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 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.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? Itās the one HN likes best too. Itās probably the only one Iāve not re-read. Maybe itās how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture heās coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didnāt read it carefully, and/or until the end, and donāt realise that ultimately itās gurgehās revulsion at azadās societal rules, and him fully embracing the cultureās values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly youāve read the novel more than I have considering your nickā¦ I might have to give it another go.
OTOH Iād 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 ā 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, didnāt 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 clearyās 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 wonāt see clearyās 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 canāt rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit itās been ages since Iāve read this books so Iāve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
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@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionairesāin American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)