372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

When we last left Zack Lightman, he was submerged beneath the Antarctic Ocean, trying to retrieve his father and save the world. But then it was getting close to happy hour, so Ernest Cline decided to just wrap things up and hit publish on one of the most unsatisfying, unbelievably rushed endings we’ve ever seen. We’re talking about an ending where cancer is cured IN ONE SENTENCE, and then the fact that MOST OTHER DISEASES were also cured is tacked on as a parenthetical to that sentence.

Conor & Mike are here to talk you through it though, with ruminations on MLB.tv’s playoff feeds, contorted faces, and a leaked scene featuring their new favorite character, The Emissary. Thanks for reading along with us, it’s been a lot of fun!

Since this is the FINAL Armada episode, we’re auctioning off our copies of the books. PLUS, Lucas Antoniak did an original, one of a kind painting of Chuckette, the original inflatable rig cow, that we’re including in the auction. All proceeds will go to 826 National.

Tickets are still available for our live show, April 11th in Minneapolis, but they’re going fast!

Need something to fill the Cline shaped void in your reading schedule? Get Conor’s book, The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe!

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As humanity’s potential end draws near, our heroes still have not been allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones back on Earth. So they all do what any normal person would do in that situation: bang the hell of out someone they just met a few hours ago.

Mike and Conor’s faces contort as they try to make sense of this lovefest. They’ll also hurt a mixture of insults and encouragement at each other as they try to determine the pop culture source of every Shakespeare quote Whoadie spouts, and feel goofy grins spread across their faces as they stump each other with a VERY difficult final installment of Real or Fanfic

Your assignment for next week: finish the damn book! And then buy a ticket to see us live in Minneapolis, April 11th at Sisyphus Brewing. Tickets available here.

Logo and Inflateable Cow Rig T-shirts are currently on sale for just 14 bucks! All t-shirts and our live show poster done by Lucas Antoniak.

Conor’s novel The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe continues to delight readers despite its lack of Star Wars references and inaccurate Godzilla metaphors.

This week’s fanfic written by: Paul DeCoursey-Clark, Daniel Conrad, Alex in Chicago, Jordan Roher, Janelle Scinta, Nick Donald, & Alex Fauth.

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The Europan death armada is just  hours away, and mankind’s last defense force is behaving about how you’d expect: grinning, crushing hard, and making references to classic 80s horror anthologies.

With only 100 pages left in the book, Mike and Conor are convinced that events that advance the plot forward may soon begin to actually occur. In the meantime, we’ll discuss the gamers’ favorite snack foods. There’s also a interesting historical footnote we uncovered revealing the pivotal role D&D played in WW2 and an exceedingly tricky Real or Fancic?

Your assignment for next week: Read up until PHASE THREE, page 293 in our edition.

Please join us on April 11th, for our first ever LIVE podcast, at Sisyphus Brewing in Minneapolis! We’ll be discussing the Ready Player One movie. Online ticketing available soon!

Picked up a copy of Conor’s book, The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe yet?

What about an official 372 Pages t-shirt, designed by Lucas Antoniak?

And keep checking our RiffTrax Kickstarter page, where any day now, an extremely relevant stretch goal will be announced!

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The calendars may say that it’s March, but to us it’s Clinetober! Here at 372 Pages we’re power-leaping into the month like a terrible Godzilla simile from the classic Toho kaiju flick Godzilla. This week’s reading may have broken the all-time record for most notes scrawled in the margins of our copies of Armada.

Conor & Mike are here to examine all of the rich, complex new characters we meet: religious housewife, stoned dude, streetwise teen, and Asian stereotype.  They’ll also examine the classic Angry Chief trope as well as the curious priorities Armada’s characters seem to have when faced with imminent war and annihilation. Plus, an exclusive look at the controversial new process of “Clineifying” classic audiobooks!

All this plus a very tricky Real or Fanfic, the Dumb Sentence of the Week, and for the first time ever a consensus on the Boring Sentence of the Week!

Next week’s assignment: read up to chapter 19, page 250 in our editions.

Conor’s novel The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe is available here.

We have logo t-shirts and one depicting the inflatable cow that is the original hell of a rig! They are available here. Shirt designs by Lucas Antoniak, whose work is here.

Check out our 2018 RiffTrax Kickstarter. Stretch goals announced soon!

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Mike and Conor cover an absolutely thrilling stretch of Armada in this episode. Hold your breath because we’re about to discuss all of this: not one but TWO phone contact exchanging scenes, not one but TWO briefings in a large auditorium, and to cap it all off: an EULA acceptance scene!!!

We’ll also explore some of the unintentional comedy in the book, fail miserably in identifying fan fic or real, and shatter the world record for use of the word “Clineian”.

Your assignment for next week: read up to Chapter 16, page 205 in our version.

We have t-shirts now! They are available here. Shirt designs by Lucas Antoniak, whose work is here.

Conor wrote a novel! It’s better than Armada! Buy it here.

Check out our 2018 RiffTrax Kickstarter. We’ll be announcing stretch goals soon and there’s one our listeners may be particularly excited about…

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In this episode we meet Zack’s insanely hot TV addicted gamer mom. Turns out the Hot but Relateable Mom trope isn’t just a Clineian invention, and Conor reveals where he’s seen it turn up recently.

Also, Mike was able to pull some strings and secure a scene from the movie version of Armada, a movie so secret, it hasn’t even been announced yet! Some of those actors sound familiar…

There’s more Star Wars than you can shake a rig at, but also inexplicably Vanilla Sky and The Edge of Tomorrow references, not to mention Dumb Sentences, Boring Sentences, and some incredibly creative fanfic submitted by listeners!

Your next assignment: Read up to chapter 12, page 148 in our edition. We’ll take next week off as Mike travels to London for two RiffTrax Live shows.

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In this first fifty pages of Armada, our hero sees a flying saucer, reads a giant list of movie release dates, and then goes to work. Somehow we talked about this sequence of events for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

We also get caught up on what Conor and Mike read in between Cline novels,  read about someone watching someone else play a video game, and learn the origin of this mysterious sword “Excalibur” that our  hero mentions.

Next week read up to the start of Phase Two,  that’s page 97 in our edition. Resist the urge to throw the book and keep the Dumb Sentences, Boring Sentences, and Fanfic coming!

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We’re back with a new season!  Join us as we read Ernest Cline’s followup to RP1, Armada. We’re extremely excited to read what is widely regarded as Cline’s bad novel.

We’ll talk about our expectations, see if we can guess whether a critic was reviewing RP1 or Armada, and play a quick round of Real or Fanfic.

If you choose to read along, your first assignment is to read up to Chapter 4, that’s page 47 in our edition. Thanks for listening!

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We’re done!!! After one last robot fight, video game speedrun, and  rote recitation of a popular “geek” movie, we’ve finally reached the titular 372nd page.

Tune in for the Dumb Sentence of the Book, one last Fan-Fic or Real, Great Moments in Villains with Tiny Robots, and some extremely creative listener emails. Nathan’s alternate ending skit is available here and Taylor’s song is available here.

We are auctioning off the copies of RP1 we read to make this podcast with all proceeds going to charity. Check them out here, please, we want them out of our houses.

Thank you for joining us on this journey! We’ll maybe be back with another title, after we take in some creative work that is actually good.

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In this episode, Wade Watts faces the possibility of a lifetime of slavery! But then he gets out of it easily thanks to his hacking prowess, which he totally has had all along but forgot to mention.

We’ll talk the unceasing cultural relevance of the “hang in there baby” motivational poster, the concept of Performative Niceness, and revisit some of Wade and Aech’s most meaningful conversations, where they connected on a purely mental level in the most intimate way possible.

Your assignment for next week: finish the damn book!

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