#rp2

[cosmictabulator]

People need to make more fantasy worlds based on weird manifolds, we have so many disk worlds and sphere worlds and torus worlds, I want an RP^2 world where you set out to find the edge and come back with the opposite orientation

[strawberry-seal77]

Sasha and her cup of dirt

if you get this reference I will give you a single atom of mountain dew

[cute-but-nutty-lady]

Norma was nervous and she had no reason to be nervous. Why was she so nervous?! She knew Alex, not all that well, but they were close enough that she shouldn’t be feeling THIS nervous. He was “moving in” today after he got done with work because he was an elected official and this all needed to seem “real”. She supposed she understood.

He was an elected official and it would seem odd to the town if he was living in a separate house, especially when they were supposed to be newlyweds and happy. Of course, when she had asked Alex to marry her for the insurance, she didn’t think this far ahead. She didn’t think about logistics. They would have to live together, share their space and time with each other, go to events and out to eat together…she was feeling overwhelmed. So she did what she did best…

She started cleaning the house from top to bottom, dusting, vacuuming, spraying every surface down with Lysol, replacing all the bedsheets -including the ones in her room for some reason-, and put fresh flowers around the house. By the time she was finished and glanced at the clock in the kitchen, she knew he would be “coming home” soon.

Yeah, Norma was nervous…but also a little relieved? She didn’t think being alone in this house would be good for her and she was actually kind of happy he was coming. Out of all the men in White Pine Bay, maybe even the whole damn planet, she liked Alex the most. He made her feel safe and he never made her uncomfortable with anything he said or did. It could be worse…

@sheriffxbulldog

[khanstartrekrp]

@ravencatart​

His eyes opened wide, the sensation in his chest as if he were drowning, almost all his muscles contracted and his body just moved. In a glimpse, his hand was holding her neck tight, his eyes looking the ones of a ferocious beast, his hair spread over his eyes, his mind still trying to understand what was happening, all he could feel was despair, but that only lasted for a few seconds. He started to breathe properly, realizing who he was holding, noticing it had been a nightmare. Slowly his muscles relaxed and he let go of her, now his eyes widened with guilt. “Sorry....mnghh....what....what happened? Where am I....?” He grabbed half his face with his hand, sitting down, gasping for air, slowly recovering.

[gojomegumi]

READY PLAYER TWO SPOILERS

Nolan Sorrento escaped from prison 🥳

[weird-cool-blondie]

I’m busy (:

[leslea]

Ready Player Two: The Mysognist’s Love Song

This is a review. Spoilers & typos to follow:

I enjoyed Ready Player One (RP1). It was quirky and fun. The dystopian setting was disturbing, especially as the kid who served as the story’s protagonist didn’t actually do much to make the world a better place, once he became its newest prince. We’re told from the git-go that the world is spiraling downhill, and what does Wade/Parzival do at the end? The bare minimum. He lets the debtors go. He shares his riches with his friends. Well, he was literally just a teenager, and most assuredly a feral one, at that, so you could excuse his lack of vision. Certainly there would be a Ready Player Two (RP2) that would redeem our child champion?

Haha, no.

RP2 is the story of what happens to a neglected impoverished child when he lucks into immense privilege, but lacks the heart, charm, or charisma to be anything other than a hermit and an incel. Where Harry Potter could arguably be said to have started from a similar circumstance, yet grew into an actual savior role in his fight against Voldemort & the Death Eaters, Wade Watts’ character in RP2 is unabashedly a less-loveable version of Donald Trump in a world where he is, in all practicality, king. 

As RP2 begins, Wade owns everything. Not just the Oasis, but a futuristic tech that allows one to record their own visceral experience of being alive. This tech, called ONI, goes even more viral than the Oasis, and makes Wade rich beyond the human mind’s ability to calculate. He has power--so much power, he can control anything. He is literally the richest man in the world, and most assuredly its most envied/hated. Nothing is out of reach for him--and though his friends from RP1′s ‘Gunting days are portrayed focusing on developing real relationships (marriages, babies, etc.), working on improving their environments, and delivering aid to their communities, our dear Wade simply pines for the one thing that eludes him: Samantha, aka Artemis, his fierce and determined love interest from RP1.

He brags about the one week he spent in seclusion with Samantha in a bedroom. He talks way too often of his other sexual exploits via ONI, allowing him to experience sex from the POV of other men, women, transpeople, and non-binary folks. He has done the deed every which way but loose, and author Ernest Cline is as eager to share those details with the reader as he is the spout off acronyms and descriptions of fictional technology. Whereas the latter will have you yawning in boredom, the former will simply turn your stomach. Raise your hands if you were hoping for more cybersex in RP2. Anyone? Anyone? Right. 

Before I delve too deeply in how important it is for even blockbuster authors like Cline to CONSENT TO QUALITY EDITORIAL INPUT, I need to outline some important problems with this story beyond “What’s wrong with Wade, items 1-999.”

Samantha is justly described to have turned her back on Wade over some important issues. She is a woman of integrity, and for years Wade stalks her virtually, even though in all reality he grows a smaller and smaller figure from her past. Think about any woman you know who moves on and gets things done in life: they do not sit around pining for a dickhead ex who they slept with once, years prior. They just don’t. Samantha, however, despite all her success, integrity, and morals...just can’t help but fall back in love with Wade.

All powerful Wade. Involuntarily celibate (in the “Earl,” as Cline calls “in real life,” [IRL]), plugged into the internet from his spinal column or brain stem or whatever, 12 hours per day Wade. Childish destroyer of dissenting user accounts Wade. Stalker Wade.

Although Samantha refuses to make eye contact with him for years, the moment he needs her help...poof. She’s back on his jock like static cling, if I may borrow Cline’s penchant for quoting nostalgia in lieu of creating new content.

While Samantha’s inexplicable change of heart is problematic enough, it is only foreshadowing for a bigger problem with the story. Wade, as owner of the Oasis and all that digital shit, ends up on a quest to restore the Siren’s Soul. This is the “egg hunt” of RP2. Instead of eggs, this time he’s hunting shards, which is fitting, really, because Cline left me feeling sharted on by earlier than midway through the text. 

Where were we? The shards. Right.

The singular essence of Kira Underwood, constantly referred to as “Og’s wife,” has been divided into seven shards and hidden around the Oasis--that is, until the end of the story when Cline mercifully hid the last two together. I might have wept if the story had gone on one chapter longer than necessary. When the shards are collected and merged, they will...? What? Oh, they will coalesce into the actual soul of the departed woman. They will bring her back, digitally.

Now, not only is it creepy on many levels that Wade--let’s call him Parzincel--is repeatedly referred to as Kira’s owner, but his idol before him, James Halliday, is characterized has having created this ONI technology for the main purpose of bringing Kira back, so that a digital version of himself could finally possess her. While “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” is certainly a handy commandment, “thou shalt treat women as FUCKING PEOPLE WITH THEIR OWN INHERENT RIGHTS” would perhaps be a better placard to engrave and set on the desk of Halliday--to then be passed down to Wade. It never seems to dawn on Parzincel that he has no right to possess Kira, or any other ONI user. 

The in-game avatar of Halliday eventually explains that Kira’s “siren” avatar was able to explain to him that possessing her, manipulating her, etc. was wrong--but ONLY after Halliday hooks himself up the ONI and lives some of Kira’s experiences. Cline plays Halliday off in both books as an Aspergian genius, someone very high functioning on the Autism Spectrum, but as the mother of a young man with autism, I am beyond disgusted at the idea that you would have to hook one living being up to another human being’s synapses for them to have ANY understanding that the other person is a free, competent human being with agency of her own. Kira is repeatedly characterized as an artistic genius with a great heart. She, like Samantha, is demonstrated to be loving and kind. Generous. And yet both Kira and Samantha are primarily belongings for men to possess, control, pursue, and lose. Oh, if only they did lose them...because of course, they don’t. In Parzincel’s dream future, the best thing he can do is create a double of himself, so that he can experience the inexplicable love of Samantha in the “Earl” as well as in an ONI paradise. 

Kira, as the “first stable AI,” is never once shown having any sort of existential crisis. She simply loves being a pretty plaything for Wade and Jim and Og, digitally--and naturally she is “still in love with Og.” Okay, whatever. By this point in the story, Og and Kira are nothing more than paper dolls set up to somehow replace Wade’s missing mother/father figures. You can almost see the author sitting spraddle leg on the floor of his study, pushing dolls around. “You are the mommy now, and you are the daddy...and Wade is the baby! Now kiss!”

In a world as technologically advanced as that of RP2, there would be nuances to digital characters, right? If only there were nuances in the humans who created them, I suppose.

Cline’s Parzincel has a weird weird weird way of looking at women. So does Halliday. Even the benevolent Og only barely registers as showing any interest in Kira’s consent, and then, only when he is, himself, close to death. It’s like Cline knew the only decent human being in this story was Ogden Morrow--and possibly Kira. We don’t really get to spend enough time with the Kira character to know. 

But why would we? We are just readers, and she is, after all, Og’s wife.

I won’t get started on the Lo-Five or what he did to Aech. I’ll let Tim take over for that bit.

[neroziehe]

little lighthouse lodge

Nero drove up to that Saturday evening couldn’t have been more obviously titled the Little Lighthouse Lodge. Nestled at the end of a winding road and hugging the closest rocky shoreline, the Lodge, indeed, had a tall ivory spire to welcome its guests. If they didn’t notice that, perhaps in the dead of night- The ambulating light at the top continued, on and on, sending its guiding beam for miles.

The Lodge itself didn’t compare in size to most hotels. Just from a peek from the outside, it maybe had a dozen rooms to its name, maximum. But, what it didn’t have in size, it made up in charm, hospitality, and the ultimate feeling of pure, unadulterated retreat from the insanity and nauseating pace of the modern world. As Nero pulled up to the small gravel lot just outside the front porch, not a single little light from the city managed to pierce the sky. No sounds of traffic, of loud party music blasting its bass through the walls, or random shouts from disgruntled streetgoers. Just… Peace. The warbling chirps of crickets, the rush of the waves lapping up against the rocks, and the murmurs of an older couple just carrying on casual conversation at the back corner of the porch, only pausing to give Nero a wave and a warm greeting… And that was it.

Pushing through the front door, the same cozy atmosphere carried through. Sturdy wooden furniture littered the space. Old family portraits lined the walls- Ones echoing from past generations, slowly gaining color until the most recent photo, including a somewhat younger Winnie standing between her parents. She was the spitting image of her father. Russet-red hair in curls. Freckles. Shorter in stature, but not sacrificing strength. And, behind a massive oak desk, sat the very man himself. The only difference, when he looked up to see someone coming in the door at this late hour, was that his eyes were a deep brown rather than the blue of his daughter’s. His bushy brows perked,

“Well- Good evenin’! Welcome to the Little Lighthouse Lodge!” Phillip bellowed in greeting. He rose to his feet. “What can I do for ya? You get lost? You’re lookin’ a bit spiffy for somebody lookin’ for a room here!” He let out a jovial laugh that sounded so much bigger than his short body.