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.)
OT: I had a realization awhile back that I’d basically cut American scifi out of my life. The politics are just gross to me now, and the overseas stuff is just plain more fun.
What comes out of the states seems to reduce to libertarian (closeted white nationalist) wank fodder, and I guess its been this way since…Campbell? Certainly Niven-Pournelle. It just got gross.
(Partially prompted by me listening to Iron Council again).
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:
there’s plenty to read; an incomplete list of authors just off the top of my head: nnedi okorafor, ann leckie, martha wells, kate elliott, annalee newitz, sarah gailey, malka older, sarah jane anders…
Man I’m getting some great recommendations out of this.
Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of “Landlocked in Foreign Skin”, like it’s 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 I’m thinking they’re a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martine’s 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 “culture” at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (I’m on book #2 currently). I’m more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guin’s sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, I’d 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 don’t regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.
I’ll have to try some of this then!
Ngl, Iron Council made me ugly cry.
Also highly recommend Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee.
It’s got romance. It’s got swashbuckling. It’s got vendettas. A woman smashes a genocidal empire with mathemagic. Conversely, the empire’s greatest general is an effortlessly cool gay dude with dyscalculia from the Korean part of Space Texas who lives in people’s shadows, and it makes sense how that happened. The genocide happens because of a lone maniac’s 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!