Just want to point out that Armada is very similar to Ender's Game and The Last Starfighter while referencing both.
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Ready Player Two has breached containment and is looking for the little man in the canoe
- Thread starter Adree
- Start date
I'm not ashamed to admit that the first one is one of my guilty pleasure (well the audiobook, that is). But this second book is weird.
Ok, yeah, I'm catching up on the rest of this thread and I think you cracked it.
He is absolutely the kind of person who constantly edits a fan wiki to add "this scene is a reference to this other show" in trivia sections, when that's not true and it's entirely just the editor imagining a connection to another thing they like. Except he's writing it, so they are actually references even though it's still nonsensical.
The first book was pretty enjoyable, it's medicore writing was over shadowed by the nuttyness of it all. I did enjoy the characters and the search for the keys. The references served a purpose at least.
12 Chapters in. The book is definitely a sequel. Doesn't really get rolling until Ch 10. Wade turning into a more assholish Halliday by way of IOI was an interesting way to go. The McGuffin that gets the plot started had me expecting someone to mention the ST TNG episode about Holodeck addiction but oh well.
My main take away is "nothing is as it seems" and I think the "Sword Art Online" plot is a trick to motivate the characters. Guess Ill find out. The over all mystery of the shards is interesting though.
Book needs more Art3mis, Shoto seems even less of a character now and Aech has lost her cool factor somehow. The new Trans character and her friends are cool though. Hope they pop up again soon.
My main take away is "nothing is as it seems" and I think the "Sword Art Online" plot is a trick to motivate the characters. Guess Ill find out. The over all mystery of the shards is interesting though.
Book needs more Art3mis, Shoto seems even less of a character now and Aech has lost her cool factor somehow. The new Trans character and her friends are cool though. Hope they pop up again soon.
He would have spent a paragraph explaining that that was the reference then.
You know, I actually appreciated that the Ready Player One movie was able to add some meaning beyond the references. The point of the story wasn't that the dude loved 80s shit like it was in the book, it was that he didn't want his successor to make the same mistakes he did and the references were just the setting.
...don't think they'll be able to pull that off this time around if they opt to adapt this
...don't think they'll be able to pull that off this time around if they opt to adapt this
Must be. His last name even is an anagram of "incel".
Now to insert a meme GIF (Graphics Interchange Format in full; a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on 15 June 1987). Perhaps the one where George Lucas, director of the Star Wars movies, says "It's like poetry, it rhymes", while making a Star Wars movie.
Ah yes, while making the classic film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which released in theaters in 1999.Must be. His last name even is an anagram of "incel".
Now to insert a meme GIF (Graphics Interchange Format in full; a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on 15 June 1987). Perhaps the one where George Lucas, director of the Star Wars movies, says "It's like poetry, it rhymes", while making a Star Wars movie.
While i browsed ResetEra, a semi-famous videogame forum in the roarin' 2020's, the year that went down in history for a major pandemic, i noticed a notification on my twitter feed, a social media platform not too strange to controversy, such as the time the - now former - President of the United States used it for 'shitposting', a common slangword of the early days describing the act of making nonsensical, absurd or insulting statements.
As i tabbed over to my twitter feed to see what the notification was about, i was promptly greeted by pictures of Nero Claudius, the one from Fate/Grand Order, a videogame famous for turning historical personalities into oversexed anime women, to the delight of any sex starved man such as me.
Scrolling past these pictures of hers with increasingly large breastage bordering on the art of hentai, a japanese form of cartoon pornography, i was to be greeted by several tweets celebrating the announcement of Neo: The World Ends With You, the long awaited sequel to the cult classic videogame on the Nintendo DS that had been remastered just a few years earlier.
Celebrating its announcement with a witty tweet of my own, referencing the song 'Gimme All Your Love' from its outstanding soundtrack, my throat became a bit dry. I took it upon myself to grab the Römerwall Classic standing next to me, my favorite sparkling water, drawn from a thousands of years old reserve in Westgermany near the city of Cologne, and refreshed myself with a hearty sip.
Both refreshed and in jolly mood, i decided to make myself miserable again, as i always do, and go back to browsing the depths of the internet where i spotted a thread on the aforementioned ResetEra forums deriding a book whose existence i had not been aware of prior. It's name was Ready Player Two, a sequel to the famous Ready Player One written by Ernest Cline in 2011 and adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018. With curiosity, i opened the thread and read through some of the excerpts when i had to ask myself "Who actually reads this shit?", as it was neither smart in prose, nor witty in its humor, let alone thrilling in any way. This book, as it seemed to me, was satisfied entirely with listing an endless amount of 80's properties, such as Terminator or The Ghostbusters - but only the first one.
Shaking my head at the triteness of the book, i quickly pressed the big, red X in my Chromium Browser, famous for consuming an overly high amount of Random-Access-Memory to the ridicule of large portions of the internet, and shut down my Windows 10 powered Computer and went into my bathroom.
Therein, i brushed my teeth with an electric toothbrush and Elmex toothpase, the orange one, and stripped myself off my shirt, depicting a moogle from the Final Fantasy Franchise, first created in 1987 by Hironobu Sakaguchi and by now at over 15 games with the 16th up-and-coming.
Afterwards, i went into my bedroom, stripped my lazy-day sportshorts off as well, the kind that i often enjoyed wearing on my days off - because they were very comfortable even after uninvited greetings by Nero Claudius - and fell into the MALM bed that i had bought from IKEA, a famous swedish furniture chain known for cheap prices all around the globe. In my sleep, i dreamed of weird and Kafkaesk nightmares in which i was trapped inside a mediocre pulpnovel written by a nerd with too much time and not enough personality, who enjoyed trapping his characters inside an endless construct of 80's references and creepy sexual advances.
As i tabbed over to my twitter feed to see what the notification was about, i was promptly greeted by pictures of Nero Claudius, the one from Fate/Grand Order, a videogame famous for turning historical personalities into oversexed anime women, to the delight of any sex starved man such as me.
Scrolling past these pictures of hers with increasingly large breastage bordering on the art of hentai, a japanese form of cartoon pornography, i was to be greeted by several tweets celebrating the announcement of Neo: The World Ends With You, the long awaited sequel to the cult classic videogame on the Nintendo DS that had been remastered just a few years earlier.
Celebrating its announcement with a witty tweet of my own, referencing the song 'Gimme All Your Love' from its outstanding soundtrack, my throat became a bit dry. I took it upon myself to grab the Römerwall Classic standing next to me, my favorite sparkling water, drawn from a thousands of years old reserve in Westgermany near the city of Cologne, and refreshed myself with a hearty sip.
Both refreshed and in jolly mood, i decided to make myself miserable again, as i always do, and go back to browsing the depths of the internet where i spotted a thread on the aforementioned ResetEra forums deriding a book whose existence i had not been aware of prior. It's name was Ready Player Two, a sequel to the famous Ready Player One written by Ernest Cline in 2011 and adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018. With curiosity, i opened the thread and read through some of the excerpts when i had to ask myself "Who actually reads this shit?", as it was neither smart in prose, nor witty in its humor, let alone thrilling in any way. This book, as it seemed to me, was satisfied entirely with listing an endless amount of 80's properties, such as Terminator or The Ghostbusters - but only the first one.
Shaking my head at the triteness of the book, i quickly pressed the big, red X in my Chromium Browser, famous for consuming an overly high amount of Random-Access-Memory to the ridicule of large portions of the internet, and shut down my Windows 10 powered Computer and went into my bathroom.
Therein, i brushed my teeth with an electric toothbrush and Elmex toothpase, the orange one, and stripped myself off my shirt, depicting a moogle from the Final Fantasy Franchise, first created in 1987 by Hironobu Sakaguchi and by now at over 15 games with the 16th up-and-coming.
Afterwards, i went into my bedroom, stripped my lazy-day sportshorts off as well, the kind that i often enjoyed wearing on my days off - because they were very comfortable even after uninvited greetings by Nero Claudius - and fell into the MALM bed that i had bought from IKEA, a famous swedish furniture chain known for cheap prices all around the globe. In my sleep, i dreamed of weird and Kafkaesk nightmares in which i was trapped inside a mediocre pulpnovel written by a nerd with too much time and not enough personality, who enjoyed trapping his characters inside an endless construct of 80's references and creepy sexual advances.
Every time I think my stuff sucks compared to my idols I remind myself that there is some utter trash that has been hugely successful. I'm forty. I'm still writing. Still self publishing. Maybe it'll never happen, but I'm going to keep putting stuff out into the world.
Is this just a Wikipedia copy/paste?
Also, "smirked futuristically" sounds like something I'd hear in this forum.
Remember it's okay to like "girl things" but only in secret and in the privacy of your own home.
Pixelated Boat is a parody account, this isn't an actual excerpt from the book.
Difficult to really tell, though, isn't it?
I feel like I've never read a piece of fiction in which the author captures themselves so effectively with mere prose. The annoying af insecure nerd in a group of friends who's entire personality is based around being a living nerd shit wiki. Twilight was nothing like this, they're not even in the same galaxy of trash.
I really want to hate-read this but I reaaaaaaally don't want to give Ernest Cline $15. Probably going to be a library read when things simmer down.
Oh...Must be. His last name even is an anagram of "incel".
Now to insert a meme GIF (Graphics Interchange Format in full; a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on 15 June 1987). Perhaps the one where George Lucas, director of the Star Wars movies, says "It's like poetry, it rhymes", while making a Star Wars movie.
We've already got 8 pages of entertainment out of it and climbing, so unintentionally or not he's provided all of us with enjoyment.
I think they know the important public service they provide by torturing themselves for our entertainment.
if cline eventually writes a novel referencing culture from ~10 years ago, would it have a RPO section?
Dude is such a god awful hack. So yeah ofc the defenders come out for him but I'll say this.
Like the other poster said, it does give me some confidence in me taking up writing. Especially when I know the stuff I would write would not be at all horrendously spouted shit like the quoted tweet above.
Like the other poster said, it does give me some confidence in me taking up writing. Especially when I know the stuff I would write would not be at all horrendously spouted shit like the quoted tweet above.
RPO was a novel curiosity that appeared in a time of pre-GG, pre-Trump, internet fuelled gleeful nostalgia masturbation. But there was nothing imaginative about any of it, not the characters nor the settings. Don't know if I have any will to dive into RPT and based on these excerpts I get a distinct whiff of desperate old man trying to make sense of the world around him.
A reference stops being a reference when you attach the TV guide descriptions/Wikipedia page. Holy crap.
Everyone shat on his previous book and now he's just writing this out of spite.
That one is a joke. Though I cannot really fault you for not picking up on that.
It's so wild to me that he almost certainly wrote this part thinking it would improve on the transphobia in the original that was criticized, except... the main character is basically being extremely invasive and outing her, then being real weird about it, so...
Hey, just following in the age-old tradition of literary greats such as Herman Melville and Jules Verne to just sort of endlessly list things for chapters on end.
You don't get it. It's secure because nobody is as good at the 80s as the owner. Except the protagonist, that is! Most impressive! Duh.
I mean, you could never...
lol
For some reason, this was the post that finally made me feel sick to my stomach. Jesus Christ Cline.
I would love, and I mean love to have a list of Cline defenders who also trashed the Twilight or 50 Shades series.
I've been bamboozled!
But it speaks volumes that it could have been his work.
I've met some of them at a Smash tournament in a local gaming bar. They also turned out to be the most stereotypical nerds you could find, it was quite something.
This reads like if you took a Wikipedia article, then everywhere there's a hyperlink you insert the preview you get by hovering over it.
Of course, the best and most sufficient way to understand and sympathize with another human being or minority is to have sex as them. I mean, what else can there be to it?
When is the inventor of VR porn getting the peace prize?
Of course, the best and most sufficient way to understand and sympathize with another human being or minority is to have sex as them. I mean, what else can there be to it?
When is the inventor of VR porn getting the peace prize?
I remember reading RP1 and assuming it would end with Wade realising that he needed to stop living in the 80's, to build proper human relationships that weren't based on pretending to be 80's/gamer-kid cliches and to use his new wealth to make changes to the real world.
I mean, the novel has an interesting dystopian world, where people have retreated into living online because they've given up on solving real-world problems. Governments and economies have collapsed, provincial towns are in ruins, no-one is interested in solving the environmental catastrophes.
I assumed the obsessive and obnoxious references were due to the story being told from Wade's point of view and him starting his heroes journey as an awkward geeky kid who's a bit of a dick. I assumed it would get better as Wade grew as a character.
I assumed the novel would have a twist, where the corporate boss goes, "You're playing a game that we literally own, there is no possible way for you to win. The only reason the egghunt is still running is because it generates high user engagement that we can use monetise our old IPs. You think anyone would be paying us for virtual DeLoreans and X-Wings otherwise? We just deleted your ONI account for breaching the terms of service in your EULA, goodbye."
Surely, the second half of the novel would follow the typical heroes journey where the big setback from defeat by the big evil corporation causes him to re-evaluate things and try again, being less selfish, learning the power of friendship and rallying the oppressed to take down the corporation in the real world (sorry, the Earl). I mean, corporate terrorists just bombed his hometown, killing hundreds or thousands as the stacks collapsed (and this was written after 9/11).
But no, Wade wins by just being really good at games and knowing about 80's cheese, being saved by a wizard, and hiding from the corporate death squads IRL by buying a very fancy apartment and using, like, 5 VPNs or something.
The sequel sounds even worse. I mean Wade is richer than Bezos and Zucherberg, with more power than all the world's governments. And he's using his powers to wank to porn and stalk people (but it's okay because he watched some trans porn and got hard, so he's not being transphobic or creepy when he logs in as admin to look up a hot girl's birth sex).
I mean, the novel has an interesting dystopian world, where people have retreated into living online because they've given up on solving real-world problems. Governments and economies have collapsed, provincial towns are in ruins, no-one is interested in solving the environmental catastrophes.
I assumed the obsessive and obnoxious references were due to the story being told from Wade's point of view and him starting his heroes journey as an awkward geeky kid who's a bit of a dick. I assumed it would get better as Wade grew as a character.
I assumed the novel would have a twist, where the corporate boss goes, "You're playing a game that we literally own, there is no possible way for you to win. The only reason the egghunt is still running is because it generates high user engagement that we can use monetise our old IPs. You think anyone would be paying us for virtual DeLoreans and X-Wings otherwise? We just deleted your ONI account for breaching the terms of service in your EULA, goodbye."
Surely, the second half of the novel would follow the typical heroes journey where the big setback from defeat by the big evil corporation causes him to re-evaluate things and try again, being less selfish, learning the power of friendship and rallying the oppressed to take down the corporation in the real world (sorry, the Earl). I mean, corporate terrorists just bombed his hometown, killing hundreds or thousands as the stacks collapsed (and this was written after 9/11).
But no, Wade wins by just being really good at games and knowing about 80's cheese, being saved by a wizard, and hiding from the corporate death squads IRL by buying a very fancy apartment and using, like, 5 VPNs or something.
The sequel sounds even worse. I mean Wade is richer than Bezos and Zucherberg, with more power than all the world's governments. And he's using his powers to wank to porn and stalk people (but it's okay because he watched some trans porn and got hard, so he's not being transphobic or creepy when he logs in as admin to look up a hot girl's birth sex).
Look, anyone who's wanked himself off to lesbian porn can't possibly be a bigot.