|
Mr. Sunshine posted:Having read nothing of RPO except this thread and a few internet takedowns, I suspect that the move will be better than the book, or at least less obnoxious. 'Cause the book seems to go "This was a Firelfly class spaceship, based on the design of the Serenity from hit TV series Firefly by cult director Joss Whedon (who, did I mention, also happens to be president of the world)" at every other turn, but in the move it's just gonna be a spaceship unless you know where it's from. The movie will probably be quite different from the book, because the plot of the book is based entirely on the pop-culture it references, and I'm sure the producers aren't going out of their way to acquire the rights for each of those specific elements. In the trailer it looks like they're just cramming it full of whatever properties Warner Brothers owns instead. They are also clearly adding extra stuff to the movie make it more interesting. The second half of the trailer depicts an enormous car chase, which doesn't appear in the novel at all. The protagonist's avatar is depicted as a kind of huge ogre, when in the book he can't afford a fancy avatar, so it looks like him -- an overweight high-schooler. I wonder if it'll still have the tangent in the middle where Cline rants for several pages about how much it sucks to be a tech support worker.
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2017 07:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:18 |
|
|
Trauma Dog 3000 posted:Have you ever read a criticism of The Road where it's bleakness is used as a justification to attack it's readers? its
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2017 04:32
|
|
|
relevant to this thread
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2017 18:41
|
|
|
ashnjack posted:I liked the winning entry. What am I missing? It's glurgey and predictable. Sure, it's just a short essay, but it doesn't go anywhere. The person was sad because their friend got early-onset dementia. Then they went to the future and it was cured! Yay! Also something about apps and being a smart cool coder and all the coffee and also music is the secret key to the brain. Watts' entry is fantastic. The central concept of a genetically-engineered altruist given supreme authority over life and death is lifted wholesale from his own Maelstrom and Behemoth, but who cares. He's right. Maxwell Lord posted:Eh, he glosses over a lot in his quest to indict human nature- it's not just short term gratification that prevents people from doing the right thing but an uncertainty as to what will actually do any good. It's not like everyone knows what's best but just doesn't wanna do it. No, it's a lot closer to that than you think. Everyone knows what we need to do about racism, sexism, healthcare, poverty, climate change. Short-term personal greed is absolutely what keeps us from moving forward in those fields. I think I'll subject myself to the KJA one next e: it was bad quote:Magdalene remembered what the medical techs had said after she collapsed in the terminal. They laughed, relieved that she “only” had brain cancer. She tried to put the pieces together. “So removing a brain tumor is nothing more complicated than getting a filling at the dentist?” (this is immediately after he describes how her brain tumor was treated with future medical tech by drilling a hole in her skull, albeit a very small one) 
Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 06:29 on Oct 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 06:01
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:Cool, give me your exact plan that everyone agrees is necessary. Massively raise taxes, use them to fund vastly increased social services. If you disagree with this it's because you're exactly who Watts is talking about Maxwell Lord posted:See, I prefer sappy optimism to taking a poo poo on people's attempts to envision a better future. I prefer to read something that acknowledges the unsustainability of our current situation rather than just "yay in the future we fixed everything with magic and smartness" Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 18:11 on Oct 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 18:04
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:Okay, so what precisely is the new tax rate, how do you ensure everyone at the top doesn't dodge said taxes or move away (this was a reason Reagan's tax cuts, disastrous though they were, passed a Democratic Congress- the top margins weren't paying much anyway despite the paper rates), and what is the structure and proportion of these services? Like, if it's a monthly basic income (an idea I favor), how much? If it's free-at-point-of-service health care (which also needs to happen), do we set that like the UK's system, or Canada's, or France's? We can start by returning the tax structure to where it was in 1946. 90% top marginal bracket, applies equally to all income, gains, inheritance, corporate profit, and so on. We can also pass any of the progressive budgets you see tossed around that decimate military spending, agribusiness subsidies, etc. We could also remove 100% of the fancy deductions and loopholes and shelters in the tax structure and have zero effect on the median American family, so let's do that. If the wealthy decide to move away, gently caress'em. The attitude that plutocrats are a hallowed class that's responsible for everyone else's success needs to die. We can implement structures similar to what China does with its economy to keep money from leaving the country. Racism is fundamentally an educational problem. Children aren't born racist -- they have to be taught that behavior. You can't really fix grown-up dyed-in-the-wool racists, but if their kids go to school with kids of all different colors and are repeatedly taught that racism is stupid and bad, they'll grow up with an open mind. A general reduction in poverty will reduce street crime, and more importantly will also reduce the sort of stratification that leads to police building an "us-vs-them" mindset. And if nothing else, we can spend more money on Internal Affairs investigations. We're probably too late to fix climate change, but dumping the money that Apple currently spends making iPhones thinner into the NSF and NOAA research budgets certainly couldn't hurt. And, to your last point, if there's no democratic solution to the problem, well, Watts might be onto something... Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 19:42 on Oct 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 19:39
|
|
|
Peter Watts is real good and I long to live in his future where Quebec is a world superpower
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
Bakeneko posted:I would call it nihilistic because the solution it offers for all the world’s problems involves technology that doesn’t exist, and won’t exist in the foreseeable future. We can’t put nanites in people’s heads, and we can’t rewrite their DNA to make them more altruistic, therefore he’s basically arguing that in the real world there’s no hope. By this definition all speculative fiction ever written is nihilistic. Bakeneko posted:Say what you want about the themes of the winning story, but from a technical standpoint it was better written. lol e: also, I think that the "winning" story wasn't judged to be the best of the pile -- it was the winner of a much broader contest open to the public, and the prize was being included in the collection. It didn't beat out Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi. It's amateurish, but in that light it's fine. Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 23:31 on Oct 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 23:26
|
|
|
Bakeneko posted:How so? The whole message of the story is that the world sucks and humanity sucks and it’ll keep sucking until we can rewrite our DNA because humans are inherently broken. Other sci-fi works offer fictional solutions to real-world problems, but they don’t usually go to that extreme. Nor do they usually state that the world is doomed unless some unrealistic thing happens within the next 20 or so years. This is no more or less realistic than saying the world will keep sucking until we can have self-driving cars/robot butlers/vacuum trains/fusion power/matter-condensers/artificial intelligence/etc. Actually, I'd argue that Peter Watts' ideas are more plausible than most science fiction; in his novels he goes as far as writing appendices that cite the academic papers backing up his speculation. And if you don't think that science fiction has been predicting doom-unless-we-change-now for decades, you haven't read enough stuff from the cold war. The only difference between Watts' short story here and one of Isaac Asimov's short stories about future nuclear-powered robots in space or whatever is that Watts comes out and says "if we don't change things, we will all die" while Asimov leaves it as an implication.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2017 00:05
|
|
|
"Wow, great," I whispered.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2017 01:02
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:Well I mean if you have the opportunity to literally hang out with God it seems like that should be your #1 priority yeah. this was one of my mom's primary justifications for joining a cult, ama
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2018 02:59
|
|
|
Barudak posted:How hot was the cults god? here he is claiming to lift three and a half tons with one arm 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2018 03:10
|
|
|
no women anywhere in that list of authors, i notice
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2018 09:00
|
|
|
Trauma Dog 3000 posted:martha's face is all hosed up huh Go to a Walmart in rural Kansas sometime and look around
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2018 18:34
|
|
|
PJOmega posted:I still say RPO could've been heavily redeemed if the final test was different. Instead of being able to quote loving War Games it instead drops him into a scene ripped straight from their idol's mind. It's from when he turned his back on his wife. His friends. His family. And at first Percival (I think that was the protagonist's name) goes "oh I've read about this" and attempts to recreate what happened line for line. That would be too mature, though. RPO is a young-adult novel. It's not targeted at people who are currently teenagers, of course, but at 40-something men who are mentally twelve years old. But it's still YA literature and so has to fit all the genre tropes.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2018 21:51
|
|
|
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. Ah, phew, I'm glad someone else noticed that. There's one scene in particular where that characteristic of his writing really stood out to me: quote:Making it all the way to the end of the movie wound up being a lot harder While it's a stupid concept, it at least could have been dramatic if Cline had written this in real-time. Let us learn about the game along with the protagonist! Tell us the story as he misses a line and gets a warning, with no idea of what's going to happen if he misses -- does he just have to start over? Does he get ejected from the game? Is he permanently banned from the OASIS? Oh no, he got another one wrong! What is going to happen? Will he get the next line right??? ...but no he just tells us up front "I passed it just fine, of course" and then explains how the game works but we don't give a poo poo any more because we know he beat it already. Christ it's bad writing. SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Aech’s this character's name is supposed to be pronounced like the letter "H" but every time I read it I kept hearing an Alfred E. Neuman "ecccchhhh"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2018 06:12
|
|
|
Also this masterful metaphor just digs right into my brainquote:It was like being forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had never actually rehearsed. Why yes, you could say that! It was a lot like that! In fact you could be even more accurate and say that it was like being forced to act the leading role in a movie you'd watched many times but had never actually rehearsed.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2018 06:14
|
|
|
so in this world does your head shrink as you grow up or what
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2018 19:31
|
|
|
Voyeuristic Wizard for me please
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2019 23:27
|
|
|
cptn_dr posted:I'm the urinating goblin Mr. President???
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2019 00:54
|
|
|
For a high school English project I illustrated the scene from the Odyssey where Odysseus and Telemachus team up and execute all of Penelope's suitors. I faithfully depicted exactly what Homer said: shooting them with arrows, running them through with spears, and chopping off their heads. The teacher gave me a B- and a note reading "does it have to be so gruesome? :-("
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2020 15:55
|
|
|
I'm the 1000-megawatt homeless electrocuter
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2020 18:37
|
|
|
Captain Monkey posted:The skin of her belly is transparent? does anyone have that quote where the character is having sex with a virgin and describes something like a "soft snapping sound like a balloon breaking" i think i threw up a little writing that but i need to send it to someone
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2020 21:29
|
|
|
sounds like some sort of heavy drilling equipment, like maybe a tunnel-boring machine.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2020 00:01
|
|
|
Yeah JRRT was really the king of that kind of stuff. One fictional language wasn't enough, huh? Gotta pretend you're translating it from one into another? If Frodo were a real person, it would be pretty stupid and more than a little racist to try and translate the meaning instead of the sounds. Like imagine if you met a Chinese woman and she was like "my name is Yawen" and you went "oh, okay, so I'm gonna call you Elegant Cloud or Elclow for short since that's what your name means"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 02:55
|
|
|
Also re. supplemental material I read a great little anecdote from a retired publisher who said he loving hated JRRT because he would always get sent all sorts of random unsolicited manuscripts, but once the Lord of the Rings took off he started getting boxes full of poo poo like maps and dictionaries and drawings of characters and cloth samples and sheet music for songs and everything else with a 7th-grade fantasy novel somewhere in the bottom
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 02:58
|
|
|
coincidentally i just came across this and ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 03:54
|
|
|
Elviscat posted:So, if I plug in: Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood e: oh, dang, scratch Margaret Atwood off for D I guess. At least The Handmaid's Tale is meant to be transgressive rather than just horny Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 08:04 on Feb 26, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 08:00
|
|
|
 really a shame they cut it from the show
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2020 01:31
|
|
|
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
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2020 09:34
|
|
|
Inspector Gesicht posted:I haven't seen that movie in fifteen years and only recall the bit where Will Smith puts his Keds on the table. They aren't loving Keds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HpIZrOH4zc
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2020 20:47
|
|
|
grittyreboot posted:Any time Will Smith plays a cop there's always some morally repugnant behaviour that's either played off as charming or pathos. In I, Robot he hates all robots because of tragedy. He kills a fairy in Bright and says "fairy lives don't matter". And Men In Black is just about a sci fi border patrol. Haven't seen Bad Boys tho. wasn't he also a cop in wild wild west? what's the gross behavior in that one
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2020 05:42
|
|
|
that was a railroad water tower.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2020 06:57
|
|
|
Serephina posted:ubermench ? 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2020 06:09
|
|
|
divabot posted:a lovely twitter thread from September, going through self-published Kindle romance classic MY ANTIFA LOVER. Warning: contains no Antifa, very little smut. My favorite part of this is that the 5'4" dark haired junior congresswoman named Alexandria (hmm) lives in Seattle for work because the author doesn't seem aware of the difference between Washington state and Washington DC
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2021 16:18
|
|
|
Being paid by the installment has the same ultimate effect, since if you want to inflate your story to fill more installments you are going to have to use...more words.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2021 02:08
|
|
|
Shakespeare is absolutely better when performed but the language is still pretty loving dense if you're fourteen years old and it's four hundred years later. Having the actors hamming it up just gets that 14-year-old to understand about 60% of it instead of 20%. I think the worst possible way to absorb it though has to be getting a whole class of 14 year olds to stutter through a couple of pages out loud as the characters. Ooooomg
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 21:33
|
|
|
If Fallout Equestria is genuinely the longest single continuous work of English fiction, why isn't there a Wikipedia page for it?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2021 10:02
|
|
|
How do people still not realize how twitter works The whole point of the game is to never become Twitter's protagonist and the best way to do that is to never post on it in the first place
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2021 17:24
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:18 |
|
|
remember the sex scene where the author describes the woman's hymen breaking as a snapping sound like a sausage casing or a balloon or something? i think it was posted in this thread a ways back but i can't find it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2021 21:35
|
|