Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
and of course thereās absolutely nothing in the books that suggests itās a problem. (hell, thereās a good chance there actually is a lively japanese folk dance fan community there despite the fact that earth was never a part of the culture.)
I figure part of the āscanā that a Contact ship does when it encounters a ālesserā planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.
I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if thereās an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.
incidentally I feel Iām seeing in this post and in the shit like Karpās 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.
Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasnāt a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.
explicit in āState of the Artā:
Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.
This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point itās not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.