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Old Kentucky Shark posted:I tried to read Armada so i could submit some Real or Fanfics, but I gave up pretty much instantly. I also tried to do that, made it like 50 pages in and drove the book back to the library in a loving blizzard just to be rid of it, it was that insufferable. Submitted a Fanfic of Real entry anyway and Mike said I nailed Cline's lovely tone of voice perfectly.
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Jun 12, 2023 07:21
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Kangra posted:John Scalzi has definitely written some better stuff than that. I think the Kline conspiracy theory is only around because everyone's trying to imitate that style, given how popular it was. Not exactly a high bar to clear. I tried reading The Kaiju Preservation Society because its premise was right up my alley and drat near threw it against the wall because every line of dialog was a quippy Joss Whedonism or a terrible "They fly now? ...They fly now!" call and response between characters. Just insufferable after a very short while.
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Jun 30, 2023 08:11
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jeeves posted:Shadow Moon keeps the crown! I don't think anything is going to ever steal Shadow Moon's crown for just how weird and awful and hateful it was just over all. Maybe Bob Honey?
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Jul 1, 2023 06:26
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Shadow Moon was actually where I first started to fall off the podcast purely because it was so miserable and it just never seemed to end. Listening to them describe a series of events that ended in a character once and soon to be again played by Warwick Davis killing a dog and kicking a 12 year old boy's teeth in in a fit of rage for little discernible reason was my breaking point.
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 07:23
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MassRafTer posted:Does anyone remember Mike's story about meeting Tony Danza and saying something about Going Ape that made him really mad? I couldn't find it searching on the patreon and after watching Going Ape I wanted to revisit it. I feel like there's been a few "Mike meets a famous person and pisses them off somehow" stories over the year on 372 Pages. It just feels like it's an unintentionally recurring bit.
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Jul 4, 2023 21:06
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MassRafTer posted:I am genuinely impressed how barring maybe or or two every pre planned bit on this podcast is just genuinely awful and yet the rest remains pretty funny. It's very ironic that they constantly harp on the authors running potentially funny jokes into the ground only to absolutely strangle the life out of any potential humor to be found in those like 4-minute plus skits, holy poo poo.
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Aug 17, 2023 04:49
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jeeves posted:I read Redshirts like 10 years ago or whatever and remember thinking "wtf why do people like this?" I hope Redshirts wins, Sclazi is a very Clineian writer and what I've read of his works really turned me off very quickly.
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Sep 14, 2023 01:07
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Breadallelogram posted:When I looked at the patreon poll earlier today, Teen Archaeologists was winning with a healthy margin, but all 3 books were at 30-something%. I hope they get to all three of these at some point. Really good choices. Given how The Missus and Teen Archeologists are by two returning champion 372 fan favorite authors, I can't help but see them each getting done at some point no matter which one wins the poll. The only one that's up in the air is Redshirts, which probably just needs more people to sell Mike and Connor on how easily Sclazi slides into a trifecta with Cline and Weir in terms of unearned nerd bravado cringe poo poo writing.
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Sep 14, 2023 04:40
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MassRafTer posted:Them not going back to Tek or Titus Uno makes me sad. And I can sort of see why. Unless there's some real bangers of bonkersness in the other Titus Uno books, you kind of get everything you need to know about the series in 64 Squares, and doing two or more Titus Unos would just be insufferable because of all the auto-complete repetition. Not going back and finishing the Tek series though is a loving sin. I need to know how many more meetings about Sonny Hokori there are in the books before Sonny Hokori actually finally shows up.
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Sep 14, 2023 18:24
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MassRafTer posted:I would buy this if the next book wasn't a repeat author and one of the other options in the poll another repeat they basically said they'd be doing in the future either way. I was also gonna say that most of the 372 Pages library of authors don't really have follow-on books that could be explored, but no, actually, it seems like it's just Jim Theis, Charles E. Harris, and whoever the gently caress wrote My Immortal. Because even Amanda McKittrick Ros had two other novels to her name after Irene Irene Iddesleigh, somehow.
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Sep 15, 2023 21:26
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Kangra posted:I don't think Tyra Banks has any other (fiction) books; I'm sure she has a memoir/self-help or something, though probably not the same author as Modelland. Yeah, she (and by that I mean whoever ghostwrote Modelland for her)'s another one who's a one-and-done for them too. Bram Stoker's kind of off the table because Lair of the White Worm was his only dud. And I don't really see them going back and doing anything else from either Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown because just like Cline, they have one style of writing and every book is basically the same for them, so there's nothing really interesting to dig into there from the rest of their repertoires. At least EL James is such a batshit trainwreck of an author (and a person) that The Missus is worth a look at.
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Sep 16, 2023 22:52
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https://372pages.com/ep-151-the-adventures-of-the-teen-archeologists-intro It's Teen Archeologists time, bay-be! How many loving repeated sentences are gonna be in Larry and Denise's lesser known opus THIS time?
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Oct 5, 2023 19:03
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Mordja posted:Very glad to have Larry & Denise back I love that all their old staples are back with them: characters who all hate each other, endless simplistic repetition of ideas, not understanding basic geography, history or culture, and just piling on way too many characters than you could ever be expected to remember or give a poo poo about like they're just clowns spilling out of a clown car. I'm halfway through Episode 1 right now and it's like, okay there's the three main teens, then two more join them because they're the kids of the family friend/local guide, that seems reasonable, five's a decent number for a group dynamic--AND THEN TWO RANDOM KIDS JOIN THEM OFF THE STREET FOR NO REASON! And they're basically just carbon copies of the first two additions. And I expect there's gonna be like five more teens joining them when they get to the lost civilization, in addition to the two or three whole characters that are in the prologue that just do nothing, and then disappear for the rest of the book. I'm really starting to buy the theory that these books are just the published result of an editing war between Larry and Denise.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:32
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Denise: You what's better than eight main characters, Larry? Larry: [sips a big margarita] Ssssssfukkin EIGHTY MAIN CHARACTERS! *belch* E: Like, for real, I'm actually kind of impressed by the Ellises' inability to understand what a protagonist is so they just wander in and out of viewpoints like a car drunkenly swerving all over the road. To the point where the alleged main character(s) just disappear from the story for hundreds of pages at a time because they get wrapped up in ten different minor characters' interlinking bullshit and they just loving forget who they were supposed to even be writing about in the first place. At least with Antigua you could realistically say the main character was supposed to be Rebecca, even though she's in like 1/10th of the book. I honestly could not tell you who the main character of Teen Archeologists is even if you put a gun to my head. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 07:10
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Kangra posted:I'm a bit behind on this, so just finished Teen Archaeologists. I only realized after listening to the entirety of the third episode that I had completely missed the second episode. Having a completely new set of characters and situations was completely unsurprising to me; about all I noticed was that Mike & Conor seemed to be more familiar with Isabella than I would've thought, but I chalked it down to them having actually read the book. Still blows me away after all this time how unmoored Larry and Denise are to the idea of a main character/characters. Like I'm pretty sure after having gone through all the episodes of Teen Archeologists now that either Isabella the Evil Sorceress or the princess is the protagonist of the book and the Teen Archeologists are just guest stars characters to their bullshit. The book's so incoherent that if you miss or skip an episode it feels like Mike and Connor have moved on to another book entirely and I'm kinda sad that the Ellises only have this and Antigua to their names because I would very much like the guys to visit another out of control batshit self-published fantasy novel like that again.
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Dec 27, 2023 05:10
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MassRafTer posted:I do not understand a single thing that is going on in the new book. Haven't started it yet, but after Land of the Moepek, I am down for some good old fashioned self-published incoherence, because holy poo poo Larry and Denise just loving broke me in a way I'll never recover from.
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Jan 31, 2024 09:22
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Anime. It's a guy trying to write his own shonen superhero anime. It's why the girl punches him all the time, that's a stock thing that happens in anime. Oh sweet Jesus, this is gonna be a ride. I also love that the book's Amazon page already has the patented 372 Pages comet tail of "Customers who bought this book also bought..." to it. The internet moves fast.
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Feb 1, 2024 05:10
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Mordja posted:I can't believe this wasn't written by a 13 year old. It's a bigger self-instert wish fulfillment than My Immortal! Yeah, this has some HUGE 15 year old millennial incel misogynist power fantasy vibe to it. I'm about half an hour into Episode 1 as I write this and the main character already creeps me the gently caress out. e: Oh wow, it's super racist and ableist too. e2: Pan-ther-man, he flies like a moron! nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Feb 2, 2024 |
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Feb 2, 2024 19:56
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jeeves posted:Not since Super Constitution have I had a real hard time making it through more than 10 min of a time of this. There's this absurdly weird balance going on here where it's like "Is this REALLY worth all the time and effort put into recapping and examining it?" but it at the same time IS just so fascinatingly batshit that it makes you want to know more about it, even if every new revelation leaves you even more confused. I do get where you're coming from where someone like Ernest Cline is big enough and terrible enough that he warrants a good making GBS threads on, but this guy... I'm really trying to death of the author him as much as I can and just pretend that the book is some kind of separate existence despite the main character clearly being the author. I finished listening to Part 1 just yesterday, just in time for Part 2's release, and I've also just recently come off listening to the AI episodes of Behind the Bastards, and it's got me thinking in a way. Robert Evans and his guests talked at length about how AI, in its current algorithmic form at least, is probably never going to achieve spontaneous creativity, so it will never be able to write anything as batshit weird and bad as stuff like Kaileb's Dream or Super Constitution or Trucking Through Time or My Immortal. It can try, but it will never be able to truly replicate that je ne sais quoi of factors involved in the misfiring of neurons in a flesh and blood author's brain that makes them think some random insane thing sounds like a good idea to them so it needs no further explanation or examination. And so in this age of ever encroaching AI and the weird cult of shitheads who've sprung up around it to herald its advent, I find stuff like Kaileb's Dream weirdly commendable just because a computer will never be able to spontaneously do... all of that. Holy poo poo 
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Feb 19, 2024 05:08
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Mordja posted:I'm confused about what separates this author from any of the other self-publishing weirdos--outside of the delusions of grandeur--that would make you guys uncomfortable. There's this Schrödinger's cat vibe thing about the book where it could be "a deluded 14 year old wrote this" or "a guy in his 30s with big mental issues wrote this" and I don't know where to come down on it. I don't feel "uncomfortable" with the book, but there is something clearly off with the whole project, it's just that loving weird.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:25
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Mordja posted:Do you dream of every breakfast, lunch, and dinner you've ever eaten, at least? That is the part of this book that is loving killing me. It's just an endless series of meals and the protagonist entertaining his guests in the most boring rear end upper middle class white person who's stuck in his teens mentally way possible while a demon army a billion billion billion strong allegedly stands ready to invade and destroy the Earth at any moment. Also it is the LEAST surprising thing that the love interest for the 17-18 year old boy is 13. This book has been just radiating creeper vibes since the jump, so it's refreshing to just see it come right out and confirm that it is in fact as textually creepy as it has been subtextually creepy so far, thanks Kaileb!
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Mar 27, 2024 01:05
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Breadallelogram posted:The characters were 15 and 13, the author was like 30. Gross! These characters as-written feel like they should be in their 20s or 30s. Especially with the constant talk of consummating their marriage, and how he wants to wait until their of age, and then you realize she's 13 
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Mar 27, 2024 17:09
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I appreciate the guys releasing the first episode of the Bat Book series on what my work computer task bar informed me was Bat Appreciation Day. I don't know if they timed it that way, but it was very appropriate.jeeves posted:How can he have written a book for people who are way too young to understand 80s references? I am also extremely interested to see how this plays out. This is hilariously outside of every one of Cline's comfort zones. The guy wrote three books that were basically all the same book with the words jumbled about, so what's he gonna do when all of his trope and genre crutches aren't available to him?
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Apr 18, 2024 03:28
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Defiance Industries posted:It's not like his references were particularly artful or subtle. "A variety of 80s dance moves" indeed. My favourite Clineism remains the whole "You must fight seven different versions of Prince!" set piece, and then Cline couldn't think of seven different looks for Prince so it's just Batdance Prince, Purple Rain Prince, Unpronounceable Symbol Prince and then use your imagination for Princes 4 through 7. He couldn't even do something funny like have one of them be Dave Chappelle impersonating Prince either.
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Apr 19, 2024 04:27
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Defiance Industries posted:Or engaging, or clever, or intriguing Yeah, I realized half a second too late "you are talking about Ernest Cline". That's like trying to get a lead pyramid to roll down hill. A better metaphor than I bet anything Ernie's ever written or will write 
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Apr 19, 2024 04:36
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Mordja posted:This episode actually made me consider for the first time that Cline might have been a big fan of MST3K and I wonder if he knows how much Mike loathes his work. Had the exact same thought in the exact same place listening to that episode. Just "lol, I wonder if Cline knows".
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Apr 21, 2024 21:35
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It feels like Cline's trying to replicate one of those 60s/70s-era childrens' novels he grew up reading in school where Some Adult poo poo happens in between wholesome animal-centric adventures like Owls in the Family, Watership Down, Redwall, The Rats of NIHM, etc. It is deffo one those "guy in his 50s writing the kind of book he read as a child 40 years later for an audience of 1" things.
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Apr 22, 2024 00:53
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BRANDS BRANDS BRANDS BRANDS 1980s REFERENCE BRANDS BRANDS BRANDS how can you tell this is an Ernest Cline novel? I am happy to say I overestimated Cline. I legit thought this was him trying something completely out of his wheelhouse to break out of his self-made box, but NOOOOOOPE 
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 17:00
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Cline going on an in-character rant about how cool and awesome and friendly and you should totally rub your face all over them about bats post-COVID is a tiny bit , just saying Yeah I get that the book is set in the 80s, but still, a single bat killed 7 million people my guy. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 08:50 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 08:45
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I'm actually weirdly impressed at how Cline it got so quickly too. It was like a dam bursting and it all just came spilling out at once. The more I hear of this book, the less confident I am that this was Cline trying to break out of his box and failing miserably, and more like someone dared him to try and write the most un-Cline novel he could and gave him the writing prompt "a story about a girl and some bats in rural Texas" just to see how far he could get before he gave in and dragged all his terrible tropes out of the tickle trunk. Like how Jim Butcher wrote the Codex Alera series because someone dared him to write a Pokemon fanfic set in ancient Rome.
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May 11, 2024 21:06
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