Episode 2 – A List and a Lich

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Update your Gunter Wiki, crapburgers, it’s time for a new episode! This week we calibrate our tastes with Mike’s, delve into the delightful parenthetical autistism of James Halliday, take a closer look at the infamous “List” that initially caught our attention, discuss the danger of taking the advice to “write what you know”, and crown our Dumbest Sentence of the Week!

This episode covers chapters 4 thru 8 of Ready Player One. For next time, read thru chapter 13, page 133 in our edition.

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5 Replies to “Episode 2 – A List and a Lich”

  1. Some stuff that doesn’t tweet well:

    Cline does mention copyright, curiously to note that things over 40 years old are freely available. I’m assuming Disney was destroyed by a revenant, headless zombie Walt and the various eternally extended copyright lengths were rolled back to the more sensible 40 years at some unmentioned point in the dystopic future.

    Also, you’re right vis-a-vis “The Tomb of Horrors”. I feel like somehow the author is managing to be both an ubernerd AND a poser. Like some kind of Pendergast.

  2. I am a fan of Midnight Oil, who had a varied musical catalogue and were active the entire 1980s and beyond. So the most offensive part of the List to me was that the cherry on top of his encyclopedic knowledge of the era’s music was *having heard of* Midnight Oil’s top hit in America.

    It seems clear that of the areas of pop culture listed, he’s weakest in music, unless we start including 80s dance moves.

  3. Also, no way, on a game planet populated by high schoolers, would a conspicuous artificial feature like the skull made of stones remain unnoticed for 5 years. That’s just silly.

  4. Who were some of the other bad authors mentioned in this episode? I wanted to find out more about them.

  5. For the Nintendo thing, the real reason is probably because Nintendo is notoriously litigious with its intellectual properties, suing people even for things that are clearly fair use. But this is also easily explained in universe.

    We are told, repeatedly, that a lot of what’s popular in the world of RP1 is popular specifically because Halliday’s Easter Egg caused a whole new generation of people to discover the stuff he liked. Halliday didn’t have a Nintendo system when he was a kid, so he was not nostalgic for Nintendo, and consequently it didn’t have the same kind of resurgence as the other stuff.

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