u/LoveAndViscera

Without going into all the details, five-to-six nights a week, I sleep in the girls’ room and my wife wakes me up when my alarm goes off. Sunday, I don’t because it’s the one evening that my wife is reliably home, so we both take our bed.

Historically, one of the girls will start crying in the night and my wife will get up because she’s a much lighter sleeper than me and refuses to wake me up when the kids cry despite my entreaties partly at least because she gets so few bedtimes with them.

But she was still in bed when I woke up! The twins slept through the night! I knew we were close to this, but it’s happening! I’m so close to sleeping in a bed instead of a pad on the floor.

There’s no shortage of nosy boss stories and this isn’t exclusively a Korea thing.

But let’s break this down. Let’s say you need an advance. Why? Doesn’t matter. Life happens and you’ve earned that money. You are legally entitled to it and you need it a little earlier than scheduled.

Many bosses will demand a full explanation. Maybe they’re worried you’re preparing a midnight run. Maybe they have megalomaniacal tendencies. But you have three options. First, you can stand on reason and say it’s nunya and catch flack. Second, you can fess up and now your boss knows too much about your real life. Third, you lie.

Always take door #3, Monty! Do not merely lie, spill the spurious tea like it’s 1770’s Boston and you’re in a racially insensitive Native American costume! Go big! Weave a tale so long-winded and complicated and inane that your boss will regret ever letting you into their office.

“You know what, I’m glad you asked, bossman! I am absolutely fuming over this. So, I built my home PC from scratch. It’s not that difficult to do, if blah blah blah. So, I was looking for some RAM etc etc etc. The guy gave me a XS350 which is not the XL350 that he advertised. Jargon jargon jargon. So, I go to the police station and they’re all yadda yadda yadda. So I do this thing and the guy is like that and then I’m back at the police station and it’s uuuugh. So in summary, I spent ₩1,000,000 getting this part I needed and I’m almost out of lunch money.”

They want to get up in your business, give them way too much business and not a shred of it true. Waste an absolute maximum of their time. That’s what busybodies deserve.

Sago Mini Friends is frequently just a little off. A lot of the episodes have this-was-made-by-a-cult vibes. But my kids love it.

In this one, Harvey gets a new toy that he treats like it’s alive and Ginga is frustrated with how it’s ruining their games, but then they bully Ginga into playing with the squeaky pineapple and, after a song, she’s all on board.

It’s not a good lesson about imagination or trying new things; it’s just about embracing someone else’s delusion. Pineapple Pat is an AI chatbot and you’re supposed to stop complaining about it and fall in love with Bixby or whatever.

APRIL 1, 2026
Fans of a popular comedy D&D actual play show responded today to news that the group would be trying out a new system.

“I’m so excited that they’re trying this new system.” One fan said. “It’s my favorite system and the world it’s part of is so rich and beautiful that these jokers better lock the fuck in and do it right.”

Other fans voiced similar concerns. “The group is so chaotic, unhinged, and bisexual. Every episode of the last season had me dying but the jokes end now, bitch.” Said a Reddit user whose ID is a reference to the actual play’s first season. “They aren’t playing basic ass D&D anymore. This is a big boy TTRPG.”

The most common hopes fans had for this new season were a central conflict and clearly defined goal laid out in episode one; player characters who were deeply invested in that conflict and actively moved it forward; and fanatical devotion to the official setting.

“Every single scene needs to serve the plot.” Said another fan. “You want to do bits; save them for the talk back show.” Gesturing at their own eyes with two fingers, they added: “Brennan? Brennan. Don’t fuck with the lore!”

Brennan Lee Mulligan was not in the room, nor was the interview being filmed.

Yet, not the entire fandom shares this view. “Obviously they’re going to do a comedy version of this system’s type of story. It’s a comedy show.” A long time viewer told us moments before being attacked by an apparently roving gang of fans that shout jokes at improv shows.

“Everything this group does is peak, so the new season will be peak.” Said a young woman while nervously stroking her own hair. “It has to be peak. Because if isn’t peak, why is it my favorite show? My favorite thing can’t have flaws because then I wouldn’t have the best taste of anyone online. It’s gonna be peak. Total peak.” After seizing the interviewer by the lapels, she added: “IF IT’S NOT PEAK, I WILL KILL MYSELF!”

The call came in at 4:15am. A 5-year-old going by “The Dragon” needed to use the potty but suspected there was a monster somewhere between her door and the bathroom.

I made a sweep of the living room, kitchen, hallway to the bathroom as well as the bathroom itself. No monsters or monstersign detected. I then accompanied the Dragon to the bathroom. When she had finished her business, I accompanied her back to her room and got her settled in then slept for approximately 30 minutes before backup arrived to tell me that my alarm was going off.

Hello, I’m a linguist. I have degrees in etymology (the history of words) and pragmatics (how communication works). I’m here to explain all of the points Mr James made in his Smartypants presentation.

PH as /f/
<Ph> is not pretending to be <F>. <F> stole <Ph>’s spot. <F> used to be /w/.

We make the /f/ sound by gently holding our bottom lip between our teeth and /p/ by holding our lips together and blowing them out. So, /f/ is kind of like a softer version of /p/. That’s why people started writing /f/ as <PH>. The <H> softens the <P>.

Way back in the history of the Latin alphabet, there was no <W> and <F> was holding down the /w/ sound. But then the Romans started using <VV> for /w/ and <FH> took over /f/ but then they dropped <H>.

So, why do we still have <PH>? Virtually every English word containing <PH> is from Greek, which has the letter phi (which is pronounced “fee”, not “fie”). Phi got written as <PH> before <F> lost /w/ and that Romanization somehow survived the Latin shift. How? No one knows.

I before E except after C
There are a mere 44 words in the English language follow this rule and over 900 that break it. So, who screwed this up and how did they screw it up so badly?

The short answer is “Victorians and they didn’t know enough words”. Words go through trends. All of the trendy words at a given point in time are called “the vernacular”. In 19th century vernacular English, this rule was sort of true. Those 44 words were way more common than most of the other 900+.

But also, the Victorians just loved rules and weren’t as rigorous in their research as modern science demands.

English steals words
There’s this infuriating meme that English is three languages in a trenchcoat. People like to make out that English is running around beating up other languages and stealing their vocabulary. And it’s just not true.

First, English doesn’t come from England. It comes from Denmark (and portions of Northern Germany). Somewhere around the 6th century, a bunch of these Germanic people began immigrating to southeastern Britannia: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Their combined dialects became Old English.

Being in Britannia, they adopted a few local words because they didn’t have their own words for some stuff. But then, in 1065, the English King Edward the Confessor died without an heir (he may have been ace/aro) and three guys fought for his crown. The winner was Guillaume de Normandy, aka William the Conqueror; a Norman Duke who did not speak English. He spoke Old Norman French.

Normans are called Normans because that region was heavily colonized by Vikings (Northmen). So, he was speaking this French that was a mix of Old French and Old Norse. Old French descends from Latin, but it’s got a bunch of Gallic influences because the Gauls were conquered by the Romans.

So, English doesn’t steal from German. It is a Germanic language. It doesn’t steal from French or Latin. Those words were forced into the language at sword point.

But also, literally every language has a bunch of words borrowed from other languages. English ain’t special.

Silent letters
We used to pronounce all of those. English didn’t add silent letters. English speakers looked at those letters and went “nah”. So, why do we still spell them that way?

Tradition. That’s it. You would not believe how hard it is to get people to adopt spelling reform. It took the whole ass American Revolution to get the <U> out of “color”. Noah Webster rocked up with his dictionary like “we aren’t British, so we’re going to spell things differently because freedom”. That’s the level you have to be working on to get people to spell differently.

One day, a cleansing fire will come to remove <C>, an utterly useless letter, from English; but I doubt I’ll live to see it.

Island
Okay, this one is special and deeply stupid. “Island” used to be “yland” but then some guy in the 1500’s was trying to take English spelling back to its Latin roots. The Latin word is “insula” which descends into “isle”, but “yland” comes from Old German.

Somehow that got traction and we’re left using the stupid spelling.

Plantain vs Mountain
Syllable stress. It’s planTAIN and MOUNTain. English speakers have this tendency to slip a vowel known as a schwa into every unstressed syllable they can. But plantain gets the stress on the second syllable, those the /ei/ vowel.

Ballay
French drops terminating consonants. If you think English orthography is fucked, go look at French.

Spell it the way you say it
We’ve actually done this. Middle English (that’s English between William the Conqueror and William Shakespeare more or less) is kayotik with its spelling. People really were spelling everything the way they said it and that shit got locked down by…THE PRINTING PRESS!

Yes, mass produced books resulted in standardized spelling and your accent can go fuck itself.

*Wonderpets in the City* is a show on Apple TV about a guinea pig, rabbit, and snake traveling the world to help animals. Meaning that, despite the title, nothing happens in the city. It’s just three urbanite animals explaining to the wild rubes how all of their problems can be solved with teamwork and then standing back and watching the other animals do all the work; like some kind of domesticated animals’ burden.

The show is animated like a ransom note. It reimagines a collage of National Geographic clippings as Cecelia Giménez indulging in nostalgia for *Clutch Cargo*.

Unsurprisingly, there are frequent songs. These songs are presumably prewritten yet manage to sound like an episode of *Play it by Ear* where every one is Chris Grace. The score has zero interest in what the singers are doing, presumably because the singers are musical theater majors who were forced to quit their respective programs after their ear canals prolapsed.

It’s like an entire series designed to give hope to people who think practice is waste of animal.

I have three young children and such is the nature of my job that I don’t get to spend a lot of time having grownup conversations. I have found that my vocabulary, once the envy of SAT-takers everywhere, is not what it used to be. I need the most lexically-challenging podcast you can think of that isn’t STEM. I’m looking for people that talk like a NYT or Atlantic culture and society writer, but not puppet-mastered by an oligarch trying to reintroduce feudalism. Help!

I’ve been rereading some 2010’s Image and keep finding the finales weak. *East of West* and *The Wicked + The Divine* both had endings that felt too happy for what they had earned. *Luther Strode*’s third volume was plain boring. *Fatale* similarly didn’t evolve enough to make its ending feel climactic.

What do you credit that too? Is it something about how long it takes to finish? Is there something about the medium itself that makes finales unusually difficult?