pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



nicky
@nicky

i love bad literature so much. i love when someone has the confidence to write a novel but none of the talent or skill to back it up. i cant get to sleep tonight so im finally diving into Ready Player One and it's like... actively painful. it's clumsy and awkward and completely up its own ass. but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't having a good time!!

and this isn't a "so bad it's good" thing either, this is slop. this is less than slop. i'm on chapter 4 and i already fucking hate it. i love how i hate it. it makes me feel like i could get back into writing because i know i can do better than this. Ernest Cline is a hack. i have so much to learn from him


nicky
@nicky

this is fucking exhausting. this is transcendent. i am absolutely miserable. i'm having the time of my life


pendell
@pendell

It's so wretched in part I think because it has the seeds of something really clever. If the author had even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, all of this absolute slop could have been recontextualized into a genuinely amazing bit of satire.

I mean, just think about the world this book takes place in. A world so unjust, so vile, so wretched and inhospitable to humanity due to how badly the rich have fucked the entire globe, that the younger generations have no recourse but to escape into VR, to spend their entire lives living a fabricated existence so they can pretend their lives aren't crushingly desolate and empty. And that world is so vapid, so void in creativity, life, or soul, that the entire culture is built around the popular media of decades past. Nothing new is created anymore, the old is simply recycled and regurgitated. At some point in their history, new art stopped being created, either because humanity as a whole lost the desire to produce it, or because the capitalists who control culture and society deemed new art unnecessary. Probably a mix of both. These kids live in a circular hell of off-air reruns, and there's a whole lot thematically to explore there, sitting just under the surface like an untapped goldmine.

But instead the book is about this kid beating Elon Musk in VRchat by understanding more 80s references and winning all the wealth and power he could ever want, or something. One could almost suggest that the book's absolute refusal to engage with its own concepts and worldbuilding are, in a way, its own searing commentary. That all the characters are just completely blind to it, complicit, happy to eat the slop they're continually fed, happy to be another link in a human centipede of culture, Starship Troopers style. A Starship Troopers-style film adaptation of this book would have been legendary, imo

But then, that's not describing the characters. That's describing the author.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @nicky's post:

To date RPO is the only book to ever earn the distinction of being flung completely across the room by me not once but TWICE, so revolted was I by its crimes against the written word

my ex told me "you have to read this! it's so good, and really funny" and after about 30 pages I was like, "wait, but you think I'm funny, what am I doing with my whole life" full-blown existential crisis mode

The quality of the writing is atrocious, but as a white male capital-g Gamer who grew up in the 90s and 00s diving through the 80s media enjoyed by the generation before me while dreaming of a VR-enriched future... it's still absolutely atrocious slop. Slop that directly pandered to me through "Oh hey, I get that reference. Oh hey, another reference I get. Hah, that's cute how those references have been mixed together. Oh hey this bit is about one of my favourite movies. That's an obscure super robot." I basically see it like the low-grade YouTube Poop of writing, just a mishmash of references assembled into something vaguely original, that is in fact just riffing on other, better works.

I read rpo on my e-ink tablet, which allowed me to scrawl "ew, fuck" in huge block letters across a page without actually defiling a book. and then it got a movie adaptation? by steven spielberg?!!?

full disclosure I remember having fun watching the movie. I don't know if I'd watch it again, but I've definitely seen worse things

i read rpo because i worked in tournaments and a coworker recommended it as an insight into the mindset of competitive gamers and to this day i have no idea which part he was thinking of

in reply to @nicky's post:

SKFJGKDF UUUUGGHH THE ACCIDENTAL COMEDIC TIMING ON THE BILL HICKS LINE LMAOOOO "im so cool 😎 i even mEMORIZED FUNY EDGY COMEDIAN"

i've never heard anything about this book other than "it's popular and has a big movie" so i Assumed there was a good reason people liked it so much???? but oh my GOD LOL

credit where it's due, it is funny, but only if you're laughing at the author :eggbug-sob:

i read this when i was like 12 and it didn't strike me as weird just given how everything online seemed to be about things from the 80s and 90s i had barely heard of. i was like yeah yeah whatever half of all the things i watch are about, like, mario 64 or ocarina of time anyway. this was my view of all adults; obsessed with consumerist trash from their childhood and completely arbitrary in the rules they set up based on them.

i also remember thinking 'going to school exclusively online', 'deepfaking you from just a second of your voice', and 'spending all day in your room for your entire life' were silly and horrible concepts too though. and now a bunch of loser rich ceos think 'making cool thing from book real' is the way to go societally. so im just sayin. i think rpo is like a deeply repulsive unsettling mirror to the psyche of the average millenial (the main character boy) and to societys "pioneers" who have all the money (the ceo guy who was obsessed with like, pacman or whatever.)

rpo is truly astonishingly bad. like it's hard to communicate to people who haven't read it how bad it really is lmao, you just have to show it to people and say "people thought this was really good. critics loved it."

it won an award for "libertarian science fiction" :^)
the sequel is bad in a whole new way, also

in reply to @pendell's post:

Right. There are a couple of potentially brilliant twists, here, speaking as someone who grew up when this media was mainstream.

  1. This is a person with no adult supervision demanding that they...like, go outside or make friends or at least read a book.
  2. There's a certain bigotry to what's mysteriously not on the list. Like, I don't know how a rational '80s consumer loves The Greatest American Hero but not Remington Steele, other than finding maybe Stephanie Zimbalist threatening...

But yeah, like Stranger Things, this is much more about trying to convince readers that being like the author is not sad at all, rather than using those references as commentary.