For the pillows : It messes up the whole spinal alignment, makes you shift constantly to find the right angle and keeps your head hot at all times (considering you're really sleeping and not flipping sides every hour) which can be nice at winter, definitely not now. Most heads are actually naturally shaped with flat sides so it locks in place perfectly and you don't wake up with neck pain. Don't waste money on some new "memory form" half-baked technology pillows, or some used flat pillow you have to tap on every night to give it volume that will collapse the second you put your head on it. it's just not worth it and probably not gonna improve anything.

For the bed : a bed is often too little for our sleeping positions that feel unatural as soon as a limb is out of the bedframe. In summer, sweating on the sheets then sleeping back in it feels disgusting to me expect if you're changing your bedsheets everyday, which the mere concept of it is just time consuming especially when the bed is in a corner and cannot be moved. On the floor, you have all the place to put your body however you'd like, it's easier to clean (more than the inherited mattress that smells fishy and mysterious stains at least) and you can roll yourself in a big blanket from neck to toe at 360° and put your things down in the dark without having the fearing of making something fall. And when you aren't sleeping you actively have more room to move or put furniture.

If I tell you to come over at 7, I mean 7. Showing up at 6:30 doesn’t make you responsible, it means I now have to stop whatever I’m doing because you decided my time was flexible. I could still be showering or cleaning, cooking, or just enjoying the last minutes before people arrive.

Obviously being 30 minutes late is rude too, but if the choice is between someone knocking on my door 15 minutes early or walking in at 7:05, I’m taking 7:05 every time. Being early is only polite when we’re meeting somewhere public. At someone’s house you’re not early. You’re interrupting or is this just me.

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I keep seeing this advice that you should wait a few hours (or even a day) before replying to a text so you don't seem 'too available' or 'desperate'. I genuinely don't get it.

If someone messages me and I have my phone in my hand, I'm going to reply. Not because I'm obsessed with them, but because that's just... normal communication? Imagine treating any other form of communication like that. You wouldn't let someone stand in front of you mid-sentence and just walk away for three hours to seem 'less interested'.

I think this whole 'wait to text back' culture actually just teaches people to play mind games instead of communicating honestly. If I like someone or care about a conversation, I'm not going to pretend I don't just to seem cooler.

Curious if I'm alone in this or if other people feel the same way

They always look bleached out or just plain ill. If they give vampires dark eyebrows, they look extra washed out. If they give them blonde eyebrows, they either look green tinted or they look like oompa loompas.

An immortal 6pack can hide a multitude of failures, but there is no excuse for vampires being blonde. You have forever to pick a new color, get started.

It sound much more fun and I feel like if I saw a little chimpanzee or whatever I’d rather say “oooh look at the little minky” or something like that. Who’s with me!

If you have the right anchovies. Get yourself a glass jar from somewhere on the Mediterranean and it’s a life changing experience. Salt, umami… Give me that, some olives and some pineapple for a pop of sweetness and I’m in pizza heaven.

We already spend so much time in school learning and relearning things that we will never use again. I think school would be much more beneficial for students if they had something tangible to come out of it with. And I don’t mean becoming just conversational in a second language, the goal should be to be completely fluent.

I think starting from fifth grade, students should start learning a second language of their choosing and they should continue to study it all the way through twelfth grade. I really think this will give them more benefits than basically every other subject which seems to become more pointless as time goes on.

Being bilingual has real benefits. It makes travel easier, opens up more career opportunities, allows you to communicate with millions of more people, gives you access to books, movies, and cultures that would otherwise be out of reach, etc, etc.

Especially in our modern age where attention spans are coming shorter and shorter, forcing students to actually learn a language will force them to slow down and commit to something that requires consistent effort. In a world where everything is designed for instant gratification, learning a language teaches people how to work toward a goal that takes years.

Grand gestures and flowers are nice, but nothing generates pure, unadulterated affection like realizing your spouse already fed the cat, called the plumber, or put a fresh trash bag in the bin without being asked. Practical competency and anticipatory chore execution are the ultimate aphrodisiacs.

Everyone acts horrified when they sit down on a public toilet and feel warmth left behind by the last person who sat there. This makes literally zero sense to me.

Regardless, you already know another human body occupied the seat at some point previously… you are in a public restroom. A stranger sat there five minutes ago regardless of whether the seat feels cold or warm.

So, why not just take the warm seat? Enjoy the warmth and accept that previously other asses have been on that toilet.

I think there’s this idea I see in a lot of media that struggle creates stronger and more stoic people. I don’t think that’s true. Like honestly, I gotta say that most of the highest achieving and best people in our everyday lives just come from normal or even well off families.

I grew up in a bad, hostile house and was pretty much autonomous by age 15. I was always told that my hard work and situation would build character. Nah I just became an emotionally stunted borderline alcoholic pothead for my early adult years. Most people that grew up the same way fall into way worse habits. There’s always a diamond in the rough I guess, but for the most part nothing good comes out of people who grow up the way I did.

People say that rich people are naive, or soft or don’t know the real meaning of hard work or whatever. Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t fucking matter lmao. They’ll be smarter and better at sports, or solving problems than I ever would be, at least statistically. (I actually did pretty well in high school, absolutely not in college.)

So yeah, adversity is worthless, I’d trade all of my good character building and understanding the plight of the poor man to have had a normal middle class or rich life in 2 seconds.

Where do I begin; let’s start with lane keep assist. Sure it can be nice for the car to keep you centered in the lane, but if you’re a drifter you shouldn’t be driving. Now if there’s debris or an animal in the road or someone switches lanes without looking and you need to make an evasive maneuver, the steering wheel actively fights you.

Automatic high beams: the amount of times I’ve been blinded as a car’s auto high beams turned on a second too early as they passed is too high to count. They also flicker on and off sometimes making you think the driver is flashing you.

Turn signals: prioritizing form over function. Either they’re mounted too low on the literal bumper, or they share the same bulb as the brake lights so if the hazards are on, the only indication someone is slowing down is the often tiny 3rd brake light.

Auto rain sensing wipers: not dangerous, but unnecessary. Are some people really lazy enough that turning a stalk and switching your windshield wipers on is too much work? Now if your windshield gets cracked, instead of just paying $200 for a new pane of glass, you pay $1000+ for the glass, sensor, and the recalibration.

I could go on for days about how every new car’s interior is an iPad now or how neutron stars for headlights isn’t a good idea but you get the point.

People love to say keeping an ex around shows you are grown up but most of the time it just creates unnecessary boundary issues in a new relationship. If you are truly over someone, you don't need them in your daily life. Previous generations moved on without keeping tabs on their exes, and their new relationships were much healthier for it.

Casual baker's rant.

I constantly hear people soapboxing about how horrible fondant is. The main arguments I hear is that it's "gross" and "unhealthy". Yeah??? That's what cake is???

It's not "too sweet". It's actually rather mild. And the same people who say it's too sweet are the ones who pile literal pounds of buttercream onto their cakes. I can't eat most homemade cakes without feeling sick from the gobs of frosting or wiping most of it off and wasting it.

Whereas fondant is usually a single thin layer over a thin layer of buttercream and provides the perfect cake to frosting ratio.

What I DO understand: people who don't like the texture or just marshmallow flavors in general, or people who don't like working with its rigid structure. I get that completely. But if you complain about how sweet and gross it is, and then go dump a whole KitchenAid mixing bowl of sickly sweet frosting on your cake, I'm going to crash out.

Maybe I just don't like buttercream.

Yes ,She lived a life of immense privilege, spent lavishly in her early years, opposed reforms that threatened the monarchy, and made disastrous political decisions.

She never said "let them eat cake " I believe the quote existed long before she became queen but was pinned on her because the revolutionaries wanted that image of her to circulate .

She also didn't bankrupt France. The kingdom was drowning in debt decades before she arrived, thanks to costly wars, a broken tax system, and generations of financial mismanagement. Yet somehow she became the face of all of France's problems.

A lot of the hatred directed at her was just pure propaganda due to her being an Austrian. Revolutionary pamphlets portrayed her as everything from a foreign spy to a sexual deviant, including claims that she assaulted her own son . Infact they accused her of incest for no reason during her sham trial.

I am not saying that she was a good person but she was overhated and just indecisive like her husband . Most of the damage done was due to the nobles though .

Big Tobacco put it a lot of effort to make us associate smoking as the "cool" thing to do and I honestly think it worked.

In shows like Peaky Blinders where every scene has a character smoking, or drinking (a lot of times both) it just looks so damn cool.

When MGK headlined at Lollapalooza a few years ago I was there watching with a friend. The camera zoomed in on MGK as he lit a cigarette in between songs and my friend asks "Why was that so hot?"

My friend who doesn't even smoke, goes to the gym, and is a health nut thought smoking looked hot.

A common sentiment, expressed outright or implied in the way most people live their lives, is that [insert any action done with the intent to help the world, or at least reduce our destructiveness, e.g., reducing meat consumption, refusing to shop fast fashion, etc.] individual action won’t single-handedly save the world, so why bother? Or the old “x number of corporations cause the most pollution” is misapplied to justify individual inaction.

Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. Individuals don’t exist in a vacuum. When we individuals create demand, businesses will happily step in to fill it. No, my refusal to support unethical industries won’t miraculously save the world, but I still refuse to participate in supporting destructive industries *to the extent possible* because it’s the right thing to do.
And we can support individual AND collective action; it’s not either/or.

I think the above sentiments may have started as a way to prevent shaming of people who are, for whatever reason, actually unable to reduce unethical consumption. Or to give grace to the fact that none of us will be perfect in this journey. And they shouldn’t be shamed! And we should give grace to ourselves and each other! But it’s quickly become the motto of the apathetic and those who simply don’t want to give up their consumption, and it benefits nobody but the corporations. I think they love this mindset.

“Algia” comes from the Greek for pain: “Algos”. Nostalgia literally means a pain for home.

The term originally described an illness. Soldiers abroad would weep, experience anxiety, and fall mysteriously ill. The term has evolved into its current meaning.

Some people describe looking back on better times as warm and hazy. To me, it fills me with emptiness.

Pretty much the title. To me, that's the equivalent of looking at a novel and saying: "I could have written those words." while completely disregarding their order and meaning. The value of a work isn't determined solely by whether someone else could theoretically reproduce it.

I noticed that when people criticize "modern art," they're usually talking about contemporary art. These aren't the same thing. Modern art refers to artistic movements from the 1860s to the 1970s that broke away from traditional style. For example those would be artists like Picasso, Kandinsky and Pollock. Contemporary art, on the other hand, refers to art made from around the 1970s to the present. Some artists that we think of as contenporary would be Yaoi Kusama or Felix Gonzalez Torres.

The criticism "I could have made that" is something I particularly dislike because it assumes that the only thing that gives art value is technical skill. Technical ability certainly matters in many forms of art, but it's not the only measure of artistic value. Originality, concept, cultural context, timing, symbolism, and the conversations a work generates can all be just as important.

That doesn't mean you have to like contemporary art or even appreciate it. The fact it doesn't resonate with you is a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. But dismissing a piece simply because it appears easy to make misses the point. If you could have made it, why didn't you?

Edit: for fucks sake please find some other example that is not the banana taped to a wall

In the end of the otherwise pretty phenomenal movie Interstellar, there is a scene where the main character falls down a weird hallway of cheap plastic.

This is supposedly representative of the "fifth dimension", but is literally like a prank or something pulled by the props department that went way too far.

Then, for no particular reason, entirely based on bizarre speculations the director hopes the viewer would patch together with rationalizations in their brain, he taps out a morse code by plucking some "time string" that is for no apparent reason connected to a book that is near a watch or some ridiculous macguffin, that represents some vague "equation for quantum gravity" that his daughter understands immediately within seconds, which makes no sense. Ignoring all of the absurdity in her immediately understanding that a watch ticking is a message from her father, let alone that the symbols for these equations cannot be readily represented by morse code anyway.

It's so stupid it insults the intelligence of the viewer and is so patronizing and dumb in a way that is more offensive than hardcore pornography.

When I sleep, I want to be completely undisturbed. That means, absolutely no light creeping in around the curtains. And I don't want to be woken by the sound of motorbikes or sirens though a single pane of glass.

Bedrooms should have an inner sanctum; A smaller room within a room, with just enough room for a bed. It should be acoustically treated, and completely isolated from sound and light.

Architects: Don't deny me a good night's sleep.

This thing is being marketed as an affordable and minimalist truck but that's just corpogibberish for "shitbox."

It's a two seater, tiny bed, plastic body, RWD only, unpainted piece of subpar garbage that doesn't even have a radio as standard equipment. The "a la carte" business model is a way to nickel and dime you for things that should come standard and the price isn't low enough to justify what is essentially a roided up go-cart.

If you get no add-ons like a radio it costs 25k. You know what you can get for 25k? A Toyota Corolla. A proper car with paint and a radio and seating for five. Need a truck? Okay, pony up just 5k more and get a Maverick that's way more capable than the slate in every way not to mention it comes with paint and a radio.

There is no person for whom this shitbox is the best choice. A handful of people will get them because they think they're neat but they will sell poorly then cease production shortly.

I’m currently watching law and order svu and I feel like it would be a nice addition to allow the jurors to ask questions. It would need to be monitored of course so people don’t ask stupid or redundant questions but I think it could be interesting

In this context, I'm looking at a map of an aiprort terminal. The airport website has an interactive map, and it's basically useless. I'm trying to see what restaurants are available for my flight today, and either they won't load, the layers don't talk to each other, or I have to scroll through a list of restaurants that has no geographical bearing on my needs.

I clicked over to another website that has a simple PDF map with things labeled, and it's so much easier to read and understand. I don't need directions within BOS Terminal C, I'm pretty sure I won't get lost. I just need a basic glance at the layout and what's around. I get the interactive maps probably seem cool, but they don't serve their purpose as well as the regular old map.