Yeah dried plums. Idk why it suddenly becomes a new word, something French I think?

Or prune juice: a warrior’s drink

I was thinking Barclay had his hand in this monstrosity

I used to work at a credit union in IT. I can confirm financial institution laziness knows no bounds. Separate from their laziness is the vendor compatibility. I can’t count how many vendors do not update their software to run on modern browsers and relied on specific IE instances. Adding to all that is just the institution itself having decades old hardware and software because modernizing things can be incredibly expensive. The core my company used was incredibly outdated Unix and required a ton of different middleware just to make sure we were compliant where absolutely necessary. If it wasn’t necessary nothing got done. And that’s better than a lot of banks that could be running on some COBOL based core. Completely redoing the core will affect every middleware crap solution they’ve patchworked together to keep running over the past few decades and will be insanely resource, cost, and time intensive.

Even these days at my current company I run into this shit. Huntington bank requiring IE for check processing, or SAGE DB software requiring 2013 Access or else it won’t work. These are huge companies still utilizing outdated piles of garbage.

Bots and shills accounts are a huge problem in any public discourse about any topic, but they really come out in full force when “hot button” topics come up. IE: I watch Doctor Who, also a highly political and progressive show with “fans” suddenly and inexplicably divided the second there was a whiff of casting news regarding a new Doctor.

Years ago, before Jodie Whittaker got the role officially, there were reports that Phoebe Waller-Bridge might be in talks to play the Doctor and the Doctor Who subreddit exploded with “as a woman I don’t think the Doctor should be played by a woman” posts. After Jodie was announced the posts exploded again. Then later, there were talks a black actor could be playing the Doctor and once again inexplicably tons of 'as a black man I don’t care about representation… " posts went flying.

Even little subs like PrintSF for sf/fantasy etc. books got the occasional comments when it was time for Hugos. Any mention of female or diverse authors being nominated got random accounts never accessing the sub before saying shit like “anyone else notice all the books are by LGBTQ authors? I’m just asking questions” never to be seen again after Hugos were over. There’s still a remnant of Sad Puppy/Puppygate bad faith posters and shills sewing discord years later after the whole drama subsided.

It just seems like anytime potential division can be created there’s an influx in new/ random accounts pushing it where it makes no sense, like with Star Trek or Doctor Who specifically being great examples. I hope fediverse places make this kinda blatant discord harder to create.

I have to imagine a lot of this “I’m done with woke star trek” crap is perpetuated by bots and shills. Post histories on Reddit for accounts saying these right wing talking points were either days old in response to some new Trek show or episode, or years old accounts that haven’t posted in forever then suddenly posted a bunch of talking points in every thread they could find.

There were definitely legit accounts of people upset by new Trek for other reasons but far outnumbered by “anti wokester” puppet accounts. When it came to Twitter I wouldn’t bat a lash if one out of every hundred accounts were bots. After noticing their trends they get easier to spot. It’s the only thing that makes sense when the alternative is there are legions of trek fans that never noticed how progressive the shows were and suddenly decided to be angry in the past couple years.