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 I guess we all had to get here at some point. Ready Player One is a 2011 novel by creepy neckbeard Ernest Cline. As a man who grew up in the 1980s, Cline is a man who defines himself and his generation by the media they consumed. This is his car, and I'm not even loving kidding:  RPO is a book by and for people who define themselves by pop culture. It's a book for people who get a Jurassic Park sticker on their jeep despite having only seen the movies once and not really remembering the third one, have a weekly podcast with 5 regular listeners about 80s movies, and still try to tell girls they don't know anything about Batman unless they can explain exactly what Zur-En-Arrh is. It's for people who have no personality once the veneer of pop culture references is stripped away, and people who can never really explain what their hobbies are beyond consuming media. Despite being widely derided on Something Awful as vapid and boring, RPO has been wildly successful and is two weeks away from the release of a Steven Spielburg film adaptation. After a while I started to worry about potentially being called out for criticizing it without actually having read it, so I decided to grab a Kindle copy and see if the complete text really is as bad as that excerpt everyone has seen. Yeah, that's basically the whole book. This will be a read-along with me, as I've only read the first two chapters and part of the third at the time of this OP. I do know the vague plot synopsis and the ending thanks to Wikipedia so it's not going to be an utter surprise, but I don't know how deep the pop culture rabbit hole goes. I also feel like this will help people really decide on their feelings about the book and be able to truthfully tell people "This is why it sucks". I'd come up with some cheesy 80s reference to lead into this but you're going to have enough of that bullshit when I start updating. Let's just get this over with.
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Mar 13, 2018 00:50
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PJOmega posted:Chitoryu I simultaneously salute you and worry about you for your dedication to Let's Reads of horrible books. Shine bright you crazy diamond. I have to do something when slacking at work.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:00
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Before we begin, let's look at some of the praise put at the beginning of the book and decide whether or not to ironically weep.quote:“[An] adrenaline shot of uncut geekdom … sweet, self-deprecating Wade, whose universe is an odd mix of the real past and the virtual present, is the perfect lovable/unlikely hero.” If this is our generation's Neuromancer, does that mean all future cyberpunk is just going to be pop culture references?
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Mar 13, 2018 01:03
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quote:Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest. I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in on my video feed, announcing that James Halliday had died during the night. RPO wastes no time in explaining the setting. We'll get more details later, but Chapter 0000 (that's really how it's written in the book) just sort of dumps the basic plot with about 2 paragraphs of text. Halliday was an eccentric, possibly insane 67-year-old man when he died in 2039. He's described as a combination of Howard Hughes, Richard Garriott, and Willy Wonka, creating possibly the most insufferable manchild of a businessman that Cline could think was cool. He was a bachelor with no friends, no family, and no children. Instead, his will appeared in the form of a 5-minute video titled Anorak's Invitation (Anorak was Halliday's avatar in OASIS) that was simultaneously emailed to all OASIS users upon his death. The video was heavily analyzed frame by frame for any sort of meaning, so of course we get a detailed description of the entire video. quote:Anorak’s Invitation begins with the sound of trumpets, the opening of an old song called “Dead Man’s Party.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypUpv9xelg I hate to tell you Ernest, but that ain't a loving trumpet. The black screen transforms into a party where Halliday (appearing as he did in his 40s on the cover of Time, wearing an old Space Invaders shirt and faded jeans) is dancing with a bunch of teenagers in 80s dress. He's not dancing with anyone, just wildly swinging his arms around alone. One might say he's....dancing with himself. Get it? GET IT? quote:When the lyrics kick in, Halliday begins to lip-synch along, still gyrating: “All dressed up with nowhere to go. Walking with a dead man over my shoulder. Don’t run away, it’s only me.…” I removed them from the copied text, but there's multiple annotation links in here. Possibly to give the illusion of being an in-universe document, there are footnotes describing some details not included in the text. Such as how all the teenagers at his party were extras from John Hughes teen films digitally inserted into the clip, or that the funeral is actually Heather Chandler's funeral from Heathers and thus all the mourners are the film characters. The quarters over his eyes were even minted in 1984, which seems a little too obsessive. quote:“I, James Donovan Halliday, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.…” He continues reading, faster and faster, plowing through several more paragraphs of legalese, until he’s speaking so rapidly that the words are unintelligible. Then he stops abruptly. “Forget it,” he says. “Even at that speed, it would take me a month to read the whole thing. Sad to say, I don’t have that kind of time.” He drops the scroll and it vanishes in a shower of gold dust. “Let me just give you the highlights.” So, that's who the entire estate goes to: literally whoever manages to figure out his bullshit. Kim Jong-un recruits a team to solve it for him and grant the entire fortune and controlling stock in OASIS to North Korea? Halliday don't give a poo poo. He wants people to play his game. quote:Halliday snaps his fingers again and the vault disappears. In the same instant, Halliday shrinks and morphs into a small boy wearing brown corduroys and a faded The Muppet Show T-shirt. The young Halliday stands in a cluttered living room with burnt orange carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and kitschy late-’70s decor. A 21-inch Zenith television sits nearby, with an Atari 2600 game console hooked up to it. Guys I'm making a 1970s period horror film and I don't have this many references to the 70s in it. quote:“So the guy who created Adventure, a man named Warren Robinett, decided to hide his name inside the game itself. He hid a key in one of the game’s labyrinths. If you found this key, a small pixel-sized gray dot, you could use it to enter a secret room where Robinett had hidden his name.” On the TV, Halliday guides his square protagonist into the game’s secret room, where the words CREATED BY WARREN ROBINETT appear in the center of the screen. I'm getting really annoyed by "videogame" as one word. If you want to see this Easter egg for yourself, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS-HYWRdb2g The living room fades out. Now Halliday is in his avatar as Anorak (a taller, slightly handsomer wizard version of himself) standing in a dim cavern. Here he reveals the truth: he's hidden an Easter egg in OASIS. Whoever can find it gets the whole fortune. He shows three keys: copper, jade, and clear crystal. As he recites the first clue, flaming subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen. quote:Three hidden keys open three secret gates The jade and crystal keys vanish, leaving the copper one hanging around Halliday's neck. quote:The camera follows Anorak as he turns and continues farther into the dark cavern. A few seconds later, he arrives at a pair of massive wooden doors set into the cavern’s rocky wall. These doors are banded with steel, and there are shields and dragons carved into their surfaces. “I couldn’t playtest this particular game, so I worry that I may have hidden my Easter egg a little too well. Made it too difficult to reach. I’m not sure. If that’s the case, it’s too late to change anything now. So I guess we’ll see.” Oh great. He didn't even playtest his loving will and it might be impossible for anyone to ever get to. quote:Anorak throws open the double doors, revealing an immense treasure room filled with piles of glittering gold coins and jewel-encrusted goblets. Then he steps into the open doorway and turns to face the viewer, stretching out his arms to hold open the giant double doors. So first, one more annotation mentions that the pile of treasure behind him also includes stuff like old 80s video game systems and cartridges and hundreds of dice. Second, Halliday intentionally staged the end of the video to look identical to the 1983 Dungeon Master's Guide cover.  What a loving nerd. The end of the video has a link to Halliday's personal website. While it used to have nothing but a looping animation of Anorak making potions and looking over spell books in his lab, the site now includes a huge scoreboard that quickly became known by the dramatic nickname....the Scoreboard. In its default format, all 10 spots are taken up by the initials "JDH" with a score of 000000. quote:Just below the Scoreboard was an icon that looked like a small leather-bound book, which linked to a free downloadable copy of Anorak’s Almanac, a collection of hundreds of Halliday’s undated journal entries. The Almanac was over a thousand pages long, but it contained few details about Halliday’s personal life or his day-to-day activities. Most of the entries were his stream-of-consciousness observations on various classic videogames, science-fiction and fantasy novels, movies, comic books, and ’80s pop culture, mixed with humorous diatribes denouncing everything from organized religion to diet soda. If your goal was to make me think Halliday is quirky and cool, you're failing miserably. If anything, it sounds like he didn't have anything in his life except 80s pop culture and based his entire personality at it. *stares intently at the reader* The Hunt, as it became known, led to a huge resurgence in 1980s culture. The 2040s are now a near carbon copy of the 80s from hairstyles to music, as everyone young and old began obsessing over finding the Easter egg and earning a $240 billion fortune. Millions of OASIS users became "egg hunters", or "gunters" because this is a sci-fi book and we need at least one really dumb slang term to be sufficiently cyberpunk. But as the years went on, the number of gunters (I keep reading it as "grunters" and that's never going to stop) started to die down. The Hunt became an urban legend, one last practical joke by a crazy old rich dude. quote:Then, on the evening of February 11, 2045, an avatar’s name appeared at the top of the Scoreboard, for the whole world to see. After five long years, the Copper Key had finally been found, by an eighteen-year-old kid living in a trailer park on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. The only thing that's about to get set straight is my opinions on this book, believe me.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:43
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I just found this in another thread and wish I included it in the OP.
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Mar 13, 2018 02:11
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JacquelineDempsey posted:I blame his selfless valor in experiments with torpedo juice I may or may not have gotten drunk tonight on 95% Everclear mixed with Dr Pepper.
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Mar 13, 2018 04:07
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https://twitter.com/mrfeelswildride/status/973288876570587137
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Mar 13, 2018 13:31
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The first proper part of the book, "Level One", begins with a quote from Anorak's Almanac.quote:Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable. In case you thought Halliday would ever get more likable, you're out of luck. quote:I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence. Here's the first glimpse we get of our hero, Wade Watts. Within seconds of meeting him, we discover just how much of his personality is based around the obsessive Hunt and rote consumption of all media related to it. We learn more about the stacks later, but I'll cover it here. As you can see on the movie poster (which is the cover of new editions of the book), the economic problems the United States is facing about 20 years from now basically killed any ability to live in rural areas. Everyone just packed up and moved to the nearest city, and to deal with the sudden overcrowding they just combined all their trailers, RVs, mobile homes, shipping containers, and cars into towering shantytowns that occasionally topple over. Somehow this made more sense than expanding outward and all occurred over an incredibly short timeframe. Wade's home in the Portland Avenue Stacks of Oklahoma City is a former double-wide trailer with 15 people living in it, including two other families renting bedrooms. quote:I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I’d found it in a trash bin behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I’d been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. Its hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every videogame made in the twentieth century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9kXKzYorFo I live in the Orlando area, and until September you could find DisneyQuest at what's now called Disney Springs. It was a big 5-story arcade with free games once you paid admission, including a whole room full of 80s arcade games. When I was a kid I played Robotron quite a few times there, though I could never get past 5 or 6 waves. It's definitely one of the loudest and most annoying arcade games of the time, and I feel bad for anyone who hears him playing it for hours. Once he's done, Wade browses through his video files; he's downloaded every single piece of media mentioned in the Almanac. He picks an episode of Family Ties, though he's already watched all 180 episodes multiple times. He says it would take decades for him to watch and play everything mentioned in the Almanac, but that seems to be more because he does poo poo like watch all 180 episodes of Family Ties repeatedly. We learn a bit more about Wade's family. His parents had him when they were teenagers and his father was shot in a grocery store robbery when he was a few months old. His mother, Loretta, raised him alone while working as an OASIS telemarketer by day and an OASIS brothel prostitute by night. Since earplugs didn't really help Wade not hear his mom dirty talking to clients every night, he watched movies with the volume turned up to drown it out. Eventually she gave Wade an OASIS visor and gloves as a toddler and used the virtual world as a babysitter, leaving him to be raised in a virtual Sesame Street and playing learning games. Since OASIS also acts as the world's biggest public library, he began spending all of his time consuming media in it. So what we get here is sort of a Freudian excuse for Wade's lack of personality: he was raised on a steady diet of pop culture practically from birth at the expense of having actual parents. He's more like a golem created from DVDs and binary code. quote:I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking. Wade says that he wishes someone told him the truth right up front, and we get a long quasi-monologue describing what he wants someone to have told him. It's really not interesting enough to copy and paste, because it's basically a long form "God doesn't exist, the economy sucks, there's an oil crisis, global warming is terrible, and we're all going to die and experience eternal oblivion because the afterlife is a fairy tale so you may as well just play video games forever to dull the pain." It's edgy teenager philosophy for three pages. quote:The OASIS is the setting of all my happiest childhood memories. When my mom didn’t have to work, we would log in at the same time and play games or go on interactive storybook adventures together. She used to have to force me to log out every night, because I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked. You can tell how important Wade's mom is to his life because she gets like two sentences dedicated to her death. We get a quick mention of Wade having wallowed in despair after she died, but it feels kind of meaningless because we never see any of this despair. By the time the book takes place, he's already moved on to an obsession over gaining Halliday's fortune. The only way we can find out that he felt sad is because he told us that he felt sad once. Halfway through the fourth episode of Family Ties, Aunt Alice comes in. As soon as she sees Wade's laptop, she demands that he hand it over to pawn for food vouchers. He protests that he needs it for school (which he doesn't) and that he already gives up all of his food vouchers for rent, so she brings over her shirtless thug of a tattooed boyfriend Rick to threaten Wade for it. He doesn't even say a word, just raises his fist, and Wade hands the laptop over. He's already locked the keyboard and erased the hard drive before Rick got in and he's got two spares hidden in the trailer, but now he needs to restore it from his backups. Since dawn is approaching, Wade decides to leave for school early. He pulls on his only winter clothes and exits the trailer, which is the top unit in a 22-story stack alongside I-40. The stacks are covered in solar panels and water and sewage tubing to deal with the basics of life. quote:Our trailer was near the northern edge of the stacks, which ran up to a crumbling highway overpass. From my vantage point at the laundry room window, I could see a thin stream of electric vehicles crawling along the cracked asphalt, carrying goods and workers into the city. As I stared out at the grim skyline, a bright sliver of the sun peeked over the horizon. Watching it rise, I performed a mental ritual: Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective. I’d started doing it after watching a science program from the early ’80s called Cosmos. You really are lucky to get through even one page without an 80s reference. quote:I slipped out the window as quietly as possible and, clutching the bottom of the window frame, slid down the cold surface of the trailer’s metal siding. The steel platform on which the trailer rested was only slightly wider and longer than the trailer itself, leaving a ledge about a foot and a half wide all the way around. I carefully lowered myself until my feet rested on this ledge, then reached up to close the window behind me. I grabbed hold of a rope I’d strung there at waist level to serve as a handhold and began to sidestep along the ledge to the corner of the platform. From there I was able to descend the ladderlike frame of the scaffolding. I almost always took this route when leaving or returning to my aunt’s trailer. A rickety metal staircase was bolted to the side of the stack, but it shook and knocked against the scaffolding, so I couldn’t use it without announcing my presence. Bad news. In the stacks, it was best to avoid being heard or seen, whenever possible. There were often dangerous and desperate people about—the sort who would rob you, rape you, and then sell your organs on the black market. Wade pauses at the unit three stories below, an Airstream trailer, to say hi to Mrs. Gilmore. She's a woman in her 70s who spends most of her time in an OASIS megachurch congregation. Wade uses his technical expertise to fix her console when it breaks in exchange for anecdotes about life in the 80s. quote:She was always praying for me too. Trying her hardest to save my soul. I never had the heart to tell her that I thought organized religion was a total crock. It was a pleasant fantasy that gave her hope and kept her going—which was exactly what the Hunt was for me. To quote the Almanac: “People who live in glass houses should shut the gently caress up.” Wade I think you might be an rear end in a top hat. Reaching the "floor" (the sunless ground level of the stacks), Wade weaves through an obstacle course of junk filling the spaces between stacks. His destination is a haphazard junkyard where all the abandoned vehicles used to reach Oklahoma City were thrown after their construction. Specifically, he's heading to his hideout in a van that's 2/3 buried under other cars and just open enough for him to squeeze through the rear doors. Wade turned this van into his 4x4x9 foot hideout after he found it still with the keys. quote:The van was my refuge. My Batcave. My Fortress of Solitude. It was where I attended school, did my homework, read books, watched movies, and played videogames. It was also where I conducted my ongoing quest to find Halliday’s Easter egg. If you turned identifying references into a drinking game with non-alcoholic beer, you would still die of alcohol poisoning. Wade hops onto an exercise bike and pedals to charge the batteries; because he has nothing else in his life, this and climbing down the stacks are his only daily exercise. quote:I opened the rat-proof metal box where I kept my food cache and took out some bottled water and a packet of powdered milk. I mixed these together in a bowl, then dumped in a generous serving of Fruit Rocks cereal. Once I’d wolfed it down, I retrieved an old plastic Star Trek lunch box I kept hidden under the van’s crushed dashboard. Inside were my school-issued OASIS console, haptic gloves, and visor. These items were, by far, the most valuable things I owned. Far too valuable to carry around with me.
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Mar 13, 2018 14:38
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Mel Mudkiper posted:hey guys I helpfully included a link in the OP! But just in case you've been trying to avoid reading it: 
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Mar 13, 2018 15:01
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JacquelineDempsey posted:So, 15 people in a double wide that's 22 stories up, and there's a laundry room. Uh-huh. I think Cline straight up said that he put Halliday's age as almost identical to his own so they could share interests.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:24
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Trust me, it gets even stupider when OASIS boots up.JacquelineDempsey posted:I just find this interesting because of that review claiming that this book is this generation's Neuromancer. Here we got a book written by a guy 2 years older than me --- and I'm an old fart by Internet standards --- that does nothing but fan wank about 80s poo poo. Stuff that happened well before "this" generation, if that reviewer is talking millennial so or whatever. I showed the infamous excerpt to my mom (who was born in 1964) and she was aghast. She said that after living the 80s she didn't want to experience this much of it all at once.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:49
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All right, normally I update a chapter a day but I want to get to the meat of this book: OASIS.quote:My avatar materialized in front of my locker on the second floor of my high school—the exact spot where I’d been standing when I’d logged out the night before. So yeah, OASIS is such a big thing that its digital currency is the most valuable in the world. Despite the economy tanking? Also I'm unsure just how much of OASIS is supposed to seem like a video game with great graphics and how much it's supposed to feel like a holodeck, because Cline seemingly writes both. quote:A small mirror was mounted inside my locker door, and I caught a glimpse of my virtual self as I closed it. I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical. The school’s strictly enforced dress code required that all student avatars be human, and of the same gender and age as the student. No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway. The movie makes Wade's avatar, Parzival, look like a knock-off Raiden from Metal Gear Solid. This DeviantArt drawing probably looks more like the real thing:  Wade says he started out with the username Wade_The_Great, then after a few changes settled on a reference to Percival from King Arthur's round table. He had to choose the weird spelling because all the others were taken. While OASIS has data on all users' real identification (even their fingerprints and retinal patterns), a Supreme Court ruling allowed it to remain private and the real identity of users is locked up tight by Gregarious Simulation Systems. Wade's school has his info, but only accessible by the principal so not even his teachers or classmates know who he is. quote:Students weren’t allowed to use their avatar names while they were at school. This was to prevent teachers from having to say ridiculous things like “Pimp_Grease, please pay attention!” or “BigWang69, would you stand up and give us your book report?” Instead, students were required to use their real first names, followed by a number, to differentiate them from other students with the same name. When I enrolled, there were already two other students at my school with the first name Wade, so I’d been assigned the student ID of Wade3. That name floated above my avatar’s head whenever I was on school grounds. This book would have been much better with BigWang69 as the protagonist. The school bell rings and brings up a HUD notification that Wade has 40 minutes to get to class. He uses subtle hand motions to move, but can also use voice commands if his hands are occupied and I can't help but feel like that's the worst maneuvering system for a VR game. I don't know if it would be worse writing to ignore that and make OASIS basically a holodeck for the reader or to follow it exactly and have everyone's dialogue occasionally interrupted by shouted directional commands. College is done in OASIS as well, but it still requires money and Wade has neither the money nor the scholarship to get in. Since he doesn't want to sign a 5-year indenturement contract with a corporation (this is supposed to be cyberpunk in case you forgot, and you will), his only prospect in life is to be a full time gunter. Wade is approached by a school bully, Todd13. He makes fun of Wade for wearing one of the default avatar outfits instead of an expensive designer skin. quote:“Your mom bought them for me,” I retorted without breaking my stride. “Tell her I said thanks, the next time you stop at home to breast-feed and pick up your allowance.” Childish, I know. But virtual or not, this was still high school—the more childish an insult, the more effective it was. Wade mentions a planet here. It's brought up casually earlier in the book, but OASIS consists of thousands of virtual planets. I'm not sure if any size is really established for them, but the processing power for this game probably takes Moore's Law and stomps it into dust. Wade attended a real school until 6th grade, which didn't go well because his childhood growing up in an MMORPG emotionally stunted him and he has no way of communicating with anyone outside of video games. As you can imagine, he's overweight and poorly dressed in the real world as well because he's a poor OASIS addict on a diet of government-subsidized junk food. In short, Wade is the gooniest loser of a protagonist that could have been written. quote:Even so, I tried my best to fit in. Year after year, my eyes would scan the lunchroom like a T-1000, searching for a clique that might accept me. But even the other outcasts wanted nothing to do with me. I was too weird, even for the weirdos. And girls? Talking to girls was out of the question. To me, they were like some exotic alien species, both beautiful and terrifying. Whenever I got near one of them, I invariably broke out in a cold sweat and lost the ability to speak in complete sentences. Never mind. He's actually a troper protagonist. quote:Then, one glorious day, our principal announced that any student with a passing grade-point average could apply for a transfer to the new OASIS public school system. The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades. And now the conditions at many schools had gotten so terrible that every kid with half a brain was being encouraged to stay at home and attend school online. I nearly broke my neck sprinting to the school office to submit my application. It was accepted, and I transferred to OASIS Public School #1873 the following semester. So I want to break off for a little bit to talk about escapist school fantasy. This is a really common subgenre of young adult fiction that permeates sci-fi and fantasy: the protagonist is whisked away to a fantastical environment where everything is cool and awesome, they get to learn awesome stuff, and they can take advantage of the special powers they have (and maybe an old prophecy or destiny) to become famous and powerful. Everyone's read or watched works like this, like Harry Potter, Sky High, The Magicians, Psychonauts, or countless anime and visual novels. Where RPO breaks from this trope is that the protagonist only has anything special about him in this environment. In Harry Potter, for instance, Harry has to go back to the Dursleys every summer and not do any magic, but at least he has magic and it's just a matter of time before he can be free of their bondage and go about being the powerful Chosen One full time. When he's at Hogwarts, he gets to spend most of the year surrounded by magic and friends and adventure. On the other hand, Wade has to go back to the real world every day. At the end of the day, he has to turn off OASIS and go back to being a poor fat kid with acne living in the slums. The whole point of escapist fantasy like this is that it allows for people to imagine a way that their life can magically change overnight (sometimes literally). They really have superhuman powers or a special destiny, and they're taken away from a dreary and boring life to a world of adventure where everything revolves around them. Their original life is replaced with a new life, and they never have to go back. How many people do you know on Facebook who have sarcastically listed their job as "Waiting for my Hogwarts acceptance letter"? Wade has to go back unless he succeeds at finding the Easter egg. And even then, it's going to take work to stop being a fat acne-ridden kid who has no social skills once he takes off his virtual reality headset; it's not like finding the Easter egg and gaining control over a $240 billion fortune is suddenly going to grant him muscles and the ability to talk to girls without being the "Jizz In My Pants" guy. For all he knows, he's now going to really be like Notch: fabulously wealthy but fat, lonely, and unloved except for the digital masses who don't know what he's like in the real world. quote:When I arrived in my World History classroom, several students were already seated at their desks. Their avatars all sat motionless, with their eyes closed. This was a signal that they were “engaged,” meaning they were currently on phone calls, browsing the Web, or logged into chat rooms. It was poor OASIS etiquette to try to talk to an engaged avatar. They usually just ignored you, and you’d get an automated message telling you to piss off. Wade opens up the Hatchery, a gunter forum; in keeping with their cargo cult of the past, the forum is designed to look like a 1980s BBS complete with a screeching modem sound when logging in. Most of the forum is useless bragging and running in circles trying to decipher cryptic Almanac hints, so Wade rarely posts. The important story info we get is that there are a lot of threads making fun of Sixers, or "Suxorz" because Cline's knowledge of the Internet ended about 20 years ago. These are employees of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a multinational conglomerate and world's largest ISP, who use their six-digit employee ID numbers as their avatar names. IOI has formed a Department of Oology as professional Easter egg hunters dedicated to using the power of science to find the Easter egg and gain control of GSS, allowing them to monetize OASIS and plaster ads everywhere. Sixers are the corporate military analogue of this cyberpunk setting. They all sign a contract stipulating that they'll give control of GSS to IOI if they find the egg, in return for real world food and board, benefits, health insurance, and lots of powerful OASIS gear. All Sixer avatars use the same generic male appearance with default facial features and a navy blue uniform, only differentiated by their employee ID stamped on the right breast of their avatar's uniform. Sixers are so hated among gunters that they're often killed on sight and some of the larger clans hold competitions to see who can kill the most. quote:Like most gunters, I loathed the Sixers and was disgusted by their very existence. By hiring an army of contract egg hunters, IOI was perverting the entire spirit of the contest. Of course, it could be argued that all the gunters who had joined clans were doing the same thing. There were now hundreds of gunter clans, some with thousands of members, all working together to find the egg. Each clan was bound by an ironclad legal agreement stating that if one clan member won the contest, all members would share the prize. Solos like me didn’t care much for the clans, either, but we still respected them as fellow gunters—unlike the Sixers, whose goal was to hand the OASIS over to an evil multinational conglomerate intent on ruining it. "It's okay for a private organization to gain control over the entire fortune and OASIS, as long as they're not this evil one!" quote:After checking a few other gunter forums, I tapped a bookmark icon for one of my favorite websites, Arty’s Missives, the blog of a female gunter named Art3mis (pronounced “Artemis”). I’d discovered it about three years ago and had been a loyal reader ever since. She posted these great rambling essays about her search for Halliday’s egg, which she called a “maddening MacGuffin hunt.” She wrote with an endearing, intelligent voice, and her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides. In addition to posting her (often hysterical) interpretations of passages in the Almanac, she also linked to the books, movies, TV shows, and music she was currently studying as part of her Halliday research. I assumed that all of these posts were filled with misdirection and misinformation, but they were still highly entertaining. Yeah if you read "Nerd Porn Auteur", you can definitely start seeing Cline's type of woman creeping in here. Also Wade is so stunted that he slobbers over a female avatar of someone who could very well be a 45-year-old basement goon (remember how nobody knows the true identity of anyone in OASIS?) and saves all her avatar headshots. Our hero. Also notice how Wade specifies that her face is supposed to be so realistic that it looks like her facial features were scanned onto her avatar. The movie takes the opposite approach and goes as Uncanny Valley as humanly possible:  Wade finishes reading Art3mis's latest blog post (an in-depth essay on John Hughes teen movies) when he gets an instant message from his best (and only) friend. quote:Aech: Top o’ the morning, amigo. Oh yeah that's the end of the chapter. Just kind of meanders to a close like Cline realized it was running too long and chopped it in half. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 17:00
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Does he ever explain why a world in which trailers are stacked on top of each other to form unstable towers of rusted death can afford to supply hundreds of thousands of VR headsets to children in public education Absolutely nothing makes the slightest lick of sense about the world. The economy is so terrible that cities are overcrowded after everyone abandoned the rural countryside to try and make a living, but millions or billions of people spend their lives in a glorified MMO. Elderly women go to virtual church instead of real ones, Wade's mom had both of her jobs in OASIS, virtual credits are the most stable currency, and any kid with a decent GPA (not high enough to get a scholarship) gets a virtual school with a free hookup. Even the poorest don't starve because they get government-subsidized meals, and in fact they have so much food that they still get overweight despite climbing the stacks every day! How does anything survive? Who stays outside the OASIS to keep a multinational conglomerate running? How many people are churning out headsets in China for millions of public school students? Who's running the farms for all those breakfast cereals and powdered eggs and milk? Oh yeah, and Wade mentions that stacks toppling over domino-style is not an uncommon occurrence. But they still think that's the best way to utilize real estate!
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Mar 13, 2018 17:26
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I read ahead and I’m going to combine the next two chapters because the meeting between Parzival and Aech is so loving annoying. Imagine two rear end in a top hat holier-than-thou nerds ribbing on each other and another dude for the whole thing and you’ve basically got it. It’s almost entirely pointless.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:09
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So it turns out the book answers my question about the size of the planets soon: life-size. OASIS is set up like a Rubik's Cube divided into 27 cube-shaped zones, each of which is 10 light hours (or 10.8 billion kilometers) across. This gives the entire OASIS universe a span of 32,400,000,000 kilometers from end to end. "Sci-fi authors don't know numbers" continues to be true, because it's a virtual universe in the most literal sense. I don't even want to think about how much processing power it must be taking up.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:08
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Subjunctive posted:Mostly depends on how much total area is being observed at a given time, and what’s in it. Universe size doesn’t really matter except as bragging rights. I think a number of players is specified as "millions", and there's thousands of planets (as will be explained, these include full simulated fictional universes like everything seen in Star Trek or all of the gaming space in World of Warcraft and Everquest). World of Warcraft maxed out at 12 million players with a much smaller space and graphics that could hardly be described as lifelike.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:45
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Oh hey apparently it's billions of players. Simultaneously.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:57
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PJOmega posted:It's been awhile since I tore the book apart, so this might be wrong. No you've actually got it right. This gets covered in the next few updates, but I'm fine explaining it now because it really emphasizes how impossible the scale of this thing is. It'll also help us get back to plot faster because two chapters get dedicated to just establishing OASIS and how it works. OASIS costs only 25 cents as a lifetime sign-up fee, probably Halliday referencing arcade games only costing a quarter. However, everything in the game costs OASIS credits. Along with real world ways to earn money still working in OASIS (like selling services or getting sponsorships), you can earn credits and XP (which Cline keeps calling "XPs" and annoying the crap out of me) by completing quests and killing NPC enemies. GSS makes money by selling in-game items like avatar skins, vehicles, and teleportation services between planets. Wade's big problem is that you need to earn XP to increase your abilities like in any other game, but he has to spend most of his OASIS time in school. He's only level 3 because without any money he basically has to hitch rides with Aech and other gunters to low-level zones to scrape his way through the ranks. OASIS is so immersive because along with haptic feedback gloves, the visor beams the graphics onto your eyes with lasers to make it look like it's actually the real world around you. If it weren't for needing gloves and a visor, it would basically be the holodeck.
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Mar 13, 2018 21:31
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Solumin posted:You wouldn't simulate the whole universe in high fidelity, just the parts people are playing in. That saves some computing power. Also, the graphics are probably handled client-side. WoW's graphics are simplified so that older computers can play it, not because it's easier on the servers. There's some mention of templates being used, but it really is as ridiculous as it sounds: a planet is a planet, without repeating terrain and simulated right down to every single blade of grass. From the way it's all described, the way OASIS looks in the movie (modern lifelike CGI) is actually how it's all supposed to look in the book. It's a wish fulfillment ultimate video game where anything and everything is possible and all your favorite fictional worlds are real.
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Mar 13, 2018 21:36
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Solumin posted:Isn't it weird that Oasis is not really immersive then? You can use voice commands to move your character, he grabs his school books by tapping on them... It's not VR with haptic feedback -- which would be really interesting advances that wouldn't be out of place in a sci fi novel. It's more like Second Life. Reading ahead, it's really inconsistent. Everyone is still just sitting in their rooms (or in Wade's case, a freezing abandoned van with a rickety heater) wearing haptic feedback gloves and a visor. Even if they're touching everything through the gloves and having the images beamed onto their retinas, they should still feel everything in their real environment so Wade would be thrown out of immersion by going underwater or into a desert or snowstorm in the game. And obviously they don't feel anything that's not touching their hands. But the book seems to treat it like a holodeck in every sense. Cline forgets exactly how everything is being operated and has it feel like a full immersion brain-jack VR with a HUD.
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Mar 13, 2018 22:19
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Baron Corbyn posted:If I'm remembering right, the Red Dwarf novelizations have something along these lines with Better than Life. Everyone who played it became addicted and had to be cared for like a baby because they wouldn't leave the game. Even the Pendragon Adventure series (literally for 13-year-olds) handled it better with their fourth book. One of the Territories was a futuristic one that had fallen into ruin because almost the entire population had decided to live in virtual reality forever, with only a small handful of people staying out to maintain the buildings they were in. A later book had them to go a Territory that seemed to be an isolated island with primitive technology, and it's revealed that it's actually the future of the previous Territory where they had gone full post-apocalyptic after the virtual reality broke down.
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Mar 14, 2018 13:31
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quote:The system verified that I was on the chat room’s access list and allowed me to enter. My view of the classroom shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small thumbnail window in the lower right of my display, allowing me to monitor what was in front of my avatar. The rest of my field of vision was now filled with the interior of Aech’s chat room. My avatar appeared just inside the “entrance,” a door at the top of a carpeted staircase. The door didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t even open. This was because the Basement and its contents didn’t exist as a part of the OASIS. Chat rooms were stand-alone simulations—temporary virtual spaces that avatars could access from anywhere in OASIS. My avatar wasn’t actually “in” the chat room. It only appeared that way. Wade3/Parzival was still sitting in my World History classroom with his eyes closed. Logging into a chat room was a little like being in two places at once. The Basement is done up to look like a 1980s rec room: wood-paneled walls covered in vintage movie and comic book posters, an old RCA television with a Betamax VCR, Laserdisc player, and vintage video game consoles hooked up, 80s arcade games, bookshelves lined with back issues of pop culture magazines and RPG supplements, and a stereo currently playing "The Wild Boys". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M43wsiNBwmo Wade's friend Aech (pronounced like the letter H) is a high level gunter who's made a lot of virtual money in PvP tournaments, and is even more famous than Art3mis because Wade just gets to hang out with celebrities like that. Normally the Basement is only available to fellow elites, but Aech and Wade share similar obsessions over Anorak's Almanac and everything in it so Wade is allowed in despite being 27 levels lower than Aech. Because Wade's not in school, the avatars here run the gamut from vampires and dark elves to cyborgs and Vulcans. Aech's avatar is a tall, handsome white guy with brown hair. As before, the movie has gone...a little different.  This is actually kind of a lovely thing on Spielberg's part. I won't spoil it, but you may already be able to guess why changing Aech's avatar from a normal handsome white guy to an orc might come off as a bad move. quote:As I walked over, he glanced up from the Intellivision game he was playing. His distinctive Cheshire grin stretched from ear to ear. “Z!” he shouted. “What is up, amigo?” He stretched out his right hand and gave me five as I dropped onto the couch opposite him. Aech had started calling me “Z” shortly after I met him. He liked to give people single-letter nicknames. Aech pronounced his own avatar’s name just like the letter “H.” I'm going to be leaving out more dialogue than usual in this chapter because I cannot loving stand it. Aech and Wade have a friendly rivalry where they're always trying to one-up each other on trivia, which means this chapter alone would be lethal for any kind of 80s shout-out drinking game you wanted to play. It's like watching two clones of the Comic Book Guy ribbing each other. I'll include samples, and please note that the whole loving chapter reads like this. quote:“So what did you do after you bailed last night?” he asked, tossing me the other Intellivision controller. We’d hung out here in his chat room for a few hours the previous evening, watching old Japanese monster movies.  quote:“Starlog, eh?” I said, nodding my approval. So yeah, this whole chapter is like this from start to finish. Keep in mind that these are the characters we're supposed to root for and think are awesome. This arguing over a Rutger Hauer fantasy movie goes on for another loving page (including Aech making an empty threat of banning Wade for calling Ewoks "Endorians") before another gunter shows up, I-r0k. I-r0k somehow manages to be even lamer and more poorly written than Aech and Parzival, an obnoxious poseur who walks around with a plasma rifle at all times and harasses everyone. He and Aech share virtual classes together, which is probably the only reason he's even allowed in the Basement. quote:“Are you cocks arguing about Star Wars again?” he said, descending the steps and walking over to join the crowd around us. “That poo poo is so played out, yo.” Any room with these three people in it would be immediately improved by completely destroying it. Wade quickly challenges I-r0k's knowledge, and I-r0k decides to test him by daring him to name a game that he pulls out of his inventory. Wade instantly identifies it as Swordquest: Earthworld from 1982, then follows up by challenging I-r0k to name the other three games in the series. When he can't, Wade smugly begins zipping through a bunch of trivia about them and he and Aech bounce questions off one another. The only really important part of this is that Halliday apparently modeled the Hunt after the contest Atari held to help sell the game (which ended prematurely when the last game was canceled in the video game crash of 1983). quote:“Fine. You win,” I-r0k said. “But you both obviously need to get a life.” Is it bad that I agree with I-r0k? quote:“And you,” I said, “obviously need to find a new hobby. Because you clearly lack the intelligence and commitment to be a gunter.” With perfect dramatic timing, the 3-minute warning bell rings and all three have to log out and return to school. I'll include that chapter here as well, because I can summarize it fairly quickly. quote:My avatar’s eyes slid open, and I was back in my World History classroom. The seats around me were now filled with other students, and our teacher, Mr. Avenovich, was materializing at the front of the classroom. Mr. A’s avatar looked like a portly, bearded college professor. He sported an infectious grin, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. When he spoke, he somehow always managed to sound like he was reading a passage from Dickens. I liked him. He was a good teacher. The virtual schools are basically the best schools ever. The kids are programmed to be unable to leave their seats or talk to each other so there's no real disciplinary issues, and the virtual environment allows them to have "field trips" literally anywhere, from King Tut's tomb to the inside of a heart. Wade eats his lunch by eating a real world protein bar while his avatar sits on a grassy field. Like he said before, travel costs virtual money through either teleportation or purchasing an in-game ship (the school parking lot is full of TIE Fighters, X-Wings, Vipers, UFOs, and Space Shuttles). While the more privileged kids (or ones with friends to hitch a ride with) spend their lunch breaks shopping, flying around, hitting up a virtual club, or questing, Wade lacks the friends or funds to really get out. There are thousands of planets in OASIS, growing from only a few hundred at launch. Some were painstakingly hand-crafted while others were randomly generated, but they run every single fictional environment possible. Along with generic environments like a zombie apocalypse or cyberpunk city, OASIS absorbed just about every existing MMORPG world like Warcraft and Everquest after launch and has licensed tons of IPs: Firefly, Star Wars and Star Trek, the Metaverse from Snow Crash, Middle Earth, The Matrix, etc. You name it, it probably exists. OASIS is divided into 27 cube-shaped sectors in a Rubik's Cube shape, each 10 light hours long. I previously mentioned that this gives a ridiculous distance of more than 33 billion kilometers to travel from one side to the other, hence teleportation services. Along with selling in-game items, GSS makes most of its money from selling spacecraft fuel and teleportation fees. quote:Traveling around inside the OASIS wasn’t just costly—it was also dangerous. Each sector was divided up into many different zones that varied in size and shape. Some zones were so large that they encompassed several planets, while others covered only a few kilometers on the surface of a single world. Each zone had a unique combination of rules and parameters. Magic would function in some zones and not in others. The same was true of technology. If you flew your technology-based starship into a zone where technology didn’t function, your engines would fail the moment you crossed the zone border. Then you’d have to hire some silly gray-bearded sorcerer with a spell-powered space barge to tow your rear end back into a technology zone. Ludus, the school planet, is perfectly boring and ordinary. It's permanently daytime and filled with nothing but thousands of schools, all copied from the same template and separated by seed-generated parks, forests, and rivers. Because Wade can't afford to leave Ludus, he's stuck hitching rides with Aech to be dropped off in low-level zones and kill kobolds and goblins for a few credits that go right back to teleportation fees back to school. All of his equipment came from item drops, and he's painstakingly made it to level 3 after years in OASIS. This is a huge embarrassment as a gunter, but he can't risk going out too much because if he gets expelled due to poor attendance he'll have his school OASIS rig confiscated. He also can't find a job outside of school, as the Great Recession is in its third decade and even fast food restaurants have a two-year waiting list. And yet....everything keeps going? There's enough government-subsidized food for Wade to grow fat despite climbing a 22-story junk tower twice a day, the schools can provide huge amounts of OASIS rigs for free to students with perfectly average GPAs, and there's a multinational conglomerate that can pay for a whole virtual army with expensive technology, despite the economy being so in the shitter and power so expensive that even automobile travel out of town is too costly for most people. How the hell does any of this stay standing? chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 15:23
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Wheat Loaf posted:Compared and contrasted with other stories which are built on references and allusions to other works, what is it that really sets RPO apart from, say, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Anno Dracula or Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton concept? Well, I'd argue that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie is still crap. What I'd say is that the biggest difference is that these other works aren't just about referencing those works. League isn't just about Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Mina, and Dr. Jekyll constantly referencing and calling back to their standalone fiction to each other. They're not just reliving their prior adventures with other characters. The point is to take these existing characters and mash them up to see how they work together in unrelated situations. RPO is about the references. The plot itself is one that's been rehashed over and over and the book would be 1/4 its length with all the 80s references excised. It's about pointing at stuff that's popular for nerds to be into and combining it all for the sake of it. The thread title I chose, in case you haven't seen it, is an old Flash animation that's basically the same thing as RPO but 3 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WgT9gy4zQA
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Mar 14, 2018 16:03
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This is also a good explanation of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMBylNJQEbg
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Mar 14, 2018 16:14
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I'm going to do one more update right off, a relatively short one. Ernest Cline decided that the best way to write would be to have two chapters back to back describing OASIS and a biography of Halliday. The plot gets put on hold for this, so I'll just knock out the rest of the exposition here.quote:After lunch, I headed to my favorite class, Advanced OASIS Studies. This was a senior-year elective where you learned about the history of the OASIS and its creators. Talk about an easy A. Halliday (who was almost definitely autistic) was born June 12, 1972 in Middletown, OH. His father was an alcoholic machine operator and his mother was a bipolar waitress, so not exactly the best environment for someone with autism. He had no friends or social skills until another boy in school, Ogden Morrow, saw him reading the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook by himself in the cafeteria and invited him to game with them. Morrow and Halliday quickly became best friends and business partners. Halliday became a game programmer at 15, creating Anorak's Quest for a TRS-80 Color Computer ("Anorak" was a nickname he was given by a British exchange student). It was only created for his D&D group, but Morrow encouraged him to start selling it. They quickly went from selling floppy disks out of ziplock bags to establishing their own game company, first in Morrow's basement and then in an office in a Columbus, OH strip mall. Gregarious Games took the gaming industry by storm, creating revolutionary works until by the end of the 1990s Halliday was viewed as possibly the greatest game developer of all time. Morrow acted as the businessman while Halliday stuck to programming. He could charitably be called "eccentric", walking out of conversations or interviews if he got bored and laughing to himself for no apparent reason. He often locked himself away for days or weeks to work on games, and had such an obsession with the 80s that he would occasionally lash out and fire employees who didn't get his references (Morrow would then rehire them). quote:By their thirtieth birthdays, Halliday and Morrow were both multimillionaires. They purchased mansions on the same street. Morrow bought a Lamborghini, took several long vacations, and traveled the world. Halliday bought and restored one of the original DeLoreans used in the Back to the Future films, continued to spend nearly all of his time welded to a computer keyboard, and used his newfound wealth to amass what would eventually become the world’s largest private collection of classic videogames, Star Wars action figures, vintage lunch boxes, and comic books. OASIS is the perfect game for everyone. The graphics are detailed down to individual blades of grass and weather patterns on a planetary scale. Halliday and Morrow imagined it as the perfect escape from a boring world, where guaranteed anonymity allowed you to create whatever idealized self you wanted. As an "open-source reality", anyone could create new worlds or even make their own private planets in a sort of cyber-Mormonism. The visor uses low-power lasers to beam images directly onto the user's retinas and the haptic feedback gloves allow for realistic touch feedback. Halliday's genius programming allowed for 5 million simultaneous users on launch, which has expanded to billions by 2045. quote:Most online games of the day generated revenue by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access. GSS only charged a onetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, for which you received a lifetime OASIS account. The ads all used the same tagline: The OASIS—it’s the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 17:05
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Solumin posted:And look, he managed to mention that rich guy's movie collection without going into excruciating detail about it! Usually he'd be listing everything that was in it. Oh just you wait.
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Mar 14, 2018 17:08
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sportsgenius86 posted:I started reading this the other day just so it's at least fair when I poo poo on my wife's friend for loving this book and oh my god it's worse than everyone said. Honestly, the actual game world would be a really interesting place for adventures. I want to like the idea of an MMO with a playing field 10 times larger than the solar system where you can drop into just about any fictional universe the author can think of. Cline just does it a complete disservice. He thinks that nerdiness (and in his mind, attractiveness as a person) is about consuming and enjoying traditionally "nerdy" media while geeking out about science and numbers, and he puts his own childhood on a pedestal above all others. He doesn't put any stock into whether or not anything he's consuming is actually good. The gunters' cargo cult of the 80s isn't presented as a bizarre reversal of the progress of human civilization, but as something to aspire to as the epitome of coolness. I will say that the book tries to present spending your entire life in an MMO and worshiping the 80s as a bad thing toward the end, but the message flies in the face of how awesome it's all presented as earlier.
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Mar 14, 2018 20:40
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I decided to look on Tumblr to see the current climate regarding the movie. 
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Mar 14, 2018 21:21
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Memento posted:burn it to the god drat ground XPs and videogames
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Mar 15, 2018 02:41
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sector_corrector posted:This book is awful, but doing whatever it is this thread is is severely loving deranged. Reading it? I agree.
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Mar 15, 2018 03:37
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Angry Salami posted:So traveling from planet to planet or across zones isn't instantaneous? You gotta actually get in your spaceship and spend time traveling across virtual interstellar distances? How much time are players spending just sitting in their imaginary spaceship just commuting? There’s teleportation, but it costs credits. Wade is stuck because he has no friends to hitch rides with and is too poor to afford teleports or spacecraft. But yes, the fastest spacecraft travel at light speed so it would take at least 30 hours with the best ships to fly from end to end of OASIS. What would the volume of OASIS be?
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Mar 15, 2018 04:39
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Deptfordx posted:I completely missed Ready Player One till the movie trailers hit. Oh no, it's one in this next update. I'm just going to include a screenshot because gently caress transcribing it.
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Mar 15, 2018 13:55
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So energy is now expensive which is why we can afford to run all these VR headsets? But not run an electric car or something to get around? He says that there's streams of electric cars going down the interstate to the city when Wade leaves for his hideout, but also that oil is so expensive that people need to use OASIS to get out because they can't even take road trips. So...which is it?
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Mar 15, 2018 13:56
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quote:The rest of my school day passed quickly until my final class, Latin. Ah, here we go. This is the "infamous excerpt", the one that decides whether you're going to love or hate this book. I'm not going to transcribe it because it would be way too much effort fixing the spacing and italics, so you get a screenshot instead.  So coming off that eye-glazing monologue, we learn that Wade already figured out the first clue 4 years ago! While obsessively reading the Almanac, Wade noticed that some letters had a tiny notch on them (Minecraft reference spotted). He thought it was a printing error in his hard copy at first, but confirmed that they were in the electronic copy. Writing down the marked letters, he found that they formed another message: quote:Three hidden keys open three secret gates Other gunters had found this message, but kept it to themselves. Then after 6 months, an MIT freshman named Steven Pendergast publicized it and took credit in an interview. Going public with a clue thereafter became known among gunters as "pulling a Pendergast". This rhyming phrase, the Limerick, spent years unsolved. Wade decided to figure out the meaning line by line, and started doing some research. quote:The Copper Key awaits explorers Okay, I'm calling bullshit on this one too. Tabletop RPGs remain extraordinarily popular even now as we hit the 2020s and show no sign of disappearing. Wade was born in 2025, so he's not that far off from us. And yet despite OASIS having a planet literally called Gygax and filled with recreations of old D&D modules, he's never even heard of pen & paper roleplaying or known how they worked? So the big problem with this clue is that there's thousands of planets. Gunterpedia has a comprehensive list of every quest on planet Gygax and the Tomb of Horrors isn't one of them, nor on any other pen & paper planets. Also the chapter actually ends here, but I'm moving on to the next one because almost the entire chapter was taken up with Wade's rambling about all the 80s poo poo he's obsessed over. quote:Our teacher, Ms. Rank, was standing at the front of the class, slowly conjugating Latin verbs. She said them in English first, then in Latin, and each word automatically appeared on the board behind her as she spoke it. Whenever we were doing tedious verb conjugation, I always got the lyrics to an old Schoolhouse Rock! song stuck in my head: “To run, to go, to get, to give. Verb! You’re what’s happenin’!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weaCffBvWGE quote:I was quietly humming this tune to myself when Ms. Rank began to conjugate the Latin for the verb “to learn.” “To Learn. Discere,” she said. “Now, this one should be easy to remember, because it’s similar to the English word ‘discern,’ which also means ‘to learn.’" Halliday had donated billions to establish the OASIS public school system and Halliday Learning Foundation before his death, and clearly cared quite a lot about education, but there are thousands of schools on the planet and hundreds of private schools and universities elsewhere in the game. Wade figures Ludus could still be the location because, as one of the original planets, GSS handcrafted it and Halliday would have been involved enough to be able to mess with the source code. He also starts considering the implications of Halliday wanting a schoolkid to find the Copper Key, but doesn't tell us what he's implying. Wade thinks that if the Tomb of Horrors is anywhere on Ludus, it'll look like the way it's described in the module: "a low, flat-topped hill, about two hundred yards wide and three hundred yards long” with a series of flat black stones arranged in the shape of a skull. Ludus is a big place, so it's very possible that nobody has stumbled upon it even by accident simply because it's a loving planet. Wade has to spend the next 17 minutes sitting anxiously for class to finish and unlock his avatar. Once it's over, he remains in the empty classroom and opens up a 3D holographic map of the planet. It has a circumference of exactly 1000 kilometers; Cline says this is about 1/3 the size of Earth's moon, but a quick Google shows that the circumference of the moon is actually 10,921 kilometers and Ludus is actually less than 1/10th the size of the moon. There's no oceans, just grasslands and forests divided by rivers and lakes, and it's permanently daytime with a cloudless blue sky. Wade searches through a warez site for a high-end image recognition plugin to download for OASIS and has it scan for any sites matching the image data of the Tomb of Horrors entrance. After 10 minutes, he's got a match. The only problem is that it's over 400 kilometers away, and at full speed it would take his avatar 3 days to run there. Teleportation would take minutes, but he hasn't got a single credit to his name. So he decides to cheat a little. quote:Each OASIS public school had a bunch of different athletic teams, including wrestling, soccer, football, baseball, volleyball, and a few other sports that couldn’t be played in the real world, like Quidditch and zero-gravity Capture the Flag. Students went out for these teams just like they did at schools in the real world, and they played using elaborate sports-capable haptic rigs that required them to actually do all of their own running, jumping, kicking, tackling, and so on. The teams had nightly practice, held pep rallies, and traveled to other schools on Ludus to compete against them. Our school gave out free teleportation vouchers to any student who wanted to attend an away game, so we could sit up in the stands and root for old OPS #1873. I’d only taken advantage of this once, when our Capture the Flag team had played against Aech’s school in the OPS championships. Wade trades his books for his armor, shield, and sword at his locker and sprints out of the school. As he crosses the boundaries that indicate he's leaving the school zone, he turns off his floating nametag to keep from being identified. The transport terminal is a large domed pavilion supported by a dozen ivory pillars, each emblazoned with a T in a blue hexagon. Wade steps into the first booth (which he says reminds him of the TARDIS because it's a blue booth) and inserts the voucher, invoicing his school 103 credits for 462 kilometers of travel. Wade instantly appears at the other school, which looks completely identical except for the surrounding scenery. He wonders why anyone would actually go to a game when they could just watch a video elsewhere, especially since NPC fans would be used to fill the stands anyway. I'm sure football has the same weight on Wade's mind as religion: it's for ugh, normal people. quote:I was already running in the opposite direction, across a rolling green field that stretched out behind the school. A small mountain range loomed in the distance, and I could see the amoeba-shaped forest at its base. Wade studies the map and memorizes all the traps and puzzles. If Halliday recreated the Tomb of Horrors perfectly, he's in big trouble trying to fight Acererak at the end because of his low level. If he dies, he loses all his items and progress and has to start over as a level 1 avatar. The only thing he's got going for him (other than being the only one he knows of to figure out the clues) is that as a level three, he won't lose a ton of progress and can theoretically just keep running back to try again over and over. After passing through the forest (where trees are rendered in such detail that you can even see ants climbing over the bark), he climbs the low hilltop and sees the exact same image from the book:  Using his shield as a shovel, Wade digs through the spot in the cliff where the module says the tomb is buried. Sure enough, he finds a tunnel with a mosaic of colorful stones forming the floor and a red tile path leading deeper. Clutching his sword and flashlight, Wade finally enters the plot.
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Mar 15, 2018 14:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah but the strongest world economy is a virtual reality world built around the tastes of an eccentric anglophile with a nostalgia complex. If anything, English would be the only language left on earth because it was the primary communication method in an instant global economy It’s a little justifiable, since as a planet with a 1000 km circumference and nothing but schools it wouldn’t really be a place for exploring. Wade says that none of the simulated animals in the forest grant XP for killing them so it’s not worth adventuring when you can go to the Star Wars universe or something.
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Mar 15, 2018 15:37
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I dunno, I feel like this universe has to have a ulillillia or two who spends all their free time mapping out poo poo no one cares about You have a point there. Also I mentioned this in another thread long before I started reading this book, but Cline establishes that there were movies beyond Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull while still leaving Mad Max as "holy trilogy", despite Mad Max: Fury Road being known to be in production with the cast publicized at the time of this book's writing and publishing.
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Mar 15, 2018 15:48
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Drunken Baker posted:The whole 80s obsession was brought about BECAUSE of the "Easter Egg", right? I might be wrong here, but that's how it came off to me. Yeah, OASIS has every nerdy environment you could think of as a game world. That's why it has stuff like Firefly despite not being 80s. Halliday's Hunt became such a phenomenon that it singlehandedly led to the 2040s becoming a repeat of 80s pop culture, with even fashion and music taking after the 80s. And it's the 80s because Cline loves the 80s, so he made Halliday almost the same age as him so he could justify the book being predominately about 80s stuff. Also I read ahead to the fight with Acererak and you're going to loving die, either laughing or facepalming.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:14
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So I just did some light research into the timeline of events in the book and it makes no loving sense at all Yeah, I think OASIS should be getting started around now. Wade was born in the stacks in 2025, which means the recession needs to get so bad (while still being called the Great Recession despite being even worse than the Great Depression) that people start living in 20-story shantytowns only 10 years after the publication of this book!
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Mar 15, 2018 17:37
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anilEhilated posted:I'm not sure whether it was you or Cline who missed it but that sure as hell is not a limerick. It's actually called the Limerick (as a proper noun) by the gunters.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:53
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I think this thread is active enough that I can get away with two updates a day.quote:The walls of the corridor leading into the tomb were covered with dozens of strange paintings depicting enslaved humans, orcs, elves, and other creatures. Each fresco appeared in the exact location described in the original D&D module. I knew that hidden in the tiled stone surface of the floor were several spring-loaded trapdoors. If you stepped on one, it snapped open and dropped you into a pit filled with poisoned iron spikes. But because the location of each hidden trapdoor was clearly marked on my map, I was able to avoid all of them. If you find this description incredibly boring, get used to it because that's how this book is. Rather than a detailed, action-packed description of Wade going through the Tomb of Horrors, we get paragraphs simply describing what he did over the course of minutes or hours. It's almost like an autistic person describing their favorite video game. In the Pillared Throne Room, we get the first difference: Acererak is sitting on the throne, far sooner than he's supposed to be encountered. This is a huge problem, because Wade's level 3 avatar and +1 Flaming Sword can't do diddly squat against a lich. At least if he dies he can just come back and try again at level 1. He tries to activate his game's recording function, but finds that it's not allowed in here. quote:“I seek the Copper Key,” I replied. Then I remembered I was speaking to a king, so I quickly bowed my head, dropped to one knee, and added, “Your Majesty.” All right, in the real Tomb of Horrors you can get out without dealing with Acererak as long as you don't attack him when he first materializes (he just absorbs the energy) or touch his skull and let it suck out your soul. So how did Halliday program this fight to get the Copper Key? quote:The lich let out a long, disturbing cackle that echoed off the chamber’s stone walls. “Very well!” he said. “You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust!” Jesus Christ. quote:The fireball in Acererak’s hand vanished. He stretched out his leathery palm, which now held two shiny quarters. “The games are on me,” he said. This is the funniest thing in the goddamn world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWoiLNri0OM Acererak is much, much better at Joust than Wade is. Wade needs to take the first five minutes just to remember the controls, while Acererak is an AI that barely makes mistakes. The lich easily defeats Wade, who asks if he can switch sides because he's used to the other side of the cabinet. Hilariously, Acererak lets them switch players. quote:It worked. I slipped into the zone, and the tide began to turn in my favor. I began to find the flaws in the lich’s playing style, the holes in his programming. This was something I’d learned over the years, mastering hundreds of different videogames. There was always a trick to beating a computer-controlled opponent. At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence. Honestly this scene would be legitimately great if it wasn't so dry. I actually really like the idea of it. Cline just gets so wrapped up in boring descriptions of activity that he doesn't put any soul into it. There's no tension, one paragraph drifting to the next to an inevitable conclusion. Wade defeats Acererak, who angrily smashes the console to pixels that scatter across the floor. As he and Wade exchange bows, Acererak transforms into Anorak, Halliday's avatar. quote:“Now,” the wizard said, speaking with Halliday’s familiar voice. “Your reward.” See, this is what I'm talking about. It's nerdiness distilled to the barest components: references. This would work much better in a movie, where things like the teleportation sound would be subtle Easter eggs for viewers to identify. In a book where the protagonist has to explain everything going on, it feels more like Cline made a list of every 80s sci-fi and fantasy work and checked off a box every time he referenced one. Wade looks down at the key with wonder and elation. We know this because Wade says that he looks down at it with wonder and elation. It's a simple antique copper key embossed with a Roman numeral I. Engraved along the length of the key is “What you seek lies hidden in the trash on the deepest level of Daggorath.” Wade is such a nerd that he instantly understands its meaning: the TRS-80 computer was nicknamed the "Trash 80" back in the 80s, and Dungeons of Daggorath is an obscure 1982 computer game for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Wade also gets off topic by explaining how "dagorath" is Elvish for "battle" in Tolkien's works but he knows it's Dungeons of Daggorath because it has two g's. The next place Wade needs to go, therefore, is the planet of Middletown. Halliday made a perfect recreation of his hometown, including an extremely detailed reproduction of his childhood home and room. While he's never been able to visit, Wade knows from pictures and videos that Halliday's room on planet Middletown has a TRS-80. quote:I checked the time: 11:03 p.m., OST (OASIS Server Time, which also happened to be Eastern Standard Time). I had eight hours before I had to be at school. That might be enough time. I could go for it, right now. Sprint like hell, back up through the dungeon to the surface, then hightail it back to the nearest transport terminal. From there, I could teleport directly to Middletown. If I left right now, I should be able to reach Halliday’s TRS-80 in under an hour.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:42
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