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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems (awful.systems)
submitted 4 weeks ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Want to wade into the sandy 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 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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[-] rook@awful.systems 18 points 3 weeks ago

AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.

Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!

https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 17 points 3 weeks ago

genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago

It is a literal gateway to fascism imho, esp when people get into nostalgia for a time that never was.

And compared to nostalgia for mom n pop stores, this even is nostalgia for a mass produced product.

[-] rook@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago

I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.

Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?

I was gonna say that was probably the slop extruder's doing, but it looks to have been applied manually for some godforsaken reason. Best guess is whoever was behind this audiovisual extrusion thought "celluloid filter = Nostalgia^tm^".

[-] rook@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

I suspect it is also hiding some rendering artefacts.

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

I imagine it helps with the slightly plastic look that skin still gets too

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days

Nostalgiabait is the slopgens' specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn't an issue if you're trying to fabricate an idealis-

such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I've got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck's so different across the pond?

(Even from a "making nostalgiabait" angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD's directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you've got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)

this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
28 points (100.0% liked)

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