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.

If this meme were intellectually honest your man in the top picture would be getting measured with parking and/or gas meters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m also from CO, and I also felt compelled to point out that Trump never won here. I remember thinking on election night back in 2016, “Well, whatever happens, at least it won’t be our fault.”

She’s still probably going to win her primary though. If it were her against a single other Republican she’d be in trouble, but there are five other candidates, none of whom are willing to step aside for the strongest contender, so there’s a good chance Bobert is going to skate through with some shockingly low percentage of the vote.

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.

I do actually know the difference between a Glock and a S&W. The video I saw was light on pixels, and the way it was edited the gun was in motion for most of it. I could tell it was a striker-fired pistol, but it was hard to make out exactly which one, and I’m at work and didn’t want to Google up a higher quality video of a guy shooting himself in the head. It looked enough like a Glock, and it’s usually a Glock in these types of videos so I just kind of guessed. Apparently I got it wrong.

Did he just fucking think the safety was on?

That looks like a Glock, and Glocks don’t have a manual safety. A lot of modern pistols don’t have them anymore. Not that having one would have helped this guy. With gun handling this reckless it was only a matter of time before something bad happened.

Yeah, I’ve read a bunch of articles over the last few years about how a lot of law enforcement agencies are finding that instead of getting a warrant and doing a bunch of surveillance they can just buy people’s private data from a data broker and get more info than they would have been able, or allowed, to gather if they’d gotten the warrant.

I don’t know anything about the Drake/Kendrick thing, but the term nymph probably became associated with pedophilia because of the novel Lolita. It’s one of the creepy endearments the main character comes up with while he is obsessing over the child he’s going to rape later in the story.

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.

In the same CoolZone Media vein, Hood Politics might fit the bill as well.

Sounds like a rejected lyric from a Leonard Cohen song.

And if you eat that, and then eat the right kind of flower… Holy crap, my dude, shit gets wild.