Amph Ready Player One- book and film discussion thread

Oh I have that too in theaters near me. Maybe I should rephrase what I said before. I meant to say why buy tickets weeks, if not months, in advance of a showing? No matter how popular a movie may be near me, chances are pretty good that I'm able to secure good seats within the middle of the theater as soon as a week in advance of the showing. During the holidays like Christmas and New Years it might be difficult; but during a normal weekend it's not really an issue.

 

Why wait a week when I can assure I get good seats now? The price isn't going to change. I get peace of mind today.

 

Do you always look to see movies during opening weekend?

 

Yes, that's usually the only time I go is opening weekend. I want to see if before it's spoiled.

 

No it doesn't. People think the sky being the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel means static, but that's what CRTs did when tuned to no channel. The intent was - having seen and lived neon-infused Asian skies at night I can confirm it - a warm blackness, where there was a faint glow to it. That kind of partially, almost backlit darkness:


Like that.

But the reason I compare the two is that the plot is similarlly around the virtual world being a counterpart, running in parrallel, to the real world and influencing it directly. In Snow Crash, it's because of a premise that involves Babylonian ur-language being itself a virus and that virus being able to be transmitted through the Metaverse to cause fatal brain damage.

Stephenson would return to the theme of the virtual world intersecting with the real world in REAMDE, which is also a better novel.

I agree on the humour, but honestly what makes Snow Crash the better choice was how oddly prescient it is with respect of the anarcho-capitalism that makes up the day to day life in the United States. There's an element of hyperbole to everything, of course, but if you compare American 2018 to the story, it feels like the current trajectory is uninterrupted. And people aren't stuck on 2004 L3375p34k.

And frankly, Hiro Protagonist is the best name for a laconic cyberpunk antihero yet.

 

I've seen each of the last three SW movies during opening weekend, and I managed to buy a good ticket within a week or so.

 

And the good seats for big films sell out near me at the cinemas I like to go to on opening weekend. I really don’t see the point of this anecdotal evidence, or a reason not to buy in advance.

 

Yeah. You can feel free to continue posting about why no one should see RPO because you didn't like the novel.

 

Don't get defensive, Ernest.

 

It's not suprising you like both Ashoka Tano and RPO. The rich depth of character in both is the glue that binds them.

 

As if I care at this point if someone doesn't like a character I do. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. It is YOUR OPINION that she doesn't have a rich depth of character; just as it's YOUR OPINION that RPO is a bad movie with bad characters.

 

seems like you care.

 

I really don't.

 

It's ok to admit you do.

EDIT: Also, since adaptations are adapting the source material (wasn't just a cute name after all), and I've continually referenced the book, maybe you should revise your assumption that I'm critiquing the film.

 

But I don't. You can call it morbid fascination that this particular thread is as popular as it is; considering most of the people posting in it don't like the novel.

 

I think you care a little too much.

 

Stephenson wrote in a later essay "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash' "
As for Gibson, here's what he said about it:
"I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful, a whopping anachronism right at the very start of my career,in the imaginary future, but an invisible one, interestingly. One that revels a particular grace shared by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I must have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal free channel on a wooden cabinet motorola with fabric covered speakers. Readers compensated for me shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden and imagined whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on a melancholy of the phrase dead channel."

I believe that the creators of Max Headroom indicated that the show always opening with static as an homage to Neuromancer.

True; Gibson didn't really address a lot of the social ramifications of the Matrix in the Sprawl trilogy, although it was stated that it was extensively used in Neuromancer - but on an individual level, he did put on stage the idea of 'living forever' in virtual reality.
In many ways, Snow Crash seemed both a homage and a parody of the original batch of cyberpunk novels, which had already run their course by the time it came out... and needed to be parodied, with Bruce Sterling declaring everything to be "[blank]-punk". (my favorite definition: "Nowpunk is a term invented by Bruce Sterling, which he applied to contemporary fiction set in the time period (particularly in the post-Cold War 1990s to the present) in which the fiction is being published, i.e. all contemporary fiction." )

Well, the book was set in 1998...

I'm not disputing that!

 

Also, Ender Sigh, what you showed a picture of isn't a "warm blackness." It's just a bunch of light pollution in a heavily developed area.

 

Right, but that kind of sky is not common in Asia, especially China/Japan, and during summer they're humid as all get out. Unless you've experienced a humid Asian city at night you won't necessarily get it - and Neuromancer definitely describes Chiba as warm. It "only" gets to around 80% humidity in summer there (as opposed to >95% in Singapore) but still - the impression I get now of that opening line is very defined by the warmth of the night sky in Asia.

 

I've never watched a meme die in front of my eyes.

 

you seem upset. Want to discuss?

 

This isn't even about Ready Player One.

It's about an improperly used meme format that's crossed over from Reddit to here.

When memes intrude into the JCC, you know they're dead.

 

SELL SELL SELL

 

They couldn't get Star Wars

Or Ultra-Man.