WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

As for the other aspect:

Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.

If you want any degree of force in your swing you are already “aiming and aligning” anything. Its the difference between wailing and actually throwing a punch. A schoolkid throwing a swing might bloody a nose but is probably going to hurt them as much as their target. Someone who knows how to properly make a fist and put their body into it? You don’t need much strength to fuck someone up.

So, theoretically, you could still do a decent amount of damage on an unarmored civilian using something like a morningstar. But that is almost entirely the spikes.

If you wanted any hope of causing meaningful damage to an armored opponent or even an unarmored combatant with their adrenaline pumping? You needed to know how to swing your weapon whether it was a mace, a hammer, or a sword. And as long as you hold the weapon correctly, you get hitting them with the fun bit “for free”.

Maces were great for abusing the peasants and hammering on knights.

War hammers were god damned crimes. Because the focused blunt end of the hammer can REALLY cause some serious damage. But also? The back is a pick. So you don’t even need to dent the armor and cause bruising. You just pierce a brain on the backhand.

Which is why the lucerne hammer (bec de corbin above) was the best anti-armor weapon out there. A polearm that can fuck you up three different ways.

Yes and no.

I am a big fan of block buttons and use them quite liberally (if someone responds to me in a manner that makes it clear they have no intention of having a conversation? I never see them ever again).

But the problem is that it only blocks it for the user who blocks them. So harassment is still a thing and now even fewer people are likely to flag it for moderation (to the extent that works).

There is obviously room for abuse but I am a firm believer that any block feature must be bidirectional. If user A blocks user B then A and B can no longer see each other or interact. Which would be a fundamental lemmy feature which makes things difficult.

But “just block them” is good for people who are annoying. Not for people who are abusive. And while the latter isn’t SUPER common on lemmy, there are still a good number of people who respond to the simplest of things with “Fuck you you fucking moron and you should go kill yourself”

To add on to what others have said:

It is also part of the white supremacist manual* and we have seen it for decades. It used to be that people would “joke” about how their thoughts aren’t “politically correct” before they say something. But mostly it was the idea of accusing people who care about… anything of being a “social justice warrior” and so forth.

The idea being that you make people react with “Ugh, not again” rather than “Yup, that is fucked”. It equates both sides and encourages people to become “apolitical” because they are privileged enough to not have to actually care.

And that is more or less it now. The idea is that if any character has even a hint of melanin, all the usual chuds will lose their god damned minds and try to destroy it. And yeah, everyone hates asmongold et al. But they also hate the people who “take the bait”. And the studios rapidly learn that it will mostly hurt their sales to have anything but the whitest of white cis men as heroes and the whitest of white big titty girls as damsels.

Then EVERYONE is happy. The devs/film makers/whatever don’t have to worry about death threats (hmm. Do you think that best friend might be Jewish? Better play it safe and still threaten to hunt down and rape that guy’s daughter). The people who care about basic humanity don’t have to say anything. And the chuds get to live their fantasies. And everyone else doesn’t have to hear it and can “just enjoy something”. Well, unless they don’t want to be a white dude. But who wouldn’t want to be a white dude, am I right?

It is REALLY REALLY fucking annoying and I strongly encourage people support (that may mean subscribing to) outlets that give a shit.

*: couple decades back there was a pretty major “leak” of a neo nazi handbook for how to indoctrinate people. And it is terrifying how often the same tactics are used. It is probably on archive dot org somewhere?

Let’s be honest here: if the Carradines knew power rangers was a thing they would have insisted on putting on some yellow face and taking Thuy’s job.

No? Pink is a “girl” color. And even in the original sentai source material, Pink was a girl (hence the skirt). Yellow was a dude which is why you can really tell what scenes were filmed with the US stunt team/actors and what were from the original (hint: Is the bulge in the crotch or the chest?).

Yeah. I can believe that Trini was an accident. They wanted two girl rangers. Blue, Red, and Black are “boy colors” whereas Yellow is neutral.

And Zack’s character was pretty normal for the era (black guy who incorporates “hip hop” into everything he does) but there is zero chance it was not intentional to cast the Black guy as Zack the Black ranger.

And yeah. Even as kids on the playground we all knew that was racist as shit. I’ll always remember my homeroom teacher trying not to laugh her ass off while she was telling us we can’t talk about how they should have cast a Native American as the Red Ranger.

Trump is a violent rapist so it “makes sense”

There is nothing more cat than hanging out, getting cuddles, and then running like hell at the first sign of danger.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

It is “news worthy” in that basically every outlet doing printer reveiws/content will mention it. Even fricking Norm on Tested pointed out the problems with bambu and the issues if you want to use the laser cutter on anything other than Windows.

Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say “Yo dog, take it down a notch”

I think there are two big aspects to this.

The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don’t actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.

Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a “prosumer” hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but…) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer… because that model works a lot better for print farms.

And, as an aside before I get to the “real” point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And… that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can’t spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.

And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize “reverse sear” cooking.

So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what “the paper trick” was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you… probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because… they were pain points.

And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.

Which… not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has “Make them great (again)”. Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.

Yes. the system logs every entry/exit by keyfob.

Whether the building managers associate those fobs with individuals or even know how to look at the log is a different discussion entirely.

That said: If the building cares enough to have a lock on the door then they have a camera too and THAT is much more likely to be recorded. So if your “friend” depends on people not knowing he is entering or exiting his building for whatever reason… good luck with that.

Fun story time: I used to work at a facility that was VERY strict about people badging in and even out of many areas. At one point it came up in a safety debrief that there was no way to log who was inside or outside of an area… that required badging in and out. Could see someone’s brain cell trigger in real time as they proceeded to ask a lot of very pointed questions that boiled down to:

They had an access control list that was checked. They did not know how to access the log files to know when that list was checked or even the result of a check. The person who asked questions was pushed out of the company because it was easier.

If a government has you in the nebulous situation where you technically aren’t in the country yet and they want your phone, it doesn’t really matter what security system you have on there. You either give them access or go to a black site.

That’s why every company of “moderate” size ends up adopting a policy of “DEVICE for foreign travel”. You don’t take your actual work laptop/phone/whatever. You take a burner (except they hate the term “burner”) that can remote in but stores little to no data locally. And you realize that any good remote access software has logic to detect if you are accessing it from a security checkpoint and flag you…

So what does that mean for you, an individual?

• A super locked down device is just gonna get your ass beat… if you are lucky.
• A completely clean factory wiped device? That is going to raise a bunch of red flags (kind of rightfully) and more or less equate to the above

Like almost all things privacy/security related: Nothing is easy if you actually need it. A good friend of mine is a journalist and they semi-regularly do the kinds of stories that get a person “investigated”. And the reality is that there is nothing they can do, in software, to protect themselves. So what they instead do is have completely separate devices that are never in the same physical location. So, unless they are communicating with a sensitive contact, they always have a device that “looks real” because… it is. Texts from the partner about a dinner party next week, spam from facebook, etc.

And if they need to access something sensitive while on foreign travel or otherwise unable to get back to their “private” devices? Either buy a cheap laptop at a best buy equivalent or use one of their burner emails/accounts.

I want to agree with Beart but…

SAG et al have already more or less abandoned voice actors. In the very near future it won’t matter if actors agree to work for these companies because they won’t NEED those actors. They’ll have training data or they’ll pay randos off the street to generate some training data that they then heavily tweak to sound like Ashley Burch and so forth.

And before people pretend that consumers won’t stand for that: Anyone with any knowledge of scene composition or lighting clowns on Netflix et al near constnatly. Guess what the super popular movies that everyone watches are? Because, yeah, there will still be works of art like a Blade Runner or even an Anora (the plot was shite but the cinematography was peak). They’ll pale in comparison to people pretending they aren’t going to watch Happy Gilmore 2.

And same with VA. People will claim they are opposed and it is horrible and complete trash compared to a human… and they’ll still buy the games until having “human” voice acting is the exception and only for “arthouse” games.

You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.

Storage is cheap until it isn’t.

On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.