Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of Awful youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • mountainriver@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Shouldnā€™t they be fans of The Culture? And didnā€™t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

    (It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Shouldnā€™t they be fans of The Culture?

      I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We donā€™t even blog!)). So I doubt it.

      • self@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesnā€™t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because theyā€™re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yudā€™s nonsense ever will be

        so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

        They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I donā€™t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism weā€™re talking about).

        yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. itā€™s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yudā€™s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

        thereā€™s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always donā€™t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just arenā€™t bored enough yet.

        yud omits this (probably, Iā€™m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isnā€™t gonna end your existence (they donā€™t do murder, and thereā€™s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient beingā€™s mind) but theyā€™re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Subliming

          Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.

          Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasnā€™t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldnā€™t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ā€˜the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinityā€™

          Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.

        It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldnā€™t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).

        (Iā€™m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you donā€™t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).

        Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? Itā€™s the one HN likes best too. Itā€™s probably the only one Iā€™ve not re-read. Maybe itā€™s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture heā€™s coerced to infiltrate.

        Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          i would think they didnā€™t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and donā€™t realise that ultimately itā€™s gurgehā€™s revulsion at azadā€™s societal rules, and him fully embracing the cultureā€™s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            Obvsly youā€™ve read the novel more than I have considering your nickā€¦ I might have to give it another go.

            OTOH Iā€™d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona ā€“ i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)

              • gerikson@awful.systems
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                6 months ago

                Yah Skaffen is the best drone, obvsly.

                Thx for the reference to Soldier F, didnā€™t know about his case.

                • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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                  6 months ago

                  this modern example of censorship is pretty wild: uk actively enforces this ban despite the fact the sdlp mp for foyle, colum eastwood, used his parlliamentary privilege to get clearyā€™s name into hansard, and at the time i still had a twitter account, the tweets naming the bastard were either reported or sweeped by some internal search. you wonā€™t see clearyā€™s name mentioned on reddit either.

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he canā€™t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)

            edit itā€™s been ages since Iā€™ve read this books so Iā€™ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get

            On an episode of Lex Fridmanā€™s podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.

            šŸ¤®

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        select the Banks extract, pass through wc: 1677

        select the yudā€¦emanation, do same: 13442

        at this stage itā€™s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

          Thereā€™s a metal ballad in there, I swear.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            other album track titles:

            • cascading infinity
            • which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
            • the quintillionth heartbreak
            • lies of being