Pulseaudio not starting
Well that was the weirdest thing. I opened up /etc/pulse/default.pa and noticed that the first line was:
!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
That looks an awful lot like a #!/bin/bash style opening (I don't know the proper name for it, comments on a postcard) so I stuck a hash at the beginning like so:
#!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
And it works!
No idea how that got broken. I don't think I've ever purposefully edited that file before.