Who sucks?

[pure_mercury]

I can ride with this, to a degree, but isn't a work always part of a larger context? Not just the author's life and personality. I find Mary Shelley's life to be fascinating but I can't stand her as an author, for the most part, but at the same time she is an "important" author because of where/when/why she wrote and who she affected, if not a particularly good one IMO.

Yes and no. I acknowledge work as important and influential that I don't personally enjoy. Television are a very influential band. I don't care much for them. Lots of people hate Ayn Rand (just look at this thread; I am not big on her myself), but she is way more influential in terms of Western society of the last 50 years than all but a handful of writers. And, by all accounts, she was a raging bitch. These aspects don't really enter into my critical faculties when deciding whether something is good or bad, though. That has a different meaning for me. I can also separate between "I like this" and "This is great." They usually coincide, but it's not necessarily so.

 

[Eileen]

Ayn Rand

Yes.

Richard Dawkins

Yes.

Limerence

Hahaha! Yes.

NPR, in general, sucks.

WRONG!

Garden State sucks.

You are correct. It really does suck. It sucks in a way that makes me deeply sad.

Sufjan Stevens doesn't suck outright, but his vibe smacks of 3rd grade extra credit project, and every damn song sounds exactly like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer."

WRONG! Very wrong! SO WRONG!


Things that are overrated...

Phish
The Grateful Dead
The Lord of the Rings (films and books. I like them well enough but don't get the devoted fandom.)
CS Lewis
Marijuana
LA

 

[pure_mercury]

NPR? Really? People listen to it all day long at work, and it's a big MEH most of the time.

This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence | The Onion - America's Finest News Source


And I actually agree with this writer that Sufjan Stevens is to indie rock as Zach Braff is indie film; they aren't terrible, but who decides that they speak to my generation (and, more specifically, to me)? They're precious. I don't like my artists to be precious.

Chicago Maroon | Let's be objective here: Sufjan Stevens sucks.

"To find the answer, look to Sufjan’s film counterpart in overrated indie stars: Zach Braff. Like Sufjan, Braff has been called the voice of his generation, a title his flick Garden State doesn’t merit. The reason Braff is called that is not because he is the voice of his generation, but because he seems to be. Braff has called himself the voice of his generation, and since he tried to express that in a movie, who are we to question him?"

 

[Tallulah]

That reminds me. Hemingway. Love some of his short stories, but hate his novels. I want the hours of my life back that I spent reading A Farewell to Arms, hoping against hope that it would get better, since it was a FREAKING CLASSIC. I hated that stupid nurse character that did nothing but call him darling all the time. It's like he'd never met a woman in real life before. He did have a cool house with lots of awesome six toed cats, though.

 

[pure_mercury]

That reminds me. Hemingway. Love some of his short stories, but hate his novels. I want the hours of my life back that I spent reading A Farewell to Arms, hoping against hope that it would get better, since it was a FREAKING CLASSIC. I hated that stupid nurse character that did nothing but call him darling all the time. It's like he'd never met a woman in real life before. He did have a cool house with lots of awesome six toed cats, though.

It was all overcompensation for the small penis.

 

[heart]

Lots of people hate Ayn Rand (just look at this thread; I am not big on her myself), but she is way more influential in terms of Western society of the last 50 years than all but a handful of writers.

If she's responsible for Western society than that's just another reason to dislike her work. She takes a thread of truth and then ruins it by wedding it to her absurd notions.

 

[pure_mercury]

If she's responsible for Western society than that's just another reason to dislike her work. She takes a thread of truth and then ruins it by wedding it to her absurd notions.

I like her politics, somewhat like her work (The Fountainhead, Anthem, We the Living), but I really dislike the philosophical aspects of Objectivism. And she and her cabal of Objectivists late in her life were a bunch of jerks, pretty much.

 

[Zergling]

About half to 2/3 the books I had ot read for English classes in school.

 

[pure_mercury]

I totally did not get why Things Fall Apart was supposed to be so great.

 

[Martoon]

One I forgot on my list:

Any light pop soul ballad that begins with a mellow electric piano, and female vocalist going, "hoooooooOOOOOooooo, hoooooo hoooooooo" in an airy voice. Which may or may not be followed by a "mmmmmmmm, mmmmmmhhhmmm hhhmmm..."

I think I've just eliminated 22% of popular music over the last couple decades.

 

[Samuel De Mazarin]

Marijuana

Totally depends on what you're smoking.

 

[Ivy]

I haven't had any in ten years but I aim to retest the notion that pot is overrated in a few weeks when we spend six days in a treehouse for our anniversary.

 

[Jack Flak]

The greatness of a drug is time dependant. For example, cocaine is the best drug for 30 min, and the worst drug for the next two hours.

 

[Samuel De Mazarin]

I haven't had any in ten years but I aim to retest the notion that pot is overrated in a few weeks when we spend six days in a treehouse for our anniversary.

Sounds like a wonderfully cool way to spend an anniversary! I hope you have fun and it's as romantic as it sounds...

make sure you don't buy shwag/skunk... I mean, if you're actually going to smoke, try to get pot which has color to it...

A lot of people like trying to debunk the theory that smell and look has anything to do with potency, and without going into correlation-causation relationships, I'll assert that the best weed I've smoked tends to have lighter, brighter green leaves and brightly colored filaments of purple or red... it also smells like a light perfume mixed with bark...







legalize it

 

[Ivy]

True. Acid was pretty awesome for about six hours, and then abysmal for five years.

 

[Samuel De Mazarin]

True. Acid was pretty awesome for about six hours, and then abysmal for five years.

ouch

 

[Ivy]

Sounds like a wonderfully cool way to spend an anniversary! I hope you have fun and it's as romantic as it sounds...

make sure you don't buy shwag/skunk... I mean, if you're actually going to smoke, try to get pot which has color to it...

A lot of people like trying to debunk the theory that smell and look has anything to do with potency, and without going into correlation-causation relationships, I'll assert that the best weed I've smoked tends to have lighter, brighter green leaves and brightly colored filaments of purple or red... it also smells like a light perfume mixed with bark...







legalize it

This is what I've told the old man. I'm not breaking a ten-year streak for sticks and stones.

(I have no idea if "sticks and stones" is valid pot terminology, but it really should be if it's not.)

 

[Samuel De Mazarin]

This is what I've told the old man. I'm not breaking a ten-year streak for sticks and stones.

(I have no idea if "sticks and stones" is valid pot terminology, but it really should be if it's not.)

Actually, I haven't heard that... usually people say "stems and seeds"/"seeds and stems"... but "sticks and stones" is AWESOME!!!!



I'm stealing it (with due attribution to a nice lady on mbtic)...

 

[EffEmDoubleyou]

I can't believe I was ready to make Martoon my platonic life partner and then he proceeded to make a hate list that could have doubled as my "favorite things" list. He somewhat salvaged himself at the last minute by hating Angelina Jolie. But the scars are deep, and they are real. KISS forever!

I was going to make a new list of things that suck, but I found a way to sum them all up in one single entry:

Things that college kids like (drinking too much excepted).

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Totally depends on what you're smoking.

Or, she just honestly is not impressed the inherent qualities of being high on marijuana.

____________

Anyhow, another one to throw on the list: The Catcher in the Rye.
It was a classic, and a subject of controversy, and I'd heard so many people call it their favorite book. So, it really came to my surprise when I read it, just craptacular it was.

I hate the rambling style of following Holden's train of thought, which is made subsantially worse by how much I hate Holden himself. He annoyed the living daylights out of me, and contrary to what so many had said, I never sympathized with him for identified with him, save one part. The actual story being told was fantastically uninteresting. Monumentally uninteresting. I was looking for something all the way to the end, and found that it was just a bunch of nothingness, capped off with just one more statement that made me want to bang Holden's head into a table.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel in four days. I took several weeks to read The Catcher in the Rye. When you compare the length of the two books, and the fact that the easier one for me was basically a thesis, it says a lot about how bad The Catcher in the Rye seemed to me.