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Memento posted:He's not even memorising it, is he? Doesn't he just have a Yup. Makes the whole 'xps for completing quests, and game currency for finding gold' thing hilarious too, as there's a whole world of published D&D mods that everyone has access to the solutions for, so why aren't gunters all rolling in bitcoin from grinding them?
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Mar 16, 2018 07:41
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PDF of the module opened up in his field of view so he can walk past everything by looking it up?
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PJOmega posted:In universe it is because Halliday's quest has loving destroyed a generation of culture. Millions of kids and content generators don't see any other avenue out of abject poverty but to pour themselves into the mold of an autistic old man with a raging nostalgia boner. The hilarious part is, I'm pretty sure that's an entirely unintentional reading of Cline's work. He honestly thinks 80's kitsch is superior enough that it would overwhelm the current pop culture if people just had a reason to dig into it.
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Mar 17, 2018 06:24
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Better question. If IoI has that much money and power in the real world, why do they give a gently caress about Halliday's game when they could be buying Senators and controlling the game via FCC regs for vastly less. Or just goldfarming until they break the economy.
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Mar 18, 2018 04:41
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There's another question about this whole disaster of a world building attempt. You have a long running semi progressive nerd President. Why is the country still a corporate dystopia if the position has any power?
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Mar 18, 2018 04:55
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:That's a real thing for people who started playing D&D in the 70's and for people who learned the game from those people; the game back then was more of a tournament style puzzle-quest, and people treated their characters like self-inserts and loot-collectors that they would carry around from table to table. Most people would play different characters from time to time, but each would also have "their character" usually their favorite and highest level one, that they would use whenever they could get away with it. That's where all the main characters came from for Dragonlance as well. They're mostly all PCs from a campaign run in Hickman's apartment for a bunch of writer friends.
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Mar 18, 2018 14:16
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Paladin posted:Pile "Aech and Art3mis are the same person" onto the list of better plot twists this book COULD have had. That is much more interesting, and I wish we got that instead.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:26
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Paingod556 posted:The PvP restriction only stops physical harm. Mental and psychological harm, however... I'm still wondering how this works with the Block feature. I mean, you can mute them, but they can still spawn a locker around you?
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Mar 21, 2018 00:48
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iospace posted:FORTRAN is still being used today, believe it or not. It has some very niche roles and is still getting updates to the actual language itself (and a lot of legacy code being maintained). One of the old salts I used to work with was fluent in it. He'd still take occasional contract gigs for high five digits for a week of work on some arcane production system that nothing else would work in and which was impossible to replace.
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Mar 23, 2018 08:09
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chitoryu12 posted:What really baffles me is the idea of all this stuff like tabletop RPGs being some kind of lost knowledge that even adults don’t know about until clued in by the Hunt. Hell, Tomb of Horrors itself was re-released last year by WotC. We played it at a gaming con over the winter. It's fun, if brutal, but hey that's 40 year old RPG design.
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Mar 26, 2018 03:51
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Deptfordx posted:Just looked at the Wikipedia plot summary for Armada, and I'm not sure which it's ripping of more, The Last Starfighter or Enders Game. Por que no los dos?
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Mar 26, 2018 10:12
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chitoryu12 posted:I kinda want to keep the Let's Read stuff going with more famous bad books. I started out with cheap pulp that I read as a kid, but major stuff that gets big film adaptations seems to bring out a lot of earnest discussion and entertainment. There's a Sword of Truth let's read going over in TG right now that is nearly as painful as this one.
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Mar 28, 2018 14:29
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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: 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 Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 15:11
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Young Freud posted:Also, why even bother with setting up an indentured servitude system where you have to pay for room and board when you can rig up some "gig economy" equivalent and the slaves pay you for the privilege of working for you? This bit actally makes sense. They indenture people for not paying their ISP bill. It's a collections process.
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Apr 2, 2018 14:20
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Leofish posted:What would be the Oasis equivalent of being told to post a thread on the Oprah forums or something in order to get into Goonter Squad? Take them to Planet Goatse, and keep the ones who notice the ring, clearly. Can you imagine how jaded we'd be if we could experience the Internet interactively?
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Apr 2, 2018 14:25
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chitoryu12 posted:Also notice how the two main mechs in this final battle (Mechagodzilla and Leopardon) are from the 70s and Ultraman is from the 60s, so the most prominent artifacts we've seen aren't even from the 80s in a book that's exclusively about 80s nostalgia! Hilariously, EVA units are mid-1990's too. Poops Mcgoots posted:The hosed up thing imo is that Cline could've gone for another Hideaki Anno Mecha anime and brought in Gunbuster, but I guess that would've required doing research on a deeper reference and we can't have that! GUNBUSTER would actually loving -be- 80's! Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 20:19
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Grenrow posted:Yeah, like the supply robots they use being some movie reference. Why the gently caress do they bother? They're working for a paycheck; they don't give a gently caress about any of this pop culture bullshit. That line is really weird because Wade is bitching about them just copying stuff from the 80s. Motherfucker had a living room modeled after the one from Family Ties, which isn't even relevant to the plot. All of the egg hunt stuff comes from sci-fi movies, tabletop rpgs, and video games, so he didn't have to bother with any sitcoms to begin with. A short list of more interesting things that could be referenced if Cline actually gave a poo poo about the 80's, -famous- movies and TV only, as filtered through the favorites of my nerdy friends. He may even have hit a couple of the real popular ones by accident: Die Hard Aliens The Terminator Princess Bride Night Court Full Metal Jacket Scarface The A-Team Poltergeist Top Gun Dukes of Hazzard Crocodile Dundee Spaceballs Quantum Leap Blade Runner The Blues Brothers GI Joe The Three Amigos ThunderCats Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Uncle Buck RoboCop MacGyver Rambo Star Trek TNG Transformers Weird Science Alf Labyrinth Conan the Barbarian Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mad Max:Beyond Thunderdome
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Apr 3, 2018 14:02
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loquacius posted: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 70s Hell, Dragon Ball was entirely in the 80's, and DBZ started in 89.
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Apr 3, 2018 15:26
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chitoryu12 posted:Yeah I think more than one person in this thread predicted exactly what was going to happen. Fun note. The quarter as extra life was featured in Scott Pilgrim Volume 3, released in 2006. He uses it in Volume 6, released in 2010. RPO released in 2011. Bit of math there...
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Apr 3, 2018 15:46
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It would be so much better if one of the competitors had to exclude the other two who were their buddies, just like Halliday's two friends excluded him by hooking up.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:43
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StonecutterJoe posted:This...this is not how criminal trials work. "Sorry, sir, we thought getting you off was a slam dunk, but it turns out Wade hired the best defense attorneys on earth and convinced them all to become your prosecutors. That's a thing he can do now, because he's the best at everything and has all the money." I assume the author is conflating criminal prosecution with suing over breach of contract and TOS. I mean, Wade could just ban IOI and all employees thereof and confiscate their in game cash. He can do that now.
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Apr 3, 2018 22:47
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nine-gear crow posted:Too recent for Cline's nostalg-o-vision to detect and too obscure for his wading pool-depth tastes. “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.” ― Ernest Cline, Armada
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Apr 4, 2018 12:19
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loquacius posted:Yeahhhh I dunno, I've already read Reamde. Yeah, as usual for Cline, that list is just a Wikipedia entry of top names in gaming. Gabe Newell hasn't done any game design in decades, and even then he barely touched any of Valve's stuff as he was focused on Steam as a platform. Lord British and Roberts are each into their own several years without any results post-Kickstarter schemes, and Miyazaki is a project manager (and a drat good one) more than a game dev.
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Apr 4, 2018 13:53
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Choco1980 posted:Wait, nobody can figure why Mt Shasta is on the paranormal/conspiracy world? Have they ever researched ANYTHING about Mt. Shasta? If you're from NorCal, literally every story you have about it is that it's Weird Stuff Central, everything from weird lights in the sky to bigfoot to shady MIB reports there. He'll, I figured it was a Shadowrun reference.
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Apr 4, 2018 21:43
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nine-gear crow posted: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. Exactly. Also to have the friend's avatar-deaths be more meaningful than 'whoops bomb'. Go full mecha show climax and let him pick them off as wade struggles to keep up. Build some drat tension.
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Apr 6, 2018 13:22
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F'Nale. As in Final. ...
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Apr 8, 2018 09:38
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loquacius posted: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 Imagine how horribly vicious the Goon Wars on Eve would be if they could pay their rent instead of just denying people their spacebucks. If PVP pays in real money, then the Oasis should be a blood-soaked wasteland.
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May 23, 2018 11:29
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