Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
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)
You're viewing a single thread.
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 “Little Lock,” which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a “brat” and confesses that she can’t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as “my most shameful thoughts,” and also as “sacred and special.”
I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. "So profound, very wow"? "You mean it's all shit? —Always has been."
She mixes provocation with needy propitiation
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
But the narrator’s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levy’s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the book’s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own style—the drama of its own specialness—and unable to provide needed context.
So, it's bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
Honor Levy
someone tell me it isn't just me who always parses this person's name as "honour tax" and has a doubletake first thinking "..yeah, accurate" before remember it's actually their name-name not and not a byname
"They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do."
This is exactly why these people always feel so weird. Like, have you considered not hanging out with assholes?
Yeah, just give it to the feller who reviewed Guy Fieri's restaurant. It's better to just rip the bandaid off.
Sadly, he's left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
alas!
Edit: Also, very much in our wheelhouse!