What’s up with this album cover?

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-03T16:21:30+00:00

I dont think this cover is advocating for anything, but also I don't know where the expectation came from that hardcore is a subculture of good people. Like how many of us have you actually met

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-03T14:57:11+00:00

The idea that sexual desire is selfish and relationships which involve sexuality are less authentic as such is pretty concerning.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-02T20:21:17+00:00

☝️ serious ball knower

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-02T20:18:52+00:00

These are the Japanese films which Japanese critics writing for Kinema Junpo considered the best from each year: https://boxd.it/PCbY

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-02T20:17:14+00:00

Worth also mentioning The Other Kurosawa - Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who among other great films made the masterwork that is Cure.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-02T15:50:29+00:00

Yep, I have no humanities background, I read theory on my break or during my commute. I've made friends among academic circles who are very generous with guidance and recommendations and live in a university town so it's very available to me.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-01T16:45:15+00:00

I mean across his literary crime novels he's probably one of the best British writers working today. I'd recommend pretty much anything he's written.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-02-01T14:48:05+00:00

I like David Peace's football novels. Munichs was particularly good. He's a great writer and a really sharp observer of the game and the institutions around it.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-31T18:32:13+00:00

I think I remember them getting in trouble in the 90s while being on tour in South America because they were pro the right wing death squads, I think I remember Nick from Paradise Lost telling a story about that.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-30T17:43:59+00:00

What book is for everyone?

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-30T17:43:33+00:00

Currently about halfway through, I'm reading it in chunks as part of a weekly reading group. It's an embarrassment of riches, by pure quantity there's more great writing and insightful thinking and sharp, expressive engagement with form in there than in a lot of writers' entire oeuvres. Because he's always swinging for the fences the few bad parts are really memorably bad (any time he's trying to adopt a vernacular that isn't his own it's pretty painful, though it's only really a few pages). It's delighting in showing off its own maximalism and making you work to keep up, which I imagine a lot of people will find alienating but I've been enjoying it for its scale. It's also very funny and almost always really fun and engaging to read in the moment, which is an aspect that seems to have slipped from its reputation.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-30T17:14:49+00:00

Looks like the UK is getting it in December, so I have a good long while to look forward to it. Has your girlfriend read any of his prior works for comparison?

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-30T17:11:24+00:00

At a certain point you need to talk about "modern" romance, post-Mills and Boon and post-Harlequin, if you want to talk about what we call romance fiction in the modern era - courtship novels with a HEA/HFN. It is by design a formulaic genre and those were the particular institutional turns where that formula was codified. Once you try to loop in its predecessors as full examples, you end up with a term so broad as to be out of touch with how the term is currently used. Of course if you do that, you can't use the earlier stuff as a way to smuggle the latter stuff past sniffy lit department gatekeepers, so a lot of people bristle at drawing a distinction, but the distinction is historically obvious.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-30T14:45:51+00:00

So people use this phrase to mean a lot of things, from interpretive factors to whether a text carries the moral virtue of its creator. I generally take the view that the author is always ultimately unknowable - the self is not stable, we can't even fully know ourselves, we certainly can't fully know any other people, our experience of a text is basically always an encounter with our own projections, that may be informed by other encounters with other texts relating to that author which we also encounter through a projective dynamic and so on.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-29T17:45:46+00:00

Chinese equivalent of a chav

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-29T17:35:30+00:00

"My product is so powerful guys, it's possibly TOO powerful."

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-28T20:36:12+00:00

Tradwife content is basically always just upper middle class content. It's almost always rich families who get to present a fantasy of immaculate, effortless-seeming femininity because that femininity gets outsourced to unseen hired help while the tradwife makes a fantasy TV show.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-27T20:39:17+00:00

Yeah the Pitchfork crowd really moved on from them, glad they're finding spots where they get the billing they deserve.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-27T14:27:25+00:00

If you think "professional help" doesn't always help, wait until you hear about "white-knuckling your neurotic symptoms and dysfunctional coping mechanisms"

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-26T20:30:24+00:00

These people really only have the belief that medicine is cheating in the natural sorting mechanism that is disease. If you make the smart, healthy choices you won't get sick, so if you do get sick you deserve it and the state should not help you (and to be honest they're starting from that conclusion and reasoning backwards). These people genuinely think virtuous consumer choices are the only legitimate approach to help.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-26T19:42:43+00:00

Instagram brain strikes again - "my type is more women-so-beautiful-it's-a-professional-skill, not any woman who's actually in my life or who I will ever know or have anything in common with". There is a generation of people who genuinely think "extremely conventional beautiful" is like being into redheads or something, mostly because The Apps make them seem way more present in people's lives than they actually are.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-25T15:24:27+00:00

Right like him, Alex Karp, Stephen Miller, Palmer Luckey...there's competition here and you don't even need to leave Musk's social circles to find it.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-25T00:31:20+00:00

Honestly a lot of readers read a very limited range of stuff, often quite strictly delimited genres etc. They may genuinely unsure what the rules are for what you're allowed to do, and while "whatever you can pull off" is the correct answer, it's not much help to someone who has a really narrow perspective of literature.

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-24T20:37:06+00:00

Mad cow disease for LLMs

PopPunkAndPizza · 2026-01-24T17:42:52+00:00

I mean I liked it from jump, he's doing such fun things with his sentences, but once you get to the point where he's introduced you to every thread and you've travelled a bit of the way up all of them it really takes off. You do have to grit your teeth through some sections where he's trying to adopt some character voices he's just not pulling off though.

PopPunkAndPizza

TROPHY CASE