Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
This is old news but I just stumbled across this fawning 2020 Elon Musk interview / award ceremony on the social medias and had to share it: https://www.youtube.com/live/AF2HXId2Xhg?t=2109
In it Musk claims synthetic mRNA (and/or DNA) will be able to do anything and it is like a computer program, and that stopping aging probably wouldn’t be too crazy. And that you could turn someone into a freakin’ butterfly if you want to with the right DNA sequence.
this is not even wrong lol
It certainly comes across a little different when said by someone who thinks cisgender is a slur and that changing one’s sex is some sort of great moral evil.
Turning into a butterfly is a cool sci-fi future but those trans people are a bridge too far.
Also like it’s just hard to listen to, being drug hazed ramblings-- I want some actually fun sci-fi speeches!
Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don’t think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity’s future, not recoil from it like later epigones.
Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991
He was doing the easy sex-swapping thing in The Ophiuchi Hotline, several years before Steel Beach.
So I gather but SB is the only book I’ve read
This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.
And just think, he’s been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.
Threshold was best episode imo.
There’s a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.
For the love of god please hook me up.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=luEDui2zAUw
Much like when the Voyager passed warp 13, our AI development is moving too fast with potentially magnitudinous consequences.