quote:The system verified that I was on the chat room’s access list and allowed me to enter. My view of the classroom shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small thumbnail window in the lower right of my display, allowing me to monitor what was in front of my avatar. The rest of my field of vision was now filled with the interior of Aech’s chat room. My avatar appeared just inside the “entrance,” a door at the top of a carpeted staircase. The door didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t even open. This was because the Basement and its contents didn’t exist as a part of the OASIS. Chat rooms were stand-alone simulations—temporary virtual spaces that avatars could access from anywhere in OASIS. My avatar wasn’t actually “in” the chat room. It only appeared that way. Wade3/Parzival was still sitting in my World History classroom with his eyes closed. Logging into a chat room was a little like being in two places at once. The Basement is done up to look like a 1980s rec room: wood-paneled walls covered in vintage movie and comic book posters, an old RCA television with a Betamax VCR, Laserdisc player, and vintage video game consoles hooked up, 80s arcade games, bookshelves lined with back issues of pop culture magazines and RPG supplements, and a stereo currently playing "The Wild Boys". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M43wsiNBwmo Wade's friend Aech (pronounced like the letter H) is a high level gunter who's made a lot of virtual money in PvP tournaments, and is even more famous than Art3mis because Wade just gets to hang out with celebrities like that. Normally the Basement is only available to fellow elites, but Aech and Wade share similar obsessions over Anorak's Almanac and everything in it so Wade is allowed in despite being 27 levels lower than Aech. Because Wade's not in school, the avatars here run the gamut from vampires and dark elves to cyborgs and Vulcans. Aech's avatar is a tall, handsome white guy with brown hair. As before, the movie has gone...a little different. This is actually kind of a lovely thing on Spielberg's part. I won't spoil it, but you may already be able to guess why changing Aech's avatar from a normal handsome white guy to an orc might come off as a bad move. quote:As I walked over, he glanced up from the Intellivision game he was playing. His distinctive Cheshire grin stretched from ear to ear. “Z!” he shouted. “What is up, amigo?” He stretched out his right hand and gave me five as I dropped onto the couch opposite him. Aech had started calling me “Z” shortly after I met him. He liked to give people single-letter nicknames. Aech pronounced his own avatar’s name just like the letter “H.” I'm going to be leaving out more dialogue than usual in this chapter because I cannot loving stand it. Aech and Wade have a friendly rivalry where they're always trying to one-up each other on trivia, which means this chapter alone would be lethal for any kind of 80s shout-out drinking game you wanted to play. It's like watching two clones of the Comic Book Guy ribbing each other. I'll include samples, and please note that the whole loving chapter reads like this. quote:“So what did you do after you bailed last night?” he asked, tossing me the other Intellivision controller. We’d hung out here in his chat room for a few hours the previous evening, watching old Japanese monster movies. quote:“Starlog, eh?” I said, nodding my approval. So yeah, this whole chapter is like this from start to finish. Keep in mind that these are the characters we're supposed to root for and think are awesome. This arguing over a Rutger Hauer fantasy movie goes on for another loving page (including Aech making an empty threat of banning Wade for calling Ewoks "Endorians") before another gunter shows up, I-r0k. I-r0k somehow manages to be even lamer and more poorly written than Aech and Parzival, an obnoxious poseur who walks around with a plasma rifle at all times and harasses everyone. He and Aech share virtual classes together, which is probably the only reason he's even allowed in the Basement. quote:“Are you cocks arguing about Star Wars again?” he said, descending the steps and walking over to join the crowd around us. “That poo poo is so played out, yo.” Any room with these three people in it would be immediately improved by completely destroying it. Wade quickly challenges I-r0k's knowledge, and I-r0k decides to test him by daring him to name a game that he pulls out of his inventory. Wade instantly identifies it as Swordquest: Earthworld from 1982, then follows up by challenging I-r0k to name the other three games in the series. When he can't, Wade smugly begins zipping through a bunch of trivia about them and he and Aech bounce questions off one another. The only really important part of this is that Halliday apparently modeled the Hunt after the contest Atari held to help sell the game (which ended prematurely when the last game was canceled in the video game crash of 1983). quote:“Fine. You win,” I-r0k said. “But you both obviously need to get a life.” Is it bad that I agree with I-r0k? quote:“And you,” I said, “obviously need to find a new hobby. Because you clearly lack the intelligence and commitment to be a gunter.” With perfect dramatic timing, the 3-minute warning bell rings and all three have to log out and return to school. I'll include that chapter here as well, because I can summarize it fairly quickly. quote:My avatar’s eyes slid open, and I was back in my World History classroom. The seats around me were now filled with other students, and our teacher, Mr. Avenovich, was materializing at the front of the classroom. Mr. A’s avatar looked like a portly, bearded college professor. He sported an infectious grin, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. When he spoke, he somehow always managed to sound like he was reading a passage from Dickens. I liked him. He was a good teacher. The virtual schools are basically the best schools ever. The kids are programmed to be unable to leave their seats or talk to each other so there's no real disciplinary issues, and the virtual environment allows them to have "field trips" literally anywhere, from King Tut's tomb to the inside of a heart. Wade eats his lunch by eating a real world protein bar while his avatar sits on a grassy field. Like he said before, travel costs virtual money through either teleportation or purchasing an in-game ship (the school parking lot is full of TIE Fighters, X-Wings, Vipers, UFOs, and Space Shuttles). While the more privileged kids (or ones with friends to hitch a ride with) spend their lunch breaks shopping, flying around, hitting up a virtual club, or questing, Wade lacks the friends or funds to really get out. There are thousands of planets in OASIS, growing from only a few hundred at launch. Some were painstakingly hand-crafted while others were randomly generated, but they run every single fictional environment possible. Along with generic environments like a zombie apocalypse or cyberpunk city, OASIS absorbed just about every existing MMORPG world like Warcraft and Everquest after launch and has licensed tons of IPs: Firefly, Star Wars and Star Trek, the Metaverse from Snow Crash, Middle Earth, The Matrix, etc. You name it, it probably exists. OASIS is divided into 27 cube-shaped sectors in a Rubik's Cube shape, each 10 light hours long. I previously mentioned that this gives a ridiculous distance of more than 33 billion kilometers to travel from one side to the other, hence teleportation services. Along with selling in-game items, GSS makes most of its money from selling spacecraft fuel and teleportation fees. quote:Traveling around inside the OASIS wasn’t just costly—it was also dangerous. Each sector was divided up into many different zones that varied in size and shape. Some zones were so large that they encompassed several planets, while others covered only a few kilometers on the surface of a single world. Each zone had a unique combination of rules and parameters. Magic would function in some zones and not in others. The same was true of technology. If you flew your technology-based starship into a zone where technology didn’t function, your engines would fail the moment you crossed the zone border. Then you’d have to hire some silly gray-bearded sorcerer with a spell-powered space barge to tow your rear end back into a technology zone. Ludus, the school planet, is perfectly boring and ordinary. It's permanently daytime and filled with nothing but thousands of schools, all copied from the same template and separated by seed-generated parks, forests, and rivers. Because Wade can't afford to leave Ludus, he's stuck hitching rides with Aech to be dropped off in low-level zones and kill kobolds and goblins for a few credits that go right back to teleportation fees back to school. All of his equipment came from item drops, and he's painstakingly made it to level 3 after years in OASIS. This is a huge embarrassment as a gunter, but he can't risk going out too much because if he gets expelled due to poor attendance he'll have his school OASIS rig confiscated. He also can't find a job outside of school, as the Great Recession is in its third decade and even fast food restaurants have a two-year waiting list. And yet....everything keeps going? There's enough government-subsidized food for Wade to grow fat despite climbing a 22-story junk tower twice a day, the schools can provide huge amounts of OASIS rigs for free to students with perfectly average GPAs, and there's a multinational conglomerate that can pay for a whole virtual army with expensive technology, despite the economy being so in the shitter and power so expensive that even automobile travel out of town is too costly for most people. How the hell does any of this stay standing? chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 15:23 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:11 |
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Compared and contrasted with other stories which are built on references and allusions to other works, what is it that really sets RPO apart from, say, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Anno Dracula or Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton concept?
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 15:33 |
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Wheat Loaf posted:Compared and contrasted with other stories which are built on references and allusions to other works, what is it that really sets RPO apart from, say, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Anno Dracula or Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton concept? What separates Airplane! from Epic Movie? references can be used eloquently to explore the significance of the character or story, or to analyze the premise exported into other contexts. A good transformative work uses the past works as a template to explore new interpretations. RPO just points at a yoda and goes "look its yoda"
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 15:38 |
Wheat Loaf posted:Compared and contrasted with other stories which are built on references and allusions to other works, what is it that really sets RPO apart from, say, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Anno Dracula or Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton concept? Well, I'd argue that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie is still crap. What I'd say is that the biggest difference is that these other works aren't just about referencing those works. League isn't just about Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Mina, and Dr. Jekyll constantly referencing and calling back to their standalone fiction to each other. They're not just reliving their prior adventures with other characters. The point is to take these existing characters and mash them up to see how they work together in unrelated situations. RPO is about the references. The plot itself is one that's been rehashed over and over and the book would be 1/4 its length with all the 80s references excised. It's about pointing at stuff that's popular for nerds to be into and combining it all for the sake of it. The thread title I chose, in case you haven't seen it, is an old Flash animation that's basically the same thing as RPO but 3 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WgT9gy4zQA
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:03 |
This is also a good explanation of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMBylNJQEbg
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:14 |
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I did not realize how goddamn BORING the writing in RPO is. It is so...mundane. The entire thing is really just boring description loaded with nostalgia, isn't it. Why attempt to use the English language in an interesting way when you can make millions off of reminding 40 y.o. IT guys of their preteen years? Ernest Cline surely does not know why.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:18 |
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chitoryu12 posted:Well, I'd argue that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie is still crap. Mind you, Ultimate Showdown does end on a punchline that points out how silly the whole concept of ’famous pop-culture figures gruesomely murder each other because reasons’ is. I’m not sure RPO ever manages the same.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:21 |
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my bony fealty posted:I did not realize how goddamn BORING the writing in RPO is. It is so...mundane. The entire thing is really just boring description loaded with nostalgia, isn't it. One of the most horrifying moments on the forums thus far for me was a couple sci-fi fans being like "What do you mean you care about the quality of the prose?" chitoryu12 posted:RPO is about the references. The plot itself is one that's been rehashed over and over and the book would be 1/4 its length with all the 80s references excised. It's about pointing at stuff that's popular for nerds to be into and combining it all for the sake of it. The thread title I chose, in case you haven't seen it, is an old Flash animation that's basically the same thing as RPO but 3 minutes long. It gets even worse in Armada, where the plot ITSELF is an 80s reference and the characters in the story explicitly acknowledge that what they are doing is "just like that 80s movie"
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:24 |
my bony fealty posted:
yes At least when Stranger Things made me realize "holy poo poo, the eighties is to kids now as the 1950's was to me when I watched Back to the Future", I could at least respect the craft involved. This book poo poo just makes me feel old and makes a mockery of everything I value in art.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:28 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:yes I think Stranger Things gets a bad rep because its referential stuff is entirely window dressing. Theres a new critical idea in the geek sphere I actually find kind of interesting despite the fact its troper poo poo. There is this idea that a work cannot simply be deconstructed but also reconstructed. Which is what stranger things feels like to me. Its not explicitly referencing 80s tropes as much as its taking our joined cultural memory of 80s cinema and acknowledging the tropes while creating a new narrative
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 16:35 |
I'm going to do one more update right off, a relatively short one. Ernest Cline decided that the best way to write would be to have two chapters back to back describing OASIS and a biography of Halliday. The plot gets put on hold for this, so I'll just knock out the rest of the exposition here.quote:After lunch, I headed to my favorite class, Advanced OASIS Studies. This was a senior-year elective where you learned about the history of the OASIS and its creators. Talk about an easy A. Halliday (who was almost definitely autistic) was born June 12, 1972 in Middletown, OH. His father was an alcoholic machine operator and his mother was a bipolar waitress, so not exactly the best environment for someone with autism. He had no friends or social skills until another boy in school, Ogden Morrow, saw him reading the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook by himself in the cafeteria and invited him to game with them. Morrow and Halliday quickly became best friends and business partners. Halliday became a game programmer at 15, creating Anorak's Quest for a TRS-80 Color Computer ("Anorak" was a nickname he was given by a British exchange student). It was only created for his D&D group, but Morrow encouraged him to start selling it. They quickly went from selling floppy disks out of ziplock bags to establishing their own game company, first in Morrow's basement and then in an office in a Columbus, OH strip mall. Gregarious Games took the gaming industry by storm, creating revolutionary works until by the end of the 1990s Halliday was viewed as possibly the greatest game developer of all time. Morrow acted as the businessman while Halliday stuck to programming. He could charitably be called "eccentric", walking out of conversations or interviews if he got bored and laughing to himself for no apparent reason. He often locked himself away for days or weeks to work on games, and had such an obsession with the 80s that he would occasionally lash out and fire employees who didn't get his references (Morrow would then rehire them). quote:By their thirtieth birthdays, Halliday and Morrow were both multimillionaires. They purchased mansions on the same street. Morrow bought a Lamborghini, took several long vacations, and traveled the world. Halliday bought and restored one of the original DeLoreans used in the Back to the Future films, continued to spend nearly all of his time welded to a computer keyboard, and used his newfound wealth to amass what would eventually become the world’s largest private collection of classic videogames, Star Wars action figures, vintage lunch boxes, and comic books. OASIS is the perfect game for everyone. The graphics are detailed down to individual blades of grass and weather patterns on a planetary scale. Halliday and Morrow imagined it as the perfect escape from a boring world, where guaranteed anonymity allowed you to create whatever idealized self you wanted. As an "open-source reality", anyone could create new worlds or even make their own private planets in a sort of cyber-Mormonism. The visor uses low-power lasers to beam images directly onto the user's retinas and the haptic feedback gloves allow for realistic touch feedback. Halliday's genius programming allowed for 5 million simultaneous users on launch, which has expanded to billions by 2045. quote:Most online games of the day generated revenue by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access. GSS only charged a onetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, for which you received a lifetime OASIS account. The ads all used the same tagline: The OASIS—it’s the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 17:05 |
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I actually liked the dialogue when Wade and H were talking about Lady hawk or whatever. It felt natural, it actually had some back and forth to it. It read like typical nerd banter. I'm pretty sure it's an example of "write what you know" and Cline just copied a conversation he And look, he managed to mention Halliday's movie collection without going into excruciating detail about it! Usually he'd be listing everything that was in it. Edit: the above was about the previous update, I took too long to respond apparently. Of course Halliday was a "rockstar" programmer. Sounds like he was absolutely terrible to work with. Solumin fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 14, 2018 |
# ? Mar 14, 2018 17:08 |
Solumin posted:And look, he managed to mention that rich guy's movie collection without going into excruciating detail about it! Usually he'd be listing everything that was in it. Oh just you wait.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 17:08 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:One of the most horrifying moments on the forums thus far for me was a couple sci-fi fans being like "What do you mean you care about the quality of the prose?" I am an ardent SFF reader and that is baffling to me. Imagined written worlds cannot come alive without prose that meets a minimum of competency and creativity. Or without characterization that feels real in a fantastic setting. But I suppose many (most?) SFF readers aren't looking to read about well-imagined places and people, rather they seek escapism and the literary equivalent of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Many of my favorite literary works share this appeal: Proust's Combray and its inhabitants are as alien to me as any amazing planet I've read about in a sci-fi novel, but that does not stop them from being eminently relatable and having an intrinsic human quality.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 17:59 |
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I started reading this the other day just so it's at least fair when I poo poo on my wife's friend for loving this book and oh my god it's worse than everyone said. The bad part is there's a fairly interesting story there IMO, the execution is just so painstakingly awful that it's irredeemable. In better hands it could be a fairly interesting book. It's bad to the level that I'd think it was an intricate troll job if I didn't already know more about Cline.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 20:31 |
sportsgenius86 posted:I started reading this the other day just so it's at least fair when I poo poo on my wife's friend for loving this book and oh my god it's worse than everyone said. Honestly, the actual game world would be a really interesting place for adventures. I want to like the idea of an MMO with a playing field 10 times larger than the solar system where you can drop into just about any fictional universe the author can think of. Cline just does it a complete disservice. He thinks that nerdiness (and in his mind, attractiveness as a person) is about consuming and enjoying traditionally "nerdy" media while geeking out about science and numbers, and he puts his own childhood on a pedestal above all others. He doesn't put any stock into whether or not anything he's consuming is actually good. The gunters' cargo cult of the 80s isn't presented as a bizarre reversal of the progress of human civilization, but as something to aspire to as the epitome of coolness. I will say that the book tries to present spending your entire life in an MMO and worshiping the 80s as a bad thing toward the end, but the message flies in the face of how awesome it's all presented as earlier.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 20:40 |
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Let’s not let the mere word “gunter” pass by unremarked-upon.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 21:11 |
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It has recently occurred to me that we owe it to ourselves to jack off to Stormy Daniels explicitly because Ernest Cline would definitely 100% not
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 21:14 |
I decided to look on Tumblr to see the current climate regarding the movie.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 21:21 |
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Yeah, more and more people are spending increasing amounts of time in this immersive simulation to the detriment of their real lives but it's been *medically proven* to not be addictive, guys.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 00:39 |
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What does OASIS do that the Metaverse didn't, anyway?
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 00:46 |
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quote:rack up some XPs burn it to the god drat ground
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 01:31 |
Memento posted:burn it to the god drat ground XPs and videogames
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 02:41 |
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This book is awful, but doing whatever it is this thread is is severely loving deranged.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 03:16 |
sector_corrector posted:This book is awful, but doing whatever it is this thread is is severely loving deranged. Reading it? I agree.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 03:37 |
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So traveling from planet to planet or across zones isn't instantaneous? You gotta actually get in your spaceship and spend time traveling across virtual interstellar distances? How much time are players spending just sitting in their imaginary spaceship just commuting? Did Chris Roberts play any role in designing this world?
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 03:51 |
Angry Salami posted:So traveling from planet to planet or across zones isn't instantaneous? You gotta actually get in your spaceship and spend time traveling across virtual interstellar distances? How much time are players spending just sitting in their imaginary spaceship just commuting? There’s teleportation, but it costs credits. Wade is stuck because he has no friends to hitch rides with and is too poor to afford teleports or spacecraft. But yes, the fastest spacecraft travel at light speed so it would take at least 30 hours with the best ships to fly from end to end of OASIS. What would the volume of OASIS be?
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 04:39 |
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30 light hours/side, a light hour is about 1.1 billion km in length, so (30*1,100,000,000km)*(30*1,100,000,000km)*(30*1,100,000,000km)=2.97e+13km3, or 29,700,000,000,000 cubic kilometers.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 04:50 |
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I never gave much thought to the scale of computing it would take to run something like OASIS, but after reading folks talk about it it’s like A.M. from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream became carelessly apathetic instead of self-hating homicidal. Every nanoangstrom engraved with WHERE’S THE BEEF.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 05:19 |
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I wrote a simulator for a universe with those dimensions, it was easy. You can even play in it. But it's single player, first-person view, and the universe is completely empty other than the player. You can play it by turning off your monitor.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 05:36 |
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Gnome de plume posted:Yeah, more and more people are spending increasing amounts of time in this immersive simulation to the detriment of their real lives but it's been *medically proven* to not be addictive, guys. give him the credit for the one piece of subtlety he's had so far, he's very much implying it's addictive there, just not through chemical means
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 05:47 |
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sector_corrector posted:This book is awful, but doing whatever it is this thread is is severely loving deranged. Welcome to The Book Barn
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 06:05 |
I'm so confused. So energy is now expensive which is why we can afford to run all these VR headsets? But not run an electric car or something to get around? Also was there a nuclear exchange in the first paragraph? Cline posted:Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. There's a loving nuclear war going on, and these kids are just allowed to sit around and play video games instead of being drafted to fight? Cities are going up in atomic flame and people are seriously just sitting around playing an MMO? Sure, it's been 5 years since the nukes were launched but I can't imagine the government just letting 18-year-olds play video games all day. This is the kind of poo poo that would cause martial law to be instituted, not provide an acceptable excuse for dicking around in the magic bullshit MMO!
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 06:06 |
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm so confused. I think the implication is that nuclear terrorism is an increasingly common occurrence.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 07:18 |
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Tunicate posted:give him the credit for the one piece of subtlety he's had so far, he's very much implying it's addictive there, just not through chemical means Given that this is Cline we're talking about I'd wager all my XPs that this was completely unintentional.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 10:40 |
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This is the worst loving thing I've ever read, and I'm not even reading it. Thank you for your service.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 10:43 |
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Every nanoangstrom engraved with WHERE’S THE BEEF. I loved this also https://twitter.com/leonardpierce/status/974018822121324544
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 12:05 |
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Pastry of the Year posted:I loved this reminds me of a fun game for this book keep track of how many times he describes something as "classic"
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 12:22 |
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chitoryu12 posted:Trust me, it gets even stupider when OASIS boots up. I completely missed Ready Player One till the movie trailers hit. I have to ask, what's the infamous excerpt that people keep referring to? Edit: Wait is it the post above from Pastry that I literally just noticed? Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Mar 15, 2018 |
# ? Mar 15, 2018 12:24 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:11 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:reminds me of a fun game for this book Double points for when he refers to something as "classic" instead of describing it. "He started doing some classic 80s dance moves." "They wore classic 80s clothes." Those are the only ones I remember cemented in my brain from 372 pages. I couldn't unsee it after that.
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# ? Mar 15, 2018 13:32 |