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.)
From Gwern’s “solution”:
Dafuq?
Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature can’t be a coincidence. It’s not like the line “there are more things in Heaven and Earth…” has been repeated so often that even Wolfe’s narrator calls it “hackneyed”… Hold on, I’m getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpiece…
I would say myself that Wolfe’s alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to lift… Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is “the time is out of joint”. Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.
Also, the illustration sucks.