FtttG
User ID: 1175
I understand a few people on this site really abhorred RF Kuang's 2023 novel Yellowface. Freddie deBoer has a tremendously bitchy article today taking Kuang to task for her perceived false modesty in her New Yorker profile, which doubles as a very harsh review of Yellowface itself. It's transparently written from a place of envy and spite, deBoer barely pretending to mask how much he covets Kuang her literary success in comparison to his own meagre book sales, but entertaining for all that, and I'm sure that any of you who disliked Yellowface will find much to agree with in his critique.
(Without having read Yellowface I can't comment on its literary merits or lack thereof — but its author is pretty cute and I would.)
FtttG
4mo ago
Usually goes in small-scale, although it's arguably a better fit for this thread.
FtttG
4mo ago
Hardspace Shipbreaker. Attempting to dissemble a ship as neatly and efficiently as possible with a minimum of waste was enormously absorbing, appealing to the same part of my brain that can't relax until everything in my apartment is in its right place.
On Halloween I was coming home from the pub at maybe 10 or 11 pm when I happened on a girl who'd passed out on the street after having too much to drink. I immediately realised she needed to get to a hospital to have her stomach pumped, so I called an ambulance and put her on her side in case she was sick. Her two friends called me a pervert and accused me of groping her, then left, abandoning her to her fate. Because of the occasion, I had to wait somewhere in the region of three hours for an ambulance to arrive. At least some other passers-by stopped to help, including two nurses in training. A day or two later the girl texted me to thank me and said she was cutting ties with the two friends who'd abandoned her.
In July I went into my local cornershop, in which a customer was accusing the staff of short-changing him (I assume he was mistaken). He attempted to climb over the counter to assault them, whereupon I stepped in to put him in a half-nelson and drag him out of the shop. He feebly attempted to attack me before being dissuaded by his (I assume extremely embarrassed) girlfriend and slouching off in defeat. The staff were very grateful and made a point to thank me when I came into the shop over the following few days. Another patron came up to me immediately afterwards and quipped that I was in the wrong line of work and ought to become a bouncer.
A few weeks ago, my parents were flying back from Australia, and I offered to drive them home from the airport as I knew they'd be jet-lagged. When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.
FtttG
4mo ago
Jussay Smol-yay is back in the news this week, with the release of a new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, which purports to tell an alternative perspective on Smollett's claims to have been the victim of a racially motivated (and homophobic) hate crime on the streets of Chicago, for which he was indicted and convicted for filing a false police report. I think the question mark in the title tells you everything you need to know about the director's confidence in his narrative. Even film critics at progressive media outlets are giving it short shrift.
FtttG
4mo ago
Less than a hundred pages from the end of Speaker for the Dead. Still can't really say I'm loving it, and certainly I'm not enjoying it half as much as I did its predecessor.
I have a copy of The Children of Men which I've never read, but I've seen the film adaptation several times and (one major plot hole aside) loved it. Well worth checking out. I believe the author gave it her seal of approval.
I went for a run on Sunday to break in my new runners. I was hoping to do 5k, but I'd barely made it 400 metres when I tripped coming off the footpath and fell over. In the past whenever I've tripped while on a run, I've just gotten back up and kept going, but this time felt different. After getting to my feet and hobbling across the road, for a moment I actually thought I was going to burst into tears from the pain.
I managed to limp home and laid down on the couch for a bit. By the evening my foot and ankle had swelled up like a balloon and I was limping heavily. I tried to keep it elevated when I went to bed, and didn't get much sleep. On Monday morning I was genuinely considered going to the hospital, as I wasn't sure if it was a sprain or a fracture. Fortunately I had a compression sleeve to put on it, and by Monday afternoon the pain had mostly subsided and I could put weight on it. Three days later the swelling is starting to go down, it barely hurts at all and I'm walking normally - but large parts of my foot are covered in dark purple bruises. It's sort of fascinating to look at, actually. I had no idea a sprain could look so dramatic.
FtttG
4mo ago
The other scandal.
FtttG
4mo ago
I'm now coining FtttG's Law: the longer an online organisation goes on, the probability of it becoming embroiled in a child grooming scandal approaches 1.
FtttG
4mo ago
If a Scotsman finds out you knowingly transmitted human immuno-deficiency virus to them, they're sure to SHIV you.
On Friday I printed the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project for the missus to read. She's about halfway through it, and so far the feedback has been guardedly positive. She's consistently said that it is neither boring nor cringe (my primary and secondary worries about it, respectively) and that the prose is, for the most part, very readable.
Spiked has a lengthy write-up about the Zizians, whose intended readership is normies who've never heard of rationalism, Eliezer and so on. I'm glad that people are still talking about this story, I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
You're dead right. In Ireland and the UK, there's something of a tradition of watching Love, Actually every Christmas, a movie I loathe. My girlfriend was curious so we went to see it in the cinema. On Christmas Day we ended up watching Bridget Jones's Diary (written by Richard Curtis, who wrote and directed Love, Actually), and even though I'm not a romcom dude, it was head and shoulders above Love, Actually. It's legitimately funny, and there's actual chemistry between the three leads.
FtttG
4mo ago
You ever tried to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time?
I'm doing it right now, and I am killing it. Skill issue. /s
FtttG
4mo ago
Yes, that's why the OP was right to say that it's grammatically (or syntactically, or whatever) incorrect.
FtttG
4mo ago
This sounds perfectly natural to me.
"Xing his Y, he Zed" is meant to describe two concurrent actions. "Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she pressed send on the email."
FtttG
4mo ago
Awhile back I asked for some kind of gaming platform aggregator: a program that pulls all the games you own on Steam, GOG, Epic etc. in one place, so that you don't e.g accidentally buy a game on Steam that you forgot you already bought on GOG.
Playnite was exactly what I was looking for, it's easy to use, does exacty what it says on the tin, and it's free.
For a lot of political principles, you'll have a coalition made up of people who sincerely endorse that principle, and people who contingently endorse it so long as it's convenient for them and will abandon it at the drop of a hat when it no longer is. Annoyingly, the members of the latter group often masquerade as members of the former and even do such a good job that members of the former group are taken in by them.
I'm a principled free speech absolutist, as a consequence of which I sincerely believe that Mahmoud Khalil should be able to disseminate Hamas propaganda on college campuses without the federal government weighing down on him (or Kneecap waving Hezbollah flags, for that matter). During the period 2009-16 (and to a lesser extent 2021-24) I was under no illusions about the conservatives railing against "cancel culture": I knew full well that a significant proportion (perhaps even an absolute majority) had no interest in free speech as a general principle and just wanted to be the ones doing the cancelling. I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the
DixieChicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush. It's a lonely life being a principled supporter of free speech: there aren't enough of us to be a real political movement on our own, so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip: Democrats when Trump is in the White House, Republicans when Newsom is; Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are. It's all the harder to be a free speech absolutist when prominent organisations which used to share our values (e.g. the ACLU) faced a choice between sticking to their guns and going under, or staying alive by skin-suiting themselves, and opted for the latter.(I will cop to a bit of Schadenfreude about how short-sighted many of the arguments progressives were making in defense of censorship between 2009-16 were. I routinely pointed out that the "it's a private company, they can do what they want" argument was bound to come back to bite them in the ass sooner or later - this was several years before Musk's Twitter buyout. A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)
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