• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I did, loved it mostly, but… they literally erased a brother. There was another one, and he was even more tragic than the one they kept - he was small, and had extremely brittle bones, and the only thing he wanted was to wrestle, of course… and they let him, and he got put out by injury very quickly, and then followed his dead brothers.

    I think they cut him out because first off, it would probably have come off to audiences as “overdone” or something because it is difficult to countenance that much tragedy on one family. But also, the ones who were alive to allow that last one to happen bear some culpability in his death. He should’ve been sent to distant relatives and kept completely away from the family wrestling cult.


  • If you liked The Wrestler and have not seen Beyond The Mat (1998), do that. Randy “The Ram”'s entire story is basically a straight copypasta of the section on Jake “The Snake” Roberts, one of the best wrestlers of his era. “Best” is used here in a very loosely-defined way, because well, we’re talking about Pro Wrestling.

    But I was like 12-15 during the high years of the WWF, I was watching some of the most legendary names, and Jake was my absolute… ok well it’s a tossup between Jake and George “The Animal” Steele, who was older, looked like my grandpa a little bit, managed by Captain Lou Albano (both vintage heels turned face) from the Cyndi Lauper videos and had an excellent “crazy ape man” kinda schtick. He also would destroy a turnbuckle every match and I loved the vandalism.

    For a kid of the right age, mid-80s WWF was the best entertainment going, in a time when you had 13 channels if you were lucky. VCRs weren’t even completely ubiquitous yet. What else going on? Family Ties, Growing Pains, Lawrence Welk…

    But Jake was an absolute dark horse with incredible intensity, and totally unique - most were using steroids then, he had a very basic physique and didn’t give a shit. Most wrestlers would be high fiving and gesticulating and getting the crowd whipped up as they walked out. Jake would just walk out staring at the ring or his opponent, neither hurrying nor dallying, just a purposeful walk, with his grey sack containing a python slung over his shoulder. Great finishing move, great schtick, one of the absolute legends.

    Finding out over a decade later that his life was this Shakespearean (think Titus, not Romeo) tragedy the whole time was just wild, but also not at all surprising, because anyone who watched his matches could see that this was a different type of dude from your typical wrestler.

    Don’t sleep on Beyond The Mat. It’s also got some amazing stuff with Mick Foley and Terry Funk, two dudes who have done more damage to each other than the Romans did to Jesus, and who love each other intensely for it. Lots “holy shit what the fuck did he just do” clips.


  • It would be accurate to say that the Internet reached a critical mass of user in 1995. I was here in 1992, and 95 is when media started talking about the internet as a necessary thing for businesses etc to get onboard with, and by extension, when loads on servers started to get wild. A communal pool of servers for the web community to lean on during times of extreme demand is still an excellent idea that can solve a lot of problems, but not if we let capitalists run it for profit. Never work.






  • Why not rsync directly? Why insert a network share to muddy the process?

    Anyways, this is pretty much the “good” use of AI, as I see it. Indeed, if models are more tightly trained to focus on one specific bit of data, such as the manual for an application, a locally-run LLM could transform the help menu into a chatbot that teaches you the app.

    This could be the future reality, if the “throw a firehose of money and a bunch of horrible code at it and hope we can charge people who have no money a lot of money to rent our bullshit” brigade are guillotined.









  • Understand what a Reverse Proxy is, because you will not escape reading that phrase.

    Host things with Docker for now. If you don’t start hosting until you understand everything, you won’t start for a long time and that is silly.

    Use Cloudflare for now, because they handle a lot of security stuff for you that you definitely don’t want to screw up. If you don’t know what Cloudflare is, read up on CDNs and why they exist. Their Zero Trust Tunnel is the easiest and safest way to go, as long as you don’t plan to do anarchy or sedition on it, just talk about your household plants and dogs and what not and you’re fine.



  • What you want is called Spinosad. It’s marketed under other names, but it will deal with them immediately and decisively. Can be hard to find, when I needed it there was a local grow shop aimed at weed growers that sold it in small bottles, only a small amount added to your watering can is needed.

    Kills every stage of life, which is the downfall of many bug killers - gets the adults but not the eggs. This stuff is a thrip nuclear option.