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.)
That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.
I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe that’s just the European perspective.
In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.
Serious question: how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up “how to make money off a Minecraft server” and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.
Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.
For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less “block building game” than “robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for,” and even though it’s mostly against Mojang’s TOS, all the kinds of monetization you’d expect have followed. When you hear “Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit,” imagine “freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit” and you’ll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.
In the Year of Our Lord 2025 how does anyone, much less a published journalist, not recognize “Western Civilization” as a dog whistle for white (or at least European) supremacy rather than having anything to do with representative government or universal human rights or whatever people like to pretend.
Uni is also a good place to learn to fail. A uni run startup imitation place can ensure both problems (guided by profs if needed) and teach people how to do better, without being in the pockets of VCs also better hours, and parties.
Re: minecraft - kids/people who aren’t very good at technology can’t or are unwilling to learn how to host their own servers, so that’s your potentially paying audience. Or people who want to play with a ton of other people, not just their family/friends. And you can do some interesting things with custom scripts and so on on a server, I remember briefly playing on a server which had its own custom in-game currency (earned by selling certain materials) and you could buy potions, equipment and various random perks for it (and of course there are ways to connect that to real money, although you might get banned for it).
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