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Since I refuse to ever let this go: please note the name of the protagonist is shared with a real-life important figure in Oklahoma. I feel it’s more than a coincidence; maybe Cline just thought the name sounded cool, but an editor (HA) should have caught this because it’s insensitive and thoughtless at best.
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Mar 13, 2018 13:02
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I never gave much thought to the scale of computing it would take to run something like OASIS, but after reading folks talk about it it’s like A.M. from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream became carelessly apathetic instead of self-hating homicidal. Every nanoangstrom engraved with WHERE’S THE BEEF.
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Mar 15, 2018 05:19
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The easter egg is done so poorly in this because look at how quickly ARGs and game secrets are solved these days. Scott Cawthon kept burying things in FNaF with increasing difficulty and people solved them in weeks, if not days after release. Ever since the Marble Hornets stuff people almost expect there to be hidden content of some kind and comb all sorts of games for them. Hell, when I played WoW I’d explore for fun and stumble into things!
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Mar 15, 2018 19:33
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Memento posted:He's not even memorising it, is he? Doesn't he just have a Oh wow, I just realized he’s basically doing a late 00’s LP where he keeps the footage of pausing the game to open GameFAQs in the same screen then skips over an important cutscene to get to more rote gameplay.
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Mar 16, 2018 12:27
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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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Deptfordx posted:As someone who played a lot of D&D in the 80's, this leapt out to me as well. Well of course, being so good and perfect at games her character never died! And given the guys were in love with her they never challenged her in a way to harm the character, allowing it to be even more powerful (but not more than their characters of course). I know that’s implied but given all the gross tropes about D&D and behavior toward the one girl in the group I have a hard time believing otherwise. “Leucosia” is a Greek name attributed to one of the Sirens. The first part had me side-eyeing since it means “white,” and sure enough the name can be translated as “white being” or “bright essence.” I can’t believe Cline got the name from anywhere else but mythology unless there’s an obscure source he pulled from, but he’s suggesting this woman named her character after the monstrous femme fatales that lured and devoured men that were only outsmarted after Odysseus protected his crew and resisted them, causing them to leap to their deaths. Not that Cline ever thinks too deeply about his references, but when it comes to treatment of women I will always look extra hard at his choices.
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Mar 18, 2018 12:38
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Millions of anonymous players in the OASIS and none of them are hovering above the Tomb of Horrors blasting music or spawning trillions of strobe light mosquitoes to crash the server? This made me laugh very hard, thank you. My fondest memories of WoW were kiting world bosses, spamming holiday effects, and just having fun with glitches/unintended consequences (anyone remember Druid stacking?). Phat purps? Who gives a poo poo, lets go pet battle in the subway! Your point about the childhood bedroom is something I missed and you’re spot-on. chitoryu12 posted:Let's all remind ourselves what a real VR Second Life-esque game turned into: https://youtu.be/CfS0OGQDamk
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Mar 19, 2018 01:02
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Art3mis has the exact same dead-eyed expression in every poster. Uncanny valley usually doesn’t bother me but good job RPO, something finally presented a humanoid that’s so unsettling to look at I get vaguely nauseous. I think Avatar was the last thing that came close. Plus the dead eyes don’t help the fact she’s a “prize” for the main character, either. Also: Aech’s design plus the reality of who operates that avatar is probably going to stir up some valid remarks.
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Mar 19, 2018 12:25
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“Flibbertigibbet” - in my experience this antiquated word usually gets applied to young women and implies not only are they overly chatty, but the subject of their chatter is frivolous. For the female lead to use that word repeatedly to describe herself is as Clineian as the non-stop references.Old Kentucky Shark posted:There's a certain character that i have a lot to say about, but I'm holding on until it comes out in the story. I appreciate in advance your labor in discussing this.
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Mar 19, 2018 23:21
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Wade is the ultimate result of the person who uses pop culture and “nerdy” media in place of an actual personality or self-improvement.
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Mar 20, 2018 03:30
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Drunken Baker posted:The only other thing that stood out was at the end, when Wade wins (spoiler alert) he writes it into the Oasis code that the system shuts off on Tuesdays and Thursdays so people have to get out of the house more. So he does what other MMOs already do? WoW used to shut down from 6am to at least 2pm server time every Tuesday, sometimes staying down a few hours longer depending on the kind of maintenance/updates happening. Also (spoiler tags because it refers to the end of the film): way to override the agency/free will of everyone else who may be using the VR program to attend school, get therapy, visit distant family/friends, watch and experience events otherwise inaccessible for a myriad of reasons, work together on business and charity-related projects, and so on. Yes, spending all your time playing games is unproductive, but people use VR/the internet for SO MUCH MORE than ignoring the state of the world via power fantasies. This just made me realize yet ANOTHER couple plot/sense holes in the whole OASIS setup.
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Mar 20, 2018 10:58
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What gets me is people will mill about to chat and show off if there’s incentive to do so. I can’t place the number of times I saw this in WoW because someone got the latest phat lewt from an endgame raid that everyone could identify on sight, or for that matter some ultra-rare mount that took months of reputation farming or getting incredibly lucky with a rare drop. I think someone said so earlier but it’s as if Cline never played a single MMO, or maybe had a bad experience in early Runescape or something and never returned.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:44
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Now, in defense(!) of E.L. James, at least she actually describes the events taking place in Fifty Shades, while Cline just tells us it happened post-fact. James has a background in TV production (I think?) so I can see where describing what’s happening presently would come easy to her, but 70% of her text is Twilight and like Meyer from whom she plagiarized she refers to “rich” things in the way Cline refers to the 80s. It’s not as often but it’s there, and hilariously almost none of those things are as rich or exclusive as she pretends them to be. RPO is out in around a week? I’m aggravated it’s probably going to take money from Pacific Rim: Uprising which even with mixed reviews is still it’s own IP that pays homage to stuff like Giant Robo and Godzilla and has a more diverse cast by comparison. Maybe if we all convince people to see Black Panther just one more time instead....
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Mar 21, 2018 03:42
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Again with Pacific Rim but it’s an example of a similar thing from script to screen. The original story was from scriptwriter Travis Beacham but it was Guillermo del Toro who expanded on the script and brought life to the film. Beacham’s novelization and comics have some similar issues as RPO with representation as well (girlfriends for the queer-coded scientist characters, lesbians who die off-screen).
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Mar 21, 2018 13:26
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chitoryu12 posted:Also Wade says he got his armor and sword from his occasional forays with Aech to try and level up. The implication is that you start OASIS with nothing but the pixels on your back.  I’m kind of ignorant in this area but don’t a lot of people mod games in a myriad of ways from buying/swiping assets and using them willy-nilly to ground-up making assets and whole games on their own? Minecraft? RPG Maker? The countless clones of the last decade of indie horror? And it seems a lot of younger people went into programming, art, etc. as a result of modding for fun. This all implies Wade has no concept of making something on his own, even to the extent of acknowledging “I’m not really creative, so I commissioned someone to make a sword in a style I liked.” But why am I seeking an iota of self-awareness in Cline’s work? Zanzibar Ham posted:It's 80's Nostalgia World, you're expected to find an old man in a cave to hand you your first weapon. Good point, yet there were folks in the 80s making their own games, or crackers with flashy screens. One of the earliest C64 games Wizard had a robust level builder/editor and is hardly obscure. SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 20:51
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chitoryu12 posted:I’ve seen most of the Twilight films, but never read more than excerpts from the books. Much like RPO, it’s easy to make fun of but a lot of the mockery comes from people who have never actually sat down and tried to read the series. I feel like I can make more nuanced criticisms if I bite the bullet and do it. This was several pages ago but: a few people spent about six years (!) doing this on a LJ called Das Sporking. I think the content was brought over to Dreamwidth last year. There’s a metric assload of content, including commentary on forum posts Meyer made on contemporary fansites that when coupled with her books make for some supremely hosed up ideas. It’s also a fascinating study on how she killed her career. And much like this thread, it brought about a lot of rewrites and “spitefic” that were often far better than the original, or at least cathartic to experience after the awfulness I’d the source material. Thanks for entertaining us, chitoryu. Twilight is a whole different world of deep hurting and wish fulfillment, and I think it’s in a different direction than most people realize. I look forward to your take on it! If there’s a way to make four empty posts for the relevant chapters those will likely still be more tolerable than the original. Clipperton posted:There would be no SA or any other gunter clan because Urban Smurf would have cracked it on day 1 Also many pages ago, but this made me smile.
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Apr 6, 2018 03:41
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I like how in a RPO thread I’ve learned yet another reason the entire Twilight franchise is terrible. P.S.: the way Meyer describes vampires in the books leaves them horrifically pale, including the ones who are native Brazilians, then you remember how there’s a bit in The Book of Mormon how people will be made “white and delightsome” in heaven and welp. As for having to play Adventure, I can only think back to the Freelance Astronaut’s Let’s Play of it, including pipes! insistence on singing the Brick House baseline the whole time. King Kong: millions of players yet no one ever considered how to fool King Kong by distraction, or ditched a vehicle for King Kong himself and rode the giant ape to glory, or even somehow mucked with the code to invoke 1986’s King Kong Lives and fell old banana breath with a literal broken heart!
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Apr 9, 2018 01:49
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roomforthetuna posted:I'm curious how, in this story, Kong couldn't be defeated by a big stream of cars all making it that far in the same race. He can't pick them up and fling them that fast, the animation we saw doesn't have the speed for that. Does he just stick his hand on the track blocking the entire track? And then also stick his rear end on there when some of the cars in the stream start jumping higher than a Kong-hand? I’m picturing a really smug King Kong just sitting in the middle of narrow street, leaning against one building, feet just narrowly not ripping the awning they’re balanced on across the road, blithely ignoring engines revving and honking while he sips on a water tower’s worth of Ecto Cooler. People would attempt to emulate this on other worlds to where “Kong blocking” would be a frustrating OASIS meme. Why is every silly idea we come up with more fun than a single idea Kline managed?
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Apr 9, 2018 03:57
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