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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I got married a month ago, in a barebones courthouse elopement. Click through for some pictures of our adorable ring-bearer.

Congratulations! Your wife is very beautiful, and you don't scrub up too bad yourself! I hope you have many wonderful years together.

Congrats. Courthouse elopement is awesome. My wife and I did that as well. Instead of blowing ungodly amounts on a wedding, we saved it for the down payment on a house instead. Plus we're both introverts, so win/win there.

Congrats! You're a man with the same sensibilities I share.

My question had no ornation, deployed haphazardly while sitting on our couch, and Elle first asked if I was serious before her emphatic yes.

With the same flare for drama and romance, my proposal (such as it was) occurred in my car, on the way to dinner, with the observation that we really should just get married since we were going to be together forever anyway. The only place we differed is that we did go with 4 guests, just our parents. That line was easy enough to draw that we didn't think it would offend anyone too terribly.

I knew there was a reason I liked you. We did immediate family only, one surviving grandparent, siblings, parents, plus maid of honor/best man.

The only place we differed is that we did go with 4 guests, just our parents. That line was easy enough to draw that we didn't think it would offend anyone too terribly.

That's what my friend did with their elopement. That would've made sense if our parents were in town, but if they were going to fly in then naturally others would also want to be there and then...

Congratulations. With a predatory wedding industry and keeping-up-with-ashley mindset on social media, a courthouse elopement is the most cost-effective and sane way of getting married.

If you’re religious, the old Sunday morning ceremony followed by potluck in the parish hall is pretty cheap too.

Seriously. We saw photos of a wedding our friend went to that no joke cost $160k (flowers alone were $15k) bankrolled by the bride's rich family. Within the opulent displays of wealth genre, it seems weddings remain the least socially offensive.

Could weddings be a new avenue for laundering money?

How would that even work? The point of laundering money is to fabricate a plausible legal source for illegally-obtained cash, and I don't see how an extravagant wedding accomplishes that.

You can't? Seems obvious to me. Astronomical prices for goods or services that have little to no fixed value. Many wedding businesses are already random fly by night operations. You could set up front companies for catering, flowers, photos, pay with illicit cash, then take 90% on the back end as legitimate business income.

Whose money is being laundered and who is doing the laundering?

Same person for both. Imagine they bill you 15k for flowers, write it up as 30k on their books, you pay 15k however you pay, they pay another 15k in illegal cash. It all gets written up as coming from you, even though half of it is their own money illegally gained but now with a "legitimate" income source. So long as nobody compares notes.

Then again, everything I know about money laundering I learned from Breaking Bad and Ozark, so you know. Grain of salt and all that.

The "split-invoicing" you're describing would indeed be money laundering, but I don't see how wedding suppliers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this tactic. It would immediately raise red flags if a florist is depositing tens of thousands of dollars in cash since weddings are not known to be a cash-intensive industry. Generally you'd want a service business which has little to no variable costs (like flower inventory) to keep track of. That's why Breaking Bad used a car wash, and Ozark used a strip club. Both are perfect money-laundering operations.

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Congrats! that first photo is badass + tasteful.

Congratulations! I see someone is successfully mixing work and pleasure, at least in terms of locale ;)

Out of idle curiosity, any particular reason you didn't have friends or family over? Are you planning an "official" wedding later?

Oh, and I see the resemblance between your Substack profile picture and yourself, was that you intentionally choosing a similar picture or did you commission it/generate it with an AI?

Thanks! Both of us wanted to avoid the stress of combining the rote legal filing with the social ceremony, so eloping was our way of "getting it over with". We didn't do this correctly though, because rule #1 of eloping is to shut the fuck up, but we told people about it and naturally they wanted to attend. We thought about maybe opening it up to 4-6 people, but then other people heard about that and understandably got pissed. So we resorted back to zero guests. Our plan is indeed to have follow-up parties to make sure everyone is included, but at a much more leisurely pace.

The profile pic is a random portrait of Ibn Battuta the Maghrebi explorer. I didn't think we looked very similar, but it was close and fitting enough for a PFP.

The profile pic is a random portrait of Ibn Battuta the Maghrebi explorer. I didn't think we looked very similar, but it was close and fitting enough for a PFP.

I dimly recall his career as an explorer, and also the fact that there was a Bollywood song named after him, for god knows what reason haha.

So we resorted back to zero guests.

A bald faced lie, as expected of a lawyer (who is incidentally also bald), I can clear see one, don't tell me a royal feline doesn't count!

Haha what a bizarre topic to have a Bollywood song on, but hey at least he did visit India on his way to China

Congrats.

How many years of misery did you agree to endure? What I mean is, I have a very catholic great-uncle. For 50 years he and his wife hated each other. They had kids, lived in different parts of their house, and with everyone, they had just one subject of conversation: the assholishness of their better half. He forbade her to come to his funeral, so even death could not quell the depth of their feelings for each other. That may have been too many years of contractual pain. No-fault divorce, zero years, is too few. I think 5-10 years of commitment to misery could be the sweet spot.

This is a good question to ponder. We talked a lot about friends of ours who were in miserable marriages and how important it was to avoid a similar fate. So though we didn't agree on a specific set of years, we did agree that this will work only so long as it makes sense, and for us to avoid sweeping any issues under the rug. Who knows how effective such an oath will be but I figure it's better than nothing, and serves at least to reminds ourselves of each other's expectations.

Congratulations! Your ring-bearer looks very confused by the situation, though very adorable.

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