this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (28 children)

I regret to inform you that, once again, aella (via this)

fucked that this is at least moderately honest

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Ok I have to say, I despise aella but as a promiscuous woman I completely fail to see what's supposed to be the problem with this particular form of play. That people like having casual sex? That they have slut pride? What.

I probably passed the 100 mark myself several years ago, I've hooked up with girls with much more obvious slut tattoos too, and we're all antifascist anarchists. Is this community ok with sneering at public sexuality now?

The only thing I found vaguely mid in that X is using a tattoo gun rather than scarification, branding, or at least stick-and-poke. But I don't kink-shame people for being casuals.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Personally I like sex work and amateur tattooing better when they aren't part of some convoluted attempt at rationalist virtue signalling on social media. Honestly it's kind of weird that you landed on disapproval of promiscuity as the reason anyone here would find the happy couple sneerable.

Not strictly related to the OP but fuck kink-washing sfba rationalism, at the very least the attempted normalization of non-con sex play in a subculture as inundated with cult dynamics as them should be fair game.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

I cannot understand the reason y'all find the couple sneerable, as I look at that tweet and see something I very much would have done to one of my partners if they asked, and the language used by the bottom as the same language my partners might have used to describe the activity. If anything it's very much on the tame side, for our standards. Promiscuity is me trying to understand what is it that's so sneerable in the first place. Is it just "lol sex thing weird"? Is it "you'll regret your tattoo when you get older"? Me and my girls have done so much more intensely weirder sex things and more risqué tattoos. I expect to be ridiculed for it by like, cishet right-wing men, but to find that type of attitude here was shocking.

Like, "virtue signalling" as in the thing that rats accuse us of doing every time we have a motivation they cannot comprehend such as basic empathy, right? As in the rationalist's stereotypically verbose euphemism for what previous generations of misogynistic male nerds used to call "attention whoring"? Is that the sneerable thing then, that people like showing off when they do an unusual sex thing? Because if so I have like, years of mastodon flirty banter y'all can go sneer at, if we're branching out from "nerdy fascism bad" to "kink on main bad".

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The guy goes by the handle RatOrthodox, calls rationalism his religion in the replies, seems kind of a cult-brained ideologue anyway based on his other tattoos, and went out of his way to make boinking aella into a public achievement/trophy thing.

This is just from the OP, I bet I could find any number of additional absolutely ridiculous things about him if I bothered with his twitter feed (edit: someone else did). Basically he seems like sneer incarnate, and if rationalists ever stormed the capitol building I bet he'd be the one with the face paint and the horned fur hat giving interviews.

Virtue signaling is not really interchangeable with attention whoring, it's when you specifically (and usually clumsily) want people to notice that you are part of an ingroup, and in this case the ingroup definitely isn't just people who like amateur tattooing and horny post on main.

Maybe I should explicitly note that unless this turns out to be another aella publicity stunt she does seem pretty incidental to the whole thing and her only fault appears to be being attractive this type of weirdo in the first place, which I'm not blaming her for.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

are you aware of what discussion group you're posting this to

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Think you are right, and tbh I didn't read this as a kink thing but more some weird glorifying Aella as some sort of important cult leader thing (and misread it and assumed it had to do with the flowchart event, and not this (which I should have noticed was wrong as there were less than 100 people involved in that, for which a 'I was nr 100' is quite odd to me (and fits into the whole cultleader vibe))). A reason why I only focused on the guy myself.

And you are totally correct that people sneer on Aella way to much just because she is {a woman, sex worker, a bit strange, unapologetic about being a sex worker, has sex the wrong way, {more weird reasons unrelated to her being part of the 'we should do eugenics!' crowd}} (pick any that apply). And have mentioned this before in other places. (oddly enough this caused somebody on bsky to just go full anti sex worker, so that was an easy block at least). But yes you are right to call us out on this.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

My stance is that I hate Aella because she exploits her life experience to be a disgusting misogynist and it is morally correct to kinkshame unpleasant heterosexual men who associate with the rationalist sex cult. I'm not interested in other people's hangups beyond that.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

oh, no, to be clear: this isn't about the sex/sluttiness - I have no issue with that at all. in a more general sense (over the wider set of things aella), her positioning herself as a "sex researcher" but often using that to bash specific groups or put out a specific narrative, that is far more problematic

but regarding this specific thing, tho: the "forced a tattoo on me" bit specifically, and all the rationalists doing their weird quasi-intellectual arguing with everyone who asks questions. the "forced" wording feels ... intentionally bait&switch? presumably (..hopefully?) there's mutual consent here, so it's a fucking choice to go frame the event that way

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

That's very much the language my play partners use online, though? I totally post banter like "that submissive was so blanked out that I took advantage of them by doing X", to which they'll reply "implying I didn't evily manipulated you into doing that in the first place", and so on. This is so commonplace in my communities that I failed to even understand what could be the problem before you pointed it out. I mean, "I forced my famous domme to mark me as a trophy as her #100 simp"? How would you exactly force (non-kink sense) someone to tattoo you anyway, and if you did and were unwise enough to brag about it, presumably the microcelebrity in question wouldn't like and retweet it? I took it to mean "I was so into the idea of being marked, I'm glad she agreed to my pestering", and I would bet money if any of my people talked in that exact wording, that's what everyone would take it as. I mean, otherwise I would probably have been arrested for the frequency of times I say "bye everyone gonna tie someone up and do unspeakably cruel things to them" and whatnot

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think in this thread it’s not “this thing is gross because it involves sex stuff”, it’s “this sex stuff is made gross by the involvement of aella and co, who we understand to have fundamentally different and incorrect ideas about ethics both in general and specific to sex”

Basically anything Aella touches merits a sniff test.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm imagining the same statement from a different person, on a platform that is not Xitter, about a sex partner who is not Aella.

(thinks)

Pierre Menard, author of the Kink-ote

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Gotta say, I’m not much of a JLB head, so I don’t fully understand this (would love an explainer!). At first glance I thought this was a Menards reference and super didn’t understand.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a story about a man whose passion project is rewriting Don Quixote, that is, arriving at exactly the same text as Cervantes, but from his own experiences. The narrator quotes the same line from both and observes that the remark by Cervantes is empty rhetoric, while the statement by Menard alludes to a whole school of philosophy that did not exist in Cervantes' time. So, "Though they are verbally identical, Menard's is infinitely richer."

I wasn't going for a deep-lore reference, just a bit of silly wordplay about the title.

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