Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It’s the one HN likes best too. It’s probably the only one I’ve not re-read. Maybe it’s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he’s coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didn’t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don’t realise that ultimately it’s gurgeh’s revulsion at azad’s societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture’s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly you’ve read the novel more than I have considering your nick… I might have to give it another go.
OTOH I’d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)
Yah Skaffen is the best drone, obvsly.
Thx for the reference to Soldier F, didn’t know about his case.
this modern example of censorship is pretty wild: uk actively enforces this ban despite the fact the sdlp mp for foyle, colum eastwood, used his parlliamentary privilege to get cleary’s name into hansard, and at the time i still had a twitter account, the tweets naming the bastard were either reported or sweeped by some internal search. you won’t see cleary’s name mentioned on reddit either.
@gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can’t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit it’s been ages since I’ve read this books so I’ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
🤮
@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)