I finally got around to reading the book yesterday. Hoo boy.

It can be hard for younger folks to believe, and older folks to remember, but in the days before the internet and "geek culture" it was sometimes possible for someone with geeky interests to make it to high school, college, or even beyond without ever actually meeting another geek. Maybe you lived in a small town, or had strict parents, or couldn't afford to travel halfway across the state to the nearest sci-fi convention. Maybe you kept your hobbies a secret because you didn't want the other guys on the basketball team making fun of you, or you figured out that girls were more likely to talk to you if you weren't wearing a tee shirt with a dragon on it.

What that meant was that an openly geeky person could sometimes find themselves in the awkward position of being some poor extremely enthusiastic geek's very first geek friend. Eventually they'd calm the fuck down, but for the first few weeks or whatever, every time you saw them they'd open with some variery of "HAY FELLOW GEEK! LOOK AT ME, I'M GEEKING!!" cram as many Monty Python quotes and tenuous gaming references ("Oops, I dropped my pencil! CRITICAL FUMBLE!") as possible into the conversation, and basically hump your nerd leg until you were ready to swat them with a rolled up newspaper.

Ready Player One read just like that.

There's so, so much wrong with the book that I am not interested in the movie. I won't get into the clumsy virtue signaling, the casual misogyny, the abysmal plotting, or the terrible protagonist because there's articles and articles on that.

But a little thing that pisses me off is there's all these little errors in the book that show Cline wasn't even into most of this stuff and did only the laziest, most cursory research when trying to depict these things. Ex: his description of the opening house in Zork doesn't match the text description or the graphic representation in the game. What does it match? The game's fucking BOX.

Zork had a box? (my parents didn't love me and I had a pirated copy)

What a difference a few decades can make. I never thought anything of that cover when I saw it in shops back in the day, now it is awesomely wrong on so many levels:

The heroic warrior and paragon of 70's manhood looks like he was on his way to Pride week when he stopped for a bit of fun with his sparkle sword.

The goblin cowering on the ground in his shabby clothes is hopelessly outgunned here. This is a robbery homicide in progress.

The jaguar-man creature in the background is just watching the poor goblin get snuffed...and we can't see what he's doing with his other hand.

What is the giant trough of meat supposed to be?

It's just a trough of raw meat. Everyone had one of those back in the 70s.

It's how we made our beef jerky back then, before the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and Beef Jerky Maker took came along and took all the artistry out of the process. You'd dissolve alternating layers of raw beef and macrame in a vat of Jovan Musk and then airbrush the resulting mixture onto the side of a Chevy conversion van to dry.

Only 70s kids will remember!

I only switched to Jovan Musk when they stopped selling Hai Karate.

That's not an Orc*! That's a tiny little goblin*!

*as in hobgoblin/goblin; orc/ur-whatever

Leather Goddesses of Phobos had a comic? No wonder I couldn't have sex with the Sultan's wife.

I still haven’t found anyone who ever wanted to play dungeons and dragons with me.

I find the hard part isn't even finding people who want to play, it's finding people who want to play and can all schedule the same 4-6 hour chunk of free time on a semi-regular basis.

True dat. And then a couple of your players bring various social maturity issues to the table and you're looking for people again. By the time you find a stable group that can let each other have fun some of you find or replace life partners and/or start having kids and the whole endeavor is doomed again.

Pre-internet it's a miracle the game ever got the kind of traction that it did.

The video games were a god send

I found people to play D&D with me, but never a second time.

I will run 5E for you via Roll20, if you want me to Mookie.

Thanks Silent. I think I'm gonna have to stick to junkfood like Rogue Crawlers. Ala Pixel Dungeon. I'd love to see it posted on SE though- but that may not be... realistic?

The offer is there Mookie, starter module shouldn't take more than an evening or two on Roll20, comes with pre-made characters.
I have been wanting to play more D&D, my only current game is once a month so I am not being completely selfless here.

trying do do it on site maybe, but getting a group together and moving to myth weavers/roll 20 or such seems more viable.

I play with my kids, and between their homework and my work schedule, we find it pretty hard. I did play a lot when I was in high school, but then I had 8 hours blocked off every Sunday for it. Plus, fewer responsibilities than as an adult now.

This reminded me of another video I saw about RPO-- which, it turns out as I search for it, is by the very same person. It's basically the same thing but with more snark.
Ready Player One for Girls

Holy shit this has all the "EVERY BOOK, EVERY GAME, EVERY SONG" that made the audio book so annoying.

Saw that one too. :D

Her video on Rogue One is on point if you haven't seen it.

I like her suicide squad script doctor vid. I think that was the first of hers I ran across.

Except when he gets all quantum crap!

Do you have time to hear about our lord and savior, BeOS?

I haven't seen it, nor read the book, and based on what I've heard (Half in the Bag), I'm in no rush to do so. Grew up on Gibson and Stephenson too. Maybe I'm just old. I'm so far ahead of the curve, I'm over the hill!

It's not a great book, but it's the VR book that the current gen grew up on. I remember when Oculus first hit the scene, Snowcrash and RPO were the bibles everyone was bandying about. Of course then oculus sold out to the company that was essentially the villains Of RPO. So....

It’s dystopian future Harry Potter.

It's the most likely dystopia. Plus, brainwashing!

Except for the whole universal online education and the poor having access to VR.

I would love to have seen Neo-Comcast throttle his connection right before he was going to win.

That part seems plausible. 20 years ago, who'd have thought homeless people would have smartphones and internet access?

William Gibson, probably.

LOL, you're kidding, right? A virtual charter school? I bet that's standard roleplaying fare over in /r/NeoliberalsGoneWild.

Oh, I mean I could see more of a Brave New World propaganda/ 1984 hour of hate thing Fox News thing.

The movie was a good mix of averaging out all 80s and gaming reference and Internet lingo for the masses into a PG-13 movie.

If you liked Wreck-It Ralph, you'll like Ready Player One and the upcoming Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2

Just saw it because Quiet Place was sold out.

‘Read’ the book on audio on a long work drive.

T.J. Miller is best part of the movie. Should have replaced the villain they used.

Analysis in link is pretty spot on.

Total spoilers:

We're supposed to have flying cars by now. The leap in tech is happening with CGI. It's not farfetched

I don't think we get flying cars in our lifetime. Too much can go wrong, and everyone below you has a bad day.

Agreed. Widespread, every-home availability of flying cars is a complete no-go without a vast upgrade to the world's communication, guidance and geolocation networks as well as an energy source that can allow small vehicles to provide VTOL and long-range flight with low emissions and low operating cost.

It seems more likely to me that when such technology emerges and the flying car becomes available to the masses we will neither own those vehicles nor pilot them. It's more likely we'll see an automated sky-UBER scenario than a Jetsons scenario.

And that's probably for the best. The street racing enthusiasts and the mouthbreathers out there rolling coal will likely never be fit to pilot an aircraft, even one with digital training wheels.

I’ll settle for just having a decent flow of traffic.

Sorry to tell you the odds are still better on the flying car. See: people

30% would be furries if it came out now, but it's supposed to be the far future where everyone uses VR. The sort of people that were on the internet in 1998 aren't the sort on it in 2018.

Not true, there are still plenty of perverts on the internet.

It’s more akward when the avatar pegging you could be your grandma.

I knew it was grandma when she ignored my safeword.

Never make "grandma" your safeword.

Well yeah, I know that NOW...

And we really appreciate you gathering them all on the same site for us. ;-)

I should have stuck to my guns better. The bumper sticker was pretty specific. :P

You be sure to keep receipts of whatever you collect. We're going to expect ~30% of whatever you get. Thanks again. ;)

Aside from hearing the book title and having knowledge that Spielberg was adapting it for film, this is the most I've seen or read about it. I also learned a new term for this "genre" of book: LitRPG.

I was reminded of when I was a teen and attempted to collect all the info I could find online from game manuals to build a planet in which every NES original creation (no ported games or ones adapted from other media) lived and interacted on a giant landmass in their respective kingdoms. I made some plot about Dr. Light finding these orbs on the moon that orbited the planet that, unbeknownst to anyone, contained a mysterious dark energy that turned all the princesses evil and erupted a huge war. It was about a decade later that I first heard of "Game of Thrones" and realized I had basically been creating an 8-bit version of that.

Loved the book. Probably because i loved the book, I was disappointed in the movie. They changed too much that didn't need to be changed for cinematic conversion. If i had not read the book then the movie probably would have been much more enjoyable.

Ready Player One (the book) was indistinguishable from a Family Guy episode: just constant non-sequitors referencing better narratives.

It was fucking booooooring.