From CNN:

#NAFO has its critics, even among opponents of Russia’s war against Ukraine, who accuse the fellas of sometimes going too far in trolling Russia, pointing to recent posts mocking a young Russian tourist who was killed by a shark in Egypt.

But #NAFO has no editors or censors. It’s young and brash, self-aware, and epitomizes the way young people communicate today. The Russian government and its propagandists often have a tin ear when it comes to humor, which the “NAFOFellas” are only too happy to exploit.

While I can appreciate the value in crowding out inane imperialist propaganda with similar inanity, — tho e’en if it arguably contributes to further deterioration o’ good-faith argument, I’m too realistic to believe that good-faith argument is possible in the zoos o’ social media — these 2 paragraphs stood out to me. This article admits that NAFO is engaging in racist attacks gainst an innocent civilian, then just immediately wipes that concern ’way with a, “But that’s just the hip young people not giving into your censorship, bro. Only propagandists have a problem with racist hatred”, ironically feeding into 4chan sentiment that racism is rebellious. I wonder if CNN would take this sentiment when commenting on young people posting memes ’bout Israel. ¿Is it only the Israeli government who has a “tin ear” when it comes to certain kinds o” “humor” that certain propaganda groups are happy to exploit”? That’s the danger o’ borrowing tactics from the far-right: while it can in many ways be mo’ effective than what the left is doing, in some ways it’s intrinsically tied to right-wing ideas like racism.

@ the very least, perhaps a stuffy, pseudointellectual institution most definitely not aimed @ young people like CNN shouldn’t be praising this kind o’ irrationality, specially when bugging me to sign up for a subscription. A’least the college dropouts @ NAFO aren’t pretending their memes are worth money ( well, maybe ).

But, then ’gain, I can’t pretend to be surprised that an institution as mentally mediocre as CNN would trade these long-term issues o’ feeding racism & global division ( which, now that I think ’bout it, CNN probably likes the global division part ) for the quick hit o’ getting their readers on the right side o’ things. Lord knows, it’s hard to get the kind o’ people who still read newspapers to not support Russia — & it’s totally a reasonable goal to obsessively try to get e’ery single person on the planet to agree with your sentiment when there are people who still insist that the world is flat, climate change is fake, & the world was created 6,000 years ago by sky god who is his own son — so it’s important that we encourage young people to be 4channers so we can get that extra 1% o’ people putting Ukraine flags on their social media & doing shit-all-else. The good news is, since no young people read CNN, CNN won’t have any real effect: CNN’s mummified readers will snort ’bout those wacky young people & their beepboops & forget all ’bout.

I also love how so many psuedointellectuals are trying to pump up this random group o’ people screwing round with poorly-paid Russians who probably couldn’t give a rats ass what inane drivel their bosses force them to spew out — if it’s not AI — as if it’s some deep sociological phenomenon.

From NAFO’s Wikipedia page:

NAFO was described as a “Western civil society response to Russian campaigns” by Tobias Fella, a political scientist training Bundeswehr soldiers in dealing with social media. It is part of a larger “battle for sovereignty of interpretation” on shared online spaces. According to Politico, “To delve into NAFO is to get a crash course in how online communities from the Islamic State to the far-right boogaloo movement to this rag-tag band of online warriors have weaponized internet culture.”

American media studies professor Jaime Cohen argues that the NAFO movement “is an actual tactical event against a nation state”. British-Lebanese journalist Oz Katerji asserts that NAFO “has hampered Russia’s propagandists and made them look absurd and ridiculous in the process”. Ukraine’s Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand Vasyl Myroshnychenko noted that the grassroots, decentralized nature of NAFO is an important part of its strength.

According to one analysis, “The largely English-language memes have kept Western attention on Ukraine’s war—attention that is vital given the importance of Western arms to Ukrainian forces.” American Lt. Col. Steve Speece of the Modern War Institute at West Point argues “Meme content shared in NAFO channels … is almost exclusively English language and presumably not intended for Russian audiences … These fora exist to generate content for the entertainment and status of their own members. Yet even Western national security policy is sometimes explicitly driven by the emotions—like outrage—cultivated in online communities.” Speece argues that online agitators like NAFO take the role of bad cop in a good cop/bad cop dynamic with policy makers.

According to the Berliner Kurier, “Like real NATO, NAFO has an Article 5 duty of assistance. This means that each fella can call on the others for help if they are under attack or encounter serious disinformation. For this, the NAFO members use the hashtag #NAFOarticle5 and then receive support from other fellas.” An analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations assessed it as being “very effective”.

Yes, I’m sure a bunch o’ randos shitposting to Russian bots is what will save Ukraine, not the fact that Russia’s faltering economy & tin-can military. That’s the dream for pseudointellectuals who pretend that e’ery time they like something on Twitter X they’re fighting the system. I think my own blog is already proof that this tactic doesn’t work: if it did, all my shitposting ’bout capitalism & its cousin wearing a moustache named dapitalism & Zombie Marx from the past decade would’ve brought us sexy communism already, & I sure as shit don’t see any sexy communism in my midst. Nope, it’s all ugly-ass brutalist architecture on 1 side o’ the curtain & pretend copyrights for ugly monkey pictures on the other. O yeah, & CNN.

Till I finally found a way to turn it off, my phone decided to give me its own version o’ Mozilla’s beloved Pocket with its own mountain o’ trash clickbait & 1 website whose idiotic titles kept catching my eye was a website called “Literature Hub”, so let’s take a look @ its greatest hit:

“On the Myth of the Made Writer and the Madness of Emerging”

For someone who thinks of herself as a writer, I’m writing very little these days.

Unironic r/writingcirclejerk member here.

It’s been months since I’ve liked anything I’ve made, or since I’ve felt much pleasure in making it.

Wow, nobody else in the universe has felt this way. It’s too bad there’s not a million cliché advice ’bout it. Better make your own, too.

Obviously, it can’t be that they’ve managed to grow a li’l bit o’ better awareness o’ literature & have come to realize that what they’ve been writing sucked & obviously “study literature, specially literature I’m not familiar with, including critiques & commentary ’bout other literature, ’cause I take writing seriously & want to be always improving” isn’t the solution, but moping round hoping for that right sparkle to strike you is.

In July, a friend of mine died, and his widow asked if I would take his dog. Although I’d known this dog for many years to be a calm, assured, stately fellow, our beginning in California was proving rocky. He whined in the doorways, keened into the empty air, paced through the nights. I could find no cause of his discomfort. I reached out to a writer friend, a woman who knew about dogs, wrote about dogs, had taken in dogs of all kinds her whole life. I needed help.

If this is how you write, I can definitely see both why you haven’t liked anything you’ve written or why you don’t derive pleasure from it, since this is a terrible way to start a novel. Love how they just casually mention their friend dying & then goes on to, “anyway, let’s talk ’bout his dog, the real star o’ the story”.

To clarify: when I say “writer friend,” what I really mean is “writer in whose workshop I was a student at a conference exactly once and who, for whatever reason, took a bit more of an interest in my work than was strictly required by her position, and who now, on very slim occasion, emails me, and who I, on very slim occasion, email as well.” She is advanced and successful, has published many excellent books and won prizes for them, makes her living writing, teaching, and lecturing.

So by “friend”, you mean “someone way out o’ my league”.

She is what I’ll call here a Made Writer…

Ah, now I understand: by “friend” you mean “business associate”, & by “business associate” you mean you’re part o’ some mafia o’ writers. ¿Why aren’t you writing ’bout that? That would be far mo’ interesting.

…and I call her a friend too not because we’re friends exactly, but because I was writing to ask her about my life, and about my dog. We were speaking of human things, not of writerly things.

¿You ask her ’bout your life & your dog? ¿Why would she know mo’ ’bout it than you?

All right, I’ll quit boring you with this banal tripe. You want to get to the meat o’ this article. Here you go:

I opened the file, twitchy with that particular thrill of finding oneself proximal to the famous; a video of Michael Ondaatje’s dog!

Cool, I guess…

We get interrupted by this giant-ass red text that’s super meaningful:

There is a kind of freedom in divorcing the maker from what is made.

This is clearly just the writer o’ this article trying to justify continuing to listen to R. Kelly.

Anyway, back to our feature presentation:

Of course, I thought, this is Michael Ondaatje’s dog, by which I meant, of course Michael Ondaatje, brilliant writer, would have a brilliant dog. And it might be true that Michael Ondaatje does in fact have a dog with these (or other) particular talents, but what I’d come to understand shortly (after paging through the exchange a second time) is that nothing actually suggested this was Ondaatje’s dog. Sure, he sent the video, but that was all. I’d made the leap of ownership on my own. I’d equated Michael Ondaatje’s singularity and success in writing with Michael Ondaatje’s singularity and success in dogs, which is to say, singularity in life, in self. He was his writing, and his writing was him.

99% o’ you readers are probably thinking, { ¿Who the hell is Michael Ondaatje? }. I actually read 1 o’ his books in high school — tho I don’t remember much ’bout it other than that he had that trite habit o’ trying to make e’ery bowel movement into a deep metaphor for life, which I think the writer o’ this article is trying to do with fucking dogs. What I do remember is my teacher introducing Ondaatje as the man who wrote a book that inspired a movie that became a part o’ a Seinfeld joke. It must be so lonely for Michael Ondaatje @ the top.

Before we continue, and to clarify: I am not a Made Writer.

That means Ondaatje can kill them & there’s nothing they can do ’bout it — real greaseball shit.

I am, at best, a writer in the middle-beginning of her career, a writer who finds herself in the anxious, hand-wringing early-success-place of having seen some of her work recognized, but not yet knowing what that will mean.

Anyone who e’er considers themselves “in the middle-beginning of their career” & isn’t in the middle-beginning o’ their life isn’t going to do well, since great artists always strive for improvement, regardless o’ how ol’ they are — e’en “Made Writers”, @ the risk o’ finding Brandon Sanderson’s head in my bed next morn.

After piddling away in obscurity for a decade and earning an MFA, and after seeing two or three publications during that decade in journals that either do not exist anymore or have little to no footing in the literary world, my career has accelerated. I was granted a scholarship to a high-profile conference, and then another; I was awarded a residency, and landed a story at a lit mag you would recognize, and then another, and another.

“& nowhere in any o’ that time did I write a single sentence o’ decent prose. ¡The system works!”.

As a result of some of this, I started to get emails from agents, and although no one who’s read it thinks my manuscript is a book, it’s become clear to me that if there is a path to having a book, I am on it, or one iteration of it, or anyway I am Doing the Writer Thing.

Yes, I guess you could describe panically typing word after word without any concern for whether or not they combine into coherent sentences some vague sort o’ uppercase “Writer Thing”. Personally, I would try writing an actual book rather than some vague Schrödinger’s Book Manuscript. Maybe they’re referring to the Marxian belief that labor’s social value can only be understood @ the marketplace. “Nope, sorry: it’s a mud pie”.

That I feel this way only by the measures of these externalities is, of course, and like Ondaatje’s dog, part of the problem.

Also, it would help if you stop getting distracted by niche-famous authors’ dogs.

After a brief and thrilling few months in which my productivity seemed to flourish with all this newfound external support, I’ve come to hate this part of my career.

¿What part? ¿The actual fucking writing?

I am not writing as much, and what I do write is by any measure flatter, more predictable, and emotionally more wretched to come by. I have stopped reading almost entirely (the last book I read was The Beet Queen, and it took me four months to finish it). I watch endless hours of television, a lot of which I’ve seen several times already. I turn my mind off whenever possible, which is one of the swiftest ways I know to poison any hope of meaningful work.

There’s this weird popular phenomenon ’mong people my age & younger to indulge in what I will now call “pitybrag”, which is where they essentially brag ’bout how useless they are. As someone who has this natural Darwinian avoidance to flaunting my failures ’less I can make it funny — & if this is an attempt @ comedy, well, it’s ’bout on the same level as a mentally-insane blog writer — I don’t understand why someone would want to do this, just like how I don’t understand the appeal o’ going on reality TV shows or Jerry Springer.

I do this for a reason, of course. That reason is: the experience of being in my own mind is uncomfortable.

¡Well, then quit fooling round in there & get back to your writing desk & get writing!

My mind is, when allowed to rest, at odds with itself. Languishing in it is the last thing I want to do.

The tragedy in all this is that if this writer were born a bit earlier they could’ve thrived as a writer for nu-metal artists like Papa Roach.

I am sure this reality comes from many places, and that some of those are personal to me, but I recently had a conversation with another writer —

Much as C. S. Lewis allegedly shouted, “Not another fucking elf!” when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to their writer group, I want to shout, “¡Not ’nother fucking writer!”.

We discussed everything: the pressures of the externality, how hard it was to resist the value system of prestige that permeates the literary world, how much it seemed that what mattered in that world (our world?) was not the quality of the work as we understood it, but the determination of the value of that work as offered by external sources.

They’re definitely talking ’bout the Marxian conflict ’tween labor value & use value as expressed thru exchange value.

Mo’ big-ass red text:

The reality of being an artist means, first, that one endeavors to express authenticity; the seed of that authenticity definitionally begins in a private place.

Worst economic theory e’er. ( Well, maybe not as bad as Milton Fucking Friedman’s “F-twist” ). Shigeru Miyamoto doesn’t express authenticity when he has Italian plumbers growing big & jumping on giant turtles — & if your definition leads to the conclusion that Super Mario Bros. isn’t great art, then it’s already falsified itself. & the last part seems to imply that “authenticity” is insularism, when one could argue that obsessing o’er one’s own “deepness” is, in fact, a very artificial phenomenon o’ modern western societies & much less authentic than humanity’s natural proclivity toward social interaction.

*

My favorite line from Ulysses.

I don’t think this pattern—in which the complex, interested, curious self creates interesting writing, which in turn garners recognition, which in turn buries the once-curious mind in a value system that hinders the creation of interesting writing—I do not think this is limited to the beginning-middle writer.

Personally, I don’t think it means anything ’cause it’s a jumble o’ superlatives. It sounds like they’re saying, “I’m such a genius, but I write shit. ¿Where is the synthesis to this dialectical conflict?”.

In fact, at that same conference where I met my despondent kindred writer friend, I saw it in a Made Writer as well. He was a faculty member at the conference, had seen enormous success with his first book, and was working toward a second. If my last few years feel fast to me, I cannot imagine what his trajectory felt like to him, in which he rocketed from a non-writing life to national acclaim in a few short years.

¡Yes! ¡Anonymous faculty member at the conference! ¡My favorite rock star writer! I loved his most recent book, .

A lot has been written about art and madness.

A lot better stuff, to be quite frank.

The general theory proposes a link between the predilection of a mind to create—art, music, writing, whatever—and the predilection of that same mind toward collapse.

No, the general theory proposes that laissez-faire economic policies can’t sustain full employment. ¿Did you e’en read Keynes?

To my read, the reality of being an artist means, first, that one endeavors to express authenticity; the seed of that authenticity definitionally begins in a private place.

God damn it, it’s that bad economic theory ’gain.

Which is why I started writing this essay in the first place.

¿To babble on ’bout trite philosophical musings?

I am afraid that, having stepped into the public eye (even a little, at 34), I won’t ever escape my current arrest.

I can assure you that nobody cares ’bout you, much less the police, who have mo’ important people to arrest, like Michael Ondaatje & his dog, who recently made a local book store that moved his latest book from the front window in favor o’ “yet ’nother fucking Stephen King doorstopper” have a “surprise fire” in relataliation ( he did give them a “fair warning” ). This is like that joke where some office drone draws a picture for slide #37 in some powerpoint presentation & 1 coworker mildly praises it & then the office drone goes round in shades offering autographs for their “masterpiece” to the bemusement o’ their coworkers.

Fears are not reality. I know this. Or, I repeat it to myself in the effort that it might become something I know.

This makes no fucking sense. You can’t make a statement & then claim you don’t know that statement after you just stated it — ’less Ondaatje’s genius dog snuck in & wrote that 1st sentence.

If there is a solution to this—to my assumption that Michael Ondaatje’s writerly genius extends to his dog —

It’s to stop smoking a whole bowl o’ Presidential Kush on a Saturday afternoon.

to my beginning-middle friend’s self-loathing

I thought you were the “beginning-middle” writer.

to the Made Writer’s struggle with his second book

How ’bout he struggles to get a name for himself & any o’ his books.

I think it has to lie somewhere adjacent to the New Critical view of literary criticism.

¡What a twist! ¡This was ’bout some outdated theory o’ literature this whole time! ¡Fooled you fuckers! They might as well have legitimately brought up a fucking Marxian or Keynesian theory & it would’ve made as much sense.

That there is a kind of freedom in divorcing the maker from what is made.

Shit, that’s what this line is ’bout. I’m reading “Sirens” from Ulysses.

At yet another literary conference, at which I met yet another Made Writer (yes, probably I should just take a break from these) —

Maybe you should spend mo’ time sitting your ass down & writing or studying writing ( probably more o’ the latter ). That’s what helps me write — less talking to idiots with no talent & mo’ writing so I can actually hone my own. It’s no guarantee — I mean look @ this blog post — but it’s better than any alternatives.

I heard the only piece of advice that I’ve found practical in these struggles of the last year.

Blood scrawled on the wall: “¡Practice, you idiot!”.

I was sitting with this writer in a one-on-one meeting, on Zoom

Wait, ¿You were sitting next to them but talking to them on Zoom? That’s some Boomer’s joke o’ a millennial.

She was an older writer, had come up decades ago, and told me that she had, certainly, but also that in some ways, it was just easier back then: no internet, no social media.

Actually, the internet is incredibly useful if you don’t waste your time reading idiotic nonsense from social media ( which… I’m doing right now, admittedly ). T. S. Eliot & James Joyce could’ve written all those foreign language parts in a snap with Google Translate^TM. ( Rock o’er London, rock o’er Chicago; Google Translate: Please Translate, you bastard ). Yes, it would’ve been inaccurate… but it’s an open secret that many o’ genius Eliot & Joyce’s translations were inaccurate — specially their gaijin attempt @ Japanese.

I can’t believe how long this article is going. ¿How does it end?

My new dog is doing much better now, thanks in no small part to the emails of the Made Writer. He no longer keens at the doorways, although he does sometimes seem to look around for something that is not there. This is a product of his circumstance, I think, a discord between a life he knew before and the life he knows now. It is an understandable madness.

Nope, sorry: tho this be madness, there’s no method in’t.

So, I just read o’er 2,000 words — tho it felt like 8,000 — o’ some rando meander thru several mixed metaphors ’bout their obsession with being a writer & nowhere do they talk ’bout anything they’ve written or have been writing or any mechanics o’ writing that they particularly like or dislike or anything that could prove that they e’en know what writing a book is. I think that “manuscript that may not be a novel” is 80,000 words o’ this meandering without a plot, setting, or theme & its characters are just writers & their dogs. ¡Today Scooby-Doo & the gang meet John Updike!

Actually, that sounds like it’d actually be funny. There’s my solution to your writer’s block ( I think that’s what they’re saying they have ), rando writer who will ne’er read this: write a book ’bout Michael Ondaatje & his dog solving mysteries. ¿Wasn’t that a plot point in Bojack Horseman?

I.

Renowned newspaper, The New York Times, writers o’ such hard-hitting pieces as “Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her”, “Need to Find Me? Ask My Ham Man”, & the Pulitzer-winning, “The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’”, — which was actually a swerve from their opinion 5 years earlier expressed in “’Tummy Time’ May Not Be Needed”, only to come to a happy bipartisan, centrist compromise 2 years later with, “The Truth About Tummy Time”, which has, “So, yes: Tummy time is good — but you don’t need to overly fret about it” as its Google blurb, ’cause, fuck no, I’m not wasting my time reading god damn articles ’bout tummy time like a 40-year-ol’ wine mom — had what experts call “a bitch fit” after 180 o’ their own contributers & GLAAD called out The New York Times for being, what we in the ergot call “transphobic shitbags” for spewing stale superstitious op-eds by credential-less professional randos, while offering actual trans people hardly any podium on which to speak on important trans issues, as well as reminding e’eryone that they were homophobic shitbags back in the 80s — ( but they don’t remind e’eryone that The New York Times also in the early 90s peddled that famous book o’ white supremacist pseudoscience, The Bell Curve ).

Anyway, you came here for the bitch fit, so here it is:

Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name.

This “attacking” — as hypocrites who try to weaponize the empty meme o’ “cancel culture” as a sad, impotent Orwellian political tool to silence dissent call “criticism” — was aimed @ articles whose authors were “outed” by The New York Times themselves on the articles themselves, so it’s The New York Times who were the real doxxers here.

This attempt to twist this letter, which barely focuses on the writers beyond a couple name drops as details & focuses entirely on the scummy machinery that is truly responsible for these articles’ existence, is such a pathetic & transparent digression.

That policy prohibits our journalists from aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy.

You have to admit, executive editor Joe Kahn — ¿am I doxxing him in my hurting his fragile feelings attacking homicidal manslaughter gainst him by revealing his well-known name — has the balls o’ a Fox News anchor to lie in such a transparent way. ¿Who is he trying to fool that no other New York Times contributor has had ties to advocacy groups or involved themselves in politics? For fuck’s sake, the open letter itself pointed out that many o’ the op-eds were by people who were part o’ antitrans advocacy groups — tho unlike these people, who proudly announce their ties to LGBT, ’cause it’s something a civilized person would do, these cowards hide their ties ’cause they know they’re terrible people for it. So what Joe Kahn means is that journalists can’t align themselves with pro-LGBT advocacy groups, but they can align themselves with hate groups. This fits perfectly with The New York Times’s “ethics policy” o’ supporting bigotry. Being gainst bigotry obviously violates that policy.

We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.

¿Does Kahn have so li’l respect for his own paper that e’en he doesn’t think it deserves to be italicized, or did the typewriter he wrote this on not have a way to italicize text?

The New York Times, by its very nature, must attack others sometimes, so this “ethics policy” is just “don’t bite the hand that feeds”, which is laughable as an “ethics policy”, but arguably just as laughable as a threat, since that shriveled hand is barely feeding shit with what a slum newspapers are now.

Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written.

This is so hilariously sad. It amazes me that people try to portray these papers as serious or intelligent with shit like this. Yes, keep telling yourself in the mirror you’re important, New York Times: a’least there’s 1 person who believes it. What’s e’en better is the middle-school level diction here. ¿“Deeply reported”? ¿What does that e’en mean? That’s what a teenager says when they want to seem like they’re saying something important, but have nothing to say.

The journalists who produced those stories nonetheless have endured months of attacks, harassment and threats.

Which, if this did happen, — Kahn doesn’t provide any evidence, which is par for the course for The New York Times — would’ve happened regardless o’ the letter, since your paper was what revealed their names. It’s cute that Kahn thinks that these contributors imagined up this idea that these stories were transphobic, when many other news outlets were already shitting on you.

Nowhere in the letter is there any advocation for harassment or any interaction with the writers @ all, since, ’gain, it’s aimed primarily @ The New York Times as an institution itself. ¿Does Kahn believe any criticism @ all is advocating violence? The New York Times names several people by name — here’s them singling out Lia Thomas, a trans athlete in their article ’bout the riveting topic fascist conspiracy ’bout the spooky trans people scheming to steal all the swimmer medals with their magical secret muscles; I bet nobody has e’er harassed her ’cause o’ this article.

Like all “cancel culture” hypocrites, it’s 100% “rules for thee, not for me”: I can shit talk anyone else I want, but anyone who criticizes me e’en the slightest is a vicious villain. Like they say: can’t take the heat, get the fuck out o’ the kitchen. The fucking nerve o’ this spineless worm to peddle hateful propaganda & then act indignant when it’s thrown back @ him in the most polite, tepid way possible. What a coddled, spoiled brat. But it’s no surprise: this is the attitude one gets when one is spoiled rich, ne’er having to actually deal with real world problems, living in a coddled bubble o’ yes-men.

The letter also ignores The Times’ strong commitment to covering all aspects of transgender issues, including the life experience of transgender people and the prejudice and violence against them in our society.

Which is, ne’ertheless, not worth as urgent a memo or any leash-pulling on the disobedient worker slaves as polite talkback gainst The New York Times — ¡the real victimized minority!

A full list of our coverage can be viewed here, and any review shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false.

There is no list here, so that is accurate, as The New York Times’s sloppy agitprop doesn’t deserve to be called “coverage”. Considering all the other newspapers — who are in no interest to support the proles, lest their own drones revolt — are pointing & laughing @ your transparent transphobia & you’re the only 1 so fervently defending your own paper, no, I don’t think any review backs you up, bud.

We have welcomed and will continue to invite discussion, criticism and robust debate about our coverage.

’Cept this criticism, ’course.

Even when we don’t agree, constructive criticism from colleagues who care, delivered respectfully and through the right channels, strengthens our report.

“Your criticism is only valid if done privately, so I can squash it & punish you ’way from public view”.

We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.

Well, then you’d better go rush in some barely-educated college students, ’cause 180 o’ your employees just fucking did.

We live in an era when journalists regularly come under fire for doing solid and essential work.

“Like these journalists daring to take us to task, & being threatened for not obediently following our corporate line”.

We are committed to protecting and supporting them.

Small print: so long as they only say what The New York Times tells them to say.

Their work distinguishes this institution, and makes us proud.

Yes, it distinguishes you as a bigoted, draconian institute proud o’ your own farts.

What a cesspool o’ a company. In an online era where anyone can bullshit up their own “paper” online or on social media & probably get mo’ views, — certainly anyone who has the clout to work with an o’errated paper like The New York Times — ¿why would anyone subject themselves to being slave drones for these pigs? I hope most o’ these contributors start their own papers & tell The New York Times to stuff it up their ass.

Anyway, I wasted your time, as The Onion, always brilliant, created the best critique o’ The New York Times anyone could.

II.

¡But that is not all! ¿O, you thought The New York Times was done pearlclutching? ¡The New York Times hasn’t e’en begun their pearlclutching! In the 2 billionth installment o’ “Rich White Person Not Loved ’Nough by E’eryone in the World”, The New York Times has made an op-ed dedicated to defending brown-nosing J. K. “Wizards Shit Their Pants” Rowling’s ability to add an extra billion to her Scrooge cash pile, which the vile trans activist antifa commie reds want to sabotage by putting her in the cis gulag where she’ll be forcibly reeducated, as trans people do all the time.

The article starts with a bunch o’ vague platitudes ’bout trans deserving safety, too, which seems nice, ’less you have mo’ braincells than The New York Times’s editors & follow the links to find the extra caveats @ the end that say, “but trans people still get an L”. This op-ed claims that these carefully cultivated quote mines they made up just now are ignored by “a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups” — truly the spookiest spectres haunting the globe — who actually read the original full quotes & had the audacity to call Rowling a, ¡gasp!, “transphobe”. That’s obviously hate speech & these people should be cast from polite company for their insidious attempts to cancel famous children’s book writer. Hilariously, in the very next paragraph, the writer acknowledges that this “noisy fringe” includes The Leaky Cauldron, “one of the biggest ‘Harry Potter’ fan sites”. That’s an awfully popular “fringe”.

The next paragraph has the predictable topics o’ “cancel culture”, harassment & doxxing, the latter 2 o’ which are, indeed, terrible when they happen to anyone. This article doesn’t have any complaints ’bout it happening to anyone else, tho, — including those “powerful” transgender rights activists & LGBTQ “lobbying groups” ( the 1 type o’ lobbying group The New York Times doesn’t jerk off to ), as well as average trans people who just exist, most o’ whom have far less money to protect themselves than Rowling, nor do they have the arbitrary loyalty that so many o’ these arrested-developed journos still obsessed with children’s books have for this rando celebrity to spew all this propaganda on the public. Moreo’er, it has no relevance to the topic o’ transphobia: if a white supremacist gets harassed, — & some almost certainly have been — ¿does that validate white supremacy? ¿Could Rowling not scrounge together a mo’ educated brown-noser that a’least knows what “ad hominem” attack logical fallacy is & do The New York Times lack the basic high-school education to realize how infantile this article is? ( The answer to the latter is definitely “yes” ). If The New York Times wanted to write an article on the problem o’ harassment & doxxing in general & how it corrodes public debate, that would be good ’nough; but melding it directly into the issue o’ trans issues is peak intellectual dishonesty.

But after that we get the real meat o’ this article: grifting this guest writer’s podcast series, “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”, which is just Rowling whining ’bout how she’s the only person who’s been threatened in the universe. Yes, it’s a refreshing take to look @ the bigot’s perspective on things & completely ignore the most threatened minorities — that’s what we call looking @ both sides, ’cept we only look @ 1 side, since trans people aren’t famous & rich ’nough. Sorry, ¿did I say this was refreshing? I meant refreshing like water that’s been left in the sun all summer long. It would actually be refreshing if The New York Times let the dirty underclasses get a single word in edgewise.

This op-ed writer goes to the deranged comparison o’ Rowling to Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed by an Islamic zealot after an Iranian head o’ state declared a fatwa on Rushdie decades ago. Last time I checked, no trans head o’ state e’er declared an official fatwa on Rowling — in fact, last time I checked, there have ne’er been trans heads o’ state @ all, that’s how big & powerful they are. Still, this is “a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers” are “demonized” — that is, ’gain, criticized. The conclusion is obvious: no one is allowed to criticize writers e’er. If you e’er criticize a writer for their opinion, you’re basically leading them to be stabbed to death. Meanwhile, this op-ed writer, who is clearly demonizing LGBT activists by depicting them as violent maniacs, isn’t endangering them. See, it’s only dangerous when the uppity lowerclasses open their mouths gainst their celebrity royalty; when these cissies slander vulnerable groups in the most cowardly & idiotic ways possible, that’s just “having an opinion”. Only famous celebrities have the right to have opinions; average social-media users should keep their mouths shut & be “civil” ( read: obedient to the upperclass ).

And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

If we translate “her actual views” as “my whitewashed version o’ her views manipulated to make her look better than she is”. I find it funny that this op-ed complains o’ censorship when she herself censored Rowling’s real words to cut out the inconvenient stuff, like “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists” & describes caring ’bout trans rights as “scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow” — literally parroting the same rhetoric rightwingers use gainst all women’s rights issues. Granted, it’s easy to see how someone as dense as the average New York Times writer could fail to comprehend the passive-aggression ’hind Rowling’s empty, vague platitudes & skewed perspective, deliberately downplaying the threats toward trans people & deliberately exaggerating the threats toward the most important class, her.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia?

Clearly it’s ’cause those people read her full words on trans people & not your carefully-crafted quote mines.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

This paragraph is fascinating, since, unlike the rest o’ the article, which has tried to clean up Rowling’s transphobia, here it’s just laid right out — ’long with just plain ol’ sexism. She unironically says Rowling supports “sex-segregated prisons”, like an edgelord on Reddit bragging ’bout how they thought Jim Crow was actually a good thing, O, here comes all the controversy, I’m such an individual. I hope these prisons are “separate, but equal”, since anyone familiar with history knows how well that works. We could just keep e’ery individual isolated & keep down violence for e’eryone, but that would waste too much tax $ on the shameful enterprise o’ treating humans humanely, so let’s just indulge in superstitious traditions & assume that gay people don’t exist & ne’er commit sexual assault — prison rape certainly isn’t a common trope, since separating people by arbitrary chromosome layout genitals I don’t know any coherent way to define genders has done such a great job.

What a “biological woman” is is vague, anyway. ¿Are physically transitioned trans people included? ¿How is this measured? — with the utmost science, I’m sure, as well as genital-groping, ¿since how else would anyone know, &, mo’ importantly, how is it anyone else’s fucking business? This is why society rightfully considers people who obsess o’er “biological” gender fucking gross: it’s literally defining people by body parts that nobody else should be caring ’bout ’less we’re actually having sex. If anything, trans people seem to be mo’ enlightened, since they seem to think beyond just tits & cocks.

& then we have the sudden swerve into an imaginary strawman in the middle with the whole “‘people who menstruate’ in reference to biological women”, which contradicts the immediately preceding statement ’bout trans people being all ’bout “self-declared gender identity”, without any biological element @ all. It’s almost as if Rowling’s being deliberately strict & deliberately gatekeeping people based on criteria that’s simultaneously narrow & vague. Shocking that people might think such a person is an asshole, specially when that criteria isn’t based on any scientific knowledge, — Rowling being a writer o’ children’s fantasy, not a scientist ( & while I don’t have the time to do a thorough investigation myself, most o’ the scientists I’ve seen talk ’bout this issue have a much less hamfisted approach, shockingly ’nough ) — but on this rando’s kneejerk feelings. If The New York Times had any intellectual integrity they would spend mo’ time talking ’bout scientists’ opinions on trans issues, not yet ’nother blowhard celebrity, but we already established that they have no credibility, so here we are.

Then we have “incendiary comments about transgender people”, which doesn’t sound transphobic.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.

These statements are contradictory & show that the writer is either so stupid that she doesn’t know what transphobia e’en is or hopes that her readers don’t. This is like people who say, “I’m not racist, but…”. You can assert till your face is blue that you’re not a transphobe, but people are still going to call you a transphobe, ’cause people decide for themselves whether or not you’re a bigot, you don’t get to decide for them. Not only does constantly saying, “I’m not a transphobe” not dispel people o’ that view, it makes the mo’ likely to believe it, since actual “not transphobes” don’t need to constantly declare that they’re not transphobes: they show, don’t tell. In fact, we don’t call people “not transphobes”: we call those people trans supporters, in the same way we use the word “feminist” ’stead o’ “not sexist”. ¿Would Rowling declare herself a trans supporter? Well, that answers the question, doesn’t it.

The “vocal trans activists” part is specially rich. These morons have been filling social media with their mental diarrhea for years, but have the audacity to call other people loudmouths. You wrote a multithousand epic ’bout 1 fucking person, ¿& you’re not 1 o’ those vulgar “vocal activists”?

She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing.

But she does explicitly support “sex-segregated prisons”, which doesn’t include transgenders — ¡so I guess that means Rowling’s so progressive, she doesn’t believe trans people should e’er go to jail! ¿What bathrooms does she believe trans people should use? If the answer isn’t, “public bathrooms should be broken up into individual stalls for e’eryone ’cause sex-segregated bathrooms is a superstitious barbarism”, then there’s no answer that won’t be transphobic — or sexist, for that matter.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

How ’bout I not take pampered randos who have no stake or credentials & ’stead ask actual scientists or trans people. While I’m @ it, ¿why don’t I ask a bunch o’ white male journalists whether or not antiaboriton laws are sexist & read the article, “20 Sexist Donald Trump Quotes We’re Done With”. After all, he tells e’eryone he’s not sexist & believes some women have troubles in their lives ( for instance, he agrees with Rowling on the dangers o’ trans people ), so he can’t be sexist, ¿right? I love the Twitter user who quipped “Serious question: do you think that there are *right* witches that should be burned?”. I should note that having done the most basic research I could bother to do, I found that this rando ran something called “TERF Anonymous”, so clearly they’re an expert on what is & isn’t transphobic, just like I always make sure to ask what the leader o’ the Klan thinks when I think something I say might be insensitive to black people. If this article has informed me o’ anything it’s that all these people being literally murdered for s’posedly being transphobes when they’ve done mo’ for trans people than anyone are laughably terrible liars.

For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed.

Yes, that’s the quality o’ Rowling’s writing for you. I don’t know why you’d subject yourself to such torture.

Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.

Yes, that certain kind o’ person is “not a fucking idiot”, which is a class that, unfortunately, doesn’t include this op-ed writer. ¿What does this transgender character do, by the way? Surely if ’twas a positive representation, you’d be itching to go into details. I’m guessing the fact that you don’t is an indication that you’re hiding very gross transphobic depiction & are once ’gain, what we in the business call, “lying your ass off”.

This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.

Hey, look, ’nother irrelevant comparison. ¿& did you know that Kanye was criticized for saying Bush didn’t care ’bout black people? That means people who criticize his flagrant antisemitism are also wrong. Duh, I understand how logic works.

Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases.

Yes, now that Rowling’s a bigot, too, she can finally enjoy Harry Potter. ¡Whew! ¡What a relief!

¿What are these “biases”? ¿Being a “Rowlingphobe”? Yes, ¡somebody please think o’ the Rowlings!

She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling —

Jesus fucking Christ, that sounds exhausting to listen to. ¿What obsessed neurotic wants to spend 9 whole hours interviewing some rando children’s fantasy writer? She’s not e’en a great fantasy writer. If ’twere LeGuin, maybe — she wasn’t a bigot, for 1.

— the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy —

What a load o’ horse shit. Rowling has babbled on & on her spicy hot takes on transgenderism for years.

— explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.

Harry Potter embraced species-based slavery as “what’s natural for them” & made fun o’ the 1 person who revolted gainst it, had essentialist morality where someone born in a “corrupt” way is naturally evil & people are sorted into the evil camp & born as a bootleg white supremacist ’cause they have an ugly name like “Draco Malfoy”, & has a chosen-1-by-birth protagonist. Harry’s an “outsider” only till his birth superpowers makes him save the day & then e’eryone loves him. Harry Potter is only progressive to the most regressive morons — which is to say, Americans & Britons.

All o’ this is to say, Rowling isn’t a liberal, she’s a reactionary, primitivist, superstitious ( for example, she’s Christian, which is not only superstitious, but inherently patriarchal ). This ’splains her weird “separate but equal” view on gender & her discomfort with “unnatural” genders. Much as she’s uncomfortable with the idea o’ a hero who doesn’t have certain blood make them the chosen 1 or their name indicate how bad they are, she’s uncomfortable with humans taking control o’er their own gender. Furthermo’, her weird obsession with segregating traditional women — a better term than “biological” women, since there’s no science ’hind her conception o’ “real” women, only ol’ superstitions largely inspired by The Bible — & men: unlike materialist leftists, who rightfully view male supremacy as not being inherent to men’s physical gross penises but to the artificial nature o’ their superior political & economic power, which is in no way integral to their biology, & believe that the solution is to eliminate political & economic equality ’mong genders so that men don’t have power o’er women, Rowling believes there are integral differences ’mong genders that makes true intermixing ’mong them impossible. ( This has the added benefit o’ this neoliberal continuing to support the political-economic system that reinforces this inequality o’ power ).

This is ultimately why I find the idea that trans women are men trying to cynically game the system ridiculous if you have an actual left-wing perspective: men have nothing to gain by becoming women. The idea that trans women want to sneak into women’s bathrooms to creep on women is ridiculous when you realize men have mo’ power to do this than trans women: society has already poisoned the well on trans women ’nough that e’en going near a “biological” women or a women’s bathroom is deserving a lynching; men already have plenty o’ scuses for going into women’s bathroom, including just barging in & not caring ’bout the consequences. The idea that trans women are trying to sneak ’way women’s “benefits” is based on the rightwing delusion that minorities get special benefits; if anything, it should be trans men who are seen as trying to game the system ( tho a liberal should praise this, as men don’t deserve their advantages, anyway ); but this is ne’er the case, for the obvious reason that despite Rowling & other transphobes’ rants ’bout society s’posedly catering to trans people & “erasing” women, the vast majority o’ e’en trans supporters, much less transphobes, still view trans women as separate from traditional women & trans men as separate from traditional men & it’s obvious that trans men will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that traditional men get, & trans women will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that rightwingers claim women have. The unquestionable fact, given all the statistics on how much mo’ likely trans people are to be violently attacked or sexually assaulted, is that trans people are a lowerclass, have-nots, not some privileged class that transphobe liars claim in the same way sexist “men’s rights activists” claim women have imaginary privileges o’er men or white supremacists claim black people have imaginary privileges o’er white people.

If anything, it seems less like Rowling is interested in gender equality, viewing it as futile, as a gender essentialist, & is ’stead jealous o’ the supremacy men have o’er women & want to create a class lower than women to abuse in the same way men abuse women. It’s no different from the bitter poor whites who cling to capitalist economics: they give up on class equality, but since nobody wants to be the lowest class, they sooth themselves by keeping black people lower than them, & thus are horrified by the idea o’ racial equality, leaving poor whites in the lowest class. Trans women being kept separate from traditional women is the only way to keep traditional women from being the lowest class for those too cynical to believe in true equality.

1 o’ the best ways I can frame this is to ask 1 simple question: ¿which side are trans people on? ¿The left or right? ¿Which side is almost entirely gainst trans people? There’s no coincidence: bigots gainst 1 class o’ have-nots tend to hate all have-nots. Rowling only finds the appearance o’ feminism cool ’cause it benefits her; e’eryone else can get fucked. She’s not a leftist, but that all-too-common artificial form, political narcissism; & we’ll not be surprised when later she’s revealed to be hanging out with rightwingers, as political narcissists tend toward the rightwing.

This is far from the only time Rowling has been ’fraid o’ genuine rebellion gainst authoritarianism: ¿remember her hatred o’ actually pro-labor Corbyn ( ’cause he would raise her taxes, unlike nice neoliberal war criminal Tony Blair )? ¿Remember her tepid withering before Israel boycott with weak ( & hypocritical, since I doubt she’d say the same ’bout South Africa under Apartheid ) platitudes?

I should add that “empathy toward one’s enemies” is self-defeating slave-morality tripe typical o’ “turn the other cheek” Christianity that mo’ oft than not enables authoritarians by dampening fighting back — as Jesus did when he tried to distract Jews from genuine revolt gainst their Roman imperialists in favor o’ fake spirituality bullshit & as “centrist” saboteurs do when they continually attempt to needle the left or moderate liberals ( ne’er the right ) into “compromise” or decorum with political opponents interested in neither — tho, also typical o’ Christianity, it’s fake & hypocritical, given Rowling’s deliberate downplaying o’ trans problems for the sake o’ feeding her own pity — & “the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends” is literally valorizing favoritism, which is contradictory to an equal, just democratic society, which should put the primacy o’ justice o’er giving advantages to one’s buddies. Only backward savages hold these as great philosophical ideals.

The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology

Nobody but transphobes call treating trans people humanely as “gender ideology”. By definition, anyone who has an opinion on gender has some “gender ideology”. As John Maynard Keynes would have said, those who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any gender ideology are usually the slaves o’ some defunct superstitions. So it’s rich — & narcissistic — o’ Rowling to claim that her ideas aren’t “ideology” — they’re just the truth — completely unproven “truths” by a mediocre fantasy writer, not an actual scientist.

— such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context.

Rowling doesn’t believe trans people should be treated equally in law, e’en tho equal treatment under law for e’ery human being, no matter who they are, is a fundamental principle o’ liberal democracy, putting her in the similar camp as those principled people who don’t believe women should be treated as “indistinguishable from men in virtually every legal and social context” or that blacks should be treated as “indistinguishable from whites in virtually every legal and social context”, also known as “fascists”. It’s shocking that so many people with firm beliefs in liberal equality & democracy might be disgusted by someone whose political beliefs regarding trans people are fundamentally incompatible with basic liberalism.

Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?

’Cause she’s a grifter who makes money off outrage clicks.

“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.

None o’ which is helped by Rowling’s attention party, since they’re not the ones who get the 9 hour podcast, she does, & those who do get to be a part o’ Rowling’s boom box are carefully curated to be sure they’re sufficiently in agreement with Rowling on trans issues. If Rowling actually respected other women’s opinions, she would include a variety o’ opinions, including the many women who are trans supporters ( in fact, most polls show that women support trans rights mo’ than men ), not just those “with similar views”; the fact that she only shares her platform with women “with similar views” spotlights that these other women are only valuable insofar as they glorify Rowling’s views. After all, this podcast isn’t titled, “The Witch Trials of Women”, it’s “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”. The s’posed harm to other women is only a problem in how it harms Rowling.

Also, you have literally been saying that Rowling was being silenced, but now admitting that she isn’t being silenced — ’nother transparent lie.

All right, I’m sorry, but I can’t read any more o’ this article. It just goes on & on & on, & it’s nothing but pitying & valorizing & Jesus fucking Christ, Rowling could be Mother Theresa & she wouldn’t deserve so much fucking ego stroking. I don’t give a fuck ’bout what some celebrity actor that you yourself admit is biased ’cause, by your own words, their “careers Rowling’s work helped advance”; I don’t care what some other journos in your circlejerk say. Nobody likes journos or care ’bout their uneducated opinions. Nowhere in this entire article does this braindead op-ed writer quote a single scientist or cite any actual biological science, despite their gross obsession with strangers’ biology, nor actual trans people. ¿They couldn’t find a single trans person who was, like, “O, Rowling’s not transphobic”? Look @ all the black people or women Fox News can bribe into pretending Republicans aren’t Nazis. Rowling has to be the biggest transphobe in the world if this op-ed writer writing, like, a whole novel as big as Order of the Phoenix trying her best to make this random idiot sound like the world’s savior can’t find 1 trans person to vouch for Rowling.

For someone who talks up what a feminist she is, there is barely any talk o’ anyone other than Rowling & how mean ol’ critics are saying mean things. There are maybe a few carefully curated examples o’ privileged journos — the only class that matters, apparently — having to write for different papers, but that’s ’bout it. As bad as it is for anyone to get death threats from obsessed weirdos, — which Rowling was probably already getting several years earlier after she killed Dumbledore — it seems like skewed priorities to treat it as the biggest issue facing feminism, specially when it’s matched by downplaying & delegitimizing trans-supporting women getting death threats. I guess “feminism” is now “only some women matter”. Women get harassed & threatened for any opinion under the sun, but The New York Times apparently felt like “not treating a vulnerable minority group like trash” was the only 1 worth defending. Plenty o’ women get death threats & gross comments ’bout being prostitutes for talking ’bout birth control health insurance policy; it seems less like Big Trans is the problem & mo’ that there’s a lot o’ gross sexists out there & trans people have fuck all to do with it. ¿But why should The New York Times criticize sexism & possibly offend the many sexists who read ( or write ) their articles when they can attack a much mo’ politically weak demographic ’stead?

Actually, there’s 1 paragraph I want to point out:

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”

Note I included the link for “credulous”, ’cause it’s important: NPR thinks Rowling sucks, The Atlantic thinks she’s going to be the next John Yudkin. That settles my opinion: NPR is 1 o’ the most informative news shows in the US, The Atlantic is shit not e’en fit for the bottom o’ my boot. Yes, I’m sure Rowling will be vindicated just like that COVID-skeptic economist who thought treating AIDS in Africa wasn’t worth the money will be.

1st, I love the hypocrisy o’ trying to use rando journos’ knee-jerk opinions as shallow as book review blurbs as “evidence”, but rejects far mo’ detailed, wellspoken opinions by other journos as “embarrassingly credulous”. So, the evidence that this opinion is right is limited by the litmus that the people providing the evidence believe this opinion is right. That’s known as “circular logic”, ’nother logical fallacy this uneducated writer & The New York Times don’t comprehend.

¿What beliefs will be “proven right”? This article has been vague & been throwing round words to get round the obvious contradiction ’tween “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message” & “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists”. Those beliefs definitely aren’t “trans people are people, too, & deserve to be treated equally under the law”, nor are they beliefs unrelated to trans people, so they’re almost certainly transphobic, & I’m going to bet that they’re not going to be “proven” right in the end, since it’s mostly ol’ boomers like Rowling & this writer who believe it, while millennials & zoomers o’erwhelmingly support trans rights — to the point that despite many o’ them growing up with Harry Potter & worshipping this o’errated series, many have now become jaded o’ Rowling ( for good reason ). Sounds to me like it’s a losing side supported primarily by dinosaurs who will be dead in a couple decades.

Sorry, there’s 1 mo’ paragraph I want to point out:

In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. ​​She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.

Note to Americans: The Guardian is, as much as revile them, generally considered liberal ( liberal ’nough that, howe’er stupid they may be, aren’t baseless ’nough to cater to transphobes… well, ’cept for that concern troll letter they posted, giving voice to a totally-not-transphobe & not to a trans person @ all, since The Guardian can’t e’en not be terrible in this case ); The Telegraph & The Sunday Times are conservative. Shocking that conservatives are mo’ accepting o’ bigots than liberals. You’d think hard-core feminist J. K. Rowling would be loath to work with such sexists who support abortion limits, but apparently tolerating sexists is better than tolerating trans people. I’m sure this is ’cause leftists are so darn intolerant o’ bigots, unlike rightwingers, who are tolerant o’ e’eryone ( who shares their bigotry ). This isn’t surprising, since, as stated, Rowling’s feminism is thin as thread, & despite the thin facade o’ liberalism Rowling wears to attempt to be hip with the millennials, — which has stupendously failed with e’en their masses o’ raving Harry Potter fans feeling alienated from her transphobia — her integral philosophy is inherently conservative in its reduction o’ humans to biological forms & reduction o’ morality into simplistic biblical ideals with no basis in complex concrete reality.

Also, I wasted your time ’gain, as this article can also be summed up better in this simple comic.

So we have 2 articles that are full o’ lies so transparent, they must be made o’ glass. This is no surprise from such flagrant liars as The New York Times, a newspaper only for the most gullible o’ pseudointellectuals.

As someone who has written a review or 2, I’m fascinated by the art o’ reviewing in & o’ itself: not just the conclusions they set out, but also, specially, the arguments they set forth to try & back up those conclusions & how persuasive they seem to me. This is why I’ve written a few attacks gainst reviews in which I agree with the conclusion, such as an inane praiseworthy review for my favorite video game, Wario Land 3. This comes from my schooling, which ( probably to avoid getting sued for potentially violating freedom-o’-speech rights ) was openminded ’bout just ’bout any kind o’ conclusions, no matter how revolting, so long as one made a sophisticated attempt @ backing one’s arguments.

Thus for today I will go all the way & look @ reviews for a book I’ve ne’er read, some 2021 books called “Sorrow & Bliss: A Novel”. Yes, it really has “A Novel” as the official subtitle, & no, I have no idea why.

The only reason I e’en checked out this book was ’cause I found it on some list I found on Google that some rando named Steve Donaghue made o’ what he considered to be the worst fiction books o’ 2021:

In case so many of the rest of the books on this list haven’t given readers enough anti-science egomania, this idiotic, carpingly condescending story of a woman with a “mental illness” that mainly seems to turn her into a too-online Twitter-hole ought to make up the difference.

This is an all-too-common example o’ 1 o’ my least favorite types o’ terrible reviews: 1 that focuses so much on conclusive opinions & not ’nough on textual evidence or examples &, worse, is so vague in its criticisms that e’en after reading the review I have no idea what kind o’ book this e’en is. Granted, less than 50 words is way too short for an adequate review for anything worth reviewing, since it leaves no room for detail. I think, ironically, the person who wrote this review is “too-online”, as he assumes I’m familiar with whate’er Twitter bullshit he’s vaguely alluding to. Unfortunately, beyond copypasting the poems I post on this blog into Twitter with a grunt & then leaving ( which I’ve stopped bothering to do now that I’m convinced Musk will be the death o’ it ), I don’t do hardly anything on Twitter ( & I suspect hardly anyone will within the next 5 years thanks to Musk ), so I have no idea how this “Twitter-hole” ( ¿why is there a hyphen there? “Hole” is a separate word, not a suffix ), nor what “anti-science egomania” this book has or why this reviewer puts scare quotes round “mental illness”. ¿Does this reviewer who tries to imply that he’s pro-science deny the existence o’ mental illnesses — which is to ask, is this reviewer a psychology-denying crank, which is certainly not what I or any civilized human being would consider “pro-science”?

Ultimately, this review is just a bunch o’ cursing disguised as intellectualism by the use o’ vaguely-alluded implications. Being “anti-science”, an egomaniac, carping, condescending, & “too-online”, do, indeed, sound bad, but one can’t be sure if they truly are bad without understanding how they are these things & what the reviewer thinks makes this book “anti-science” or what he interprets to be an example o’ the vice o’ being “too-online”. This is a common tactic for people with unpopular opinions who want to disguise their unpopular opinions as general-held sentiments. Thus, “believes that depression is a real mental illness”, which is something with which all civilized people agree, is turned into a generally-hated dog-whistle “anti-science” much in the way rightwingers turn “treats black people humanely”, which, ’gain, all civilized people think is good, into “woke”, which sounds bad & ridiculous, e’en if most couldn’t tell you what it’s s’posed to mean.

Tier: D

So intrigued by this antireview that failed to give me any information, but, ironically, made me mo’ curious to see what kind o’ book would inspire this vague mess o’ ideas, I had to look up the book on Amazon — specifically its blurb.

In this reviewer’s defense, while I must emphasize ’gain that I have not read this book & cannot adequately review it myself, the blurb doesn’t inspire confidence in me. I can definitely say that the blurb is poorly written:

Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.

A common vice o’ modern literature ( that is literature o’ today, not modernist literature, which is some o’ the best literature out there ) is relying on childish choppy sentences. This paragraph is particularly fragmentary, since the different sentences don’t e’en connect. Most o’ this paragraph is empty details stripped o’ any importance. “She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel”. Cool. ¿Who cares? E’eryone is “going to write a novel”, & writing a book ’bout a tortured “genius” middle class white person struggling to become an uppercase-A “Artist” is the most cliché & uninteresting concepts for a book. Meanwhile, bringing up that our protagonist used to live in Paris, but now lives in a gated community, which she hates, but can’t bear to leave, is some unironic 1st-world-problems & exhibit #200,000 o’ how detached from reality upper-class Americans are. That said, there’s no indication o’ “anti-science” in this book so far; & honestly, the concept o’ a book ’bout someone who “creates internet content for no one” is the least uninteresting part o’ this blurb & could be an entertaining topic for a book if done with self-effacing humor & without the bathos-inducing melodrama that this blurb is so far exhibiting.

The blurb continues:

Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain—why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people.

This paragraph just insults the reader’s intelligence, pretending that hardly anyone has e’er heard o’ this concept o’ “depression” before. So far it seems like 1 o’ the 47 words o’ the previous review was right: “egomania”. This blurb tries to pass off our protagonist as the world’s only sufferer from depression, e’en tho that is far from the truth. Usually books ’bout depression are written for others with depression in a way o’ creating resonance & understanding, making them not feel ’lone; but this blurb’s use o’ alien diction to depict depression as this 1-o’-a-kind mutation o’ the protagonist does the opposite: as someone who does have depression, it turns me off, & it feels mo’ like an exotic exhibitionist performance put on to thrill people who don’t have depression — which is a gross, dehumanizing thing to do. I can’t tell, since the previous review was so vague, but maybe this was also what Donaghue meant by “condescending”: it certainly feels condescending to people with depression.

With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has.

Speaking o’ vague language: ¿what does it mean for Martha’s parents to be “chaotic”? ¿Is that a euphemism for “abusive”? Also, I certainly hope this Ingrid person literally abandoned Martha & didn’t “abandon” her in a metaphorical way by dying, since the protagonist would look like a selfish asshole for complaining ’bout how she suffered for someone else’s death.

It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin.

“It feels like the end but maybe”’s missing comma is a legit grammatical error in an official blurb for a mass-published book.

I’m sure many o’ the hot-shot commercial publisher types I’ve read from would say that this is a well-written blurb, but I disagree. Then ’gain, I think their perspective is that the obnoxiously intelligence-insulting way this blurb is written is “attention-grabbing” to the masses o’ idiots in the same way jingling keys would be, whereas as someone who doesn’t find jingling keys particularly fascinating, I find it, well, obnoxiously intelligence-insulting, so this is probably why I wouldn’t make a good publisher, since my instinct is to criticize the masses for being idiots, which isn’t liable to make the masses o’ idiots want to buy my stuff, whereas the effective way to fleece them is to pat them on the back for their idiocy & indulge them.

But we haven’t gotten to the bottom o’ the swamp yet: that would be the editorial reviews.

“Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I’m always hoping to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know.” — Ann Patchett

Drinking game: take a drink e’ery time we see “brilliant” or [insert adverb] funny. Enjoy that coma from alcohol poisoning.

But this review doesn’t just spew clichés, but also mangles them: ¿what does “brilliantly faceted” mean? Nobody uses that phrase. The phrase is “multifaceted”, not just “faceted”. “Faceted” by itself doesn’t mean anything in this context, & it isn’t made any mo’ meaningful by the addendum o’ an empty superlative before it.

We also have laughably exaggerated metaphors, making it sound like the reviewer has an online fetish for being “engulfed” by literature.

The most shocking thing is that this blurb was written by a real writer & the daughter o’ 1 o’ the most imaginative writers who had a very distinct voice to his writing. I guess you can’t inherit literary genius. My only hope is that Ann crapped this out in a minute for whate’er quick buck they were offering.

Tier: E

“Completely brilliant, I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it.” — Gillian Anderson

This reviewer judges this book to be “completely brilliant”, as opposed to those which are merely partially brilliant. Then we get a comma splice, & after that redundant padding: Gillian doesn’t just think e’ery woman should read it, but also e’ery girl. ¿Why stop there? Maybe e’ery female, lady, gal, lass, miss, madame, femme, & any other synonym you could find should read it, too.

Tier: F

“An incredibly funny and devastating debut. . . . enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing.’” — The Guardian

It says something bad when a newspaper as shoddy as The Guardian provides 1 o’ the least inane review o’ the pack. There’s still plenty o’ trite, empty phrases ( “madcap energy” ) & empty, repetitive superlatives ( “sensitive & heartfelt” ), & the reviewer fails to describe this book in a way that distinguishes it from millions of other books, that could also be described as “funny & devastating”, or the many books that vaguely involve “try[ing] to make amends & change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing’.

Tier: D

“Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt . . . Martha’s voice is acerbic, witty, and raw.” — Booklist (starred review)

This is the closest a review came to having anything resembling a specific example from the book to make it stand out from any other book, the conflict o’ struggling with “inaccurate” diagnoses & medications — tho this does make me rethink my earlier interpretation o’ our 1st reviewer’s criticism o’ “anti-science” & makes me wonder if, quite the opposite, he was criticizing this book for exhibiting depression-skepticism or skepticism toward the efficacy o’ antidepressants ( I don’t feel bad for the misinterpretation, since, as I said, he refused to give a concrete example to back up their vague criticism o’ “anti-science” ).

Tier: C

“Meg Mason’s unflagging comic impulses drive this novel about the havoc a woman’s mental illness wreaks on her marriage.” — Shelf Awareness (starred review)

A common vice o’ reviews, specially editorial reviews, which are far too short to give useful information, is trading meaningful critique based on examples o’ the text with empty but poetic ( & that poetry is mo’ William McGonagall than Kobayashi Issa ) diction. If this reviewer wrote “This book ’bout a woman’s depression ruining their marriage is funny” ’twould say ’bout the same thing, but they try to hide such an empty conclusion with laughably o’erwrought purple prose as if they were describing Conan the Barbarian wrestling the ermine-orbed serpent or Moses parting the red sea with his rod aloft: this book isn’t just funny; its writer’s “unflagging comic impulses drive this novel” like a school bus.

Tier: D

“Brutal, tender, funny, this novel—a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations—came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book.” — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

’Nother common design pattern for automated review generation: “[adjective], [adjective], [adjective]…]. & if that wasn’t ’nough, we end 1 o’ the tritest, most ridiculous exaggerated praise e’er: claiming that the work “changed” the reviewer. Unfortunately, these works ne’er change these reviewers into people with any form o’ imagination or critical skills o’ analysis.

By the way, my favorite example o’ this silly trope is a YouTube video that claims in its thumbnail, I shit you not, that the music in Donkey Kong Country:

I mean, I love Donkey Kong Country’s music, too, but I can’t remember any philosophical epiphanies or major life decisions I’ve come to that were inspired by the bubbling melodies o’ “Hot Head Bop”.

Tier: E

“A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humor; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.”  — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company

This novel is truly comic, as opposed to those fake comedic posers. This review is notable in that it makes a point specific ’nough to be outright wrong: tragicomedy is, in fact, not rare @ all, but goes all the way back to e’en The Bible, & probably earlier ancient literature, too.

Tier: D

“A quiet and achingly beautiful love story. . . . LOVED it. Masterfully written. And powerful.” — Elin Hilderbrand

More o’erwrought prose. I hate it when a book is so beautiful it gives me aches. To wrap up our bathos, we have the high superlative “masterfully written” followed by the much weaker “also, ’twas powerful, too”. “This book is genius & also pretty darn swell”.

Tier: F

“Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!” — Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters

The other cliché to add to our bingo card is comparing a work to ’nother work — tho I love how this reviewer twists 1 o’ her comparisons by addending, “yet completely original”. Yes, this completely original work that can only be described by saying it’s like other works. I’m also not sure what “arch” humor is & have a sneaking suspicion that this reviewer doesn’t know, either.

Tier: E

“Funny and tragic.” — Jojo Moyes

Give Jojo credit: this says what all the other reviews say in just 3 words.

Tier: D

“I really loved Meg Mason’s SORROW AND BLISS, which is sometimes very sad and often very funny and ultimately hopeful.” — Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over, via Twitter

OK, to be fair, this 1 adds “& hopeful”, too.

Tier: E

“So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel. What a debut.” — Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety

Calling a book “deeply affecting” is like describing my chair as “strongly sittable”: it may be true, but doesn’t mean much.

Tier: F

“A gorgeous, heart-rending book.” — Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy

¡YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, SORROW AND BLISS!

Tier: F

“SORROW AND BLISS is brilliant. A comic gem that will also break your heart.” — Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time

I’m surprised it took this long to encounter a review describing the work as a gem or some kind o’ jewelry.

Tier: F

“Evocative and hopeful.” — Book Riot, “5 Contemporary Literary Fiction Books That Are Game-Changers”

Generic & meaningless. That’s a great way to describe a book that is purportedly a “game-changer”. Nobody’s e’er written a book that’s evocative or hopeful till Meg Mason invented the concepts o’ evocation & hope in 2021.

Tier: F

“Sorrow and Bliss is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” — Sara Collins, Costa First Novel Award-winning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton

¿Why do you abuse the people you love?

Tier: E

“Sharp yet humane, and jaw-droppingly funny, this is the kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound. A masterclass on family, damage and the bonds of love: as soon as I finished it, I started again.” — Jessie Burton, New York Times bestselling author of The Miniaturist

“Spicy, yet sour, & nose-pickingly readable, this is the kind o’ review you will want to shove into the mouth o’ e’eryone you know. Jessie has a spectacular skill for adverbs & using commas, & her understanding o’ how much zestiness a reader can take is insightful. A Raid: Shadow Legends on drama, diction, & the love triangle o’ adjectives: as soon as I ate it, I ate it ’gain.” — J. J. W. Mezun, The Mezunian bestrepelling author o’ A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic ).

Tier: D

“Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.” — Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures

¡Irrelevancy, your honor!

Tier: F

“Examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator’s mental illness on her closest relationships. . . . Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha’s experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. . . . An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” — Kirkus Reviews

They’re not surprising, but these god damn adjectives still get me. You can’t just have regular ol’ clarity: it has to be the “pitiless” kind, like it’s a stronger palette swap in the latter half o’ Dragon Quest. Since we’ve established that the blurb a’least thinks Martha is the only person in the universe with this exotic mutation as-yet unnamed & undiscovered by all the brightest scientists, I’m doubtful o’ the “without either condescending” part. & since Martha apparently complains ’bout how agonizing it is to live in a gated community that they just can’t bear to leave, ’less Martha is given the guillotine by the proletariat by the end o’ the book, I think the author probably does let her off too easily.

Tier: D

“The book is a triumph. A brutal, hilarious, compassionate triumph.” — Alison Bell, cocreator and star of The Letdown

¿Was this review written by Lionel Fanthorpe? “This review is repetitive. A repetitive repetition that repeats & repeats & says the same thing they say ’gain & ’gain & doesn’t say anything else but that which has been said before & nothing mo’ but what was said before”.

Tier: F

“This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant—the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” — Bookseller+Publisher

I’m glad that the reviewer alerted me that this book is a “real” romance, as opposed to all those fake romances that are truly ’bout martian conquerors. I always hate it when I buy a book with some sexy shirtless man on the cover & it’s just blasting cyberpneumatic cannons @ the Xythnians from Kyklocks. ¿How will my cyberpneumatic cannon shoot off then?

& they let you know that this is a modern love, involving mental illness, which didn’t exist before 2021. ¿Virginia Woolf? ¡Ne’er heard o’ her!

Despite all this, this is 1 o’ the mo’ in-depth — a’least as in-depth as any o’ these Hallmark card reviews get — reviews. Note how it makes a comparison to ’nother writer, but qualifies it by noting specific differences ( which is mo’ meaningful than just saying “but also completely original”, which is just straight-up contradictory ). Granted, it’d be better if the claims o’ being “less self-conscious” & “more mature” were qualified with examples & elaboration, since we’re still taking the reviewer on their word & they’re still relying heavily on vague superlatives. & the rest also devolves into a list o’ superlatives, with the hint that it this book s’posedly goes into greater depth into the complications o’ middle-class families than some unnamed general standard being the closest to what we might call actually giving meaningful information. Still, based on our now subterranean standards this is up on the higher tiers.

Tier: B

“Improbably charming . . . will have you chortling and reading lines aloud.” — People

( Laughs ). E’en the reviewers are vague: we don’t e’en get a specific person cited for this review, but some vague “people”. This gives a new perspective to the phrase “¡The people have spoken!”.

I like how “People” starts by laying out their expectations that this book would be shitty, setting up the gravel-level standards this book apparently surpassed. Presumably, these low standards were based on reading the blurb.

This review carries out the impressive feat o’ being both vague & clearly wrong: it libels me by claiming that I will “chortle” — ’cause our failed poet reviewer can’t use a basic word like “laugh” — & read lines ’loud, which I would ne’er do for e’en the funniest book, simply ’cause reading lines ’loud while laughing noisily in public is something only a peak douche bag would do, & reading lines ’loud & laughing to yourself while ’lone is something e’en a deranged lunatic like me would consider too bedlamite.

Tier: F

Below these reviews my eye caught the author bio, &, well…

Meg Mason is a journalist whose career began at the Financial Times and the Times of London. Her work has since appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Times (UK), and the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts. Born in New Zealand, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters. [emphasis mine]

So we can confirm that Sorrow & Bliss: A Work o’ Literature Comprising Abstract Latin Letters that Combine to Form Abstract Concepts Physically Bound in the Form o’ a Codex is an author self-insert book so transparent that the author couldn’t e’en be arsed to change the name o’ the magazine they worked for to 1 o’ its carbon-copy competitors.

Bonus: Mo’ Bad Reviews

Our 1st reviewer, Steve Donaghue, also wrote a list o’ worst 2021 nonfiction books, & it starts pretty funny:

10 The Chief’s Chief by Mark Meadows (All Seasons Press) – On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Mark Meadows publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on All Seasons Press for giving him a book contract.

Kind o’ low-hanging fruit for a worst-book choice, — specially since the rightwing grift machine pumps out these doorstops e’ery year — but I can’t disagree, & it’s only #10. ¿What’s next?

Tier: B

9 The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (Regnery Publishing) On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Josh Hawley publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on Regnery Publishing for giving him a book contract.

I mean, I can’t disagree…

Tier: B

Unfortunately, Donaghue gives ’way the game when he makes a mistake copy-pasting the review for the Peter Navarro book & using for the Jim Jordan book, as he blames Peter Navarro ’gain. Or maybe he just really hates Peter Navarro & decides he wants to blame him a 2nd time just to be sure.

Some o’ the other items are weirder, tho…

6 The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro (Broadside Books) – Very smart and very lazy Ben Shapiro takes a legitimate social issue – the rise of the authoritarian Left – and lavishes pan-shallow unoriginal platitudes on them while cloaking the whole mess in the fascists talking points of the very monsters who consider him a useful idiot.

1 o’ the great thing ’bout using these vague superlatives or invectives is that I have to play guessing games regarding what the person is trying to e’en say. Now, from Ben Shapiro that’s no surprise, since like most fascists he deliberately communicates in shibboleths to disguise bigotry as profound, complex thought. But Donaghue, who portrays himself as vaguely antifascist & spent half his reviews criticizing what many fascists considered to be a feather in their cap, seems to have different goals. One may expect him to be o’ the Enlightened Centrist™ tribe who feels the need to balance out their outrage @ a Republican attempt to outright o’erthrow the US government by manufacturing an imaginary leftist equivalent. Perhaps he portrays the “Black Lives Matter” riots as the equivalent, despite the fact that these riots presented no threat to the US government beyond being an international embarrassment — & if that’s the case, then we’d have to consider nearly e’ery American who vacations to other countries as an equal evil to the Trump Putsch. ¿But, anyway, would e’en an Enlightened Centrist™ consider Shapiro to be “very smart and very lazy”? I’m hoping Donaghue takes his brilliant “rap isn’t music ’cause my daddy told me it isn’t” & the way he embarrassed himself in front o’ a BBC conservative by being too crazy e’en for him — which adds him to the list o’ Americans who are an international embarrassment — as examples o’ him just being too lazy to unleash that intelligence that he’s keeping very well hidden.

It’s not that I’m in denial that there exists an authoritarian left; but when I think o’ “authoritarian left”, I think o’ Leninists, & I don’t see any big Leninist movement on the verge o’ seizing the US capitol & setting up the American Neobolshevik Communist Party as the dictatorship o’ the proletariat, no matter how many jokes ’bout guillotines I make. As we’ve established here before, we can’t e’en get Biden to do something as symbolic as raising his fist & shouting, “¡Down with the bourgeoisie!”, while still doing their bidding, no matter how funny ’twould be. Maybe Donaghue took some downers & fell asleep while watching a Russian Civil War documentary just after US news & mixed them up in his mind. It happens to me sometimes, too. But given some o’ the other things he’s written, I get the sneaking suspicion his idea o’ “authoritarian left” is just some irrelevant few randos on Twitter calling him a racist ’cause he refused to capitalize the B in “black people” — which is to say that he is “too-online” & needs to stop spending so much time on Twitter & mistaking the idiots on it as relevant to greater society.

Complaining ’bout the “rise” o’ the authoritarian left also really undermines Donaghue’s attacks gainst Trump as a fascist — a clear rightwing authoritarian. ¿Is it reasonable for him to be alarmed that the left should become authoritarian as a counterbalance to the right’s growing authoritarianism, or is Donaghue 1 o’ the many delusional Americans who thinks reality spawns from dreams & wishes & not power & that sternly protesting people willing to use violence & underhanded tactics will magically make these tyrant-wannabes no longer a threat? After all, when fascism rose as a threat in Europe, the allied powers acted in many ways that almost anyone would consider “authoritarian” — far worse than a few randos calling other randos racist for not spelling “latinos” “l@t!n%”, like any progressive L33tspeaker should. ¿Would not Donaghue consider FDR, who interned Japanese Americans & heavily censored newspapers, radio, & e’en letters, an example o’ the “authoritarian left”? ¿Would he say the same ’bout Winston Churchill, who also censored media while the UK was fighting fascists? Also, ¿didn’t Donaghue outright call for publishers to refuse to publish works by Trump supporters? ¿Isn’t that censorship, & thus “authoritarianism” — a far greater form o’ authoritarianism than calling other people bad names, which, in fact, is not authoritarianism, but merely using one’s freedom-o’-speech rights to express their opinion of others? It seems reasonable that in an America where violence gainst minorities is on the rise that jokes ’bout black people go from being harmless edgy comedy to a means to recruiting mo’ fascists, & that it’s a reasonable reaction by the left to feel added urgency to employ whate’er means don’t full-on violate freedom o’ speech, or e’en defacto suppression o’ speech thru economic means, to try & stifle & undermine this tactic, which, ultimately, is for the goal o’ subverting e’en the pseudodemocracy that the US has. But I guess it’s mo’ important that Donaghue ne’er has to fear being called a racist, which is literally lethal to white people, than it is for white people to endure the slightest inconvenience to prevent fascism from coming to power. Expressing one’s disdain for fascism is all one needs to do to make it topple @ its foundation in the fantasyland o’ people who live purely in the world o’ books & not political reality.

But it gets worse…

5 Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin DiAngelo (Beacon Press) – I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the author of White Fragility could write a book more virulently racist in just one lifetime, but this noxious volume – in which she makes clear that all white people are racist genetically, regardless of upbringing, education, or outlook (Klan members will find such claims familiar-sounding, only in a slightly different context) – does the trick.

This review devolves into outright malicious lying, & one can easily see this simply by reviewing the Amazon blurb:

In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. [emphasis mine]

Dr. DiAngelo — who is a white person, & so can shit-talk crackers just as much as I can, just like black people can use the N-word — nowhere blames genetics for racism, but white people’s social conditioning. This makes sense when you consider that Dr. DiAngelo is a sociologist, not a biologist. Mo’ importantly, she distinguishes it from the bitter hatred o’, say, a Klansman, as a different kind o’ racism caused by an unintentional harm caused by ignorance. It is Donaghue who decides to be triggered by being called a well-meaning accidental racist, as if this “offense” is anywhere close to the kind o’ spiteful, actually threatening speech that hardcore racist white people spew ( ¿does DiAngelo recommend harassing white people with depression & urging them to kill themselves in her book, which is what white supremacist groups like Stormfront actually did to people after Trump won the election? ), & rather than do what a smart person with any dignity would do & just shrug it off & say, “¿What are you gonna do?”, he stupidly gives in to the bait & reacts in the most extreme, idiotic way possible, literally reacting to the accusation o’ being racist with the schoolyard comeback, “¡No, you are! ¡In fact, you’re such a superultramega racist that you’re just like those Klansmen who murdered & intimidated black people for decades… ’cept, you know, you haven’t actually murdered anyone or intimated anyone or have done anything but make a few white people feel a li’l queasy”. It shows an amazing lack o’ self-awareness that a white person would unironically attack without e’en the slightest sense o’ humor a book called “White Fragility”. “¡Can you believe these bullies called me a whiny bitch!”, he whinily bitched. I would venture to argue that the idiocy that Donaghue portrays here is mo’ racist gainst white people like me since it does far mo’ damage to our reputation than some guilt-fetishing honkey, whose worst crime is actually probably annoying black people with her constant Jesus-like faux-humility, as if constant apologies & longwinded treatises on made-up jargon acronyms like BIPOC help black people with real problems, like being shot by white supremacist police or poverty — albeit, none o’ which are on the same level o’ enormity as people on Twitter calling Donaghue mean words.

Donaghue could’ve gotten sympathy by merely calling this book dumb & useless; but portraying it as an extreme form o’ racism comparable to Klan lynchings is a ridiculous form o’ both-sidesism that helps the very fascists he pretends to be fighting gainst. Trying to conflate minor misdemeanors gainst white people as equal to the worst acts o’ racist terror gainst black people is the precise tactic that fascists use to justify white supremacist terror as “defense” gainst “the authoritarian left”.

Anyway, this review o’ reviews has gone on way too long. Get the fuck out o’ my house so I can take my pants off.

It’s that time ’gain: time for ’nother example that proves we live in a postparody world where the most ridiculous satire is, in fact, reality.

Yes, in our hypercapitalist dystopian world, this is real headline I read from Reuters, a news organization people keep telling me is s’posedly 1 o’ the best sources for information: “Gen Z poses a problem for the luxury industry”. As you can see, the zoomzooms have grown up ’nough to join an ol’ tradition that millennials have been a part o’ ( & are still a part o’ ) for decades now: newspapers whining ’bout young people not buying ’nough stupid shit. Thruout the past 2 decades there were way mo’ news articles than I e’er needed to read in my lifetime whining ’bout how millennials were too good with their money to invest in housing bubble schemes to buy shitty, o’ervalued McMansions in suburban wastelands so they can be surrounded by illiterate yokels with houses painted entirely in MAGA election stickers, unlike their parents who went bankrupt buying useless houses in 2007. &, ’course, we can’t forget that unforgettable article we looked @ in my Pulitzer-winning treatise on equisquiliology, “A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic )”: “The Raisin Situation”, wherein the fucking The New York Times ( Jesus, what a dogshit ’scuse for a newspaper ) described the valiant efforts o’ some rich guy to bring enlightenment to the savage millennials like Promethean fire & manipulate convince them to buy mo’ raisins.

From $300 bucket hats to $900 sneakers and $700 t-shirts, the high-flying luxury sector is fretting over the appetite among financially stretched Gen Z consumers for such “aspirational” purchases.

If you didn’t catch it, “aspirational” here is a euphemism for “stupid & pointless”.

If you pay close attention you might catch the words “financially stretched” & be curious ’bout the point o’ view o’ the Gen Z people & how they feel ’bout their own financial struggles. Well, you’ll have to use your imagination, as Reuters could only find time in their busy schedules to examine the financial struggles o’ billionaires trying to make up for that li’l bit o’ extra gold they won’t be able to add to their Scrooge McDuck swimming pools o’ gold.

Whereas in North America and Europe, inflation and a rising cost-of-living are hitting discretionary incomes of young consumers especially hard, China’s problem is different.

“In the U.S., inflation is a huge issue, the major focus of a lot of luxury companies … In China, it’s the youth unemployment rate that’s alarming right now,” Kenneth Chow, principal at consultancy Oliver Wyman said.

You selfish proletarians probably thought that unemployment is only a problem for you & your inability to afford basic needs like food & rent, but you forgot to consider the harm this causes for luxury sellers: if you can barely afford to buy food or pay rent, ¿how will you e’er pay them for $300 bucket hats?

Government data for July registers the unemployment rate of China’s urban population aged 16 to 24 at a record 19.9%, exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on big tech firms that traditionally hired droves of graduates.

“This might be the first time that a lot of young adults (in China) are facing (such an) economic impact, so it will be a testing ground on how these consumers are going to spend on luxury items going forward,” Chow said.

Yes, Chow certainly has his word cut out for him, figuring out the magical mathematical equation to get people without money in a deeply dysfunctional economy devastated by a deadly pandemic & the pall o’ rising authoritarian politics to buy mo’ $700 T-shirts with the words “Ne’er Trust a Taco Tuesday Fart” on it. My thoughts & prayers are out there for our brave luxury sellers.

“If a recession happens, then I will 100% buy less or maybe even stop buying altogether,” said U.S.-based luxury lifestyle and travel TikToker Jeffrey Huang, 28, who shares his Louis Vuitton shopping trips and hauls with his 150,000 followers.

The cancellation o’ Pokémon Card Unboxing #243,143 was mo’ tragic than the premature cancellation o’ Firefly.

And big brands have signaled their intention to grow top end sales of $10,000 handbags and $5,000 coats rather than focus on attracting new entrants onto the bottom rung of the ladder.

This is a smart plan: in economies where the total amount o’ money isn’t shrinking, but the # o’ people who have money are shrinking, with those few gaining much mo’ money, it makes sense to rely less on selling several affordable goods to the masses o’ people going broke & rely more on trying to get as much money out o’ the few goods they sell to the shrinking % o’ rich people, relying on their psychological need for conspicuous consumption to reinforce their economic superiority.

“As the prices are rising, I’m becoming more and more cautious because I feel like I did do a good amount of spending in the last year,” said Sara Yogi, a 26-year-old San Francisco, California resident, adding that she may hold off buying a $2,900 Prada bag and one costing $3,200 from Bottega Veneta which are both on her wish list.

You can tell things are dire when people are reducing themselves to the level o’ caveman savagery by withholding from themselves, like water from a parched throat in a desert, $2,900 bags — which is ’bout $2,900 mo’ expensive than the bags you can just cadge from your local Walmart’s self-checkout stations.

This shift to focus on core luxury consumers also encompasses a cohort of wealthy Gen Z consumers less likely to be impacted by inflation or unemployment.

“1% o’ Gen Z consumers are reported to have said, ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine’”.

But the concern is over would-be buyers who were meant to help Gen Z account for a fifth of all spending in the luxury goods sector globally by 2025.

You other failures, on the other hand, are shirking what you’re meant to do, which is raise your peoples’ abstract # up to 20%. ¿Have you no shame, poor people? ¿Have you no concern for your responsibility to luxury sellers?

Some luxury labels, including Balenciaga and Dior, are embracing the metaverse —

¡Nope! ¡Stop! ¡I’ve heard ’nough!

This is why Marxism is outdated: imagine wasting so much o’ your time writing 3 volumes attempting to critique capitalism in detail when nowadays you could just say, “Look, guys, capitalism led to the metaverse. ¿What mo’ proof do you need?”.

Virtual sneakers from brands like Gucci have already proved wildly popular, with a price point of $17.99.

Who wants to bet that these virtual sneakers can’t be bought with virtual money.

Whether in the real or virtual world, entry-level products call for high levels of creative investment.

“Creative investment” is an interesting way to say “stupidity”.

“There is this young crowd of consumers that are entering into the market that requires a lot of creativity at more affordable price points,” said Bain partner Claudia D’Arpizio, adding that not all brands are equipped for this.

Yes, I can imagine it takes a lot o’ imagination to convince people to spend money on shit that doesn’t e’en exist ’stead o’, you know, stuff that actually exists & has a use. & by “imagination”, I mean “lying”.

There is good news for brands, however.

Well, that calms my breathing a lot. When unemployment is almost 1/5th o’ the youth population, my greatest concern is always how Tony the fucking Tiger is weathering the storm.

If they do find the right offering of entry-level products, or if the economic situation of Gen Z consumers improves, the desire for luxury products remains undimmed.

This is idiotic. If people don’t have money, they can’t buy shit, no matter how “right” the offering — well, ’less they buy on credit, which will ’ventually run out, & would just be a short-lived bubble if many people did that & would lead to many o’ you idiotic companies going out o’ business. That’s basic math. They keep hammering in the importance o’ some vague “solution”, mostly revolving round inspiring or convincing consumers, when the problem isn’t a lack o’ desire, but a lack o’ money. ¿Are they so stupid that they think poor people can be convinced into becoming richer by enticing them with luxuries?

& the situation for Gen Z consumers won’t improve: if fewer people are buying things, then fewer things will need to be produced, & thus fewer jobs are needed, which will only cause unemployment to rise, & therefore fewer people with money & fewer people buying things. This is also basic math & the basics o’ how recessions work.

“Young people in China are enthusiastic about luxury products,” Yi said. “Lockdowns, or the temporary unemployment rate won’t change their long-term preferences.”

What Reuters fails to mention is the obvious solution to this seemingly inharmonious contradiction ’tween unemployed youth’s desire for expensive, useless junk & their lack o’ money to buy said junk: have the government tax these luxury sellers’ excess money & redistribute to the poor youth so they can buy this junk. Or better yet, only redistribute to people not dumb ’nough to want virtual sneakers & let the luxury sellers go bankrupt, ’cause, now that I think ’bout it, these luxury sellers provide no value to society whatsoe’er & the world would be better off if they were gone. In short: no, Reuters, I don’t give a shit ’bout the problems o’ businesses who don’t belong in any halfway meritocratic or productive economy. A bigger question is why Reuters does & why anyone would consider Reuters a news organization worth taking seriously.

The New York Times is a perennial target o’ mockery for the same reason as mainstream economics: as per my Nobel-Prize-winning Satirical Function for Determining Mockery for Particular Participants, a key component o’ Mezunian economics, as set forth in the face-melting Economicon, people with high opinions o’ their intelligence but low actual intelligence are the choicest targets. This is the newspaper who turn their noses @ the vulgar social media & blogs kicking their asses, which would be fine if they actually had standards ( I, too, turn my nose up @ social media, tho that’s mostly ’cause they have shitty user interfaces & try to dox me just by using them ), but this is also the same newspaper that regularly posts articles by “Suck On This, Iraq” living moustache Thomas Friedman; near Darwin Award winner for apparently almost dying from a pot candy bar, Maureen Dowd; Ross Douthat, a man who bragged ’bout how he was too stupid to read a relatively simple economics book that he shockingly misinterpreted ( Capital in the 21st Century isn’t Marxian but merely an adjustment to neoclassical economics ) while recommending creepy ol’ men in universities act as surrogate daddies to women students so they’d be less likely to be financially successful ( he references a study that shows that college students who attend rich parties a lot tend to be mo’ successful due to the networking opportunities ); & “Hot Dog & Bun Factory fairy tale proves offshoring doesn’t cause unemployment” Paul Krugman, the Nickelback o’ economists, dearly beloved by moderate “liberals” who have ne’er read any other economists.

So ’twas no surprise when looking o’er The New York Times’s list for the best books in the last 125 years ( that seemingly random # is due to it being a celebration for their own book reviews section ) that they also have terrible tastes in terms o’ literature. During the initial preliminaries we had a bizarre hodgepodge: Ulysses right next to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ( not only does The New York Times stupidly insist on using the inane US title made up by ignorant executives ’cause they thought US readers would be as dumb as them, they also picked 1 that hardly any Harry Potter fan would pick o’er, say, The Goblet of Fire or The Order of the Phoenix ), The Great Gatsby next to Charlotte’s Web. ( If they were going to include a kid’s book, ¿why the hell would they pick a book that mo’ people probably know ’bout due to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon rather than something like Alice in Wonderland, which has actual literary value & is 1000-times mo’ influential? ). Meanwhile missing are À la recherche du temps perdu, which is regularly put up there with Ulysses; no The Magic Mountain; no Gravity’s Rainbow; no Moby Dick; no Petersburg by Andrei Bely ( admittedly an underrated gem e’en outside the New York Times ); nor a single book by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Umberto Eco, Borges, Yukio Mishima…

But since then they’ve narrowed it to 5 choices. Let’s see what these choices are:

5. Beloved

This isn’t a bad choice, tho NYT readers probably only know ’bout it now thanks to the brilliant marketing assistance Republicans are giving Toni Morrison by banning it from schools for making white kids feel queasy, a common character-building exercise schools employ ( Republicans, as everyone knows, are disgusted by the idea that their children might build mo’ character ’bove their own feebleness ).

I want you to keep in mind this entry’s ranking for later, tho…

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude

Also a solid book, tho I can’t imagine anyone truly familiar with Latin American literature ranking this as higher than much o’ Borges’s work ( indeed, it’s a post on r/unpopularopinions ), which was much mo’ experimental & arguably mo’ influential. Granted, this is probably the only Latin American work these honkeys know.

3. 1984

& here’s where it all goes downhill. This book is dogshit. Isaac Asimov wrote a famous devastating review gainst this book & its cynical attempt to half-assedly exploit science fiction without understanding an iota o’ that genre & all its nuances as a tool for pure political propaganda by a man who, howe’er great his politics were ( a’least before he started McCarthying people he suspected were communist, gay, “too anti-white” — read: opposed to racism gainst black people — to the UK’s IRD ), ne’er had any respect or understanding for art as art itself, who saw it as nothing beyond a tool for propaganda, as everything else. Beyond politics this book has no value: its characters are 1-dimensional strawmen, its language is basic, & the world-building is shallow & inane — a whiny teenager’s idea o’ how e’en totalitarian societies operate, which is why teenagers ( & those whose politics is mentally adolescent ) love it so much.

But e’en as propaganda, this book is an utter failure: it’s an amazing self-own that such a vociferous democratic socialist created the greatest tool o’ propaganda gainst socialism, used primarily by alt-right hacks like Ben Shapiro, which is easy thanks to this book being so broad & vague — which is precisely why it “resonates” with everyone: it allows everyone to fill in the “evil” side with whate’er they want. That the man who warned ’bout the emptiness o’ terms like “democracy” & “fascism” would write a book with heroes & villains so empty is a shocking failure. His nonfiction, specially his essays & Homage to Catalonia, are far better than this waste o’ time.

2. “The Fellowship of the Ring”

The New York Times are such morons that they don’t e’en realize that this isn’t a book, but part o’ a book: mistaking The Lord of the Rings as a “trilogy” ’stead o’ a single, unified book separated into volumes by the publisher gainst Tolkein’s wishes for crass business reasons is a classic amateur move. For anyone else it’d be nitpicking, but it’s hilarious to me that an organization that prides themselves on s’posed honest integrity would make a basic mistake that you’d get roasted for on fucking TV Tropes, the website that lets anyone add whate’er conspiracy theory they want without citations & calls themselves a “buttload mo’ informal” than Wikipedia ( which also wouldn’t let such a sloppy mistake slide ). This is pretty much exhibit A evidence that it’d be safer to get your news from Wikipedia than The New York Times ( which is not to encourage getting one’s news from Wikipedia ).

They also lose points for not using the kickass psychedelic book covers they used in the 60s official US editions as their image:

Some might expect me to laugh @ The New York Times for putting a mainstream fantasy work @ the #2 spot; but while I myself would not consider The Lord of the Rings the 2nd best novel o’ the last 125 years, or e’en in the top 10, I can see some reasoning ’hind its inclusion: it’s unquestionably the most influential book on this list that pretty much created the modern fantasy genre as it exists. That deserves some props. It also has a lot mo’ literary value than people give it credit: it has finely-crafted worldbuilding that pays attention to details down to the moon cycles with believable fantasy languages ( helped by Tolkein being a legit linguist ). While the characters can be hokey sometimes, there is mo’ moral nuance than one might remember: it’s a clever twist that the ring is vanquished not by the nobility o’ the heroes, who it turns out, are not so heroic that they can o’ercome the ring’s power, but by the pitiful Golem, who accidentally drops it in the volcano trying to steal it — & is only able to ’cause earlier in the book the heroes decide to spare him. Granted, it’s just conservative Christian “turn the other cheek” slave morality; but genuine Christian morality is mo’ refreshing than the might-makes-right white-&-black morality that conservatives oft erroneously pass off as Christian morality. Moreo’er, tho, this book has excellent prose, specially its scenery descriptions, which is a rarity in a lot o’ contemporary literature, both “literary” & “genre”.

It’s better than Harry Potter & certainly several leagues ’bove 1984, as well as the next book on this list…

1. To Kill a Mockingbird

This choice for #1 book o’ the past 125 years is such an amazingly bad choice — & yet so perfect for The New York Times’s main demographic. Its o’errated mediocrity is merely a reflection o’ The New York Times.

Much as 1984 is only beloved as juvenile political propaganda, To Kill a Mockingbird is mainly beloved as a weak white-centric attack gainst racism — which is specially bad when you consider Beloved, a much better book in every way that’s much mo’ devastating & unsentimental in its criticism o’ racism, was 4 books below. That none o’ Ralph Ellison’s books made it on this list or e’en the preliminary list is criminal. These fuckers thought god damn Charlotte’s Web is better than Invisible Man. What toilet paper o’ a newspaper.

& yet, it can’t be a surprise that the multitude o’ self-indulgent white liberals who read The New York Times would prefer this self-masturbatory tract o’ the noble middle-class white lawyer who tries to save a black man, who is treated mo’ as a prop to demonstrate our white savior’s greatness than as a real person, from the savage poor whites. Mixed in this book is a ton o’ classism: only the upper-middle-class lazy-libertarian Atticus, who opposes systems o’ racial inequality but praises systems o’ economic inequality that are just as racist, & Tom Robinson’s rich employer are depicted as anti-racism ( the book doesn’t acknowledge that both these people — the Atticuses have a black servant — exploit their racist society to get cheap labor out o’ black people ). It legit reads like a South Park episode, & is a twisted view o’ the real world: tho there are definitely racist, dumb, & repulsive poor white people, rich white institutions are the leaders in exploiting racism for their gains.

In addition to its weak-ass politics, this book doesn’t have all that much literary value. Compare Beloved, with its anachronistic chapter order & its greater use o’ imagery, color, symbolism, & just o’erall much better prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a thoroughly unexperimental book with prose so basic & repetitive it becomes tedious to read real quick & makes hardly any use o’ the large gamut o’ tools the English language & structures put @ the writer’s disposal. Ironically, Truman Capote’s friend hardly did a better job o’ writing rather than typing than Jack Kerouac.

Here’s an example o’ the stellar prose in this book:

The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long agodarkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

& that was me trying to find a relatively good part o’ the book. It’s hardly the worst prose in the world — ¿but this is the kind o’ prose in the best book o’ the past 125 years? ¿Better than the flowing detailed descriptions o’ À la recherche du temps perdu? ¿Better than the haiku-like sharp details & experimental subjective perspectives o’ Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Give me an hour & I could probably find 100 books with better prose than this book, which hardly has any better prose than your average Stephen King or James Patterson. I think Brandon Sanderson probably has better prose & unquestionably Lord of the Rings does.

Meanwhile, most o’ the prose is tedious dreck like this:

Mrs. Merriweather seemed to have a hit, everybody was cheering so, but she caught me backstage and told me I had ruined her pageant. She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic. He said he couldn’t see my costume much from where he was sitting. How he could tell I was feeling bad under my costume I don’t know, but he said I did all right, I just came in a little late, that was all. Jem was becoming almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong. Almost—not even Jem could make me go through that crowd, and he consented to wait backstage with me until the audience left.

I know some people take the “show, don’t tell” thing too far & demand that everyone “clench their fist” & bark like dogs rather than just be pissed off, but “She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic” might be 1 o’ the most sterile way to describe something, specially since the sentence right after already shows how he shows sympathy, so this sentence is redundant filler. I refuse to believe this isn’t rough draft material.

& I know this is s’posed to be a child narrating ( ¿tho is it s’posed to be a child now or an adult reminiscing ’bout their childhood? ), but e’en children aren’t this dull, & it’s not as if children are this grammatically correct, anyway. Contrast with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is also from the perspective o’ a child, which has much mo’ character to its hick talk — not the least o’ which ’cause Mark Twain put much mo’ care into the various dialects. Also, Huckleberry Finn is a comedy, so its plain talk works better than when To Kill a Mockingbird tries to use it for s’posedly profound speeches.

Here’s an example o’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s much better prose:

We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn’t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly do anything with them.

As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn’t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.

Note that when this book’s telling, it just tells in short sentences, saving its long, multi-clause sentences for mo’ detailed description. Also note how the hick talk is done thru a much livelier dialect, rather than just sounding like it’s coming from an uneducated robot.

Keep in mind, most wouldn’t say that Huckleberry Finn has anywhere near the best prose o’ all literature — it’s just 1 o’ hundreds with better prose than To Kill a Mockingbird.

While this book is relatively short @ 96,000 words, its main plots — Tom Robinson’s trial & the mystery o’ Boo Radley — are e’en shorter. So short, in fact, that this book could probably be a novella if not for all the padded-out dialogue of ordinary people doing ordinary things. There’s 1 scene that goes on for several pages wherein Jem tries to give a note to Boo Radley, which just goes back & forth with filler dialogue, only to end on a shaggy dog story when Atticus stops him. This kind o’ stuff isn’t inherently terrible: Ulysses, widely considered 1 o’ the best works o’ English literature, is mostly just ordina — well, people doing ordinary things. But that book plays a dozen literary tricks as it does so, which is why there are entire books dedicated to footnotes for every few sentence o’ that book, while there’s nothing to say ’bout e’ery “Thank you” & “No, sir” in this book. Plus, e’en its prose is better: nothing in this book will compare to the lavish way Bloom describes the uses o’ water in the “Ithaca” chapter.

’Nother contrast. Here’s 1 o’ the dozen or so pointless scenes in Mockingbird:

One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.

Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be here.”

Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s set for five-thirty. I want you to know that.”

It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs. Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped. The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what would we do?

“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.

“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure…”

Jem rose. “But—”

Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.

“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.

“No,” said Jem. “Yes,” said Atticus.

( “‘Come in!’ she screamed”, followed immediately in the next paragraph, “Atticus came in”, is some prime bathos ).

Anyway, here’s the far better “boring” scene from Ulysses:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

( This is also bathos, but intentional, & much mo’ interesting & obviously took much mo’ work to conjure up than the filler dialogue before ).

OK… but all these problems would be… acceptable, I guess, for the best book e’er if the plot & characters were jaw-droppingly well-written. Well, they’re not. The story is average @ best, but the characters are straight-up terribly written. This book stars not 1, but 2 Mary Sues: the aforementioned noble white middle-class lawyer, who has no flaws, & his spoiled brat o’ a narrator who’s not like all the other girls & spends most o’ the book praising her flawless father. I should add that this book is heavily based on Harper Lee’s own upbringing, so it’s a shock that the characters who represent the author & her beloved father are depicted as perfect. This legit reads like a bad fan fiction or webcomic.

There are 3 types o’ characters in this book: the perfect anti-racist white heroes, the vile racist poor white villains ( so vile that the main villain has to stoop to attacking the Finch children, e’en tho racist people rarely go round killing the white children o’ e’en antiracist white people, ’cause apparently killing black people isn’t evil ’nough ), & the black people, who are all peaceful, servile Uncle Tom 2ndary props to warm all the white liberal hearts. 1 sickeningly sappy scene depicts a large community o’ blacks giving food to their white Jesus, Atticus. The 1 time a black person does anything resembling active resistance is when Tom Robinson tries to flee from jail & is shot to death, which is considered foolish by our noble whites & worth mo’ noble pitying. In this book black people are worthy o’ nothing beyond pity. That’s why they’re symbolized by the titular mockingbird that’s killed: they’re cute li’l pets to make rich white liberals feel good ’bout themselves ( to be fair, the other “mockingbird” is a shy abused child, who is also a pet for well-off people, & his abuse is ’nother example o’ the evil o’ poor people ). Heaven forbid this book depict actual struggle — ¡perhaps e’en with violence! — as that would make this book’s white audience squeamish & they would probably turn round & root for their white supremacist society. This book’s outdated relic o’ racial ( & specially economic ) politics is perfect for an outdated relic that is The New York Times, whose own politics are consistently early-20th-century.

Special note should be given to their critic note for this book. In addition to acknowledging their idiocy in missing a basic fact stated plainly ( since subtlety was beyond Harper Lee’s literary skills ) in this book when they 1st read it, they @ 1 point brag ’bout how New York is so much better than the savage rural lands ’cause they know how to leave people ’lone ( said the airbag who probably supported “Stop & Frisk” for “improving law & order” ), leaving e’en an urbanite elitist like me wishing to Allah that Al-Qaeda would bomb these fuckers ’gain.

<Doctor, it hurts when I lift my arms>.

<Then stop lifting your arms>.

– An ol’ joke.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

– ¡Rrrring! ¡Bing! Carlos Marukusu

There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.

– George W. Bush

2 interesting news items have hit my way; & what’s most interesting is how li’l people are talking ’bout their connection to each other.

The 1st is a lament that, much as Mario “died”¹ on March 31, 2021 ’cause Nintendo stopped selling some laughably shitty remake o’ games that have been round for decades, the original Super Mario Maker for the Wii-U has been removed from the Wii-U eShop & will no longer accept level uploads. People “lament” this as if they’re surprised. As someone who paid a whopping $2 for a used copy o’ WarioWare D.I.Y. after its main selling point, letting players upload & play each other’s custom-made microgames, was mooted by Nintendo shutting down their DS servers, I wasn’t surprised whatsoe’er, much as I remember when I put my hand on a hot stove & burn my hand that said stove is hot & I shouldn’t put my hand on it. Unfortunately, it seems the gaming populace @ large has the memory o’ dogs ( which is why gamers also howl when 5 whole years go by without yet ’nother sequel to their favorite series — in gamer years 5 years is an eternity ).

The 2nd is excitement o’er Nintendo’s new “maker” game, Game Builder Garage, which is ’bout making general games, rather than specifically Mario levels.

You have to give Nintendo credit for their ballsiness o’ reminding people in the loudest way possible o’ what a waste o’ money their maker gamers are — specially compared to superior works, like Lunar Magic or Game Maker, which are still going strong several decades after the 1st came out — just before announcing yet ’nother maker game. & as expected, rather than do the basic logic & put 2 & 2 together & show the slightest bit o’ skepticism toward yet ’nother expensive rental, the internet has nothing but acclaim for this new brilliant scam o’ Nintendo’s. I can’t wait for all these people to buy this & then, a mere 6 years down the line, lament when Nintendo brings down the server, & all the hard work people have put into making games.

Also interesting is the # o’ journalists treating Game Builder Garage as a brilliant new idea, & not an e’en-mo’-inferior bootleg o’ Game Maker. I could understand journalists not mentioning Lunar Magic when discussing Super Mario Maker, as rom-hacking is a bit mo’ niche & journalists tend to be worshippers o’ their corporate gods, & put their fingers up in cross shapes when faced with the seamy underground o’ emulation or the idea o’ anyone but Grand Daddy Nintendo making works with Mario in it. But Game Maker isn’t some obscure gem ( for 1, it’s no gem ): games like Undertale & the original version o’ Spelunky were made in it². Yes, I know Game Builder Garage tries to set itself apart with generic emoticon characters as a part o’ their “visual programming” gimmick, which doesn’t seem to do much beyond putting boxes & lines round the same conditional statements that are the bread & button o’ all game maker GUIs, like Game Maker.

Which is also why I’m much less appreciative o’ Game Builder Garage than Super Mario Maker, e’en me, who you could probably call a “centrist” in the copyright wars, can a’least understand Nintendo wanting to take leadership o’ the creation o’ Mario content from Lunar Magic, e’en if the nature o’ Nintendo’s business practices severely hamper their works: their inability to maintain these makers for mo’ than a decade; their need to keep heavy-handed control, including not allowing custom graphics ( ¿what if some edgelord drew penises everywhere & some churchmom began ranting @ Nintendo to politicians on the teevee? ) or patches or custom sprites; & their insistence on making people who want to play your creations buy the game-maker ( imagine in everyone who bought Undertale had to buy Game Maker, too ) — all o’ which are limitations that don’t hobble the rom-hacking scene or Game Maker @ all. Nintendo is a company that makes products, it doesn’t deliver services; & tho Nintendo may not realize it, creation tools like game makers are services, not products. But it’s hard for me not to think a company that is pushing their way into the general game-maker scene despite their obvious incompetence in such cases is a bit arrogant. It may be right for Nintendo to assert ownership o’ Mario, but it’s definitely wrong for Nintendo to assert ownership o’ creating games in general.

This may seem dramatic, but I want to emphasize my point ’bout Nintendo’s heavy-handed control o’er their makers. I don’t e’en need to waste my breath telling you that these tools are not open-source ( granted, neither are Game Maker & e’en Lunar Magic, which is a flaw in both o’ them ). For as much as incompetent but highly-paid ( a’least ’nough to buy all these expensive games ) journalists like to thumb their nose @ the elitist programmers ’cause they’re o’erpaid for doing somewhat intelligent work, as opposed to journalists, who are o’erpaid for doing work without the smallest shred o’ intelligence or quality ( not unlike the Republicans they pretend to be different from ), they don’t mention that no programmer would be caught dead using a language or compilers that weren’t open source ’cause it leads to this thing called “vendor lock-in”, which is particularly pernicious if said vendor abandons their tool — which is precisely what Nintendo does.

This is fine for games themselves, since those are relatively passive mediums where I am just a user o’ art. But I won’t lie, the idea o’ creating art that’s locked down in a corporate-owned tool & which could be permanently disappeared @ the whim o’ business executives like Trotsky from Soviet photos makes we want to vomit. This is why I don’t e’en fuck with rom-hacking or fan games anymo’, much less would I ne’er in a million years put effort into making levels for Super Mario Maker. If I make a work o’ art, I want — no, demand — complete & utter control. That is a bare necessity for this work to be mine.

Which is to say, ’cause o’ Nintendo’s opaque grip on your creations, it is wrong to say that Game Builder Garage will allow you to create your own games — ’cause they’re not yours, they’re Nintendo’s. Part o’ me has the immense urge to put on my Marxist hat — it is a nice-looking hat — & say something ’bout Nintendo leveling up to the next wrung on the strange loop o’ capitalism’s decadence³ by figuring out how to convince fools into paying money to allow Nintendo to exploit their labor. After all, a big part o’ the appeal o’ Super Mario Maker is being able to play others’ levels — levels not made by Nintendo, but made by other users. Ne’ertheless, Nintendo gets all the profits & users pay for the privilege o’ doing work for Nintendo. Such is the brilliance o’ the “gamification” o’ labor: if you can convince the proles that work is fun ( & if they don’t think work is fun, they can go work somewhere else, ’course… ), you can convince them to pay to do it. It’s only fair: business executives, after all, don’t get to join in any o’ the fun, since they don’t do any work.

So, yeah, I’ll pass. I know not being exploited is bougie as fuck, but I think I’ll stick to my elitist art that I actually have control o’er & could maybe e’en make money off myself — I know the idea o’ people making money doing hard work programming is ridiculously pretentious; a much better economy is for people to make money making videos & articles that suck off corporations while they scam people using their irrational devotion to imaginary cartoon characters.

Anyway, we can’t end this article without some MSTing o’ terrible articles, so roll the clips:

Probably the most revoltingly pretentious — while pretending to be raising their fist gainst the elitists — is the generic-named The Gamer’s “Game Builder Garage Could Be The Most Important Game Of The Year”. Someone please get this cum off me.

I don’t mean it will be my favourite. I’m not even sure I’ll play it. I don’t want to make games, in fact, I hate games – that’s why I became a games journalist.

You may think this is an absurd statement to make — perhaps that was part o’ the “joke”, if one had been attempted. But since we’ve established the major theme o’ gamers being masochistic, it actually makes perfect sense that someone who despises games as much as themselves would force themselves to form a career out o’ playing them & writing ’bout them.

But while the game of the year lists will be full of open-world adventures, ambitious new shooters, funky indie hits, and stellar RPGs[…]

Thank you for reminding me o’ what a black hole o’ creativity the game industry is.

Game Builder Garage is putting in the work to ensure that games like that – and genres we haven’t even conceived of yet – can be made in the future.

Until our great god Nintendo came round, making games was impossible. I’m so glad that Nintendo bestowed us with this ability like Prometheus fire to mere mortals. Let’s hope Nintendo is generous ’nough not to patent making games.

“Just learn to code,” has become something of a meme – a quick turn of phrase indicative of the cruel and unhelpful advice offered to hard working people whose jobs have been made obsolete by the changes of the modern world. If you’re a 47 year old coal miner, “just learn to code,” may as well be “just jump to the moon.”

If you’re a 47-year-ol’ coal miner, you probably can’t afford to slap down a quick $300 for a Switch, so I fail to see how this helps them any better. I seriously doubt businesses are rushing out to hire people who can make games controlled by Nintendo, which can’t be sold. I’d believe a poor person checking out books from the library to learn coding & receiving cheap laptops from some kind o’ welfare system & mooching off a library’s Wi-Fi⁴ mo’ than I would believe a poor person buying an expensive video game system, an expensive video game, & an expensive TV. But, yes, tell me ’gain why doing work & learning is much mo’ bougie than buying the newest extravagant trinket. Nothing pleases me mo’ than people who have obviously ne’er done a blue-collar job in their life trying to pretend that their expensive toys ’bout cartoon characters jumping on turtles are the hammers & sickles by which the working class will finally o’erthrow their corporate masters. It’s a wonder that so many people tar millennial like me as lazy when clowns like these loudly proclaim their belief that working & learning is for uppity people; ¡only buying luxuries is proletarian!

But if you’re a 12 year old kid who loves video games? Absolutely learn to code.

Only young ( middle class ) people can learn things. I guess the 47-year-ol’ coal workers should just go out & die in the pasture. It’s people like these, who probably think o’ themselves as “progressive”, that really drill in how hard it is to improve poverty, when e’en people who consider themselves to be in favor o’ helping impoverished people, almost certainly from utter ignorance, have such strikingly contempt for so many impoverished people while trying to vouch for them.

There are no borders online, no immigration. If you’re the only queer kid in your town, you don’t need to go through it alone – there’s a whole community out there. If you’re disabled and unable to leave your home, the digital world can still allow you to make the most of your talents and creativity without physical obstacles.

This reminds me o’ those stories I’ve heard recently o’ LEGO trying to sell some new rainbow-colored LEGO people or something to show their support for LGBTQ+ fleece gullible progressives out o’ their money. But a’least what LEGO did was relevant to LGBTQ+ people. ¿What the fuck does this game have to do with queer rights or immigration rights?

Game Builder Garage is not the first game of its kind, but it nestles into a niche that could make it the most impactful.

It’s not innovative, but since Nintendo’s mo’ popular than some indie nobody who could do a better job, it’s better. & people wonder why our media is becoming so monopolist when people think like this.

The world is becoming more digital, and a kid that knows how to code will have far more opportunities. Some schools are already including coding and binary modules into their ICT programs, but schools often lack the budget to roll these out across the student body – especially in poorer districts. Game Builder Garage not only makes these vital lessons more readily available to kids, it also makes them far more fun than sitting in school and listening to a teacher.

I ask ’gain: ¿how does an expensive game for an expensive system help poor people who are defined by their lack o’ money? People oft scoff cynically @ rich “philanthropists” like Bill Gates who give billions to help poverty without improving the political system to improve poverty @ the root level while exploiting people thru their businesses; but a’least they give to poor people ( something far too few people with plenty o’ money to spend on Switch games do ). This writer is arguing that Nintendo selling people a commodity should be treated like some kind o’ Lyndon-Johnson-level social program.

Even the good ones are nowhere near as interesting as the Nintendo Switch. You can play Fortnite on the Switch! Can you play Fortnite on your Maths teacher? Didn’t think so. Case closed.

“Kids are dumb & shallow & can only learn if you jingle keys in front o’ their face while doing it”. This writer shouldn’t mistake everyone else’s idiocy with their own.

Even the most well funded schools with the best resources would struggle to match that level of individual tailoring and room for expression, and even fewer again would then let you fly a spaceship you just built and blast aliens out of the sky.

If you want to know the root o’ the Anglo world’s ( I think this writer’s British — but as Brexit showed, the American apple doesn’t fall far from the moron tree ) stupidity, this sentence is it: “Experienced professionals are far worse @ teaching kids than a toy made by random rich people”. I’m not sure why the most well-funded school couldn’t afford to hire workers to make a game-maker no different from Nintendo, — specially since they would be actually aiming their development for instruction, so could use their years o’ knowledge regarding teaching to cater it specifically toward teaching, rather than just doing what artists think would be cool — ’less it’s just a comment on how e’en the best-funded school probably has crumbs compared to what a toy company has. This is, indeed, a sobering reminder o’ what our society values vs. what it doesn’t.

But that crappy little basic jumping platformer with a wonky stickman and off kilter blocks and bland textures – that will matter more. Because the kid who makes it will stick with it, and they’ll be able to make a proper game with a proper character and intricately designed levels. That’s an opportunity they might not have gotten without the release of a game like Game Builder Garage.

As someone who was literally doing this when I was 10 years ol’, I can only laugh & shake my head @ this inane writer’s ignorance. The opportunity has already existed for decades; Game Builder Garage hasn’t offered shit but a larger price tag & the outright promise o’ obsolescence within a decade.

I doubt it will make my yearly top ten, but in a decade’s time, my number one pick might owe it a lot.

No it won’t, ’cause in a decade’s time all o’ the games made in Game Builder Garage will be gone after Nintendo shuts down their server.

Ars Technica’s article, written by former Darth Vader stick figure owner o’ casino-machine-ruled SMBHQ ( which now apparently redirects to a page ’bout “Mountain House Essential Bucket Freeze Dried Food 24 Serving”, who I guess is the new NC President ), Kyle Orland, is much better written, acknowledging that game makers have existed for decades. In stark contrast, he seems to be trying not to show the slightest bit o’ emotion when writing ’bout this game, which could be either a desire to try & be “objective” as possible or just an utter lack o’ interest. I couldn’t blame the latter.

That said, I find it interesting how the article does acknowledge how “Nintendo maintains control over this interpersonal sharing”, but expresses this purely as an issue o’ keeping kids from experiencing “naughty content”, comparing it to updated policies by Apple to block spam or fake news from their App Store, but without any concern that people may be, you know, censored. I’m not the most hard-core free-speech advocate — I’m too cynical to advocate for anything, — but e’en I think it’d be an issue worth bringing up, specially when so many journalists keep focusing on how this will help the less fortunate get access to programming ( which I still dispute ). ¿So it’s a big problem that poor people can’t make their own games, but it’s not a big problem that poor people can supposedly only make their own games so long as they allow a large corporation carte blanche to delete their work permanently ( I’m very doubtful Nintendo will make it easy to backup your creations, given their track record ) if they don’t like it?

I do have to comment on this part, tho:

After seeing the components that go into even simple in-game objects, our Nintendo rep said he would “never make fun of a moving platform ever again… I get why it’s difficult and challenging and fun and gratifying. I have this to thank for giving me an increased appreciation for what I’m playing.”

Yeah, faceless rep, that isn’t happening. I’ve literally made my own moving platforms with actual code, & I still think they’re hokey & not very intricate — they’re just an if-else statement with adding & subtracting a # from ’nother #⁵. If creating moving platforms in Game Builder Garage will be complex, then I can’t imagine that players will be impressed so much as get bored by having to do apparently just as much tedium as normal programming & move on to making boss marathons in Super Mario Maker 2.

Next we have Engadget’s “Nintendo’s ‘Game Builder Garage’ is a powerful and complex game creation tool”. Apparently nobody can agree on whether this game will be complex or simple.

There are dozens of gaming tools out there that promise to teach your kids to code, because after all, they’re going to need those precious STEM skills to survive in today’s workforce. I’ve looked at a few of them and passed on many others because well, they didn’t really seem all that fun. Nintendo’s upcoming $30 Game Builder Garage for Switch might actually buck the trend, in that it’s not designed to teach your kids how to code so much as it is teaching about actual game design — not only how games run, but how to make them actually fun.

As much as I complained ’bout the cream-filled 1st article I looked @, a’least it ne’er outright lied ’bout the game ’twas talking ’bout ( well, beyond it being 1st-o’-its-kind ). This article boldly starts out by proclaiming that this game doesn’t teach you how to code, but teaches you creativity itself, something that, ’course, is impossible — paradoxical, in fact, since creativity is defined by its break from teachable patterns. This is specially questionable when we consider that games like New Super Mario Bros. 7261 have demonstrated that Nintendo themselves have forgotten how to be creative or fun.

The company wants you to understand why certain decisions get made in terms of item placement or timing, and use that thinking going forward with your own creations.

If anything, the points this writer makes makes me e’en less genial toward this game. In a time when, if anything, the platforming genre is afflicted with levels that are too busy stumbling o’er each other to follow the rules ( when they’re not just going the other extreme & just screwing o’er players as a trolljob ), abandoning the amicable oddity & spontaneity o’ games like Super Mario Bros. 3 &, later, obscure cult classics like the Wario Land games, I hardly feel solace knowing millions will be indoctrinated into making the same levels with the same generic difficulty increases & the same cliché mechanics like falling platforms.

It’s a lot to take in, which is why Game Builder Garage makes it as cutesy as possible. Instead of dry text or even the colorful block aesthetic that so many other kids’ coding tools use, Nintendo has chosen to represent different functions as cartoony creatures called “Nodons.” Each one does something different, and is perfectly happy to tell you about it. They kind of reminded me of the binomes from the ReBoot cartoon back in the ’90s, because yes, I am old.

Apparently other millennials think you have to still be a child to not be ol’.

Actually, the screenshot this article shows made me realize how fucking creepy these fuckers look. They look like some satire o’ a kids cartoon I’d see in a Kramer’s Ergot comic.

Past those initial lessons Nintendo is taking a rather laissez faire approach to the homebrew community around Game Builder Garage after it comes out in June. There will be no central sharing place for the games you create; instead your creations will be given a unique code you can send to friends and family. Or presumably post places like Reddit, where I imagine people will use subreddits to trade tips and tricks, as well as create “tools” of their own to perform specific functions that people can embed in their own games. Nintendo is fine with all of this, including posting tutorials and real play videos on YouTube.

¿How is this any mo’ “laissez-faire” & why does this writer keep using the term “homebrew” wrong? A “laissez-faire” approach that is truly amiable to the homebrew community would be to make the compiler or virtual machine on which the game works open source & offer creators access to the underlying representation, not give them opaque codes that only work in Nintendo-controlled systems & can only be traded ’tween people who bought the game.

I am relieved to hear that Nintendo is a’least spreading the wealth ’mong their fellow large corporations by giving a free opportunity for large social media conglomerates like Google & Reddit to also add e’en mo’ millions to their Scrooge McDuck mountains o’ gold.

Given Nintendo’s famously stringent and litigious history, one may wonder: What if you decided to use Game Builder Garage to remake Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda? Well, you can, and Nintendo’s fine with that because you still had to use its product to do so — no one’s buying Game Builder Garage to avoid paying for old NES titles, after all. In fact, you’ll need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to share anything, and NES Online already gives you access to most of the old titles you’d want to play anyway. Re-creating old games in Game Builder Garage is more about understanding how they work, and Nintendo hopes that kids raised with Game Builder Garage will eventually take the lessons learned with them into future careers in the game industry.

It’s funny you say that, as it’s just as true that since roms already give people access to most ol’ titles, no one’s playing custom-coded fan ports like the PC port o’ Super Mario 64 or disassemblies to avoid paying for games, since they already have means to do so. ¿So what do we assume people who were already making those games were doing it for?

I hope I’m not the only one slightly grossed out by the line “kids raised with Game Builder Garage”.

( Laughs ). I have to point out this comment:

plato:

The problem is, it probably is not available in my language.

Somebody start a change.org petition for Nintendo to release a translation o’ Game Builder Garage in Ancient Greek so we can see Plato rant ’bout all the trolls creating shitty games & their wanton disregard for the laws o’ game design.

While trying to look up a weird Tyler, the Creator lyric involving eating all the cheese @ the store, I stumbled ’pon this gem.

If You Eat Cheese (Ever), You Need This $15 Container

I hard disagree. Beyond all expectations, I continue to survive while still eating the occasional cheddar without this ( exorbidant ) container.

I cannot tell you how often I’ve googled “how to store [insert type of cheese].”

If true, that depresses me. I don’t fall into this problem ’cause I’ve heard o’ foil sometime in my life.

Despite the amount of time I spend thinking about cheese and the amount of space in my fridge that’s devoted to cheese[…]

This ’splains why this $15 container is so vital: while normal people fixate on such topics as whether that lump they found a few days ago is cancer or their financial future in this slump, this poor writer’s mind is trapped by the conundrum o’ the logistics regarding the storage o’ cheese in their fridge.

Boss: ¿Where’s the next article? It was due yesterday.

Writer: I’m sorry, but I can’t concentrate on my writing. ¿Can’t you see my fridge is running out o’ space for all my cheese? ¿Don’t you see some o’ my cheese will go hard & grow mold any minute now? I just bought some milk, but now it’s going to have to go bad, ’cause the entire fridge is full o’ cheese.

[M]y brain just can’t seem to retain information on whether parchment paper, a resealable container, or the original packaging is the best storage choice and in which scenarios.

That’s ’cause none o’ those are the best storage choice — specially not the 1st. “Hmm… Maybe I should store my cheese inside the US Constitution…”. This ’splains e’en better why this container is vital: too many people have gone to jail for life for trying to break into where’er they keep the Constitution & steal it so they can use it to wrap their cheese.

The concern is that cheese needs to breathe[…]

Vegetarians obsess o’er the rights o’ chickens & cows — ¿but what ’bout the rights o’ cheese? Last week I saw blocks o’ gouda & parmesan filling the Seattle streets holding signs labelled, “¡I can’t breathe!”.

I actually looked this up, since I always smothered my cheese in foil, & its flavor ne’er suddenly changed from cheddar to rancid pork, while the many times the dumb nephew & neice failed to completely wrap the cheese with foil only accomplished making the cheese go hard & crusty. Tho I couldn’t find an answer that wasn’t other blog writers writing ’bout weird new ways to contain their cheese, I did find this inspirational bit o’ philosophy from some rando who teaches French:

Yes! It was the right message at the right time: cheese needs to breathe and so do humans and their projects. I’ve set aside the blog post I had been writing but I can give it to you in a nutshell‐‐[ sic regarding this bastardization o’ the em dash ]or in a fuzzy white coat en velours if you fancy.

Move o’er Satre & Foucault: France’s got a new GOAT philosopher.

Having to throw away cheese because of improper care on my part is certainly something I want to avoid — hence my frequent googling.

I love the “frequently googling” part, ’cause it implies the writer keeps trying to find answers but finds none & is just wasting their time or the writer has severe memory problems & has to keep reminding themselves that you wrap cheese in foil, not holiday wrapping paper.

While having my very own temperature-controlled cheese cave is just not in the cards for me at the moment[…]

Keep in mind the “at the moment”; they’ll ne’er forget their lifelong dream o’ the ultimate cheese cave.

I have been gifted with another wonderfully effective solution — one that’s affordable and requires no online searching to use properly.

“As opposed to the Raspberry Pi with which my other ‘friend’ gifted me, which I had to manually program to control my cheese’s temperature, which failed due to a rounding error ( ¡stupid floating points! ¡ne’er use JavaScript! ), causing my cheese to die o’ heatstroke”.

Anyway, the writer tells an epic tale ’bout their boyfriend’s mother showing them a container with holes in it ( accompanied by the weekly 2 tons o’ cheese ) as if ’twere the ring to rule them all & that this saved their fridge from being conquered by the horrible stench from this cheese their boyfriend’s mother insists on giving them. Nobody informs said mother that it’d be simpler if she didn’t give them stinky cheese, but cheese that can take care o’ itself & shower regularly.

You’ll no longer find cheese storage questions in my search history anymore and my fridge remains wonderfully full of cheese but free of their strong odor. And I haven’t wasted any cheese due to poor storage.

I’ve already accomplished all o’ this without paying $15 for tupperware containers with holes drilled into them, so I don’t know why you’re bragging.

All thruout this article I was finding myself mo’ interested in this weird ad on the side showing someone boiling macaroni. I have no idea what it’s advertising, — ¿macaroni? — but I couldn’t help being mesmerized.

Since I wrote 2 extensive posts analyzing the level design o’ Super Mario 64 & Super Mario Sunshine ( not planning on doing the Galaxy games, tho — & I wouldn’t be wasting money on this remake if I were, anyway, since I still have my Wii copies ), it makes sense that I would write ’bout this topic.

I have mixed feelings ’bout this remake remaster port cheap emulator & roms worse than what pirates offer. I remember I had 2nd thoughts while working on my analyses o’ Super Mario 64 & Super Mario Sunshine, since I had read the leaked rumors ’bout 3D Mario “remasters” earlier this year & wondered if I perhaps should’ve waited to play these remasters; howe’er, I was skeptical o’ these rumors @ the time & decided that it’d still be better to play thru the originals in their entirety & maybe after the “remasters” come out unwisely waste e’en more o’ my short time going o’er those & comparing & contrasting. Interestingly, I remember my skepticism was ’cause I doubted Nintendo could put out good remasters in such short time & thought that, @ best, the rumors would be that Nintendo would just release Virtual-Console-style ports — ’cept I expected them to be much cheaper. Since it turned out that I was right, it turned out my fears were unfounded & I, thankfully, ne’er have to play Super Mario Sunshine ’gain & deal with its dumb ass “challenges” o’ waiting on boats & ramming watermelons into walls for several minutes. On the other hand, it would’ve been nice to see Super Mario 64 fixed up, as it definitely needs it, & to see if Nintendo could make Super Mario Sunshine not a buggy, sloppy mess anymo’.

I’m probably the only person as mixed ’bout this release, as everyone else is either mindlessly excited or deeply troubled by the caveats that Nintendo pointlessly added to this release, like their scummy use o’ limited release to create “fear o’ missing out” & pressure gamers, who are notorious for their lack o’ self-control & wise financial practices ( but are oft well-paid, despite this incompetence ). I think the reason is that, as I’ve hinted or said outright in some o’ my analyses, I don’t think the 3D Mario games were all that great the begin with. Super Mario 64 was revolutionary for its time, but has aged poorly; Super Mario Sunshine is just flat-out badly designed & is such a mix o’ low ambition & sloppy, amateur mistakes in terms o’ bugs that it should make such a AAA company like Nintendo blush; & Super Mario Galaxy was essentially the McDonald’s o’ video games — good for a quick, mindless play, but derivative & quite sloppily-designed, as well. There are plenty o’ 3D platformers that are better than the latter 2, including Banjo-Kazooie, the original Spyro trilogy, &, hell, e’en Donkey Kong 64, which was a’least ambitious while being sloppy & incompetent, as opposed to Sunshine & Galaxy which were sloppy & incompetent while just copying Super Mario 64 & failing to understand what made that game work in the 1st place. Hell, e’en Super Mario 3D Land & Super Mario 3D World are better, since they a’least understood how to handle straightforward platforming correctly, while Super Mario Sunshine kind o’ butchered explorative platforming & Super Mario Galaxy couldn’t figure out whether it wanted to be an explorative or straightforward platformer & opted to half-heartedly do both @ the same time.¹

The comparison to the Spyro trilogy is fitting, as those games received full remasters a year or so ago, all for $40, with some o’ the most gorgeous graphics there are so far. Now, granted, in my recent playthrus o’ the games I’ve found that these games haven’t aged super well, either, — I would probably rank them all lower than, say, Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie — & I felt bad ’bout buying this remake, as I feel I was just feeding this remake/rehashing obsession that is starving the artistic world o’ new ideas². So you can imagine how Super Mario 3D All-Stars has crossed the line into definite no-buy. Still, it’s hard not to be embarrassed to see Nintendo, who were once the greatest game publisher in the world, get their asses kicked by some nobodies called “Games for Bob” & fucking Activision.

Some people may brag that this is a great business decision on Nintendo’s part, & they’re right; but Nintendo fans should realize that this great business decision, like many great business decisions, came @ the loss o’ Nintendo’s dignity & reputation. Perhaps Nintendo has no reason to care ’bout this, but people who invest so much o’ their life dedicated to this corporate god o’ theirs should, as the only thing mo’ pathetic than worshipping a faceless corporation is worshipping a faceless corporation that makes crap now. Granted, Nintendo’s been making crap for the past few decades, as one can see from modern Mario & Zelda games & pretty much every home console since the Super Nintendo, including the Switch, which is so bad, Nintendo was sued o’er its crappiness.

I should point out that, from what I’ve seen, the ports look worse to me than probably to others. While people try to give Nintendo the most pathetic o’ “you tried” trophies for their higher-resolution UI elements in Super Mario 64, while not improving any o’ the other textures, I think having a mix o’ high-resolution & low-resolution textures looks mo’ jarring & cheaper than just sticking to consistently low-resolution textures. I’m also very doubtful that Super Mario 64 will play well on the Switch. The Switch has o’er-sensitive control sticks that make slight nudges negligibly different from full yanks, making everything in every Switch game feel slippery. I don’t know why they would make them that way, as it renders useless the whole point o’ having control sticks with different levels o’ force you can apply, but the N64 & GameCube didn’t have this problem. The Wii-U control sticks were the same, & I played the Super Mario 64 Virtual Console port, which feels way too slippery ’cause o’ that, so I have li’l reason to expect different from the Switch’s version. Not to be that guy, but you truly have to play Super Mario 64 with the original N64 controller to make it not feel like ass. I still think buying a used N64 & Super Mario 64 would be a better deal than this remake, e’en if it comes close in price, since the other games aren’t worth much, anyway.

What makes this remake’s timing e’en worse is that it came out so soon after the unauthorized release o’ the disassembly o’ Super Mario 64 into C code ( made easier thanks to Nintendo’s incompetent failure to apply optimizations on their C compiler, which caused slowdown in areas, such as “Dire, Dire Docks”, where there wouldn’t be with the optimizations ) & the proliferation o’ ports ( including a PC port, which I regret not using when I made my analysis o’ Super Mario 64’s level design, as I could’ve had widescreen screenshots ) for just ’bout every system & mods — including the switch already. Nintendo fans had beaten Nintendo’s own port months ago. These ports have many extra mods, including texture upgrades, that you could only dream o’ getting in the “official” release.

This leads us to a particular anomaly: here we see superior versions o’ works made for free that are forced into the underground — effectively censored — ’cause they were not “officially” sanctioned by the “owner”, while only the mo’ imperfect product is legally allowed to be bought & used. ¿Does this not go gainst both our artistic & economic goals to encourage efficiency, to encourage the production o’ the best products? & yet here the law is outright preventing the best work o’ art from succeeding — trying to prevent it from existing. But someone well-versed in economics could easily find the answer: the cause is a monopoly — to be specific, a government-sanctioned monopoly known as “copyright”. ’Cause Nintendo owns the game, they don’t have to compete in making the best version; they only need to legally outlaw any competitors.

Thus, rather than creating an environment where works are refined to their best, most consumer-pleasing version, consumers are left with nothing but imperfect versions competing with each other, as the only way to compete with an imperfect work o’ art is not to refine it, as would be the rational way to make it better, but to make a completely different work that trades imperfections for other imperfections. This is also inefficient in that it forces people to “reinvent the wheel” & recreate art slightly different to avoid being struck down by the government rather than work on the parts that need to be improved. Hence why we have such absurd bootlegs like Yooka-Layley, rather than a new Banjo-Kazooie game. ’Course, programmers who are familiar with how open-source software would recognize this all too well: it’s the same reason why proprietary Windows & OSX users have to tolerate the quirks in those OSes while copyright-free Linux users can change anything they don’t like ’bout their OS or download from the variety o’ competing options.

’Course, pointing out the simple fact that, yes, copyright has elements that are simply bad for the world o’ art & the economy, would enrage ( which is odd, since it’s not as if we’re @ risk o’ the law changing, so they should be feeling very safe ) worshippers o’ their favorite corporate gods, who have produced much propaganda in defense o’ copyright, much o’ which is inaccurate³, but which has nontheless latched into people’s minds. This is probably ’cause the extreme version o’ copyright that currently exists in the US doesn’t have much to stand on, logically: e’en economists, who tend to be pro-ownership, can’t keep themselves from cynically calling it the “Mickey Mouse law”. After all, while one could maybe argue that if Nintendo didn’t hold a monopoly on a new game they make, they wouldn’t be able to make money & continue funding development o’ new games ( tho this makes one wonder how so much great open-source software was funded ), ¿will Nintendo fans be so delusional to argue that Nintendo could not produce games if they couldn’t keep gouging people for games they had already spent their money making decades ago? ¿Were artists not perfectly able to make a living creating art with only 14 years to profit off a work o’ art centuries ago? ¿Why do owners suddenly need mo’ than 90 years now?

Still, I’m less angry than some people, not only ’cause these games aren’t that good to begin with, but also ’cause Nintendo’s attempt to sell this game in a corrupt way is so self-defeating, I can only laugh, & that ungenerous part o’ me kind o’ thinks that the people who fall for it are so dumb, perhaps the world is better with them having less money. For instance, I might be mo’ horrified by Nintendo trying to exploit “fear o’ missing out” if we weren’t talking ’bout decades-ol’ games that people have already missed out on. & while Super Mario 64 was revolutionary for its time, Super Mario Sunshine & Galaxy’s impact on the industry is minimal. The only game I can think o’ that Sunshine influenced was some indie game called A Hat in Time, & the only game I can think o’ that Galaxy influenced were bootlegs, like the illustrious DuLuDuBi Star. The truth is, when these games came out the rest o’ the industry had far mo’ interesting games to pay attention to, like Grand Theft Auto, Halo, & Resident Evil in 2002 or… Actually, looking it up, it seems 2007 was a very dry year, as well as 2006. In hindsight, I’m no longer so sorry that my poverty made me miss out on the newest games in the late 2000s — it seems they were mostly crap, anyway. Anyway, I can bet almost anyone who hasn’t played these 2 games hasn’t played other games that are far mo’ significant & better.

In fact, I would go far ’nough to say that while Nintendo is gouging players for these half-assed ports o’ rather half-assed games, they slipped thru much better games for close-to-free ( well, so long as you’re already paying for Nintendo Online ): the original Super Mario All-Stars. My recent playthru o’ the 3D Mario games ( I played Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 round the end o’ 2017, so it wasn’t that long ago ), I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not nearly as good as the classic 2D Mario games. While 64 hasn’t aged well & Sunshine & Galaxy weren’t that great when they 1st came out, the original Super Mario Bros. & Super Mario Bros. 3 are still excellent & make me remember after decades o’ mediocre Mario games how Mario came to fame in the 1st place.

Also, it’s not as if Nintendo’s the only company in the world to o’erprice outdated work simply ’cause it has a well-known brand’s face on it: Apple’s been gouging people on computers with outdated specs fore’er. I could e’en see someone who is rich ’nough that they can’t be bothered to care that they’re o’erpaying paying $60 to try these games. Hell, I wasted $50 on that new Zelda game wherein you just wander thru empty forests, fight the same generic fantasy monsters with sticks, & wait every few minutes for Link to catch his fucking breath ( I guess that’s where it got its name ); compared to that ol’ games that are a’least actual games & not inferior simulations o’ wandering thru the local forest looks pretty good.

What makes me truly feel bummed out ’bout this release is how excited everyone is ’bout it & how much it reveals how li’l standards & self-respect video game fans have — admittedly not a new epiphany, since “gamers” have been flaunting their cultural & general intellectual paucity ( as well as corporate servility ) for decades; I mean, we’re talking ’bout a demographic with such fragile egos that they feel the need to give themselves the label “gamers”, as opposed to fans o’ any other art medium, who don’t embarrass themselves so. Immediately after I had read ’bout the Nintendo Direct ( the only time I have e’er given a shit ’bout these corporate advertisements, since, as mentioned earlier, I had an actual interest in these remakes beforehand ), my YouTube recommendations — as recommended by the robotic equivalent o’ that friend 1000 IQ points lower than you who thinks quoting ol’ video games is funny & whom you wonder why you e’er associate with them in the 1st place — was inundated with the most embarrassing selection o’ videos o’ corporate fellatio ( if you want proof that capitalism has usurped Christianity as the dominant religion in the west for the moronic masses, just gaze ’pon the zeal o’ worship so many people cast ’pon their divine made-up legal entities — while these same hypocrites who demand that video games be respected as art have so li’l respect for the actual flesh-&-blood artists who did the actual work that they could probably ne’er name a single programmer if their lives depended on it ), accompanied by thumbnails with bearded young white male #13892 mugging the camera with some wacky expression.

’Cause I’m drunk & surly, I’m going to spend the rest o’ this article breaching online etiquette & make fun o’ these goons:

For instance, the 1st video I found was titled “Nintendo Just Won 2020 With their Mario 35th Anniversary Direct”, whate’er that’s s’posed to mean — I guess that Nintendo’s better than rival game development companies. Keep in mind that this is the same year Sony & Microsoft are releasing new consoles. I haven’t played a Sony console in decades & probably haven’t played a Microsoft console e’er⁴; but e’en I have to admit that if you think new consoles by Sony & Microsoft are less impressive than half-assed ports o’ ol’ games, you must have drunk the Nintendo Kool-Aid & have given up all independent, critical thought. Imagine how sad it would be that you think regurgitating out shit Nintendo made decades ago is the best thing o’ 2020. If I thought this rehash was 1 o’ the best things video games had to offer, I would just dislike video games, period.

& I don’t know why YouTube keeps recommending me videos o’ Grover from Sesame Street talking ’bout Mario games, but he’s apparently obsessed with Paper Mario. Well, now he’s talking ’bout Super Mario 3D All-Stars with a video titled “The Mariosplosion Was REAL”. The only explosion I saw was Nintendo shitting themselves in the pants, & then offering their fans to buy it for $60, which they gladly did — proof that Austrian-schoolers’ “mud pie” argument gainst the labor theory o’ value is backward, as only in a capitalist society could you succeed by selling people mud pies.

Amusingly, IGN, 1 o’ those sites who throws 10s like candy⁵, is being surprisingly nitpicky, with its title, “Super Mario 3D All-Stars: Mario 64 Speedruns Won’t Be Nearly As Fast”. O’ all the problems a remake could have, “speedrunners can’t exploit a glitch anymo’” is far down the list o’ relevance. Usually people praise companies for fixing bugs, not criticize them for failing to leave them in.

Perhaps the silliest video is the video by Nintendo’s own channel called “We Played Super Mario 3D All-Stars!”. No shit you played it, dipshits — you made it.

Our next video features a gamer dude so generic he’s wearing a Star Wars baseball cap. This as well as his very creating channel name, “Geeks + Gamers”, let’s you, fellow gamers &/or geeks know that he is, also, what you humans call “gamers” & “geeks”. He doesn’t show his face, howe’er, as he’s facepalming next to the title, “People Are Still Complaining About Nintendo Despite Super Mario 3D All Stars Announcement”. ¿Can you believe that the peasants have the audacity to criticize our great Lord & Savior Nintendo, e’en tho they gifted us with 3 games they already made decades ago ( 2 o’ which were ne’er that great, e’en for their time ), when they should be bowing down & giving themselves up to the sheer sacrifice Nintendo’s stockholders have done to sell fanboys 3 half-assed ports @ an inflated price that are worse than what fan hackers have made for free?

Gainst all good reasoning, I took the time to watch the video & had to laugh near the beginning when I heard him say that, “[T]ime has been very good to Super Mario Sunshine”. Yes, time has been good to that game where I just randomly clip thru floors, blue coins clip thru walls, Mario randomly spazzes out while on ledges, minigames handle failure in inconsistent ways, cutscenes have Mario in 2 places @ once & 1 cutscene has Peach with her own eyeballs as earrings, — & those are just the unquestionable bugs, much less the mo’ subjective sloppy level design — says man who has clearly only read other fawning praise o’ the game & has ne’er played it himself.

Pictured: game that time has been good to.

His whines are nothing mo’ than that Nintendo has made limited releases before, so that means it’s OK now. Give this man an A+ in philosophy. Personally, I couldn’t care ’less that this is limited release, since it’s not worth the price it costs @ any time. I would love to hear someone give a reason why it’s a good idea. Granted, as someone who has actually studied economics watched that Jim Sterling video where he complains ’bout this game’s limited release & knows such concepts as “false scarcity” & “FOMO”, I know all too well why it’s a good reason for Nintendo’s wallet & a bad reason for consumers — which is why smart consumers will avoid buying this garbage, thereby pressuring corrupt businesses like Nintendo to either stop being corrupt or go out o’ business. ’Course, pro-market economists are wrong that consumers in market economies are smart, so I expect to see plenty o’ idiots gladly throw their money ’way to corrupt corporations, thereby causing scam artists to flourish — ¡just like how these scummy YouTube channels thrive on their cheap clickbait titles! It’s like that joke from The Simpsons wherein Lisa does that experiment on a hamster & on Bart, but with Bart replaced with gamers: while the mouse learns to stop trying to eat the electrified cheese, gamers while go after that electrified muffin time & time ’gain.

& then we have a billion videos by GameXplain & Nintendo Prime. Nintendo Prime I am almost certain are paid shills, with their switch giveaways & pathetic jabs gainst Sony as if Nintendo Life are elementary schoolers still babbling that “Nintendo Does What Genesisn’t”.

Like “Gamers + Geeks” ( who, now that I think ’bout it, is probably also a shill, since certainly no genuine fan would be so generic ), or whate’er that clown called himself, the 1st video I found from them was 1 wherein they whine ’bout the existence o’ people who s’posedly don’t like this remake. Hilariously, the pinned comment o’ the video is Nintendo Prime admitting that they utterly fucked up understanding what the original Super Mario All-Stars was: they claim in the video that ’twas just ports o’ the original NES games, rather than remakes with totally new graphics &, in the case o’ Super Mario Bros., completely reprogrammed from the ground up ( not for artistic reasons, but ’cause Nintendo lost the original source code⁶ ).

But my favorite argument by Nintendo Life is in a comment farther below, wherein they demonstrate that they completely fail to understand what reviewing is:

However, that doesn’t change what this is, factually. It’s a collection pack, and it should be judged for what it actually is, rather than what you would rather wish it was. That’s where I have an impasse with some reviewers, they are knocking it for not being something else entirely rather than just judging it purely based on it being a collection pack.

Critiquing a work is nothing mo’ than comparing a work to what is expected o’ it & evaluating whether or not it has met or exceeded those expectations. If we take this argument to its logical conclusion, reviewers should just rank any work o’ art with the binary “good” for being what it is, while with this philosophy it’d be impossible to rank a work as “bad”, as “bad” would be defined as a work not being what it is, which is a paradox. “Yes, Bubsy 3D is ugly, sounds like the computer is constantly burping, & has cumbersome controls; but people need to respect Bubsy 3D as a game that is ugly, sounds like the computer is constantly burping, & has cumbersome controls, rather than judge is based on what it is not, a game that looks good, has music a sane human would find pleasing, & actually responds to your button presses in a way any reasonable person would expect”.

& most people I’ve seen do judge this game as a collection pack: they judge it as a bad example o’ 1 that’s beyond the normal market price o’ collections. They also judge it’s price as the outcome not o’ a fair market, but o’ false scarcity & monopolistic behavior.

’Course, we couldn’t have clickbait without a li’l bait-&-switch title that hints @ an audacious claim that is obviously wrong, & Nintendo Life dutifully delivers that with their “Super Mario Galaxy 2 Teased By Nintendo for 3D All-Stars”. In the top pinned comment, ’course, they admit that they think the chance o’ Galaxy 2 being released as DLC is “20%”. What formula they used to calculate that seemingly arbitrary chance is a mystery.

But the most horrifying video Nintendo Life unleashed on us is this 1 titled “That Mario Nintendo Direct Was Superb (If Predictable) – Super Mario 3D All Stars” showing bearded man with creepy jack-off face while the somewhat less horrifying Super Mario 64 Mario face with its crusty polygonal eyelids gazes @ the viewer like a banshee. All this surrounded by the big, bold text, “A SUPER MARIO DIRECT ACTUALLY HAPPENED”. ¡Holy shit! ¡A glorified advertisement… for a Mario game? ¡Such an event happens only in a blue moon!

GameXplain is a bit less clickbaitty ( just a li’l, tho ) & a li’l mo’ obsessive, offering dozens o’ videos obsessing o’er the different title screens & menus & the version differences for the opening cutscene in Super Mario Sunshine, which GameXplain themselves admit is pointless, since the Switch version is using a crappy, compressed video from Twitter that looks worse than the GameCube version ( also, spoilers: in the Switch version Mario is still in the clip o’ Bianco Hills they watch in the airplane, before they 1st take foot on Bianco Hills, just like those Superfriends episodes wherein Aquaman joins the others in going out to rescue Aquaman ).

They don’t offer any analysis, which would require some intelligence on their part, but just show every clip they can find. It’s 1 thing when fans obsess o’er footage from an upcoming game in development; but this is shit we’ve had for decades. & it doesn’t look any better. It’s the same shit. ¿What kind o’ neurotic fucking idiots get obsessed o’er ol’ shit being released with a few textures looking slightly less blurry?

That’s not to say that GameXplain doesn’t have clickbait, such as the blatantly false “Super Mario 3D All-Stars Go Beyond “Simple” Ports – Here’s the Evidence!”. People have already looked into the game & found that Super Mario 64 & Super Mario Sunshine are emulated ( Galaxy’s main code is recompiled to native Switch, but GPU & audio are emulated, for some reason ). This reminds me o’ when Polygon so slovenly asserted that the models in those new Pokémon games were totally not rips from the 3DS games ’cause the developers said so as if they were the New York Times parroting the US military, only for many hackers to actually compare the models & prove that the models are so similar that if they weren’t ripped, the developers wasted their time plagiarizing their own work. But one should ne’er let reality get in the way o’ one’s mindless worship o’ their favorite corporations.

As expected, this video has a huge pinned comment by GameXplain wherein they try to move the goal posts by redefining “emulated” as “not done by Nintendo”, making this an ad hoc argument, since the whole argument is whether Nintendo’s doing better than unofficial sources ( which GameXplain for some reason calls “public domain”, which is inaccurate, since they involve copyrighted material ). GameXplain actually shows mo’ ignorance regarding the “public domain” work than 3D All-Stars ( which is no surprise, since there’s no money in it for GameXplain to shill for nobody hackers ). For instance, they claim that Galaxy’s recompiled source code is something “you wouldn’t see in the public domain”, e’en tho recently hackers were able to disassemble Super Mario 64 into C code, allowing it to be recompiled into many different ports without any form o’ emulation — a case wherein, bizarrely, the hackers have mo’ resources than Nintendo themselves, since Nintendo did have to emulate it. GameXplain also claims that Nintendo was able to update textures from sources that only they had, which has 2 problems: looking @ the video, only a tiny minority o’ the textures are improved ( which, as I said, looks worse than if none o’ the textures were changed ), so they clearly didn’t keep most o’ them ( which is no surprise: the fact that Nintendo had to emulate Super Mario 64 implies that they lost its source code ). But this is also untrue as many o’ the textures were stock, which hackers have been able to find, such as the backdrop to “Wet-Dry World”, not to mention how fans have been able to make all-new custom high-definition textures for the whole game ( which, granted, are mixed in quality to the point o’ uncanny valley — that Peach, uh… needs a bit mo’ work ).

But these videos can’t compete with Metacritic in terms o’ gallons o’ jism being flung on you like Nickelodeon slime by so many “critics” stroking Nintendo’s long, hairy dick. Granted, now’s an unfair time to do this: the only reviews out are by critics given advance copies by Nintendo in return for giving Nintendo easy high scores — which is to say that none o’ these “critics” have any credibility, anyway. Luckily, Metacritic has no standards for whom they count as a “critic”, so we don’t have to miss out on the sugary cum.

For instance, Cubed3, a website I’ve ne’er heard o’ with such bad web design that I think it’s being run by a Russian who has ne’er played a video game before, starts by praising Nintendo for doing “the utterly expected”, as opposed to doing what was just expected. ¡This was utterly done! Unfortunately, if I complained ’bout every way this writer twisted the English language into the equivalent experience o’ eating scorpion tails, we would end up with a section longer than the review itself. Let me just point out that this wordsmith called the game the switch’s “rectangle of delight”. This is why critics should stick to just mentioning important elements in the game & analyzing how they effect the experience o’ the game — you know, what readers came for — rather than subject them to their shitty attempts @ poetry.

I must admit I almost missed how idiotic the opening line is: “Why are you looking at this? Go and play Super Mario 3D All-Stars now!”. This review came out before the game was released — your readers can’t play it yet. I don’t think you could find any better proof that this reviewer didn’t put an ounce o’ thought into what they were writing.

I’m most amazed that this review is only a few paragraphs, but still wastes its time saying the same things, such as asserting in as many ways you can that you should buy this game, while barely analyzing the game itself. This reviewer, who has apparently ne’er played any other game in the universe, is astounded that Nintendo put so much sweat & blood into making an opening FMV. No other video game has e’er accomplished such a feat. Clearly Super Mario 3D All-Stars is the real Schindler’s List o’ video games.

Also, this:

Menus are bright and filled with titbits [ sic ] that any information-hungry fan is going to lap up and appreciate every time they start up one of the three titles included. [ Emphasis mine ]

@ 1st I was going to make fun o’ how this reviewer apparently has ne’er heard o’ Mario Wiki or thinks their audience is too dumb to have heard o’ it ( considering what that audience is willing to read, that’s a fair assumption ); but then I noticed that typo & realized why Mario fans are so excited now. As they say, “sex sells”.

A lovely addition that nobody would hold against Nintendo leaving out of the package is the addition of each soundtrack.

Nobody would hold it gainst them ’cause you can find this music on YouTube & this is the stupidest way to deliver music to people. Nobody’s going to be lugging their fucking Switch round like a boom box just to hear Mario music. If Nintendo wanted to actually be useful, they would’ve just given buyers FLACs they could put on their phones or music players ( or hell, put it on Spotify — ¿why don’t game companies try to make a deal with streaming services so they can make extra money off their soundtracks rather than do nothing & watch as game fans just upload their music to YouTube for free? ) — you know, how real human beings listen to music.

After admitting that they got lost choosing ’mong the jungle o’ 3 whole games, — ¡that’s 1 mo’ than this reviewer has learned to count up to yet! — the reviewer offers a whole 2 paragraphs spewing cliches ’bout these games without a breath o’ real analysis. E’en then, this reviewer finds a way to waste words on irrelevant shit, like the SNES Super Mario All-Stars, ’cause this reviewer is truly hopeless @ formatting their thoughts & has ne’er graduated high school.

What’s funniest is that this reviewer goes so far in praising this remake that they outright contradict themselves in praising it, claiming that Super Mario 64 is “all represented here pixel perfectly”, when obviously it isn’t — ¡Nintendo improved some o’ the textures! Apparently this remake is so great that it has broken the laws o’ logic & is both improved & exactly the same.

’Course it wouldn’t be a bad review without getting basic facts wrong, — proof that this reviewer didn’t really play these games that are apparently God’s own golden vagina juice — claiming that in Super Mario 64 Mario “still relies on the standard hop, skip, and wahoo to get the job done”, when Mario can do many mo’ things, like punch, kick, dive, carry things, swim, grab chains & climb round them, fly… Also, Mario doesn’t skip in this game — tho if Nintendo did change it so that he did, I would bump my view o’ this remake a point or so higher.

Master these here and it becomes a lot simpler to grasp the level design and approaches for the rest of the journey through the Mario vault.

No it doesn’t, ’cause as anyone who has actually played these games knows, Super Mario 64’s level design is radically different from Sunshine’s & Galaxy’s — that’s why there are such strong arguments o’ Super Mario 64 vs. Galaxy, etc.

With its excellent level design, infinite replayability, and perfect soundtrack, it’s easy to get lost in Mario 64 for months and never want to leave.

“Infinite replayability” — that’s not ridiculous hyperbole by a reviewer with Nintendo’s cock so high up their throat it’s reaching their kidneys. This reviewer might as well claim that playing this game will cure blindness while they’re @ it. ¿& “perfect soundtrack”? Don’t get me wrong, the Bowser theme is 1 o’ the best Bowser themes e’er, & “Bob-Omb Battlefield” was such a good song that it’s e’en the best song in Galaxy 2; but we’re talking ’bout the same game with that obnoxious “Slider” song — ’cause I love my clock & rainbow castle levels sounding like a fucking hoedown.

& don’t bother going into any detail regarding said level design, since it’s not as if different people have different opinions regarding what makes certain level design bad or good — which is important to note, as despite what this reviewer thinks, Super Mario 64’s level design is actually controversial. No, I’ll just take your word for it, reviewers so unprofessional you didn’t e’en bother to get a security certificate for your website that is probably bloated with ad JavaShit.

Spoiler alert: it is.

Leave you must, however, in order to jump into one of the most unique⁷ platformers Mario has ever headlined…

This reviewer is talking ’bout Super Mario Sunshine, which those who have actually played it know is just Super Mario 64 but with a water pack. I can think o’ plenty o’ games with Mario in it mo’ exotic ( & just generally better ), such as Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Mario Pinball Land, Mario Party Advance. This is why I hate Sunshine fans: they’re like rock fans who think they’re super avant-garde ’cause they listen to Pink Floyd.

Nintendo, in its infinite wisdom, was always going to mix things up and this left many players a bit wary.

If you think Super Mario Sunshine “mixed things up”, you have clearly ne’er played a game other than Super Mario 64 & Super Mario Sunshine.

Yes, Nintendo ( a company, who are not real organisms, & thus cannot have thoughts @ all ) has “infinite wisdom” & has ne’er made a mistake — that’s why they got their asses kicked hard during the GameCube era, ’cause the people playing PlayStation 2 & Xbox were all thinking, “¡Whoa! ¡Mario with a water pack! ¡That’s too radical for me! ¡I’m going to stick with my dumb 1st-person shooter that radically redefined how 1st-person shooters play or that dumb car-theft game that redefined the open-world genre Super Mario 64 created & with which Super Mario Sunshine did nothing new”.

Having never taken the plunge first time round, owning a GameCube but getting a dungaree fix from Mario Kart: Double Dash instead, it is interesting to come at Sunshine with fresh eyes.

OK, ignoring the hilarious dangling participle implying that the abstract concept o’ “coming @” ( a very accurate malaprop — this reviewer is, indeed, cumming @ Sunshine ) Sunshine with fresh eyes played Mario Kart; ¡this person talks ’bout the history o’ Sunshine as if they’re an authority, & then admits that they didn’t e’en play it when it came out, e’en tho they had the perfect opportunity! ¿Why? Probably ’cause they didn’t want to waste their money, ’cause they knew back then deep down how crappy it was. But now that it’s hip to love the game, now they have to go out & pretend they love it like all the other drones.

Also, I tried looking up “dungaree fix” & Google just stared @ me in confusion & Duck Duck Go told me to Go Fuck Fuck myself. All I know is that dungarees are a type o’ pants.

Much like the popper trousers of the time, it now ranks as one of the biggest regrets missing out initially.

¿Why is the reviewer so obsessed with pants & can they keep their creepy fetish ’way from our discussion o’ Mario games?

It should never have been in doubt, going by the triple A standard of Nintendo, but Super Mario Sunshine is superb.

“Nintendo is defined as making good games, therefore this game that they made must be good. I have very independent thought”.

Tasked with cleaning the island of Delfino, using Mario’s new sprinkler-cum-best-friend, F.L.U.D.D., exploration is a delight.

I’m in awe @ what a mangled mess this attempt @ English was. I think my favorite part is that they call it “the island of Delfino”, rather than its actual official name.

F.L.U.D.D. brings with him a whole new traversal scheme and allows for what would easily have been the most innovative level design that had ever been seen at the time (more on how it was topped later).

Nintendo’s most innovative level design was when they put that blue coin in that random place in the water or when they put 4 blue coins on 4 underwater pillars that all look the same.

Also, your attempt @ a cliffhanger would work better if there wasn’t just 1 game left to talk ’bout. “Duh, clearly ’twas Mario Tennis for the GBC that tops it”.

After mo’ faux-poetic superlatives that do not offer concrete details & could easily be written ’bout any game, it’s so generic, which includes such amazing accomplishments as “platforming over multiple levels”, which no platformer has e’er had the technology & brilliance to achieve before this Citizen Kane o’ video gaming, the reviewer — hold on…

It all proves to be never frustrating

Not e’en Sunshine fans would say something so blatantly untrue.

and is frequently overshadowed by other outings for the digitally rendered Bob Hoskins

¿What the fuck is this s’posed to mean? ¿Does this reviewer think every other Mario game is just an adaptation to that crappy Super Mario Bros. movie? No wonder they have such a lofty view o’ Sunshine.

Interestingly, in the reviewer’s single-minded obsession to give nothing but praise for this remake, the reviewer starts bashing Galaxy 2:

The decision to leave out Super Mario Galaxy 2 was always going to raise a few eyebrows but, as mentioned, it’s arguably not as good – don’t worry, just move on.

( Note: this wasn’t mentioned before in this review ).

It’s “arguably” not as good, but we don’t need to actually bother arguing. Just move on, guys, & just accept what I say without question.

Nintendo has also taken the time to simplify the Wii controls and allow for easier planet-hopping by mapping the often-frustrating star spin to the Y button. The Joy-Con set is the control scheme of choice, however by utilising the gyroscope in the Pro Controller, Star Bit collecting mid-galaxy hop is just as comfortable with all control schemes.

So, using motion controls is frustrating, but the best way to control this game is… motion controls… but it’s just as comfortable using any control scheme.

Galaxy also has the esteemed honour of introducing easily the best female character to ever grace a Mario game, in the form of Rosalina.

Rosalina is a hurt-fic character who does jack shit ’cept warp me ’way from the level I want to go back into to collect mo’ stars so they can tell me some stupid bullshit I don’t care ’bout despite s’posedly being a god that would get you laughed out o’ any creative writing class. That’s much better than characters like Goombella or Bow, who have actual personalities & volition. Truly Nintendo’s bootleg Disney princess who does nothing is the apex o’ feminism.

By the way, I just noticed this reviewer is italicizing video game titles, something that most people don’t bother doing, tho it technically makes sense to, since that’s the recommended way to style book, movie, & TV show titles in pretty much every style guide I’ve e’er read & is what is usually taught in school. That this typo-ridden article that barely managed to accomplish coherent English sentences manages to get this pretentious detail right only confuses me mo’.

Nintendo is never going to be accused of not taking innovation to another level […]

Yes, they are: I do it all the time.

[…] but it’s here that sends the company into the outer atmosphere (excuse the pun… no, don’t actually – it was great!)

Go fuck yourself.

Every galaxy explored offers a unique challenge […]

Yes, that Bowser lava level is totally different from that other lava level.

with even groan-worthy additions like the Bee Mario Suit being used to good effect…

Wait, ¿why is the Bee Mario Suit o’ all things groan-worthy? ¿’Cause it’s annoying to use? ¿Then how is it used to good effect? By definition, if it’s groan-worthy, it has a bad effect, ’less you think groaning is — you know what, let’s just hurry up with this shit.

I am baffled that this 1 detail that I could not e’en bother to qualify as good or bad I was so apathetic to it is the 1 flaw in what is s’posedly an otherwise flawless gem. Not pachinko or those dumbass boat rides with Yoshi in Sunshine; not e’en the Spring Mario power-up, which e’en people who love Galaxy regard as uncontrollable.

After saying nothing o’ substance ’bout these 3 games they s’posedly love so much, the reviewer mentioned the “giant Goomba in the room” regarding the limited release:

In truth, if this was any other company then there is no way this would be accepted […]

That’s ’cause they people who like those companies actually have standards, unlike Nintendo fanboys, who would buy a jar o’ toenail clippings if Nintendo plastered Mario’s face on it.

[…] yet when you objectively look […]

You haven’t looked @ anything objectively, you twat.

[…] as well as really thinking about whether or not consumers are going to pick this up […]

“If it sells well, it’s good”. Most reviews are written with the goal o’ encouraging or discouraging sales, so this is some circular logic here.

It shouldn’t have happened […]

It shouldn’t have happened, but e’en people with “infinite wisdom” sometimes make mistakes.

[…] but anyone who has an interest in this collection is likely to pick it up as soon as it’s released

Imagine how stupid this argument is: anyone who is interested in games that were released decades ago will only be interested in buying them immediately after they’re re-released. I mean, sure, people have been interested in playing Super Mario 64 for 24 years; but after March 2021, nobody will e’er have any reason to want to play this game.

Just be sure to not get taken in by scammers looking to charge over-the-odds when expecting a shortage. There won’t be one.

& this has been proven to be false.

Sorry for how long that went on, but that was the worst review I have e’er read in my life — perhaps e’en worse than that review o’ a video game book wherein the reviewer just complained that the writer was fat & was sad that his grandparents died. It still astounds me that there exists… some creature as stupid as this writer. You may bring up some alt-righter who pretends the world is flat or something, but they have a cynical motive for that shit, & they actually oft do the best they can with what terrible material they decide to work with. ¿How can you do such a shitty job selling 3D Mario games? ¿Did Nintendo pay this guy? ¿Why? ¿Who would look @ this review & think it’s worth money? ¿Did this guy do this by his own volition? Then that means he was trying to be completely genuine, which means they are genuinely this stupid. ¿Was this a 12-year-ol’? ¿Why would a review by a 12-year-ol’ be on Metacritic? ¿& how would they have the sophistication to set up so many Google Ads? I genuinely have trouble believing a human like this exists & that this isn’t some social experiment I don’t comprehend.

It’s hard to top that review, but I must carry on. Our next target is a li’l mo’ professional: a newspaper called The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mario defined the rules for the era of 3D movement in games, just as he defined the rules for the previous era of 2D sidescrollers […]

Well, this is partly true: Super Mario 64 defined 3D platformers, but Sunshine & Galaxy didn’t define shit. By that point nobody gave a shit ’bout 3D platformers, & if they did, they probably took mo’ influence from Banjo-Kazooie & Rare’s games. & Grand Theft Auto III had taken leadership for open-world games a year before Sunshine came out & underwhelmed anyone who might expect a Mario game on the same level o’ quality.

[Y]ou might find them eccentric by today’s standards, but the charm, craft and imagination on display is timeless and undeniable.

If their timelessness is undeniable, then why do they look eccentric by today’s standard. This is basically a tone-deaf way o’ saying, “If you think these games haven’t aged well, fuck you, they have. So there”.

For the uninitiated, 1996’s Super Mario 64, 2002’s Super Mario Sunshine and 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy are the red-capped everyman’s first 3D adventures.

No they’re not. Technically, Super Mario 64 isn’t e’en, since Super Mario RPG was arguably 3D. Mario had many 3D “adventures” thruout the N64 era, before Sunshine came out.

In the next sentence, this professional newspaper makes a typo & spells “depsite” “despite”. Remember this next time newspapers try to brag ’bout how they’re so much better than blogs & deserve their bloated subscription fees.

Compared to the previous trainwreck, this review looks downright decent in comparison. It a’least gets the facts right, & e’en acknowledges the wonkiness in Sunshine & its rushed development & mentions the inclusion o’ elements from the obscure “Shindou” release in the Super Mario 64 port. ’Course, they could have just researched that; but it would’ve been a miracle if the previous reviewer had bothered to do any semblance o’ research. Granted, I’m confused how they could claim that Galaxy, which is probably the most repetitive o’ the trilogy, has much slower movement than Super Mario 64, & is bloated by e’en mo’ pointless, unskippable cutscenes than the others, “makes the previous games look slow and repetitive by comparison”. This game you have to 100% twice, but as a green character the 2nd time, just to complete & which expects players to do many missions a 2nd time, but with only 1 hit point the 2nd time, sure isn’t repetitive @ all.

But I think my favorite part o’ this review is the way they had to qualify their main thesis ( buried in the middle, for some reason ):

but as it stands these are the best officially available versions of three incredible games [ emphasis mine ].

E’en they can’t lie & pretend this remake hasn’t gotten its ass kicked by what fans have done.

Metro.uk.co demonstrated Newgrounds-level scoring dissonance, providing plenty o’ examples o’ how flawed this remake is while ranking it 10/10. 10/10 is “as important a cultural achievement as Citizen Kane or Ulysses”. I don’t like to insult people for liking things, but the socially-responsible part o’ me has to say that if you think Mario jumping round galaxies & collecting stars is as culturally important as Citizen Kane… well, you’re the reason nobody takes video games seriously as an art form. Their logic is that Super Mario Galaxy is so great that it by itself merits this collection a 10. Spoiler: they don’t go into any detail ’bout why this is the case, save that “the movement and controls are so crisp you can almost taste the salt and vinegar”, which doesn’t make any sense. What they don’t mention is that e’en speedrunners who constantly play Galaxy games admit that Galaxy’s controls are finicky & that the physics sometimes just outright bug out, like sometimes making you go down when you hold up.

This is in contrast to their claim that “every jump in Mario Sunshine feels like a leap of faith”, which e’en I think is hyperbole. I mean, you have a jetpack for most o’ the game: e’en if you miss a jump by an inch, just hover the rest o’ the way. O’ all the complains I had ’bout Sunshine, not being able to land on platforms was not 1 o’ them. Well, ’cept for rope on poles; but that’s just ’cause if you try to hover after you grab it, Mario does some dumbass spin-flip that serves no purpose. But that’s rare & is offset by the fact that these ropes have hit boxes so buggily generous that they just warp you on top if you get close to them.

’Course it wouldn’t be a wank-fest for Galaxy without mentioning “the patented Nintendo magic”, which is the elusive way to say, “I have irrational nostalgia for this game & have no critical reason to like it”. That’s cute if you’re just a normal person, but makes you unfit as a critic for a video game, where having critical thought & being able to actually analyze the game with concrete points is a necessity.

The closest they come to concrete examples is when they bring up rolling on a ball or a level assembling itself as you move round ( which isn’t a real gameplay gimmick, just a visual effect that’s distracting & detrimental to gameplay ), which they claim “other developers would make the basis of an entire game”. ’Cept, no, they wouldn’t, ’cause these gimmicks are lame. If they’re impressed by these, I can only imagine they would explode if they saw a game with actual creative gimmicks, like, say, Donkey Kong Country 2.

Also, this review gets some facts wrong. For instance, they claim that “That wasn’t organised in a couple of months from someone’s bedroom”, when, in fact, it has been proven that this game took only 6 months to develop.

I do have to give them credit for having spine ’nough to admit Sunshine was a shitty game.

in Mario Sunshine we rarely felt anything other than mild irritation and frustration.

In the game’s defense, I would personally add “amusement @ such bad design & programming”, but I think I just have that taste for crap that other people can’t tolerate ( as these reviews o’ bad reviews demonstrate ).

1 thing all these reviews have in common is that none o’ them actually try to prove their point with examples & are so scant with details that anyone who has ne’er played or seen these games would have no idea what kind o’ games these are. This is typical for game reviews. I remember when I considered trying out Witcher III, ’cause I heard ’twas s’posedly great, but could not find any information on what kind o’ game it is — including what its genre was ( my best guess is that it’s an RPG, which means it’s probably as fun as spending a whole day sitting by an ant hill & smashing my thumb down on each o’ the million ants that come out ). The only hint I received was that it seems to have some cliché fantasy schlock writing that would get you laughed out o’ a speculative fiction writing guild — which is to say, typical video game writing. All I’ve e’er been able to learn ’bout The Last of Us games is that its story involves people zombified by mushrooms ( basically, an idea ripped off from EarthBound, ’cept its writer was smart ’nough to realize that this is a silly idea unworthy o’ drama ). This plot you’d find in a cheap airport novel in literature is considered 1 o’ the best video games e’er written, as said by a gamer community whose idea o’ “literature” is Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. No one e’er says what the actual gameplay is. ¿I guess you shoot people? That’s ne’er been done in video games before. It’s amazing to think that video games have such huge artistic opportunities, & yet all anyone wants to do is make shooter & platformer games ’bout genre-fiction schlock or make VR shit so people can stare up anime girls’ skirts. ( Incidentally, Anime Girl VR is the next Casablanca o’ video games ).

I want to just point out that in my asides ’bout these games I have delivered mo’ concrete information ’bout these games than these reviews do. If I only knew Galaxy by what these reviewers say, I’d only know that it had “big bosses” & a woman character that some random person thinks is the best woman character written, but apparently doesn’t care ’nough ’bout them to give any details, including their fucking backstory & that this game looks beautiful in the opinion o’ the reviewers. Considering the # o’ game fans who think barren wastelands that look like everything got peed on are gorgeous next-level visuals, I wouldn’t e’en take this assertion for half a grain o’ salt.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars has already outsold all other games on Amazon, which is to say that despite gamers’ complaining, they still couldn’t keep themselves from buying it, e’en tho there’s millions o’ better games out there for cheaper, ’cause they’re just that stupid. Look forward to the 40th Mario anniversary when Nintendo sells a limited-edition disk o’ Donkey Kong that has stains on it ’cause the intern used it as a coaster for his drinks during the months before release. I can’t wait for the GameXplain videos detailing how these pixels are extra pixellated & are 2.8% mo’ saturated.

But ’cause you’ve suffered ’nough thru this longwinded article full o’ cyberbullying & soapboxing irrelevant political opinions ( ’less I cut those parts out — if so, pretend I ne’er brought it up ), I offer you some actually great YouTube videos I found on the subject:

SAY THE LINE, MARIO.

Here we have the best summary o’ Super Mario 3D All-Stars. Just look @ what amazing comedic timing there is, with the long drawn-out pause, just the right length, & then the switch movement @ the end. That’s slapstick worthy o’ classic Tom & Jerry.

Accompanying music

A couple years ago, Firefox, my browser o’ choice for purely traditional reasons ( when I started using it, Chrome didn’t exist yet, & all its then competitors sucked ass — still do, actually ), decided to bless me by showing me recommended articles by Pocket. ¿What is Pocket? I don’t know & I don’t care. All I know is that whene’er I opened a new tab or opened my browser, I got to see 3 new articles with zany images that looked like they belonged on Clickhole, from such venerable sources o’ wisdom as Offspring Lifehacker ( ’cause I definitely want to get responsible advice for raising living human beings from nerds who compare raising kids to hacking a computer ) or Nosepickings, — er, I mean Brainpickings — or e’en such refined repositories as the New York Buzzfeed Times or the Bezos Post, where democracy dies in dimness.

’Cept the New York Times then turns round & says I have to pay, which isn’t going to happen, since they’ll just waste it on Thomas Friedman’s moustache wax. Shit, I can’t e’en be bothered to hack their sad JavaScript code from ScriptKiddies.com used to try keeping me from reading their work for free. I guess you can’t expect a newspaper that can’t figure out how to hire competent writers to hire competent web programmers.

This article is dedicated to the best hits o’ those recommendations o’er the year, carefully kept in my pantry for years like eggs, to their perfect ripeness o’ stank.

For example, as I started writing this post, Mozilla helped me by giving me a perfect example:

When I think o’ hard-hitting news articles that fight “fake news”, as Mozilla proclaims in 1 o’ their messages, I think o’ an article named “Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot”… ¡As the mastermind ’hind the Democrats’ Pizzagate conspiracy! ¡It all ties together now! As for “Big tech has your kid’s data — and you probably gave it to them”, that’s definitely fake news, ’cause I don’t e’en have kids.

I love this example ’cause it demonstrates yet ’gain how “new fads” are just the ol’ with new names. Much as how “SJWs” are just last century’s politically correct & today’s “fake news” is last century’s “yellow journalism”, “clickbait” is just a new name for “Weekly World News” tabloids. ’Cept now newspapers that call themselves serious are jumping on the self-driving car right off the cliff.

¿Think I’m joking ’bout that New York Buzzfeed jab? ¿Have you tried reading such hard-hitting pieces as, “Where to Find Bangkok’s Best Street Food While You Can” or “7 Ways to Keep Your Bedroom Comfortably Cool This Summer”? ¿How ’bout “The Last Great Clothing Store” or “Bananas vs. Sports Drinks? Bananas Win Study”? That latter 1 sounds like some wacky gorillamilk pseudorandom humor. ¿How ’bout “36 Hours in Budapest”? ¿Or “The Highs and Lows of Testosterone”? Then there’s “The Univesity Is Fake. The Laughs Are Real.” showing me a sexy caption o’ some guys big crotch-emphasizing belt. Mmm… You got my buttersworth, New York Times. After that we have some sexy gossip like, “Conana O’Brien’s Unequited Fanboy Love for Robert Caro”. ¿Who’s Robert Caro? ¿Who fucking cares?

Then you have the New York Times turning into the New York Lifehacker with such hard-hitting advice as “How to Avoid a Renovation Nightmare” & “How to Enjoy Fine Dining on a Fast Food Budget”. They e’en follow QZ in spreading fake news ’bout me having a child with their article, “How I Know You Wrote Your Kid’s College Essay”.

But the New York Times isn’t the only venerated New York newspaper to give us tips. ¿Have you read the New Yorker’s high-class article, “Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken—Here’s the Recipe”. I was still ’live when this newspaper still insisted on spelling “cooperate” with a diaeresis. How papers rot quickly.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, fights for oligarchy “democracy” with such bold news as “Ten fruits and vegetables you’re storing wrong” & “NBA players know they’re addicted to their phones. Good luck getting them to”. ¿To what? O, god, I haven’t had to endure this much tension till I had to wait a whole day to see whether Heather Fairchild would truly get run o’er by that train.

A lot o’ these articles are virtually advertisements, oft for some celebrity the writer’s wanking off to. For instance, we have “Can Jack White Change His Stripes?”. See, it’s clever ’cause The White Stripes have been broken up since 2011 & Jack White’s been doing other things for years before this article came out. Then we have “The Instagrammer Teaching People How to Live Like Pioneers”. “Instagrammer” is up there with “Guy who sits on his couch all afternoon in his boxers rubbing his crotch as he watches court shows” in prestigiousness.

Also, Pocket for some reason kept giving me basketball articles, woefully ignorant o’ my utter lack o’ interest in that pastime. You would think this service would a’least, I don’t know, pay attention to what kinds o’ articles I actually click on & maybe use that as an indication o’ the kind o’ articles I might want to read.

Anyway, like the wisdom o’ Allah ( who’s totally different from God, guys — look, he’s wearing a moustache ), the # o’ these idiotic articles is so numerous you could fill the earth with a sea o’ its ink, & thousands will still be puking out a thousand mo’ articles the very next day. I literally have o’er a thousand snapshots — & I only e’er use “literally” literally. Thus, I shall only treat you with the greatest o’ hits:

For instance, here’s a gem from my favorite woo factory, The Guardian, embarrassing the left with their mystic crank economics yet ’gain:

Empty half the Earth of its humans, It’s the only way to save the planet

Nothing like clickbait that makes you sound worse than Hitler. As it turns out, the wacky writer — who isn’t a scientist & doesn’t provide anything resembling science in his long religious ramble, but is a science fiction writer, which is ’bout on par with studying medieval history under the tutelage o’ a random Renaissance Faire dork — isn’t saying we should kill off half the world’s population, but have them scrunch together in cities. Which he says we’re already doing — ¿so apparently we don’t have to do anything? ’Cept apparently it needs to be managed, anyway, or else… ¿it’s still happen, but not some vague way it should be happening? Robinson has a Ph.D in English, ¿& yet he can’t write an article for a prominent newspaper with a consistent, straightforward thesis?

After that, he says we should leave half the planet to, I dunno… Just grow back into Eden ’gain, ’cause it’s natural. Robinson clearly ne’er took a Logic 101 class, or else he would know that that’s a logical fallacy… which is something he should’ve had to take when getting his Ph.D in English, since being able to competently write persuasively is kind o’ a requirement in most English programs. Then ’gain, I used to be great @ math in school & I forgot all that shit, so maybe Robinson forgot all o’ his English learning & just scribbled out this nonsense for a quick buck for The Guardian. Can’t blame him: they probably didn’t pay him much.

Porcelain that looks like pastry

Mo’ than 100 o’ these articles are just “Here’s some niche thing you ne’er cared ’bout ’cause it’s irrelevant & stupid”.

By the way, ¿can I rant ’bout the annoyingly trite pattern o’ writing editorials like a story, with some description opening. “Joe Nobody wore a white T-shirt & talked with his mouth”. They act as if they’re the next Tolkien to hide from themselves the reality that they’re precious 200,000-word manuscript ’bout the depth o’ being a white middle-class, mildly liberal academic is languishing in some agent’s slush pile. Ironically, Robinson, who actually is a published writer, didn’t indulge in this nonsense, to his credit.

J. Cole Does Not Want to be Famous: Exclusive Interview

¿Then why are you writing a public news article ’bout him, assholes?

On Social Media and Its Discontents

I love that li’l snipped under the headline that seems like it’s trying to turn me off as much as possible. “As someone who has publicly criticized the major social media…” should be translated as “As someone who thinks he’s mo’ important than anyone else does…”. As someone who writes English using Latin letters, I can definitely authoritize that those are, indeed, words that have been written.

Nobody Knows Anything About China

Foreign Policy takes “No news is good news” straight to the heart.

24 Cognitive Biases You Need to Stop Making [Infographic]

#1: Thinking that yelling @ readers through your headlines will encourage them to listen to what you say.

I mean, look @ how shitty Lifehacker is @ Chess: they haven’t captured a single black & they’ve got only a queen left. That’s not e’en possible.

Wild Wild Country: The Jaw-Dropping Story of the Cult Next Door

There was a cult that murdered many people by forcing them to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Shit, there are authentic religious groups that have thrown gay people off buildings & made Creed albums. The only jaw-dropping I’ll be doing to these hippies in saffron robes is yawning.

How to Make a Whole Mess of Fancy Mussels

How ’bout I don’t ’cause that’s a stupid thing to do.

“Mussels are one of those sexy, evocative dishes…”.

Apparently the answer is “Furiously masturbate into it”. Remind me ne’er to go to any dinner party held by… ¿Skillet Lifehacker? God damn it, ¿how many subjects can you guys give bad advice in? I can’t wait till the 1st Health Lifehacker article: “22 Orifices You Need to Stick a Fork in Right Now”.

How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less

Read clickbait headlines.

Why is Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’ set in Japan? We’re not sure either

¿Then why are you fucking writing ’bout it?

¿& who the fuck is Wes Anderson, anyway?

How to Enjoy Fine Dining on a Fast Food Budget

Steal.

How Bill Hader Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Show Business

If the picture is any indication, it’s by becoming Jack Torrence from The Shining.

¿& who the fuck is Bill Hader, anyway?

Is it time to give up on fish oil?

’Nother hard-hitting piece from The New York Times. Yet ’nother “I’m a random nobody, & I’m going to drivel on ’bout my particular ( but also not rare ’nough to be interesting ) life problems as if The New York Times were Livejournal”. ’Cept Livejournal is free. & it has crazier people, so it’s actually better.

Grampa to fish friend: “Hey, ol’ pal: ¿you think I should stop funding the butchery o’ your kind to feed my gluttonous maw?” No wonder that fish looks horrified.

Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use It

Nietzsche: “Um, ¿camera man? My face is up here”.

This “news” is essentially: “Hey, ¿do you remember that Nietzsche existed mo’ than a century ago?”.

“Nietzsche on Meaningless Buzzword, Meaningless Buzzword, & Some Jumble o’ Poetic-Sounding Words that Together Don’t Mean Anything”.

Globalization’s Backlash is Here, at Just the Wrong Time

Mo’ zany economists. This economist can’t e’en pretend that “globalization”, or “trade laws preferential to the rich people who wrote & lobbied for them” ( let’s remember that “strong-arming other countries into accepting US draconian copyright law & patent law based mo’ on how much money you have than what role you had in creating the idea” is defined as “free trade” in the Orwellian world o’ economics ), as somebody actually honest might call it, isn’t harming working class people, so he just says, “Well, it’s too late, anyway” & claims that, anyway, all those Chinese people would’ve become well off & would’ve bought all the stuff Americans are making to balance things out… which is the same bullshit “the market always balances itself out” claim that economists had claimed in the 90s when Paul Baby-Sitters Club Krugman made his brilliant hot dog & bun factory metaphor. It’s almost as if the “market” isn’t run by some magical invisible hand in the sky that ensures karmic justice but is a complex social system full o’ inconsistencies that doesn’t balance out to anything @ all.

Nowhere is there any semblance o’ the scientific method or empirical evidence used in this article — like a striking lot o’ economics works. But I’m sure the book he’s advertised @ the end, The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, is a cool-minded, rigorous work o’ science & not sensationalist fawning o’er some corrupt politicos. ( I do like the use o’ the word “alchemists” for economists, since both are pseudosciences ).

How Kacey Misgraves Found Her Golden Hour

Since I don’t know who the fuck that is, I’m going to wager I don’t care.

There are good reasons for ignoring the news

“We have no self-awareness”. It’s almost as if The Guardian is taunting me with their shittiness now. Fun fact: that’s the same paper bag all The Guardian staff must wear on their face in public to hide the shame that is their buffoonery.

It’s easy when nobody in the news industry produces any actual news.

Teachers and Parent Share Stories From Inside the 'Fortnite' Phenomenon

Maybe if they spent less time sharing stories ’bout their kids that nobody cares ’bout they’d have mo’ time to learn proper style & learn that video game titles aren’t put in quotation marks but italicized. Typing it like that makes you look like an obnoxious idiot who makes quotation fingers when talking ’bout this thing all the hip kiddie-Os are into.

For fuck’s sake, they’re not e’en real quotation marks, but the half-assed flat marks people had to suffice with in ASCII.

‘Grandma’s food’: How changing tastes are killing German restaurants

This is the worst thing to e’er happen in Germany.

A diet guru explains why you should eat dinner at 2pm

[Missing picture, Richard]

& I ’splain why this “guru” can go fuck himself.

“First, there was the change is what we were[ … ] [ emphasis mine ]”. Still in the blurb, & we already find a typo. Keep those standards strong, QZ.

How to Craft A Life You Don’t Need to Escape From

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I feel like the answer to most o’ these clickbait headlines could be, “Go seek help: you have mental problems”.

Also, the Grammar Gestapo in me is amused by the way “a” & “from” are capitalized, but “to” aren’t. It’s almost as if someone tried to emulate the strange pattern o’ headline capitalization without knowing the rules ’hind it.

A Naturalist With a Checkered Past Rediscovered a Long-lost Parrot… Then Things Got

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This isn’t news: this is the beginning o’ an elevator-speech blurb for some wacky airport novel.

&, god damn it, ¿why would you e’er capitalize “with”, but not “lost” there? ¿Why would you e’er think “with” would be mo’ prominent than “lost”? ¿Don’t you guys know why we capitalize certain words & not others? This is why I’m glad so many newspapers are shifting toward the Spanish style o’ only capitalizing the 1st word: that’s harder to fuck up & make look hideous. ¡I mean, look @ what what a hangnail that “With” is!

J.K. Rowling Needs To Stop Messing With Harry Potter

This isn’t news: this is just the Comic Book Guy whining, “They Changed It Now It Sucks”, ’cept rather than keeping it in the bowels o’ usernets, where they belong, like in the 90s, Kotaku is giving them a prominent podium.

The Best Board Games for Kids, According to a Board Game Blogger

This gold-standard advice by Offspring Lifehacker is right up there with “The Best Movie, According to Guy who Never Shuts Up About It @ Work”. Becoming a board game blogger is so prestigious you need to study for almost a decade to get your Ph.D in tabulaludemology.

How the Finnish lifestyle of getting drunk while wearing pants became the new hygeine

It’s better than getting drunk & not wearing pants, as they do in the States…

9 Genius Ways to Fold Clothes to Save Space

& after that you can read, “22 Hobbies You Can Get to Fill the Black Hole that Is Your Meaningless Existence & Stop Worrying ’bout Such Frivilous Shit as whether Your Clothes Don’t Take Up a Li’l Too Much Space — ¿What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?”.

Want to live for ever? Flush out your zombie cells

When I picture The Guardian’s staff, I can only imagine screw-eyed trollish people sitting around, gazing off @ the office tiles, high on peyote till 1 o’ them remembers they have some serious meeting with some business vital to funding their operation, hastily stands up, & tries to smooth o’er their wrinkled business suit & rub their hair into something resembling tidiness as they rush out the building.

He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured.

These choppy sentences in the headline make me think the writer’s got something, too.

I want to give a shout-out to his 5th-grade nephew for this wicked MS-Paint picture, though. That’s exactly how I picture people recently cured o’ schizophrenia & cancer.

Cat Power Is Doing Just Fine, Thanks

I didn’t give a shit ’bout this rando I’ve ne’er heard o’, so thanks to you, too, passive-aggressive headline.

An enemy of envy

I was mo’ interested in the starting snippet o’ the article below the title, “When I heard [ certified rando ] Jerry Saltz say this during his [ thing o’ his I’m plugging ], I immediately got up, write it down on an index card, and pinned it above my desk”. Mr. Saltz then informed him that his anus was bleeding from this writer jamming his head into it so hard. If this was worthy o’ the decisive index card, I think he’s going to need to buy many mo’ packs if he were to accidentally stumble ’pon & read a work o’ actual credible philosophy.

In Praise of Mediocrity

A’least we know that the New York Times lives by this credo.

The Cat Who Could Predict Death

(Laughs). That impressive photo o’ the cat seals the bathos. We need to make a statue o’ that face.

There are too many video games. What now?

Stop buying them. Now let’s move on to the real problems…

Da Story of Da Bears: How an ‘SNL’ Sketch Defined Sports Fandom

Ah, yes, I almost forgot ’bout the vital news article that ’splains a meme to all us squares — in this case, an outdated meme that will switch the roles round, but still make the young shake their head in shame.

Pokémon: The 20-year fad

The article is actually ’bout the opposite: arguing that it’s ridiculous to think Pokémon is just a fad. Good thing nobody I’ve e’er met thinks that, since it is, indeed, ridiculous. I’m glad Polygon used their limited resources to fight gainst such an important strawman they made up in their mind.

A radical idea for reducing inequality deserves more attention

If Karl Marx had named his book this ’stead o’ dusty ol’ “Das Kapital”, he would’ve won the world o’ ideas. Sadly for Marxists, who spend the rest o’ their lives hiding in the shelter o’ their dimly-lit college campuses, that role has been seized by the philosophy o’ waking up @ 7 am every morn & only eating food whose calorie count and carbohydrate % are prime #s.

If this image is any indication, The Economist’s radical idea is for everyone to gamble on pachinko. I can say from experience that that is, indeed, a popular philosophy for bettering the livelihood o’ the working class ’mong the working class. But like communism, it’s just a fantasy — albeit a much mo’ expensive 1. This is why I support communism: it’s a cheaper distraction for the working classes than gambling & alcoholism. Plus, e’en if it wouldn’t make any lasting societal change, I think ’twould be fair ( &, mo’ importantly, entertaining ) to see a working class person take a whack @ a rich guy just a few times. I’d make a joke ’bout a dystopian novel ’bout a corrupt capitalist society that keeps itself sturdy by sacrificing a few rich people a year to let the poor murder them however they want in return for letting the rich stay in control; but I think that’s the role pretensious left-wing intellectuals play in the real world. “I’ll let you exploit me; but let me fantasize ’bout shooting that Soros Jew”.

Look, guys, these Pocket ads have truly worn me down. I had to suffer for them for your entertainment; now you must suffer through my bleak humor for my entertainment.

On brighter topics: we need to demand Konami make a Karl Marx pachinko game. It’s a historical necessity, in honesty.

The Only Story in the World: John Steinbeck on Kindness, Good and Evil, the Wellspring of Good

This is fake news: there are, in fact, a’least quite a few mo’ stories than just 1 in all eternity.

How to write the perfect sentence

These crackas @ The Guardian mix up “for ever” & “forever”, & now they try to tell me what a perfect sentence is.

If the snippet is any indication, they drivel on ’bout nothing — so typical The Guardian content.

How to Help Teenagers Embrace Stress

Certified Word Creator Mezun Mezzanine says that whipping them is always best.

American Weirdness: Observations From an Expat

¡Ha, ha, ha! ¡Americans are disgusting, backward slobs! This may be true, sir; but not only is it not news, I don’t take that shit from someone who thinks “from” deserves to be capitalized in a headline.

How to Live Better, According to Nietzsche

Anyone who has read Nietzsche’s biography knows that Nietzsche is not a good role model for living well.

Need to Find Me? Ask My Ham Man

This is a 100% real headline from the New York Times, the same organization that published the Pentagon Papers. This is 100% scientific proof that God is dead.

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

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Americans have ne’er “practiced democracy” ’cause real democracies don’t have silly electoral college systems, but are actually elected by popular vote. It’s only people ignorant o’ how the US’s electoral system works or idiotic Americans who think “democracy” is “whatever the US electoral system says” who think the US is democratic.

Ignoring that, though, if whoe’er wrote this trite article actually looked @ the data, they would know that voter turnout is ’bout the same level it’s always been this century & that the President’s election better reflects popular will mo’ nowadays than in the past. Americans have ne’er been big voters & have ne’er not looked @ the election in a cynical way. If anything, now people have a reason to care mo’, since now there are actual real ideological differences ’tween the Republicans & Democrats: back as early as the mid 90s, & definitely during the late 1800s, who you preferred was generally based on clan mentality. ( That’s OK, ’cause elections were generally decided by Boss Machines, anyway ).

But we can’t let that get in the way o’ our ol’ bloated pundit full o’ hot air bemoaning the loss o’ the ol’ days when things were idyllic & the average upstanding citizen said “golly” & “swell” as they watched the local negro get lynched.

Li’l Wayne Is Ready For His Comeback

He’s the only 1.

The Startup Whiz Trying to Make Big Business out of Social Philanthropy

We call those “con men”.

On the Sidelines Of Democracy: Exploring Why So Many Americans Don’t Vote

’Cause unlike the people who write these articles, they have real jobs.

Also: the US is not & has ne’er been a democracy, you idiots. Take a history or civics class for once, please — this is high-school shit. You just need to read 1 o’ our wonderful slaveholding founders ranting ’bout how democracy is anarchy, man, or know how electoral colleges work to know this.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a Python convert

Considering the # o’ war criminals who have won Nobel Prizes, the fact that the Nobel Prize Committee’s just an arbitrary group o’ rich people with loud opinions, & the fact that Alfred Nobel himself was gainst the existence o’ an economics Nobel Prize ’cause he ( rightfully ) viewed them all as corporate shills, I think some heathen who prefers a programming language used quite oft for mathematics & data can get a pass. I mean, it’s not like he chose PHP. Honkeys would shoot his ass if he touched that gunk.

The appealing myth of the frugal billionaire

See, now the genius who took this hilariously embarrassing photo o’ Fuckerberg deserves a Nobel Prize for Best Photography. “Huh huh huh. Duh… I made the social mediaz”.

Worries about the rise of the gig economy are mostly overblown

People make fun o’ country bumpkins who claim climate change can’t be real ’cause it snowed once, but self-claimed “intellectuals” don’t blink when “classical liberals” ( too bad it’s “classical” like ham in the back o’ your fridge, not wine ) claim that they saw 3 rich young shitheads go surfboarding, clearly such silly things as economic stability are useless. ¡Surfs up, bro! ¡Let’s catch this wicked boom!

Smartphones Aren’t Ruining Your Eyes

We need a section for “antinews”: bringing up that something isn’t happening. Breaking News: Pigs Still Don’t Fly.

A Saudi Prince’s Quest to Remake the Middle East

The true news is meta: “Journalists who Fashion Themselves as Noble Opponents to Evil ( while, Conveniently, also Claiming to Be Unbiased, which Utterly Contradicts this Goal ) Suck the Dick o’ Murderous Dictators”.

But a’least we got this swanky Photoshop art o’ the Prince raising his hand to ask the teacher to let him go to the bathroom.

In Defense of Elon Musk

“Rich White Person Not Loved by Everyone ’Nough”

Yes, but there’s no defense for this juvenile writing o’ choppy sentences. ¿Do these newspapers outsource their writing to the local Kindergarten?

How the Finnish survive without small talk

¿These fuckers are statistically the happiest people in the world, with some o’ the best health care, educations, & welfare systems in the world, & they don’t have to deal with drunken dipshits rambling ’bout some conspiracy theory they heard ’bout aliens? I don’t think it’s news that they’re surviving.

Small talk is legit just shitty talk. Wasting your time having small talk with people is the equivalent o’ sitting round reading the marketing copy on candy wrappers ’stead o’ reading Shakespeare.

Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her

Yes, you saw that right: The New York Times. ¿Have I mentioned that these are the same organization that released the Pentagon Papers? Remember that next time your douchie elitist moderate friend brags ’bout how smart they are for reading it & not filthy blogs.

Three Writing Rules to Disregard

“#1. Don’t show irrelevant painting o’ Moses on your trite rules for writing advice written by someone who writes like a middle schooler”.

They waste the entire blurb blabbing ’bout how they do, indeed, still support the existence o’ some rules in life. Truly brevity is the soul o’ wit.

Why Americans are suddenly paying $550 per month for new cars

’Cause half o’ them are idiots & the other half are con men — & the whole sum are wastes o’ carbon.

Also, not to be that guy ( fuck it: I love being that guy ), but did they truly need to make their representative o’ the slobbish lowerclass American who chose to impoverish themselves with their fancy transportation without lobbying for themselves a large ’nough negative tax to pay for it like the frugal rich a fat black woman.

The Raisin Situation

The Greatest Generation bemoaned Baby Boomers & Gen X’ers as useless potheads & whiny brats; these generations twist a once-respected newspaper into bemoaning Millenials for not eating ’nough raisins. The Greatest Generation were so right ’bout Boomers & Gen X’ers that they can’t e’en bemoan their kids half-intelligently. “Back in my day we didn’t bitch ’bout you shits not buying ’nough raisins. ¿What the fuck is wrong with you, son?”

How this one font took over the world

It didn’t. Hardly anyone uses Gotham or e’en knows ’bout it. ( Laugh ). That’s like someone writing, “How Ill Niño became the biggest band in the world” or “How Clannad Spelunker took over the world”. ¿What world does this writer live in?

All My JavaScript Is Broken and I Don’t Know Why

You’re a shitty programmer & JavaScript’s a shitty language. There, I solved your issue. ¿Can you start giving me real news ’stead o’ some rando idiot’s whiny problems?

A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace

’Less it’s a séance, I don’t fucking think so.

Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more

I can say from personal experience that disabling Pocket in their Firefox browser would make a vast improvement.

Also, if The Economist wants me to be happy ’bout fewer people committing suicide, ¿do they truly want to pick a stock market trader as their example o’ someone saved from the noble duty o’ committing sepuku after fucking up & losing their family’s mortgage so they could fund the next “disruptive” start-up by some pothead 20-year-ol’ tragic waste o’ human life? Ha, ha, I’m kidding, capitalists — I love you guys. ( I’m kidding — no, I don’t ).

Two Harvard guys based their million-dollar business on a whole lot of nothing

That’s not news; that’s, like, 90% o’ businesses nowadays — including the Washington Post, which makes millions posting articles ’bout insignificant memes. Clearly stories ’bout some hicks scamming a bunch o’ idiots into giving them millions for a trailer is how they will fight the darkness that is clutching our “democracy” that was ne’er democracy — seriously, read a history book, guys, you’re just embarrassing yourselves.

Why are more Americans than ever dying from drug overdoeses?

I would joke that this is obviously preferring to die with dignity than live in pathetic luxury as an American… but I have an inkling that dignity is a foreign concept to The Guardian.

“The growing drugs crisis sweeping across the US is deadlier than gun violence, car crashes or Aids [ sic: Christ, The Guardian can’t e’en spell AIDS correctly — ’less they’re referring to the assistants who helped Jared Fogle child-fuck his way out o’ obesity ], none of which have killed as many Americans…”. This thing that kills mo’ Americans is deadlier. Thank you for your acknowledgement that the laws o’ basic mathematics still continue, The Guardian — this is quite an accomplishment for you.

Toward a More Radical Selfie

This is why communism failed — ’cause, ironically, the most bougie fucks e’er, the French, got their mitts on it & made it frivolous & lame so that now painting with your nose & making up academic terms is “radical” — radically boring. France needs to stop fucking round & go back to slaughtering some monarchs. I’m serious.

Showering Has a Dark, Violent History

“¡Extra! ¡Extra! ¡Smelly Journalist Prepares Article on Evils o’ Showering, with Research & Everything, Just to ’Scuse Their Refusal to Shower!”

I love it when the “news” is fucking ol’s. If I wanted to read the history o’ showering, I have these things called search engines ( but not Google — that shit will just give me mo’ clickbait articles on what time o’ day Certified Groin-Cleaning Experts have empirically proven to make you mo’ likely to be a millionaire ).

Double Feature: “The world has just over a decade to get climate change under control, U.N. scientists say” & “How to Get More Done in Less Time”

¡Sounds like these U.N. scientists need Monday.com!

Fuck “Fiddling while Rome burns”; the phrase should be “Clickbaiting while the world drowns in humanity’s own oily fat”.

She Was Told ’No’ 100 Times. Now This 30-Year-Old Female Founder Runs a $1

¡A whole $! ¡Holy shit! ¡Think o’ the whole gumball she’ll be able to buy! It’s a good thing Entrepreneur made thrifty use o’ their words to include that this entrepreneur was a female &, most shocking, 30-years ol’… which is probably round when most successful entrepreneurs become successful, or a’least way too many to count.

Teens And Teachers Say Fortnite Mobile Is Destroying Some Schools

I thought Pokémon cards & rock & roll already destroyed school fore’er.

Look @ those menacing meme dances. Truly this is our world’s greatest trouble.

19 Great Truths My Grandmother Told Me on Her 90th Birthday

#1: “You’re a shitty photographer. ¡Get that shit out o’ my eye!”.

Theodore Roosevelt on the Cowardice of Cynicism and the Courage to Create

¿Offering idealist gibberish from 19th-century equivalent o’ Sarah Palin who actually did stumble his way into presidency from what everyone assumed was a safely useless vice-president spot o’er the corpse o’ his assassinated predecessor? Check. ¿Quoting Maya Angelou, everyone’s favorite living Hallmark card? Check.

’My whole life has been a lie’: Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish

¿Could there be anything worse than The Guardian melodramatically claiming that their whole life is a lie ’cause some food item doesn’t come from where they think it does?

Swedish Meatballs Are Turkish? ‘My Whole Life Has Been a Lie’

¿How ’bout if they plagiarized the fucking story from The New York Times, — ¡clearly holding the corrupt powers o’ the Swedish Chef to account! — including the same melodramatic “My whole life is a lie” bullshit.

E’en worse: The New York Times outclassed them by actually using true single quotation marks, — ¡& they’re filthy double-quote Americans, too!­ — while The Guardian made due with those half-assed generic flat single quotes like savages. Clearly true single quotes are too bourgeois for our misnationed-meatball-protesting radicals.

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

They didn’t, you fucking loonies. “This is what happens when…”. This is what happens when you have stoners who were dropped on their heads when their own stoned parents were distracted by the 8th solo in a Grateful Dead song writes your articles.

Has Alanis Morissette Made the Most Woke Musical Since ‘Hair’?

No, but there’s mo’ important problems we must address here:

1. Only the kind o’ morons who try to eat their fingers ’cause they think they’re hot dogs calls something “woke” unironically.
2. Hardly anybody has a story ’bout 1st hearing “Jagged Little Pill” ’cause, last time I checked, some singer who sang bubble-gum-pop that sounds like Sean Connery trying to be a sexy girl suddenly writing bitter songs ’bout her breakup with 1 o’ the guys from Full House ( ¿Which 1? ¿Why aren’t we writing ’bout this deeper quandry, New York Times? ) isn’t the fucking moon landing.
3. Everyone knows that Rent is the “wokest” play out there — in all its hipster dumbass glory.

13 Lessons to Make Your Really, Truly Happy. Maybe.

I hope “make horrifying Photoshop edits wherein a leashed dog becomes a floating disembodied head” is near the top o’ the list — ’cause such a task does, indeed, seem like ’twould bring me mighty happiness.

“[…]to see if I might goose my felicity quotient”. I don’t think you’ve quite grasped how English words work.

Is capitalism worth saving?

¿Have you read all o’ these advertisements hard-hitting news articles? As a wise gerbil said, “Push the ‘die’ button, you fucking moron”.

Intermission

Let’s take a break & laugh @ this ad I found months ago for some Christian movie ’bout the Apostle Paul, who in this adaptation seems to be Jesus’s lover based on the way their faces are snuggling. You sure got my butter’s worth, Heyseuss Christopher.

“Their Faith Challenged an Empire”. & now it’s whored out to a newer empire, but with Socrates replaced with fucking Steve Pinker — proof that Christianity is inferior to the Greek gods.

These assholes are so greedy they straight took “paulmovie.com”. So now if someone wants to promote a movie simply called “Paul”, they’re fucked. Thanks a lot, Jesus.

24 hours at my local Dunkin’ Donuts

I thought ’bout making a Twitter account or something called “#notnews”, or however the hip hiphop PHP-to-C++ hashmaptags works in these kiddios’ O(n) efficiencies; but then I discovered such a hashtag was being used by right-wing morons so they could whine ’bout newspapers not sufficiently coddling their self-esteems by pretending they’re not morons. This is proof that rightwingers ruin everything enjoyable.

But, yeah, this rando’s Livejournal post ’bout going down to their “neighborhood Dunkin’”, as the Hammer Bros. hablar in el barrio, is surely riveting news & not a waste o’ precious electricity.

The polarized reactions to Pixar’s ‘Bao’ are rooted in culture

This stark cultural difference is whether or not one gives a shit ’bout families & children, evident by a bunch o’ dumb white people leaving posts saying, “Duh… ¿What’s it mean, man?”. This is less evidence o’ some deep cultural difference ’tween Chinese & westerners & mo’ evidence o’ white people being dumb — hardly a new development.

The importance of high standards: Key takeaways from Jeff Bezos’ latest

Using Amazon as an example o’ “high standards” is like praising the culinary experise o’ a McDonald’s fry cook. The fact that this is Medium, notorious journalistic whorehouse, just raises the irony to a 2nd dimension.

Evidence: the blurb is just “Follow me on Twitter (@parsa_s)”. This won’t be happening.

‘Why are you still here?’: Inside the last Blockbuster in America

Speaking o’ the lower standards o’ Amazon, here’s the Amazon Post posting a not-subtle-attack-@-all gainst a cement-&-mortar media seller for their rude continued existence. You’d think they’d have the decency to realize they’re irrelevant & just give their business o’er to Amazon already.

People love to bash the media for the biases they have, e’en though not having a bias is impossible; but they don’t oft note how this bias is mo’ & mo’ just aiming for that which serves these newspapers’ business interests, whether it be this or demonizing social media ( totally not ’cause it’s a major competitor ). It’s like watching Coca-Cola release a news article ’bout the moral degeneracy o’ Pepsi & pretending that they’re doing it out o’ some noble cause to save “democracy” from “darkness”.

Marissas Mayer Is Still Here

Cool. ¿When can she fuck off & get out o’ the way o’ real news items, since I have no idea who she is & surely don’t care?

The creepiest part o’ a lot o’ these articles is how oft they’re just kiss-ass advertisements for people, as if modern capitalism has devolved back into feudalism & newspapers are just patrons for aristocratic nobles, but with corporate logos replacing family crests — the “Duke o’ York” replaced by the “Duke o’ Yahoo”.

Though, I must say, trading your allegiance from the Google clan to the Yahoo clan sounds ’bout as wise as keeping allegiance with Renly Baratheon.

Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive

¿Truly? ’Cause the US government seems quite capable o’ affording much mo’ expensive military expenses that have no evidence o’ being particularly effective @ making Americans better off or wasting money on inefficient health care systems or allowing some o’ the richest people in the world ’nough tax cuts & loopholes to have no income taxes. Perhaps if students stopped foolishly wasting their money paying back their debts & ’stead used that money to pay for lobbyists, then maybe the US government would find a way to “afford” forgiving their debt.

But, you know, actually trying to help & reward people for actually becoming smarter isn’t nearly as beneficial to society as buying the military shiny aircraft that ne’er gets used. It’s not as if history is saturated with evidence that human development comes primary from educated people & it’s not as if China’s kicking the US’s ass largely ’cause the US’s workplace is unskilled.

Why Brazilians are always late

I think a better question is why the BBC is suddenly racist. Perchance, ¿do you have any theories to trade ’bout why Poles are so bad @ screwing in lightbulbs?

The City of My Birth in India Is Becoming a Climate Casualty. It Didn’t Have to Be.

Considering the only people truly perturbed ’nough by this to want to do anything aren’t powerful ’nough to do anything, I think real life has shown that it did have to be. But I’m sure this will be the article by reasonable moderate liberals that will make the Grinchlike corporate powers’ heart grow 3 sizes & decide that they do actually care how the world turns out decades after their wrinkled bodies are dead.

Question for this writer: acknowledging the empirical evidence that the people in power are usually sociopathic, ¿how effective are appeals to empathy & emotion liable to be? History has shown: ¡not much!

Parents, stop feeling so guilty about TV time

After all, the continued success o’ CNN proves that you don’t need braincells to be successful, so you may as well let their brains rot. ¡Think o’ all the student debt society can’t afford that they would save!

“I’ve never met a parent at ease with the fact that children watch television”. ¿Truly? I’ve ne’er met a parent who was disturbed @ the idea o’ a child possibly watching TV. ¿Does this writer only know Amish parents?

How Criminals Steal $37 Billion a Year from America’s Elderly

It’s like every 1 o’ these articles is a setup for the punchline, “capitalism”.

“Marjorie Jones trusted the man”. You should ne’er trust the man.

Can You Afford to Change Your Career

Obviously I don’t care to waste any time on this article’s trite subject-matter o’ “lifehacks”, but all o’ it on this perturbing photo o’ a thin, flesh-colored dog that looks like a hand puppet wearing a yellow safety hat with a hammer in its mouth.

You Need a Life Strategy Because Extraordinary Lives Don’t Happen by Accident

Strategy #1: save time not reading inane, empty life advice & use that time to actually do things useful.

If I had a $ for every article or book blabbing ’bout how great it is to be “extraordinary”, written by what could pass for a carbon copy o’ a million other generic business advice people, I‘d be rich & I would’ve had this post up mo’ than a year earlier, since I wouldn’t have had to work. That’s probably ’cause people who do what one might call “extraordinary” things are too busy doing them, not talking ’bout potentially doing them.

On the immensely creative illustration: ¿Know what’s extraordinary? Sunsets. That’s something you don’t see every day. Just like how I don’t see a photo o’ a guy staring @ a sunset in every fucking article ’bout living the best life you can masturbating to your shriveled ego. I think these self-help writers have language backward ( for 1, “self-help” is help I don’t need from others, & thus is help I shouldn’t pay anyone else for ): they seem to think “extraordinary” means “thing that everyone else does”.

Epistocracy: a political theorist’s case for letting only the informed vote

I wouldn’t wager much on the advice o’ a so-called “political expert” who is apparently ignorant that there already exists a much better term for this concept — “meritocracy”. & if he truly had political expertise, he’d know that history has consistently shown that “meritocracies” always lead to corrupt aristocracies as being smart doesn’t make you ethical. The public would, ironically, have to be utterly suicidally stupid to give power to people so much smarter than them, as that’s just a guarantee that that leader will be smart ’nough to twist that power into e’en greater power & twist the rules o’ meritocracy toward being biased toward themselves. Brennan might want to look @ such great examples as Soviet Russia & “Communist” China to see where his “epistocracy” will lead, as such people as Lenin, Stalin, & Mao were some o’ the smartest & well-educated people round & had the same great idea that only those with the proper political training should be allowed to make decisions. ( ¡But their scientists were “wrong”, unlike Brennan’s preferred scientists, who are “right”, so decreed by Brennan, so they’re completely different! ). Meanwhile, the happiest, healthiest, stablest, &, ironically, best educated ( smart ’nough to see the ignorance o’ Brennan, yet ’nother casualty o’ the US’s high-quality education systems ) countries are the most democratic countries. I’m sure a work o’ such subtlety & depth as “Against Democracy” have much to say to counteract these empirical facts & is not just a long pundit rant.

Also, I’m not sure if this is Brennan’s fault or Vox’s, but anyone who truly has political expertise would know that constipated-smiling Trump ( ¡There’s that liberal-biased media attacking our Great Leader with their unflattering photography! ) look there didn’t win democratically — he received fewer votes than Clinton.

Facebook Is Testing Its Dating Service. Here’s How It’s Different From Tinder

From the looks o’ this love-strung Fuckerberg with his hand on his heart like he’s acting in a low-budget Shakespearean play, the difference is that while Tinder is ’bout finding a date ’tween 2 various people ( I’m guessing — fuck if I know what “Tinder” is ), the Facebook Dating App will be all ’bout hooking up various people with Fuckerberg himself, a brilliant idea Fuckerberg came up with after his tragic breakup with his last girlfriend, Zelda Pastrami. This is 100% true fact & not libel — it can’t be libel since I’ve been saying this all ’bout somebody named “Fuckerberg”, which isn’t e’en a true person.

How to Motivate Yourself to Exercise Every Morning

¡See? ¡I was right! ¡I was not only right ’bout these fuckers creating a branch site for medical advice, I was right that it’s suicidally terrible! ¡Just look @ that image o’ some woman “exercising” by jumping off a cliff! I would complain, but, honestly, this is just natural selection doing its duty.

“Long before I noticed any benefits of doing burpees every morning[ … ]”. ¿Do I want to know what “burpees” are? Obviously not — which is why nature was nice ’nough to make me too lazy to Google it ( or “DuckDuckGo it”, to be precise, since Mozilla doesn’t want me to use Google ’cause they’re a competitor they’ll sell all my juicy data & I have no reason to bother changing the settings ).

Why Water Is Weird

¿Water is weird? ¿How ’bout the crazy bastards who made a photo o’ someone punching their fist into water? I think humans are the last organism to judge other material as “weird”.

I mean, just look @ this blurb: “One day, frustrated after many hours of meditation and practice, Bruce Lee, still a teenager, went[ … ]”. You don’t see water writing articles ’bout water & then starting it by talking ’bout Bruce Lee & meditation.

Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

I feel gross just coming near this. I can feel the jism splashing on me from the dick-waving contest ’tween edgelord Greenwald, friend o’ bigots just to shock the mainstream, man, with the same intelligence & taste as one who moons people in public, & the wastes o’ oxygen known as the average newspaper pundits. I particularly love the way this article tries to make me feel bad for their friends who call Greenwald a “bully” ’cause he doesn’t suck their dicks, as their coddled upper-middle-class upbringing has accustomed them. Watch these same hypocrites later “bully” the poor for not voting ’cause they have real jobs & don’t have time. Upper-class people need to realize that God’s only purpose for putting them on this world is for people to throw rocks @ them & laugh. They’re certainly not useful for anything else.

This isn’t a news article: it’s ’nother self-promotion piece. It’s a hatchet job on someone who makes fun o’ them done purely so people will not listen to these mean voices & keep loving good ol’ New Yorker. If these newspapers think I’m going to pay a subscription so they can keep giving me the literary equivalent o’ them furiously masturbating while they cry to themselves in front o’ my ( & the wide public’s ) face like some has-been celebrity desperate for attention, think ’gain. I don’t give a fuck ’bout Greenwald, & I certainly don’t give a fuck ’bout the New Yorker’s inability to accept that somebody doesn’t like them. Get o’er your fucking selves. Maybe if you spent the effort writing this drivel on actual significant news, people would actually take you seriously.

Donuts Are Better For You Than Muffins

Lifehacker does more o’ the Lord’s Darwinian work by leading their braindead readers toward early deaths.

What’s driving Elon Musk?

Not those crazy space cars he keeps yammering ’bout, yuck yuck gross.

Rick Owens Is Still Out There

GQ turns into America’s Most Wanted.

The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow

I think I once quipped that ol’-school communists were quaint in how they complained ’bout the horrors o’ selling one’s craftwork as lifeless commodities when nowadays capitalism steers people toward selling themselves as commodities, as living logos. I could find a way to tolerate this if it went the other way, too, & scientists found a way to make the Monopoly man or Chester Cheeto come to life — ¡then capitalism would be awesome!

&, no, I have no idea who Gwyneth Paltrow is &, shocking as it may seem, I also don’t care. I’m sure she has done some truly vital work that will lead to the next big economic revolution & isn’t just some “social media influencer” or “con artist” — whatever they call them nowadays.

Bo Burnham’s Age of Anxiety

Bo Burnham is the only milennial to have anxiety. It’s his age.

I made the mistake o’ looking up who this rando is so I could be sure that previous joke was accurate & found out he started out as a YouTube celebrity. So he legit is a useless “social media influencer” & I can safely forget his existence within minutes o’ writing this sentence.

This Story Has Already Stressed Ryan Reynolds Out

“¡Ryan Reynolds is a useless white person! ¡Isn’t it great that the New York Times is wasting a whole news article on him & not people who actually put effort into doing useful work!”. It’s no surprise: the mediocre are drawn to the mediocre like flies to shit.

¿Wasn’t the obsession o’ useless celebrities 1 o’ the main reasons people said TV rotted people’s brains? ¿So how are newspapers like the New York Times or the New Yorker any different?

Inside Nintendo’s secretive creative process

“Regurgitate the same shit we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, but worse, so we can constantly remind people that we were great in the 80s & early 90s & are fucking has-beens now”.

I’m surprised The Guardian’s praising Nintendo, considering their terrible green policies. The revolution is stifled not by violence, but by the irresistible cuteness o’ corporate mascot, Pikachu.

Is promoting vegetarianism a form of colonialism?

No, & just in case you ask, it also isn’t a brand o’ T-shirt or 8th century philosophy. I can’t wait till QZ’s next hard-hitting debate: “¿Is health care reform a color o’ drapery?”.

The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’

I can just imagine America’s evil o’erlord, Hairpiece, raising his fist up as he reads the audacious “The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’”. If the New York Times didn’t receive a Pulitzer for this hard-hitting piece, then there is no justice.

Actually, there’s no justice regardless, so ne’ermind.

Why you might want to wrap your car key fob in foil

’Cause you’re an inbred moron. I’m glad USA Today has a clear vantage o’ whom their main audience is.

How to Rinse Your Recyclables Without Wasting Water

“We told you to rinse your recyclables. ‘But what about the wasted water?’ you asked. So we asked some scientists”. & they told you to fuck off & quit distracting them from real problems. If their cheeto-fingered fanbase stopped buying so many anime figurines & filled their whole fucking room with the Amazon boxes maybe they wouldn’t have this problem.

About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

It can teach us just as much as eastern philosophy: nothing — which is, as it turns out, the entirety o’ The Guardian’s knowledgebase.

40 Years of Chronicling the Unnoticed

“40 Years o’ Writing ’Bout Useless White People ’Cause the New York Times Hates their Readers”.

“‘Don’t you have better things to do than watch me vacuum apartments?’ wondered a cleaning woman I spent some time tagging along with”. ¡Ha ha ha! ¡Nothing’s wackier than some creepy ol’ fuck staring @ his probably-poor-&-desperate cleaning lady lustily!

Disposable America

“A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America”. ¿Who needs serious philosophies that deal with real-world problems in concrete ways when you can have these o’erfed ditzes pontificating ’bout fucking straws. I would agree that America is disposable, but thanks to its nuclear power, it’s mo’ accurate to call it indisposable radioactive waste.

Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism

Unlike The Atlantic, the same geniuses who think ads for alien-worshipping cults count as “news”. ( ¡Ne’er live it down! ).

Like the Greenwald article before, this is pure business propaganda, like Coke criticizing Pepsi for not “understanding” cola. All that newspapers like The Atlantic know ’bout news is that Facebook is dangerous competition to them, so they, in all their integrity, puke out propaganda pieces that their viewers couldn’t give 2 fucks ’bout with the transparency o’ a Republic politician sucking an oil executive’s dick. It’s clear that “journalism” today is nothing but “advertisements” that only succeed so long as they make the papers who puke them out money. So, no, I would say that the problem for these newspapers is that Facebook knows “journalism” all too well.

Does Facebook Need a Constitution?

No, but I’m going to need sleeping pills to quell the nightmares this Photoshop crime gainst eyes will cause.

Alternate headline: “Pot Calls the Kettle Black ’Gain”. ¿Where’s the Constitution for NY Mag, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic?

’Sides, considering the founding fathers were all racist, sexist bumpkins with backward views who believed in superstitions like bleeding as medicine, I fail to see how a constitution would fix Facebook’s problems. I can’t wait for such noble rules that Facebook won’t follow, anyway, as “Likes by black Facebook users only count as 3/5ths o’ a like”.

Capitalism is unfolding exactly as Karl Marx predicted

Nowhere in Das Kapital does ol’ ¡Rrring! ¡Bing! Karlos Marukasu say anything ’bout our most potent example o’ the decadent nadir o’ capitalism: the cancer o’ clickbait article ads crowding out genuine art. So clearly Marx was wrong in many ways: he totally understated the lows capitalism could go to.

In fact, this photo shows the exact ironic horror that is capitalism: a poor brown-skinned worker probably making less than minimum wage under the table being forced to shiny these big portraits o’ Karl Marx’s decapitated beard & some other bearded communist that wasn’t sexy ’nough for anyone to remember — all for a bunch o’ rich useless bougies to pontificate ’bout for a second before their mind wanders toward some other opiate fed to them by the next headline that crowds their minds in the anarchic cesspool known as social media.

Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

’Cause they’re lazy hacks who put only the minimum effort necessary to trick the mindless masses into handing them their money. It’s certainly not, as these narcissist hacks try to insinuate, ’cause the “tragedy” o’ the absolute boredom that is these Turing failures’ lives is e’en a crumb as interesting as they think they are.

¿Don’t believe me? Actual ( grammatically flawed ) line from this article: “You think this is dull? Knausgaard seems to ask. What about me? I have to live it and write it”. Clearly this is the only snowflake on earth to endure the hardship o’ slowly making reheated lefto’ers without any other thoughts, so surely ’nother dozen stories ’bout such will stand out & infect people’s memories just as well as Tolkien.

Writing books ’bout the ordinary lives o’ ordinary people has been done since the early 20th century — & much better, too. These clowns’ drivel doesn’t e’en come close to Joyce, Woolf, Chekov, or Ellison.

Stephen A. Smith Won’t Stop Talking

To be fair, neither does the New Yorker, which is just as brain-harmingly unfortunate.

I Watched ’The Simpsons’ for the First Time and I Couldn’t Stand It

I think I’ve mentioned in my many articles shitting on Ocarina of Time — which is seriously mediocre & lacks any artistic merit — how much I hate self-absorbed hysterics who be all like “¡Ooo! ¡I’m giving an unpopular opinion! ¡Bring the pitchforks!”, when the most likely response from the majority is nothing since nobody fucking cares ’bout you or Vice, which is also mediocre & lacks artistic merit.

Complaining ’bout The Simpsons not being funny is like complaining ’bout I Love Lucy not being funny or someone in the 2100s, after capitalism finally collapses & is replaced by Englesist Magical Socialist Paradise criticizing Vice as advertisement trash for upper-middle-class parasites. They’re all right, but unfair: 90s people were savages & had no taste.

I Faced Off Against the World’s Best Chess Player. You Will Totally Believe What Happened Next.

If this caption is any indication, it’s that the world’s best chess player also won the Guinness Record for biggest shit-eating grin.

“UNITED NATIONS — I nearly deleted the email.” ¡Suspense!

Nobody Trusts Facebook. Twitter Is a Hot Mess. What Is Snapchat Doing?

I think a better question is what this photo o’ a guy who looks like a serial killer in front o’ a green background is doing ’bove this article. I guess this is the CEO — 1 hour after waking up with a hango’er.

Redirecting

( Laughs ). The Guardian & Pocket are such fuck-ups that The Guardian sent an error page to Pocket & Pocket just accepted it. That’s like if somebody sent into The Guardian a photo o’ their asshole & The Guardian just published it as is. Ne’er stop pushing the bar to its lowest limit, Guardian.

America Soured on My Multiracial Family

“The US is still infected with racism & water is still wet. News @ 11”.

I’m sure all the racists who voted for Hairpiece & his ilk will read this article & take it to heart, so I’m sure it’ll accomplish much. @ the very least, we can be sure that plenty o’ middle-class ditzes will feel good ’bout their own “lack o’ racism”, only to 2 days later complain ’bout how Affirmative Action is unfair & the black populace should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Free Cash, No Strings Attached

Slate sees all this other sluttish ( thanks, Shakespeare ) trash the New York Times & the Atlantic puke out & says, “Hold my drink”. @ this point these newspapers ought to just write stories ’bout whether some rando is the true father o’ some lowerclass pregnant hick & have articles ’bout some woman showing off her tits to win Jerry beads ( O wait — The Sun already does that, pretty much ).

Psychology Itself Is Under Scrutiny

Tonight Psychology shall be played by the lead singer o’ your favorite grunge band.

Meanwhile, economics continues to stumble round in irrelevancy in their blissful lack o’ self-awareness.

Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)

’Cause nobody likes any o’ them & the unwashed masses have become so fucked by the rich that e’en their thick skulls have realized they should become politically active, but are also too soft to have a coherent strategy for fixing things, so they, as masses do, go in wild different directions while the useless classes tut tut & contribute to earth-choking climate change by typing these useless articles.

I thought ’twas obvious, NYT.

Phishing Is the Internet’s Most Successful Con

I think Google & Facebook’s stocks would show that stealing people’s private info & selling it to advertisers is a far mo’ successful con.

Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

Maybe ’cause those who are prosperous waste that prosperity on making inane photos o’ frowny faces in pennies & quarters & then rail ’bout how we can’t afford to raise taxes to feed the pobres.

Nine Ways You’re Cooking Pasta Wrong

¿What is this, Communist China? I have the right to freedom o’ choice, & thus any way I cook pasta is, tautologically, a rational economic choice, e’en if it gives me E. coli, Bloomberg.

The Critic Whose Olive Garden Review Went Viral Remembers How Anthony Bourdain Spoke Up

r/WarholWasRight

“‘The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was […]’” This is right up there with the 10 Amendments o’ things children should be memorizing in school.

Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

¿Why bother? The New Donk Times offers a just-as-good view.

How everything on the internet became clickbait

In fairness, The Outline is surely an authority on the subject.

“Remember Yanny vs. Laurel?”. No, & I’d like to keep it that way. I’m glad to hear it’s “some science thing”, tho. Special credit to the 1st graders who wrote this article.

Yayoi Kusama: the world’s favourite artist?

Definitely. ¿Picasso? ¿Da Vinci? Hacks. ¿Osamu Tezuka? ¡Phhh! ¿What has that fool accomplished? No, this random person I’ve literally just heard o’ now is definitely the most renowned artist.

Why I Lied to Everyone in High School About Knowing Karate

A better question is why you thought the wide adult world would give a shit ’bout some frivolous thing you did in high school. ¿Are these news articles or diary entries? I can’t wait till tomorrow’s hard-hitting piece, “Why I Pooped My Pants in College”.

When is a nation not a nation? Somaliland’s dream of independence

When it’s not militarily powerful ’nough to defend its independent status. ¿What do you think is the reason? ¿Not ’nough middle-class liberals care-stared ’nough?

I Learned I Have Sleep Apnea. It’s a More Serious Problem Than Many People Realize

Diary entries are not news.

“Now I am afflicted with a problem, so now I consider it important”.

Firefox Is Back. It’s Time to Give It a Try.

Subtle, Mozilla.

Welcome to Powder Mountain — a utopian club for the millennial elite

Burn it to the ground.

In The Guardian’s defense, they seem to share my utter disdain @ this mystic cult for the rich. It’s clear they made this article in support for Proposition 71, a law that would deem any rich person moronic ’nough to waste their money on this garbage objectively proven beyond doubt too stupid to have earned their money in any meritorious way &, mo’ importantly, too dumb to handle money, & would redistribute all their money toward actually useful things & people, like curing the climate change wrought by our O-zone’s destruction caused by all these blowhards’ hot air.

What 1,147 Men Think About #MeToo: A Glamour x GQ Survey

Asking men’s opinion on criticisms gainst them fucking o’er women ( literally ) is like asking the Chinese President’s opinion on whether or not he’s corrupt.

Memes Are Becoming Harder to Monetize

Good. Maybe then writers will actually have to have creativity & skill & hacks like the Atlantic will be bankrupt & homeless, like they deserve.

Here’s How to Pick a Perfect Melon Every Time

How ’bout we fix the gaping hole that is your reason for existing that would cause you to fret o’er frivilous shit like whether the melon you picked @ the store is “perfect”.

¡For fuck’s sake, “Self.com”! — ¡that photo isn’t e’en o’ melons but watermelons! ¡They’re totally different things! That’s like calling grapenuts just “grapes”.

Everything You Fight Has Power Over you. Everything You Accept Doesn’t

See, it’s clever ’cause it’s obviously wrong — by definition, if you accept something, you allow it to have power o’er you. In truth, this is just romanticized nihilism: you have no power, so just pretend that everything that happens is what you wanted, anyway. This is a great philosophy if you’re the kind o’ impotent who reads Medium articles & will ne’er do anything useful.

& we have 1 “you” lowercase, but not any o’ the others. If I’ve learned anything from these news articles it’s that there are a lot o’ editors who are bad @ editing.

Friends and Enemies: On Slogan Tees

Genius plan: now men have a ’scuse to stare @ women’s tits & pretend they’re feminists for it.

Fifteen years ago, Reebook and Adidas wanted him badly — so how exactly did LeBron James end

He died by choking on that shoe he’s just starting to eat in this photo.

Life-Changing Lessons in How to Pack Right for Travel

“I feel bad for most people I see in airports”. The kind o’ person who has their life changed by learning how to pack clothes better has no right feeling bad for anyone else — they are truly the lowest o’ lifeforms. Fucking flies feel bad for these people. “Man, we may eat shit & die after a couple days; but a’least we don’t dedicate our lives to folding clothes perfectly”.

There’s no escaping Drake on the internet

( Laughs ). This is the best photo. Look @ him hug those trophies to himself like a momma cat her kittens. Drake will bite you if you try touching 1 o’ his trophies. They’re his.

JS hoisting by example

Featuring photo o’ cat with constipated face.

Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me

Typical Atlantic, bragging ’bout their lack o’ usefulness ’gain.

Trump Has Changed How Teens View the News

“Everyone who doesn’t love us are filthy Trump-lovers who stupidly worship arbitrary memes, as opposed to rational people, who worship arbitrary traditions — effectively, ol’ memes — like nationalism or the Constitution”. I just realized that modern news has the mentality o’ butthurt webcomic creators like that guy who made So You Want to Be a Cartoonist: don’t waste your effort actually making good work to try & convince people to buy your work when you can just write a bunch o’ propaganda pieces whining ’bout how everyone who criticizes your work are evil.

The outrageous plan to haul icebergs to Africa

It’s outrageous to move ice from a place with plenty o’ ice to a place that could actually use ice or water. That’s ’bout as outrageous as that plan to haul Chinese tea to the US in return for American corn — we call this crazy idea “trade”, & it’s quite swell if you like your countries to have both corn & tea.

The only thing shocking ’bout this is the idea o’ white people actually giving stuff to Africa, as opposed to their typical strategy o’ taking stuff ( & people ) from Africa.

My 84-Hear Old Neighbor Has The Only Good NBA Takes

Out o’ all the clickholish articles in Pocket, this is the clickholiest. Truly, news has gone dada.

The Trouble With Johnny Depp

If this illustration is any indication, Depp’s real trouble is that he’s transforming into Atilla the Hun.

How to Talk to Little Kids

I can’t blame this poor li’l child for being so frightened @ the thought o’ some goober from Lifehacker coming to talk to them. That’s the most criminal thing: Lifehacker knows their advice is harmful to children, people’s health, & people’s good taste, but still give it out.

How Hunger Pangs Can Make Nice People ’Hangry’

Fun fact: scientists have objectively proven that NPR using the word ‘hangry’ means a loving, perfect god cannot possibly exist.

I think liberals & conservatives should make a bipartisan compromise on this: conservatives should defund NPR & let it die, but only if liberals can forcibly shut down all private media. Everyone wins.

The US has a 2.5 billion-pound surplus of meat. Let’s try to visualize that.

Let’s not ’cause it’s disgusting, just like Americans are.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty these days. So here’s a comforting thought: The United States of America will not run out…”. Yes, what keeps me getting out o’ bed every morn is the knowledge that Americans will ne’er run out o’ corpses to devour to keep themselves fat. Truly this is a Marxmas miracle.

The Glory of Otis, Fattest of the Fat Bears

See, now here’s something that actually soothes me: photos o’ fat bears. What a majestic sight.

Distracted? Work harder!

“Trouble focusing could just mean that your work isn’t complex enough, and that there isn’t enough of it”. Or, you know, I could have ADD or some other mental problem. ¿But who needs to talk to a psychologist or someone who actually knows true science when I could listen to a “productivity consultant”? I’m sure they’ve studied for years, writing many peer-reviewed theses.

Why Public Transporation Works Better Outside the U.S.

Pretty much every question ’long the lines o’ “Why [BLANK] works better outside the US” can be answered with a simple “Americans are helplessly incompetent”. You didn’t have to write so many articles to rub it on — tho I could see why you’d want to.

Hallucinations Are Everywhere

Yeah, that’s what happens when you’re up past midnight typing shitty jokes ’bout shitty clickbait articles.

The epic rise and fall of the name Heather

This is right up there with that other vital news story, “The epic rise & fall o’ my interest in Animal Crossing: New Horizons”.

“When people think of endangered species, they tend to think of the giant panda, the blue whale, or maybe the snow leopard”. Maybe that’s ’cause those are real living creatures & not fucking names, you asshole.

Ethan Hawke Is Still Taking Ethan Hawke Seriously

He’s the only 1.

How One of Hitler’s Favorite Works of Art Got Stolen—Twice

The only thing worse than the fact that a man butchered mo’ than 12 million people & tried to annihilate entire races o’ people is that there was a man who did that & dumb fanboys who give a shit ’bout their favorite art — which, knowing what an edgelord Hitler was, was probably a Doom mod that takes place in a synagogue.

Why You Should Let Your Kid Be Annoyingly Repetitive

I mean, if Lifehacker’s allowed to for so long, it’s only fair that your li’l shits get to, too.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist sold his medal for $765,000 to pay medical bills

This is genuinely surprising: I can’t believe a Nobel Prize would sell for so much. I’d expect it to go for maybe… $10.

Should Art Be a Battleground for Social Justice?

I think a better question is, after millenia o’ art being used as a battleground for social justice, going all the way back to the oldest o’ religious works, ¿are there truly people moronic ’nough to think that art shouldn’t have morals in them? Before this whiny fucker was e’en born George Orwell had been saying that all art is political; but sure, only now has that changed. & I’m sure this guy’s the only one to e’er have to pick up his dog’s shit when he takes it on walks, too. ( I’m kidding — this is kind o’ degenerate filth who just leaves the dog shit on someone else’s lawn. )

Man, I’m so sad I didn’t pay for a New York Times subscription. ¿How else will I hear some Boomer-ass fuck whine ’bout the kids these days & their YouTubes? O wait — I can just go to an ol’ folks home.

“The civilized dinner party is probably over — even when you’re dining with friends. Everything means too much now. Everything. Our politics, obviously”.

“¡If I can’t rant ’bout the negroes @ dinner any mo’, then truly civilization is doomed!”.

Throw Your Children’s Art Away

“It’s shit, anyway”.

You laugh @ this spiteful advice, but these brave souls are saving your children from a fate worse than death: being a webcomic artist. They may be drawing a face with curly hair now; but 12 years from now they’ll be drawing nothing but misshapen anthropomorphic fox tits.

Was Aaron Sorkin Right About the Internet?

No, ’cause just ’cause he’s loud doesn’t mean this coke addict has any idea what he’s talking ’bout, no different from that living helium pump / pill-poppper he took after, Rush Limbaugh.

My favorite out o’ his long list o’ catchphrases this journalist has punished the reader with was, “From time to time I’ll read some of the comments under stories … to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting”. See, it’s funny, ’cause Sorkin is such an uneducated druggie that he doesn’t know that the Klan existed centuries before the internet &, in fact, had a lot mo’ power back then, too.

My response now: Sorko really called the whole imminent-rise-of-white-nationalism thing, and we should have listened to him.

I love how this journalist reveals that they’re e’en mo’ ignorant ’bout the internet than the guy whose only experience with it is making up strawman characters who use it by their lack o’ awareness that white supremacy was a thing on the internet long before Hairpiece turned it into a meme.

This journalist also reveals themselves to be a living offensive stereotype by concluding essentially that, “tho Sorkin was right [ sic ], but he sure was mean ’bout it…” — ’cause moderate liberals are such useless tools that they reject or accept an opinion based purely on how politely it’s stated. This is why these same hypocritical clowns eat up white supremacy when it’s tied up in a bow o’ pseudoacademics & given a nice name like “The Bell Curve”.

What Sorkin was “right” ’bout was that the internet is bad ’cause it’s speeding up his inevitable irrelevancy it lets everyone get a voice, when only TV-show writers who have no political or historical expertise should be heard. He proves this with his patented theorem o’ having fictional Mary Sue characters that look like how he wishes he looked declare it in multi-minute long unsufferable speeches & then having fictional audiences applaud. & the sad thing is that it worked, as now this idiotic journalist has wasted precious electricity regurgitating opinions no mo’ profound than my hick neighbor & now the joke’s on me, ’cause now I’m degrading myself by answering it. This is what Pocket does to you.

You know what, I take back what I say: Sorkin was right — the internet is bad, burn it down. I mean, it has Sorkin & American journalism on it, & we all know what mindless trash that is.

But, seriously, Sorkin: Republicans have ne’er been honorable or civil, you fucking tool; they’ve kept on fucking that rat since the 70s.

Buying frozen fish isn’t what it used to be. Here’s what you need to know

What I need to know is why article headlines have gone from being so obsessed with being punchy that they used to abandon helper verbs, but now they just add extraneous sentences that could apply to any article. I can’t wait till the sequel: “Picking your car color isn’t as easy as it used to be. Here is a newspaper article that you read to learn information ’bout the real world”.

Ever felt jealous of a Friend’s Achievement? Here’s How to Get Around It

Rat poison.

I do agree with the expression on that middle guy’s face, tho — I do that in reaction to every New York Times article I run into.

I’m Sorry to Report Instagram Is Bad Now

The good news is that BuzzFeed has always been shit — so some things to last fore’er. Just like AIDS — or “Aids”, as The Guardian spells it.

You walked into that 1, guys.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about this any more than you do”. Then don’t. Clearly this amateur’s ne’er heard the age-ol’ writing advice: starting a work by apologizing for the work being shitty does not make the rest o’ the work no longer shitty.

The Western alliance is in trouble

O shit: Kefka moved the Warring Triad.

I would forgive The Economist for every milquetoast simplistic moderate laissy libertarian pap they’ve spewed if they began speaking o’ the pre-Trump era as the “World o’ Balance” & the post-Trump era as the “World o’ Ruin”.

Why Whales Got So Big

I think a better question is why humanity has to not only drive them near extinction, but now rub pepper in the wound ( ¿is that as painful as salt? ) by fat-shaming them.

Wall Street looks overvalued

That’s not news: they’ve always been scamming people into thinking they’re valuable for centuries.

Stephen Malkmus on How to Be a Useful Human

Step 1: Write articles ’bout serious issues, not random rich white people nobody’s heard o’.

Yes, Adults Can Have Chocolate for Breakfast. Really.

Gee, thanks for the permission, New York Times. I had no idea you became world dictator.

Why South Asia’s majorities act like persecuted minorities

Presumably the same reason white people do: they’re narcissists.

Why new tax rules make Roth accounts better than ever

I love how the photo shows a young couple sitting in front o’ large stacks o’ cash sitting on their table — you know, ’cause normal rich people just carry round large stacks o’ cash & don’t have these things called bank accounts. Nothing gets me in the mood for reading ’bout tax rules & Roth accounts like a couple whose Roth account exists simply to launder the money they gained, presumably, thru illegal drug sales or human trafficking.

I gave up my IBM job to become an organic farmer—and learned a bitter truth

Let me guess: ¿was that bitter truth that pretending to be 3rd-world worker is far mo’ miserable than a cosy, o’erpaid white-collar job sitting round typing out unit tests? ¡You don’t say!

This Is What Record-Low Unemployment Looks Like in America

I’m kinda glad I waited years after I compiled these together, during a country-wide quarantine due to “¡My Corona!” & race riots, ’cause articles like these are much funnier in hindsight. It’s like a parody o’ all those dopey “This is what peaceful protests look like” glurge, but gainst our quarantine-inflicted mass unemployment.

Also, I love how this article’s illustration implies that record-low unemployment looks like a ghost city with not a soul round. No, that’s what quarantine looks like — psyche: Americans don’t obey quarantine. If they’ll give themselves heart disease just to eat McDonalds, they’ll certainly risk a deadly disease to hang out on the beach during the summer.

How the Bernie Wing Won the Democratic Primaries

¿See what I mean ’bout these articles being much funnier years later? This is right up there with all those morons who wrote “20 Minutes into the Future” stories ’bout the glorious Hillary Clinton presidency.

5 Minimalist YouTubers Who Will Inspire You to Throw Everything Out

Thinking ’bout a species as insignificant as “minimalist YouTubers” would, indeed, make me want to throw everything out with a good ol’ fashioned gunshot to my own temple, since that would mean I have nothing left to live for.

I love how 80% o’ Pocket articles exist purely to remind people how pathetic they are. I almost feel as if Pocket is run by a subtle supervillain conspiring to drive up suicide rates out o’ pure venomous bitterness.

What Happens When ‘the Justin Bieber of Food’ Grows Up

He realizes how hollow his existence is & becomes alcoholic like most 30-year-ol’ fry cooks.

Bomani Jones Has a Funny Joke for You

It better be the funniest fucking thing in the world to deserve its own news article.

Bomani Babatunde Jones was born in Atlanta to an economist mother and a political scientist father. Bomani means “warrior,” and his first two names are a

What a laugh riot.

Henry and Baloo: Dog and cat travel companions gain cult following

Enlightened people like to mock ol’-school religions like the Abrahamic religions; but the kind o’ inane trash our money-fetish capitalistic world shovels @ us every day makes me appreciate how much less stupid those ol’ religions were. A’least people back then didn’t worship a dog who wears a cat on their head like a hat.

11 Reasons You Might Be Tired, Even After Sleeping Well

’Cause I’m reading boring shit like this.

Drake Is Too Big to Fail

Cool. I can’t wait for the federal government to give him millions o’ tax $ while whining ’bout how they can’t afford to pay social security or forgive student loans.

Suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder? Try Forest Bathing

¿How ’bout I just go to a forest, something I could’ve always done, & not just make up a stupidly pretentious term for doing so?

China’s radical plan to limit populations of Beijing and Shanghai

¡Sounds like Lottery Time!

The Guardian truly has a thirst for culling the herd. I’d be fine if they were put @ the top o’ the list, ’cause let’s be honest here ’bout who’s the most vital & who’s the least.

This Delightful Christopher Robin Trailer Will Relieve Some of Your Existential Dread, At Least

No, if that illustration is from the trailer, it will ensure I can ne’er sleep ’gain for fear o’ the nightmares it’ll bring.

Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill?

If we e’er develop a time machine I think 1 o’ the 1st things we do is find every one o’ these hypocritical whiners complaining ’bout how “shrill” the modern world is & send them back to a time when you could literally be imprisoned or executed for straying from the narrow dominant ideology & we’ll see how much they like it better.

’Cause nothing’s “manlier” than bitching ’bout the kids these days.

A record number of folks age 85 and older are working. Here’s what they’re doing.

Wishing they were dead.

My favorite genre o’ economic analysis is economists getting off to the misery o’ the proletariat.

When do you know you’re old enough to die? Barbara Ehrenreich has some

With that look o’ pure despondency on her face, I’m going to presume this cut-off headline ends with “cyanide tablets”.

But I saved the best for last:

Waking up early won’t change your life—but it’s awesome for capitalism

If I could choose 1 thing from the internet to show Martians or people centuries in the future to make them understand 2010s internet, it would be this article with this unrelated photo o’ cats. Thank you QZ for finally doing good work.

Now, I had to finally dig into Firefox’s configuration so I could get rid o’ Pocket, ’cause ’twas legit making me too depressed with the uselessness o’ humanity that it flaunted — ¡What a relief it is to see a clean search bar after carrying such a weight for so many months!

Now sing it with me:

Actually, a mo’ fitting song is this nonsense I crapped up as a break from all this trash: