witch's curse: lip balm doesn't work on you anymore

The Latin phrase et al is short for et alium, meaning "and garlic", originally used in recipes to indicate that they should include the baseline ingredients considered obviously delicious additions to all foods. It gradually got extended to mean "and the other obvious additions" in a broader sense, and with this meaning was adopted into various Romance languages and those influenced by them, such as English.

referring to a place by an exonym is imperialist but using the local language for it is appropriative, so please be sure to refer to locations by coordinates only. unfortunately longitude is eurocentric so please instead use the new Coordinated Universal Meridian which places 0° latitude at the weighted median location of all of Earth's population, updated annually based on the latest available data and published in the Coordinates Universal Meridian Mandatory Yearly Supplement

Liz has, for various reasons, historically struggled to find the bandwidth to watch TV and movies. in recent years though that's been changing! she watched sixteen films this month which I think might be a lifetime record for her

but every silver lining has a cloud, as the saying goesn't—the more stuff Liz wants to watch, the fewer things I can justify watching on my own! oops

I think it's really cool that a universal linguistic constant is using another language's word for "bread" to mean "bread in the style of that cuisine", and I think we should broaden the application of that pattern substantially. For example I think every language should use a transliteration of the word "car" to refer specifically to needlessly oversized vehicles with terrible mileage

not so much a costume as just me being hot in a slightly more goth-inflected direction. we got one group of trick-or-treaters quite unexpectedly and they said "whoa what smells so good" (it was the hot pot)

Me: You ever think about how amazing consciousness is? Like, how everything beautiful in the world exists not just in itself but also in the reflection in the minds and hearts of every single person who appreciates it?
Zandra: Except for Jim the Philosophical Zombie.
Jim the Philosophical Zombie: I deeply appreciate beauty! ...as far as you can tell 😉

speaking of Windows my computer has developed a delightful little quirk where it hisses and pops over headphones but only if there is not a Windows settings window open. I discovered this by opening up the sound settings to try to fix the hissing and popping and succeeding but not in the way I had intended