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.)
The usual suspects are mad about college hillās expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, Iām in bed and canāt be bothered to link at the moment.
Found this
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldnāt be sneer worthy on itās own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), itās contributing factors likeā¦
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 (heās 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 itās 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 characterās working for literal Hellā¦ 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!)
ā¦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 shouldnāt 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.
obligatory reminder that ādath ilanā is misspelled āthailandā and I still donāt know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand
Thatās about what I was thinking, Iām completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.
Regarding the second and third point though Iāll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that itās also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
Always a bad sign when people canāt just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the āhustleā (for lack of a better word). Iām 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 āProject Lawfulā started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that arenāt nearly as wordyā¦ 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 āhis author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slavesā he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadnāt bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And thatās 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 Eliezerās 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.)
It turns in that direction about 20ish pages inā¦ 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.
Iām sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If itās not the implicit racialization of everything, itās 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, weāre going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and thatās final.
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
Anyone found with a non-cube platonic solid will be lockerized indefinitely
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 shanāt). The authorās site appears to be live.
8BFās site has been taken over by bots, and I canāt 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 Clevingerās blog, Nuklear Power. Hereās 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 didnāt get that people didnāt agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example. One of his comics was also called āthe atheist, the agnostic and the assholeā so yeah. The 00ās online comic world was something.
gosh iām sure glad that these kinds of people disappeared from the internet /s
@istewart
I would simply learn how to keep āgamesā and ārealityā separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didnāt 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 isnāt 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).
Weāve 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 ālintamande kelsey piperā 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 āVladmir Putin/Sauronā. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
Previous thread
E: we didnāt 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 canāt 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.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yudās coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I donāt know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified ālintamandeā 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:
ā¦ before the āwhat the fuck is this fucking shit?ā intensified beyond my ability to care.
Yeah I couldnāt find the strength to even get to the naughty stuff, I gave up after one or two chapters. And Iāve read through all of HPMOR. š
Iām hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played āexquisite corpseā parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didnāt pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.