There are books now that are specifically used as status symbols: people use them to appear to be the person they want others to see them as.
Consumer culture has the distressing effect of enhancing the human tendency to convince oneself that one liked something, for the sake of conformity and peace of mind. People tell themselves that they liked what they were told they should like.
Reviewers often wind up with extreme biases for and against certain types of works, for similar reasons to the above. It's also not too crazy to consider there may be some corruption in the literary review community.
Marketing is now a powerful discipline with cutting-edge psychology behind it. When used by trained professionals instead of incompetent corporate outcasts, it can essentially function as mind control, even for the well-informed.
Also, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
TL; DR: Don't feel bad about hating something everyone else seemed to love. There are many reasons why terrible books can get good reviews. And your own opinion is still a valid opinion, even if it's contradictory.
the sense of horror when you finish a book that was Ass Bad and you go to see what fellow haters are saying but all the reviews say it is the best thing they've ever read. feel like i just saw my reflection in the mirror move all by itself or something
(1) "He used, in an hour and a half, a whole can of propane."
(2) (while one of the best-known marimba bands on the West Coast is playing in the park) "There's some odd music over there. Do you wanna come?"
Does this mean the era of fish-post-reblogging is at an end?
I eat paper
Note that this does NOT say, "If a person cares about you, they will drop whatever they're doing, RIGHT NOW, and rush to your side for any reason you deem sufficiently important, and if they don't, then they don't care about you at all."
“No matter how busy a person is, if they care, they’ll find time for you.”
— Unknown
It says very clearly, right under the map:
That would be the joke.
Yes, it's their latitude transferred over to the West coast.
Cannot believe the number of people who are either freaking out or trying to dunk on this, because they think OP is claiming that's where these cities actually are.
It's just a geography joke.
Eastern cities on the west coast
This is not a god-emperor.
This is a god whose name is "Emperor."
Long-dead, he was the last ruler of a once-powerful empire whose cultural influence outlasted it.
Was he deified in his lifetime? We no longer know. But he is deified now.
While his memory lives on, his true name has been lost. At some point, the word "emperor" ceased to have meaning except when referring to him, therefore his name is now Emperor.
Why is this simple fact so hard for people to understand
While on that again, I notice that people do this thing where they're like "TME is useful because it describes how people who are not trans women can and do invent malicious rumors and harassment campaigns about trans women and everyone believes them".
And I'm sorry to point out but it's not just "TMEs" that do this. I have been around here for many years and I can confirm that trans women are just as happy to invent or reblog callout posts and generally do abuse by proxy. Just like everyone else.
There isn't really any kind of identity category that makes someone inherently safe, principled, or progressive.
ok hot take but i think there is, actually, some linguistic utility to calling twitter 'X'. Twitter was a social media platform with certain functions and a particular culture. After elon took it over, its functions dramatically changed, and the culture on it likewise shifted. EG: paid blue checkmarks, moderation actively biased against the non-rightwing, 'cis is a slur', pay-to-win features, active promotion of misinformation, active promotion of toxic posters, worse branding, a stupid fucking AI tool, and a virulently right-wing culture are all new things that came along after elon took over.
I think in a meaningful sense Twitter is a website that is gone now, like google+ is gone. It has been replaced by X, which is a meaningfully different website. That we saw one website slowly transform into the other is beside the point, at this point the distinction between old-twitter and new-twitter is significant enough that i think using the new name actually makes sense.
I have thousands of shitposts, rants, and essays sitting in notebooks, left over from decades of not using social media or having many friends. Hold on tight.
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