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HopperUK posted:I didn't say he wasn't a weird writer in some ways, I just think he's better at writing women now. Though are those the Mr Mercedes books you're referring to? I've managed not to read them. Sorry for spoiling them e: They're not on-topic for this thread. I've read much much worse.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:06 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:14 |
3D Megadoodoo posted:He put a sex scene in the "detective novels except the last one where it's Aliens from the Internet" trilogy just because ?!?!?!? I don't remember any aliens in that book.What I remember is the mercedes killer got psychic powers and could possess other people using an app. Did I just block the aliens out of the equation? it's been a while so I wouldn't be surprised
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:15 |
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Mr. Sunshine posted:The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is one of the few novels where I find the underlying ideology of the author more revolting than the (still quite revolting) contents of the story. i read it once, thought "yeah i can see why this is self-published", thought it did an ok job of being what it was, didn't read it a second time and have no plans to. What was the author issue?
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:16 |
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Ambitious Spider posted:I don't remember any aliens in that book.What I remember is the mercedes killer got psychic powers and could possess other people using an app. Did I just block the aliens out of the equation? it's been a while so I wouldn't be surprised The aliens were just a reference to Fahrenheit. e: I don't remember if they were aliens even in that one, but a Deus Ex Internet all the same.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:16 |
3D Megadoodoo posted:The aliens were just a reference to Fahrenheit. Ah got it. Man I loved that game when it came out. Can’t imagine it holding up very well.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:24 |
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Ambitious Spider posted:Ah got it. Man I loved that game when it came out. Can’t imagine it holding up very well. I got an ending where my player character was a literal rotting corpse but still hosed the leading lady and I never looked back.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 01:30 |
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The tale of an editor, and of the one twilight-knockoff, vampire-erotica manuscript which stood above the rest: Crucifix Nail Nipples
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 04:56 |
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I got an ending where my player character was a literal rotting corpse but still hosed the leading lady and I never looked back. I'm sorry what
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:01 |
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Screaming Idiot posted:I'm sorry what
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:05 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:David Cage. Okay but what
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:06 |
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Screaming Idiot posted:Okay but what She literally goes "whoa why is your dick cold are you dead or something haha?"
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:07 |
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I just started Ready Player 2. One my favorite dumb things is they got their super VR recordings, and anybody can record anything and upload it right? Well Wade's company has an AI that flags inappropriate recordings. Then a human employee has to check out if the AI got it right. Some poor sod has to log on and literal relive a rape, or kiddy porn, or snuff film. It is just a throw away line, but the author didn't think about it for longer then it took him to write it. I immediately though holy poo poo the poor dude who probably doesn't get health care and lives in a box sized house, has to check for content Super VR Recordings. lol This book is bad.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:40 |
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Isn't that the same job that makes people suicidal just like, doing it on screens? That's fun...
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 07:52 |
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I was going to say, there are definitely people doing that job for Facebook (for way too little money, although I'm not sure there's enough money in the world) and having breakdowns about it, so the very concept that it exists for immersive VR is amazingly awful
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 09:14 |
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i saw someone post the ending and this horrific vr universe (that still makes everyone's lives worse) is empathetically reasoned to be A Good Thing and allowed to continue thriving while the characters all went to get married and have kids in the EARL almost like the characters in the book are completely blind to their privilege, how could that be, ernest cline?
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 09:21 |
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The Saddest Rhino posted:i saw someone post the ending and this horrific vr universe (that still makes everyone's lives worse) is empathetically reasoned to be A Good Thing and allowed to continue thriving while the characters all went to get married and have kids in the EARL That he gets any praise at all is gross. The whole reveal in RP1 was Art3mis had a 'reuban-esque' figure in VR and was so amazing for daring to not be a waif thin girl but was hiding some dark secret about her appearance and when they finally meet at the end her shocking disfigurement that she was sure makes people repulsed by her was that she was a thin, pretty white girl with a birthmark on her face. Huffing his own farts isn't enough Cline has a special machine in his house he hooks up to his butt so he can vape his own farts. Holy poo poo, I just realized RP1 and 2 are just Twilight for white male nerds.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 09:31 |
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pentyne posted:her shocking disfigurement that she was sure makes people repulsed by her was that she was a thin, pretty white girl with a birthmark on her face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07w3u8iLa-s&t=124s
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 09:34 |
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Ernest Cline is an author in the same way that a Subway sandwich slave is a chef.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 10:36 |
ScottyJSno posted:I just started Ready Player 2. Not just that, the book specifies that OASIS will alert the authorities based on local laws. So have loving fun if you're in Saudi Arabia or something because the system you use to connect to the world will automatically flag anything that deems you a degenerate. pentyne posted:That he gets any praise at all is gross. She still has that "Rubenesque" figure in real life. Her body is supposed to be the kind of young girl (Cline writes a hell of a lot about teen loving when he's pushing 50) that has just enough body fat to have a big rear end and titties but not actually be "fat."
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 10:45 |
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Ernest Cline is an author in the same way that a Subway sandwich slave is a Ftfy
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 10:55 |
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chitoryu12 posted:Not just that, the book specifies that OASIS will alert the authorities based on local laws. So have loving fun if you're in Saudi Arabia or something because the system you use to connect to the world will automatically flag anything that deems you a degenerate. man white tech nerds just loving love jerking off to a future where there's literally no protections for anyone outside a conservative default social norm.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 10:59 |
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divabot posted:i read it once, thought "yeah i can see why this is self-published", thought it did an ok job of being what it was, didn't read it a second time and have no plans to. What was the author issue? Radical primitivism. The entire not-so-subtle point of the book is that it is better for a handful of people to live in stone age savagery than it is for billions of people to live in an immortal post-scarcity utopia.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 12:06 |
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ulex minor posted:Poppy Z Brite is awful, it's this very, very bad 'serial killers in love' kind of stuff written by a 13 year old. It's edgy goosebumps and as a trans person the way they write about that stuff makes me want to bash my head into a wall. Not a megafan of Billy Martin (the artist formerly known as Poppy Z. Brite), but he is a trans man himself. Which doesn’t mean that he was ever good at writing about trans stuff!
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 17:31 |
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Wasn't there a part in the original book where Cline has Wayne's best friend talk about how her mom got her into computers early because she saw them as a way for her daughter to avoid racial discrimination because anyone could be anything on Oasis?
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 18:09 |
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Screaming Idiot posted:Okay but what Fahrenheit is what happens when you decide "I want to make a game like this film I liked", and then you keep adding films with no regards for tone or genre until the result is a gloriously incoherent mess. It starts of kind of like Se7en, but with cultists, has a brief detour into Silence of the Lambs (David Cage likes his rape-threats) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and then turns into Highlander, with Matrix-esque wall-running, bullet time fights, escaped AIs, a secret society of homeless guys, a few kamehameha fights. The zombie sex comes after you and your girlfriend get killed in an abandoned theme park by an immortal Mayan sorcerer. You survive as some kind of weird zombie, because your parents worked at Area 51 and you absorbed weird radiation from a pool of Materia. You gently caress the cop who has been pursuing you all game, and she comments about how cold you are and how your breath doesn't fog. Your dead girlfriend is never mentioned again.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 19:43 |
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Nucleic Acids posted:Didn’t Gamemaster Anthony give the movie a negative review in some magazine? I need to know more about this.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 20:06 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Fahrenheit is what happens when you decide "I want to make a game like this film I liked", and then you keep adding films with no regards for tone or genre until the result is a gloriously incoherent mess. It starts of kind of like Se7en, but with cultists, has a brief detour into Silence of the Lambs (David Cage likes his rape-threats) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and then turns into Highlander, with Matrix-esque wall-running, bullet time fights, escaped AIs, a secret society of homeless guys, a few kamehameha fights. This is perfect material for this thread, what is a game but a really interactive bad book
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 20:08 |
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What is a book? A miserable little pile of pages...
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 23:35 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Fahrenheit is what happens when you decide "I want to make a game like this film I liked", and then you keep adding films with no regards for tone or genre until the result is a gloriously incoherent mess. It starts of kind of like Se7en, but with cultists, has a brief detour into Silence of the Lambs (David Cage likes his rape-threats) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and then turns into Highlander, with Matrix-esque wall-running, bullet time fights, escaped AIs, a secret society of homeless guys, a few kamehameha fights. I actually died while saving a kid from a frozen pond e: in the game ee: At least that's how I remember it. gently caress if I'm ever going to play it again or look up the possible paths.
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# ? Nov 27, 2020 23:43 |
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There aren't many paths. Most of the options boil down to doing one specific thing or move closer to your character killing themself, if not an instant game over. You can intentionally gently caress up when the cop characters are investigating, and it won't matter at all.
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# ? Nov 28, 2020 00:17 |
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lol the end of Ready Player Two is the end of SOMA.
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 21:43 |
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Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber was a kickass series with a bafflingly poor last installment. The narrator is a prince named Corwin with eight squabbling brothers who all have the power to cross into parallel worlds. The action of the first two books is about him against his treacherous brother Eric. The action of books three and four throws in a poo poo-ton of twists and retcons/recontextualises prior events to weave a fascinating mystery. The last book is Corwin trying to get from point A to point B without his trademark teleporting deck of cards. 50 pages of good plot bookends 100 pages of random episodic crap that has no bearing on anything, like when Corwin gets his horse stolen by leprechauns. It's just like how the last Harry Potter book wasted half the runtime with just boring old Harry camping, wiping his arse with leaves, and meditating on how much he hates the trans community. The ending of Nine Princes in Amber is as bad as Damnation Alley by the same author.
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 22:06 |
Groovelord Neato posted:lol the end of Ready Player Two is the end of SOMA. But written by a guy who thought it was actually cool and good instead of a horror story.
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 22:07 |
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Groovelord Neato posted:lol the end of Ready Player Two is the end of SOMA. If it is then Charles Stross also beat him to the punch as that's one of the stories in Accelerando.
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 22:10 |
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Except it sucked for the people who went into the spaceship can in that book too!
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 23:32 |
Yeah, RP2 is full dumb transhumanist utopia poo poo. I bet Cline’s an Elon Musk stan.
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# ? Nov 29, 2020 23:39 |
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I've never met the man, but from what little I've read of RP1 and 2, Cline strikes me as someone who has no conscious moral or ideological convictions, but who would (if pressed) call himself a liberal. He has unconsciously internalized mainstream US liberalism, so he gives a paper-thin show of tolerance for racial and sexual minorities, without ever reflecting on what tolerance means or demands. He glorifies the self-made billionaires (while at the same time villifying billionaire corporations) without ever reflecting on the kind of society these billionaires are creating and thriving in. Of course he likes Elon Musk.
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# ? Nov 30, 2020 00:05 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:The ending of Nine Princes in Amber is as bad as Damnation Alley by the same author. Huh, was Damnation Alley notoriously bad? I've read it, but I recall my impression was "low budget 70s action/horror film novelisation" (amusing because the actual movie has almost nothing in common). Hardly a classic but not a travesty either.
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# ? Nov 30, 2020 03:22 |
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For those that enjoy Steven King, I'd recommend the recent books written by CJ Tudor, the Chalk Man and The Taking of Annie Thorn. They have a lot of Steven King energy, including an ancient evil that plays a part in both books but something I appreciate is that the supernatural element isn't the main antagonist in the stories - it's a catalyst, but the human element of the situation is always a bigger threat. He apparently released other books after that I haven't got around to yet.
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# ? Nov 30, 2020 06:54 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:14 |
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uvar posted:Huh, was Damnation Alley notoriously bad? I've read it, but I recall my impression was "low budget 70s action/horror film novelisation" (amusing because the actual movie has almost nothing in common). Hardly a classic but not a travesty either.
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# ? Nov 30, 2020 08:41 |