I feel like we’ve done this joke before. Maybe last re-read of the series…
Edit: Yes, we’re recycling our content now. Oh well. Still a good book!
1 Like
For those interested in the Game of Thrones books, Insider.com published a good article outlining how the discussions of how much the TV show and books would line up changed over the years. There will be people who don’t care because they saw the TV show and that was good enough for them, but for those who are waiting for the last two books, it sounds like there will be enough material that’s different to make it worthwhile. The question remains as to whether Martin will finish them.
William Gibson - Agency
In November, I will be reading Ready Player Two. I’m looking forward to seeing which direction Ernest Cline went with it. Previously, he said he was going to try to make the book be something that could be a sequel to the first book and the movie. In other articles, he said he would be focusing on just the book.
1 Like
I just finished The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Interesting read, and covered a lot of stuff I played in the 80s and 90s. An interesting thesis of the book is how for a long time (up until around 2000) a major defining feature of Mac gaming was being ‘Mac like.’ So ports (especially in the earlier era) that were too close to the ‘standard’ for the era often floundered when compared to games that took advantage of the mouse and even the Mac UI.
Lots of “old friends” from Glider to Marathon.
2 Likes
Oh, there’s a great web version of one of the classics of Old Mac Gaming: Web Glider lives! (Turn on ‘Air Visible’ to make it less frustrating… The houses ramp up in difficulty as you go down the menu, and the last house available is quite insane.)
Just finished ‘The Art of Happiness’ by the Dalai Lama.
Just started into ‘Future Noir - the making of Blade Runner’ (the 2017 updated edition that covers ‘BladeRunner 2049’).
I had something mildly witty to comment about this, but the forum ate it.
The Paid Companion by Amanda Quick. It’s a nice, light historical romance/mystery that I don’t have to think about too much when I read it. A perfect palate-cleanser after a long and complicated workday.
Re-write from earlier: Is BladeRunner 2049 with watching? I’m one of the few that is somewhere in the middle for the original. I don’t hate it, but I don’t know if I consider it as highly as many people do. It’s just a movie to me.
(The best take I’ve seen on BladeRunner is a podcast called The Film Reroll which runs various movies as RPG mini-campaigns. The BladeRunner one centers on the players as replicants, with Deckard as basically a force-of-nature NPC to be evaded.)
I’m slowly reading As You Wish by Cary Elwes, a memoir of his time working on The Princess Bride. Lots of fun background information from everyone he could talk to that was involved.
I have some ‘heavy reading’ coming up in that I had purchased a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur with the intention of reading it on the UK trip we had scheduled for next month. That’s not happening, so I guess I’ll read it when we go stay in a cabin for a long weekend.
3 Likes
BR:Original - It depends on which version you’ve seen - the original release, director’s cut or final cut. The final cut went back and fixed a lot of the mistakes (continuity, spoken dialogue not matching lip movements, etc) and as such make a more coherent story. Still very ‘noir’, with a lot of subtle threads to the story.
BR:2049…
I’ve seen it 3 times (first time was in the cinema when it was released), then bought the DVD.
I felt that it dragged a bit in places the first time around, and I did miss a lot of the back-plot and what was going on with regards to Wallace, his replicants and why he was so obsessed with Rachel. You do have to listen carefully to a lot of the dialogue and join the dots yourself - nothing is spoon fed to you.
It’s worth a watch, and then a re-watch to pick up the bits you missed the first time around. The cinematography is (to my eyes, anyway) amazing, and the soundtrack is totally spot on.
As with the original, it has a good, hard look at “What is human?” and “How does a replicant differ from a ‘real’ human?”.
2 Likes
If you are interested, you can still get copies of Marathon for gratis, off the 'net.
I stumbled across them whilst seeing what was available to install on my Mac via ‘homebrew’.
More info here: https://alephone.lhowon.org/
I actually stumbled across my sleeved copies yesterday, and I think my CD-R with the Marathon Infinity installer and a curated selected of the best 3rd party maps, conversions, etc.
I was more happy to read the short history of Bungie in the book: Bungie was huge in Mac gaming for a long time, and I admit some bias in feeling they’ve been in a run since they’ve done 3 major IPs with similar-ish themes. (Marathon and Halo being the Space Marine doing Space Marine stuff genre; Destiny being a bit of a tweak, but still techno-wasteland-wanderers.) I’d love to see a similar company come back and fill the old Bungie niche of “We make games based off popular genres, but with a fun twist.” although I admit this might not be practical today: The book does make the point that a lot of small companies have gotten priced out of the industry because a AAA game requires a large staff and budget, while smaller games require various combinations of super thin margins, including ads, or ugly stuff to make the game pay like targeting the ‘whales’ who get hookoed and do spend $9.99 for a shinier button.
(Bungie’s pre-Halo history was a few small games, then Pathways into Darkness and Marathon as “FPS, but with an actual story”; Myth as RTS, but no base building and real 3d terrain; Oni as a networked fighting game when such a thing was considered not possible. Even Halo was intended as an FPS with an open world and integrated strategy/command elements.)
1 Like
All of the Foundation books in order… then iRobot I think…
been a long time since I read any Asimov
1 Like
I still (well, about 15 years ago when I last read it) really like Foundation. The sequels less so.
And Asimov was brilliant but not great at making interesting human beings.
2 Likes
I’ve never read it. Do you think it’ll make an interesting show?
I’m worried they’ll want to add a lot of cable-tv style drama.
The original book would probably need to be an anthology of sorts: there’s a framing story of this group who are led by a mathematician that has learned to predict the future on a very large scale.
Then each episode or story arc would be one of the short stories in the book detailing a very different era in the group’s history as they seek to minimize the impact of an inevitable collapse of galactic civilization. In one they’re dealing with corruption from the Imperial government. In another they’re using religion and preserved tech as a tool to get control over other fragments.
I’m curious how the show will go. At best maybe they’ll plan for one arc a season but I won’t be surprised if they try to keep the cast more current.
Riverworld didn’t do very well. I have the same kind of feeling about this.
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. was the only non-romance book in the very rural rental home at which I just stayed a few days. I got about 2/3 the way through in between all of our other activities. With regret, I left it for the next person who would desperately need something to read while staying there.
2 Likes