Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025 - eviltoast

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.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    Strange is a trooper and her sneer is worth transcribing. From about 22:00:

    So let’s go! Upon saturating my brain with as much background information as I could, there was really nothing left to do but fucking read this thing, all six hundred thousand words of HPMOR, really the road of enlightenment that they promised it to be. After reading a few chapters, a realization that I found funny was, “Oh. Oh, this is definitely fanfiction. Everyone said [laughing and stuttering] everybody that said that this is basically a real novel is lying.” People lie on the Internet? No fucking way. It is telling that even the most charitable reviews, the most glowing worshipping reviews of this fanfiction call it “unfinished,” call it “a first draft.”

    A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition of HPMOR at 26:30 or so:

    It’s extremely tiring. I was surprised by how soul-sucking it was. It was unpleasant to force myself beyond the first fifty thousand words. It was physically painful to force myself to read beyond the first hundred thousand words of this – let me remind you – six-hundred-thousand-word epic, and I will admit that at that point I did succumb to skimming.

    Her analysis is familiar. She recognized that Harry is a self-insert, that the out-loud game theory reads like Death Note parody, that chapters are only really related to each other in the sense that they were written sequentially, that HPMOR is more concerned with sounding smart than being smart, that HPMOR is yet another entry in a long line of monarchist apologies explaining why this new Napoleon won’t fool us again, and finally that it’s a bad read. 31:30 or so:

    It’s absolutely no fucking fun. It’s just absolutely dry and joyless. It tastes like sand! I mean, maybe it’s Yudkowsky’s idea of fun; he spent five years writing the thing after all. But it just [struggles for words] reading this thing, it feels like chewing sand.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      I can’t be bothered to look up the details (kinda in a fog of sleep deprivation right now to be honest), but I recall HPMOR pissing me off by getting the plot of Death Note wrong. Well, OK, first there was the obnoxious thing of making Death Note into a play that wizards go to see. It was yet another tedious example in Yud’s interminable series of using Nerd Culture™ wink-wink-nudge-nudges as a substitute for world-building. Worse than that, it was immersion-breaking: Yud throws the reader out of the story by prompting them to wonder, “Wait, is Death Note a manga in the Muggle world and a play in the wizarding one? Did Tsugumi Ohba secretly learn of wizard culture and rip off one of their stories?” And then Yud tried to put down Death Note and talk up his own story by saying that L did something illogical that L did not actually do in any version of Death Note that I’d seen.

      And now I want potato chips.