Been continuing my effortposts and original writing over on my dreamwidth blog. I’ve already shared a handful of things here, but I’ve kept up the habit long enough that I want to make a dedicated spot to yell about things I’m proud of making.
And the one I just posted, Thinking About Love - A brief meander about the different ways people show love, and some personal limitations I’ve run into with expressing it.
I don’t know if having a key point in “Logan Lucky” being the ability to drive from Boone County West Virginia to Charlotte NC and back in one day (with other things happening) is smoothsharking or nerdsniping but it kept eating at me the whole time regardless
In all honesty the dichotomy is kind of new; I used these terms loosely interchangeably until I got smooth-sharked this morning and I started thinking harder about how I tended to use them. I originally classified my fatigue with the carcinization meme as being smooth-sharked, but I don’t think people are being Intentionally Wrong, I think it’s more oversimplification. But the reason I’m irritated is more about “people are repeating this meme and not grasping how evolution works” which feels in line with “I’m annoyed about misinformation and broader lack of knowledge” behind my worse instances of smooth-sharking
Am I being overly pedantic about this jokey classification system of my own pedantry? Yes and that’s a sign that I should super go to bed
for me it’s not even being exposed to the show itself except for a few essays and memes, but that it’s probably the most well-known piece of media to take place at my alma mater, and, yes, people have brought the show up to me when I’ve mentioned where I went.
When I went to my reunion a few months ago I even discovered to my horror that one of the alleys in the nearby city had been named after the show…
Sorry, I should probably have something more to say about the actual topics but I don’t have much more to say besides I generally find smoothsharking such a tedious joke, while also feeling like at some point people susceptible to falling for it need to pull back a little?
I basically agree that it’s something that undergirds a lot of conspiracy and conservative thinking… But so does a lot of other pedantry?
NOOOOOOO not the school, oh no. And no worries about tangents lol I’m happy to rag on that show for a bit
Yeah me getting smoothsharked is like. Usually it is just a mismatch between my brain and the tone of the conversation. Someone is speaking imprecisely or exaggerating in order to make a joke work because That Is How Jokes, and my brain registers the inaccuracy first and responds to that instead of like. The actual intent. On some level taking a smoothshark seriously to the point of the original requires thinking that other people are stupid and like. That’s not a great default assumption to be operating from.
I’m a little curious how pedantry contributes to conspiracy stuff (i guess extremely literal and particular readings of things) but idk that an extended convo about conspiracy theorists is the vibe right now
Maybe not conspiracy as much as conservative thinking.
And I guess the bad part of the pedantry is that it’s often not true. I was thinking of stuff like “the civil war wasn’t really about slavery.” “Um actually there’s only two genders.” “Destroyed by facts and logic and reason.” So fake pedantry.
Eta: but like what frustrates me is that while I obviously know people who acted like them at my college (it’s a science and engineering school, it’s going to be like that), a lot of us basically broke away from being that because we were no longer top nerd like we were in high school, and trying to “be cool” and you know what I think we were in so many ways. There used to be a blurb in a recruiting guide that was some quote being amazed a bunch of hypernerds could seem so “normal”. Like obviously there were issues especially back when the gender ratio was so skewed, but I know for sure me and my friends would have hated them in college.
