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 for starting this.)
New Iris Meredith: “There’s no such thing as Just a Tool”, featuring the writings of notorious Nazi and notable 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger on the nature of tools, and Meredith’s own writing on how philosophically bankrupt the current tech industry is.
As a bonus, here’s an old Bluesky thread I found about game design affecting a game’s community.
Always love reading Iris’ work. I’m already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I’m getting my money’s worth to be sure.
Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.
Interesting if somewhat unintentional contrast between tools: a 7-month-old microblogging/Twitter-like thread is readily considered “old,” even if it contains (and might be a primary reference point for!) information that is relevant long before and long after. The same can’t always be said of a blog post.