u/Basilisk_Tape7

For a long time I treated my setting like everyone living in it had access to the same wiki I did.

If a war happened 300 years ago, people knew why. If an old fortress was built for a certain purpose, everyone more or less understood that purpose. Different cultures had opinions, but the basic facts were always conveniently correct.

Recently I started messing with that.

One city is proud of a famous "victory" that was actually an organized retreat. A religious festival supposedly commemorates one event, but historians think it started almost a century earlier for a completely different reason. People in one region confidently blame a neighboring kingdom for introducing a crop that archaeological evidence suggests they were growing first.

None of these are huge secret twists. Most will never even be resolved in the story.

But suddenly the world feels much more real to me because people inherit bad information, simplified stories and local myths just like we do.

How much incorrect history do you intentionally put into your worlds?

Pendant ma dernière recherche d’emploi, j’avais pris l’habitude de répondre à chaque mail de recruteur presque immédiatement.

Même quand le message arrivait à 21h, pendant le déjeuner ou un dimanche, j’avais cette impression qu’attendre quelques heures pouvait donner l’image de quelqu’un de peu motivé.

Au bout d’un moment, je regardais mes mails beaucoup trop souvent et chaque notification me mettait un petit coup de stress.

Cette fois, j’ai décidé de fonctionner autrement. Je consulte mes mails deux ou trois fois par jour et, sauf urgence réelle, je réponds quand ça m’arrange. Parfois deux heures plus tard, parfois le lendemain matin.

Et surprise : absolument rien de catastrophique ne s’est produit.

Les recruteurs continuent de répondre, les entretiens se planifient normalement, et surtout j’ai arrêté de vivre comme si chaque mail pouvait disparaître si je ne sautais pas dessus dans les cinq minutes.

Je crois que j’avais confondu être réactif avec être constamment disponible.

Vous avez aussi des habitudes de recherche d’emploi que vous avez dû volontairement calmer ?

I've noticed that people here seem to have much stronger opinions about phone calls in the evening than I'm used to.

A German friend once looked genuinely surprised when I said I'd called an older acquaintance around 21:15. To me that wasn't particularly late, but he said he would never call someone after 20:00 unless they were a close friend or he knew they were awake.

Since then I've started noticing it more. Some people seem fine with WhatsApp messages at any hour but treat an actual phone call after a certain time almost like you're ringing their doorbell.

Obviously I wouldn't call a coworker or someone I barely know at 23:00. I'm more curious about the grey area between roughly 19:30 and 21:30.

Is there a commonly understood "too late to call" time in Germany, or is this mostly generational? And does it change completely once you're close to someone?