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.)
Today I was looking for some new audiobooks again, and I was scrolling through curated1 lists for various genres. In the sci-fi genre, there is a noticeable uptick in AI-related fiction books. I have noticed this for a while already, and itās getting more intense. Most seem about āwhat if AI, but really powerful and scaryā and singularity-related scenarios. While such fiction themes arenāt new at all, it appears to me that thereās a wave of it now, although itās possible as well that I am just more cognisant of it.
I think thatās another reason that will make your prediction true: sooner or later demand for this sub-genre will peak, as many people eventually become bored with it as a fiction theme as well. Like it happened with e.g. vampires and zombies.
(1 Not sure when ācurationā is even human-sourced these days. The overall state of curation, genre-sorting, tagging and algorithmic ārecommendationsā in commercial books and audiobooks is so terribleā¦ but thatās a different rant for another day.)
Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity weāre suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)
It doesnāt have to be IMO, in particular when itās an older work.
I donāt mind at all to rewatch e.g. AI-themed episodes of TNG, such as the various episodes with a focus on Data, or the one where the ship computer gains sentience (itās a great episode actually).
On the other hand, a while ago I stopped listening to a contemporary (published in 2022) audiobook halfway throuh, it was an utopian AI scifi story. The theme of āAI could be great and save the worldā just bugged me too much in relation to the current real-world situation. I couldnāt enjoy it at all.
I donāt know why I feel so differently about these two examples. Maybe itās simply because TNG is old enough that I do not associate it with current events, and the first time I saw the episodes was so long ago. Or maybe itās because TNG plays in a far-future scenario, clearly disconnected from today, while the audiobook plays in a current-day scenario. Hm, itās strange.
(and btw queer loneliness is an interesting theme, wonder if I could find an audiobook involving it)