Good news, everyone! The good folks on the RedditorOfTheDay subreddit picked our friend AnnArchist to be Redditor of the Day yesterday. He filled out a little questionnaire for the RedditorOfTheDay folks listing all sorts of fun facts about himself.
In addition to moderating the Men’s Rights subreddit and posting hilarious videos of women getting beaten up to the beatingwomen subreddit, AnnArchist (who is a dude, despite the name) also enjoys: Skyrim, bass fishing, sports talk radio, chicken tacos, and football!
His biggest pet peeve:
People who want to interfere with other people’s happiness.
His biggest worry about Reddit?
I just hope the community doesn’t grow so quickly that we lose the quality debate and discussion that has kept many of the users around reddit for a long time.
Over on ShitRedditSays, fxexular has helpfully catalogued some of AnnArchist’s contribution to the “quality debate and discussion.” Like his considered opinion on one female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
And his opinion of an alleged false rape accuser:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
You can find even more of these charming nuggets in my post about him here.
In his answers to the RedditorOfTheDay questionnaire, AnnArchist reveals himself to be a truly sensitive soul. Here, he shares a painful moment from his past:
When I was a senior in HS and when my friend and I saw … the plane fly into the twin towers our first reaction was laughter rather than OMG thats a tragedy. Yea, we’re fucked up. I TPed my High School that night. I’m a horrible person.
Oh, and did I mention that he’s the creator, sole moderator, and basically the only contributor to the NSFW4 subreddit, devoted to posting pictures and videos too horrific and offensive to post anywhere else on Reddit?
Godspeed, AnnArchist! Thank you for making the world a better place!
NOTE: This post is almost entirely made up of sarcasm.
You know, I have no idea how on topic this actually is at the moment, but I don’t care. I was just shelving mah history books, and I gotta rec Norman Cantor’s In The Wake Of The Plague as an absolutely awesome account of the black death and it’s effects on the medieval world, and by extension, everything after. Every non-history-geek non-medieval-geek I’ve gotten to read it loves it, much less the geeks. Everybody Tolle, lege!
I love very much and yet don’t love Mill. (And for all that’s great about him, he also said that benevolent despotism was the way to handle the less-evolved folks in the wider world. Ah colonialism, why you gotta colonize all the old peeps we wanna like! ) Then again, the truth is I’m not that into the Utilitarians in general. So Utilitarian, you know?
I loves me some plague doctor masks, I think I’ll have to read this book.
Gah. So many books, so little time. And so much internets to distract me xD
seconding love for Norman Cantor. He also wrote a great essay on impact of Tolkien and Lewsis’ fantasy novels on contemporary conceptions of the medieval world.
And yes, there are major flaws in Mill–just as there were major flaws in the strain of abolitionists in the US who wanted to “free the slaves” and send them all back to Africa.
ithiliana – Oh! The American Colonization Society was FASCINATING.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
I loves me some plague doctor masks, I think I’ll have to read this book.
YOU DO YOU DO! XD
As long as we’re throwing around questionably relevant disease-related book recommendations, might I suggest Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by Micheal Bell? It’s about vampire legends as they relate to nineteenth century tuberculosis outbreaks. (In New England, obviously.) Fascinating stuff.
>>I was really close to buying a book my Nietzsche this week
Go with Max Stirner instead. Some people actually claim Nietzsche plagiarized him. I can certainly see the similarities, but Stirner has less douchebags worshipping him, so points to him.
Ah! Mercy Brown type stuff? Sounds interesting!
I can certainly see the similarities, but Stirner has less douchebags worshipping him, so points to him.
HAH! Seconding!
Stirner it is then.
You lot are quite smart. I envy you.
Oh oh! what is your opinions on HP Lovecraft? is it good stuff or overrated? I love anything to do with the macabre and supernatural and his works keep coming up
Okay – I love him. Love his mythos, love his flair for the creepy and the cosmic. Not a dialogue writer, and in many stories racist as HELL. Not just “of his time” but FOR his time But I just can’t get enough of it. If you like the pulp prose of that era in general, he’ll be up your alley, if not… his style may grate on you.
I’m a big Lovecraft fan too, Quackers, but yeah, the racism/xenophobia/insanely purple prose can be…off-putting.
Put it this way, it’s like you took DKM, took away the doll fetish, made him much more intelligent but really morose, had him stay up all night after scaring him to death with tales of giant squids, then had him write pulp horror stories.
I recommend the hell out of Lovecraft. But yeah, he was pretty fucking racist. Also, get used to the word “cyclopean”. You’ll be reading it a lot.
Oh, and think twice if you’re averse to adjective-heavy run-on sentences.
Yeah, Lovecraft wrote some damn good stories, but the good bits got buried in the fucking avalanche of words. Man never met a twelve letter word he didn’t adore. But the last sentence from ‘The Dunwich Horror’ gave me the screaming chills.
*sighs* racism. Has to ruin everything. And purple prose…get enough of that in fanfic lol. I guess I can tolerate it if I’m really into the story.
which books by him would you guys recommend? From what I gather the Cthulhu Mythos is written by a bunch of authors?
Neil Gaiman skewered Lovecraft’s style quite beautifully in ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.’
I remember hearing that Lovecraft repudiated the racism near the end of his life. Can’t find a quote, though.
Oh, and Nietzsche revolutionized philosophy as we know it. I don’t care how many douchebags think he’s cool, they have no idea what he’s talking about. I’d recommend you get “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “Nietzsche’s Teaching” to introduce yourself to it.
http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsches-Teaching-Interpretation-Spoke-Zarathustra/dp/0300044305/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322803030&sr=1-1
Neil Gaiman skewered Lovecraft’s style quite beautifully in ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.’
“Anyway. H.P. Lovecraft. He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’ What does he mean, eh? What does he mean? I’ll tell you what he bloody means. What he bloody means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs.”
(I love that story.)
I haven’t read any non-Lovecraft Mythos stories beyond a one or two things by August Derleth. As far as things Lovecraft wrote himself, my favorites include The Colour out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness,Pickman’s Model,The Thing at the Doorstep and The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Polliwog: That’s one my favorites by Gaiman, too. He can be screamingly funny – Good Omens is another one I love by him.
Most non-Lovecraft Cthulthu Mythos works are not very good. EXCEPTION: the “Call of Cthulthu” RPG.
VoiP: The Munchkin Cthulu game is awesome, though more parody than actual Mythos. Same with Lil Cthulu:
and the HP Lovecraft Historical Society: