Ready Player Two OUT NOW -

[Commander X]

View attachment 1747506

This was much funnier when it ran in the 9/11 issue of the Onion (back when the Onion was still funny):
Now More Than Ever, Humanity Needs My Back To The Future Fan Fiction

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

I'm halfway through and it's very,very painful.
This makes me feel better about my 1st grade Marmaduke ripoff comic, I could have gone places with that provided I also made a deal with Satan.

 

[DiabeticSP]

I'm reading it because the Rifftrax guy does a bad book podcast which is pretty amusing to listen to.

But I can't listen without suffering through the book as well.

I've read some trash along with the podcast and this is EASILY the worst. Its actually just garbage. It doesn't even have the earnestness of RPO (not that that helped much).

The funniest part is dropping "didnt you ever watch Sword Art Online" immediately before they get trapped inside the Oasis. Wow, how original.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

I've abused the Audible return policy way too much but as soon as I can I'm returning this one. The 372 pages podcast linked upthread has added a whole new dimension to the awfulness of this author's books. My God Cline has issues. The whole subscription, in fact.

Spoiler

The copied mind into ai replicant copy must be ripped off from the superior Bobiverse books. Or its imitators. Go read that shit instead.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

How will a sequel a decade after the first even work?
The first was written in an era with very little self awareness and it slid under the radar but even the author must be aware of what a fucking manchild masterpiece his book is by now.

This is so fucking true it's almost painful. I was an 80's kid, and it was truly a great and awesome decade. A lot of bad stuff happened too, but we like to forget that and that's ok. Nostalgia was fun when it was confined to poorly made personal web pages on Angelfire or whatever.

But giant media corporations have now been humping the mummified corpse of the 1980's for longer than the 80's even lasted. It's disgusting, the mass market version of "geek culture" is infantilizing, and Ernest Kline's book made me realize how gross it is for chronologically adult men to be obsessed with cheap and disposable pop culture detritus made for children 30 or 40 years ago.

I'm honestly glad the movie cut Klein's neckbeard atheism out truly Spielberg can take even mediocre material and make it passable. As seen with jaws, mostly because he knows how to please audiences and critics alike. Unlike Klein who only knows how to please his fellow Fedora wearing neckbeard fans

Spielberg did pretty good work on that movie. Because he - unlike the writer - isn't a socially retarded autist. It was pretty lol that he cast conventionally attractive actors and included a scene I don't remember from the book, where Wade closes the Oasis a couple days a week to encourage people to hopefully not completely waste their lives.

Even Spielberg couldn't make it "good" tho, and it was pretty painful to watch a whole society of people who are hopelessly addicted to online vidya games while the real world around them falls to shit out of neglect. Felt like a kind of Harrison Bergeron or Brave New World tier dystopia. You could've changed the music in the movie and easily recut it as a horror film or a depressing social commentary about the human spirit being crushed by a seductively oppressive system.

A good ending to RPO would've been if it went down the Fight Club route - Wade hits the "delete" button and forces everyone to stop injecting digital dopamine into their eyeballs and try caring more about their lives and the people around them. I assume this would also reduce Ernest Kline to pants-shitting rage.

 

[Commander X]

There's a thread over at the AutoAdmit forums where someone is tearing into RPT piece by piece - and it's a doozy.

I'm up to where the thread author is at chapter 10 part 2, the writing shows that Cline, like many "nerds", doesn't know anything about technology really, just that they make noises and displays of colors and light that sometimes make him clap his hands together delightedly like a toddler.

-Faisal reveals that, while they can't track Anorak directly, they can at least detect if he comes close. He provides Wade and the others with "Bracelets of Detection" made by GSS's engineers, which will glow red if the Robes of Anorak come within 100 meters of them. Apparently, the bracelets were already prepared because GSS was suspicious of how strong the robes were. Also, since they're in a frigging video game, couldn't they program them to glow red if he's, say, 200 meters away?
-During his confrontation with Wade, Anorak mentioned the "Big Red Button." Wade had kept the button a secret, so now he's forced to spill the beans. Nobody seems mad about Wade keeping it a secret. Instead they just drone about how deleting OASIS would be the worst thing ever:

"'Why would Mr. Halliday be reckless enough to build a self-destruct mechanism into the OASIS?' Faisal asked, still shaking his head in disbelief. 'He knew there would be disastrous consequences if the OASIS ever went offline and stayed that way. We conducted several studies, involving dozens of simulated scenarios.' He turned to me. 'Mr. Watts, if you—or anyone else—ever presses that button, it would disrupt global communications, law enforcement, transportation, and commerce….The world would be thrown into complete chaos.'

"Shoto nodded. 'The entire drone protection force would go offline and remain offline,' he added. 'There would be shipping delays, food and medicine shortages. Rioting. Markets would crash. States would fail.' He shook his head. 'Jesus, the whole of human civilization might even collapse.'"

-The crew babble a bit more to autistically cover various angles: They can't turn off the OASIS for a few seconds, because logout would still be disabled. They also speculate that Anorak's firmware update may include a protocol to lobotomize anyone who gets unplugged. And finally, they speculate that Anorak might deliberately hold 500 million ppl hostage by threatening to press the Big Red Button. That leads to this preposterous exchange:

"'But if Anorak did that, he’d be killing himself too. Wouldn’t he?'

"'Unless he has a backup,' Faisal said. 'A standalone simulation we don’t know about.'

"'Like that one TNG episode with Professor Moriarty,' Shoto said.

"'Ship in a Bottle,' Aech and Art3mis said in unison.

"'Can our guys analyze Anorak’s firmware?' I asked. 'To find out what he changed?'

"Faisal shook his head. 'Our software engineers are trying to do that right now,' he said. 'But Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they’ve never seen before. They don’t even know how to disassemble or decompile the code, and even if they could, they don’t think they would be able to understand it.'"

-Yep, just do replace your firmware with a new programming language in a firmware update. Nbd. More than anything, this shows just how egregiously pathetic Cline and those like him are. They imagine themselves as smart "nerds," but they're just goons who consume pop culture. Actual computer science might as well be fucking magic, and in this book it literally is. Anorak is a powerful wizard who can cast more powerful computer spells than other wizards.

Science being like magic for nerds like Cline certainly holds true for a passage in which Cline's self-insert character Wade's ex-gf (they dated for two weeks but had SO MUCH SEX YOU GUYS!) escapes her AI-hacked plane at high altitude:

-After that's done, Art3mis announces that she has no plan to be held hostage, and logs out of the OASIS. She then lets the cast see a camera feed from her plane. While the plane is attached to a tanker jet getting refueled, she puts on a parachute and blows out the emergency exit, parachuting out. Everyone starts clapping (not flame). Art3mis's parachute is described as bearing the logo of her foundation -- "the one where the adjacent letter t and number 3 in her name resembled an armored woman in profile, drawing back on a futuristic hunting bow." I wonder what a "futuristic hunting bow" looks like.

-But wait: She thought getting away would be that easy? LOL no. Her plane's autopilot swerves to pursue her. First, it tries to ram with her in mid-air, but Samantha cuts her primary parachute just in time. She falls untill she's just a few hunderd feet above the ground, then pulls her reserve chute. But even then, once she lands, the newly-refueled jet dives into her landing zone and explodes

A helpful AutoAdmit poster comments:

Holy shit. This guy solves problems like a six year old does. Art3mis' drone piloted business jet - the type of plane that has a pressurized cabin and cruises at 600 mph at 35,000 feet, a very different beast than the unpressurized planes that fly at 150 mph at 10,000 feet that are typically used by skydivers - has been hijacked by a malevolent AI? Boom, Art3mis just pops the ol' cabin door open and hops out with her parachute. Nevermind the fact that pressurized cabins are pressure vessels engineered so as to make "blowing the door" impossible unless the cabin is depressurized beforehand, a process that would be performed via the very same system that HallAIday has just hijacked. Nope, she just pops the doors and jumps from an aircraft flying at 600 mph against a 250 mph headwind, which NOAA's windchill calculator says would make the -40 C/F ambient feel like -141 F/-100 C and freeze your eyeballs, lungs, and skin instantly.

Reading the excerpts in that thread really helps the cultural significance of Cline's novels actually achieving bestseller status strike home for me: they provide a vivid picture of the psyche of the sort of people who are only concerned with nothing but living and CONSOOMing their little dopamine hits via BIDEO GAEMS and "geek culture" movies i.e. endlessly rehashing the material they enjoyed as children. The hero-fantasy of RPO and Armada, where the nerd hero's skill at remembering stuff about 80s Saturday Morning Cartoons or being really good at video games is just a cover atop the real fantasy at the center of the premise, which is all about getting to limitlessly consume fantasy escapism with no nagging parents or other authority figure buzzkills to pull the plug or badger them into logging out for awhile.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

There's a thread over at the AutoAdmit forums where someone is tearing into RPT piece by piece - and it's a doozy.

I'm up to where the thread author is at chapter 10 part 2, the writing shows that Cline, like many "nerds", doesn't know anything about technology really, just that they make noises and displays of colors and light that sometimes make him clap his hands together delightedly like a toddler.

Spoiler

Science being like magic for nerds like Cline certainly holds true for a passage in which Cline's self-insert character Wade's ex-gf (they dated for two weeks but had SO MUCH SEX YOU GUYS!) escapes her AI-hacked plane at high altitude:








A helpful AutoAdmit poster comments:

Reading the excerpts in that thread really helps the cultural significance of Cline's novels actually achieving bestseller status strike home for me: they provide a vivid picture of the psyche of the sort of people who are only concerned with nothing but living and CONSOOMing their little dopamine hits via BIDEO GAEMS and "geek culture" movies i.e. endlessly rehashing the material they enjoyed as children. The hero-fantasy of RPO and Armada, where the nerd hero's skill at remembering stuff about 80s Saturday Morning Cartoons or being really good at video games is just a cover atop the real fantasy at the center of the premise, which is all about getting to limitlessly consume fantasy escapism with no nagging parents or other authority figure buzzkills to pull the plug or badger them into logging out for awhile.

It's an amazing train wreck. Wil Wheaton even sounds disgusted with performing the audiobook from time to time. This piece of shit is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

[Syaoran Li]

So, I recently thought of something this morning.

I've noticed that despite being a concept that could lend itself well to books and movies, a lot of the more well known works about virtual reality tend to suck. Ready Player One is the most egregious example, The Matrix is an overrated crock of shit with two god-awful sequels, and Sword Art Online is a mess that started out as a generic but okay knock-off of .hack//Sign before it spiraled into the awful clusterfuck it is today.

Westworld was good in the first season but has since declined sharply.

If I actually had the talent to write and was going to write a "Ready Player One: Good Version", here's what I'd do to make it slightly less autistic and retarded than Cline's novels.

1. Emphasize the shoddy nature of the real world and how everyone is miserable

2. In this setting, VR is considered a unique privilege promoted and gatekept by the elite and the upper-middle classes and not merely a regular activity. Nobody who goes into VR ever really seems to come back, which helps sell the idea of it being this ultimate escape into paradise. The mega-corporation that runs the VR world has a lottery every year

3. The main character lucks out and wins the lottery.

4. He goes into the VR world thinking it's gonna be awesome, but he's now trapped and if he dies in the game, he dies in real life. He can't be the Marty Stu hero of his dreams and the corporation actually picks what world that new players spawn in. Take a page from Westworld where different servers are a pastiche of different genres and setting archetypes

5. Avoid the consoomer stigma and keep any copyrighted references to a bare minimum. If you must have a bunch of fictional characters from preexisting works, keep them limited to public domain figures. Sherlock Holmes showing up in your novel is a lot less inherently autistic than Han Solo or Captain America doing the same.

6. If you have to have one consoomer-tier 80's reference, go for Highlander's concept of "The Prize". Make it to where someone in the VR world can win The Prize by achieving certain specific criteria and completing a list of specific and difficult goals to reach. The entire world is designed to distract players from ever actually getting The Prize.

7. The main character lucks out and wins The Prize. The twist is that just like in the 80's pop culture work that it's referencing, the Prize is simply being able to die. So, he's brought into the real world and is then killed. His last thoughts as he's dying is "Be careful what you wish for". The End.

Make it a dark satire of escapism and consoomer culture.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You know, I always thought that a VR device that can kill you if you get unplugged is a retarded concept that no one will ever buy. But reading this thread, I understand that people like the author will gladly kamikaze themselves if there's a Mario game on it.

2. In this setting, VR is considered an expensive privilege of the elite and the upper-middle classes and not a regular activity. Nobody who goes into VR ever really seems to come back, which helps sell the idea of it being this ultimate escape into paradise. The mega-corporation that runs the VR world has a lottery every year

The problem of VR being an expensive privilage is that it's not logical or makes for a good allegory. In-universe, the elite and rich won't go into virtual fantasies if they are already fixed in the real world and can spend their time partying and flaunting their superiority. While in the real world, the people who spend most of their time online are the middle class who at this point basically given up on any social mobility and use consoom as replacement for self-improvement and self-reflection. VR should be the opium of the masses, being sponsored by the elites to keep their competition placated.
The VN (with gameplay) Baldur's Sky does this point really fucking well.

 

[Syaoran Li]

You know, I always thought that a VR device that can kill you if you get unplugged is a retarded concept that no one will ever buy. But reading this thread, I understand that people like the author will gladly kamikaze themselves if there's a Mario game on it.


The problem of VR being an expensive privilage is that it's not logical or makes for a good allegory. In-universe, the elite and rich won't go into virtual fantasies if they are already fixed in the real world and can spend their time partying and flaunting their superiority. While in the real world, the people who spend most of their time online are the middle class who at this point basically given up on any social mobility and use consoom as replacement for self-improvement and self-reflection. VR should be the opium of the masses, being sponsored by the elites to keep their competition placated.
The VN (with gameplay) Baldur's Sky does this point really fucking well.

I probably should've thought that out more clearly a little more and worded it better.

Specifically, the idea I had is that VR being an expensive privilege isn't because of the actual price but that it's heavily gatekept by the wealthy elites and they decide which ones from the lower middle classes and working classes can enter the VR world.

Basically, imagine a dystopia that's decades or even a century after a "Great Reset" type event where the entire world is pretty much locked down under a corporate world order.

The consoomer mentality has since morphed into an actual organized religion with earning the privilege of entering VR being promoted as the equivalent of going to Paradise.

The elite decided making VR escapism an earned privilege would be a good way to make sure the masses will have a more earnest motive to stay well-behaved, avoid wrong think, and to work and consoom.

The idea of a yearly lottery where random people can simply luck their way into VR without boosting their social credit score is meant as a safety valve of sorts for the perennial losers and potential ne'er-do-wells.

The main character is a loser who lucks out and wins his proverbial golden ticket by sheer chance.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I probably should've thought that out more clearly a little more and worded it better.

Specifically, the idea I had is that VR being an expensive privilege isn't because of the actual price but that it's heavily gatekept by the wealthy elites and they decide which ones from the lower middle classes and working classes can enter the VR world.

Basically, imagine a dystopia that's decades or even a century after a "Great Reset" type event where the entire world is pretty much locked down under a corporate world order.

The consoomer mentality has since morphed into an actual organized religion with earning the privilege of entering VR being promoted as the equivalent of going to Paradise.

The elite decided making VR escapism an earned privilege would be a good way to make sure the masses will have a more earnest motive to stay well-behaved, avoid wrong think, and to work and consoom.

The idea of a yearly lottery where random people can simply luck their way into VR without boosting their social credit score is meant as a safety valve of sorts for the perennial losers and potential ne'er-do-wells.

The main character is a loser who lucks out and wins his proverbial golden ticket by sheer chance.

I don't think it works well with the western mindset of "you are always a winner". Starting from school, people today are being told throughout their lives that they are great and destined to big things, only to realize that it's too much of a hard work to get ahead and sink into games/movies/shows where they can fantasize about being the very best (which is exactly what Ready Player One is). VR should be constantly accessible in some fashion, because it is the ultimate embodient of "Soma" (from Brave New World) - a drug to cause people to sink into their own world, while any deviancy should be punished by withholding the VR. Having access to VR something you need to earn, negates the fact that modern popular culture is cheap to the point everyone can access it, and the fact that people who fall for it are basically human slugs who don't want to put an effort.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

There's a thread over at the AutoAdmit forums where someone is tearing into RPT piece by piece - and it's a doozy.

I'm up to where the thread author is at chapter 10 part 2, the writing shows that Cline, like many "nerds", doesn't know anything about technology really, just that they make noises and displays of colors and light that sometimes make him clap his hands together delightedly like a toddler.

Spoiler

Science being like magic for nerds like Cline certainly holds true for a passage in which Cline's self-insert character Wade's ex-gf (they dated for two weeks but had SO MUCH SEX YOU GUYS!) escapes her AI-hacked plane at high altitude:








A helpful AutoAdmit poster comments:

Reading the excerpts in that thread really helps the cultural significance of Cline's novels actually achieving bestseller status strike home for me: they provide a vivid picture of the psyche of the sort of people who are only concerned with nothing but living and CONSOOMing their little dopamine hits via BIDEO GAEMS and "geek culture" movies i.e. endlessly rehashing the material they enjoyed as children. The hero-fantasy of RPO and Armada, where the nerd hero's skill at remembering stuff about 80s Saturday Morning Cartoons or being really good at video games is just a cover atop the real fantasy at the center of the premise, which is all about getting to limitlessly consume fantasy escapism with no nagging parents or other authority figure buzzkills to pull the plug or badger them into logging out for awhile.

Thanks for the link.
From reading it I think the author literally cannot think of an entertaiment that is not a power fantasy. If you'd describe a universe like 40k his head will explode.

 

[BScCollateral]

View attachment 1747507

This is a book that has words in it.

I didn't like the first book, because it reminded me of those "Minute Mystery" juveniles which try to turn trivia questions into murder mysteries.

Also, I automatically drop the second several letter grades for not mentioning the best Arcadia. Whatta fake nerd.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I want this to be made into a movie so I can watch the ensuing RLM videos about it.

 

[Jimothy]

I appreciate Ernest Cline as a litmus test. Whenever I get book recommendations from someone I can save my precious time and ignore their list if it includes RPO or Armada.
A couple of the guys that used to do Mystery Science Theater 3000 made a book club podcast just to make fun of RPO and other bad books. It's pretty entertaining. (link)

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Caught up with the autoadmit thread and it's a consistent level of aweful with some notable peaks. It's very noticable that it tries at once to have a gloating of how "America is now a third world country" while also keeping at "America is an evil superpower". In general it is completely hypocritical considering that the author basically ignores every piece of media that did not arrive from the USA, UK or Japan (and even the japanese and uk media is the most mundane shit ever).
In general the book fails at a multitude of ways:
Economically it thinks that corporations are benevolent gods with infinite money that can do every thing instantaneously with no economic ramifications or global feedback.
Enviromentally the heroes talk about the evils of global warming while making monuments to themselves that would cause city scale emissions just by keeping them in order (nevermind building them), not to mention private plain flights. Also no one talks about how all this in depth virtual reality would require ludcirous amounts of energy to operate. In a way it's the perfect summary of the global green movement.
Mathematically, the "you can't log out of a virtual reality that would kill you after 12 hours" would mean that, on average, every hour passed kills 1/12 of the original 500 billion because not everybody just logged in.
Chronologically the author has no idea how much time training or reading takes. I am convinced he hadn't read a book that isn't a comic or has more than 100 pages.
Legally, the author thinks that a company can legally murder you if you signed up the user agreement. We've reached South Park level insanity.
LGBT wise it's just pointless simpering. The hero is okay with trannies because he has taken it up the ass online. And one of the protagonists makes a special school for LGBT kids in the dystopian world because apperantly fuck normal kids who want to have a school. I'm also convinved that every modern day reference is done purely out of woke.
Finally, it is the most pathetic morality fails. The hero does aweful shit, feels bad for it, but winks to the reader that it would be totally awesome to do what he does. The book absolutely praises infantalism, anti-intellectualism and hedonism because this is the culture people like the author has been raised into.

I liked to say Brave New World is not a dystopia because in the end it is a functioning society of man-babies who's contend with their lot in life. RPT2 is a far worse nostalgia - where society doesn't function, the man babies are even stupider and they spend all the time wishing they were someone else.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

Thanks for the link.
From reading it I think the author literally cannot think of an entertaiment that is not a power fantasy. If you'd describe a universe like 40k his head will explode.

Tfw your power fantasy involves being a shut-in and banning trolls from the internet

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

So, I recently thought of something this morning.

I've noticed that despite being a concept that could lend itself well to books and movies, a lot of the more well known works about virtual reality tend to suck. Ready Player One is the most egregious example, The Matrix is an overrated crock of shit with two god-awful sequels, and Sword Art Online is a mess that started out as a generic but okay knock-off of .hack//Sign before it spiraled into the awful clusterfuck it is today.

Westworld was good in the first season but has since declined sharply.

If I actually had the talent to write and was going to write a "Ready Player One: Good Version", here's what I'd do to make it slightly less autistic and retarded than Cline's novels.

1. Emphasize the shoddy nature of the real world and how everyone is miserable

2. In this setting, VR is considered a unique privilege promoted and gatekept by the elite and the upper-middle classes and not merely a regular activity. Nobody who goes into VR ever really seems to come back, which helps sell the idea of it being this ultimate escape into paradise. The mega-corporation that runs the VR world has a lottery every year

3. The main character lucks out and wins the lottery.

4. He goes into the VR world thinking it's gonna be awesome, but he's now trapped and if he dies in the game, he dies in real life. He can't be the Marty Stu hero of his dreams and the corporation actually picks what world that new players spawn in. Take a page from Westworld where different servers are a pastiche of different genres and setting archetypes

5. Avoid the consoomer stigma and keep any copyrighted references to a bare minimum. If you must have a bunch of fictional characters from preexisting works, keep them limited to public domain figures. Sherlock Holmes showing up in your novel is a lot less inherently autistic than Han Solo or Captain America doing the same.

6. If you have to have one consoomer-tier 80's reference, go for Highlander's concept of "The Prize". Make it to where someone in the VR world can win The Prize by achieving certain specific criteria and completing a list of specific and difficult goals to reach. The entire world is designed to distract players from ever actually getting The Prize.

7. The main character lucks out and wins The Prize. The twist is that just like in the 80's pop culture work that it's referencing, the Prize is simply being able to die. So, he's brought into the real world and is then killed. His last thoughts as he's dying is "Be careful what you wish for". The End.

Make it a dark satire of escapism and consoomer culture.

There's a famous quote out there that states: "There are only three stories: the man who learned better, the brave little tailor, and boy meets girl." The gist of it is that every story can be boiled down into one of these three. Lord of the Rings? Brave tailor. Macbeth? Man who learned better. Every romance ever made? Boy meets girl.

The problem with works like Ready Player One is that they don't really boil down into anything. Trying to do so is like leaving a pot of distilled water on the stove until it boils dry, hoping to glean insight from the resultant scorch marks.
You could argue that RPO is a "boy meets girl" or "brave tailor" story but it's not really either. The focus of this book and by extension the sequel is on Cline's unhealthy obsession with the 1980's. Sure Parzival gets with Artemis at the end but that plot thread isn't the focus. Sure fighting off the IOI goons and winning the keys are important but they also take backseat to the fucking references. When what is ostensibly the main plot thread and driving narrative force takes backseat to your slavish recreation of Atari Joust in text form there is a problem.

The version you presented is infinitely more interesting because it bait & switches the reader with a "brave tailor" beginning that ends with a "man who learned better" scenario. I would gladly read a dour book about the lottery ticket from Hell than the endless pop culture packing peanuts that Ready Player One brought to the table.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

There are whole, better novels about how the rpo world came to be, without the severe 80s sperging and obsession. I lived through the 80s and I never knew anybody so single-mindedly fixated on everything within, though if I knew the Goldberg creator I probably would have kicked their ass in high school.

 

[Jequiti]

There are whole, better novels about how the rpo world came to be

You caught my attention here. Can you name some? I used to read/play/watch .hack// back in my teenage years and I'm not really interested in Sword Art Online since Alicization became a thing.
After I'm done with Ready Player Two, I feel like I'm never reading anything from Cline ever again, so any suggestions will be appreciated.