:0 I'm glad it wasn't anything serious...

yeah, it kind of is. I usually just try not to say "love you" online—or mostly irl too ig—and if I do I rarely say /p, but what you're saying makes sense actually

I do understand where you're coming from, you have a good point there.

At the same, I want to make it completely clear when I say stuff like that lol. Especially for younger kids and people who might get confused easily, it can be tough when phrases are used in very different contexts that initially seem to have a very similar meaning (such as, "I love you"). It can mean very different things, really, and that's the beauty of language. However, it can also be a little risky/cause misunderstandings and there's really no harm in specifying, in my opinion. I'd say that a lot of time "I love you" is assumed to be romantic, unless there is clear context indicating otherwise, but as you said, it can be implied and injected with that meaning unnecessarily when other forms of love are singled out as being the exceptions. I won't say I like that tendency, but we're working with what we have, right? Better safe than sorry when you can't control the public conciousness and predispositions.

Lol my world-builder mind first thought we should just come up with more specific words (like how Greek has all those different words to describe specific types of love/affection), even if they do end up being CB-specific, when we ran into this problem. Now I've settled for the /p for simplicity's sake, though.

i....never really thought about that! i don't know if i always specify? I think either i specify that it's platonic, or i say something vague and general like "love you guys." i don't know! a few years ago when i first started using the site, COVID was happening, and i started to realize I was queer. at the same time. i was starved for the kind of support and platonic love my friends usually gave me, so an environment like this, filled with platonic love and acceptance, really helped me to grow, and figure out who i was. 

there are all kinds of love. i think most of them are good. 

Yeah, I kind of agree - like why are we assuming it would be romantic if it weren't specified to be platonic?? Another reason I don't like it is that if it becomes common, and then somebody forgets or doesn't know about that tradition, and leaves it out, it'll end up looking like that person did mean it romantically, when actually they didn't. I use it sometimes, but maybe I should start leaving it out-

i use /p just in case someone might take it the wrong way. i DO dislike using it, though! like, why would it be romantic? :)

Tell him not to read it because it's full of stuff he wouldn't understand, being a mere ten years old. That'll do the trick for sure >:)

Yeah, good idea @Poinsettia XD Say that actually, nevermind, the book is probably wayyyy to mature for him. It might help if you say that you know someone who has a 8 yr old brother who's reading it haha

So I'm not really sure but I feel like often kids hate books because they've been forced to read too much? Percy Jackson is definitely one of the books that makes kids who don't like reading read, though. Is there any way you can make it feel like something special you're doing together, like your thing? Maybe you could read it to him, or have him take turns reading with you? Or start a book club and count down the chapters until you can watch the TV show. Or since the TV show is chapter by chapter with each episode, you could read a chapter and then watch the episode based on it?

nice! hello there, sun :D

*aggressively listens to Lor's album Sunlight*