There’s constant running commentary and speculation, and biographical segments, and sometimes a little drama when surprising things happen, or expected things don’t, and a large group of people simply care enough that they want to know as soon as a pick happens, though how organic the growth of that group has been is certainly open for debate.

So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.

1. NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
2. College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
3. Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
4. More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.

As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander that chance.

For those who follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day (okay, three days now, but Rounds 2-7 are still for the nerds) that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).

Oh, you can still be mad. It was clearly a tactical retreat so they could continue to fuck over anyone with a complaint even tangentially related to the media itself. They’re evil, but usually not stupid.

They gave that up within a week, mostly because pushing it that insanely hard would have ended up setting a precedent that would have been used against them in the thousands of closer cases they probably deal with every year.

If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.

Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.

Earlier in the week, news broke that Hegseth had personally created a Signal group chat including his wife, brother and about a dozen other people who he then texted highly sensitive information on active strikes in Yemen… One person said Russian and Chinese spies were no doubt directly targeting susceptible people in Hegseth’s inner circle.

Even if, as I am sure he very wrongly does, Hegseth believes himself morally beyond reproach and too smart to be tricked, does he honestly think every single person in his circle and in their circles is as well? JFC.

Well, I can confirm their geese cousins know who they are under those feathers.

while avoiding spoilers for the latter two.

This is much worse for weekly people trying to pace themselves on a binge-dumped show.

Personally, I think it absolutely depends on the show itself and how the creators want it viewed. Some do well with a week to ruminate and build excitement. Some do better as just this “thing” you need to see as quickly as possible. I think there’s room for both.

This also likely explains the Kraven the Hunter thing happening on Netflix, with the added bonus that apparently KtH is merely underwhelming and not a literal shitshow. Can’t say personally, though , as I haven’t watched any of the Sonyverse Spiderman accessory movies.

https://youtu.be/URwZv_aB940?t=43

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Apr. 21, 2025 

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My Score: 2360

No, that’s beta.

‘Butter’ is hitting something a lot.

this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”

Also, an auteur (or the estate of an auteur) that owns a bunch of their own IP is effectively just a small studio. they have leverage to raise money for new projects, revenue streams from licensing the old ones, and the potential to enter into contracts surrounding them in all kinds of ways. Shit, a Megalopolis or two, and the auteurs will be selling their rights back to the legacy studios anyway.

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)

If you raise the tariffs to a billion percent then the US will get a billion dollars revenue for every $100 TV that comes from China! There will be so many millions of billions!!! Why wasn’t anyone smart enough to do this before???

Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).

But, you see, he looks like a secretary of defense, so therefore he must be an excellent one!

This is where I landed on it. Better than Big Bang Theory, worse than Silicon Valley. I found it to be a pretty watchable workplace comedy, and if it didn’t capture game dev well, it did capture a certain funhouse reflection of what people think game dev might be, and that’s what it needed to set the characters into motion, letting the actors cook. I know people giving it shit for its two best episodes not starring anyone from the main cast, and while true, they were two really good episodes and the floor of the main show is adequately high.

Now, in fairness, I’m not in love with IASIP and sort of checked out a long time ago, after they “died” on the cruise ship, so Rob and David Hornsby acting “similar but different” was no problem for me. I do think we were just about at the point where ending MQ makes sense, though. The show didn’t really have the bones for the characters to withstand a lot of growth, and the comedic situations for them as-is had sort of played themselves out. Obviously, for a sitcom, that’s the time to bow out. Going forward, I would love to see Charlotte Nicdao in something produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock.

Boiled Peanuts. I love 'em, but they’re salty and sodden and messy, and they can range from a disconcerting pop texture to a disconcerting slimy texture, all in the same batch.