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The Vosgian Beast posted:This is pretty much what I need to know about Ready Player One. I almost got physically sick trying to listen to that. Who the gently caress are the morons raving about how great it is? It's tv tropes the book. And Spielberg is making it into a movie? Ugh, that dialogue is going to be painful. swamp waste posted:Neuromancer is "good" sci fi I guess but the characters' relationships and the things they say to each other are like, not so good. I was gonna type up an excerpt but honestly Yeah, but it was deliberate, I think. I thought the main character was supposed to be the anti-thesis to a classic noble hero by being a borderline scumbag without any redeeming qualities (besides hacking) and the "girl" only hooks up with him because she's bored.
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Jul 3, 2015 19:33
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Vanderdeath posted:Holy poo poo thank you for this. This is absolutely incredible. "Toukie lives in Peppertown, which is very hot, and as such suited for garment factories." "Toukie is whats referred to as a forget-a-girl, I think you can figure out the context. She even signs her name as Toukie FG. She only has one friend, Lizzie Cutsherself, who lives in a tree and has red hair, that's important" "Toukie dreams of a paradise they can live in with no sharp rocks, so Lizzie can't cut herself and then Lizzie will be cured" "Toukie's favorite hobby is laying on the floor of her school and no one notices her. She lays there and eats whip cream out of a can" "If Toukie was a remembergirl, she'd get in trouble for it, but since she's not no one notices her" "Toukie is unattractive, has one brown and one green eye, has multiple personality disorder hair, and she speaks every language in the world" "The people on Sanscolor are all albinos and speak the language colorian" "We know she speaks all languages because she writes letters in different languages in her notebook T-mail jail. This is clearly not related to Tyra Mail" "Toukie is known for her undying love of Theokalis Lovelace, but he's dating Zarpessa who is hot but also a remembergirl. She's Toukie's archnemisis, except Toukie doesn't sink to their level" "We meet Toukie on the day before TDOD (the day of discovery), where is set up that her sister Miracle is the one likely to be chosen. Miracle is white, blond, pretty, and has the same eye colors." "Modelland is an type of Olympus, where the only 7 famous people in the entire world live, who are the Intoxibellas, and only famous people can come from Modelland. You can only be chosen by the judges if they see you while you are walking. If they see you standing still you won't be selected. Oh and the Intoxibellas have magic powers" "Toukie's parents, Chris and Creamy de la Creme" "You know what they say, no pain, no removal of funk stain" "They send out 7 smizes (eye smiles) in the water supply, so in the run up to TDOD everyone wastes tons of water in hopes of finding a smize. Toukie finds one, but her parents make her give it to her sister because it increases your chances of getting chosen by 96%." "Toukie is considered ugly because she's so tall and thin and just can't gain any weight, even after eating tons of whip cream" This is after only 25 minutes.
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Jul 5, 2015 05:50
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My god, this is less a book and more a deep insight into the workings of Tyra Bank's mind.
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Jul 5, 2015 06:24
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Vanderdeath posted:It's like beautiful outsider art but done by a millionaire. I'm considering reading it myself because it's absolutely amazing. I've going to the library tomorrow to check it out. It sounds batshit insane but its probably a look into the mind of Tyra Banks, someone who seems barely sane half the time she's on tv.
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Jul 5, 2015 06:33
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Anatharon posted:Eragon I think it was. Probably the worst book I read as a kid. I only vaguely remember it, but it was ridiculous self-insert by a teenage author who got published because his dad owned a publishing company or somesuch. Nah, Eragon the first book was actually fairly competant for a YA fantasy novel. The following ones with the perfect vegetarian elf race that were unquestionably superior to meat eating scum were poo poo. It was self published, a random book agent read it and thought it had promise, and then published it. It was only after his second book proved to be derivative as gently caress, moreso then book one that people realized the kid was a hack.
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Jul 6, 2015 05:02
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Human posted:Say what you want about Modeland, but Tyra Banks could have handed this poo poo off to a ghostwriter and shat something out. Instead, she crafted a deeply crazy book written by herself that's too strange to be anything other than the story she really wanted to tell. It's clearly insane garbage but it's principled. Yeah, calling it "outsider art" is the best description possible. I was actually sad to find that she didn't write the rest of the series. It's something everyone should read mostly for the experience of the mind and thoughts of a super famous model who is somewhat insane.
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Jul 6, 2015 06:58
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divabot posted:yep. The sort of work where all the effort goes into tasty hooks, in this case nerdsniping, and not so much on the slightest bit of story, characterisation, evidence of authorial perceptiveness ... Doesn't really count, that guy had his cult up and running for years before making his fanfic his big thing. There are tens of thousands of internet nerds who hang on his every word as gospel and treat him like the second coming of Aristotle despite him not having produced anything in the last 5 years other then his Harry Potter fanfic.
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Jul 8, 2015 12:24
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Pocket Billiards posted:I know it's part of the canon of cool books as judged by the internet but World War Z was on the nose. What? I can't tell if you're saying WWZ was awful or not. It was entertaining for its uniqueness at the time but has become pretty bland as vastly superior "realistic" zombie stories have come out since then. Plus Max Brooks was a loving genius. Those "Survival Guides" were a minor, but fairly popular item for a few years and once he did one for zombies that made fucktons of money he made his mark as the "realistic" zombie expert and anything he wrote would almost certainly be a huge hit.
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Jul 9, 2015 10:37
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Evfedu posted:Almost nothing that happens in any of Abercrombie's books is portrayed as being "for the greater good". And certainly none of what is was violence against women. I myself was guilty of not reading between the lines and thinking there was some moral high ground. What separates The First Law from other fantasy sagas is that there is no good versus evil, its warring mages using entire empires as their tools to prove who is right. The "good" mage even outright says that it doesn't matter and has his own 'law-breaking' magic servants he uses as a surprise tactic. The most noble and heroic character in the series is the official Imperial torturer who does some absolutely repugnant poo poo but as his core only cares that what he does improves the world around him, and ends up lucking into possibly the happiest ending of anyone in the book.
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Jul 9, 2015 10:47
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The Saddest Rhino posted:the audiobook for WWZ was pretty good with different voice actors for different stories. It was of course zombie apocalypse blah blah zombies are out of fashion blah blah but at the time it was actually fresh and not yet another zombie survival book. the movie was terrible though and had almost nothing to do with the book. Max Brook's father is Mel Brooks. Let that sink in when you see the voices involved with the audiobook, Max Brooks as The Interviewer Steve Park as Kwang Jingshu Frank Kamai as Nury Televadi Nathan Fillion as Stanley MacDonald* Paul Sorvino as Fernando Oliveira* Ade M'Cormack as Jacob Nyathi* Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warmbrunn Waleed Zuaiter as Saladin Kader Jay O. Sanders as Bob Archer Dennis Boutsikaris as General Travis D'Ambrosia Martin Scorsese as Breckinridge “Breck” Scott* Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson* Denise Crosby as Mary Jo Miller* Bruce Boxleitner as Gavin Blaire* Ajay Naidu as Ajay Shah Nicki Clyne as Sharon* Jeri Ryan as Maria Zhuganova* Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins Maz Jobrani as Ahmed Farahnakian Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio Eamonn Walker as Xolelwa Azania / Paul Redeker / David Allen Forbes Jürgen Prochnow as Philip Adler* David Ogden Stiers as Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk* Michelle Kholos as Jesika Hendricks Kal Penn as Sardar Khan* Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair Junior Rob Reiner as "The Whacko" Dean Edwards as Joe Muhammad Frank Darabont as Roy Elliot* Becky Ann Baker as Christina Eliopolis Parminder Nagra as Barati Palshigar* Brian Tee as Hyungchol Choi / Michael Choi* Masi Oka as Kondo Tatsumi* Frank Kamai as Tomonaga Ijiro John Turturro as Seryosha Garcia Alvarez Ric Young as Admiral Xu Zhicai* Alfred Molina as Terry Knox* John McElroy as Ernesto Olguin Common as Darnell Hackworth* F. Murray Abraham as Father Sergei Ryzhkov* Rene Auberjonois as Andre Renard* Literally no other book on Earth could ever get even 1/4 of that talent for an audibook.
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Jul 9, 2015 10:51
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Sleeveless posted:Tell that to all the people who hold WWZ up as some paragon of tactical realism. To be fair, if the US military was presented with an enemy force that defied all conventional notions of strategy and force projection rather then breaking it down and going back to basics they would dig in, refuse to change and scream about how bureaucrats are trying to destroy a historical institution. For those unaware, in the book carpet bombing, tank shells, MOABs, etc. aren't really effective against a massive zombie horde (although just lining up tanks and running them over should work but nevermind) so when the reformed USA bunkers down on the West Coast the guy made SecDef guts the military because $2 billion stealth bombers have no purpose anymore and faces massive resistance from the military brass for it.
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Jul 10, 2015 07:25
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Tiggum posted:I read the first one as a teenager and wouldn't have known what libertarianism was to be able to spot it, but there was enough else to put me off the rest of the series. I had it described to me as Thomas arrives in a magical new world, doesn't think its real so he rapes a woman, then later realizes the world is real and spends the series mourning his actions. quote:He is also unprepared for the sudden restoration of his health, which cures the impotence brought on by his leprosy. This, and his mental turmoil over the reality he feels but does not believe, drives him into a frenzy, causing him to rape Lena, an act which will be pivotal to all that follows. When Lena's friends and family learn of what happened to her, they are barely able to comprehend the enormity of or reasons behind this crime, but the Oath of Peace to which they are sworn forbids them from taking vengeance.
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Jul 14, 2015 07:48
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Sherrilyn Kenyon She vomits out novels at an obscene rate, and once you read one you can immediately see how. I found this review on goodreads that sums it up better then I could. quote:First off, the “Born of Shadows” is the fourth book in the “League” series. I can accept that without reading the first 3 I am lacking some context, but from reading just this book I have no idea what the League is or does. They apparently keep the 9 systems (not sure if this was a metaphor or actual number) from constantly fighting, dispatch assassins that the Systems aren’t allowed to prosecute, and are so corrupt they can be bought by anyone. However, a minor plot of the novel is one system/kingdom (ruled by a Queen) is lying to give pretense to invade another system, for resources maybe, and nothing is said of the fabled “League”. The shadowy background government isn’t an effective plot device when their only reason for existing doesn’t matter for the sake of the current plot.
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Jul 14, 2015 09:59
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Pinball posted:Oh my god, I read that when I was twelve or so, and I will never forget the lady gryphon (who couldn't get a man gryphon for some reason) trying to have sex with a human dude who was some sort of magickal sex healer or something. Mercedes Lackey wrote weird poo poo. Both her and her husband. Apparently they were a team-up who abused the poo poo out of dozens of young kids of either gender.
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Jul 17, 2015 04:42
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Sakurazuka posted:Woah, what? Mists of Avalon was one of my favourite books, once upon a time. It's pretty loving dark. The daughter is the one who outed her father as a rapist pedophile years ago ("They convicted him for what he did to me but he had done it to dozens") and she said her mother (Marion) was even worse, and only kept quiet because of all the positive feelings people got from her work.
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Jul 17, 2015 11:06
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quantumavenger posted:MZB was married to Walter Breen, who had a previous conviction for child molestation from 1954. Breen was banned from WorldCon in 1963 for being a pedophile, which caused an uproar in a science fiction fandom firmly in the grip of the Geek Social Fallacies, decades before they were formulated. This document is a contemporary account of the controversy. Holy poo poo. quote:Although Breen's behavior at conventions right around the time of Pacificon II seems to have been beyond reproach, Breen (who also wrote an authoritative book on man-boy love) was known by many fans, especially in the Bay Area, to have engaged in sex with boys. (Ultimately, he died in prison a multiply-convicted pederast.) quote:Q. Where did you have this discussion with David where he thought he was too old for Walter? Poems from her daughter attempting to express her suffering quote:And how to learn to cope And not give up all my hope MZB was a bigger monster then Sandusky, Jimmy Savile, and Warren Jeffs (had to look that one up) put together. Now most of the people who own/operate the licenses for her books donate 100% of the profits to NGO's that fight for child rights. That's the important point. You can still enjoy her written works because every single dollar her estate makes goes to help people who were victims of monsters like her.
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Jul 17, 2015 13:55
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It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so. There was also some book written as a bio of some hardcore black female gangbanger with some excruciatingly bad lines. Think "So this ghetto ho tried to jack my rock, so I popped her in the head with a fo-fo and let the block know who ran the streets" but it turned out is was some middle-upper class white girl and when outed she tried to claim it was a true to life depiction of what the lower classes experience.
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Jul 17, 2015 14:23
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Marxism posted:I'm proud of them for finally taking the Star Wars EU out back and shooting it in the head. They should have done it a long time ago and from what it sound like they are just doing that so that the new EU can come and poo poo on the floor, roll around in the poo poo and then bite a few of the kids. One step forward, One step into the massive pile of Nerd-jizz money to be made. The second to last big series was nothing more then a flamewar between 2 feuding authors who kept contradicting each other out of spite. For example - author A writes about how Mandolorians are expert Jedi killers and feared by all - author B writes his novel where one Jedi murders the poo poo out of a bunch of Mandos - A replies with the next book mentioned they weren't real mandos just thugs wearing mando armor, Mandos now a feared galactic power - B has the evil force drop a plague tied to mando genetic code that will kill them if they leave their planet - A then cures the plague in the intro to her book because the mando's are just so smart they were capable of doing what the rest of the Galaxy couldn't. - B meets with the people managing the SW book contracts, gets A fired. Quality of the next series of books get slightly better but are still garbage
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Jul 18, 2015 06:43
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KiteAuraan posted:Karen Traviss really was a special type of dumbass, and that's saying a lot when the license had seen Mofferences and what ever the gently caress was going on in the Dark Nest trilogy. She's been burning all her bridges and rolling further and further downhill in terms of book deals. Her last big score was writing a random Halo trilogy. Back when she started she made a lot of drastic changes to the SW "culture" by making a ton of Jedi look like assholes and tell stories from the pov of soldiers and grunts it was controversial but a breath of fresh air from the "everything is about Jedi and no one else". However she became wholly obsessed with her details being the only accurate ones, even when she was hilariously wrong and developed a fetish for Mandolorians that she worked into everything she wrote. She also could not stop herself from taking to the internet and raging against her critics, either professional or trolls. Celery Face posted:Would that be Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival? What's more surprising is how many book reviewers fall over themselves to proclaim it as a great work and a gripping true to life story. quote:“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.” I can't believe the NYT writer just sat there raptly listening to this poo poo coming out the mouth of this lily white girl and going "Wow, you're so amazing and completely believable." pentyne has a new favorite as of 10:35 on Jul 18, 2015 |
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Jul 18, 2015 10:24
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Nothing has warmed the cockles of my heart quite like the moment I opened the TVIV thread after the last finale and discovered that the show-watchers had realized that the show was terrible. They were super eager to get to the point where they could turn the tables and 'spoil' the book-readers while not realizing that almost all of the book readers did not give a gently caress what the show did. As the show ends (7 seasons is the target) things are just going to go completely crazy because the showrunners have been following a script for so long all they know how to do its tits and excessive violence. My favorite response to the latest GoT finale were some of the book readers saying "Huh, I guess it is pretty hard to actually write a good story. Looks like GRRM isn't as bad as we thought, he's clearly much better then the showrunners". I think a lot of the ASOIAF hate comes from the insanely long breaks between books and the crazy bloat going on with the series. What was book 4 in its entirely became book 4/5, and we got tons of chapters about Darkstar and Dorne that had literally no influence on the major plots. There's no telling how the last 2 books will be, but I think in the end barring some complete batshit insanity (my friend who didn't read the books but watches the show read about the online insanity and thought it be hilarious if the series ends with an alien invasion) the series will go down as a contemporary fantasy epic in the vein of the Wheel of Time/Shanarra but nowhere near a LOTR or Book of the New Sun. Speaking of crazy popular bad fantasy, the loving Kingkiller series. The author has succumbed to his fame so hard that 2/3 of the way through an trilogy that promised to show the rise and fall of an epic hero book 2 ends with hero still in his mid teens at magic school and hopelessly in love with a courtesan who sees him as a nice guy. Also sex ninjas and the hero bangs every girl he comes across and is so good at sex his first time he beds a fairie goddess known for killing people via sex and overwhelms her. And the third book is essentially non-existent as the writer takes on tons of RPG/D&D/Kickstarter writing projects and attends every con in existence. Oh, and I forgot, the "unreliable narrator" is the defense used by fans for the terrible scenes. pentyne has a new favorite as of 11:58 on Jul 19, 2015 |
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Jul 19, 2015 11:53
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Davros1 posted:Yeah, I know. But one of the hallmarks of the G.I. Joe premise was "Bad guys attacking? G.I. Joe to the rescue!" In her first arc, it's "G.I. Joe sent to assassinate foreign leader." Traviss has very strong opinions and when hired to a job will openly tell people that she does not give a gently caress about canon and continuity and will write whatever she wants. Prior to her Star War tenure the standard procedure was each incoming author would get a massive packet of what was the current canon, and for each major series all the authors would meet up and collaborate on the series to make sure everything was consistent. I remember in 2002 reading about the New Jedi Order series, the first of the 9-10 book sagas that every single writer worked together to write an overarching outline for who does what when and kept in touch with the other writers that covered similar material. Then Traviss rolls in, tells the other authors to gently caress off, and spends 3 books of a 9 book series in a slap-fight with the only "big-name" Star Wars author left. That she gets jobs writing Gears of War or Halo books is solely because as a Star Wars author she's a NYT Bestseller and that's a great thing to splash at the top of your genre fiction.
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Jul 19, 2015 15:36
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swamp waste posted:Yeah I was gonna say, this is all true, but that's how soldiers and christians are supposed to think about themselves, and Card is all about both those things Ender's Game was a huge hit but not for the reasons Card wanted. Whatever his intentions were for the book I seriously doubt that the critical reception and analysis it received were what thought he wrote. Card wrote Songmaster, which was shockingly creepy quote:Josif falls in love with Ansset the first time he meets him. He tries to avoid seeing the boy again, but this is impossible. As he slowly starts to mature, growing 17 centimetres, Ansset starts to seek out Josif's company more and more. Josif and Kyaren have a baby boy by now, but Ansset begins to realise that Josif is sexually attracted to him, as many people have been before. He recognises however, that Josif's love is different from the lust he has seen so often. Ansset starts to feel new longings. He knows that the drugs cause problems for Songbirds, particularly boys, but he has lost his songs and wants to know what happens next. Ansset eventually offers himself to the young man, saying, "I know what you want, and I'm willing". Josif lovingly brings the boy to his first climax. As Ansset experiences his first ever orgasm, he experiences enormous pain. The Songhouse drugs have almost killed him and he is forever impotent. Whatever Card says, he is unnaturally preoccupied with homosexuality and young boys.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:57
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Oxxidation posted:It's the "17 centimeters" part that's weirdest, to me. Like Card's got a "You Must Be THIS TALL To Be Fuckable" sign in his study. I know it's always been popular to accuse the most aggressive homophobes of being secretly gay, but from Card's writings he is wholly obsessed with young naked boys.
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Jul 29, 2015 19:31
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The Vosgian Beast posted:My beef is that the "my sweet nerd hero owns those sociologists" part of Cryptonomicon is one of the worst things I've ever read, and I've read Dune prequels. I only read the first third of the book, but the MC's wife/gf is part of a social of elite liberal arts/sociology/"enlightened" group and the figurehead, some free thinking professor gets smug and starts talking about how the US governemnt is going to destroy ghettos and bulldoze parks to build the "information superhighway" and the MC just starts yelling at him. I didn't get the impression that the MC was anything more then a childish prick. The group clearly knew nothing about emergent technology and given how even in 00s people in positions of power and still baffled by the simplest new thing it's not fair to verbally attack them for being unaware. Maybe the group was being insanely smug because the MC didn't have an advanced degree but they all knew he worked extensively in computers and programming. I can't remember the details, it may have been worse then that. This is what I found quote:G.E.B. Kivistik is basically a gag character, but once he's actually challenged on his statements, he stops being pretentious and points out that Internet access is a privilege not easily given to, say, the poor, and the advantages it can confer can leave large groups of society behind rapidly while granting enormous advantages to others, which depending on who you ask, has pretty much been what's happened in the ten years since the book was released. Even Stephenson, who is trying to load the deck, refers to Randy's defense as "an uncontrollable urge to be a prick."
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Aug 5, 2015 22:38
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The Vosgian Beast posted:These people are all imaginary. This did not happen. Stephenson created this scenario. But his SI-OC Randy still doesn't come off as being in the right. He's at best an rear end in a top hat to the misunderstood and unaware of the huge gap between him and the layman in terms of technological awareness.
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Aug 5, 2015 22:49
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Klaus88 posted:Wrong, this is the neckbeardiest book. I thought people were exaggerating but that book is loving awful. I can't understand why so many esteemed authors thought it was good. It's nothing more then "Hey, the 80s were the best THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST ARGHHHHHH IM CUMMING ALL OVER MY VINTAGE COLLECTION OF JOHN HUGHES MOVIES!" Even worse, the main female character is special because unlike all those other girls who choose model-like bodies in the MMO, she's "rubenesque" which makes the main character-SI totally in love with her for how authentic and real she is. Oh, and when he professes his love for her even having never met she rejects him because she thinks she's ugly, and later the MC finds her photo and she's got one of those dark red facial marks that she thinks ruins her forever. She's also 165 lbs and 5'7, I don't know how that correlates to fat/chunky/curvaceous etc. The evil corporation is played so hamfisted that they invite the MC up for a virtual interview, and then go "We found where you live (he's actually not there) and we're going to blow it up with bombs and plant meth lab stuff so the police will totally believe it was a drug lab explosion muahahahah!" Next they send soldiers wearing body cams after one of the guys in real life and film themselves throwing him out a window while laughing and high-fiving each other saying "Man, us Sixers are so great at killing this stupid people who dare challenge us." and much more other dumb stuff. Oh, and the only other female character is a big fat black girl the MC thought was a white male. The book is a loving joke and will probably crash hard as a movie because 80% of moviegoers don't want to sit there listening to smackdowns that consist of "oh yeah, and do you know the actor who played the teacher's aide in Breakfast Club? I DO BITCH YOU JUST GOT SERVED" I'm glad Armada is getting savaged by the critics. Even the ones who loved RP1 point out is basically the same thing only now ripping off other books under the guise of "geek references"
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Aug 8, 2015 04:57
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Rough Lobster posted:Man the more I read RPO, the more excited I got. Because I was absolutely positive that a moment was gonna happen where the main character beats the game or whatever and gets scolded by the story's Willy Wonka for absolutely wasting his life researching 80's stuff. Then we all learn a valuable lesson about not worshipping the past or something. The book barely qualified as YA fiction, the only reason it was listed as "adult science fiction" is because the only people who'd get the references are 27-50 and therefore the only people likely to buy it. Oh, and I forgot my favorite part, after the MC because world famous for solving the first 2 keys he confesses to the female MC and she rejects him, so he goes on a bender and gains a ton of weight to where his expensive immersion suit would be too tight around his fat body, so he locks himself out using a health/nutrition program with a unchangeable end time (2 months) but by the end of the 2 months loves it so much he keeps it and gets super ripped in a couple of months from previously being obese. That's not how the human body works Mr. Cline, but you've clearly got some strong opinions on the human form and beauty as evident from your writing.
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Aug 8, 2015 20:24
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Don't forget the repeated characterization of Chinese people as "Klingons" who "don't value life the way we do". If the china.jpg thread has taught me anything its that is kinda/sorta/possibly true but not in the way Clancy probably intends.
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Aug 9, 2015 23:52
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Ambitious Spider posted:I recently was recommended rpo by someone who usually just reads David McCullough books. I told her I had heard mixed things, and she assured me that no it was awesome. It's "awesome" in the since that people love tons of inside jokes on every page that only they, "real" fans, would get. Do you want to see 3 pages of teenagers from the 2040s arguing about LadyHawke? Because that's the essential core of the book. I say this having read it, it's cringe-worthy for the level of 80s cultural obsession that author has but its still fun as hell to read, like so bad its good terrible fanfiction. You'll keep getting blown away by just how juvenile the writing is for a major NYT bestseller.
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Aug 14, 2015 18:48
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So after reading Snow Crash and starting Diamond Age, I'm starting to get the feeling Stephenson has some odd issues with young female characters.
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Sep 3, 2015 18:56
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Practical Demon posted:No, see, Y.T. was totally into loving the giant, radioactive guy, and she flipped him off at the end. It's totally empowering! There were 3-4 instances of the author just casually stating "And of course everyone stared down at her rear end" in various ways to emphasize that this 15 year old girl had such a great rear end that every male adult would always turn to gaze it at whenever given the chance. ryonguy posted:More so the pulp-y kind, but it got to the point when I was binging on sci fi while having a job that let me get through 5-15 books a week I started just assuming any female characters would be raped at some point. Seeking out female authors helped though. Yeah well I started Diamond Age and sure enough early on Stephenson uses a young girl getting molested for...plot reasons? Just seems really unnecessary and out of place. And earlier in the thread people were mentioning his treatment of women in Cryptonomicon was extremely weird and goony.
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Sep 4, 2015 00:00
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Does Neal Stephenson ever learn how to write a loving ending? Snow Crash and Diamond were both fun books that loving collapsed on themselves in the last 40-50 pages into hot garbage. Also, I'm going to assume that he has some extremely weird and specific sexual issues with teenage girls because he is constantly making them sexual objects in a really terrible and ham-fisted manner.
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Sep 21, 2015 11:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:Troy Denning is a loving hack who said "you know what Star Wars is missing with all those lightsabers? Arterial blood spray and uncomfortable sex scenes!" Still not the most unprofessional writer in the SW EU. Every SW EU writer was given a codex of sorts of the official 'canon' and told what they could and couldn't write, expect Karen Traviss who said "nope, don't care" and proceeded to write tons of stories where Mandolorians are the bestest evaaaar! and blatantly contradict the previous books. By that point it was a massive shitshow and Denning was the only other 'major" SW EU writer left so the entire last 7 book series was those 2 authors basically flaming each other back and forth until Traviss got fired. pentyne has a new favorite as of 23:50 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 23:20
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Arcsquad12 posted:Karen Traviss apologist Her biggest problem was taking internal issues and complaints and publicly raging about them online everywhere she could. The Denning-Traviss book flame wars could've been stopped by the editorial staff but no one at the SW EU gave a gently caress. She's probably burned every bridge/inroad she made after getting the SW books (a good deal for a mediocre author) and has tumbled down the list to writing video game novels, then comic book novels and now has to write her own original fiction.
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Nov 28, 2015 03:43
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So I read a book series that started strong but wow did it lose the plot. The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman. At best I'll say it really messes with the conventional fantasy tropes and is fairly unique but gets really....fanfiction-y after book 1.
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Dec 11, 2015 02:26
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muscles like this? posted:A lot of Rothfuss' hype came from before the first book actually came out. He got a lot of press about how he had a complete trilogy that was already all done and it was going to be awesome. Now almost 10 years later he's released a whole two of them and a novella. Good job. Also there's no way that he's actually going to finish up the story with a third book considering how slow the progress was in the second. Just head over to the Rothfuss thread in TBB. Someone is doing a "Let's Read" and despite being a stuffy English major is pretty spot on in nailing all the flaws in Rothfuss' writing and prose. Just as an example of how up his own rear end Rothfuss is, during a workshop during a Con where he had samples of his write for comment/review he explictly said his prose was perfect and every word had been worked over and refined to perfection.
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Aug 30, 2016 19:56
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Antivehicular posted:Rothfuss also claimed that he had the whole trilogy finished when the first book hit, iirc, which is such a basic stupid lie but is still audacious. I'm sure he was using the gifted-kid logic of "I can procrastinate until the 11th hour and then my ~genius brain~ will make magic words flow, just like always happened with homework." He's said a lot. His editor, a highly regarded professional in the industry, recently said she hasn't seen a single word from him since 2013 and she's pretty sure he doesn't want to be a writer anymore. I don't know if he's responded yet or if he's too busy drawing down a six figure salary from his "charity" to care.
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Jul 29, 2020 07:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:The problem with GOT isn’t what happens in the show it’s that once they run out of book content the pacing just disappears. D&D literally told their assistant to write an episode and then just used that script. The problem is much less with the outline or source material and absolutely the 2 showrunners being wildly incompetent and lazy.
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Aug 12, 2020 19:34
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The book will probably sell milions to the people who cry about female ghostbusters ruining their childhood but there are some loving savage reviewsquote:That’s the overwhelming issue with the Ready Player Whatever universe: at no point does Cline question the wisdom of an all-encompassing monoculture that screeches to a halt around 1988, while technology evolves at hyperspeed around it. “Ah, the good old days,” he sighs, and writes another chapter about loving Donkey Kong or whatever. He’s the Gamemaster Anthony of genre fiction, a clunky stylist content to wallop the reader over the head with a never-ending barrage of “Remember when?”s. quote:Some Ernest Cline fans have jumped into conspiracies, choosing to believe that the long-awaited book was actually ghost written by a Reddit community. quote:These interludes also have Parzival getting schooled by Art3mis and Aech for the gaps in his knowledge, for following Halliday’s broad-yet-narrow tastes and inheriting the man’s blind spots for pop culture that might have been more significant for women and people of color. It’s a different kind of self-awareness than existed in Ready Player One, but it feels more performative than anything else because it still comes from the perspective of a white man.
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Nov 25, 2020 10:18
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I read RP1 and it was barely digestible if only for the "lol are you loving kidding me" parts but all the posted pages are literally difficult to read in the AI text generated sense; it hurts my eyes trying to read each line and parse the details.
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Nov 25, 2020 18:52
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