Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

    • aspragg@ohai.social
      3·
      4 hours ago

      @gerikson @BlueMonday1984

      Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.

      …sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.

      …no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.

      (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        1 hour ago

        What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?

        “Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.

        The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”

        — Merriam-Webster

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Best part is the footnote:

      About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        57 minutes ago

        Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.

        “Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 hours ago

      Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends

      (His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time