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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • This is such a bizarre phenomenon. Not “micro-retirement,” but business news outlets learning about something that’s incredibly normal but might have a new name or angle, and then writing it up as if it’s this insane and reckless overreach (occasionally throwing the bone of “…though there might also be good reasons for this”).

    How do the writers behind a “micro-retirement” not get halfway through the research for this and then go “oh wait, I guess this is just normal PTO”?

    Same with all of the “millennials are destroying X industry” articles. Literally just “oh, this generation doesn’t like that product.” Or “people are house-hacking” articles (literally just having roommates). Or “Quiet quitting” (literally just doing your job).

    Probably this has a lot to do with people who are old, or who were born rich (or both) not remembering what it’s like to be young and poor, I guess. Or having corporate pressure to write an article lambasting young people for not working hard enough. Or just feeling the pressure to write something every day.

    I can’t believe it’s clickbait. That hasn’t worked in a decade or more, right?









  • You have to go pretty far back (to proto-Celtic, it looks like) to find a linguistic ancestor for the word “gull” that doesn’t just mean “that specific bird.”

    But in proto-Celtic, it looks like “weilanna” probably meant “wailer.” As in, “one who wails,” though we don’t know exactly what the suffix “-anna” means. A similar word in that language would’ve been “wailos,” which even though it sounds similar seems to have been unrelated to our modern term “wolf,” as it comes from a different proto-indo-european root.

    Anyway, the word “gull” does refer to the sounds that it makes more than anything else. So in figuring out what a landgull, airgull, and firegull might be, we need to find something noisy. Or just something annoying, given the derisive connotation of “wail.”

    Edit: This is, of course, assuming that we’re looking for different existing types of animals to be these creatures, rather than just (for instance) creating new, elemental forms of gulls; or “reskinning” seagulls with different elements; or inventing all-new animals to fill those roles.