Bullmaestro's recent activity

  1. Comment on Magnus Carlsen rules out classical World Chess Championship return, shifting focus to new era – signed up for this year's Esports World Cup where he will represent Team Liquid in ~games.tabletop

    Bullmaestro
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    TIL that Magnus Carlsen joined Team Liquid as a Chess player. It feels like one of those player signings that would have been so monumental that it would shake up the world of chess and esports,...

    TIL that Magnus Carlsen joined Team Liquid as a Chess player.

    It feels like one of those player signings that would have been so monumental that it would shake up the world of chess and esports, had Carlsen not been acting like such a pretentious asshole and sore loser in recent months. He's the kind of guy that accused one of his rivals of cheating by using vibrating anal beads, for fuck's sake.

    1 vote
  2. Comment on Skate Story | Overlord trailer in ~games

    Bullmaestro
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    The graphical style just feels disorienting to me. I get that this is probably a very deliberate aesthetic choice, but it feels like one of those artistic set-pieces that doesn't translate well to...

    The graphical style just feels disorienting to me. I get that this is probably a very deliberate aesthetic choice, but it feels like one of those artistic set-pieces that doesn't translate well to gameplay.

    5 votes
  3. Comment on If you could go into hibernation and wake up in the future, would you? in ~talk

    Bullmaestro
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    No. I don't want to abandon my family, friends, partner or the life I currently have to get a glimpse into the future. But also, if /r/collapse is to be believed, we're in for a fucking bleak future.

    No. I don't want to abandon my family, friends, partner or the life I currently have to get a glimpse into the future.

    But also, if /r/collapse is to be believed, we're in for a fucking bleak future.

    3 votes
  4. Comment on Original ‘Looney Tunes’ no longer available on Max in ~tv

    Bullmaestro
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    If David Zaslav's mission is to drive Warner Bros. Discovery to the ground then he's doing a bloody good job. Much of these shows would have been in the public domain had Disney not aggressively...

    If David Zaslav's mission is to drive Warner Bros. Discovery to the ground then he's doing a bloody good job.

    Much of these shows would have been in the public domain had Disney not aggressively lobbied Congress to drastically lengthen copyright expiration laws.

    13 votes
  5. Comment on Spotify takes down Andrew Tate pimping podcast after complaints in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
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    Any red-pill influencer who giggles like a schoolgirl at the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice. And Donald Trump bullied Romania...

    Any red-pill influencer who giggles like a schoolgirl at the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice.

    And Donald Trump bullied Romania into releasing these men from custody. What the fuck?

    How did Andrew and Tristan Tate even make it to the point of releasing anything on Spotify? Didn't mainstream social media collectively ban them for their rife misogyny?

    11 votes
  6. Comment on Lilo & Stitch | Official trailer in ~movies

    Bullmaestro
    Link
    That actually wasn't bad. Disney's live action remakes have typically sucked but this feels like it brings a lot of originality. Definitely seeing this on the cinematic release.

    That actually wasn't bad. Disney's live action remakes have typically sucked but this feels like it brings a lot of originality.

    Definitely seeing this on the cinematic release.

    6 votes
  7. Comment on Tetris The Grand Master 4 -Absolute Eye- in ~games

    Bullmaestro
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    I'm sure that it's a fine rendition of Tetris but all the gameplay videos I've seen of TGM 1 through 3 have been people doing split second block placement with total invisibility of the board near...

    I'm sure that it's a fine rendition of Tetris but all the gameplay videos I've seen of TGM 1 through 3 have been people doing split second block placement with total invisibility of the board near the end of their run and I just think it's too hardcore for me.

    1 vote
  8. Comment on Looking for lighthearted action anime in ~anime

    Bullmaestro
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    Baki Hanma - Very over-the-top martial arts anime that can get quite brutal and gory, but none of it is particularly sad or tragic, at least in the case of the 2018 series. Hajime no Ippo -...

    Baki Hanma - Very over-the-top martial arts anime that can get quite brutal and gory, but none of it is particularly sad or tragic, at least in the case of the 2018 series.

    Hajime no Ippo - Incredibly good boxing anime/manga series, but with a caveat. The three seasons that were released (The Fighting, New Challenger and Rising) only cover about a quarter of the overall manga, which is on Chapter 1485 (and counting.) Blame Madhouse and MAPPA for their tendencies to only do one really good season of an anime and then fucking off to other projects.

    3 votes
  9. Comment on Looking for lighthearted action anime in ~anime

    Bullmaestro
    Link Parent
    I'd be cautious around trying to watch the original Ranma ½ series, as there are nude scenes which could fall afoul of regional CSAM laws if they outlaw nude illustrations of minors (Ranma Saotome...

    I'd be cautious around trying to watch the original Ranma ½ series, as there are nude scenes which could fall afoul of regional CSAM laws if they outlaw nude illustrations of minors (Ranma Saotome is 16 in the series.)

    But the remake showing on Netflix should be fine to watch.

    4 votes
  10. Comment on Repeatedly upvoting violent content on Reddit can now get you flagged in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    Link
    Reddit have always been heavy-handed with posts that glorify or promote violence, at least ever since Spez took charge. They're now butting heads with the greater community because people are...
    • Exemplary

    Reddit have always been heavy-handed with posts that glorify or promote violence, at least ever since Spez took charge. They're now butting heads with the greater community because people are actually celebrating the death of Brian Thompson because his tenure as United Healthcare CEO led to a trebled rate of rejected insurance claims and a culture where millions of Americans are being denied healthcare.

    Another reason why they're butting heads is that people actually want to hold DOGE accountable and know exactly who Elon Musk has employed to harvest data and money from federal systems. But that's "doxxing", apparently. Maybe Spez is doing it because he too wants to kiss the ring just like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have. Or maybe he's scared of Trump and Elon siccing their DOGEstapo upon him.

    Shit like this is making people want to rally behind Luigi Mangione more.

    44 votes
  11. Comment on US Department of Justice again files demand to break up Google’s search monopoly in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    Link Parent
    Google initially became a search monopoly based on quality alone. It beat major players like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, GoTo, AltaVista, Dogpile, AOL and others because it consistently offered...

    Google initially became a search monopoly based on quality alone. It beat major players like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, GoTo, AltaVista, Dogpile, AOL and others because it consistently offered better search results.

    Nowadays their service has utterly declined, to the point where alternatives like Bing, Duckduckgo, Qwant, even Yandex are looking more appealing.

    5 votes
  12. Comment on Gran Turismo 3 in ultra widescreen in ~games

    Bullmaestro
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    At first glance I was honestly expecting footage of Gran Turismo 3 running through PCSX2 with HD texture and ultrawide resolution mods. What I actually saw was the author utilizing an underused...

    At first glance I was honestly expecting footage of Gran Turismo 3 running through PCSX2 with HD texture and ultrawide resolution mods. What I actually saw was the author utilizing an underused console feature that really surprised me.

    This feels like one of those novelties that was groundbreaking for its time but ultimately incredibly wasteful and over-the-top to set up, requiring three monitors and three PlayStation 2 consoles. Why an ultra-widescreen mode was added as a feature using technology clearly intended for LAN parties... I don't understand.

    8 votes
  13. Comment on Digg is relaunching under Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    Link Parent
    Stated it in my comment. Alexis Ohanian is kn0thing, I don't think I made that clear. The claim that Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and threw Ellen Pao under the bus came from the previous CEO,...

    Stated it in my comment. Alexis Ohanian is kn0thing, I don't think I made that clear.

    The claim that Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and threw Ellen Pao under the bus came from the previous CEO, Yishan Wong. Even kn0thing himself confirmed that he was the one who fired her, which he was all too eager to reveal once the community had already pulled out their pitchforks and rallied against Pao, forcing her to resign.

    As for kn0thing's resignation, it feels disingenous when someone who was part of Reddit's board of directors and clearly had enough sway to go behind a CEO's back and fire an employee because he personally didn't like how AMAs were being organized, allowed hateful content to proliferate for years yet did nothing to acknowledge this nor take any responsibility.

    How this man managed to woo Serena Williams of all people despite the state Reddit was in for years baffles me.

    5 votes
  14. Comment on Cancelled Powerpuff live-action reboot trailer in ~tv

    Bullmaestro
    (edited )
    Link
    Warner Bros blocked the video on copyright grounds, which tells me this is legit. I found an alternative upload but unfortunately WB blocked that too... First impressions: This has to be a parody....

    Warner Bros blocked the video on copyright grounds, which tells me this is legit. I found an alternative upload but unfortunately WB blocked that too...

    First impressions: This has to be a parody. It feels like it's deliberately bad writing that's trying too hard to be one of these contrived live action reboots that's loosely based on the original source material.

    And I'm not just writing this because of the diverse cast, the fact that Mojo Jojo has been outright replaced by a father & son (named Mojo & Jojo respectively), nor that no teenager would ever say "I'm not wearing that dress anymore, it's gender-normative and ass-ugly." It's that the writing in general is so horrifically bad that it makes you think this has to be a parody. I mean Donald Faison is a great actor and if I were in his shoes and got handed that script, I would have walked off the fucking set unless the point was to release a deliberately bad parody of live-action reboots.

    Take the scene where Professor Utonium is trying to talk his daughters into reuniting and cracking jokes about how creating three normal girls would've been weird. That is absolutely not how a father would communicate with children who have gone through past trauma, like accidentally killing a man.

    Also, the trailer felt like a synopsis of the entire show, not just a compelling teaser.

    I am getting serious Breaking Bad 2 vibes from this.

    6 votes
  15. Comment on Digg is relaunching under Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Alexis Ohanian makes me less inclined to support a Digg revival. If there's anything I've learned from following the history of Reddit, it's that he's a fucking weasel that will throw other people...

    Alexis Ohanian makes me less inclined to support a Digg revival. If there's anything I've learned from following the history of Reddit, it's that he's a fucking weasel that will throw other people under the bus to safeguard his image.

    Remember the time when Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and made sure then-CEO Ellen Pao got the blame? Or when he resigned from Reddit in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and acted like he never agreed with the racist and hateful direction Reddit went down, even though he had been part of Reddit's board for the years that a load of hate-filled subs (many of which I can't even name here) were at their peak?

    Kevin Rose is just a naive wannabe Silicon Valley tech-bro with a lot of failed side projects, the worst I recall being Pownce which was a lame microblogging social network service that advertised the ability to share small files of up to 10MB as one of its core features, even though there was already a perfectly acceptable medium for sharing small files that existed for years before that... and it's fucking called email!

    Digg v4 was certainly Rose's biggest failure and was such a spectacular misstep that it nuked his once-successful site overnight, but Digg was already in decline at that point with people joking that it was just a repository for posts they saw on Reddit the day before. But his other failures have just been half-arsed attempts at reinventing the wheel by comparison.

    Kn0thing on the other hand is poison.

    22 votes
  16. Comment on Digg is relaunching under Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    Link Parent
    I should clarify my position. AI done right can be very effective (look at Nvidia DLSS 4 for a good example), but it absolutely shouldn't be the main driver of the site's content, nor should it be...

    I should clarify my position. AI done right can be very effective (look at Nvidia DLSS 4 for a good example), but it absolutely shouldn't be the main driver of the site's content, nor should it be the judge, jury & executioner of content moderation decisions.

    A lot of the short and long form content I consume on YouTube and Facebook are videos that regurgitate Reddit stories, often with ASMR or gameplay footage playing in the background. There was a running joke years ago that a lot of the stories posted to these advice subs are more like elaborate creative writing projects than anything grounded in reality, but I'd say it's gotten worse these days. I'm no English major and I'm an Aspie who struggles with socializing, but even I can see the tell-tale signs that a lot of the more recent trending stories featured in these videos are entirely hallucinated by AI (the wording, the story strucutre, the language used and some of the formulaic patterns.) I state this because Reddit has well and truly been enshittified with AI astroturfing and I do not want to see Digg go down that same path.

    Want a good example of what I mean? Start watching videos from channels like Reddit Family Tales and take a shot every time you hear the phrase "said I was being disrespectful." You'll probably be hospitalized with severe alcohol poisoning after a few hours.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on Digg is relaunching under Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian in ~tech

    Bullmaestro
    Link
    What they need to do is: Ban problematic content from day one. No incest, jailbait, morbid gore videos, racial hate speech, medical disinformation, etc. Don't do what Reddit did to "justify"...

    What they need to do is:

    1. Ban problematic content from day one. No incest, jailbait, morbid gore videos, racial hate speech, medical disinformation, etc. Don't do what Reddit did to "justify" banning these communities by plucking out bullshit vote manipulation statistics out of their sphincter. Or by only making a content policy change when your name is already being dragged through the dirt on national news.

    2. Robust guidelines for community moderators and an appeals process that is fair, rather than building a cabal of power users to rule with an iron fist. Anything to stop turning Digg v5 into the partisan shithole that Reddit currently is.

    3. If they allow porn, allow strictly amateur and exhibitionist content only. Reddit is astroturfed by e-girls plugging links to their OnlyFans and it's made more niche fetish subs unusable.

    4. Ban AI generated content and vow to protect user data from being used to train LLMs.

    5. The ability to post anonymously without the need to create throwaway accounts.

    6. Decent search function, website and app from day one. And if the app is shit, don't do what Reddit did and charge a fucktonne for third party devs to use the API.

    22 votes
  18. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (March 2025) in ~health.mental

    Bullmaestro
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The one with ME/CFS? Not her. I've been somewhat low-contact with her for the last few months to the point where she's been the one reaching out to me a lot out of concern that she hurt me badly...

    Congratulations on the partner! Is this the same person you have talked about in previous posts some months ago?

    The one with ME/CFS? Not her.

    I've been somewhat low-contact with her for the last few months to the point where she's been the one reaching out to me a lot out of concern that she hurt me badly (she did), and even though we have somewhat reconciled, she's been a lot more quiet since she found out I'm with someone now. Even if she wasn't perpetually exhausted and in a low mood, our lifestyle choices may have clashed.

    Sucks about being let go. Sounds like a pretty terrible place to work anyways.. but I hope that having a partner can cushion the landing from this fall at least a little bit.

    Oh, I haven't even gone into what my experience was like before I got promoted into my current role.

    I used to work as a Senior Purchase Ledger Clerk. At the time I started working for this company (not gonna directly name my employer nor the sector, but they're a big multinational), they had already started shackling new hires to lengthier notice periods as a staff retention strategy. My notice period once I passed probation was six weeks (some were 3 months), which is utterly absurd for the kind of work I was employed to do. Unsurprisingly, the notice period was one of many big sticking points that made new hires not last long.

    Combine this with biblically high workloads, flawed accountancy software packages that weren't really fit for purpose, low pay, office in a shitty out-of-town location that's hell to drive to, and them hiring a new executive who had a raging boner for office working and RTO mandates, and it's easy to see why our department had a 95% employee turnover rate. Things got so bad that they ended up having to outsource nearly all their transactional finance roles to India and lay off hundreds of staff. They did this not necessarily as a cost-saving measure but because they had mismanaged their purchase ledger, credit control, takings and banking teams to the point where they were burning out of new people to hire.

    I stayed, not because I liked it there, but because my notice period made it practically impossible to secure another purchase ledger job. I got to final stage interviews with multiple companies (including a supervisor job that paid substantially higher) only to be passed over for candidates at the last second purely on the basis that they could start sooner. Plus I didn't want to give my notice because they at least offered a retention bonus for people who stayed during the transition period.

    I used to look after a subledger of specialist contractors who provided essential work to us. Some of them absolutely took the piss with their payment terms, and it was a mess of overdue invoices and late fees. Nothing is more soul-destroying than having a whiny entitled asshole who earns 5 times more than you hound you to the point of harassment because their invoice wasn't paid within a week.

    One contractor even had the most egregious example of late fees I had ever seen, billing us on 5 day payment terms and charging 8% compound interest per day on any overdue balances. A roughly £2,000 invoice for a week of work had ballooned into over £50k of late fees because it took us nearly a month to approve and pay it, and last I heard, it got escalated straight to legal...

    I formally raised burnout issues with my line manager a few months in. Their solution was to bring someone in with no accounts experience who would rather spend all day on their phone, make me train my job to them, and then move me to another team. And then they had the gall to start hiring for a team leader position after they made me mentor a new hire who frankly should never have been employed in the first place. My plan was to go for the TL role and quit if they didn't give it to me. I didn't get it, but they had offered me a different role which just about placated me enough to not immediately quit and go scorched earth on that place.

    When I left Purchase Ledger entirely (internal promotion), going into Commercial Finance was like a culture shock. Unfortunately, the work has dried up and that's the reason I'm being laid off now.

    As much as I'd love to spill the beans in an exit interview (which I likely won't get offered) or in a Glassdoor review, I cannot afford to burn bridges in a profession where reputation is paramount.

    4 votes
  19. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (March 2025) in ~health.mental

    Bullmaestro
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    February's been a mostly shit month for me. Valentines Day was the highlight where I went on a lovely date night with my (now) partner and finally lost my virginity at 33. I found out two days...

    February's been a mostly shit month for me. Valentines Day was the highlight where I went on a lovely date night with my (now) partner and finally lost my virginity at 33.

    I found out two days before V-Day that I was being made redundant (basically my job doesn't justify a full time role and they want to absorb my duties into the greater team.) Since then it's been a rush to find a new job since this now risks jeopardising the apartment purchase I had in the pipeline.

    The two busy days I did have went disastrously because of system fuck-ups. Like, I legitimately had to skip a friend's wedding reception because I knew I couldn't get the Monday off, and they thanked me with three days where I had to work substantial overtime to get Business Review presentations out. Oh well, won't be my problem soon. I've pretty much mentally tuned out.

    Maybe it's the amount of time I've been out at the pub (mainly for karaoke eves) but I've felt really anxious and guilty for the past few weeks

    9 votes
  20. Comment on US President Donald Trump shares bizarre AI vision of what Gaza will look like under his rule in ~society

    Bullmaestro
    Link Parent
    I have no words either. This is one of those times where Trump and his actions have truly baffled me.

    I have no words either. This is one of those times where Trump and his actions have truly baffled me.

    5 votes