Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)
a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?
[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why
i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists
i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow
i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers
at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant
fuck. it's rationalist season
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".
I'm choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible
@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …
Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)
@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)
now you've got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive i'd put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where you'd have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didn't decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)
Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I've ever heard about him
I also legitimately can't tell the degree to which they don't understand they're LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that's why it's gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.
You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.
As a fellow Usenet junkie from way back, now I'm curious which newsgroups Yarvin hung out in.
@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.
"imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity..."
We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it's told well.
Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm^ seems like a good place to start.
"Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You'll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords."
"This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes" seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don't know what they're up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.