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I went to high school in a pretty affluent area and the library was pretty much stocked at random. Lurid biographies of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's greatest monster underling shared space with teen-lit romance novels and guides to programming your TRS-80 home computer.
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Mar 23, 2018 23:17
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:I am working in a school library this year, and guess what the most popular book is among the high schoolers? I gotta be honest, I have a creeping feeling that the anti-Ready Player One folks are going to become deeply gross and unpleasant to the people that are pro-Ready Player One. Not accusing anyone in particular. Just worried that opposition to that franchise is going to be a way to display "true" investment in garbage consumerism.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:30
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I think RPO is close to passing the Twilight threshold where the backlash becomes more obnoxious and omnipresent than the thing itself could ever be
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Mar 26, 2018 20:36
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People making fun of RPO generally just have to post a couple quotes from the book itself
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Mar 26, 2018 20:53
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I...would like it if teenagers read books of worth that are well-written, not hugely sexist, and not basically the Family Guy version of Ender's Game? Is that really a sign of my encroaching evil?
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Mar 26, 2018 21:00
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I think RPO is close to passing the Twilight threshold where the backlash becomes more obnoxious and omnipresent than the thing itself could ever be this sounds like wishful thinking tbh
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Mar 26, 2018 21:02
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:this sounds like wishful thinking tbh There presumably exist people who like RPO, but I haven't really encountered them in forms other than "I can see your point but I still kinda like it" comments
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Mar 26, 2018 21:23
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The Vosgian Beast posted:There presumably exist people who like RPO, but I haven't really encountered them in forms other than "I can see your point but I still kinda like it" comments I've been cornered at networking events by guys who were angry because they overheard me making fun of RPO's popularity with another group. In "nerd culture*" there exists a significant group who identifies so strongly with the material they consume and enjoy that any attack of the material is perceived as a defacto attack on themselves. *A term that should be hated.
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Mar 26, 2018 21:39
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The Vosgian Beast posted:There presumably exist people who like RPO, but I haven't really encountered them in forms other than "I can see your point but I still kinda like it" comments 
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Mar 26, 2018 22:07
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Oh no make sure they stay far away from ukeleles 
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Mar 26, 2018 22:20
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ran into some true fans at a party this weekend. They were... girls? WoAHHHHH a GIRL who is a GEEK? Time to be creepy and weird about that! Let me accuse them of being secretly men! Man that was the secret worst part of RPO, you can tell Ernest Cline is an old nerd because he doesn't appear to know trans people who will feel like garbage if you accuse them of """faking""" their gender exist. Or he does and doesn't care, but he seems more like an idiot than an active monster, so
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Mar 26, 2018 22:33
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ran into some true fans at a party this weekend. They were... girls? Did you ask if they ever had a sex-change operation?
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Mar 26, 2018 22:50
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Scorched Spitz posted:Did you ask if they ever had a sex-change operation? Being a creep wasn't a request
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Mar 26, 2018 22:51
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Djeser posted:Oh no make sure they stay far away from ukeleles
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Mar 27, 2018 07:48
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The Vosgian Beast posted:WoAHHHHH a GIRL who is a GEEK? Time to be creepy and weird about that! Let me accuse them of being secretly men! "Oasis was the best thing ever to happen to black women, because now we can pretend to be white men!" Yeah...
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Mar 27, 2018 17:01
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Jurgan posted:"Oasis was the best thing ever to happen to black women, because now we can pretend to be white men!" Yeah... I mean that was less about gender dysphoria than avoiding racism and sexism on the internet
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Mar 27, 2018 17:50
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PJOmega posted:I've been cornered at networking events by guys who were angry because they overheard me making fun of RPO's popularity with another group. I've had this happen to me too, it's funny. I called it "'Member Berries' The Book" and they just got even more upset about it. Also, this article seems apt for this discussion. The Ready Player One backlash, explained
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Mar 28, 2018 16:10
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Handsome Ralph posted:Also, this article seems apt for this discussion. It's pretty obvious that Ready Player One skated by on sheer novelty. It got good reviews because critics usually read actual books instead of book-like objects of Ready Player One's stripe. To them, it was as alien (insular) as it was childlike (childish). A naïve critic could be forgiven for reading it as a modern version of Peter Pan, a story about a boy who never grows up and wins the day by realizing childhood fantasies. Armada backfired because Cline is a one-trick pony - doing exactly the same trick twice in a row showed just how little creativity went into it in the first place and underscored how simple the trick actually was. In the immortal words of a great man, "Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again." As for the writer's points, I don't buy the idea that Ready Player One is bad because it doesn't cater to people outside Cline's own demographic. It's an exercise in idealizing his own youth, an expression and retroactive fulfillment of the wish to have seen every cool movie in the theater, beaten every game without the Nintendo Power guide, pitted every action figure on every shelf against the rest in a truly ultimate showdown. Why should femininity or blackness figure into the idle childhood daydreams of someone who was and is neither? I don't even think that the idea of this nostalgic swarm of pop-culture references is bad inherently. It's bad here because it's laboriously, superciliously exhaustive (the article's "gatekeeping" accusation is perfectly valid), because it's all patronizingly explained and treats the reader as an outsider (rather than including them in the ostensibly shared experience that allusions are built on), because the book doesn't take even the slightest distance in perspective from the fantasy (let alone make the outright rejection that it demands - even the Darlings and Lost Boys had to leave Neverland behind), because, in the end, the pandering is desperately joyless. These problems would not be fixed by a more culturally inclusive pool of references; if anything, they'd be exacerbated, the endless, heartless cataloguing doubled at least, the sputtering spark of whatever childhood joy Cline ever took in movies or music all but smothered out completely. And if it's given that there is a sincere element of juvenile escapism, to blame Cline for his book's cultural blind spots is to blame him for having been a child in the '80s - or at all. Of course, even if the book's mess of pop culture had been handled competently, there's the small matter that the actual substance it's slathered around is pretty slim pickings. But despite the cover's insistence that Ready Player One is "a novel", it seems beside the point to actually treat it as one. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 19:04
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The article isn't really about the book having cultural blindspots though. It's more that Cline is incapable of writing anything of substance and that the pop culture worship gatekeeping in the geek community is exactly what lead to gamergate.
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Mar 28, 2018 19:58
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Sham bam bamina! posted:A naïve critic could be forgiven for reading it as a modern version of Peter Pan, a story about a boy who never grows up and wins the day by realizing childhood fantasies. That's the point. Gamergate took a lot of the garbage sloshing around in the nerd community and shone a light on it. Reviewers and opinion writers were stripped of that selfsame naivety that allowed them to look at RPO through Rose colored glasses. I guarantee you the people reviewing it for NYT didn't enjoy it, but thought "well it isn't for me, other people are liking it, so therefore it must simply not be for me and I should review it for it's audience." Which was based on a false imae of an audience that was largely alien to them if it existed at all in the way they imagined.
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Mar 28, 2018 20:43
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Improbable Lobster posted:The article isn't really about the book having cultural blindspots though. It's more that Cline is incapable of writing anything of substance and that the pop culture worship gatekeeping in the geek community is exactly what lead to gamergate. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 21:24
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Ready Player One sucks.
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Mar 29, 2018 02:30
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I think a big difference between Armada and RPO and their critical receptions is the story. In RPO, the references, as clunky and invasive as they are, make sense for the story, because the story is all about knowing references. Armada, on the other hand, is not a story where references are central to the narrative, but are instead tacked on to a different story. I think that also affected the difference in reception.Sham bam bamina! posted:Gatekeeping is a more central topic of the article - and I did acknowledge and agree with that aspect - but the issue of cultural inclusiveness was the aspect that I had the most to say about. Gatekeeping in nerd communities contributes to the shutout of non-white-cis-het-male voices, it directly ties into the cultural inclusiveness because so much “geek” stuff is written by and for straight white dudes.
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Mar 29, 2018 15:24
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That's fair. The complaint always came off to me like holding Cline or his work accountable for the segregation of the pop culture he draws on (either in its tone or maybe just because I'm an idiot), but treating his success as symptomatic of it makes a lot more sense.
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Mar 29, 2018 18:38
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This week's episode is all about The Bible Code, and boy does it deliver.
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Apr 1, 2018 05:04
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Oh man, I remember watching a History Channel special about the Bible Code back in the day, I think they even brought up the Moby Dick contest. This was a really fun episode, but lol at Clsn getting pissy about people online posting gifs.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:13
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Oh man, I remember watching a History Channel special about the Bible Code back in the day, I think they even brought up the Moby Dick contest. This was a really fun episode, but lol at Clsn getting pissy about people online posting gifs. I agree with him on that.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:14
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Oh hey, Chris and Ted Leo digressions this week. I hope Ted's doing okay. He's had some rough years. Hanged Man conveyed a lot of raggedness.
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Apr 3, 2018 14:40
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So I took a break from 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back after getting burned out on the internet backlash against Ready Player One leading up the movie's release (unsurprisingly it also devolved into a bunch of terrible nerds reciting lists of references and parroting catchphrases at each other) and what the gently caress happened to that show? I knew that Mike Nelson was conservative and Christian but he mostly kept it out the podcast so I never really cared, but then the first episode I come back to is co-hosted by his tryhard hip cool pastor and the entire opening is them shilling for their Christianity podcast they host together. It's astoundingly tone-deaf for a guy who harps at length about Cline pushing his atheism in his books.
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Apr 11, 2018 04:59
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I don't think that bringing on a co-host from a podcast that he already has and plugging that podcast for a few minutes out of a two-hour episode is quite the hypocrisy that you're making it out to be. You're acting like the podcast got hijacked as a vehicle for Christianity, but the thing you're mad about is that Mike Nelson mentioned being a Christian in a segment completely divorced from the episode's actual content. Get over it. This is like saying, "I was a fan of We Hate Movies, but then they turned the show into an infomercial for razors!" And that actual shilling is about twice as prominent as the plug here. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 05:35
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https://twitter.com/IDEOTVPod/status/984268271066103809
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Apr 12, 2018 04:33
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New episode is up on Mazes and Monsters! Disappointing because I was expecting the book equivalent to the Dark Dungeons Chick Tract and instead got family drama with a side of D&D.
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Apr 16, 2018 14:30
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That explanation of 'after school special' was excruciating. But the ska digression made up for it.
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Apr 16, 2018 15:17
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I was really surprised to learn the hat thing was in the book and not an invention of the movie.
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Apr 16, 2018 17:07
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Permotriassic posted:That explanation of 'after school special' was excruciating. But the ska digression made up for it. Agreed, Collision goes too hard in the ironic bad humor thing all the time.
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Apr 16, 2018 18:59
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Agreed, Collision goes too hard in the ironic bad humor thing all the time. If he just didn’t lean quite so hard into the terrible punchline it’d be better but he’s always had bad delivery on those jokes
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Apr 16, 2018 19:40
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While browsing through the back catalog I ran into the Night of the Crabs episode and it was loving hysterical. These guys get a lifetime pass just for that.
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Apr 17, 2018 19:24
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Mahlertov Cocktail posted:If he just didn’t lean quite so hard into the terrible punchline it’d be better but he’s always had bad delivery on those jokes I enjoy his bad delivery and I'm pretty sure it's intentional.
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Apr 22, 2018 12:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I enjoy his bad delivery and I'm pretty sure it's intentional. I’m positive it’s intentional but I don’t find it that funny. I maintain that Collision would be an excellent semi-regular guest, but his shtick doesn’t fare well as a co-host over dozens of episodes. I still generally like the podcast, though!
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Apr 22, 2018 14:10
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From the F+ forums, as a donation reward from their 24-hour marathon for the SPLC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtTieWLq_bE
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Apr 22, 2018 21:07
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