The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life. He didn't have to live with his wife much. He liked the idea of having a daughter.

Given the hand he was dealt it's a pretty good outcome for himself. Grossly selfish, but not a waste for himself.

Some don’t fully understand that the universe does not owe you any camaraderie in your affairs. Not even a small mouse to talk to. Many live the same paths we live entirely alone. While life took from her a real romance, it did not take from her partnership. Friends along your travels is not guaranteed, neither are best friends, or the bestest of best friends. Make do, seriously.

Who's to say the mother didn't have an affair or two along the way?

People usually do know what they're marrying into.

Yup, though often will deny it if it comes out. The ‘subconscious’ part is not often fully unknown forever, even if it may be uncouth to acknowledge such awareness.

This, I do think parents have a right to secrecy. Kids don't have to know everything.

Even the idea that our partners/spouses/SO should know everything about us is waaaay too extreme. I think that as long as we love and don't hurt each others and we respect the rules we set between each others it is ok to keep some things secrets.

From what I understand from the author's post, the whole marriage was a big lie to begin with so it is not like authors parents really loved each others. While we can criticize his father for not accepting divorce and thus allowing his mother to rebuild a life, we can hardly call him cheating. And I don't think kids have a right to know everything. I know my parents have had at least one major crisis when I was a kid without knowing the specifics but I have no right nor need to know why. It was between them.

A lot of couples only stay married because it is easier from an organisationnal, social and economic point of view than divorcing anyway.

> The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life.

If his wife had been content in a low-intimacy marriage, then that would be one thing. Some people are -- they have security, they have children, they have approval of their family, they're fine.

But his wife wasn't -- she wanted to end the marriage, to try to find romantic, sexual, and relational intimacy elsewhere. And he actively guilt-tripped her into staying with him, multiple times.

He got to experience romantic and sexual intimacy the way he wanted, while preventing his wife from doing the same. He stole decades of the prime of her life from her. There is simply no justification for that.

Sometimes people use "waste" in the sense of "spent selfishly/frivolously." I enjoy evenings spent with prestige television and a tub of ice cream but, past a certain point, it's definitely a waste of time, especially if I have commitments to other people.

Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you?

There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe

The author obviously has this as an acquired habit or affectation, possibly for stylistic reasons. It's interesting that some people can read this just as well as normal prose, but to others it feels as if someone is pouring sand all over their well-oiled gears. I gave up after a paragraph as well.

I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.

Many readers rely on articles being written in a specific language, does that mean every writer is obligated to publish every piece in every language?

Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?

Maybe it's because I studied poetry, or because I was a voracious reader of experimental writing when I was younger, but I've probably worked my way through thousands of pages of uncapitalized or unconventionally capitalized writing; I can empathize if it's more difficult for you to read (personally I would consider an absence of paragraph breaks a nearly-unforgivable travesty), and I wouldn't even deny you the opportunity to complain about it.

But I think calling it "a must" for accessibility is perhaps overstating it a bit.

There is no obligation at all (my comment did not include any must beyond that being a requirement for broadly accessible text either). Merely the observation that if you want to write accessible text in any chosen language, following conventions means that you expand your reach.

Experimental language has its place. I can quite enjoy that too depending on the context. But combining the wish to convey a story or message with avant-garde text layout turns it into something more akin to art. I'm not always in the mood for that, in part because it is more taxing to engage with. In this case I figure the goal of the author is for readers to hear their story, not grapple with their specific manner of self-expression. Of course if their life goal is to make lowercase text common and acceptable, then this may be completely on point. My point about the accessibility of the text still stands though.

> Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?

I can train myself to read text upside-down as well, or in Klingon, or with no spaces at all. I have no wish to do so, since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers. Besides, being able to read well because you have a solid grasp on the conventions, lexicon, and idioms used is a net benefit to me. Our brains are pattern matching machines after all — pattern recognition is what we humans excel in. If have no desire to diminish that skill either.

> since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers.

To push back on this, following convention is often the easy thing to do (so not something regarded versus defaulted to).

There's a literary history of form influencing story; there was even a story about a famous example of this on HN recently that discussed this year's Nobel laureate—who notably publishes long novels that play with punctuation conventions: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

I find that people who make a point out of violating writing norms as part of their house style typically don't have thoughts worth communicating. Nothing is missed by not training myself instead of reading something that flows smoothly.

in my experience, it is not a useful heuristic

a non native English writer may have a "house style" that you see as violating norms

dismissing all those people removes a great diversity of thought and expression from your mind without due consideration

better to engage with more ideas, even those in unusual packaging. learning to read it easily and without bias is two kinds of skill growth anyhow

Generally agree with that, but in this particular case I don't think this text was designed to be broadly accessible, given the content and the platform (little indie website).

Edit: checked out some of their other posts and they don't always use this style. Seems like a pretty deliberate choice here.

It doesn't improve readability for sure but for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.

English is a second language for me and I feel really bad when I impose a grammar mistake or a badly put together sentence to my readers!

So for me pushing that on purpose is borderline insulting to the reader ie. suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.

> for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.

Same for me. See Sam Altman, for example.

> suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.

These days you actually have to fight against spell checkers to avoid having capitals after a period.

The lower case "I" stands out very much in reading it as a self-annihilating affectation.

However, the sentences are well formed. If you really want to lose your breath, try "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Marquez. You really won't be able to put it down.

Or Finnegan's Wake, for that matter.

It's interesting to me that you had such difficulty, and it makes me wonder how old you are. Growing up using instant messengers on the internet in the '90s and early '00s, it was normal to type without ever using capital letters, except for emphasis. The only thing that changes that style is when someone is typing on a phone that capitalizes for them (though one friend manually undoes those "corrections").

35

To me instant messaging is different because we usually type short messages

The capitalization is not needed to structure the text because a sentence = a message

So the UI will take care of delimiting the sentences

I capitalised the quote. All lowercase is an annoying affectation that I didn’t choose to repeat.

to me it has much better readability