So the way to bypass discourse’s annoying nanny tendencies is to add empty old-style vBulletin bold tags after your short post, which is what I did in the previous post. Like this:
WANT![b][/b]
Unfortunately you can’t get those bold tags by hitting the bold button on the reply window toolbar because that just adds asterisks. Just asterisks won’t work. Using this technique you can post a single letter if you wanted.
EDIT: And to get discourse to ignore those tags so that it displays the codes, you need to escape them with a backslash (\) right before each open bracket, which is what I did just above.