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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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.


  • From the Wikipedia article:

    “Early chiropractors believed that all disease was caused by interruptions in the flow of innate intelligence, a vitalistic nervous energy or life force that represented God’s presence in man; chiropractic leaders often invoked religious imagery and moral traditions. D. D. Palmer said he ‘received chiropractic from the other world’. D. D. and B. J. [Palmer] both seriously considered declaring chiropractic a religion, which might have provided legal protection under the U.S. constitution, but decided against it partly to avoid confusion with Christian Science.”*

    Why would a chiropractor tell you that? Nobody selling you a quack remedy is going to just come out and tell you it’s quack remedy. That’s rule #1 of selling quack remedies. But the history of chiropractics isn’t a secret, Neither are the statistics on vertebral artery dissection and other injuries caused by chiropractic adjustments. But look, I’m not your mommy. You don’t have to believe me, and you’re free to go do what you feel. It’s your own neck you’re risking.



  • 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.









  • Crash Worship. They did sort of tribal industrial experimental music from the mid-80s through (I think) the mid-00s. I don’t know if they came out of the OG Burning Man crowd, but they very much had the Burning Man vibe from back when the Burning Man experience still included shooting guns. I saw them play a NYE show at a 1920s-era movie house turned music venue called the Aztlan, and it was bonkers.

    The show started with a massive floor-to-ceiling fireball, and kind of escalated from there. There were a lot of drummers and fire performers moving through the crowd flanked by a phalanx of nubile people in various states of undress carrying alcohol whose mission seemed to be to get as many people as possible as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. At one point I was so soaked with kerosene and alcohol that I was genuinely worried about lighting my own cigarette. Fortunately I was shortly put at ease about it when I got hit with a stray firework and didn’t burst into flame.

    It was a pretty intense experience. It’s not surprising that Crash Worship has been banned from just about every venue they’ve ever played (and I think maybe some entire cities as well). There’s no way the owners of the Aztlan knew what they were signing up for when they made this booking. I’m glad I got to be there to see it though.