Shitposts Weekly
Medium articles neither rare nor well-done for the week ending 8th September 2018.
The Simple Truth Behind Reading 200 Books a Year: A professional shitposter sits on the pot for way too long. Long story short: Start with books of a comfortable size, find time to read—even if you lose focus, read. Short story long: this shitpost.
A developer’s guide to web design for non-designers: A webshit rips a long, wet fart about how to design without being a designer. (He recommends proprietary software, too, which is turbo-gross. I would suggest Paint.NET or the GIMP, or any of KDE’s graphic tools.)
How Capitalist Utopia Became Everyone Else’s Dystopia: An asshole interprets two charts for us, and blames capitalism for America’s ills and socialism for Europe’s so-called comparative well-being. Sir, your fingers should be pointing at the confidence artists who keep getting elected to loot the economy, and don’t pretend Europe is immune to the phenomenon, either—the UK is part of Europe, its Parliament’s protestations to the contrary aside.
This Is How Vegans Are Taking Over the Meat Industry: A professional shitposter and vegan chews over recent developments in vat protein and attempts to prognosticate. Among other lies, this shitpost perpetuates the myth that dietary fat and animal protein are the main drivers of obesity, as well as the myth that animal abuse is rampant in ranching. (The reality in ranching is, most abuse occurs at meatpacking facilities and on poultry farms, and the farmers have no ability to protest.) One last myth for the road: fresh, local, natural is ahistorical hipster trash, and we ought to be improving our industrial foods’ healthfulness.
The Truth About Fish Oil: A fishing author reels in one hell of a whopper about the fish oil, uh, snake oil industry. Historical claims about diet are made, without reference to where that data came from (see the Jacobin Magazine linked above for why that can be an issue). As well, a lot of assertions are made about how it’s an omega-6 imbalance that’s killing us Americans.
How To Chart A New Course For Your Life With 3 Simple Diagrams: A self-help booklet tells a story, then utilizes Oriental mysticism to try to sell his bullshit.
How to Dramatically Improve your Public Speaking Skills: A webshit releases an excessively long, wet fart which doesn’t say anything a Public Speaking class won’t. Better: the Public Speaking class will give you some structure to work with.
Tech Titans Dish Advice About Phone Addiction: A professional shitposter shits out a post about mobile phone addiction. Long story short: don’t let the phone take over your life, and disable non-essential notifications. Short story long: this shitpost.
Down the Security Rabbit Hole: A professional shitposter looks at security software. The first two examples rely far too much on TOR, which is not as anonymous as its proponents claim, and which requires a fairly rigid set of behaviours to achieve even the limited anonymity you can get.
Rare articles which are well-done.
Is Blue Light Really What’s Keeping You Awake?: A professional shitposter points out what would be blindingly obvious to anyone who’s actually looked at the research regarding light and its effects on sleep. Put simply, minimize interactive device usage in the evening. Period. Any claims that specifically blue light causes sleep disturbances are pure bunk.
Why Scientists Still Disagree About Lyme Disease: A professional shitposter looks at Lyme disease, particularly what is termed ‘chronic’ Lyme disease. This is a reasonable high-level overview of the issue.
The Ultimate Model for Successful and Long-Lasting Behavior Change: A professorial self-help booklet talks about how to effect real behavioural change in oneself.
HBO’s Misguided Quest to Become Netflix: A professor of con artistry marketing explores AT&T’s attempt to revamp HBO. Long story short: they’re attempting to clone Netflix, without looking at how Netflix is achieving its stature (lots of capital and not much concern about quality, versus HBO’s quality-centric approach).
How to Achieve the Best Grades Possible With Minimal Stress: A professional shitposter looks at study habits. Included are some tips which are basically impossible if you have repetitive strain injuries in your hands. The rest of the advice given is reasonable, however.
How Do You Teach Your Kid to Wipe His Own Ass?: A professional shitposter and kid-wrangler talks about parenting.
The Absurdity of Student Loan Debt: A professional shitposter wishes to remind us that student debt is a Lovecraftian horror by telling us a story.
How Facebook Has Flattened Human Communication: A professional shitposter explores the consequences of shaping our communications to fit within the filters provided by corporate mass-surveillance platforms.
Black Twitter Is Laughing Racism to Death: A writer talks about racism and how people of colour are handling it online, specifically on Twitter.
Dumb Rules That Make Your Best People Want to Quit: A professional speaker reminds us that people don’t quit companies, they quit management, particularly poor management decisions.
Why ‘Sleep on It’ Is Our Most Useful Advice for Learning: A teacher wishes to remind us that learning isn’t a once-and-you’re-done process, but rather a continual one which requires taking some time away from it in order for the brain to digest the data obtained and rewire around it.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Simple: An artist points out that complexity is hard on cognition, probably one of the more unnecessary but unfortunately actually necessary things anyone’s ever said.