holy shit, it's Ready Player One for race scientists

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

Here's The Cut puff piece on Levy which just mentions in passing her podcast with Curtis Yarvin.

anyway, nice to know they're still trying to make Dimes Square a thing

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[–] 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I have now read a number of her short works, among others a daring piece titled Cancel Me and I can report that it's, shockingly, vapid baby shit.

See also from The Cut

She tells me that she reads lots of mass-shooting manifestos and jokes that incel should be included in the LGBTQ+ acronym.

Wow no way that's so wacky

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?” She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.

    cringing so hard my soul leaks out of my ears

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.

    The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on.

    I'm sorry, "lol girls with mustache fingers" is high literature but "we are the future of the planet" is stupid? Did the author flip a coin on each of those to decide where it'd go?

    Also what the fuck is this about Adderall, I don't even understand what it would mean to collectivise "the Adderall sector", but wasn't there a shortage of ADD medication not so long ago where people who needed it couldn't get it? Wouldn't we want to collectivise this??

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago*

    this reads like someone googled a list of gen z slang and then threw it in a blender with a bunch of weird race-science memes. who is this for

    I think the only acceptable response to whoever is responsible for it is a highly aggressive "touch grass"

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    “He’d burn a church for her.” He thinks, “I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver.”

    I love how clearly this communicates which of these she's seen.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Levy is rarely boring.

    [citation needed]

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.”

    Oh my god this is mortifying. Imagine being such a tryhard yet such a fucking bore. Congratulations you sound like a thousand fucking tweets.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago*

    I kind of wish that she and I could meet. I'd stare deep into her eyes, take her hand in mine, drop my voice into the register that Grandpa Stacey used in his decades of hosting radio, and intone, "Your brain is where insight goes to die."

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    To be honest I'm mortified that there exists a person who interacts with that and calls her a "fabulous conversationalist". Ah yes, gish gallop personified, exactly what I want in the person I talk to. What the fuck is the purpose for which you engage with a conversation if this is the "fabulous" outcome??

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  • [+] 11 points 2 years ago (9 children)
  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”

    "When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me," said the voice of a generation.

    One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”

    2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.

    Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.

    "Marvy. Fab. Far out," deadpanned Calvin's father.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I'm imagining a Dorothy Parker review of Honor Levy. "It took gumption to call this My First Book, in the face of the inevitable riposte, 'And it should be your last.'"

    Monday. Cold pizza and a vape around 2 pm. The Adderall at the Urbit meetup last night was too revolting, but what can you do? You can't stay up til 5 posting nrx thirst traps on just nothing. They had those divine dubstep remixers in the green coats, and Mike Crumplar was perfectly scathing, angling for a hate-fuck, and it couldn't have been funnier. Absolute VOG unit!

    — from "Diary of a Dimes Square Lady (during Days of Panic, Frenzy and World Change)"

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Tuesday. Found a cigarette butt in my Solo cup. Couldn't have been more overwhelmed with the existentialness of it all. Perfect generation moment, absolutely hilarisad. Uwu! Got two tickets to Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch. Playing at the best basement in the whole D-Square, can you believe it? Called up some completely wonderful numbers, but couldn't find anybody to go with except Roger. Wouldn't be seen dead with him after that business with Mike, but what can you do?

    Wednesday. Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch was the definitive worst. Laugh riot from end to end! Couldn't have had a better time, even if Roger does still post to X when he should know that Nostr is the future.

    Thursday. Found another cigarette butt in last night's Solo cup. Truth bomb time: what gives, yo? Rode the subway, thought hard about how everyone's face is just a mask for their true self. Thinking I need to upgrade my avi. It's completely the season for pixel art! Gotta ask Kevin about the best prompts, so I don't get something absolutely dreadful.

    Friday. Oopsies! Turns out I've been leaving the cig butts in my own Solo cups! I couldn't be more embarrassed, but ChatGPT says that the benzos can't cause memory loss.

    Saturday. Rode the subway to CVS. Bought myself an absolutely dismal new eyeliner, took a selfie with The Bell Curve. Hashtag totes not sponsored, hashtag unfiltered!

    Sunday. Oopsies! Those cig butts? Turns out I've been leaving them in my own Solo cups! I couldn't be more completely mortified. I really came in a fluffer that time, but what can you do?

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)
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    [–] 9 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    I assume "organ-meat eater" is a euphemism for "sucks his own dick"

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    "organ meat" is a whole weird Tiktok dietary pseudoscience influencer marketing thing.

    I think it started from this guy but it's a whole genre now.

    Nazis, of course, love pseudoscience diet shit.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    What is, and I mean this with all sincerity of my heart, any of this fucking bullshit?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    searches Dimes Square, wikipedia

    Dimes Square is a so-called "microneighborhood" of New York City, located between the Chinatown and Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan.

    Okay, sure

    The term Dimes Square has become a metonym for a number of associated reactionary aesthetic movements centered in the area, particularly several events and podcasts funded by Peter Thiel.

    Why do we continue on this Earth even though it's clearly a doomed endeavour?

    Media associated with the area include the podcast Red Scare

    click

    The show has been associated with the dirtbag left and the new right,

    "New right" redirects to "Right-wing populism" and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense "new" in any way. In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?

    as well as the subculture surrounding Dimes Square. It has been described in The Cut as "a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they've spawned."

    "Hey, how about we pick two bad things to focus on?"

    "Capitalism..."

    "That's a great choice, plenty of terrible stuff there..."

    "... and feminism."

    "... You were doing so well."

    What even is this ideology? Reactionaries but with bubble tea?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Decoding the Gurus did an episode on this stuff. Imagine anti-vax hipsters with extreme vocal fry and self-diagnosis of autism.

    Red Scare: Bohemian Hipsterism x Reactionary Tradcaths

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    This shit is intended to be ideologically confused. Its purpose is to seduce dissatisfied progressives towards fascism. See also, Grayzone, Caleb Maupin, the history of holocaust denial on the ultra left, there's plenty of flavours.

    "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools" etc. On this subject I've always been a fan of this Moishe Postone article: Anti-Semitism and National Socialism

    The turn to biology and the desire for a return to “natural origins,” combined with an affirmation of technology, which appear in many forms in the early twentieth century, should be understood as expressions of the antinomic fetish that gives rise to the notion that the concrete is “natural,” and which increasingly presents the socially “natural” in such a way that it is perceived in biological terms. The hypostatization of the concrete and the identification of capital with the manifest abstract underlie a form of “anticapitalism” that seeks to overcome the existing social order from a standpoint which actually remains immanent to that order. Inasmuch as that standpoint is the concrete dimension, this ideology tends to point toward a more concrete and organized form of overt capitalist social synthesis. This form of “anticapitalism,” then, only appears to be looking backward with yearning. As an expression of the capital fetish its real thrust is forward. It emerges in the transition from liberal to bureaucratic capitalism and becomes virulent in a situation of structural crisis.

    This form of “anticapitalism,” then, is based on a one-sided attack on the abstract. The abstract and concrete are not seen as constituting an antinomy where the real overcoming of the abstract—of the value dimension—involves the historical overcoming of the antinomy itself as well as each of its terms. Instead there is the one-sided attack on abstract reason, abstract law, or, at another level, money and finance capital. In this sense it is antinomically complementary to liberal thought, where the domination of the abstract remains unquestioned and the distinction between positive and critical reason is not made.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Every time I read the words "Dimes Square" a red mist descends

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 years ago* (16 children)
  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Crumplar is STILL writing about this loser crowd. Why? What led him to this?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    From what I can tell, like everybody else involved, it's ego and ennui? Sad but I suppose at least it's mildly entertaining to read about gormless rich kids failing very hard to be cool.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I have to add also, as someone who had a terrible time being 18 in 2004, I am truly amazed that these people took the vapid and complacent culture of the noughties, the mcinnes-era vice magazines, the cobrasnakes, the cory kennedies, the whole tshirtness of it, and made it even worse somehow.

    The main inovation is that the racism went from ironic to scientific!

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