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.)
On a semi-related note, I recently got around to reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (loved the Mars trilogy and thought I should get to his latest), and this chapter had me wanting to give up sci fi as well, so I will subject you all to it:
I am Jack's bone-weary sigh.
Well that's going immediately onto the "things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don't read ever" list.
It's one of the most unevenly written works I've ever read. The opening chapter is absolutely harrowing,and many of the subplots are pretty interesting. It's not like KSR is a cryptobro, he offers plenty of critique of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the novel, he just adopts "blockchain" as a handwave-y fix for financial transparency. It's also at least interesting to see attempts at optimistic climate fiction, but I think the novel could do with a couple hundred fewer pages.
His attempts at Steinbeck sprinkled throughout, of which that chapter is the worst, are universally terrible, though.