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.)
Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I'm not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it's a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I'm making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he'd try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)
Unfortunately it doesn't look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard's refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.
Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I'm pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.
The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhart's law to Gamer Brains.
is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more
A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesn't make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.
The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your "extra" APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other "quirks" of the engine. It's not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of "this was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it you're just bad" but it's definitely up there. As the game goes on you'll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.
I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that I'm starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.
He wants to be seen as the Uber-nerd, better at nerding than everybody else, so of course he would cheat. See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake. He just is hype and bravado because a group of people who saw him stutter (*) about some half remembered/understood science fiction ideas were impressed with his genius and drive up his stocks/reputation. He now is going after the anti-woke nerds as potential marks (He has said quite a few dumb thinks about video games recently).
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard. (E: He also is bad at dnd., a cooperative game which you basically cannot fail to play well))
*: Nothing wrong with having a stutter, that happens. It is weird people claim his stutter is not because he just stutters, but because it is a sign his brain is so great that he is having a hard time because it is thinking about so many genius level things at the same time.
oh hell no
so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case it’s particularly obvious: musk doesn’t give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quake’s in that right nostalgia spot that most of musk’s marks know what it is but don’t know how high-level play looks
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging — how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (it’s gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management — is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.
also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them — Sweeney really doesn’t give a fuck about UT anymore either
I'm employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation that's as simple as the game. I've got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, too... their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.
I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.
See also how he claimed Zuck was avoiding him and didn't want to fight him because he would lose. (yeah, going to Zucks home when he is not home and offered to fight you in a real ring which you keep ignoring makes you the winner really).
Or see his twitter stats. Before the muskening of twitter, twitter kept various public (because publicly traded) stats which people could see, monthly increase in something like monthly active users which can be targeted by advertising, stuff like that. (the growth rate of which was apparently about 1-2% per month, which is quite impressive imho), but now he talks about 'unregretted user minutes (up by 10% this year(*)), and stuff like that'. He never mentions that (according to the stats I looked into shortly before the takeover) twitter always grew in users, he makes it looks like he did something special. Like a guy buying a restaurant transformed it into a mcdonalds and then goes 'look we sold a lot more hamburgers than last year'.
*: I mention this because I assume that people can do a bit of math in their head and can compare 1-2% monthly growth with 10% yearly, even if it isn't the same stats.
narcissism is a fuck
this is a pithy framing, I admit, and with him as possibly a boundary-pushing narcissist with record-breaking voids inside.... still
it is funny as fuck, though
on which note: I would love to see a kind of "double-blind" experience where a pile of (ideally, more clever/clueful) muskrats get to interact with felon (without knowing that they are), and then watch the fallout as they all go "wtf is this dumbass I'm speaking to"
I'm thinking something in the survivor-y format of shows
probably wouldn't ever happen, felon's too fucking proud (and would 10000000% rig the game to own image advantage). but in a perfect world where this happened, oh wouldn't that just be some great television
this is the best idea on the internet, actually
aww schucks 😳
(I have a whole suit of gameshow ideas for felon to participate in tbh; the magic formula is "just make him do anything at all that requires a tiny bit of specific detail" combined with literally anything else, with a 7/10 "oh yeah no sorry the wifi isn't working and cell reception is bad down here[0]" layout. guaranteed comedic success.)
[0] - jammas b rokin