- Joined
- Dec 4, 2018
Good shit. Would also add that endless bitching about every entry of any given mass market content does not absolve one of one's consoomer-ness, as parties like Bex Gerber seem to believe.
Ready Player Two OUT NOW
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- Joined
- Jul 4, 2014
Listening to the book on tape at work, about 6 hours in. This book is really cringe and hard to take seriously! I read the first book and don't remember it being as bad as this. They talk about Sonic at least five times. This book is pretty much like the old "pretending to be stupid meme".
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2018
I raised my hand like Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. "Yes!" I said, as I swiftly agreed with Pargon's reply faster than a contestant buzzing in an answer on Jeopardy. (Faster than Ken Jennings? Moi?!) This book is trash, and I don't mean the brilliant grunge band Garbage. (Shirley Manson is my goddess. Move over Courtney Love!) This book is the Plan 9 of books, I don't even think JK Rowling could come up with something in the Muggle world as horrid. This reminds me of the Brony crowd, as they're all autistic like the boy on ABC's The Good Doctor. Although that actor was Norman Bates in Bates Motel which was a retelling of his early years before Hitchcock's Psycho. There was nary a shower scene to be found, I said to myself like Jean Grey reading a mutants mind in X-Men.
..........for real though. How did this fat diabetic fuck get these books to sell so well. The YA market is just filled with gullible retards.
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- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
Oh Poe's Law, when will you every cease to confuse me?
But seriously, that is some horrendous prose. It's just nothing but references. How do people read this tripe, it's almost unintelligible. If this sells well then my manuscript is the next great American novel.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Someone got an advanced copy
Also the movie would have been much better without the pop culture references. I think thats why it did so well in china. When you legitimately dont know what any of the references are, you have to assume they're new and part of that fictional universe. Honestly every change from the book was much better. Just the basic plot is all tht really needs to be used.
People bitching about the book are why the 2nd one is so woke. Everyone kept whining about bad escapist fantasies and now none of us can have fun ever.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2018
Ready Player One is what happens when you take Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, remove all the cleverness in that book, and replace it with Reddit memes.
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2019
I had been reading much better books in the years inbetween so it was a lucky guess. I'm surprised the author didn't swipe more from the better series he clearly swiped from
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2017
I guess the appeal of this is that it's basically a FF.net crossover fic/power fantasy as written by a 12 year old who drank a gallon of coffee at once.
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- Sep 25, 2019
A lot of indiscriminate rage directed at that book has less to do with its subject matter and more its depressing level of popularity. Specifically its nature as a gelatinous pile of references and its unabashed love of consumerism. As someone chipping away at my own creative work, it was a little disheartening to see something so simple and apparently devoid of life capture people's imaginations. Escapism has a place in pop culture certainly, but there was something fundamentally ugly and cheap about Ready Player One that set it apart from other forms of escapist and even self-insert literature.
That said, my anger cooled off towards the book because in the end, its not the book's fault that it was so popular. Its a really depressing sign of the times that people didn't just turn en masse towards escapism, but also towards really low effort escapism. People like me technically have no right to complain about it though, we've been railing against every escapist-oriented sequel/reboot of our favorite franchises from the start, so I'm not sure what we expected. I feel like in any decently adjusted pop culture zeitgeist, Ready Player One would be a curiosity or a novelty story, a kind of "What if we just pasted everything together" scenario discussed in passing. Instead its a landmark piece of literature and arguably one of the most popular books of the modern era.
Its just depressing. If I could sum it up I'd say it has almost an anti-escapism effect on me, where instead of being some kind of appealing fantasy it just rudely yanks me straight back to reality because of its simplicity.
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
That actually explains a lot.
I deleted my original post posing that question because I was worried it came off as too inflammatory towards @Safir and could easily be taken the wrong way, but this clears up a lot of the confusion I had.
I never read the book itself and never really noticed nor paid attention to the response surrounding the book until after the movie came out and a lot of the clickbait mills wrote ranty articles about it and I was more confused than anything as to how the literary equivalent of a cheapo popcorn flick could elicit the reactions it got.
Seeing the excerpts posted in this thread, it feels less like a fun escapist novel and more like an over-the-top parody or satire of nostalgic escapism since it reads like a stereotypical Redditor sperging about the 80's.
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2019
Its extremely poorly written for sure but if that was the only problem it had I don't think anyone would even still be talking about it. There's also a lot of salt from the pretentious literary Show Don't Tell (or insert your choice of annoying overused writing advice) crowd that the book just blatantly ignores almost everything you're not supposed to do when writing a story and was still a massive success anyway. Which I'll be the first to admit is darkly hilarious but its not really a victory I feel too good about seeing.
This one is more on the speculative side, but another thread to this is whether or not the book was artifically popularized by interested corporate interests so they could turn it into a franchise. Theories on that often veer into full blown conspiratard narratives where the book and movie outright have no fans and that its all astroturfing (something that is blatantly false) so its hard to discuss without bringing out the a-logs. I tend to believe that the movie only got put together as swiftly as it did because a few enterprising suits noticed the book's potential as a multimedia franchise and were quick to fast-track it.
This one is more on the speculative side, but another thread to this is whether or not the book was artifically popularized by interested corporate interests so they could turn it into a franchise. Theories on that often veer into full blown conspiratard narratives where the book and movie outright have no fans and that its all astroturfing (something that is blatantly false) so its hard to discuss without bringing out the a-logs. I tend to believe that the movie only got put together as swiftly as it did because a few enterprising suits noticed the book's potential as a multimedia franchise and were quick to fast-track it.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2018
Really I don't have a problem with RP1 because it's filled with references. One of the greatest books of all time is Nabokov's "Lolita" and a major part of that book is how the charming but utterly vile Humbert Humbert fills his prose with a copious amount of literary pastiches. It has so many references to literature that it has been fully annotated so that first time inexperienced readers can pick up on how Nabokov's anti-hero references practically the entire Literary Canon. The end of Lolita is more or less a parody of Raymond Chandler's pulp fiction which was insanely popular for decades.
But in the case of Nabokov he wasn't just writing this book to say "HEY I READ HEGEL MAYBE YOU DID TOO FELLOW BOOKWORM!" Well honestly maybe he did a little bit but it serves in the interest of making the unreliable narrator so interesting and clever to read. Nabokov's prose flows so beautifully and yet it's incredibly densely written. And it makes sense because Humbert Humbert is written to be this pompous highly educated European Literary Professor, the character simply is supposed to know this shit as his life revolves around books.
It is truly unfair for me to compare one of the biggest literary giants of the last century to a paperback writer like Ernest Cline. But I can't help myself because I'm reading "Pale Fire" again. Nevertheless I do truly believe there's something genuinely good to be written about a character like RP1's "Wade Watts." I think RP1 did strike an emotional chord because our modern Pop Culture Psychophere indeed makes us a bit like Wade Watts in that the great lot of us internet nerds today know an unhealthy amount of trivial knowledge pertaining to pop culture.
But this is what pisses me off about Cline's story. Excluding those antiquated Atari games I know pretty much all the games that Ready Player One references. I think a great percentage of hardcore gamers do too. But here's the thing, I'm very sure most of the gamers like me don't play every fucking video game there is (who would have the time to do such a thing??) No instead we read about them on forums, we see the key memorable moments on Youtube. We picked up on the key details because we simply live in a world where a Wikipedia entry can be read in minutes.
If I could take a magic pill that transferred all my knowledge about Pop Culture into me knowing something that's actual useful or at least intellectually savvy I'd do it in a heartbeat. Ernest Cline writes his protagonist's unhealthy knowledge of 80's Pop Trash as if it were a virtue. Personally when I read the most bemoaned passages of RP1 it rings tragic in my heart. Because really no one needs to know everything there is to know about the filmography of Kevin Smith or the TV Show "Silver Spoons."
I'll give Ernest Cline this though, at least he didn't write "Infinite Jest", seriously that book is bloated garbage.
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2020
I have yet to read the book, yes I did read the first one, but reading the synopsis made me question this line.
who is he gonna make the evil dictator who wants to "kill millions".
I also find it difficult to suspend my disbelief to the degree that 80s movies references are saving the world from genocide.
beating a company in a race to find keys in a game is one thing, but saving the world is beginning to push the concept too far.
hopefully, we'll get some Cicada 3301 like cryptography, going back and forth between the real-life and the virtual one.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
You just may get your wish. 'Course it took a decade to get the second book, so look for it in 2030, I guess.
Ready Player Two author Ernest Cline on returning to the Oasis
Ready Player Two author Ernest Cline on returning to the Oasis | EW.c…
archived 27 Nov 2020 14:22:07 UTC
Yes, I am such a fucking sperg I read interviews with Ernest Cline. Thank you for asking.
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2017
First, I'm not angry, I'm handing out stickers. I really can't think of any entertainment media commentary that could make me angry.
Ok I'm immediately proven wrong. This does make me angry. Not you specifically, but the trend, the demand even, to defer quality judgments. I see it a lot in amateur reviews, I see it in politics."How was the movie?" "Uh, it's okay. A 7. Enjoyable, I guess." And then I find out the person hated it. Like really really hated. Would think less of anyone who didn't spend a night in jail for kicking a security guard in the nuts while demanding his money back hated. And the reason why he didn't say that outright was not because of politeness, not because he didn't want to risk me having liked it, but because, "uh, other people liked it? it has a 7.2 on imdb? eh? eh? I must be wrong?" Yeah right you're wrong about your own impression you bitchass cocksucker. The only thing everyone is by definition the expert on is one's own opinions. How on earth did we concede that to the hivemind. I keep seeing threads about it. "I hated this game, what should I rate it to be fair?", essentially trying to predict the eventual aggregate score. You rate it zero. And then the people who are interested in the aggregate score can look at the aggregate score, and those who are interested in your personal opinion can get it, too.
In politics, look for the great sin of Populism. What is populism? It's appeal to voters. Who then proceed to vote for you. Because they like your policies. Which you intend to implement.What ghastly underhanded tactic!
I see it in this.
I see it in your post. "Why are you giving a bad sticker to my opinion, it's just an opinion, yours is no more correct." Well I think it IS more correct, that's why I hold it. When I come to think another opinion is more correct, I change my mind. Not, like, afterward -- it's what "changing my mind" is.
I don't care about media specifically. This undermines the foundations of logic. A or B? "Well I'm absolutely sure it's A, but someone might say B, so I guess the truth is somewhere in between." WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN.
If you think something is a dumb choice, and then you see people making it, and you consider if it may make make sense after all in light of this circumstantial evidence, and arrive at the conclusion it's still dumb - then IT IS, to the best of your knowledge, and the people who are making it are BEING DUMB, and they deserve the bins.
Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way wrote a work of fiction purely for the purposes of entertainment. Cline wrote his for money, and succeeded. (No problem with either, I'd do it too if I could.)
The problematic thing for me isn't "dumb fun", it's the dumb unfun. I want people to enjoy the shit they consoom, however retarded.Over on the multimedia subforum there's a guy who spergs about his favorite franchise. I tried it on his (impersonal) recommendation and found it to be hot garbage. But he loves it, so, uh, congrats on having shitty taste? It's a personal value judgment. He's watching what he likes and having fun, it's The Right Thing to Do. The way he has fun trying to figure out a plot with more holes in it than the Menger sponge is commendable .(I probably gave him a couple of bad stickers regardless).
I think it's much, much worse to consoom bad media listlessly (having "good" taste but not the presence of mind to stop and do something else) than enthusiastically (having shit taste). The "it's fun if you switch off your brain" opinions are always the former. No one says this about something they love. We know this because no one says this about purely physical stuff when the consciousness isn't involved, like riding a bike or stroking a cat. "It's fun if you don't stop and ask yourself if it is." Switching one's brain off is needed so that people don't notice they're bored and miserable. At least actual cooming has a natural cooldown period of post-nut clarity (or so consumeproduct.win says, am a wamen), for consoomers the next garbage bin has already been queued up.
They mean "it's better than watching paint dry", but it's current year + n, it's not actually competing with watching paint dry. Never before in the history of the world there's been more things competing for our attention. No one ever needs to kill time.
But there's a lot of money involved in persuading people otherwise. The Industry must show Growth, and Growth means producing more garbage and keeping people passively miserable with infrequent and random injections of excitement.
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2019
Ya know there was always one thing that bugged me about both the 1st and 2nd book. Okay, so this game allows you to look however you want. An yet Wade and Artemis looks like themselves just a tad handsome, H looks like a big black dude, Shoto looks like a walking Japanese steortype (nothing wrong with that). An im having a hard time buying this, like really not a single furry, big breasted anime girl or downright anime characters or fuck "muh purfect dun steal OC"
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2013
Halliday's AI self who wants the AI copy of the girl the real Halliday was in love with.
Aech changes her avatar to look like herself. Both her and Shoto change their names so they are now only Aech and Shoto.
Also, all four of them open megacharities to save the world. Art3mis does real life eco activism, Shoto helps out hikikomoris, Aech helps the LGBTQIA and the negros via the Wakandan Outreach Initiative and Wade...
Well, he gives free super VR headsets for kids to play in OASIS with.
Also, they're all helping fund the US government now.
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2020
Snow crash was already boring. The dude spent entire chapters talking about ancient mythology. That said it was more interesting than Ready Player One/Two
Pretty sure those people are mentioned in the book but never show up just to keep things PG-13. In book 2 he has cybersex with a tranny though.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2014
I couldn't sit through the movie, the whole "haha all these references and cameos" really started to annoy me after a short while.
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- Joined
- Jan 16, 2019
I don't think it ever did, like most they mentioned was players using dumb nicknames for their characters or that one guy looked like a Rob Liefield character and that was about it.