Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

[Nintex]

 many people are saying

[Ribosome]

[benji]

[benji]

[Besticus Maximus]

It's a lot of money to go to a shit university filled with nincompoops in a land where you can buy your doctor degree for fifty bucks when your dad and brothers will just think you're one of them book sissies anyway

[HaughtyFrank]

[Alpacx]

[Nintex]

and the setting is Japan. Another wasted opportunity.

[HaughtyFrank]

The Forza devs are arguably lucky that no one really expects racing games to evolve beyond new setting and racetrack. Like they're fine games but at this point they're very conveyor belt made.

[benji]

100+K likes:

[benji]

https://thefreemanmag.substack.com/p/artist-vs-audience

There’s a scene in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the novel by Otessa Moshfegh, where the protagonist takes a dump on a piece of modern art. That’s not a euphemism: she literally does this, defecating in the middle of an installation at the avant-garde gallery where she works.

This moment represents a turning point for the nameless heroine, a final conscious act of rebellion before she embarks on a project to spend the entire next year sleeping—and sleepwalking—in a dissociative state brought on by an increasingly potent cocktail of mood-altering drugs. It is also extremely funny. But—and this is crucial—the protagonist doesn’t see it as such, for the same reasons American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman wouldn’t understand why you keep giggling when he’s monologuing about Huey Lewis in between committing murders. Like any good satire, Moshfegh’s novel stays cool and earnest within its own narrative framework, always holding back from the sort of self-indulgent absurdity that would tip it over into farce.

As such—and also like any good satire—the book attracted a number of readers who took it so literally, and so seriously, that they not only completely missed the joke but would have been horrified to learn that Moshfegh was making one. Some of them believed it was transcendent, a brave and stunning work of liberation for broken women everywhere which (as one representative review put it) could “transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong.” Others, including a professional critic for the Los Angeles Review of Books, treated the book’s insouciance like a moral flaw rather than intentional feature. “Most people in the United States can’t afford to live alone as the narrator does, and many more can’t afford the necessities of life, even while employed and working,” she wrote, citing statistics from the United Way before arguing that the story “makes light of people who truly experience life-changing conditions that make self care difficult or impossible.”

But the second type of misunderstanding, and this is much more common, is that you meant one thing, and you wrote that thing—but your work has now reached a reader who wasn’t interested in that thing. He’s interested in a different thing. He wanted you to write a different thing. A different thing is what he would have written; a different thing is what he wants to talk about.

Most importantly, the fact that you wrote that thing and not a different thing makes him very uncomfortable.

More common, and more frustrating, because whose fault is this? Nobody’s, really. It isn’t even a misunderstanding so much as a fundamental hazard of creating written work in a place where anyone can see and comment on it—and particularly of writing that refuses to dumb itself down to a lower common denominator of legibility in order to indulge in subtext, or irony, or complexity, or ambivalence. Every expressed idea, even one as brief as a tweet, has an intended audience of people who will get it. But in order to find that audience, the idea must necessarily pass in front of a second, much larger group of people for whom it was not intended. People who don’t get it. People who don’t like it. People who are outraged, actually, that they had to encounter this idea at all, and who resent the hell out of whoever left it in the middle of the discourse for them to trip over.

In March 2024, the literary magazine Guernica published “From the Edges of a Broken World,” a portrait of Israeli life in the wake of the October 7 attacks by writer and translator Joanna Chen. It was a beautiful essay: lyrical, searing, and frank in its depictions of the author’s horror at the violence inflicted both on Israel by Hamas and by Israel on Gaza. It couldn’t have been easy to write; it was not easy to read. And while the piece found its intended audience, it also found a much larger, much louder audience of people for whom it was not intended: people who not only didn’t want to read it, but wanted it not to exist.

In her essay, Chen recounted a conversation with a friend, a woman whose children are terrified by the sound of bombs dropping across the border in Gaza. “I tell them these are good booms,” the friend says. It was those two words, “good booms,” that people seized on, with an anti-intellectual fervor that would have been funny if not for its profoundly disturbing implications about the state of conformism in the literary world. According to Chen’s critics—all of whom were highly literate people, many of whom either wrote books or wrote about them for a living—“good booms” could only be interpreted as a representation of the author’s own feelings about Israel’s bombing of Gaza. She thought the booms were good, because she thought the bombs were good, because she wanted Palestinian children to die.

If asked, these people would have unanimously proclaimed that this was Chen’s fault, a failure of the writer to make herself understood.

Of course, they would have been lying. These people were not trying to understand Chen’s essay; they were trying to censor it. And they did. Amid the backlash, Guernica scrubbed the essay from its website and apologized for having published it. (It was later republished by the Washington Monthly.)

Similarly, the readers for whom my essay was intended were soon drowned out by a larger, louder group who piled into the comments, screaming at me to delete the disgusting bootlicking defense of fascist murder they’d been reliably informed I wrote.

Perhaps your impulse, in moments like this, is to correct the misunderstanding. Mine certainly was, which I thought would be easy—the essay was right there!—but more than that, like a fool, I thought people would be pleased to realize they’d been mistaken. Wasn’t it a relief, to know that there was one less work of fascism apologia in the world than they’d previously feared?

But however angry my critics were, nothing made them angrier than being told they’d misunderstood; indeed, they refused to believe it. I was lying. I was obfuscating. I was merely pantomiming nuance, compassion, and consideration in order to hoodwink people into letting their guard down—presumably so that I could, at some future point, emerge from the belly of my innocuous-looking essay and put MAGA hats on everyone while they slept.

But it’s also about fear, mistrust, exhaustion, and a totalizing obsession with politics as a proxy for character. It’s about a world where attention is a commodity, and friction is intolerable, and where the greatest moral virtue of all is to be both suspicious and belligerently incurious about any idea with too many moving parts.

It is about the conviction that good faith and productive discussion are for suckers, and that anyone who asks you for this is trying to make one out of you.

It is also, of course, about media and the people who work in it—and who are struggling to keep a toehold in a professional landscape that was precarious and cutthroat even before the extinction-level threat of LLMs appeared on the horizon. It’s worth noting that many if not most viral literary controversies, the ones that end up at the top of your newsfeed because so many high-profile, high-follower accounts are weighing in, are nominally about the writing but actually about the person who wrote it, or the outlet they wrote it for, or the person who founded the outlet they wrote it for and no I’m not thinking of anyone in particular, why do you ask.

Yeah, fuck this bitch for writing fascist apologia in 2026 of all years when there's genocides going on.

[Potato]

https://thefreemanmag.substack.com/p/artist-vs-audience

It’s worth noting that many if not most viral literary controversies, the ones that end up at the top of your newsfeed because so many high-profile, high-follower accounts are weighing in, are nominally about the writing but actually about the person who wrote it, or the outlet they wrote it for, or the person who founded the outlet they wrote it for and no I’m not thinking of anyone in particular, why do you ask.

[filler]

[Nintex]

The PC era is ending

[HaughtyFrank]

Very silly discourse right now about some independent animation pilot where people are for some reason really upset that the main character has breasts

[Uncle]

the better discourse is that arin hanson is doing some of the voices and I think even acting as the voice director somehow and yet has a a bunch of compilations of all the times he's screamed the n word and other slurs

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

[benji]

[benji]

Listening and learning:

[benji]

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

get that kaffar, tobi

[HaughtyFrank]

Japanese Manga author gets harassed off twitter

Some fans got really mad at her because she shared one of those 1$ cosplay videos where a guy was wearing leeks to imitate the dreadlocks of one of her characters.



She even apologized but people said it wasn't good enough and it started a whole debate about how much she owes her success to black anime fans and black culture

She then blocked some people harassing her and people got even more mad

Her fans seem to be generally strange, for example declaring her nonbinary without her ever saying anything like that



The funny thing is she seems to put in a genuine effort to make a diverse Manga and then she gets harassed off twitter for not being progressive enough

[Alpacx]

Japanese Manga author gets harassed off twitter
The funny thing is she seems to put in a genuine effort to make a diverse Manga and then she gets harassed off twitter for not being progressive enough

Nothing is ever good enough for them.

Edit:

I do not understand support for the trans thing.

[HaughtyFrank]

Nintex, explain yourself

[filler]

Japanese Manga author gets harassed off twitter
The funny thing is she seems to put in a genuine effort to make a diverse Manga and then she gets harassed off twitter for not being progressive enough

Nothing is ever good enough for them.

Edit:

I do not understand support for the trans thing.

canada is based 

[Potato]

Japanese Manga author gets harassed off twitter

Some fans got really mad at her because she shared one of those 1$ cosplay videos where a guy was wearing leeks to imitate the dreadlocks of one of her characters.



She even apologized but people said it wasn't good enough and it started a whole debate about how much she owes her success to black anime fans and black culture

She then blocked some people harassing her and people got even more mad

Her fans seem to be generally strange, for example declaring her nonbinary without her ever saying anything like that



The funny thing is she seems to put in a genuine effort to make a diverse Manga and then she gets harassed off twitter for not being progressive enough

I keep saying it. The only way to win in these situations is to not engage with the crazy. Ignore it, don't respond, don't block, act like the crazy doesn't exist. They will find a new target in a couple of days and forget they were ever even "offended".

[HaughtyFrank]

[Alpacx]

Save us Zohran

[benji]

get that kaffar, tobi