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Gnome de plume posted:If only you'd written that while 372 Pages was covering this, you could have been featured in their "Real Or Fanfiction" segment. Amusingly enough, I actually submitted an entry for "Fanfic Or Real" for the continuation podcast they did on Armada and had it read on an episode. Mike Nelson said it was "perfectly Clineian", and I worry that it was as much of an insult as it was a compliment. I had wrote something wretched so well that it impressed an old school connoisseur of crap.
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Mar 25, 2018 09:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:so been doing some looking into Armada and it actually makes RPO look competent by comparison Armada is a fantastic disaster on pretty much every level. I tried to do the read along of it for the 372 Pages second season and I didn't make it even 50 pages. The only complimentary things I could say about the book was that every word in it was at least spelled correctly and it did not spontaneously combust in my hands while I tried to read it. So at least there's that.
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Mar 26, 2018 04:13
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chitoryu12 posted:Guess I know what we’re doing after this thread! Please do, yes. Armada kind of has to be done in tandem with RP1 as an "Oh, you thought that was bad? Watch this." encore.
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Mar 26, 2018 04:26
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Wheat Loaf posted:I was thinking recently that this might have been more enjoyable if all this pop culture stuff actually was almost entirely forgotten in the distant future and, instead of knowing it all off by heart so he never really has to try, Wade had to go on a scavenger hunt through his VR internet to puzzle out what the references are so he can figure out the clues.  No way Cline would write himself as the villain of his own story...
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Mar 26, 2018 11:20
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chitoryu12 posted:I think I'd have it play as the latter, and make part of Wade's character that he doesn't share Halliday's obsessions. He never gave any thought to the Hunt after he couldn't get into the 80s research like die-hard gunters have been, and finding the Tomb of Horrors on Ludus is a complete accident. He suddenly finds himself needing to take a crash course in the 80s and run through everything with Aech and Art3mis to try and figure poo poo out, in addition to all the stress of becoming a socially awkward celebrity. I'd kicked around going a reader response fic or novel in this vein too. I'd have it so that there was a huge disparity between the public opinion of Halliday (or a Halliday stand-in) and the real person, kind of like the one surrounding Steve Jobs, and that the more Wade found out about him, the more terrible of a person he's slowly revealed to be--abusive, obsessive, narcissistic, manipulative, domineering, politically backwards, and a beneficiary and perpetuator of the broken system that makes everyone's lives hell, but apotheosized into a nerd god by a great PR team the cultural mythos forged by a public desperate for some kind of a hero in this terrible times, and whatnot. My plan for the endgame was to go with the "winning" the Hunt actually kills the OASIS without any input from the winner, because the Hunt was actually an elaborate long-con troll specifically designed by Halliday to see if he could get at least one uber-obsessed and utterly broken weirdo to jump through a series of increasingly bizzare and demanding hoops on the sketchiest of promises, with the real "reward" being becoming famous for being the person who destroyed the OASIS by being overly obsessed with it. And instead of the mystical wizardly paternal Halliday that appears at the end of the story, it's just a canned pre-recorded beratement of the winner excoriating them for falling into someone else's obsession, or worse yet, being consumed by their own obsessions to the point of self-destruction and the ruination of probably the one good thing in their life, if even. But yeah, the basic thesis should be "Obsessive nostalgia is bad, and if you want to properly grow as a person you need to learn how to Kill Your Gods."
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Mar 26, 2018 22:31
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Shark Sandwich posted:You can’t even call this book a labor of love because as near as I can tell there’s no labor expended in its creation. Barely comprehensible screeds on UFOs from schizophrenics are imbued with more authorial care than this Pretty much. Here's a spoiler from an upcoming "fight" scene. Cline isn't able to convey tension, or action, or description. It's just three references strung together as an attempted metaphor/escape hatch to get out of actually writing what happens. It's just "Hey? Are you familiar with the things I just namechecked? Okay. Just transplant your memories of what happened during those action scenes into this one, and that's what happened. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to move on to something else unexciting."
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Mar 26, 2018 23:14
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Conclusion (and a real shocker): Cline has never known the touch of a woman, let alone her dress size, and just made poo poo up. And not thought about the impact on young women readers would be, writing what would become a wildly popular YA novel wherein being 5' 7" and 168 makes you a "repulsive" ham beast. It may horrifying (and possibly delight) you to know that Cline is in fact married, to a woman who is an author/poet in her own right, and her books are infinitely better than her husband's and much more well received, if nowhere near as popular.
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Mar 27, 2018 01:12
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Gorilla Salad posted:Was there ever any point to Halliday's co-founder being in the book at all? He's there to fill out the requisite Wozniak role of all the implied Steve Jobs allusions swirling around Halliday: the guy who actually did all the hard work and heavy lifting on OSASIS while Halliday got all the credit and attention for being the media-savvy idea man of the duo. Despite all the descriptions of Halliday that Cline offers actually painting him as an agoraphobic boor that no one would ever come to revere ala Jobs.
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Mar 27, 2018 04:21
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, I was given a recommendation from Back Hack to tackle Monster Hunter International next. This was an easy solution, partly because I could get a Kindle copy for free and partly because this is the synopsis: This has the added "bonus" of being an additional level of awful because Larry Correia is actually a Gamergator/Sad Puppy/alt-right loonie. Have fun with that one...
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Mar 27, 2018 19:37
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Renegret posted:In a perfect world, Wade swears off Art3mis and gets together with Aech. They did that at the end of .hack//SIGN. The two main characters fell in love in the game world, only to find out later that they were both girls and one of them was playing with a male avatar. So they both went “eh, gently caress it,” and started dating anyway.
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Mar 27, 2018 20:01
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Gnome de plume posted:I'm assuming it involves Drizzt somehow. Indeed. The Drizzt books, Forgotten Realms, and the early Dragonlace books were all based off Dungeons and Dragons sessions that were later work shopped into actual novels. The latest advent of the LitRPG in recent years has been more web-based audio/visual content like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone.
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Mar 28, 2018 01:53
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Liquid Communism posted:Larry Correia is a giant butthurt manbaby who looks exactly like you would expect of someone who got so angry over POC and LGBT SF/F authors getting Hugo Awards that he tried to bring down the awards in general. The general Worldcon voters hated his Sad Puppy slate of candidates so much they refused to award several Hugos rather than give them to any of those nominations Larry Correia was a frequent guest on Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor and Mary Robinette Kowal’s podcast Writing Excuses in its early episodes (before Kowal joined as a full time host), and was one of the folks they would often name check when he wasn’t on. In the time since he revealed himself to be an amazingly awful person, he hasn’t been back as a guest, nor is he referenced by name anymore. Makes you 
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Mar 28, 2018 19:29
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Sobatchja Morda posted:Somewhere in an obscure corner of the internet, I found what Roger Ebert had to say about Cline's writing: That's the real kicker, ain't it? Fanboys was made in 2009, but Cline wrote the script for it in 1998. RP1 was published in 2011, and it was functionally the same story and we're nearly a decade removed from even that too. The man has not matured one iota as a person or a storyteller since he was at least 25...
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Mar 29, 2018 03:08
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Shark Sandwich posted:Ah that’s fair.  That thing I submitted to 372 Pages I actually spent about 2 hours workshopping to tighten up and make as intentionally tone deaf and unlike my normal writing style as I could, and goddamn it paid off. In a minor way that only a few people would ever appreciate, but still.
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Mar 29, 2018 20:38
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And that’s funny because Cline’s treatment and interpretation of women in RP1 is pretty bad, but the actual worst instances casual misogyny are in Armada. There are (to my memory) four women in Armada. All of them but one are objects of lust for the main character (one of them being his own mother  ). And the first female character that’s introduced has no spoken lines of dialog, or at least meaningfully spoke lines, disappears after the first ten pages, and exists for the sole reason of informing the audience that the protagonist and narrator is in fact not a virgin because he had sex with her at one point before he dumped her.So yes, Ernest Cline has some very toxic views about women.
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Mar 29, 2018 21:17
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there wolf posted:If we're throwing out better alternatives to RPO, how about Summer Wars? Anime, but a cute movie about a threat to the OASIS/matrix/virtual reality that the world depends upon that focuses on the importance of family and friends to keep poo poo going. This is a good recommendation. The way it deals with technology and the internet is hokey and shows way too much of its Digimon roots, but it's a beautifully animated and acted story with a great emotional heart and message behind it. Hell, check out Mamoru Hosoda's entire filmography (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, The Boy and the Beast, Wolf Children). They're all a hell of a lot better than wasting your time on anything Ernest Cline's ever written. E: Plus Summer Wars does the "nerdy useless talent saves the world" bit not just better than how Armada does it, but three times over across three different equally important characters. The day is saved by a boy being really great at martial arts, another boy being really great at math, and a girl being absolutely fantastic at gambling. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Mar 31, 2018 |
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Mar 31, 2018 02:24
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Meanwhile, The Mary Sue posits (somewhat shallowly) the all-too believably theory that James Halliday is the real villain of RP1. It's certainly not an unrealistic tact to take in light of the general public slowly becoming more awake to the fact that that basically every TechBro billionaire is a monster rear end in a top hat. Steve Jobs was an abusive prick. Mark Zuckerberg is a scheming sociopath who built the world's largest self-volunteered surveillance and data collection apparatus. Elon Musk is libertarian loon who's more destructive than he is productive. Peter Thiel is a literal vampire who kills news orgs that that make him mad. Tim Cook is a secretive sleaze bag. Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone REALLY loving love Nazis. Jeff Bezos just wants to own literally everything. And James Halliday enslaved the world in his own personal 1980s nostalgia hellscape.
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Apr 1, 2018 01:23
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Shark Sandwich posted:Let’s not also forget nukes are literally blowing up in cities but there’s never any lag or downtime Ins’t lag a world-ending cursed word in the Clineverse though?
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Apr 1, 2018 18:09
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I wonder if you could out-ironic Cline or if he would have a knee jerk desire to defend anything 80s no matter how obscure and awful I don't think irony has anything to do with it. At the most he would just demure from actually criticizing it. That's something you pick up with Cline as you go through his stuff with a critical or at least aware eye: he doesn't have anything bad to say about anything from the 80s, nor does he reference anything that can be be viewed as okay to criticize. He either doesn't appear to have a content barometer, so everything from the 80s is certified good in his view, or he's afraid to step on anyone's toes from a decade creeping up on 40 years removed from our present time frame that he just won't criticize anything from it, even gently. He's terrified of insulting his gods...
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Apr 1, 2018 23:20
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burial posted:When someone rewrites this, how is the SA gunter clan going to be portrayed? lol SA is gonna be 20 years dead by then. The serious answer is: "Goonfleet". Or one of those SA-based Second Life griefing brigades.
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Apr 2, 2018 05:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:whats really shameful is that no one in the big robot war thought to pick Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Too recent for Cline's nostalg-o-vision to detect and too obscure for his wading pool-depth tastes. Anyway, ENDLESS TRAAAAAAAASSSSSSH!!!!
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Apr 4, 2018 02:21
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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.” People have already pointed out several times over that most of the people on this List of People Who Makes Video Games That I Know either don’t actually make games anymore or are ill-suited to making a game like this. But the Hollywood tie-ins are also hilariously dumb. The last game James Cameron was involved in was literally James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, and it was... not good. Also, James Cameron, to my knowledge, is not a production designer or artist, so what the hell would he have to do with contributing to the “realistic ship and mech designs” of the games? Does Cline think that every visual element of the Terminator movies came from Cameron alone? Also, Weta Workshop is the practical effects side of Peter Jackson’s production company, if anyone was going to handle the cinematics for a video game it would be Weta Digital, the computer effects firm specifically founded for Lord of the Rings and now involved in a fuckton of projects because LotR was one hell of a demo reel for them. Why not throw in a line that says “And a kickass soundtrack produced by Skywalker Sound?” While you’re at it, Cline. It gets an obligatory Star Wars reference out of the way, AND misunderstands that Skywalker Sound was George Lucas’s in-house sound effects and sound editing firm. Also, if you look online you can find designs done by Cline himself of the two “totally original, DO NOT STEAL!” main star fighters that show up in the book, the EDA Interceptor and the Soburakai Glaive. The Interceptor is straight up a Thunderfigter from Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, and the Glaive is a Cylon Raider from the 00s Battlestar Galactica reboot. And the official artists contracted for the book make NO effort to cover any of that up. Fuuuck, I’d rather play a game made by Derek Smart than whatever quivering chimerical mess that Armada and Terra Firma are supposed to be as envisioned by Ernest Cline. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Apr 4, 2018 |
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Apr 4, 2018 20:36
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chitoryu12 posted:Finally, I'm going to consider Lacero canon because it actually gives Sorrento a motivation deeper than just being a greedy 80s businessman villain. This means we can work his motivation properly into his actions and dialogue. In order to make Lacero square with Ready Player One, you would need to turn Sorrento into, and pardon the obvious video game term, it's just one of the few examples I have in my grab-bag so readily available, a Kefka character. Not some loopy deranged clown, but a guy you shrug off initially because you think he's just some schmuck who's sticking to Corporate's plot and plan, when actually he's just using the system he's been brought into and given control of the leavers of until his perfect moment arrives and he can enact his own plan and destroy everything and screw over everyone. Only his master plan has a bit more of a righteous edge to it. There needs to be hints all throughout Wade's various encounters with him. Sorrento is obsessed with the egg. More obsessed with it than even most gunters are (gently caress I hate that term). More obsessed with it than any corporate suit just looking for an excuse to rate gouge people should be. Something doesn't add up here, Wade begins to notice. And he's pretty much the only person who does. IOI just thinks Sorrento's a useful weirdo working his rear end off to help them secure their monopoly over existence itself. They have no idea he actually wants to knife the Golden Goose in the stomach and then kick its corpse into oncoming traffic, and by the time that anyone does realize it, it's basically too late, he's on the cusp of pulling off the con. And that way you get the extra layer of irony to the whole thing where the dude who wanted to kill the OASIS for enslaving the world in its addictive obsession, himself becomes lost to the obsession of trying to kill it and ultimately destroys himself over it. He who hunts monsters, and all...
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Apr 5, 2018 05:21
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Young Freud posted:Agreed, Sorrento should be a Char: a likeable antihero that has a grudge so massive that he goes to psychotic lengths to find recourse. This ^^^ Then just to sell the reference completely instead of MechaGodzilla, have him whip out an obscenely hacked version of Red Comet at the mech battle to tool everyone with.
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Apr 5, 2018 05:53
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Malachite_Dragon posted:But then Cline would reach down his divine hand and some super-contrived bullshit would happen and Wade's RX-78-2 would be replaced by Gundam Barbatos Lupus Rex because can't have our golden boy protagonist in the slightest bit of danger! Yeah, but Cline ain't writing this version, so chitoryu12's free to let Sorrento mop the floor with him and come within fingertip's reach of the Egg to, you know, have some actual drat tension in this story for just a moment.
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Apr 5, 2018 06:25
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Just out of curiosity, and since someone else mentioned how tacky as gently caress it is: On the surface, I'd say no, but usually publishers have entire rooms full of lawyers whose job it is to just get even vocal clearance from a public figure, brand, or estate or the agent or agency representing them when a Real Life person or thing is namechecked in a fictional book. And even then that's usually covered already under the First Amendment or equivalent rights in other countries. Like literally Stephen Hawking, Neil DeGrass Tyson and Michio Kaku all have speaking bit parts in Armada and I would be legit shocked if any of them know about it (or in Hawking's case knew about it  ) unless someone pointed it out "hey, you're in this lovely SciFi book I'm reading" on like Twitter or wherever.
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Apr 6, 2018 01:56
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Choco1980 posted:I'm fairly certain that Cline doesn't like/care about any video games made after the big crash of '83. This is a man who got so hyped up over the Atari Landfill being found that he filmed himself driving across country to get there, but doesn't mention Nintendo once in his book of 80s nostalgia. Nintendo is one of those companies that protects its IPs with an entire pack of Cerberuses. Because they’re a regressive and insular company at heart. I’ve no doubt Cline probably put in a bunch of Nintendo references in the first draft and was then told by his fabled editor and the army of namecheck lawyers from the publishing house to take them out or the Big N was gonna sue the gently caress out of them.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:05
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Today at work, the loudest, most opinionated, and stubborn co-worker in my kitchen was proclaiming that RPO was the BEST MOVIE EVER, GUYS. A couple times I started to open my mouth to call bullshit. I quickly realized the folly in this, and then just shook my head and decided that it would be a good time to pound out a case of chicken breasts so I could drown him out. I said earlier in this thread that I was going to go see RP1 in theaters with a group of friends as part of a suicide pact. Good news: we successfully put off going for so long that when the time came, we went to see Deadpool 2 instead, which was fantastic.
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Jun 4, 2018 01:17
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