site banner

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions

I have not absorbed normal formatting conventions, and I don't think anyone I know online/irl has either.

Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

Again, I did not know this, and I'd be surprised if anyone I know irl/online knew that either. When I write text on a computer, sometimes I want to make a vertical space, and I just do the first thing that works to make that space (here, I do use paragraphs instead of line-breaks, but that's because paragraphs happened to be the first tool that worked)

Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.

I cannot remember a time where I was unsure about the number of people "they" referred to in a conversation. In pretty much every case the "they" is initially going to be introduced as something which is clearly singular but of unknown gender (friend, cousin, teacher, student, etc)

Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike

I'm saying it merits nothing, except maybe a piece of fun trivia about the difference between line breaks and paragraphs.

I have reached the limits of my patience.

If this is really the reaction you have to formatting/grammar quirks, then I guess you just have an extremely unusual set of sensibilities. So fair enough.