I genuinely had to check Wikipedia to remind myself which civil war we call the civil war. It’s the Roundheads apparently, and even that’s split into the civil war I, II and III. Ridiculous.

I’m a millennial and don’t use Facebook. None of my zoomer family members use Facebook. In fact the only people I know who do use it are boomers.

I have two goddaughters, born 4 years apart. Each were due on 29th Feb, both arrived on the 1st March. I’m still disappointed by their lateness.

But in both cases the parents had decided to celebrate on the 1st of March on non-leap years, had they arrived on their due dates.

I used to row (in the UK) and agree. Swans are fucking terrifying and give zero fucks. I accidentally hit one with my oar once. I’ve been marked ever since. 👀

I’m not a volcanologist or anything, but surely you were taught there are different types of eruptions at school? The Pompeii one was some kind of super heated gas and ash cloud (again, not a volcanologist) that people had no chance of outrunning. The Icelandic one that shut airports blasted ash crazy high into the atmosphere, caused tonnes of disruption but not too much destruction. This one is a slow boiler - they had lots of advance warning, no toxic gas, no giant ash cloud - just a slow moving lava flow that is still causing destruction but hopefully no death.

Look, I was forced to learn R (very badly) for my PhD (which I didn’t complete). So technically I’m not a nerd (it’s sadder than that). Yay!!

Disney drop bear. It looks suspiciously clean… do you reckon it still has gonorrhoea or whatever it is they carry?

Mash.

Love the hat. Is it handmade?

I’m in the extremely vulnerable group so in 2020 I didn’t leave the house for 7 months… until my appendix burst and I spent 10 days in hospital. 7 long long months only to end up in the worst possible place for me! Amazingly I didn’t catch covid then, or since.

I’m gonna say no, it doesn’t count. Mainly cos I can move one with just a twitch from the other and I’m not special at all.

Omg 5 times?! I’m still sore about her doing it once!

Yup! That was after we got back from the vet when she was magically “injured”again. She stopped doing it when I made it clear I wasn’t buying it. But when my partner got home from work the limp returned… only on the other leg! 😂 I love that little idiot!

My girl did this! Years ago my cat came in hopping, completely unable to put weight on her foreleg. I was so worried I took her to the emergency vet, fearing she’d been hit by a car or something. I got there and placed her carrier on the counter and explained the problem almost through tears… only to open the door and for her to trot out on all four legs and jump down with no hesitation! That little idiot cost me £85 for absolutely nothing. The vet said she might have got in a fight too and was feeling a bit sorry for herself, but there was no evidence of a fight and she had no injury at all. I think she was just bored and messing with me.

EDIT: I found the photo I took at the time! April 2018, I’m still not sure I’ve forgiven her 😅

I hadn’t thought about it in such a long time but it sprang to mind the second I saw that photo. And it was really late and my partner was asleep so I decided to share my weird, barely relevant, but kinda wholesome story with some strangers!

When I was 15 I dated an older boy who cheated on me with his adopted sister’s sister (who was 13 to his 18 years) because I wouldn’t have sex with him. Yes - all round awful. He and his sister-child girlfriend hounded me and my immediate family for months and months for some reason. We had to go to the police in the end. Many years later my nana confessed that she bumped into him in a shopping centre around that time and he pretended he didn’t know her. She chased him down and hit him upside the head with her heavily overloaded handbag while shouting “that’s for being such a little shit to my granddaughter!” Best part - the mates who were with him nearly pissed themselves laughing at him. I’ve often tried to envision the scene and it’s not unlike this photo. Love you nana.

Yep, increasing the text size helped a little, but adjusting the spacing, alignment and margins helped a lot. I keep the margins thin/small, the alignment left justified and the spacing moderate-wide. Those adjustments plus the more legible font has made reading almost as easy as before my eyesight was damaged. I do have to focus more though, or the words/letters in the centre of my vision go walkabout!

I was able to show that people who stutter “stutter” when they read silently, as well as reading aloud! Although pressure/stress also makes stuttering worse, as you said.

That anticipation you mentioned - it’s called your phonological loop. It’s a cognitive process that happens subconsciously when we form words in our heads before speaking or as we’re reading. One school of thought about the cause of stuttering (and what my research supported) was that people who stutter are over vigilant in their phonological loop. Everyone analyses their speech before it’s articulated to a certain extent, but people who stutter seem to over analyse it like they’re almost expecting an error due to their stutter. That over analysis increases cognitive load and makes you even more likely to stutter; a self fulfilling prophecy, as you said.

I’ll take a look at my literature review later if I get a chance - I’ll let you know if I can find a paper about the effect of fonts.

I sustained damage to my macular last year and switched my kindle font to open dyslexic (as well as make the text larger and more spaced out) after reading became harder. That font helped to “anchor” the words down, particularly in the middle of my vision. Someone suggested a hyperlegible font which works almost as well but is better looking. From my very limited experience, I find the Cyrillic alphabet harder to read than the Roman alphabet - but that could just be my lack of familiarity with it. I learnt a little Ukrainian but only using duolingo.

I don’t know if this little nugget of info might help you, but years ago I was doing a PhD in psycholinguistics. I vaguely remember that different fonts can have an effect on comprehension and recall. I briefly considered an experiment to see if stuttering could be induced by different scripts. That was a long time ago though, I don’t know if that’s still the accepted case.

I implement the first two and the last rules in all the communities I moderate. Everyone gets either a message or a comment if they break the rules/I remove their comment/I give them a warning. I also reply to the vast majority of mod reports made, explaining what action I’ve taken and why. All my communities have a one-warning-then-you’re-banned rule, but bans are rarely permanent.

I repeatedly state that I’m looking for moderators, that I welcome all constructive feedback and suggestions regarding the way the community is run and what the rules are. I make it clear I want the communities to be a community effort. I’ve never ever vetoed a suggestion someone’s made - I always offer to let the community decide. What happens? People complaining/criticising but never taking me up on the offer to hold a vote on whatever it is they don’t like. It’s like shouting in the wind and it’s exhausting.