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Finally got caught up in this thread, thanks for making it  I've always been of the opinion that the basic premise of this book is a good idea, but it would have been much better if Cline had outsourced it to an actual professional writer instead of loving ruining it with his horrible prose, structure, and general insistence on turning what could have been a pretty decent cyberpunk story into A Bulleted List Of '80s References; to that end I'm really glad to see goon rewrite ideas and have been enjoying those posts Unfortunately Cline will never acknowledge writing this book himself and doing it the way he did as a mistake, because it did sort of allow him to devote the rest of his life to counting money
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Apr 2, 2018 18:44
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Hyrax Attack! posted:-Shouldn’t IOI have had a backup wizard with an 2nd orb? Or if it’s unique, a dozen decoy wizards with the real one entombed underground with an air tank, earning triple time? Tbf the shield is a transparent sphere, meaning you can easily tell exactly where the center is HopperUK posted:I just don't get this weird thing that happens with some authors where the pattern of the story is: Chitoryu12 was probably right when he said the part where Wade became a slave was the best part of the book, because that event was the only thing that ever happens in the entire book that manages to have enough effect to create some sort of tension and even that was just part of the protagonist's cunning 12-D chess plan I saw a Reddit post requesting an AMA from Ernest Cline, and the sample questions in the OP were all variations on the theme of "how mad are you that they changed the storyline  "meanwhile I still haven't seen the movie, so I saw that and I was like "they changed the storyline? Thank God."
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Apr 3, 2018 12:57
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The vast majority of Cline's 80s references are super basic, but it could charitably be argued that he focuses on these to appeal to his audience. Oddly enough, the only actually obscure things he's referenced as far as I remember are Japanese TV shows from the 70sProteus Jones posted:God drat. That phone booth would have been perfect for an you of course mean to say "one-time set piece that does nothing of value and is immediately forgotten"
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Apr 3, 2018 14:56
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When I read this book I didn't notice how many Grail challenges revolve around watching a movie and saying the lines right alongside the main character Like, I definitely remembered how much of it revolved around being able to beat old arcade games, but jesus Cline really places a lot of value on rote memorization doesn't he
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Apr 3, 2018 16:11
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Yeah Wade gets other, far more incomprehensible hints than that all the time ("say these three words backward and it's almost a line from a Schoolhouse Rock song  "), this is just lazy bad inconsistent characterization and/or an excuse to give Art3mis something to do
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Apr 3, 2018 16:26
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DJPON3Vinyl posted:Wait, the entire planet is watching people finish off the hunt on a live broadcast? That movie's ending was an intentional anticlimax too If Cline had any grasp of actual symbolism, the use of that particular movie as the big scary Final Challenge would be foreshadowing that there is no egg and there is no prize and Halliday's ghost is laughing at the idiots who wasted their lives on this bullshit Seriously though if I had to guess, Tempest is livestreamed but Monty Python isn't
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Apr 3, 2018 17:23
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EdsTeioh posted:This guy literally wrote a letter to Jim Butcher because he was physically angry at all of the stuff that Harry Dresden has to endure. tbf I've read one of those books (Grave Peril) and the last third of it or so was extremely stressful Like, I'm not saying he's right or anything, because if you don't actually like your media to contain tension you are a huge loving wimp, but I can kind of understand the idea that a certain amount of misery is too much to have to suffer through as a consumer
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Apr 3, 2018 19:48
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A thought: much is made of the idea that all external feeds into Wade's display get cut out when he reaches Halliday's office, but the other characters are literally in the same building as him now. Can't they just, like, walk up, and take one of his earbuds out, and talk to him normally using their voices? Or is taking out an OASIS user's earbuds considered functionally equivalent to rape or something in this setting
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Apr 3, 2018 20:45
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Zanzibar Ham posted:It's okay, he could make a Daito NPC that's indistinguishable from the real thing! How hard would it be to code in a racist Japanese stereotype? Thinking about it some more I sort of get the impression that Daito was a complete afterthought. He's not distinct from Shoto in any way; he's just The Other Shoto, The One Who Dies Like, it kinda seems to me like Cline wrote in the author-insert protagonist, the love interest, a best friend with a twist he probably thought was Extremely Woke, and a Japanese stereotype to satisfy his weeb side, and then his editor or something was like "hey none of your main characters ever really experience any real consequences, maybe you should make one of them have a tragic end of some kind? It'd build IOI's characterization too, really show how high the stakes are" and Cline was like "maaaan I don't want any of my very special imaginary friends to die after I put all this work into writing them. I dunno, let's have there be two Shotos. Maybe Shoto has a brother. But, like, not a real brother, obviously, that'd be too interesting. That guy can die. Is that ok?" but the editor was too busy snorting cocaine to answer him
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Apr 3, 2018 20:58
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Liquid Communism posted:“Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry’s brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both Terra Firma and Armada—along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA’s realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics.” Yeahhhh I dunno, I've already read Reamde. e: I'm pretty sure Shigeru Miyamoto would be fuckin' miserable working on a serious dramatic space MMO
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Apr 4, 2018 13:12
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Shark Sandwich posted:I like how Cline is such a bad author that even Andy Weir’s fanfic is a masterpiece of prose in comparison Even if we're only considering the realm of Nerds Who Decided To Write A Book rather than all authors in general, Cline isn't fit to shine Weir's shoes
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Apr 4, 2018 23:21
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OASIS goonfleet griefing idea: a quest-chain that is advertised as an act-along rote reenactment of Empire Strikes Back, but which slowly deviates until it's an original behind-the-scenes storyline with all-new characters taking place in the royal city of Naboo during the events of Phantom Menace gunters are all "the PREQUELS??? AAAAAAA  "e: random plot elements or technologies from Star Trek TOS frequently namedropped. Photon torpedoes would work well here.
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Apr 5, 2018 01:41
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I get that a custom questline is maybe a little much for simple griefing, but I really like the idea of the Star Wars prequels being kind of an "inside joke" among anyone who likes to give gunters poo poo, since they absolutely would hate those movies more than anything on Earth. I think in general it's important to project the idea that not everybody in this entire dystopia lives in the gunter bubble where 1980s pop culture is Very Serious Business and the golden age of civilization. There are probably tons of people out there who think gunters are all dumb nerds wasting away in their parents' basement pretending to be explorers and scholars.
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Apr 5, 2018 14:11
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burial posted:Is the plan still to make Daito and Shoto some midwestern weebs? I still say Daito is a wholly unnecessary character. He adds nothing to the story that couldn't be done by Shoto alone, apart from dying
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Apr 5, 2018 20:17
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The only time I'm aware of that Cline mentioned a Nintendo thing was that snippet from Armada someone posted where he namedropped Shigeru Miyamoto, and that mostly just established that he has no loving idea who Shigeru Miyamoto is
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Apr 9, 2018 15:29
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:He throws in 90's references in there too. Like Halliday specifically programmed in evangelion robots as a challenge reward. I guess not even Halliday could resist the siren song of anime Also: the Simpsons I read that part and was like "you mean just the Tracey Ullman shorts or what  " but that doesn't work because he talks about knowing Springfield better than he knows his hometown and I don't think they even went outside much in the Tracey Ullman shorts sooo
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Apr 10, 2018 16:30
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chitoryu12 posted:They still show him having to race at the back of the pack to pick up coins from dead avatars to fill his fuel tank, but he definitely starts with a lot more than he did before. It also seems like OASIS credits are still real world currency because there's a newspaper in Wade's trailer about credits being the "new dollar" and he buys a haptic bodysuit online with his reward for finding the Copper Key. Honestly the penalty for dying in OASIS being so high is incredibly outdated game design and probably yet another symptom of Cline's obsession with old arcade games, and it really doesn't jive at all with the RMT angle like, it's kind of hosed-up that people can kill each other in VR really easily and the only way to avoid tons of material wealth in the process is to be the first person on Earth to play a perfect game of in-reality Pac-Man without being told to and even that apparently works exactly once loquacius fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 19:57
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Mel Mudkiper posted:in a world utterly devoid of consequence why would you want to get rid of one of the few things that actually adds stakes This isn't the other thread, this is me noting bad video game design chitoryu12 posted:It's not at all clear how much credits are worth, either. They're presumably easy to get since any adventure or killing any NPC gets them, so they must be extremely devalued like Zimbabwean dollars. It would also be extremely lucrative to be basically an OASIS serial killer, just sort of hiding out in alleyways waiting to gank people from ambush all day, if that could literally pay your rent Def makes a lot more sense for it to be a virtual fake currency like in actual video games
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Apr 12, 2018 20:09
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chitoryu12 posted:Also on the subject of real world stress, the movie shows how some people react to losing their OASIS characters. One is a Japanese salaryman who has to be tackled to stop him from jumping out a window. yeah again if he lost a literal fungible equivalent of $60,000 in credits and items because someone sniped him from a tall building as he was parking his virtual car at his virtual workplace and is now teabagging his virtual corpse I kinda get it
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Apr 13, 2018 19:33
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