Chewbot posted:

Working at a job relevant to the topic at hand, how name-droppy of me! BioWare sucks, guys! Sorry about suggesting that some of you do nothing of value, Hitler's Gay Secret, and for sort of barely defending the author. I see I was wrong now.

I'll leave you guys alone.

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

You're getting way too pissy over a loving book.

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

Ha ha ha holy poo poo they dropped the sale. gently caress Ryan North. I was going to buy it and saw your LP so thanks for saving me .94 cents. Now $11.99

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

Derp derp wacky money cheese!

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

You can't even justify this book's existence.

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

I'm kinda getting pissed with the useless choices when it's just railroading us along the actual story.

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

gently caress Ryan North. Jesus Christ I'm so glad I didn't give money to this douche.

no they will not posted:

no they will not posted:

What the gently caress are you retards doing

no they will not posted:

Are you seriously doing a let's play of a book

no they will not posted:

Justify this thread's existence, you little beast

no they will not posted:

i said justify its existence not prove it's not violating the Let's Play subforum rules

Stallion Cabana posted:

Ryan North's To Be or Not To Be: A Circlejerk of Angry Goons

PleasingFungus posted:

Hitler's Gay Secret.

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

dreezy posted:

Look on the bright side, this thread has gone off the rails in all the ways we hoped the book would!

Beef Turret posted:

Nice edit

dreezy posted:

Look on the bright side, this thread has gone off the rails in all the ways we hoped the book would!

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

Jealous that a former GBS mod didn't give you an awesome name?

Dolash posted:

I remember hearing about this and thinking it sounded cool, I think I saw a friend get a book copy once and then I sort of forgot about it but occasionally meant to check it out. Unfortunately I can't really dig this LP's love-hate relationship with the source material. Don't get me wrong, I'm familiar with having mixed opinions on a game you're Let's Play-ing, but it's hard to assess the game with a proxy-argument going on all the time and the occasional edits to tone down criticisms make for an odd tone. I think I'll have to buy it myself to give To Be or Not To Be a real chance. Thank you for showcasing this game though! LPs are hard work.

quote:

He called you a what? Seriously? "Hruuuuuuuugh," you groan. You're not going to take this disrespect any longer. If this were a theatre you'd turn to the fourth wall and scream at them to get you out of here. But there's no fourth wall here, just an author who keeps pulling your strings and you want him to die already. The only problem is that it's not exactly easy for a fictional character to murder a real human being. You're going to have to get creative. Thankfully, you still have a faint bond to your original creator; he's probably not still alive but maybe he can still find a way to help you out of this mess. You shut your eyes tightly, whispering a silent prayer into the aether and hoping your plea will somehow be heard.





You are now William Shakespeare!

Contrary to popular belief, you actually don't spend your afterlife turning over and over in your grave at the anguish of having your life's work butchered by an endless parade of unenlightened nincompoops. For one thing, the quality and longevity of your personal fandom rivals that of the poet Virgil. Sure, there are a lot of poor performances and reinterpretations and unlicensed sequels to your plays, and sometimes you even run into some erotic fanart and My Little Pony reimaginings of your characters, but even the most loathsome hermaphrodite giantess Rosalind pornography can't hope to outbalance all the museum-quality oil on canvas depictions that artists have made out of love for your plays' most iconic scenes. And there are a lot of those paintings. Hell, you actually have a whole lot of fun whenever you run into someone writing slash fiction of your characters. That's always occasion to call all your fellow ghosts who once formed the crew of The King's Men and bring them together for a dramatic reading. poo poo's hilarious. Sometimes you even do a dramatic reading late at night in the author's kitchen, just to mess with her while she's trying to sleep.

About that, you're a ghost. It's 11 PM and you're at Oxford University. You're here because the decades-long debate about your sexuality was starting to wind down and you needed to give it a bit more fuel. You're haunting the lab where they've been scanning and reconstructing all of your old handwritten manuscripts and work papers. You found a blank sheet of centuries-old paper and have just banged out a quick little sonnet that seems sort of ambiguous and the first letter of each line all put together spell out "THATFCKINGBTCH." You're about to slip it into a hitherto-unseen pocket of one of your volumes in such a way that the sonnet flutters out and lands face up on the floor next time someone handles the manuscript, but you suddenly hear a faint voice calling to you. And it's Ophelia!

She tells you about some guy named Ryan North who's written a book where she has to endure all manner of disgrace and disrespect, and asks if you would please do something about the author. You're not quite sure what the author did to her, but it must be pretty rotten if she's begging you for revenge. You didn't even know original characters could do that!

"Well, all right," you assent under her pressurings. She tells you how exploding somebody works and it actually sounds pretty cool, and whatever this Ryan North guy did to her must deserve a good hearty exploding because why would Ophelia come to you begging otherwise? A few directory searches and you find a Ryan North on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere in the Commonwealth of Canada. It takes about a day of hitchhiking on cabs, airplanes, and mail trucks but eventually you're floating in front of Ryan North's home, late at night. You drift through the door and follow the light down the stairs into his basement, where you find him seated at a desk next to a large drawing board with a massive printed flowchart taped to it. He's typing something and appears pretty engrossed at first, but is soon distracted by the deathly chill emanating from your spectral form and gets up to find a space heater. That's when he sees you. His eyes go as wide as dinner plates at first, and he takes a step back, stunned and frightened. Suddenly, though, as he looks at your clothes, his expression melts to one of understanding, and he mumbles the words: "William... Shakespeare's... ghost."

Instantly he's wearing a huge grin and greeting you with a friendly hello, reaching out to shake your hand. You can't help but smile and turn it corporeal for him. He seems like a nice enough dude. He even offers you a beer, and understands completely when you decline on account of being unable to drink.

"So, what brings you back from the dead?" He asks.

"Actually, I'm here to explode you because of some internet thing," you reply.

"What, seriously? OH COME O--"

He's cut off when you phase into him all at once and turn corporeal. The explosion is wet and fizzy, and you feel bad for whoever's going to have to clean it up. Your attention is drawn to a soft beeping coming from the ceiling, however -- when you look up, you find a tiny device, about the size of a fingernail, with a blinking green light. The flashing and beeping accelerate quickly, to a steady tone, and you brace yourself, expecting an explosion -- but instead you hear a loud crackling on all sides, electrical arcs filling the air around each doorway and window, blocking them off. An overhead projector lowers from the ceiling on a little platform at the same time that a screen unfurls, lighting up with images of falling confetti and balloons and one word: "CONGRATULATIONS!"

Ryan North's voice booms out from his computer speakers. "Hello! If you are hearing this, then you have just murdered me in my own home! I'm worth 10,000 experience points and a unique achievement! That's really awesome!"

He continues on. Suspecting a trap, you turn spectral again and inch toward the door, only for your body to bounce away with a sudden flash and a snapping sound. "Oh yeah, and if you're a ghost and exploded me that's really cool too. Seriously, big creds for actually using my turn-corporeal-inside-someone idea. AND YOU USED IT TO EXPLODE ME, HA HA, THAT'S IRONIC. But seriously bro or maybe ghostbro that forcefield's not coming down and I spectre-proofed it too because WHY NOT"

"Down to biz. I've been murderized and my life's work isn't over BECAUSE IT WILL NEVER BE OVER BECAUSE CLINICAL IMMORTALITY THIS GENERATION HECK YEAH and that means YOU, the murderizer, win the grand prize of continuing my work for me starting right... NOW." A drawer pops open, revealing a tall, neat stack of papers. The top one has printed on it what appears to be a cartoon about dinosaurs, but there aren't any words. You leaf through the other sheets of paper and they're all the same. "That should be enough to get you started or you know you could just use the computer that's saying these words instead ANYWAYS HAVE FUN WRITING DINOSAUR COMICS FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY AND REMEMBER TO CLEAN UP BECAUSE MY BODY IS PROBABLY REALLY GROSS. BODIES ARE GROSS" and with that, the recording cuts to silence, leaving you alone and trapped.

You look around. The bathroom's still accessible, and the water probably works. You might try finding a way to cut off the power in a moment, but it's likely he accounted for that and somehow rigged the place with an internal power supply. You look at the stack of blank comics again, thinking to yourself. Words start to form in your mind, captioning each panel, begging to be placed on paper. Before you know it, you've cleaned off a spot on his drawing board and set out an empty template, and you write across the top: "Dinosaur Comics -- By William Shakespeare -- #1"

THE END

quote:

Laertes shouts through the door that he's sorry and just wanted to say goodbye before he left for France, but when you open the door a crack, he sticks his head in and says:

"I'm just saying: have sex with him and you're damaged goods."

You slam the door in his face again, barely missing his nose. You shout through the door that if you're damaged goods, he's an entire shelf of unsellable eggs that went off weeks ago and also as your brother, he's got an entirely unhealthy interest in your sex life.

"Nuh-uh! You're unhealthy!!" Laertes shouts in return, and then you hear him stomp away down the hall. What a jerk! And his retorts don't even make sense.

quote:

Your father ignoring you is no big deal, and while you're a little worried about Hamlet not stopping by more often he HAS asked you to leave him alone for a while while he mourns, and you're respecting his wishes. But if you're gonna be honest with yourself, you've also just gotten really absorbed in this problem.

You decide to split the problem into sections: delivering heat and knowing WHEN to deliver heat. It would be possible to put servants in every room and have them report when it's too cold, but that's both expensive and unreliable. It depends on the servant, the warmth of their clothes, how much they love to lie to people about what temperature their skin is sensing, and so on.

You're wandering the castle grounds when it hits you. You've been thinking about how water expands when it freezes, and how that could be used to tell you when it's cold, but it's not much use for measuring temperatures outside the freezing point. Your father, Polonius, happens to wander by, talking to himself about the evils of drink. And then you realize: ALCOHOL. The right alcohol would expand linearly with heat, and by putting it in a slender glass vial you could measure the size of that liquid, which would correspond 1:1 with temperature! Put the same markings on each of these glass vials at the same temperatures, and you've got a universal, comparable, and consistent way of measuring heat. You wouldn't have to rely on a servant's impression; they could just tell you what line the alcohol has reached!

You run back to your room to start working on the prototype. Just as you complete it, you hear a knock at your door. "Who is it?" you call. And oh my, who should answer from the other side of the door?

Kangra posted:

dromiceiomimus. I think this is better the further it is from Shakespeare.

quote:

You don't control reality with your THOUGHTS, Ophelia. Sheesh.

Anyway, Hamlet opens the door and steps into your room. "It's me," he says. You haven't seen each other for awhile; it's so great to see him. You run up and throw your arms around him and you smooch. It's just like old times.

But the moment passes, and when you look at his face you can see concern written all over it.

Decoy Badger posted:

Wait for the soliloquy.

quote:

"Listen," he says, and he begins unbuttoning his jacket, taking his garters off, and -- oh gosh, yes, he's actually doing it. He's fouling his stockings.

"What's wrong, Hamlet?" you ask in alarm. What you say next sounds like the obvious question, but you ask it anyway. "Why are you fouling your stockings?"

Instead of answering, he grabs you by the wrist. You come to the entirely obvious conclusion that he's not acting like himself. This conclusion is reinforced in the next few moments, when he moves his other hand to his forehead as if he might faint, but instead of fainting, he stares at you intensely.

"Hamlet, I don't know why you're doing thi--" you begin, and he sighs really loudly. It's the most intense sigh you've ever heard. It's actually -- kind of impressive? "Look, if you'll just talk to me we can w--" you begin, and he sighs again, so loudly that it literally drowns out your words. "Fine, weirdo, let's play the wrist-holding game. Yayyyyy."

You meet his eyes, and he sighs one of those ultimate sighs again, then gets up and leaves in what can only be described as "the creepiest way possible:" walking with his head wrenched over his shoulder so he can watch you even as he crabwalks out the door.

quote:

Hamlet tells you about a spooky ghost and a plan for murdering his stepfather, Claudius, pretender to the throne.

I'll be frank: it sounds crazy. A ghost? MURDER? But he is your friend and lover and you're not going to leave him hanging out to dry. As gently as you can, you tell him you're pretty sure ghosts don't exist, but even if they do, he needs to be certain that the ghost he saw was actually the ghost of his father. What if it was some other ghost trying to mess things up?

That seems to give him pause. Hamlet admits he never actually asked the ghost for information only his dad would know. It's possible the ghost could be an impostor.

"I'll come with you tonight, sweetie," you say. "We'll go together. And if a ghost shows up, we'll figure out what to do." You're confident no ghost will appear and that this will all just go away. You take his hand and squeeze. Hamlet looks up at you, and you can see his relief.

"Okay," he says, smiling.

quote:

To pass the time, you play a storytelling game you enjoy, where you say one word of a story and he says the next word, and neither of you knows where the story will go.

"Once," you begin.

"Upon," he says.

"A," you say.

"Time," he says.

"There," you say.

"Was," he says.

"A," you say.

"Beautiful," he says, looking at you. You smile.

"Prince," you reply, and he smiles back.

"Who," he says.

"Wanted," you say.

"To," he says.

"Kiss," you say.

"His girlfriend," he says.

"That's cheating," you say, and then you're kissing.

quote:

"That's enough," you say. "We don't want your dad catching us making out."

Hamlet grins and pulls you close to him. "I think he'd be cool with it," he says. That's a weird thing to say, but you excuse it because you know people can say some really weird things when they're way horny. You kiss some more, but finally push him away for real this time.

"What makes you think he wants to spend the afterlife watching us make out?" you say.

"Well, it's what I'd want to do," he says with a smile. "I mean, if I were me AND I was also the ghost," he explains. You're about to reply when you're interrupted by an awkward cough coming from... above you?

Looking up, you see what for all the world looks like Hamlet's dad, Hamlet Sr., only he's transparent and floating and you can see through his bod. "Hey guys," the ghost says.

You're too shocked to say anything. Ghosts are real, Ophelia! Surprise!

Hamlet looks up at the ghost and waves. "Hi Dad!" he says.