Skellybones posted:

The Halo books do introduce some weird stuff about the UNSC. Yeah sure the UNSC are the poor humans being genocided by the doom-seeking alien empire, but the only reason they were able to fight back at all is because they were on the cusp of entering a stage of brutal space fascism on their own people. The UNSC knew that it couldn't effectively administrate its own territory, so they built up a huge fleet to brutalise and awe the peasants on distant worlds. And the Spartans were explicitly designed to assassinate the poo poo out of any kind of separatist or revolutionary movement.

If everything had gone to plan, Master Chief would have spent his military career blowing up hospitals and decapitating folk heroes.

Hemingway To Go! posted:

I have never seen a wiki that does what tfwiki does

Inescapable Duck posted:

That's canon as of Reach, iirc, where the Spartans start out expecting to fight human rebels and are completely blindsided by the Covenant.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh wow this is awful.

chitoryu12 posted:

Halliday's will that mentioned the Easter Egg the gunters are looking for came in the form of a 5 minute video. This video is painstakingly described in detail in the very first chapter, including all of the 80s references Halliday shoehorned in (like how the video of his funeral has digital copies of the Heathers cast as the mourners, because it's the Heather Chandler funeral scene with Halliday in the coffin instead).

This is after OASIS and the economic situation of the world are described in the first two paragraphs of the whole book.

Ccs posted:

The guys from Rifftrax already did a Let's Read of Ready Player One. It's astonishing that this book got good reviews from mainstream critics considering how bad it is.

http://372pages.com/episode-0-a-book-were-probably-going-to-hate

Ccs posted:

The movie is getting good reviews, probably because Spielberg knows how to inject tension into a scene and excised the horrible inner monologue of the protagonist talking about how much media he has literally memorized.

chitoryu12 posted:

All right, I don't want my criticism of RPO to be secondhand. I'm going to get a Kindle copy. I might do a Let's Read thread for others who don't have the book and want to see more than just that one page, if I think it'll be amusing enough. From what I know of the book, it'll probably just end up dreadfully dull.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh wow this is awful.

Ccs posted:

The guys from Rifftrax already did a Let's Read of Ready Player One. It's astonishing that this book got good reviews from mainstream critics considering how bad it is.

http://372pages.com/episode-0-a-book-were-probably-going-to-hate

PJOmega posted:

All of this could have made sense if framed as the myopic viewpoint of a person who has given up on reality. Someone who instead of developing themselves as a person has dedicated themselves to slavishly adhering to the life of a dead idol. Who has molded themselves in the hope of the only out they are able to envision.

Everytime I let that lovely book have any headspace better concepts fold out from it in a fractal motif. There is nothing in that garbage pile of a book half so good as what it weakly alluded to.

chitoryu12 posted:

There's some hints as to Wade being that kind of character (he gets a sort of third-person-ish(?) monologue about how he found out that life sucks and there's no God so he may as well play video games all day), but it doesn't get nearly as much time as the detailed descriptions of every pop culture reference.

I'll link the thread here when I make it. It's absolutely not getting better as it goes on.

Proteus Jones posted:

Holy poo poo, thank you for that link. I love there’s entire podcast that revolves around throwing shade at the written work of Cline. It looks like they’ve finished the Let’s Read of RPO and moved on to Armada.

Ccs posted:

They've coined the term "Cline-ian" to describe particularly dumb sentences of a certain type and passages where tension is first set up and then dispelled before it gets the chance to have any effect on the narrative.

PJOmega posted:

Everytime I let that lovely book have any headspace better concepts fold out from it in a fractal motif.

Ccs posted:

The guys from Rifftrax already did a Let's Read of Ready Player One. It's astonishing that this book got good reviews from mainstream critics considering how bad it is.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I take it you don't reach many book reviews, because mainstream critics will regularly praise garbage, like George R.R. Martin or Guy Gavriel Kay.

Ccs posted:

They've coined the term "Cline-ian" to describe particularly dumb sentences of a certain type and passages where tension is first set up and then dispelled before it gets the chance to have any effect on the narrative.

quote:

Making it all the way to the end of the movie wound up being a lot harder
than I anticipated. It only took me about fifteen minutes to figure out
the “rules” of the game and to sort out how the scoring system worked. I
was actually required to do a lot more than simply recite dialogue. I also
had to perform all the actions that Broderick’s character performed in
the film, in the correct way and at the correct moment. It was like being
forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had
never actually rehearsed.

For most of the movie’s first hour, I was on edge, constantly trying to
think ahead to have my next line of dialogue ready. Whenever I flubbed a
line or didn’t perform an action at the right moment, my score decreased
and a warning flashed on my display. When I made two mistakes in a row,
a final warning message appeared. I wasn’t sure what would happen if
I got three strikes in a row, but my guess was that I’d either be expelled
from the gate or that my avatar would simply be killed. I wasn’t eager to
find out which it would be.

Whenever I correctly performed seven actions or recited seven lines of
dialogue in a row, the game would award me a “Cue Card Power-Up.” The
next time I blanked on what to do or say, I could select the Cue Card icon
and the correct action or line of dialogue would appear on my display,
sort of like a teleprompter.

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

Aech’s

quote:

It was like being forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had never actually rehearsed.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

Honestly the same thing happens when I think about Twilight and it’s interesting to contrast the two books in terms of being pure power fantasies. So much potential just left rotting on the floor for the sake of individual wank. Although the more I hear about RPO the more I feel it’s on a Handbook for Mortals level.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Controversial opinion: mainstream critics have praised George R.R. Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay.

Djeser posted:

Your actual controversial opinion: Ernest Cline is as bad as George R.R. Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay.

Arcsquad12 posted:

My hot take is put that dumb gently caress botl on ignore and get on with your lives happily ignorant of his ignorance

C.M. Kruger posted:

On the other hand I am continually amused by how furious people get over somebody pointing out the flaws in fantasy novels. It's like people going "Whadaya mean CALL OF DUTY 4 MODERN WARFARE isn't art?!?"

Sagebrush posted:

quote:

quote:

Making it all the way to the end of the movie wound up being a lot harder
than I anticipated. It only took me about fifteen minutes to figure out
the “rules” of the game and to sort out how the scoring system worked. I
was actually required to do a lot more than simply recite dialogue. I also
had to perform all the actions that Broderick’s character performed in
the film, in the correct way and at the correct moment. It was like being
forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had
never actually rehearsed.

For most of the movie’s first hour, I was on edge, constantly trying to
think ahead to have my next line of dialogue ready. Whenever I flubbed a
line or didn’t perform an action at the right moment, my score decreased
and a warning flashed on my display. When I made two mistakes in a row,
a final warning message appeared. I wasn’t sure what would happen if
I got three strikes in a row, but my guess was that I’d either be expelled
from the gate or that my avatar would simply be killed. I wasn’t eager to
find out which it would be.

Whenever I correctly performed seven actions or recited seven lines of
dialogue in a row, the game would award me a “Cue Card Power-Up.” The
next time I blanked on what to do or say, I could select the Cue Card icon
and the correct action or line of dialogue would appear on my display,
sort of like a teleprompter.

quote:

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A VHS INTO THE SLOT. ITS CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE MOVES ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER, RIDDICK. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME NECRO BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED THE GALAXYS MOST DANGEROUS PRISON. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY COLLEGE CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN COLLEGE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JEKRS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE LINES AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNIng