blakestacey

Once I asked a friend of mine, "What was the best meal you ever had?"

He thought about it a moment and then replied, "A stick of pepperoni dipped in peanut butter... after a day hiking the AT." (He'd actually hiked the whole Appalachian Trail, as I recall.)

Years before that, a different friend asked me the same question. The one item that came to mind above all others was the dessert course at a resort my family visited when I was a child, on a snorkeling trip to the Caribbean. I don't think I've had a sopapilla that good since. And sure, childhood taste buds and all, but that's kind of the point: the best subjective impression is the best subjective impression.

One of the best things I've ever made myself was early in the first COVID season. I was throwing together a soup of whatnot, and I made a broth of soy sauce, mirin, gochujang, garlic and probably a few other things. When I had a taste, it was knee-bucklingly good. I haven't hit the proportions just right again, or something; everything I've tried in that genre has been nice, but not that nice.

Dad was the sort who'd try a new thing at a restaurant and then try and figure out how to make it at home. He was good at it, too. I picked up that habit, a bit. My white whale is the suanla chaoshou/suan la chow show/swans from Mary Chung's in Cambridge, MA. For that, I have to go by memory, since the restaurant closed years ago, and I have to adapt it to my current diet, since I went mostly-vegan vegetarian. There's a dumpling-sauce recipe from 1993 that is perfectly serviceable, but I tried it with three different chili pastes and it just wasn't the same. I think it was adapted for home cooks of the early '90s and left out doubanjiang, which a Sichuan restaurant would have had on hand. A couple heaping teaspoons of that brought the flavor a lot closer....

Anywhoo. Do you folks have food memories that stand out? Best ever pizza? Cookies that you'd like to find again?

Cassandra Granade writes:

Things are moving really fast, so I went on and created a Codeberg organization for coordinating a post-Calibre path forward for uniting readers and writers in the goal of archiving, organizing, and reading books.

https://codeberg.org/rereading

DNS is still propagating, but https://rereading.space/ should be up soon as well.

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.)

Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I'd spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:

• Archive of su3su2u1 review
• Spacebattles.com forum thread: The Wizard of Woah and Irrational Methods of Irrationality
• HPRick and Morty
• "If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try."
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's advice about writing "awesome" characters
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's retrospective interview (August 2025)

And a question dug up from one of those old threads: OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

Mother Jones has a new report about Jordan Lasker:

A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, says that “I support eugenics,” and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

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.)

Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!

(90 seconds later)

We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.

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.)

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.)

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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

Retraction Watch reports:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

The resignation statement reads in part,

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Related:

• Elsevier keeps publishing articles written by spicy autocomplete

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)