Yeah, don’t get me wrong I enjoyed his lectures, it’s just very much not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and certainly not something that would have translated well to a movie

I’m personally very much a fan of both the comic and the movie

The overall plots are largely the same, the comic of course has a little more space to flesh things out.

Which does actually work against it at times, there’s a point where V just kind of goes off on a lecture about anarchy for a couple pages, which is interesting but maybe not the most exciting comic book reading you’ll ever do, and certainly wouldn’t have translated particularly well to the screen, so overall I don’t mind most of the changes they made of

Both the comic and movie are very much a product of their times and places. The comic is very much a reaction to Thatcherism in the UK, the movie more to post-911 Bush-era America.

The movie probably resonates more with me personally, but I’m also a product of that time and place. The comic strikes me as a little more timeless.

Even more appropriately, it’s V for Vendetta

Spoilers, I guess, for a 40 year old comic (the plot in the movie is a bit different)

I know that when police in my area need to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed (and can’t just be disposed of in normal waste streams, or sold or what have you) they normally take it to a local garbage incineration plant.

There was also a steel mill in the area at one point and their furnace was occasionally been put to use for similar purposes (tangential - there was at least one instance I’ve heard of where the US mint used that furnace to dispose of a batch of coins they were testing a new alloy or process or something on)

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

I really hate the term gun show loophole

Maybe the situation and laws are different in other parts of the country, but at every gun show I’ve ever been to all of those people with stands set up selling guns are dealers, so to buy a gun through them you have to go through all the legal hoops as if you were buying from a regular gun store.

I suppose there’s a lot of randos wandering around there who own guns who might be convinced to do a private sale, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with them being at a gun show except it’s a convenient networking opportunity. You could just as easily hang around outside of a shooting range trying to find a private seller.

I’m also a cart-straightener

Blows my mind how some people actually manage to walk their cart to the corral, and then decide they’re going to abandon any semblance of order in putting the carts away, you’ve already done the hard part by walking over, it takes less than a second to just not be an idiot when you push your cart in there.

Big carts in one line, small carts in the other, seems easy but they all put the square peg in the round hole.

And at least try to line them up. I don’t care if you push them all the way in, just try to line them up so that they can be pushed together.

Not that I really support cops confiscating orbeez guns as a general rule

But I work in 911 dispatch in a different area where orbeez guns aren’t illegal, and they’ve been kind of a problem this year.

I think some of our local delinquents have taken to freezing the balls or modifying their guns to shoot faster or something, because we have had a few injuries and broken windows and such linked to orbeez guns this year.

Even without that, they’re a pretty significant nuisance that have started a lot of fights because no one likes being pelted with orbeez.

And of course there’s the problem that exists with all toy guns where if you paint them black or are running around with them in the dark it can be hard to tell them apart from a real gun which is asking for trouble.

And the countless calls I’ve gotten from neighborhood karens who “don’t think it’s safe” or “that they shouldn’t be doing that here” is getting kind of old.

And not for nothing, orbeez can be really slow to break down in the environment and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re contributing to our microplastics problem.

If there is a way to twist the interpretation of a law to say that orbeez guns are illegal, I’m not at all surprised to hear about cops doing just that. Not that I generally support that, but if you caught me on a bad day after I took a bunch of calls about kids with them, I might be tempted to sign a petition to get them banned.

As someone who has regularly carried a variety of knives and multi tools almost every day of my life, I also can’t say I’m a fan of their knife laws.

That said, as-written, I don’t find them to be quite as bad as a lot of people make them out to be (how the police choose to interpret and enforce those laws is sort of a different matter)

It’s not the sort of knife I normally choose to carry, but all of the reasons I normally carry and use a knife for can be done perfectly safely and effectively with something like a regular Swiss army knife with a 2.5inch non-locking blade which should generally be ok to carry for no particular reason.

It should be noted that I do not carry a knife for any self-defense purposes. I feel very little need to defend myself, and even if I did a knife would be just about my last choice after pretty much any other object in arm’s reach. Even though where I am, I could pretty much walk around town carrying a halberd for self defense if I really wanted to and it would be legal, I actually do tend to choose my EDC knives to be pretty inoffensive-looking free of any unnecessary point/stabby bits and if possible.

And cases that really require more knife than that aren’t exactly part of my usual everyday carry scenario, and the appropriate knives for those occasions should be covered under the lawful justification and reasonable use exemptions (again, how the police actually apply those laws can leave something to be desired, but that’s often a problem here too)

Again, not a fan of their knife laws, but in the grand scheme, I’m not nearly as outraged by them as a lot of people are.

It could just be the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I don’t think it’s really a recent thing, I think it’s just hitting a point where the masses are really starting to take notice of it.

I’m pretty sure I remember seeing memes about CCTV cameras and such in the UK about 20 years ago now, and I don’t think it’s an accident that things like 1984 and V for Vendetta were written by British authors and set there.

As an outsider, it’s certainly looked to me like the UK has been kind of a nanny state for a long time, and it’s not a long walk from there to the kind of bullshit we’re seeing more of now.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I’m way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it’s very likely that I’m just out of the loop

But I hadn’t heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren’t telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

We’re at or reaching a tipping point where I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we’re talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn’t already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we’re running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren’t really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I’m not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don’t really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There’s a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don’t think there’s as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she’s often out of the house when I wake up. She’s not great at replying to texts. I never know when she’s going to be home, and usually have no clue what she’s out doing or where.

But I know who she’s doing while she’s gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I’m sure if I asked, she’d share it with me, and I’d do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I’m off hiking or something in case there’s an emergency, but half the time I wouldn’t have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we’re both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don’t need to know where each other is 24/7

i don’t know if you can really call it stalking if they’re willingly making information about themselves available for anyone to see. I didn’t have to so much as punch his name into google, just click his name at the top of his post and it was all there for anyone to see.

He didn’t have to put his information out there and make it publicly available, but presumably he was ok with everyone on Facebook having access to that information about him.

And if he wasn’t ok with that, it made him realize his error so he could address it.

By all means, please capitalize on my typo. It’s got a nice ring to it.

I have a Belgian Malinois, which, if you’re not aware, is basicallythe breed of dog used by military and police that aren’t German Shepherds. They are absolute maniacs of dogs, full of all kinds of prey drive and herding instincts and such that have long-since been bred out of your average family pet.

So for a while when I still had a Facebook I followed a couple of Malinois pages to help me better understand what was going on in my dog’s head.

Now some malinois owners are great, they understand the reasons why their dogs are the way they are and understand how to manage them properly.

Others are absolute assholes who just wanted the really cool supersoldier dog that can run up walls and eat bad guys, and don’t really do anything to channel that energy properly

I remember one post in particular of some guy’s dog “playing” with a turtle, picking it up, throwing it around, etc.

I’m a dog owner, I’ve at times dabbled in hunting, I’m an environmentalist and conservationist, I know what sort of laws are out there and what is and isn’t allowed. And people are stupid and make entirely too much information about themselves available online.

So I could see from this guy’s profile what state (and in fact what city he was in, what high school he went to what company he works for, etc.)

And I could easily Google what the laws in that state are

And lol and behold, allowing your dog to harass wildlife is not allowed in that state. There were fines, potentially prison time, the officials could even take your dog and have them destroyed over this. I think it might have even been legal, maybe even encouraged, in that state for anyone witnessing this happening to just shoot your dog on the spot.

I of course wasn’t about to report this guy over this, I didn’t want his dog put down or anything, I just wanted him to be a better, more responsible dog owner, so I pointed this out in the comments, that were, up until that point, mostly just other assholes jerking each other off over how cool malinois are.

He, of course, quickly took the past down after that.

But not before a whole bunch of people got really pissy about me looking at his profile (to see the information about himself that he made publicly available I guess?) and taking the time to Google the relevant laws in his state so that I could point out exactly why what he was doing wasn’t just morally wrong but actually illegal.

There were disturbingly few people commenting on that post who were simply angry that this jackass was letting his dog fuck with a turtle.

As an aside, my dog is a rare “lazy” malinois. She’s still more energetic and driven than pretty much any other dog I’ve ever met, there’s a part of her that definitely wants to eat someone’s face, but she’s content to sleep on the couch all day instead. She definitely would chase some rabbits, deer, foxes, squirrels, etc. given the chance (I don’t give her the chance,) and she’s never seen a turtle, but she seems to like just sniffing and occasionally licking frogs and toads (I try not to let her, but she occasionally finds them before I do on our walks, the amphibians seem mildly annoyed by this, but not enough to hop away from her, and I make sure to get her away from them ASAP so that they can continue frogging undisturbed.)

I just recently built a computer, though truth be told it’s basically my wife’s old computer stuffed into a new case, we’ve been holding onto her old components as she’s done upgrades. So it’s basically a roughly 10 year old computer, it has one of the last AMD processors from before the ryzen era, but it was a beefy computer when she built it and it’s still managing to run most of what’s out there on acceptable (for me, I’m not exactly a graphics snob) settings.

Of course it’s not gonna be compatible with windows 11, so I’ve been figuring out what my next move is going to be. Most likely I’ll bite the bullet and build basically a whole new PC and recycle this one into a home server or something, it’s definitely still got a lot of life left in it, but I’d be lying if the idea of just going over to Linux isn’t really tempting

So I did not read the article because of a paywall I’m too lazy to circumvent right now

But from OP’s summary, the main technology they’re talking about is concrete reinforced with steel or other fibers.

And that’s definitely more advanced than “pyramid age”

But it’s also pretty much a direct descendant of mud brick reinforced with straw which humanity has been using since well before the pyramids. Same basic concept, different materials.

So yes and no.