The book was crap so I wouldn’t expect anything else. I honestly think it was one of the worst books I’ve read.
I haven’t read the book, but the movie was crap too. It was just a slide show of '80s and '90s references that completely failed to capture what made those good, or even understand them.
Not even going to joke about this, but I am really hoping nobody there gets the bright idea to make a Barbie blockchain or NFT or anything like that.
Speaking of “Ready Player One”, the author Ernest Cline also wrote literally the absolute worst, grossest, most misogynistic poem I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. Now you’ll have to read it too to make sure the “Reqdyverse” never succeed and thus, zero possibility of Barbie blockchain.
lol wtf
Dunno when he made that (1990s? Early 2000s?), but nowadays even those “nerdy, smart” women are easy to find in porn. Hentai also has that in droves.
I thought we were done with web3 nft bs
NFTs for just art I’m not sure what’s going go happen, but NFTs are never going to go away when they represent an actual useful digital thing like a concert ticket.
The tech and industry just needs to further mature.
But you don’t need NFT to make a concert ticket… a barcode or QR with a simple unique number works just as well.
You don’t need anything to anything, it’s just a theoretical improvement.
No one is hacking your email and stealing the barcode, or figuring out the algorithm and generating fake barcodes. There’s no risk that if I sell the barcode to someone else that I also didn’t sell it other people as well.
Ticket fraud is huge. (Edit its a multi billion dollar problem)
To then solve those problems you bring in middle men and they charge fees.
Reselling a concert ticket securely (from my perspective, not companies) cost me and the user 5% each. And that’s if a service is even offered.
An NFT concert ticket legitimately solves a lot of real problems more efficiently than existing technology.
But ease of use of crypto and transaction fees are still too high to make this a mass market solution. That’ll change though.
NFTs are supposed to be cryptographically secure and blockchain-tracked certificates of authenticity for digital goods. “This is a unique original work by so-and-so”. Any duplication wouldn’t have the same hash and thus is not legitimate.
There are plenty of good uses for this if you are of the mindset that digital goods need to be protected and proven as unique and original works. In a proper setup, it would negate the need for DRM and enable the legal sale and trade of digital media/games in the secondary market, by preventing unlawful duplication (piracy). This is beneficial because piracy, as GabeN prophesized, is an issue of service, not price. Consumers are typically willing to pay good money for good entertainment. They do not want to pay good money and find that a game is incomplete or poorly optimized, or to have less product (digital good) for the same price (physical good) (i.e., not being able to re-download after an arbitrary date, not be able to resell, lack of boxart, bonus content, etc).
They’re desperate to make it happen because the potential benefits to them are so great that they become blinded by greed.
Just when I thought the WB’s DC cinematic Universe was such a huge Trainwreck, it looks like they plan to top it with this.
Oh and remember Space Jam?
DCEU was and is a trainwreck but the trailer for their game DC online game was banging: https://youtu.be/0WYwXer0sgU?si=XN_Xp6wyS10X2SID
Ernest Cline is a sellout who got lucky piggybacking off the success of popular franchises. I’ve seen high schoolers write better than that guy.
It’s easily the worst book I’ve read, and I only finished because of the unintentional hilarity of it all. In a story ostensibly about how evil media mega corporations are, the author wrote a hail corporateove love letter to top selling franchises without realizing the irony.
There was potential in it being a self parody, although in a way the whe situation is funnier because he was so earnest.
It’s a blur to me now but I just remember so many forced 80s references, and the plot was basic. Fan fiction vibes.
Ironically I found the megacorp produced movie version much more palatable both because it wasn’t stuck on making that which the author liked the only media worth obssessing about, it showed that fans of all eras enjoyed themselves equally in that world. And because it gave more of a human core to Halliday’s quests and the plot, rather than it just being about who’s more of a fanboy gets rich and gets the girl.
Seeing the book describe how Wade is so great at reciting every line of War Games just took me out of it. Am I supposed to be impressed by this second hand fawning over a different story? Is there even a point to that beyond Halliday/Ernest Cline thinking it’s cool?
I spent my first audible credit on that book. I hadn’t seen the movie…still haven’t. But it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, and I knew him from reddit. He did a good job. That’s all I have to say about it.
I agree. I couldn’t get through the first 10 pages.
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else in the comments, I thought I’d leave this here: https://372pages.com/episode-0-a-book-were-probably-going-to-hate
“372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” is a podcast where Mike Nelson (MST3K, Rifftrax) and Conor Lastoka (Rifftrax) read and review books they’re “pretty sure they’re going to hate”. RP1 is the first book & source of the podcast title, since it’s 372 pages. It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for books and it is hilarious, I highly recommend.
