Very frustrating to never find out what the deal is with transphobic sister and BIL. Had a very Chris Cooper in American Beauty vibe.

The bit from that one that really stuck with me is: What do i when im lost now? Do i just stay lost?

That poor kid.

I love Reddit updates. My taste in leisure reading is all plot, all the time. The updates are just distilled plot. Love 'em.

BORU is fun so long it's believable, but they always get greedy and end up taking it too far. After one or two well-received installments the updates tend to spiral into full soap opera - the transphobic sister morphs into a mustache-twirling demon, the cops come, arrests and restraining orders are passed around, the villain ends up penniless and despised, and then everyone claps.

4: That was how I originally read and interpreted the last update on inheritance, but then I reread and saw it was just saying she didn't get an inheritance because her father left everything to her mother. At first I thought it said she had actually been cut out the will, which would have been way more on the nose and sus, whereas someone being angry at the inheritance merely being not-yet seems a little more realistic.

4: My read is that it often starts out real, and then the person gets some attention for it, and writes the wish-fulfillment update that's a little too pat.

The best way to read them is like reading the legends of mediaeval saints. They twll you two things: First, a bit about everyday living conditions (the saint's miracle was to recover a ploughshare that fell down a well; clearly in this period iron was very precious and hard to come by) and second, a bit about fashionable worries and fears (this saint killed a lot of Moors and was canonised during a later war against the Turks).

Of course they're not true, but that isn't the point.

I stand by my belief that these two are true! And that they're saints.

5: Being angry that your mother inherited your father's entire estate (which is typically the default in most places) doesn't make a lot of sense (*), unless the family is very wealthy or the sister is from a prior marriage.

(*) It makes about the same amount of sense as causing a major family rupture because your gender-non-conforming sibling put on a skirt.

9: It doesn't make sense to get mad at, but plenty of irrational people still could.

Same to 9.2.

I'm not really familiar with this genre. Are many of them known to be fake? These two don't seem particularly implausible to me.

We know there are people out there who like to make things up for the thrill/satisfaction - viz. Dear Prudence.

My take is most of the viral dramatic Reddit posts are the kind of thing that could be true, because life is a rich tapestry. But some significant chunk of them - not necessarily predictably - would turn out to be false if checkable.

I forget if it came up here, but this was the big viral one a year ago. Read the whole thing before clicking through to the song.

10: Totally agreed, but it makes me even more curious WTF these people's deal is.

I'm not sure why, but the first story linked struck me as being true, and the second felt to me completely fake.

13: But BoRUs are harder to fake because they are spaced out over time, and whoever is doing the compiling often combs through all the users posts and points out inconsistencies.

Twain:

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

17: I guess, but the ones that go viral have presumably passed that gauntlet. And there's been like a decade of testing by fire.

That reminds me, I was in the CVS today and they had "Emergency Burn Cream." Seemed unnecessarily restrictive. I guess if you don't burn yourself badly enough to declare an emergency, you need to use a lesser cream?

But BoRUs are harder to fake because they are spaced out over time, and whoever is doing the compiling often combs through all the users posts and points out inconsistencies.

I don't think it's entirely beyond the wit of man to write a piece of fiction and publish it in instalments.

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the Mississippi "in its immensity and crookedness"

I think they mean the river.

Yeah, I've been away too long to really say whether Louisiana is still ahead of Mississippi in crookednesss.

19/21: I agree that some of them are fake, for sure. I just think that some of them are also real.

After Kevin's post about the olden times (I don't really care about that particular thesis) I've been coming back to the thought that a lot of inexplicable behavior is driven by people being way more stupid than you might imagine if you interact with not-stupid people regularly. They jump to conclusions, draw incorrect inferences, believe obvious bunk, and make terrible choices. Everyone does this, of course, but a lot of people get it wrong a lot of the time, and it's simply because they're stupid. So when I find myself thinking "what is WRONG with people?" I try to remember.

I once had some trouble with the woman who was selling me her condo, and I described the problem to (at least) two people: the smartest engineer at work, and my father.

Smart engineer: "The cause is obvious: she's stupid."
Father: "The cause is obvious: she's an asshole."

(Or both.)

26: They lack menwha.

They'll know what?

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Learning that his patient was coming off a three-day drinking binge, the doctor assumed the problem was alcohol related and went home for the night. When he returned the next morning, he was surprised to find the man violently ill and spewing black vomit.

30: Yo, break it down, zebra time.

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He first contracted the disease a year earlier and had been taking quinine and arsenic with mixed results ever since.

OT: I don't get the iPad. Aside from not being familiar with the keyboard, it's too big to hold comfortably in one hand for long periods of time and too small to big to rest easily on my lap.

OT: I don't get the iPad. Aside from not being familiar with the keyboard, it's too big to hold comfortably in one hand for long periods of time and too small to big to rest easily on my lap.

Plus, it's too easy to double post.

I don't think these things are going to catch on.

I have an old one that is sort of strewn around the living room, and I mostly use it to find my phone.

I don't have an iPhone, so I don't think that will work.

Use the iPad as a flashlight?

I should figure out to turn that on.

I use mine to read the internet in bed at night, so that I don't pick up book by mistake.

I dunno, the second one seems plausible enough under the rubric of "do families get dysfunctional and engage in weird, gaslighting-based conspiracies?" I think most people can point to some less-juicy anecdote in their own lives that's not too far off from that original lie. My aunt often digs holes for herself like that, but they're usually so inconsequential that the rest of us just roll our eyes and carry on. She and her best friend stopped talking to each other once for six months over an $8 coffeeshop tab.

Or the woman I used to work with who made some offhand comment about how annoying it was that her brother-in-law's mail kept getting misdelivered to her house. An extremely pro forma follow up question from me led to her divulging that she and her husband live two houses away from the brother-in-law, but the brothers have not been on speaking terms for 20 years. And this was in the city, not some goofy small town. Why didn't one family just move to a different neighborhood? Bizarre, but true.

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Speaking of small towns, and weirdness, one of my Sunday school chums became a British subject 5 years ago, and now she's standing for election to her town council in suburban Birmingham. Labour, of course. Not so weird if you know her, and especially not if you know her mother, who steamrolled her way around church committees when we were kids. I just can't imagine wanting to get involved in small town politics in a country you've immigrated to. Perhaps it is different in merrye olde Ynglande, but the small town politics I'm familiar with here would send me screaming for the hills if I somehow got drug into them.
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Citizen, not subject.

Is Chucky 3 no longer by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith?

Yes, which is how you can tell that it isn't 1949 any more.

You can tell because of all the Nazis.

You (for younger than 1983, born outside the UK values of you) can still become a British subject, but it's a sort of half-citizenship for stateless people and not something you'd normally want.

This is also cute, given that the term stopped being widely used in the UK, as ajay notes, in 1949:

All citizens of Commonwealth countries were collectively referred to as 'British subjects' until January 1983. However, this was not an official status for most of them.

I'm sure they liked that.

As the link explains, the only substantial (small values of substantial) number of people who are British subjects are the ones who applied to the Irish government for permission not to be Irish in 1948 in so far as they're not dead yet. God alone knows how weird you had to be to do that. I don't think any of the other countries other than the RoI offered the option of refusing to become Australian or Ghanaian or whatever but I may be wrong. It is of course possible to have dual nationality.

It's interesting as it's the last vestige of the old single citizenship with one passport for the whole empire; as countries, including the UK itself, legislated to carve themselves out of the single citizenship, the older system was kept so as to make sure nobody was rendered stateless. This is the very last catch-all exception; you'll notice the link with statelessness in the form.

You had to be very weird to do that, especially because as an Irish citizen you can do basically anything a British citizen can in the UK, so they were punching themselves in the mouth really hard. I think they also had to explicitly refuse UK citizenship when the 1949 Nationality Act came into force.

Sorry, 1948 Act, 1949 Ireland Act, which fixed the problem that the 1948 one accidentally de-Britished Northern Ireland!

Interesting; sounds comparable to the "American national" status that exists primarily for Samoans who don't want citizenship.

Recently was reading up on the weird FIFA eligibility rules for Northern Ireland (who have their own team).

One issue is that usually one piece of land can only count as the territory of one federation (eg because Puerto Rico has a FIFA team, PR doesn't count as US territory), but Northern Ireland is counted as the territory of both the Irish Football Association and the Football Association of Ireland (yes, those are the names, I'll leave it to you to guess which is RoI and which is NI). This matters because in addition to having the right nationality you need one of: you're born in their territory, a parent or grandparent is born in their territory, or you lived in the territory for 5 consecutive years.

The other issue is that usually you need to hold a passport of the country of the association you play for (so for PR you'd need a US passport), but you can play for Northern Ireland without actually holding the UK passport that you're eligible for.

48: If you're older than 1983, you're probably an oak tree or a fungus.

Hard to pull off jokes when you only check on the blog every 12 hours or so. L'esprit du lecteur intermittant.

It's not so much that Samoans don't want citizenship, it's that they want to ban American citizens from purchasing land in Samoa, right?

They definitely don't want citizenship for themselves because they think it would threaten communal land rights. It wouldn't actually but the perception is widespread.