- Joined
- Apr 22, 2015
No one linked the Chuck Wendig thread?
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Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
By the way, if I can shill for a moment, if you're interested in laughing at really bad writing, I'd totally recommend 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. It's a podcast by Mike Nelson (of MST3K fame) and one of his co-writers for RiffTrax reading through various bad books and laughing at them. I'm currently listening to their discussion of TekWar by William Shatner.
Jeeeesus fuck, it's literally a list of the most obvious pop culture references. It's not even clever at all, it's just namedropping a bunch of shit knowing the reader's going to recognize at least one of the things listed.Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
By the way, if I can shill for a moment, if you're interested in laughing at really bad writing, I'd totally recommend 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. It's a podcast by Mike Nelson (of MST3K fame) and one of his co-writers for RiffTrax reading through various bad books and laughing at them. I'm currently listening to their discussion of TekWar by William Shatner.
Hahaha! Get it? Those things exist!Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
By the way, if I can shill for a moment, if you're interested in laughing at really bad writing, I'd totally recommend 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. It's a podcast by Mike Nelson (of MST3K fame) and one of his co-writers for RiffTrax reading through various bad books and laughing at them. I'm currently listening to their discussion of TekWar by William Shatner.
Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
By the way, if I can shill for a moment, if you're interested in laughing at really bad writing, I'd totally recommend 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. It's a podcast by Mike Nelson (of MST3K fame) and one of his co-writers for RiffTrax reading through various bad books and laughing at them. I'm currently listening to their discussion of TekWar by William Shatner.
Armada was shit, and this is coming from someone who actually liked Ready Player One. Cline indulged all his worst tendencies as a writer, so we got one long rip-off of dozens of other sci-fi books and movies and heavy-handed preaching about Cline's pet social issues, plus a Mary Sue protagonist who gets his dick sucked by everyone else in the story even though he's an unstable, socially awkward twerp.
The main character, a high school kid named Zack something or other, gets recruited by a secret government agency to fight an alien invasion because he's super good at a video game about fighting aliens (ripping off The Last Starfighter), and of course he gets recruited by the Space Force at school in front of his bully and his ex-girlfriend so they can see how fucking cool he is, and is whisked away to become a super-elite spaceship pilot. It turns out that the game he's been playing has actually been all happening for real (ripping off Ender's Game). The government has known about the invasion for decades, and they've been engineering all the pop culture about aliens to prepare us for the attack, thus "justifying" Cline ripping off everything under the sun for the plot. Zack meets a sexy badass gamer grrl and impresses her by knowing what her tattoos are. He then goes out to kill some aliens and fucks something up big-time, but it ultimately doesn't matter because he's so good that they just slap him on the wrist and send him off to a secret moon base to kill more aliens. There, he's reunited with his dad, who got disappeared by the government to help prepare for the invasion when Zack was a baby, and gets hooked up with top-of-the-line gear and special gamer weed and meets a bunch of secondary characters we don't really care about. Then everyone on Earth gets drafted into the Space Force to fight off the invasion, including his mom and all his old school friends. A bunch of the secondary characters get killed off during the ensuing battle, along with his dad, and then it turns out the aliens were testing humanity to see how they'd react and want us to join their society, so they give us a bunch of advanced technology to help fix the climate and cure all disease, etc etc. Zack is pretty suspicious of their motives, considering their test involved killing hundreds of thousands of people, but that whole plot thread is left hanging, presumably for a sequel, and he goes off to date the gamer grrl and resume being an unstable, socially awkward twerp.
I'm sorry, it has to be a high level troll with sockpuppets, there's no way.I'm not sure which is more horrifying: The descriptions of those books, or the fact they carry a 4-star rating...
They seem legit. Looking at the reviewers' GoodReads pages, they all have a lot of other books listed as read (one person has over 2500) and have done other reviews. Now, it could be friends of the author, but I don't know. I'm scratching my head on this.I'm sorry, it has to be a high level troll with sockpuppets, there's no way.
Ready Player One is an absolute treasure trove of bad writing that I deliberately put myself through just so I could say I had borne witness to it with my own eyes. I do (very cynically) understand why it was popular, but... how could anyone have read the following and thought, yeah, this is a well-written book. It isn't. It's a string of references meant to tickle your ego because you're part of the "in-crowd" who gets it. I understand that Armada is even worse but haven't endured that myself, only listened to extracts on 372 Pages.
View attachment 902276
Where do I even begin...? It's just so much autism I don't know what to make of it.
He found a line and pulled on it, fighting toward the hatch to get himself below out of the storm, but a gust of wind knocked his feet from under him and a second slammed him into the rail and there he clung. Rain lashed at his face, blinding him. His mouth was full of blood again. The ship groaned and growled beneath him like a constipated fat man straining to shit
"I must be the color of the communist manifesto."
Vaguely, I’m aware that I’m still in my sweats, unshowered, yucky, and he’s just gloriously yummy, his pants doing that hanging from the hips thing, and what’s more, he’s here in my bedroom….
Finally, my medulla oblongata recalls its purpose. I breathe…