Yesssss! I love this kind of thing. I was watching Nick Arcade a little while ago and I was struck in the same way.
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read the novelization of halo 1 afterwards if you want to see a guy do the complete opposite
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I’ve heard that one is super monotonous with shit like “and then I took cover to recharge my shields, before throwing a plasma grenade and switching to my shotgun.” Kind of sounds hilarious if that’s true.
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I’m still reading Oblimov, by Ivan Goncharov. I heard about the book because Martin Scorcese did an interview where he said he mentioned the book, probably because of the Goncharov meme from a while ago.
Anyway, the premise of the book is the protagonist is the laziest man to ever exist. Oblimov lives off his peasants, which he inherited from his parents, and does nothing all day. People show up to his apartment to vibe and he’s like “I don’t wanna go anywhere”. He gets a letter saying his estate produced less money this year and some of his peasants ran away, and his servant keeps telling him the landlord wants him to move out next week, which he keeps ignoring. He spends the first 50 pages in bed before yelling at his servant and then taking another nap because things are too overwhelming. It’s wild how a book from like the 1800’s manages to nail the whole failson thing. I find myself relating to Oblimov in not wanting to do anything. I think I made it through the worst of the book which is an extended dream sequence of Oblomov’s childhood which I found to be kind of boring.
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master chief is always slapping a fresh clip into his MA5B assault rifle, it turns out!
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I always meant to read the fuckin Precursor Trilogy which probably made no sense
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The halo forerunner saga books are horribly boring and answer amazing questions like “How was 343 guilty spark created” and more pressingly, “Who the fuck was the bad guy I killed in Halo 4…?”
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“mantle of responsibility” always thinking about this
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Learning that the villain in Halo 4 which no time was spent to introduce the player to but every character screamed basically “IT’S HIM!!!” whenever he was on scream was actually somebody introduced in a book is something I consider a radicalizing event in my life.
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i think the exact moment i turned against halo is when they show you cortanas meticulously modeled feet in the first cutscene then make you do the first QTE in the entire series
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cortana’s original design for 4 got the game a “nudity” rating from the ESRB, so what shipped was a hastily redone version. the word “space diaper” was uttered by the person explaining this.
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I don’t appreciate that information
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sorry
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i can’t fucking believe it was originally worse like was someone rly out there like we need to show pussy in halo 4 ?
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being able to see blue labia is what motivates master chief to succeed
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I read 10 pages of lenseman and I want to throw it into a fire.
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e.e. doc smith is a horrendous writer and I find it troubling to believe that his works were so foundational to science fiction because they suck so much
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the first Lensmen I read was full of such dumb energy. loved how every brief interlude was an excuse to invent an even bigger deus ex machina. like a puppy with a planet-destroying raygun
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I read his earlier Skylark in Space book and that was a series of extreme genocides culminating in the four earth heroes singing in the shower together after they triumphantly wiped out 50% of the planet’s population
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I’ve read a lot of books but haven’t had the time to sit and write em all up. Quick takeaways:
Game Balance - Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero
A really good and useful collection of things that just don’t exist in written form anywhere else. An entire third of the book is basically about spreadsheets which is something you never see in any writing about game design but is clearly necessary. Have been aggressively recommending it to students who refuse to believe that game design is anything but concepting worlds and letting a programmer build it.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte
Tufte’s grouchiness is charming as he’s clearly been annoyed at certain infographics design transfer long time. The book is a really beautiful bit of work in its own right since it mostly uses images to demonstrates principles, particularly bad examples of graphic design or graph layouts. I think he’s a bit optimistic with his more minimal suggestions for how to represent things with as little ink as possible. But even if you don’t deal with representing quantitative information in your job I think the book is quite rewarding as a piece on representation generally.
Ulysses - James Joyce
I’ve been meaning to get around to this for a while and was dreading having to slog through. On the contrary, I think the variety of its style helps and a lot of what is written is eminently readable even if the formal choices or what is actually happening fictionally aren’t very clear in some cases. It’s a very hard book to talk about really because its main content isn’t really so much the plot or techniques but how the whole thing hangs together across a hundred different themes. I was hooked and read it obsessively through the last four chapters. It’s climax still mewls in my head from time to time.
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses - Harry Blamires
The obsession persisted after Ulysses and this is a very accessible reader. Almost felt like reading a Gamefaqs Plot Analysis/FAQ. I recommend it for reading alongside or just after Ulysses if you have the time and interest. One of my favourite things about it is it points out several plot inconsistencies which punctuate the pomposity of masterpiece in a mildly enjoyable way.
Albert Angelo - B.S. Johnson
Johnson continues to develop as one of my favourite writers. Albert Angelo is one of the cruder experiments which ultimately interrogates why we even bother with fiction to get across nonfictional ideas or arguments. I think it’s still fairly successful even though it’s likely divisive. The book also has lots of really interesting flourishes which hit close to me as someone who teaches. The book has a lot of criticisms of the British educational system and several parts are linked back to the personal guilt one feels at the inadequacies of education. One chapter has the class dialogue in parallel to the thoughts of the teacher as they question what the hell they are teaching or if there even sure of what they are saying is true. It also expresses the fears that lots of teachers have about their own authority and whether they care to exercise it given that the goal should really be improving students’ experience of the world. Good shit.
How the Tricolor Got its Stripes - Dmytro Dubilet
A straightforward primer on vexillology. It covers every major national flag and some additional ones however the histories are very brief and vary a lot in length. Spain has several pages of explanation whereas some countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan have a short paragraph each. The book is organised to cover flags in terms of their influence on one another or common themes like having stars, the sun, tricolors, regional co-schemes like the pan-African or pan-Arab colours. Helped firm up some pnemonics for remembering all the flags.
The Player of Games - Iain M Banks
I’m only about halfway through but thank you to those who recommended this here. Enjoying how Banks manages to build up a fairly believable techno-utopia without having to explain and worldbuild in a laborious, encyclopedic way. The scale and problems of a galactic colonial utopia are also neat as a subtheme.
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