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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.





  • Postal 2. I mean, it’s not a great game by most metrics, but it’s stupid fun. Also the fact that it was basically made as a middle finger to Congress for being blamed for the Columbine shooting because their obscure PC game Postal (that would have otherwise died in obscurity because it was legit pretty lame) happened to feature a gunman in a trench coat. So at the same time everyone was clutching their pearls over the ability to pick up prostitutes in GTA, I was peeing gonorrhea pee on cops and then shooting them in the face with a shotgun on which a live cat acted as a silencer, and getting into machine gun fights with Gary Coleman.





  • 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.



  • 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.






  • No, because active noise cancellation doesn’t offer any hearing protection. It doesn’t make the noise go away, it works by sending out an extra soundwave which is a mirror inversion of noise to be cancelled, sends out peaks where there were troughs and troughs where there were peaks, and they cancel each other out as far as your brain is concerned. But to work the destructive soundwave has to be as loud as the sound it’s cancelling, and now you have two sound waves blasting away, still moving air and putting pressure on your eardrums, and it’s that pressure causes the damage to your hearing.

    Proper PPE has a passive barrier that physically blocks the bulk of the vibration from reaching your eardrums in the first place. Active noise cancellation does kind of the opposite of that.