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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
In other news, Iāve stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:
Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - thereās people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the videoās whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting thereās suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.
Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.
These fake people all have extremely 2025 voices
Lmao, piss-soaked fake nostalgia aside, what is even the point of this? How exactly is one supposed to go back to the 80ās? Is this an ad campaign for a toaster bath or something?
No idea. Best guess is that its some attempt to sell fascism under a thin veneer of '80s nostalgia, mainly because this one full minute of Oops! All White People, and fascists are the biggest boosters of AI bar fucking none.
When it comes to falling for nostalgia, its generally Y2K-tinged stuff that gets me - Iām much closer to that era (again, I was born in 2000), and Iāve got a soft spot for the general visual style of that era (that its facing against Corporate Memphis/AI slop definitely helps).
Does anyone else just ā¦ not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?
I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.
Thinking about it a bit, I suspect youāre not alone - whilst the '00s were pretty great for me (I was born in 2000, remember), the '10s were a complicated mess (for a long list of reasons), and the '20s have been one wash after another - and thanks to the 'Net, Iām aware how much hot garbage the '00s and earlier decades had.
I do also have individual bits of media which Iāve got fond memories of, but thatās about it. Thinking about it, my general soft spot for Y2K stuff is probably a lot less rooted in nostalgia than I thought.