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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd August 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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 so 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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)

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[–] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The "Your Mileage May Vary" page even gets in a sneer!

Derailing: He has a habit of going down the list of tvtropes fanfic recommendations and leaving reviews on ff.net exclaiming how amazing it is that the author’s story is just as or almost as good as his own writing while dropping his story’s name. He probably reads these stories but considering that in roughly 30% of these reviews he quotes lines of these stories out of context in order to draw false parallels to his philosophies, he may simply be skimming them.

Yea verily, he is almost as smooth at this as I am at inserting references to The Romance of T'Lyn and Beckett Mariner.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    They got another (unintended) sneer on another page

    Also, advertising your own fics in other people’s comments is massive loser behaviour

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  • [–] 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

    This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author's notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).

    I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.

    Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY's part, possibly indicating that he doesn't appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.

    Edit: thinking about the way Rowling has shown her true face over the past decade... "with all profits accruing to a UK charity" makes me wonder if in whatever fantasy universe Eliezer did talk Rowling into allowing published fanfic to be monetized for "charities", that money would all end up going to TERF "charities".

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    The idea that the owners of HP would let a critical parody be published for profit (even if that profit would be donated to a UK charity) was naive at best. There's no "it's for charidee" protection for copyright law. You're right, it does indicate how distant he was from those communities, how little he knew about the history of fandom, and how little he cared about how his actions might affect them.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    @scruiser @maol What on Earth did he think Daniel Radcliffe would have been able to do?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago

    the YMMV page also has this gem:

    Values Dissonance: While his works are an interesting read no matter where you come from morally, a lot of his stuff is a bit... disturbing if your Paranoia Fuel involves Borg, Cybermen, Replicants, eugenics, individual or social reprogramming, just about any other form of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul or Hive Mind in fiction, or just something the Genre Savvy Doomed Contrarian would run like hell from. Granted, he goes out of his way to not use fiction as a starting point for ethics discussions, but you never really know...

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