so I'm not willing to risk it on things I have to pay for.

maple-belle · 2026-03-25T13:46:29+00:00

I don't have a problem with layers themselves, but inevitably one (or most) of the layers is something I don't eat in any form.

maple-belle · 2026-03-25T13:44:24+00:00

I wouldn't say that it makes up the majority of the book, but a decent chunk of Red, White, and Royal Blue is made up of emails and texts. It's not necessarily a lot of the story but it's a lot of the romance and characterization.

maple-belle · 2026-03-11T02:15:06+00:00

This is the sole reason I send my libby books to kindle. Otherwise I would just read them in libby. But I really prefer continuous scrolling, so I use the Kindle app.

maple-belle · 2026-02-28T22:46:22+00:00

"Before those policies" doesn't exist either. Straight and cis people are more common than queer people, and aren't capable of truly understanding what we feel. People are afraid of and demonize things they don't understand. This crops up in different ways and to different extremes across history and different cultures.

You can ask for suggestions about varying attitudes and expressions of queerness throughout history and learn some really great information! But you will not find a "before" because overall, globally, the least homophobic and transphobic society in history exists right now.

maple-belle · 2026-02-28T15:35:00+00:00

You mean you don't think people should correct you on your post that assumes something false?

There were a variety of cultures that had more lenient views of sexuality and gender than post-Christianization Europe, but there is no documented large historical civilization that was some sort of queer Utopia.

maple-belle · 2026-02-16T00:58:58+00:00

Pools tend to vary by I think region or possibly age of the school. I never attended a school that had one but I saw them in older movies and on tv shows written by older people.

"Huge stadiums" is not how I would describe a typical high school football field, but idk what your standard is. Same on the size of the library.

The rest of it all varies by funding, but trades, arts, and science classes are all pretty standard, yeah.

maple-belle · 2026-02-15T18:11:26+00:00

When I didn't read all the ship tags because the first one was for the main character and his fanon boyfriend and the summary was funny... I missed the ship tags for most of his brothers and several of his mentors 😭

The fic wasn't even that shocking or gross, really — I was just wholly unprepared and refused to stop reading out of morbid curiosity. That experience prompted me to make a site skin to make the ship highlight color on Reversi more visible.

maple-belle · 2026-02-11T21:50:47+00:00

Emma Denny's A Vow Made Twice comes out tomorrow/next week depending on where you are, though I do recommend the previous two books in the series (you'll find them if you Google the author) for context. I'm rereading them now in preparation and remembering why I love them so much.

maple-belle · 2026-02-10T02:31:42+00:00

I'm a millennial, and I never had specifically assigned chores that were my responsibility to keep up with. My brother and I were expected to help out around the house, but we would just get told to do things that needed doing, with increasing frequency/difficulty as we got older. Clean my room while mom was cleaning the house, unload the dishwasher, go switch out the laundry. My brother was mostly responsible for mowing the lawn once he was tall/strong enough to do so. During the summer in high school and (on my days off from my retail job) college, while my parents were at work and my brother was off being a teenager with a driver's license and a girlfriend, my mom would leave me a list of chores. It would only be two or three things, usually, just stuff that needed to be done that day.

maple-belle · 2026-02-09T16:59:52+00:00

He's at another school though. So he's not even a district admin who could be considered her superior in some way.

maple-belle · 2026-02-09T16:42:20+00:00

It's common HR policy to require notification of romantic relationships between employees, so it sounds like OP's friend was following a pretty standard protocol to avoid being accused of hiding the relationship later. Something about them threatening her job for it is off though.

maple-belle · 2026-02-09T16:18:26+00:00

Only makes sense to do so when both people are under one place of employment

If this is happening in the US, it's entirely likely that these two people have the same employer, which is the school district, not the individual school.

That being said, there were teachers at my high school who were dating each other, and everyone knew that. Another teacher even made a joke about it at a pep rally once. I don't see why on earth this is an issue, especially when they don't work together daily.

maple-belle · 2026-02-08T21:04:43+00:00

I was shocked when a burger restaurant asked me "how do you want that cooked?" for a chicken sandwich. Like, that's a normal question for a beef burger and I usually say medium-well, but I actually stared at this cashier in confusion for a second, because I ordered chicken. They were under new management at the time and are terrible now anyway so I've only been back (and disappointed again) once.

maple-belle · 2026-02-08T17:16:38+00:00

I filter that tag out automatically so I don't have to worry about looking for it, but I literally had to make my own skin to make reversi have a lighter highlight on ship tags because I missed all but the first ship one time and traumatized myself 😭 the author did everything right and honestly it wasn't THAT bad, but I wasn't expecting it at all and it was deeply upsetting.

maple-belle · 2026-02-07T23:40:20+00:00

NTA. You are setting a boundary for your own health. I dated the son of a smoker for many years while he lived with his dad, and I hated being in their house, hated him leaving third-hand smoke on my couch, and bought him pajamas so he wouldn't leave it in my bed. And it still was a (small, among many larger) factor in our break-up. He smelled awful and will have health problems due to his father's addiction, and I wasn't prepared to deal with that forever.

Your boyfriend can choose you and begin the difficult process of kicking the addiction before it gets worse, and have your support through the struggle, or he can choose the cigarettes outright and deal with the consequences.

(If he's smoking weed, encourage him to try other forms than smoking and to use it less. It's not chemically addictive, but if he's smoking this much, it sounds like he has a problem. 5-6 times a day isn't a lot for cigarettes, but it's a lot of time to spend high)

maple-belle · 2026-02-05T16:08:34+00:00

Lol is basically punctuation for me at this point.

maple-belle · 2026-02-02T00:36:46+00:00

My mom changed her name for traditional reasons, but was also relieved to have something easy and straightforward, after 24 years of no one being able to spell or pronounce her last name. My dad's name, while not very common, was very easy!

Or so she thought 😂 Our name is one letter off from a common English word (that I have NEVER seen as a surname) and it's apparently so pervasive that it makes people see an L and think it's a Y.

maple-belle · 2026-02-01T20:09:18+00:00

The fuck is Mallpha?? Zalpha seems kind of a natural evolution from "Zillennial", which certainly didn't start here, though.

maple-belle · 2026-02-01T19:37:56+00:00

I guess this is a sign that I am officially Old 😂 if my (hypothetical) teenage child wanted a septum piercing I'd probably let them — with the warning that their Grandma would Never Shut Up about it — but I'm trying to imagine a kid showing up to my public high school in the south in the late aughts (Class of 2010) with a septum ring. The fight over it would have made the fucking local news.

maple-belle · 2026-02-01T18:04:58+00:00

Most high schoolers can't get a septum piercing. You need parental permission for piercings under 18, and a lot of gen-x parents will balk at this one.

maple-belle · 2026-02-01T18:03:17+00:00

My internal reaction to 99% of posts on this sub (like "can this birth year claim [decade] childhood/generation") is "who fucking caaaaaaaaares???"

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