Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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. A lot of people didnāt survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountās cake day, too, so thatās cool.)
Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena donāt mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.
Then thereās a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. Itās pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. Itās only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise itās just sparkling sectarianism.
Better organized than the POUM, Iāll give it that. āWon outā is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.
And then thereās the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because itās impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesnāt work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldnāt possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isnāt this dystopian society more feminist?
Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.
The thing is, the world in 1984 is feminist! as imagined by a bloke who hates feminism. Sex for pleasure is outlawed, makeup and dresses are banned, women look and act like men (and indeed are worse than men) instead of following their womanly nature. Itās a feminist dystopia!
I mean, if god damned Asimov thinks your book is misogynistic, you know youāve fucked up!
never heard of wokeness, i see