Critique of pure BS — part III
Short Critique of a Whole Bunch of Articles I Didn’t Read
TL;DR — I didn’t read or like any of them.
When I started my self-appointed job as a literary critic, I hadn’t realized so many articles were unreadable. I knew they existed because I had (unsuccessfully tried to) read articles by Grimsby Hackney, but the sheer volume made my work impossible.
I had to find a way to plow through.
Genius stroke as I was experiencing physical rapture while reading Sifu’s latest story. The heroine had a similar problem to mine. She needed to satisfy her boss and a dozen colleagues during an important meeting but didn’t have much time. I won’t go into details, but in the end, she decided to bang the whole gang at once.
Why not do the same with the whole bunch of articles I hadn’t read and never would?
It sounded like a brilliant idea, and I got to work immediately after a cold shower to redirect my mind to this new task.
When critiquing an article without reading it, you should keep two things in mind.
- The first is that you have no idea what it’s about
- The second is that you don’t care.
But if you critique a whole bunch of them without reading, your approach should be different.
While you still shouldn’t care, you should realize that you know what they were talking about — statistically speaking. And, the more articles, the better because you get a clearer picture of what all these articles were about. Of course, if you pick one of them randomly, you will still have no idea what it is about since you didn’t read it, but, as a whole, statistically, you know.
With this in mind, I added a few weeks’ worth of unread articles (around 400,000) to the bunch I had not read. The usual scientific verifications confirmed my sample size was statistically significant. I had enough articles I hadn’t read for a decent critique.
Remember that the critique wouldn’t be relevant to any article picked randomly but, considered statistically, it’s the most pertinent critique I could write about articles I hadn’t read.
Here goes.
“Great stuff. Thank you for writing this and giving a voice to many people out there. I’m looking forward to reading more of your stories in the future.
In the meantime, check out my profile — we have similar interests, and I think you will enjoy my latest post.
Unrelated, but I so much loved your article that I would like to offer you some of my 2020 vintage toilet paper rolls at a discounted price.
Keep writing.”
Previously critically acclaimed critiques by Smillew: Critique I, Critique II.
For your viewing pleasure, I randomly selected two articles from the hundreds of thousands of articles I critiqued together:
Smillew, don’t forget to add your bio here. Don’t ask for money on ko-fi, but add a link to your Top Hat Seminar on Substack. You’re so close to getting your first subscriber.
