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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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

  • blakestacey@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    Ā·
    2 months ago

    The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:

    In the story ā€œLittle Lock,ā€ which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a ā€œbratā€ and confesses that she canā€™t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as ā€œmy most shameful thoughts,ā€ and also as ā€œsacred and special.ā€

    Iā€™m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. ā€œSo profound, very wowā€? ā€œYou mean itā€™s all shit? ā€”Always has been.ā€

    She mixes provocation with needy propitiation

    Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!

    But the narratorā€™s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levyā€™s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the bookā€™s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own styleā€”the drama of its own specialnessā€”and unable to provide needed context.

    So, itā€™s bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?