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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Amazing! Thanks for taking the time to share. I figured there was an aesthetic interest in addition to the morbid curiosity.

    I went through a phase where I wanted to build a library of weird, bizarre, cult, occult, and outlandish books (which I why I had a copy of Dianetics among other religious texts). I abandoned the idea mostly because I didn’t want to dedicate space to books that I never wanted to read or felt repulsed by reading.

    If you like kitschy and bizarre books, I recommend checking out the following (if you haven’t already encountered them before):

    • Telecult Power by R. Durbin
    • Apocalypse Culture by A. Parfrey

    Telecult Power makes me laugh since it’s a how-to for developing telepathy and telekinesis. Apocalypse Culture creeps me out and reading essays from that book is like dropping into a conversation midway while no one cares to explain what’s going on.


  • Bibleman and A History of Christian Hymnody are wildly different theological materials; what’s the criteria for your collection?

    Do you study religions or is the there something else, like an aesthetic thing, that drives your collection?

    Also, how much of this have you read and is there any of it that you believe?

    Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I find the notion of collecting cult and religious media to be fascinating, especially if it’s for reasons other than faith.


  • Wow, you might be serious.

    I used to keep tabs on the weird religious stuff for fun, but most of it turns my stomach these days to the point that I can’t even laugh at it.

    Definitely got super drunk and riffed on Kirk Cameron videos back when he had that Way of the Master series (e.g. the banana video).

    I used to have a copy of Dianetics that you would have thoroughly enjoyed.

    You should try to acquire a copy of a Mormon seminary textbooks. There should be a series of four of them: Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants/Church History (this is one is a gold mine). The Mormons apparently make them available as PDFs for the current versions, but the older ones are sure to be better.

    I’ve got you tagged now as “collects weird religious stuff”. Congrats.





  • So let’s give this asshole the benefit of doubt for a moment and see where this goes.

    Let’s say an environmental toxin is found to be linked to autism. Great, what’s next? Will the EPA be allowed to regulate the industries that produce or use it? Will other agencies be allowed to make policy banning its use? Will there be fines and punishment for those who knowingly introduced these chemicals into the world? No? Great! We now know what causes autism but we’re powerless to stop it.

    Thought experiment concluded.

    RFK Jr. is the kind of person who starts off saying something reasonable like we need to focus on the foods and chemicals we allow into our bodies and then, surprise non sequitur, drinking water from the sewer is guaranteed to increase your body’s natural immunity to dysentery.


  • Ten years ago two-day shipping meant two days from order to delivery. It now means two-day delivery once shipped in one to five business days. Most prime eligible purchases now just mean “free shipping.”

    I got attached to Prime as a student where two-day shipping and a $50 annual student subscription made it a useful service. There are Prime features on parts of the Amazon website I couldn’t find my way back to the same way twice. The site is riddled with dark patterns from customer service to Prime video.

    I haven’t been able to transition my household fully off Amazon, but I have switched to alibris.com as an alternative storefront for books and other media. Used sellers like thriftbooks, half-price books, and goodwill are all Amazon booksellers on alibris for the same price. They’re all shipping via media mail anyway, so Prime is useless on both sites.



  • There are a lot of complicated reasons why high tariff are a global problem in a global economy, but simply put:

    1. High tariffs raise prices
    2. High prices reduce sales
    3. Fewer sales reduces profit

    Reduced profit for a single company or industry isn’t usually detrimental to a national or global economy. But when an entire country’s economy is hit with reduced profits across every industry, then it creates a problem.

    So in summary, Americans are going to get fucked directly, “foreign countries” are going to get fucked indirectly.




  • I have a smart deadbolt that is keypad operated. It’s awful.

    Never used the smart features, and there isn’t a bypass to unlock the door when the batteries die — which happens a lot, especially in the winter. I tried using rechargeable batteries in it, but they last less than half the time of normal batteries.

    There is nothing more frustrating than punching in the key code and hearing the death of HAL9000 voice before the deadbolt fully unlocks. Luckily I have a back door that isn’t smart.

    I’m replacing the lockset soon and this won’t be a problem anymore, but holy shit is it frustrating and wasteful.






  • May I interest you in renting this fine pineapple?

    Intellectually I know that all currency systems are constructs and are volatile. That said, what bothers me so much about crypto is how it’s either an obvious scam or it appears to behave like company scrip requiring various exchanges or participating vendors, etc. It’s annoying enough using credit cards or systems like PayPal cash app, and crypto reads like a more annoying PayPal with all of the instability of a stock.

    I rarely place much value on authority, but I trust a central bank or national treasury much more than three dudes at a startup promising to disrupt how we think of money.



  • The “2000s” also has no meaning for defining a specific time period. It should mean 2001-2010, but I’ve also never heard anyone seriously refer to 2011-2020 as the “teens” and 2021-2025 as the “twenties.” Those words are already associated with decades that we still culturally reference.

    We’re a quarter of a century in and I still don’t know how to precisely refer to a 21st-century decade.