Entertainment
Exclusionary Gatekeeping Is The Future Of Entertainment
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Even the most optimistic pundits are now willing to admit that the quality of entertainment produced by Hollywood has declined. Many reasons have been put forward for this flagging level of competence, but there’s only one solution: exclusionary gatekeeping.
For more than a decade, the entertainment industry has run entirely on inclusivity. Hiring both in front of and behind the camera has been done with a representation-first mindset, which means everyone must be allowed in to whatever you’re doing, whether they’re a qualified fit for your audience or not.
The Death Of Differences
The same transformation happened in entertainment journalism. When the online movie news world emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was run almost entirely by obsessive fans. I know because I helped build it as the founder of CinemaBlend in 2000.
Sites like CinemaBlend, Ain’t It Cool News, Dark Horizons, Film Threat, The Movie Blog, and others were operated by individual owners who were deeply knowledgeable about the topics they covered. These weren’t corporate brands managed by committees. They were passion projects run by people like Vic Holtreman, Chris Gore, John Campea, Garth Franklin, Christopher Null, and Harry Knowles.
They weren’t trying to represent everyone. They were writing for their audience: hardcore male genre fans.
Over time, those independents were either iced out by algorithms that were sued into promoting mainstream media (this actually happened), or bought out by corporate conglomerates (including Cinema Blend, which I exited in 2015) who ditched the genuine, knowledgeable, gatekeeping fan owners in favor of creating something inclusive. Where those original owners had only hired other fans who shared the interests of their audience, the new owners hired opinion makers who represented everyone and everything, which in reality means they hired people who stood for nothing and no one.
This same process was happening in Hollywood itself. It’s why John Lasseter was fired for giving a hug, and Pixar hasn’t made a truly great movie since. The result in both the entertainment creation and the entertainment reporting space has been a disaster. Box office numbers are plummeting. Viewers now use positive Rotten Tomatoes scores as an indicator for which movies to avoid.
Gatekeeping Is The Answer
There’s only one solution, and that solution is gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is the act of controlling access to an idea, community, opportunity, or resource by deciding who is allowed in and who is excluded.
As part of the push towards radical inclusivity by big corporations and activists, the term gatekeeping has become a pejorative. It’s used as an emotionally charged attack against meanies. Being called a gatekeeper is the kind of thing that gets people cancelled.
But nothing of any worth happens without some form of gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is just another way of saying quality control. Quality control isn’t mean, it’s sensible.
Without gatekeeping, we’d end up with unqualified pilots crashing planes maintained by unqualified mechanics. Without gatekeeping inspectors, the quality of the food you eat degrades, the drugs you need aren’t potent, and nuclear reactors go into meltdown.
Creative endeavors are no different. Without gatekeeping a new Star Trek show hires writers who know nothing about Star Trek, and then its scripts end up filled with obvious mistakes and terrible plot holes which any fan could have spotted if they’d done some gatekeeping to hire one.
Inclusivity Is Lazy And Destructive
If you have standards and want to keep them, you must exclude people or things that do not meet them. Enforcing standards is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
I require my son to get As in math. To make that happen, I check his grades and help him with his homework when he struggles. If he doesn’t study and fails a test, I have to enforce consequences.
If I remove my requirement for an A, I no longer have to do anything. My son also won’t learn math, but I’ll save a lot of time.
Radical inclusivity is a way of removing standards, a way of deferring responsibility for maintaining quality. It’s lazy and destructive.
Exclusion Maintains Differences And Diversity
Exclusion maintains the integrity of your work, your idea, and your brand. Samurai swords are only Samurai swords as long as Claymores are excluded from being classified as Katanas. Pepsi is only Pepsi as long as you exclude lemonade from Pepsi cans. It’d be easier to fill Pepsi cans with whatever liquid is cheapest and most available, but then it wouldn’t be Pepsi anymore, and eventually people would stop buying it.
Maintaining unique differences is hard, so homogenization disguised as inclusivity allows corporations to take an established universe like Star Trek or Star Wars and wear it like a skin suit, puppeted by inclusive hires (hiring done without relevant standards) who have no idea what they’re a part of, and because they don’t care are totally willing to treat fans like fat, juicy, pay pigs to be farmed for maximum profit. They fill Star Wars up with whatever happens to be lying around, and then play the Star Wars theme music in front of it.
Giant Freakin Robot Is An Exclusionary Publication
Late last year, I relaunched Giant Freakin Robot with a renewed determination to avoid these pitfalls by making this the most exclusionary geek site on the internet. What does that mean? It means we will not work with writers who have bad ideas or ideas that are in direct conflict with the values and interests of our readers. That doesn’t serve them or us.
Specifically, Giant Freakin Robot’s readers are geeky men, and always have been, so that means finding commentators who have the same fundamental world view that most geeky men have. Engaging Alex Kurtzman fans to write for Giant Freakin Robot would make about as much sense as investing in Giant Freakin Robot makeup tutorials.
To serve our audience in this way requires gatekeeping. So we’re contracting with talented freelancers based on exclusion, rather than inclusion, and we’re doing it using this simple ad:
There’s only one required question in the application process, which pops up after you read the ad. That question is: Do you hate Starfleet Academy? Yes/No
We’ve received hundreds of applications from writers, most of them recently laid off by struggling, inclusive corporate publications. 95% of those applicants checked No and failed this rather simple IQ test. Their applications were automatically sent to a trash bin.
Before we bring on anyone new, in addition to correctly answering that single question, they’ll have to meet the standards of quality and creativity established by our crack team of genius geek culture commentators. We’ll continue to exclude anyone who doesn’t measure up.
If you want a world free of gatekeeping, go to X for random opinions and watch endless AI slop on YouTube. But if you’re looking for a place that throws out the bad and only keeps the good, then read Giant Freakin Robot. Gatekeeping is our business; it’s what we do.
Entertainment
3 AdultFriendFinder red flags — how to avoid scams on AFF
Depending on who you ask, AdultFriendFinder is either the Wild West of hookup sites, an “anything goes” paradise for adult fun, or a total scam replete with bots, fake profiles, and inactive accounts.
After months of personal testing, I can confidently say which AFF you experience ultimately boils down to how you use the site. If you approach it naively, without a strategy, you’re probably going to have some frustrating experiences. On the other hand, if you exercise a modicum of caution and common sense, you’ll discover a huge, fun, and kink-friendly community.
Here are three red flags to look out for as you use AFF, to help you spot potential scammers and separate the authentic users from the fake profiles.
Hookup apps for everyone
AdultFriendFinder
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readers’ pick for casual connections
Tinder
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top pick for finding hookups
Hinge
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popular choice for regular meetups
Credit: AdultFriendFinder
Unverified accounts
AdultFriendFinder already offers a fantastic first step in combatting fake profiles that they call ConfirmID. Once you’ve created an account, you can, at any time, upload a clear scan of a government-issued ID card and then, using a webcam, undergo a quick face verification scan to confirm that you are indeed the person identified in the government document.
This step strikes the perfect balance between not being onerous enough to annoy the average user but still requiring enough effort to deter scammers, who notoriously go after the low-hanging fruit.
Mashable Trend Report
Once you’ve completed the ConfirmID sequence, you’ll be rewarded with a verification badge on your profile, and we strongly recommend that you limit your one-on-one interactions on the site to other verified users.
Perfect profile photos
Alright, admittedly this one requires some personal judgment, as everyone should strive to upload good, high-quality photos of themselves to dating websites. But if every photo looks like it belongs in a magazine, or if the person in the photo looks a little too good to be true, you should exercise caution.
In the age of generative AI and filters, it’s trivially easy to create a fake photo or series of photos, so you should also be on the lookout for what isn’t in the photos. Are there recognizable local landmarks (clubs, restaurants, well-known parks, or street corners) in the photos, or are they all equally generic?
Over-eager chatters
Ever since chat bots became a thing, dating sites have become plagued with them, and as AI improves more and more, it’s not always easy to know, right away, if the “person” you’re talking to is really human. One dead giveaway, though, is how much they chat and how quickly they reply.
Real people go off on tangents, employ non sequiturs, and sometimes stumble with awkward questions or comments. Chat bots, on the other hand, are typically always chipper and extremely fast-talking, so much so that a paragraph-long answer can come back to you in seconds.
They also almost always have an agenda, too, whether that’s directing you to click on a link (“Follow my Instagram profile”) or getting you to divulge some potentially compromising bit of personal information about yourself.
Entertainment
SNL opens with another Pete Hegseth press conference
Saturday Night Live returned from a brief hiatus Saturday with a cold open depicting a joint press conference between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel, with “Master of None” creator Aziz Ansari playing the latter.
Colin Jost’s Hegseth hit the familiar beats at the podium — performative machismo, military bravado, and repeated jabs at the secretary’s well-documented drinking habits. This time, Hegseth arrived at the mic hauling an oversized pitcher of scotch, which he assured the room was his one for the day. He then fielded questions from the press about the administration’s handling of U.S. strikes on Iran, dismissing each reporter with the particular brand of smug confidence that has become central to Jost’s portrayal of the character.
Ansari’s Patel proved to be the sketch’s standout, arriving to defend his tenure at the FBI and proceeding to do so poorly. The bit’s centerpiece involved Patel simultaneously denying and admitting that he had locked himself out of his work email for 36 hours after forgetting he had changed his password to “kashmeoutside69.”
Funnily enough, Patel was reportedly locked out of his FBI email in real life and believed, at least momentarily, that he was being fired. As the sketch demonstrated, the distance between SNL’s Cold Open and the actual news cycle has rarely felt smaller.
Entertainment
NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for May 3, 2026
Today’s Connections: Sports Edition will require some knowledge of popular U.S. sports and pop culture.
As we’ve shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.
Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
What is Connections: Sports Edition?
The NYT‘s latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication’s sports coverage. The sports Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words, and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes before the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
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Here’s a hint for today’s Connections: Sports Edition categories
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Here are today’s Connections: Sports Edition categories
Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:
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Yellow: In Good Shape
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Green: Current NFL Head Coaches
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Blue: Famous Sports “Curses”
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Purple: Starts of Big Ten Names
Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today’s Connections: Sports Edition #586 is…
What is the answer to Connections: Sports Edition today?
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In Good Shape: AGIL, ATHLETIC, FIT, STRONG
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Current NFL Head Coaches: COEN, GLENN, REID, RYANS
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Famous Sports “Curses”: BAMBINO, BILLY GOAT, MADDEN, SI COVER
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Starts of Big Ten Names: BOIL, BUCK, CORN, HAWK
Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today’s Strands.
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Connections.
RJ Barrett, Raptors clash with Cavaliers in unexpected Game 7
Max Meyer, two relievers hold Phillies to one hit
