Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026

https://awful.systems/post/7612992

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026 - awful.systems

Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)

A LWer is super-impressed by the time travel fantasy Illumine Lingao (an example of Chuanyue)

www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/leogao-s-shortform?comm…

Listen to this pitch:

the vast majority of the book is devoted to discussing every single technical aspect in excruciating well-researched detail. you don’t simply have a paragraph about them deciding to buy guns, you get an entire chapter of different gun experts arguing back and forth about exactly which gun to buy based on maintainability, range, differences between civilian and military models, semi automatic vs fully automatic.

Apparently they’re quite unaware of the extensive number of works in Russian with similar themes:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_travel#In_Russia…

Illumine Lingao - Wikipedia

Look, I’ve read some long-ass web novels. I enjoyed Worm, A Practical Guide to Evil, and Katalepsis all start to finish. I have also spent more hours than I could count (even if I did care to) perusing excessively detailed fan wikis and reading interninal debates between nerds about minutia. I have done all of this and enjoyed myself greatly.

But the way they’re describing this sounds absolutely exhausting and incredibly dull. If this isn’t the result of some kind of collaborative project where the debates are between different actual people then it sounds like you’re just dumping your worldbuilding notes into the page and throwing a “he said” every so often.

followup, here’s a real substack interview with one of the originators of the collab novel

afraw.substack.com/p/first-dig-the-latrines

to be honest sounds like semi-fascist shit to me.

First, Dig the Latrines

The Morning Star of Lingao is China's cult industrial time-travel novel. Its main author has some thoughts on AGI, power, China's media landscape, and the end of most jobs

Concurrent