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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of āLandlocked in Foreign Skinā, like itās been a long time since I pause my life to devour a book in one sitting like this, and given that Drew Huff writes from Seattle Iām thinking theyāre a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martineās A Memory Called Empire which resonated a lot with my experiences as a Third World immigrant, with a certain honesty in portrayal of what it feels like to admire ācultureā at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (Iām on book #2 currently). Iām more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guinās sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, Iād probably say Wayfarers or Monk & Robot. Plenty of good SF authors from the USA whose politics are more or less the opposite of what you describe.
The trick is I read books by queer folk, women and PoC almost exclusively. Absolutely donāt regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.
Iāll have to try some of this then!
Ngl, Iron Council made me ugly cry.
Also highly recommend Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee.
Itās got romance. Itās got swashbuckling. Itās got vendettas. A woman smashes a genocidal empire with mathemagic. Conversely, the empireās greatest general is an effortlessly cool gay dude with dyscalculia from the Korean part of Space Texas who lives in peopleās shadows, and it makes sense how that happened. The genocide happens because of a lone maniacās insane tech debt. Different factions try to subvert each other via cleverly designed board games. There are soooo many unhealthy relationships.
5/5 stars
You had me at the dyscalculia part!