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 so 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.

last week’s edition

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Am seeking suggestions on audiobooks to listen to! I think I’d like to start with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tho I don’t know what order to go with, or if that matters.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      If I may add to these excellent suggestions:

      The Night Circus and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

      Go in cold, do not spoil! Enjoy with a a warm beverage. The readers are phenomenal.

      The Laundry Files series by local hero Charles Stross, in which it turns out that P=NP, the Great Old Ones can be summoned in polynomial time, Cthulhu ate America via regulatory capture, and the world is suffering from the magical equivalent of global warming. Our protagonists have to mitgate all of this on a British civil servant’s salary.

      The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, in which Our Regular Subjects have become a problem.

      • Anisette [any/all]@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        the night circus is one of my favourite books of all time ever, very much recommend. If you like that the magicians by Lev Grossman feels very similar in a way I cannot put my finger on, though it does not really fit into this list.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 hours ago

      Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.

      if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:

      • Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published in audio as podcasts, it’s like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
      • The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
      • The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
      • The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
      • Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith’s Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it’s downright uncomfortable.
      • A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
      • This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it’s a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
      • The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
      • This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden plant utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload hypertech cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they’re both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)
        • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

          spoilers for uh the first 20 or so pages of Fairmeadow ig, click to open:
          • Who would win: 1 presumably lesbian orc, or a non-evil, not particularly terrifying cow
          • I like what the artist did with visual storytelling here: Goma confused Sanctuary with the cow because of his horns, and afterwards she still threatened Sanctuary, for the same reason she threatened the cow: she’s treating him as meat. Alas, Sanctuary utterly defeats her, in the same way that the cow did: by caring about her state and not responding to her violence at all.
          • What Sanctuary did by force-kidnessing her with the basket of squash is actually a very effective deescalation technique you can use yourself, too. It’s something salespeople do to manipulate others. Due to some quirk of human psychology, we almost reflexively feel more friendly towards someone we helped. Not someone who helps us, somebody we do a favour for. Subconscious probably goes “if I decided to do a favour for this guy he must be an ally; otherwise I wouldn’t be helping him, now would I”, which bypasses the guards of “he’s only helping me because he wants something”. Thus if you want to defuse someone’s hostility, ask them a favour—something genuinely helpful and that they are able to do, and in a way where it’s awkward for them to refuse.
    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      If the queer experience on the 90s island of Harris intrigues you, we’re halfway through Douglas Stuart’s John of John and really enjoy it. Narrator has a Scots accent though, if you find that hard to deal with.

    • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      For the Hainish Cycle books the order doesn’t matter too much, they’re not direct sequels.

      I started with (and would recommend starting with) The Left Hand of Darkness. The first 3 Hainish novels are also her first novels and she was still developing her style, in my opinion. I think The Dispossessed is her finest work, although I still haven’t read all of her novels.

          • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            2 days ago

            Tales from Earthsea is also good.

            I didn’t mind The Other Wind… it isn’t as good as the others, but that’s a tough act to follow. It does draw together a bunch of plot threads from the previous books and provides a kind of closure, which I appreciated. There was more to say of Earthsea, but le Guin wasn’t going to have the time or energy for that.