Want to wade into the snowy 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 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
It certainly comes across a little different when said by someone who thinks cisgender is a slur and that changing oneās sex is some sort of great moral evil.
Turning into a butterfly is a cool sci-fi future but those trans people are a bridge too far.
Also like itās just hard to listen to, being drug hazed ramblings-- I want some actually fun sci-fi speeches!
Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I donāt think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanityās future, not recoil from it like later epigones.
Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991
He was doing the easy sex-swapping thing in The Ophiuchi Hotline, several years before Steel Beach.
So I gather but SB is the only book Iāve read