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.)
The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.
I’m sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it’s not the implicit racialization of everything, it’s the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we’re going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that’s final.
also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010
E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing
I never read 8bit. I read A Modest Destiny. Wonder how that guy is doing, he always was a bit weird and combative, but when he deleted his blog it was getting very early signs of right wing culture warrior bits (which was ironic considering he burned a us flag).
Never read AMD (and shan’t). The author’s site appears to be live.
8BF’s site has been taken over by bots, and I can’t be bothered to find an alternate source. Dead internet go brrrrr. Otherwise, the creator, Brian Clevinger, appears to have had a long career in comics, and has written many things for Marvel.
You can find it directly on Brian Clevinger’s blog, Nuklear Power. Here’s a direct link to the archive.
Ah thanks! On mobile the main page gets redirected to spam, but the site is navigable from the archive.
Yeah, but he used to have forums, and then a blog, and then no blog and then a blog again, and then a hidden blog etc. Think Howard has only a few minor credits on some games, he always came off as a bit of a weirdly combative nerd who thought he was right and the smartest in the room and didn’t get that people didn’t agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example. One of his comics was also called ‘the atheist, the agnostic and the asshole’ so yeah. The 00’s online comic world was something.
gosh i’m sure glad that these kinds of people disappeared from the internet /s
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
@istewart
I would simply learn how to keep “games” and “reality” separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didn’t need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.
Yes but basic dnd does have a lot of racism build in, esp with Gygax not being great on that end (nits make lice he said about how it lawful for paladins to kill orc babies). They did drop the sexism pretty quickly, but no big suprise his daughters were not into it. It certainly helps with the whole hierarchical mindset. My int/level is higher than yours so im better than you stuff. And sadly a lot of people do have trouble keeping both seperate (and even that isn’t always ideal, esp in larps).
But yes this, considering the context ks def a bit of a case of some of their ideologies, or ideological fantasies bleeding through. (Esp considering, Yud has been corrected on his faulty understanding of genetics before).
Anyone found with a non-cube platonic solid will be lockerized indefinitely
We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling “lintamande kelsey piper” and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged “Vladmir Putin/Sauron”. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud’s coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don’t know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified “lintamande” as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
And I got to about here:
… before the “what the fuck is this fucking shit?” intensified beyond my ability to care.
Yeah I couldn’t find the strength to even get to the naughty stuff, I gave up after one or two chapters. And I’ve read through all of HPMOR. 😐
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played “exquisite corpse” parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didn’t pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.
Previous thread
E: we didn’t fucking know
Not sure if anybody noticed the last time, but so they get isekayed into a DND world, which famously runs on some weird form of fantasy feudalism and they expect a random high int person to rule the country somehow? What in the primogenitor is this stuff, you can’t just think yourself into being a king, that is one of the issues with monarchies.
E: ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
Hey, write what you know
An encounter of this sort is what drove Lord Vetinari to make a scorpion pit for mimes, probably.
Found this
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldn’t be sneer worthy on it’s own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it’s contributing factors like…
the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he’s literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
the fact that Eliezer think it’s another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character’s working for literal Hell… is certainly an authorial choice)
and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
…At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldn’t be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
That’s about what I was thinking, I’m completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.
Regarding the second and third point though I’ll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that it’s also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
It turns in that direction about 20ish pages in… and spends hundreds of pages on it, greatly inflating the length from what could be a much more readable length. It then gets back to actual plot events after that.
Always a bad sign when people can’t just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the ‘hustle’ (for lack of a better word). I’m reminded of that dating profile we looked at which showed that 99% what he did was related to AI and AI doomerism, even the parties.
I actually think “Project Lawful” started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that aren’t nearly as wordy… one of them actually almost kind of pokes fun at himself and lesswrong), and then as it took off and the plot took the direction of “his author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slaves” he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadn’t bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And that’s why his next attempt at a HPMOR-level masterpiece is an awkward to read rp featuring tons of adult content in a DnD spinoff, and not more fanfiction suitable for optimal reception to the masses.
^(I think Eliezer’s writing output dropped a lot in the 2010s compared to when he was writing the sequences and the stuff he has written over the past decade is a lot worse. Like the sequences are all in bite-size chunks, and readable in chunks in sequence, and often rephrase legitimate science in a popular way, and have a transhumanist optimism to them. Whereas his recent writings are tiny little hot takes on twitter and long, winding, rants about why we are all doomed on lesswrong.)
obligatory reminder that “dath ilan” is misspelled “thailand” and I still don’t know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand