I Don't Know What to Tell You

On the other hand, dropping out the conditional out of the question turns the tone into a passive-aggressive threat. If someone tells you "stop that" as an imperative, "lopeta", that's a command. Asking in conditional, could you stop that, "voisitko lopettaa" is a polite request. "Haluaisitko lopettaa", would you like to stop that, is so polite that depending on the tone it might be sarcastic politeness that indicates hostility.

But asking someone "do you want to stop that", "haluatko lopettaa tuon" is a matter of "do you want to stop doing that voluntarily, or do you want me to stop you." By physical force, if necessary.

Even just for lines about how the other characters are doing like “Sam was too busy to come because she wa getting a noble prize” or “we invited Rodney but he was on his honeymoon” or “the entire Destiny crew were having a party because they all made it home to earth”

Min for this month's portrait!

...

...between the trousseau she provided, and the extra clothes, and jewels bought for young Caterina by her groom’ excited family—which included furs and two sixty-florin strings of pearls—the bride would have worn 400 florins’ worth of wealth ($400,000) on her body as she walked across the city to her husband's home. This was not simple conspicuous consumption: all Florence would see the bridal procession and estimate the power of these families by the wealth they saw. By supplementing the trousseau provided by the Strozzi with even more costly robes and pearls, the Parenti family—new to the popolo and excited to secure a bride from one of the ottimati—was making a modest dowry look larger, and once the bride reached her new home, the pearls and other reusable materials would be resold to buy equipment for the newlyweds' silk business.

Returning to our auto industry simile, for this wedding dress think of the kind of Lamborghini that sets the whole town gossiping when someone parks it on the street, except that it can be trivially disassembled and the parts turned back into investment capital. For the pearls, think stock market shares or savings bonds, high-value investments infinitely resalable. Indeed, the choice of pearls as a form of display was itself strategic: costly embroideries and cut gemstones were both unique and recognizable, so if one resold a particular ruby or yard of brocade, others would recognize it and comment, Ah, X-family is poor enough to need to sell! Not so the smooth homogeneity which made pearls as anonymous as coins, and who would notice if a string that had sixty pearls on it yesterday today has fifty-eight?"

Putangirua Pinnacles, Waiarapa, Aotearoa