just adding to the dialectic notes - west coast
us, literally never heard anyone say "floppies" outside eyeroll jokes, tho also never heard "diskette" out loud. for us, it was casually "disk" (even tho that's not exclusive), or a full "floppy disk" if leaning formal/pedantic.

i mean, also for younger folks, a lot of vcr's literally say "VHS" on the flap where you insert the tape - i've never seen a machine physically stamped with "VCR." (and to your point - a lot of dvd players have "DVD" on the machine, "Blu-Ray" on bluray, etc)

again, in the absence of more info (and tbh it not really being our business), i just hope all the adults love & corporate in working out the best possible plan for the kid. but i'm emotionally itchy at the quietly downgrading rhetoric i keep seeing, and how that coincides with larger patterns.

i mean, if my wife had been caring for my kid for potentially as long as that kid can remember (again, we don't know the timeline, but the kid is 6? she could've been involved since diapers), i would trust that she would deeply love that kid, would consider the kid her family & responsibility.

i hope everyone who loves this kid works together to do the best the can. but that's why i asked when you spoke with certainty.

i don't know how they think of each other, or the timeline of their family. but some of this rhetoric + quotes from paternal grandfather (who also seems to have been asked in a terrible moment, so myb unmeasured) feels like a lot of nontraditional parent (esp queer)'s nightmare scenario.

absolutely not trying to downplay his importance as father, or what this kid has/is going through. but that presumption is being used, w/ varying degrees of directness, to downplay the importance of the stepmother.

I tried searching bc reporting & rhetoric about it all seemed weird - the families (extremely reasonably!!) seem to have locked down, but his tombstone reads "son brother dad" - not husband. (Feels creepy to post, but find a grave was like 5th search result for his name yesterday, not a deep dive.)

I think ppl are confused by the vague wording in reporting ("...was previously married to..." etc), but were they married when he died?

in this regard, it's roughly the same as germany or the uk; she has long term residency, but not citizenship, & only citizens can vote in our federal elections.

constantly strange to me when folks make this argument. i had a lot to learn at 12, but neither i nor my friends thought cruelty or open mockery were fun/interesting/ok. i vividly remember a new-to-us kid making an unkind joke, & stopping at a chill "nah." who/what taught young you that this was it?

oooops, few *centuries,* not credits (??? swype ???). anyway! human history/discovery is fascinating & inspiring & sometimes heartbreaking :)

and that parenthetical (memorialized) is bc we tell ourselves a story of knowing *since then,* but we've needed reteach cycles in those few credits! and we've had to learn these can go too far - turns out, for example, minimizing contact with infants actually increases "failure to thrive" deaths.

tbh, a big part of this cluster is that it's the time this stuck (memorialized) in the culture that became hegemonic - many of these advances (to be fair, often w/ differing explanations) were discovered-lost-rediscovered many times over in many places.

tbh, many times just one + me thinking the book looked interesting was enough. so many books come out each year that it's impossible to take a good luck at everything - one order (esp a preorder) is also a prompt to look a book over.

the coverture system (arguably still the law for children) was *extremely bad* for women, but white women have never been legally property in this country. (i sympathize w/ the rhetorical point! but, more, i think it's important for white women/women-adjaceny to remember relative privilege.)

you think the massive numbers of non-citizen adults & other adults stripped of the vote & literally all the children should be caught up in hurricanes or whatever? cool story i guess.

only about 57% of eligible texan adults successfully cast a ballot in the last election, & trump got about 56% of those votes. you think the other 70ish% of eligible texan adults feel great about that?