Mostly_Gristle

Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They're modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it's not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn't going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.

You're probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it's ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.

It's polite to pretend that money doesn't matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.

This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, "Why is my internet so slow? What's this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!"

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn't set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn't even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.

I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, "Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we've added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?" But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.

There's a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that's making me think maybe it's time to ditch Windows for good.

Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.

I don't know that I'd consider myself an audiophile, but I am a musician. I run a pair of powered studio monitors out of the back of a Focusrite Scarlett usb audio interface for recording, and it's way better than any computer speakers I've ever owned in terms of sound quality and fidelity. Of course, I'm also not trying to have a dance club setup that's going to rattle the windows on my nextdoor neighbor's house with super-ultra-mega bass, but it's an avenue to consider.

I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn't even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.

It's not that we can't afford to pay you $15 an hour, or even $30 an hour, but if we did that then we couldn't give that money to the shareholders. You see, they've purchased a certificate which entitles them to the wealth created by your labor. We assure you we can imagine it must be somewhat uncomfortable to live in constant grinding poverty, but you can understand how our hands are tied here. They have a certificate. What are we supposed to do, ask a rich person to be a teeny tiny bit less rich? That's just crazy talk.

So the guy who notoriously despises public transit failed to come through on his promise to revolutionize public transit?

Wow.

I mean, who could have seen that coming?

It must be amazing to have that much money and influence.

Coincidentally the podcast I'm listening to as I type this is talking about a man sitting on death row who was convicted solely on the testimony of one "bite mark analyst" who was later shown to be an absolute fraud in a field that is already highly dubious at best. The appeals court in his case feels that just because the "expert" was wrong in all his other cases doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong in his. So that's cool.

Is anyone else surprised it's even worth that much?

I don't want to sound like I'm defending Biden, but I don't know why people find this surprising. I've only been paying attention to politics for about 30 years, but he's been saying this loudly and proudly for as long as I can remember.

Maybe people are just now noticing because it suddenly matters more than it used to. It definitely hits different when Israel is actively attempting a genocide, and it feels to me to be in pretty fucking terrible taste to beat that particular drum right now, but people are acting like this just came out of left field. He has been absolutely consistent about calling himself a Zionist for decades. It really shouldn't have come as a shock.

For people who don't know, the theory of chiropractics is that the light of God somehow shines into the human body through the top of the head, travels down the spine, and on through the nerves. If you can just fix any blockages (aka "subluxations") in that flow then it will be impossible for disease to exist in the body. Because God's light.

The founder of chiropractics was told this information by a ghost.

I know some people swear by chiropractic adjustments, but this is information I wish I'd known when I had my back injury because going to a chiropractor set my recovery back by at least three years. And the money I lost to that quack could have paid for not only the legit physical therapist that actually got me feeling better, but probably a decent massage chair too.

Every picture of Grimes I've ever seen looks like someone tried to draw Madonna from memory.

Oh, well, if the film studios say so then by all means...

And just like that there's a plausible scenario where The Undertaker comes out of nowhere and saves Democracy by choke-slamming them both through a podium.

The headline is slightly misleading. 2.8 million searches were halted, but according to the article they didn't attempt to figure out how many of those searches came from the same users. So thankfully the number of secret pedophiles in the UK is probably much lower than the headline might suggest.

Will never understand why people have such a hard on for him that they treat him like a god so their entire personality is based on him

It's because they are cruel people. Trump, and people like him, give them permission to indulge their cruelty. They give them an avenue to lean into their worst, most hateful, instincts and still feel like a good and righteous person.

See, hateful racist pricks don't view themselves as hateful racist pricks. They view themselves as sensible, rational people who see "what's really going on." When someone like Trump comes along and says, "No, you're right. The Muslims are trying to force public schools to make your child pray to Allah. The Mexicans are flooding over the border to steal your job. The Jews are conspiring to replace good white people with dirty 'woke' minorities," well, suddenly Trump is "making a lot of sense," and "telling it like it is."

Trump makes them feel good about being their worst selves. Trump lets them believe that anyone who questions their hateful worldview is just some libtard afflicted by the "woke mindvirus" and can be written off as subhuman and beneath contempt. He lets them think that maybe they'll finally get to kill a few of them if he's running the show. And because of all that he has earned their undying devotion.

On the one hand, finding out the openly fascist rich kid from apartheid South Africa shaped a company into a place where bigotry and racial discrimination are rampant is one of the least surprising things I've ever read.

On the other hand, that is an absolutely shocking level of racism for any kind of modern workplace. Like, fucking wow.

If the headline was, "For the sake of boosting their own egos, Guardian Angels assault the first Latino man they see," it would still be one of the least surprising things I've ever read.

It is perpetually disappointing the extent to which so many people who claim to be Christians fail to understand even the CliffsNotes version of the Gospel.

Jesus' arrest was probably bound to happen sooner or later though. As noted Biblical scholar Andrew Zaltzman has often pointed out, Pontius Pilate was a law and order administrator, and Jesus was absolutely guilty under the law at the time.

It's not surprising, that's how their search engine has worked forever. But yeah, icky is a good word for it.

It's not that often that I'm in a car I'm not driving anymore, but when I'm a passenger you can bet your ass I'm imagining a little ninja dude running along side the car, doing sick ninja flips over stuff on the side of the road.

Laws, international or otherwise, don't mean shit unless someone with the power to enforce them is also willing to enforce them.

Yes. The police. That famously liberal group of bleeding heart lefties.

It requires a bit of financial discipline, but having a credit card that you religiously pay off in full every month can be a really powerful budgeting tool when money is tight. It lets you combine paychecks or borrow from a future week's budget so you can take advantage of bulk prices or a really good sale price to stock up on things you use a lot of. And once you get stocked up on all your staple items, the money you would have spent on those things gets freed up for other things for weeks, or maybe even months at a time.

Speaking of stocking up on bulk items, my Costco membership has saved me a ton of money since I've had it. It might not make the best budgetary sense for everyone, but my membership fee more than pays for itself just with what I save on gasoline. Even when they don't have the best price on something, often the quality you get for the price still makes a lot of their stuff worth it for me. But even if I don't find a deal on something it's always nice to be able to grab a huge rotisserie chicken that I can make meals out of for most of a week for $4.99.

I've noticed a lot of conservatives don't have the same full-throated support for Trump this time that they did in 2016. For instance, he lost a ton of gun owner support when he started talking about "taking the guns first, and letting the courts sort it out later," and then going on to sign the bump-stock ban. I've seen some of those people go from rabid Trump fan-boys to kind of sneering whenever they hear his name. I suspect a lot of them are going to end up falling in line come November, but I wouldn't be shocked if there were a fair few people casting protest votes as well.

Damn, more like Cuba Bad-ing Jr.

This is one of the hallmarks of fascist movements. Accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing as a justification for your own bad actions. It's straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook. The republicans have been using it successfully for at least 30 years now, but we're going to see it used more and more blatantly as the GOP becomes more and more openly fascist.

Yes. Let's hear about Christian morals from miss Adultery McPublicHandjob.

Guess she never made it all the way to #7.

It's so embarrassing that she represents my state.

It's so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven't come up with a shared definition.

That's actually kind of the point. It's like how they use the words "communism" and "socialism." It's a word they've made wholly synonymous with "unquestionably bad," and it's defined by what it isn't rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, "I don't know... That sounds kinda woke." And everyone knows that anything "woke" is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.

Even when we're talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can't be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they're dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define "woke," they can't answer, "You know... N*gger stuff." That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn't be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.

Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don't like.

The Daily Mail has published an explosive report

Has this been confirmed independently? As much as I love a little schadenfreude, the Daily Mail isn't a real news source. It's barely credible as a tabloid gossip rag.

I genuinely wonder how many people would still be alive if the police had stuck with their Time/Distance/Cover training instead of the Killology Bulletproof Warrior garbage they use now.

It's not. Nobody's smoking crack out of the tip of a compressor hose. If people are stealing them for drug reasons the most likely answer is that they're made of solid brass and have a decent scrap value. They're selling them to the same guy they're selling stolen catalytic converters and the copper wire they've stripped out of newly constructed homes to.

Why do I feel like this would just be a jar of unseasoned tomato paste with some cigarette ash mixed in?

I have a fantasy where DeSantis and his supporters cause Florida to secede, then all the most die-hard evangelicals, fascists and chuds, the worst the republicans have to offer, all flock there to protect their glorious revolution. Then the rest of us can just wall it off and have healthcare, sane governance, green energy, adult discourse, and all the stuff we're prevented from having because republicans refuse to support anything unless it allows them to be cruel to someone.

Yeah, I don't know why so many people seem to forget this, but cops aren't supposed to shoot guilty people either.

Is this a shocking headline for people who weren't alive when the Cold War was still going on? Because when I was a kid Russia making plans for nuclear retaliation was just a typical weekday.

20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I've already tried and fuck off.

I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it's got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.

They're not doing him a favor by sending him to whatever passes for a "disciplinary alternative education program" in Texas though. Sounds like they're trying to stick him on the fast track in the school-to-prison pipeline.

Plus they don't send the Pinkertons to bash people's skulls in when it's cops on the picket line.

The state of science reporting has been absolute dog shit for decades. The vast majority of the time when you track down the study an article is based on, the claims of the article are either massively exaggerated, or sometimes even completely different than what the article claims. It seems like a whole industry of taking fairly mundane studies and punching them up into some exciting pieces of short fiction. So many years of garbage reporting has me immediately skeptical of any article with a bold claim, or which mentions any kind of significant breakthrough.