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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.




  • 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.





  • Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

    Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.


  • Not necessarily. With most newer pistols being designed to be drop safe, modern hard-sided Kydex retention holsters have taken over most of the function that you used to need a manual safety for.

    Safeties aren’t there to prevent the person holding the gun from pulling the trigger, and they’re not meant to compensate for unsafe handling of the gun. They’re mostly there to keep the gun from firing while you’re carrying it, or if it gets dropped. Imagine a soldier walking through some dense brush, or hitting the ground while diving for cover with a pistol in a leather or nylon holster on their hip. If you bump into the wrong stray branch, or land on the wrong rock, it could poke the holster hard enough to pull the trigger through the side of the holster. So you need something that physically prevents the trigger from being pulled.

    Glocks, and other brands of similarly designed pistols have several internal safeties that make it drop-safe, and which block the firing pin from moving forward unless the trigger is pulled all the way. It’s next to impossible for a Glock to go off unless the trigger is pulled. Then with a modern hard-sided retention holster protecting the trigger, you can carry with a round in the chamber and not have to worry about the gun going off. It makes a traditional manual safety a little redundant, and some companies just don’t bother with it anymore. On a lot of hammer-fired pistols it’s been replaced by a de-cocker.

    The thing manual safeties are still nice to have for is re-holstering your gun while the holster is on your body. You don’t have to worry about loose clothing getting caught in the trigger guard as much. You should still be careful doing it, but it’s nice to have that extra layer of safety. But then, if you’re walking around with a gun it really should never come out of its holster except for a life-or-death situation.






  • The short answer is that AR-15s are just better rifles. They’re more accurate, they’re more reliable, they’re easier to clean and maintain, they’re easier to repair, they have much better ergonomics, none of the parts are proprietary, and consequently there’s an enormous aftermarket for parts, accessories, and customization. They also have a modular design that, with the exception of the barrel nut and castle nut which have torque specifications, can be almost completely disassembled with a single roll punch and an allen wrench or two. That means if something breaks or wears out you don’t have to send it back to the manufacturer or pay out the nose for a gunsmith, you can just order the part and fix it yourself with basically just a pointy stick and a YouTube video. It also means you can start out with a really cheap rifle and upgrade it component by component until you have a high-end rifle if you want to.

    That Mini-14 on the bottom is a fine rifle, and they’re actually pretty popular, but the AR platform outclasses it on most crucial metrics. If you could only have one or the other, for most people it’d be the AR without question. A lot of people have spilled a lot of ink speculating about this reason or that reason as to why so many people want ARs, and usually manage to miss the fact that they’re just fantastic rifles. Even with the amount of cringey fetishizing of the military that happens on the conservative side of the gun community, nobody would want one if they sucked.




  • The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.