Episode 1 – A Miniseries About a Housecoat

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In this episode, we’ll learn how calibrated your tastes are with Conor’s, meet our Rubenesque main characters, discuss the book’s generously amorphous definition of 80s pop culture,  examine how hard it is to pull of convincing computer operating systems in entertainment, and wonder what possible role the undercurrent of atheism could possibly play in the book about Atari games.

This episode covers the introduction and first three chapters of Ready Player One. For next time, read thru Chapter 8, page 86 in our edition.

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8 Replies to “Episode 1 – A Miniseries About a Housecoat”

  1. To fill you in on a few (embarrassing) nerd references you missed out on; a “Cheshire Smile” is a term from the website TV Tropes, where people that have an unhealthy obsession with pop culture catalog every single thing you see in pop culture more than once and call it a trope. Also, Artemis’ description is clearly trying (and failing) to describe her as a cute anime girl. If you google pictures of anime girls (don’t), you’ll see most of them are drawn with very rounded facial features, and their chins are drawn as a point.

  2. I think Aech is supposed to be pronounced like the letter H? Although the phonetic spelling is meant to be Aitch so he got that wrong if that’s the case.

  3. I am so glad this exists. I was completely stunned how such a badly written book attained such high critical praise. This podcast soothes me.

    1. As ludicrous as this may sound, I read that the publishing rights for Cline’s first ever novel (this one) were won after a bidding war, and then Warner Brothers bought the film rights for the as yet unpublished book the very next day. I’m still perplexed over that.

  4. I didn’t like this book at all but yeah… maybe someone who gives a fail to the Marvel movies isn’t the best to be reviewing it. If you don’t even like those, the most popular comic book movies of all time, you are DEFINITELY not in this book’s target audience. It’s like a guy with celiac’s disease reviewing a pasta restaurant, it might be funny but I’m not sure where the value is beyond that.

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