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Shirec
Jul 29, 2009

How to cock it up, Fig. I

Apes-Ma posted:

Wonder if there is a chance we will get another emergency episode in march like we have for the last two years, because I just noticed that Ready Player One is coming out that month.

I can't decide if I could ever hate watch that one because every except I've seen of the book is dire, and the only good thing to come out of it is a parody trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Lz14wu1uw

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SamuraiFoochs
Jan 16, 2007




Grimey Drawer

Calaveron posted:

Super late but the way and timing Eric jumped on that “he gets chased by demons into a liquor store” cements him as some sort of comedic genius

When was that? I missed it.

Trujillo
Jul 10, 2007

SamuraiFoochs posted:

When was that? I missed it.

The Constantine episode

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow

Shirec posted:

I can't decide if I could ever hate watch that one because every except I've seen of the book is dire, and the only good thing to come out of it is a parody trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Lz14wu1uw

I assume the movie is going to tone down the badness of the book, and just be your standard YA tentpole blockbuster with some added nerd references to be Hip for the Kidz

It'd have to, because otherwise the climax is playing Tempest and then remembering every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Old Kentucky Shark
May 25, 2012

If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.


The Vosgian Beast posted:

I assume the movie is going to tone down the badness of the book, and just be your standard YA tentpole blockbuster with some added nerd references to be Hip for the Kidz

It'd have to, because otherwise the climax is playing Tempest and then remembering every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I was doing a Let’s Read of the audiobook in another thread before I quit in exasperation, but I think you could honestly make a decent movie out of it if you dropped the actual plot but retained the concept. Which, to be fair, seems like what they’re doing from the trailer.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Never forget.

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

everything about this passage makes me want to die

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Zore posted:

everything about this passage makes me want to die
RP0 is a book where the main character literally, and I mean that in the correct usage of the word, wins the internet.

AceOfFlames
Oct 9, 2012

Zore posted:

everything about this passage makes me want to die

I don't recall exactly where I heard this (might have even been these forums) but I recall someone proposing the thought experiment of reading this book but replacing every single pop culture reference with completely fictional titles and objects which would only be known to people inside that universe (i.e. instead of Back To The Future, have them call it Bloogertron or something). It would become utterly unreadable.

weekly font
Dec 1, 2004


Everytime I try to fly I fall
Without my wings
I feel so small
Guess I need you baby...



AceOfFlames posted:

I don't recall exactly where I heard this (might have even been these forums) but I recall someone proposing the thought experiment of reading this book but replacing every single pop culture reference with completely fictional titles and objects which would only be known to people inside that universe (i.e. instead of Back To The Future, have them call it Bloogertron or something). It would become utterly unreadable.

That would be a really great read.

I could see a younger Spielberg making something watchable out of Ready Player One (let's not pretend Jurassic Park is high art folks) but current era Spielberg seems to be coasting and playing things largely safe.

duz
Jul 11, 2005

Come on Ilhan, lets go bag us a shitpost


I Don't Even Own a Television covered RPO early in their history.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I assume the movie is going to tone down the badness of the book, and just be your standard YA tentpole blockbuster with some added nerd references to be Hip for the Kidz

It'd have to, because otherwise the climax is playing Tempest and then remembering every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I read that one of Spielberg's changes was to remove all references to himself and drastically reduce the references to properties he worked on so it'd mostly be references to other people's movies. I hope that's true because any reduction in references would be an improvement.



Never forget that the author is describing his own car as well as the protagonist's car.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

duz posted:

Never forget that the author is describing his own car as well as the protagonist's car.


I like how he's just hanging out at school thinking he's cool, but the kids are just ignoring him

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

I was doing a Let’s Read of the audiobook in another thread before I quit in exasperation, but I think you could honestly make a decent movie out of it if you dropped the actual plot but retained the concept. Which, to be fair, seems like what they’re doing from the trailer.

Yeah when I started I thought "I know this book is gonna suck but maybe the easter egg hunt where you have to solve riddles and go through challenges will be fun in a 90s Nick game show kinda way"

It wasn't, but it COULD have been fun

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

duz posted:

I Don't Even Own a Television covered RPO early in their history.


I read that one of Spielberg's changes was to remove all references to himself and drastically reduce the references to properties he worked on so it'd mostly be references to other people's movies. I hope that's true because any reduction in references would be an improvement.


Never forget that the author is describing his own car as well as the protagonist's car.


"I'm not sure how to make this nerdy enough so I'm going to make my license plate 'Ecto 88' even though that makes no sense as no Ghostbusters or BTTF movie came out that year so either I'm a complete idiot or a Nazi" - Ernest Cline, probably.

EDIT: Listening to the "I Don't Even Own a Television" episode about it, and the intro is exactly what happened to me. A friend who's opinions I mostly respect recommended/gifted me the book and I spent a week being pissed off at him thinking it was a great book when it's wish fulfillment fantasy on the part of a person who thinks surface-level 80s knowledge should be the most important thing for saving the world getting a lot of money.

Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Feb 5, 2018

WeedlordGoku69
Feb 12, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Angry_Ed posted:

"I'm not sure how to make this nerdy enough so I'm going to make my license plate 'Ecto 88' even though that makes no sense as no Ghostbusters or BTTF movie came out that year so either I'm a complete idiot or a Nazi" - Ernest Cline, probably.

It's a vaguely Ghostbusters-themed DeLorean. The Ghostbusters car was the Ecto-1. The DeLorean in BTTF had to go 88mph to time travel. Hence, Ecto-88.

It's dumber than dog poo poo, but I can at least follow the thought process.

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

It's a vaguely Ghostbusters-themed DeLorean. The Ghostbusters car was the Ecto-1. The DeLorean in BTTF had to go 88mph to time travel. Hence, Ecto-88.

It's dumber than dog poo poo, but I can at least follow the thought process.

Well at least you thought harder about this than I did once I formed a really bad conclusion out of it, fair play to you. I can't believe I missed the most obvious and benign explanation like that.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Yeah when I started I thought "I know this book is gonna suck but maybe the easter egg hunt where you have to solve riddles and go through challenges will be fun in a 90s Nick game show kinda way"

It wasn't, but it COULD have been fun

The riddles aren't even clever in universe. Like the world knows everything they need to know about the Willy Wonka stand in (he was a huge, unlikeable nerd who liked video games and comic books and d&d and every bit of 80's American pop culture) and they can't figure out what it means when the riddle refers to the key being stuck in a "tomb of horrors" which is the name of literally the most well known dungeons and dragons adventure module

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

Calaveron posted:

The riddles aren't even clever in universe. Like the world knows everything they need to know about the Willy Wonka stand in (he was a huge, unlikeable nerd who liked video games and comic books and d&d and every bit of 80's American pop culture) and they can't figure out what it means when the riddle refers to the key being stuck in a "tomb of horrors" which is the name of literally the most well known dungeons and dragons adventure module

Yeah like as the book went on I kept wondering why I knew every reference being made. If Ernest Cline actually lived in the 1980s shouldn't he be dropping something that isn't obvious or surface level? I'm pretty sure that only happened once (for me) when he made a reference to the arcade game Black Tiger. That's it. Everything else was really obvious or really banal, and then capping off the whole thing by having to quote all of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a thing that has been used as a joke by everyone from The Simpsons to Weird Al. It's like he was afraid to actually try to be clever because he was worried about making it inaccessible despite the fact that this would automatically be inaccessible to anyone who isn't a huge goddamn nerd who absorbs pop culture through nostalgia and memes.

EDIT: Also the times he spends half a chapter making a checklist of "Things in the 1980s I liked"

Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Feb 5, 2018

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:
Also how the nerdman won the internet and untold riches by being as vapid, superficial and pop culture obsessed as Willy Wonka but his final postmortem message is "enjoy reality"

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

Calaveron posted:

Also how the nerdman won the internet and untold riches by being as vapid, superficial and pop culture obsessed as Willy Wonka but his final postmortem message is "enjoy reality"

"Enjoy Reality now that you are rich enough to do so"

Fake edit: gently caress, I forgot about President Cory Doctorow and VP Wil Wheaton. Hilarious*

*not actually hilarious

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:
Like the villains' plan is essentially to privatize the internet and charge more for people's abilities to access the vr escapism world but then the moral of the story is to enjoy reality, I legit don't get it

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

Calaveron posted:

Like the villains' plan is essentially to privatize the internet and charge more for people's abilities to access the vr escapism world but then the moral of the story is to enjoy reality, I legit don't get it

Nothing about the world of RPO makes sense if you think about it for more than zero seconds. Apparently more than one city has been annihilated in a nuclear explosion at some point but nevermind that poo poo, do you remember PAC-MAN?

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Like, I get the idea of "the world is completely terrible on every level, but we have infinite free immersive internet so escapism is a big thing", and I'm sure you could get a good story out of it.

But instead we get the Big Bang Theory future.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:
The 372 pages podcast mentions how the book says the world is a mad maxesque crapfest but people still have the money to buy luxury goods and there's still sponsors who invest millions of dollars into e athletes

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

A Horrible Horrible Nerdman Put This In Paper And Thought He Should Show it To Others posted:

This wasn't strictly part of my research, I just have a fetish for geeky girls playing 80s songs on ukuleles that I can neither explain nor defend.

Shirec
Jul 29, 2009

How to cock it up, Fig. I

a gross nice guy posted:


Nerd Porn Auteur

I've noticed that there don't seem to be any porno movies

that are made for guys like me.

All the porn I've come across

was targeted at beer-swilling sports bar dwelling alpha-males

Men who like their women stupid and submissive

Men who can only get it up for monosyllabic cock-hungry nymphos

with gargantuan breasts and a three-word vocabulary

Adult films are populated with these collagen-injected

liposuctioned women

Many of whom have resorted to surgery and self-mutilation

in an attempt to look the way they have been told to look.

These aren't real women. They're objects.

And these movies aren't erotic. They're pathetic.

These vacuum-headed gently caress bunnies don't turn me on.

They disgust me.

And it's not that I'm against pornography.

I mean, I'm a guy. And guys need porn.

Fact.

"Like a preacher needs pain, like a needle needs a vein,"

Guys need porn.

But I don't wanna watch this misogynist he-man woman-hater porn.

I want porno movies that are made with guys like me in mind:

Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world

is a woman who is smarter than you are.

You can have the whole cheerleading squad,

I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses:

Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian.

Oh yes.

First I want to copy her Trig homework,

and then I want to make mad, passionate love to her

for hours and hours

until she reluctantly asks if we can stop

because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.

Summa cum laude, baby!

That is what I call erotic.

But do you ever see that kind of a woman in a contemporary adult film?

No.

Which is why I'm going to start writing and directing Geek Porno.

I shall be the quintessential Nerd Porn Auteur.

And the women in my porno movies will be the kind

that drive nerds like me mad with desire.

I'm talking about the girls that used to gently caress up the grading curve.

The girls in the Latin Club and the National Honor Society.

Chicks with weird clothes, braces, four eyes, and 4.0 GPAs.

Brainy articulate bookworms, with MENSA cards in their purses

and chips on their shoulders.

My porn starlets will come in all shapes and sizes.

My porn starlets will be too busy working on their PhD to go to the gym.

In my kind of porno movies the girls wouldn't even have to get naked.

They'd just take the guys down to the rec room and

beat them repeatedly at chess

and then talk to them for hours about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

or the underlying social metaphors in the Aliens movies.

Buy stock in some hand cream companies

because there is about to be a major shortage.

And I'm not just talking about straight porn. Oh no.

There should be gently caress films for my nerd brethren

of all sexual orientations.

Gay nerd porn flicks with titles like "Dungeons and Drag-queens."

This idea is a loving gold mine.

I am gonna make millions,

because this country is full of database programmers

and electronics engineers

and they aren't getting the loving they so desperately need.

And you can help . . .

If you're an intelligent woman is interested in breaking into the adult film industry,

and if you can tell me the name of Luke Skywalker's home planet,

then you are hired.

It doesn't matter if you think you're overweight or unattractive.

It doesn't matter if you don't think you're beautiful.

You are beautiful. . .

And I will make you a star.

Ernest Cline wrote that as well as Ready Player One

RobotDogPolice
Dec 1, 2016
I'm glad this thread turned into making GBS threads on RPO because that book deserves every ounce of poo poo. It's so bad and I have no idea how it received so many accolades.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

RobotDogPolice posted:

I'm glad this thread turned into making GBS threads on RPO because that book deserves every ounce of poo poo. It's so bad and I have no idea how it received so many accolades.

Because hey do you remember back to the future

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:
Wasn't ghostbusters a good movie, remember that

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:
Notice how my trademark is composed entirely of others, better trademarks

Tart Kitty
Dec 17, 2016

Oh, well, that's all water under the bridge, as I always say. Water under the bridge!

I couldn’t get through the Kindle sample of RPO. It’s that badly written. And not just for the MASSIVE JERK-OFF MOTION pop culture poo poo, but just in like, basic structure. It has no sense of pacing or flow. It’s just He-Man exposition dumping on your face for pages on end.

RobotDogPolice
Dec 1, 2016
Lets not forget the huge Japanese stereotypes who have HONORU and love ultraman. Or the paragraph dedicated to the main character loving a lubed up sexbot in his dingy apartment.

I don't think the movie will be as bad as the book which is unfortunate because I'd love to see the WHM gang tear it apart.

Old Kentucky Shark
May 25, 2012

If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.


Fart City posted:

I couldn’t get through the Kindle sample of RPO. It’s that badly written. And not just for the MASSIVE JERK-OFF MOTION pop culture poo poo, but just in like, basic structure. It has no sense of pacing or flow. It’s just He-Man exposition dumping on your face for pages on end.

RPO is an unfolding fractal turd blossom of poo poo. It's bad on the same level that The Room is bad, in that it not only makes every wrong choice, but it gives you unintentional insights into the disturbing thought processes of the author. Let's break this down.

On the top level, you have the obvious striking surface problem with RPO; that it's an endless series of disconnected pop culture references. It's TVTropes: the book. It isn't just that it makes too many pop culture references, it's that it does nothing with them: it literally just references them before moving on to the next one. There is a certain amount of basic, puerile fun to be had in the idea of mixing and matching the pop culture ephemera, like a kid smashing all their toys together, but the book doesn't even do that much. I can't state that enough: it doesn't do anything at all with the one good part of its premise. At one point, the main character goes into the Tomb of Unknown Horrors to play the lich Acerak at Joust, and that is a literal description of what happens: he plays an arcade console game with a lich. That's it. The total power of immersive virtual reality at their hands, and that's what they do with it. The failure of imagination is staggering.

Then, on the middle layer of awfulness, you have the author pointlessly upping the stakes of the game buy setting RPO in a post-peak-oil super-recession America on its downslide into a Mad Max future. This is a weird thing to do, because it's actually kind of interesting, which only makes the fact that there are only passing references to the world's state all the more infuriating, and makes the whole "Winning the Internet" all the more pointless. For reference, at one point the main character gets on a bus from Oklahoma to Ohio, and we're told that the bus is armored and has guards and machine guns to make sure it gets to its destination. Remember that, then go up and read the Delorian passage previously posted, which takes place while the protagonist is surfing the internet while on the armored Mad Max Greyhound. That's what the author decided to prioritize.

The final layer of awfulness is the protagonist, who is an overweight jobless friendless loner whose decision to devote his life entirely to his obsession with antiquated pop culture trivia ends up not only being completely validated over the course of the novel, but turns him into a billionaire and scores him a non-challenging geeky girlfriend. At no point does he make any decisions which are not manifestly terrible or inhumanly unfeeling. At one point his family, and essentially every person he knows in real life, is murdered by the evil corporation when they set off a bomb in his family trailer. This causes him to be incredibly infuriated... that they tried to kill him. At no point does he ever seem to want vengeance or grieve for the 40+ people who were killed because he tried to win the internet.

Oh, and the thing in the spoiler block? That happens right before the Delorean passage. There's about 15 pages separating them. Meditate on that. Then remember that the entire point of Winning the Contest is to preserve the status quo of the fantasy world while becoming personally rich; at no point is there even a hint that it's possible to prevent the world's slow economic decline.

To sum up: Ready Player One is the story of a fat unwashed incel hiding inside an abandoned van, surfing the internet instead of getting a job while endlessly masturbating to visions of Reagan's America while the entire world collapses around them. It would have been incredibly pointed satire if there had been any hint that the author could have conceived of it as satire.

Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Feb 6, 2018

RobotDogPolice
Dec 1, 2016
I can't imagine that the movie will be able to drop so many references because like 80 percent of the book is internal monologue that's just a list of movies and videogames followed by wiki entries about them.

GrandpaPants
Feb 13, 2006


Free to roam the heavens in man's noble quest to investigate the weirdness of the universe!

I'm actually kinda curious, is there some sort of legal barrier if those 80s references actually did something substantial in the plot? Like if it were League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 80s Edition, and starred a team featuring, I dunno, Doc Brown, Sarah Connor, Peter Venkman, (John Carpenter's) The Thing, and She-Ra actually doing stuff, would that run into more legal trouble than "My car is a reference to Ghostbusters and Back to the Future lol get it"? Obviously it doesn't excuse the actual lovely writing and, really, everything else, but it might at least explain the meaninglessness of the references?

...really I'm asking how much trouble would this supergroup fan fiction potential movie script get me into?

RobotDogPolice
Dec 1, 2016

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

At one point his family, and essentially every person he knows in real life, is murdered by the evil corporation when they set off a bomb in his family trailer. This causes him to be incredibly infuriated... that they tried to kill him. At no point does he ever seem to want vengeance or grieve for the 40+ people who were killed because he tried to win the internet.

It's okay because they were dumb normie sheep who don't understand the brilliance of nerd culture.

*buys ticket to a Star Wars movie that will rake in billions of dollars because it's one of the largest franchises on earth

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

GrandpaPants posted:

I'm actually kinda curious, is there some sort of legal barrier if those 80s references actually did something substantial in the plot? Like if it were League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 80s Edition, and starred a team featuring, I dunno, Doc Brown, Sarah Connor, Peter Venkman, (John Carpenter's) The Thing, and She-Ra actually doing stuff, would that run into more legal trouble than "My car is a reference to Ghostbusters and Back to the Future lol get it"? Obviously it doesn't excuse the actual lovely writing and, really, everything else, but it might at least explain the meaninglessness of the references?

...really I'm asking how much trouble would this supergroup fan fiction potential movie script get me into?

Touhou intellectual property figure importantly in the book's climax

Angry_Ed
Mar 30, 2010




Grimey Drawer

Calaveron posted:

Touhou intellectual property figure importantly in the book's climax

I think you meant Toho (Godzilla) as opposed to Touhou (bullet hell games), as well as stuff you can't even show in the US thanks to the shambling corpse of a copyright troll called Harmony Gold

Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Feb 6, 2018

NinjaPete
Nov 14, 2004

Hail to the speaker,
Hail to the knower,
Joy to him who has understood,
Delight to those who have listened.

- Hávamál

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

RPO is an unfolding fractal turd blossom of poo poo. It's bad on the same level that The Room is bad, in that it not only makes every wrong choice, but it gives you unintentional insights into the disturbing thought processes of the author. Let's break this down.

I am teaching Sci-Fi Literature next year, and the final novel we're going to read is RPO. It's just such anti Science-Fiction I need to see if shallow as gently caress teens get it's terribleness after reading a semester of better stuff.

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RobotDogPolice
Dec 1, 2016
RPO probably got so big because the moral of the story is that it's okay to be an insufferable rear end in a top hat who looks down on others because they don't know as much trivia about geeky pop culture as you do. There are a lot of nerds out there with nothing to offer beyond having an encyclopedic knowledge of the media they consume.

If the main character abandoned his quest to improve himself or the world in any measurable way it probably wouldn't have resonated with so many people. Instead, he inherits an insane amount of wealth because he knows some stuff about Monty Python.

I'm willing to bet Ernest Cline loathes sports fanatics even though sports culture places just as much value in being a "true" fan who remembers every bit of trivia imaginable.

You don't even have to be a REAL NERD to be validated by that book because most of the references are something that anyone who was alive during the 80s and 90s would remember.

RobotDogPolice fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Feb 6, 2018

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