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.
No, that’s what they’re doing. If you’ve ever heard it said of conservatives, “every accusation is a confession,” this is a pretty prime example. It’s a lot easier to convince people to do some gnarly shit if you can pretend that the same gnarly shit is already being done to them.
Like, running a successful grift isn’t about convincing your mark that your dubious proposition is above board. They can pretty much always tell something shady is going on. To con someone successfully you convince them that, yes, something shady is going on, but that shady thing is actually working in their favor. You have to convince them that shadiness is the trick that’s going to let them get one over on everyone else.
Nobody wants to live under a dictatorship. Literally nobody. But if you can trick them into believing they’re already living in one, well then installing your own suddenly gets a lot easier. “Look, you’re already getting grifted. But if you put us in power and let us run our grift, our grift is going to benefit you this time. We promise.”
It won’t, though. It never does.
It might finally give conservatives clear permission to go out and hurt the people they don’t like, though. And that might be enough for a lot of them.
Huh, my money would have been on syphilis-related brain disease.
My main takeaway from this article is that “Austrian Economist” is apparently the new euphemism fascists are using to try and trick people into thinking they’re doing something other than fascism.
In the same CoolZone Media vein, Hood Politics might fit the bill as well.
It’s so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven’t come up with a shared definition.
That’s actually kind of the point. It’s like how they use the words “communism” and “socialism.” It’s a word they’ve made wholly synonymous with “unquestionably bad,” and it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, “I don’t know… That sounds kinda woke.” And everyone knows that anything “woke” is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.
Even when we’re talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can’t be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they’re dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define “woke,” they can’t answer, “You know… N*gger stuff.” That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn’t be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.
Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don’t like.
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.
Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year
…Yet
Neat. I use small versions of those at my job all the time. I’ve always wondered how those worked.
I’ve noticed a lot of conservatives don’t have the same full-throated support for Trump this time that they did in 2016. For instance, he lost a ton of gun owner support when he started talking about “taking the guns first, and letting the courts sort it out later,” and then going on to sign the bump-stock ban. I’ve seen some of those people go from rabid Trump fan-boys to kind of sneering whenever they hear his name. I suspect a lot of them are going to end up falling in line come November, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a fair few people casting protest votes as well.
I honestly don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I also tried Mint thinking it might be more intuitive, but I couldn’t get WiFi to work with either of them.
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.
Same here. It’s been a while since I’ve owned an actual TV to hook them up to though.
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.
Well, you’re in luck because we are living in basically the platinum age of women fronting cool rock bands.
Just off the top of my head:
Bones UK, Sniffany and the Nits, Cable Ties, Amyl and the Sniffers, Mod Con, Waax, Gutter Girls, Flagipanis, Panic Shack, Tiger Pussy, The Hellfreaks, The Darts, The Creepshow, The Spookshow, Zombina and the Skeletones, Bat Fangs, La Butcherettes, The Death Valley Girls, Sleater Kinney, The Veleteers, The Julie Ruin, The Bobby Lees, The Coathangers, The Regrettes, The Pink Slips, The Blushes, Bratmobile, LA Machina, Scrunchies, Skating Polly, and The Nova Twins.
I could dig up more if I start scrolling through my playlists, but there are tons of women out there right now making great music. Seems like every time I turn around there’s some cool new thing.
Yes. I love mine. I originally got some bone-conduction headphones to use at my job because I work in a high noise environment and they still work while you’re wearing earplugs, but I use them pretty much constantly now. It’s really nice to have my music or podcasts and still be able to hear when someone asks me a question, or to be able to hear traffic coming if I’m out walking or jogging.
I’ve had a couple pairs of them now and weirdly bone-conduction headphones seem to be the one electronic device that under promises on its battery life. I don’t know if maybe I just got lucky, but the cheap no name set I got off Amazon promised 5 hours, but even after a year still regularly lasts 8 or 9. My Shokz Open Run Pros promise 10 hours, and I routinely get 15 or 16 hours. So that’s nice.
Lucero is pretty legit. Really nice guys too. My buddy made friends with the singer way back when he was in his previous band and subsequently Lucero is one of the few bands I’ve been following since basically day one.
Some of these are more country than southern rock, but you might also like Jason Isbell, 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Corb Lund, Wovenhand, Larkin Poe, Pink Williams (if you’re not turned off by leftist politics), and Hank Williams III (if you don’t mind a lot of drug references), and The Goddamn Gallows.
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.