conuly

If it's freshman year of high school, and both in canon and in your fic the protagonist meets his girlfriend freshman year of high school, then he cannot talk yet about how he "always" spends his summers at her family's lake house. He hasn't done that yet! He can't even say that in summer after freshman year because at that point, it's only happened once.

If your protagonist has been at their job for three weeks, their boss can't complain that they take every third Friday off. Yes, you remember very well that this was a running complaint by the time the series started, but your fic is a prequel and that hasn't happened yet.

Please. Think a little. All I'm asking here.

(These examples are made up in my head, but it comes up a lot.)

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As always, the second team is my favorite. The third... okay, I want to hate Larkin because of what he said to his sister that time, but every time he opens his mouth it's just painful. Somebody needs to hug him.

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In a few months, the eldest child on Amy’s bus will be gone. Not for a day trip. She will move to the mainland, across the sea, and live there through the school week, because the island’s only secondary school is in the north, and a school bus from the south, stopping at every road-end, would swallow up to three hours of a child’s day.

...is a 90 minute one way commute supposed to be impossibly long? So long that boarding is really preferable, even though everybody agrees it sucks? Because I'm pretty sure my sister's commute was about that length in high school, and she was only going from Staten Island up to Midtown. It's not ideal, but it certainly is doable, especially if you only are riding one vehicle and not doing the whole bus-boat-train thing. The DOE doesn't even consider it a hardship that merits a transfer until it's more than 90 minutes, routinely. It's homework time! (I agree that this new high school, if it's supposed to serve the whole island, should be centrally located.)

Of all the terrible things to happen to a child, commuting for three hours a day is still better than unwanted boarding school. I mean, it's gotta be. And if it's all the stops that add to the time, why not have the kids meet at one or two locations instead of "stopping at every road end"? That's bound to make the drive faster. For that matter, if they really think the daily commute is too long, couldn't the kids come home mid-week? The ferry - I just checked - is about an hour. They'd be home on the weekends and also one night in the middle of the week. That's better than the whole week, right?

why my skillet is full of cat hair!?

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and then my computer restarted and my browser updated and I lost all my open tabs and I couldn't just restore the old window from history! Thank goodness I found a workaround, but it was a slow, tedious process to open (most of) my old tabs again.

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Yes, it is a correct statement that somebody who lived 1400 years ago would not be able to understand you if you are speaking English.

And it is a correct statement that if they are educated, they may well speak Latin.

It is *not*, however, correct to assume that you will be able to converse, aloud, in Latin just because you both happened to learn Latin!

Welcome to the terror of Medieval Latin, my dude! If Living Person learned Classical Latin as an intellectual exercise in school, and Dead Person learned Latin just to speak to educated people far away, they may not actually have enough in common! (Also, if our living character happened to learn traditional English pronunciation - and he might actually be old enough that this is the case! it managed to persist until the 20th century! - that's another potential barrier to comprehension even if they're both speaking the Latin of Cicero and Caesar. But let's not muddy the waters even more.)

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is just how much time I'd spend telling younger people not to put themselves down.

People - mostly adolescents and young adults, as near as I can tell - do it astonishingly often - "my dumb self forgot this word", "I was so stupid and I didn't remember that", "I threw out my favorite toy because I was a stupid shitty little kid" - like, please stop.

I mostly tell them to stop because they deserve better than to be insulted by the person who knows them best, which is true, but sometimes I feel like telling them to stop because it's not cute and it's not funny, it's just inconsiderate and it puts the rest of the conversation on an awkward and uncomfortable note.

I don't say that because what if it's not some bad and immature habit, what if they really feel that way about themselves - but omg I want to say it.

( But here's a video of a clam digging into the sand )

I'm not sure what I expected when I watched that, honestly.

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but now my ankles are aching. I cannot catch a fucking break with my body wtf.

(I ought to wrap them, but I won't. Compression always makes me itchy. I'd rather not be itchy.)

Aw.

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just to figure out where they all are? You know your legs and arms and fingers are in there somewhere, but you were asleep or reading or anyway they're all touching each other so they could, individually, be anywhere?

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The real problem is not that it's hot in the summer, it's that it's not cooling down at night. Hot in the summer is what we expect. Not cooling down at night is what kills people.

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so many people are expressing concern that our beloved 11 year old talks about how much he enjoys cooking and - okay, yes, we all know he has an abused child backstory, but they don't know that! 11 years old is a perfectly reasonable age to know how to cook, or to enjoy it as a hobby! Lots of kids that age can cook and bake!

It's deeply annoying. The writer clearly is making some assumptions there, and I do not like that assumption.

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but at least it's cooled down!

(I always picture all this rain after a heat wave like somebody reaching up and literally wringing out the damp air.)

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