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.
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.
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.
No problem. They’re one of those bands whose sound changes a lot over their career, and you wouldn’t necessarily infer their beginnings from their later stuff, but if you go back and listen to their early albums like Ballots, or Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, their punk cred is a lot more obvious.
Most people only know them from that one single that got popular back in the day. They’ve never been a pop band though. They’re actually an anarchist art collective that’s been around since the early '80s. The podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff did two episodes on them. It’s worth a listen. They’re much cooler than you think they are.
Modulation? I mean, Minnesota isn’t the easiest word to spell, but that’s way off.
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.
I’m not sure if they’re still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.
Depends on which map you look at.
In the same CoolZone Media vein, Hood Politics might fit the bill as well.
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.
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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.
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I used to have that when I was a teenager. About one out every ten times I was falling asleep just at the moment I drifted off I’d feel this crazy big pop that went from deep behind my right eye to the top right part of my skull. Sometimes it was more like a noise, sometimes it was more like a physical impact, like somebody bounced a golf ball off of my skull. It was really annoying. It started to happen less and less as I got older though. It pretty much went away completely by the time I was in my late 20s.
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.