Books And Genres That Aren't What People Think - Films, games, and TV too

[Rustle]

Infinite Jest is actually really good

 

[Rustle]

Oh is this the Atlas Shrugged survivors support group? Can I join in? I honestly cannot believe people take this book, and Rand, seriously. I am convinced that the only people online who praise the book are the same ones who praise Ulysses i.e. people who haven't actually read it.

I actually have read Ulysses, I don't know if it is his best work though, Dubliners might be.

 

[Wilson The Ball]

Cormac MacArthur is a good author, but Blood Meridian reads more like a rough draft of his own notes reading the memoirs he used for inspiration. There's some striking imagery like The Kid taking shelter next to a burning tree, but everything else is just nihilistic train of thought rambling that makes less sense than the constant pedophilia in the book
"Hurr buh das da point , violence is pointless"
Woah. Holy shit, you took an English class in high school? Crazy

 

[Lagomorph Guy]

Souls games aren't about the heckin turbo-hard assrape difficulty, they're about having fun. They just require a considerable amount of free time to play that not a lot of people have. I played Sekiro a while back and it took me a fair amount of time to get through, but I would absolutely play it again if I had a week or so to throw away.

Compare that with a giant game like Persona 5 where most of the time is spent chugging through the same grindy shit over and over again. It was fun the first time, but I know for a fact I won't be able to blow through the game extra quick the second time because all that time wasn't spent developing skills, it was spent reading what is essentially professional fanfiction and hitting the same couple buttons over and over. Meanwhile, you can immediately see returns on a Souls game when you come back and just style all over the enemies and stick your sword up their ass.

I do find it entertaining how Souls games are used to argue against accessibility lol. Who would've guessed that lowering the bar so much that even a potato person with zero fuckin limbs or appendages at all can play your game would make it a boring hunk of shit. Preaching to the choir here, but game journos are legitimately retarded. Spending every day writing about entertainment for children and high schoolers like it's high art has to fuck with your brain after a while.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

I struggle to find pulp entertainment that lives up to the promise. The cliche of pulp being shallow action stories about Indiana Jones type adventurers, cowboys, and hard boiled detectives rescuing damsels in destress from railway tracks. I've yet to find these stories.

Those would be the stories that never get reprinted. Every writer and story worth preserving has been reprinted in some way. Even now, there's autists and enthusiasts diving into scans of the old pulps and bringing back more worthwhile authors/stories. Steeger Press and Armchair Fiction and Wildside Press are a few small presses that do print on demand stuff focusing on pulps and older obscure genre fiction.

As for an author. Lovecraft. I heard, repeatedly and often, that every Lovecraft story ends with the protagonist dead, insane, or both. But as I slowly made my way through his work, this is not the case at all. Maybe it happens later. Likewise, the toughness of the monsters is also wrong. If a game has the option to fight a monster, it's considered to have failed. But many of the stories have the monster dead, defeated, or simply delayed. eg. The yeti is killed by a guy throwing a rock blindly in the dark. Cthulhu is sent back to sleep by crashing a fishing boat into his head.

Oh yeah, the expectations for Lovecraft's fiction can get weird because there's an overwhelming image that people have of him that was build up over the years.

People who haven't read it and/or worship Verhoeven think it's some sort of mein kampf in space super-fascist handbook. It's a Science FICTION set in a pure meritocracy. There's no 'better race' or any other such shit, if someone is better at the job then they get promoted, simple as.

it's funny because you know who would be upset about a pure meritocratic society.

the people who call everything they don't like "nazis"

 

[Popper Whiting]

Add The Fountainhead in there while we are at it which I also read for all my sins.

The sin is not in the reading. It is the interpretation and coming to your own conclusion.

Fuck it, I'll go the generic with "The Old Man and the Sea".

Old Cuban cunt caught the biggest marlin ever. Would have made him bank. Yet at the same time he was viewed as a silly old fart, didn't know his shit. After 3 days, finally catches the thing. Sharks eat everything but the head. So he goes back, everyone knows he as caught the biggest Marlin ever, but doesn't give him a fucking cent because he brought not a single bit of profitable Marlin. He drinks a few beers other people bought him, and goes to sleep dreaming of lions he saw in his 20s, not a single thought of how he nearly starved to death catching this thing he didn't make a cent on (even though people would talk about it for years).

Was him suddenly being viewed as knowing his shit worth it, seeing as he is still living in a tin shed, didn't make a cent, and his victory drinks were bought out of pity? Or did he conquer self doubt, only to go to sleep dreaming about fucking lions when he had self doubt?

That is the difference between a Hemingway and a Rand. Hemingway can make you ask a million questions over a past the point Cuban peasant in 128 pages. And we'll all take the right lesson from it because the story asks questions that answer about us, the reader. Ayn spends 1200 words hammering home a point including a 90 page self insert rant from the "main character" to tell you that communists are bad, God is a lie and being a selfish cunt is good with absolutely no room for thought or interpretation.

Hemingway wanted you to think, and did so in less than 200 pages (whatever you decide is up to you). Rand spent over 1000 pages (including a 90 page sermon which breaks the flow and narrative) to tell you exactly what to think. If Ayn Rand was a modern bitch she'd have a 1000 page tread on here and it would be justified.

 

[Qui-Gon's Gin]

Night of The Living Dead the Zombie movie by George Romero had some political messaging in it. I can remember what exactly. But everyone else just saw a horror movie with zombies.

Some people think that the ending, where Ben, the black survivor, gets mistaken for a zombie and killed by the sheriff's posse, is a statement on racism. Romero always denied this and said that he only cast Ben as black because he liked the actor.

 

[Benjamin Spooner Briggs]

Practically all of them depending on how young the person you're talking to is. Zoomers don't actually understand what a genre is outside of tropes. Tropes ARE the genre entire to the zoomer mind. Also, if it's any more than a paragraph, it's not getting read. "Gets brainwashed of that thing" is greater storytelling to them than anything.

Anyway, I think Shakespeare was a comedy writer who thought people dying for no reason was funny. We look back on all his work as some kind of amazing feats of drama these days because it's the habit of history-dwellers to think people from the before time were always serious and incapable of humor. That said, I think most of his plays are supposed to be read with tongue in cheek.
Two teenagers kill themselves mistakenly for young love, what little idiots! I think death was just Shakespeare's favorite punchline.

Another one, Clockwork Orange. The movie is definitely a superior product to the book, but I do feel Malcolm McDowell made everyone forget a crucial part of the story: Alex is a child. He's meant to be 15 years old, which is something hardly ever discussed. I never see people mention how his parents lack of care for him certainly contributes to his desire for violence, and makes their rejection of him later on sting even more. I could go on forever about this specifically ignored aspect of Alex, and it frustrates me that nobody ever mentions it.

To give a non-book answer, Godzilla. This is so weird because the character was basically bastardized by its own creators before he could even take proper shape for the original idea. Starting as a horrifying representation of wartime death and destruction, and now you can put negro shoes on him in Fortnite. To think YouTube analog horror is some of the best Godzilla content we've gotten lately should make Japan-o-man feel great dishonor.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

I will go with the obvious - Lolita is NOT about a romance between an underage girl and a man in his 40s. It is a window into twisted world of a pedophile who considers every word and action of a little girl to be a sexual game, because he wants them to be. And let me tell you, from what I've seen here, I am a little scared of how precise Nabokov was in his portrayal of someone like Humbert. Like he is not a normal for the most part man with a twisted desire that makes him do terrible things that he regrets afterwards, but can't help himself. Oh no, he is completely delusional unreliable narrator who even refuses to call himself a pedophile (NAMBLA, MAP, anyone?). Fuck, even YandereDev said "I AM NOT A CRAZED PEDO GROOMER WHO GRABS CHILDREN ON THE STREET AND RAPES THEM" even though nobody accused him of doing exactly that, he just refuses to accept that in essence he is the same kind of degenerate, he just adapted it for his hikki lifestyle. If tomorrow there would appear some light non-offensive term accepted by society he would start calling himself that on the spot.

 

[Grub]

I hold the same opinion of Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, which is a painful fucking slog for different reasons (especially the "Men are so dumb and need cunty women" Jordan put's into nearly every single chapter of that fucking series).

The part of the wheel of time that broke me was the 1100 page book that covered like a month's worth of in book time or something like that. I enjoy descriptive writing but there comes a point when it just gets retarded. I also hate how 90's fantasy turned into a dick waving contest to see who could have the longest, most convoluted, glossary filled fantasy series out there mostly because of the Wheel of Time. I think the worst example is that Terry Goodkind series that's basically the Wheel of Time except if there was a rape scene every chapter.

Souls games aren't about the heckin turbo-hard assrape difficulty, they're about having fun

I honestly kind of hate most soulslike games because they seem to focus on nothing but the combat aspect of Dark Souls and not much else. The combat was fun in Dark Souls but I mostly liked the metroid style world and the exploration. None of the other soulslikes I've played have bothered with that part of it. Even the later From Soft games moved away from it. I never really found Dark Souls that difficult. There was no way to actually fail and the consequences for dying really wasn't that bad. It's not like it's that difficult to get more soul. The bosses were challenging and required practice and even regular enemies could fuck you up if you weren't careful but it's definitely not as difficult as a lot of other games I've played. I just assumed all the dark souls difficulty memes was because the Remaster was a lot of baby's first tough game after growing up with AAA shit that holds your hand.

 

[Cemetery Support]

Cormac MacArthur is a good author, but Blood Meridian reads more like a rough draft of his own notes reading the memoirs he used for inspiration. There's some striking imagery like The Kid taking shelter next to a burning tree, but everything else is just nihilistic train of thought rambling that makes less sense than the constant pedophilia in the book
"Hurr buh das da point , violence is pointless"
Woah. Holy shit, you took an English class in high school? Crazy

Blood Meridian is the most reddit, Aspen Colorado, matcha tea, psychic shop, mad at your deadhead parents, uncombed beard, loser book there is an I will not abide by any other opinion.

If you go to r/booksuggestions, its the first book to be recommended, at the top of any comments section, for any particular reason and I refuse to engage with the literature on a serious basis.

 

[Requiem for a Ween]

Kiwi Farms is not a trolling, cyberbullying, stalking and harassment forum.

Anyway, I think Shakespeare was a comedy writer who thought people dying for no reason was funny.

He definitely had a sense of humor which he did very little to hide and was something of a prototroll in his time. I'm not at all convinced his works were intended as anything more than pulp entertainment. His literary influence, historic relevance and posthumous reverence just make people want his works to be far more serious than they actually are. Don't let the archaic language fool you, his writings are full of gay puns, sexual innuendo, dirty jokes and scathing insults.

The dignified image people have of most historic figures is largely the result of scholars retroactively portraying them that way because they want their field to be taken seriously.

 

[Benjamin Spooner Briggs]

Kiwi Farms is not a trolling, cyberbullying, stalking and harassment forum.

He definitely had a sense of humor which he did very little to hide and was something of a prototroll in his time. I'm not at all convinced his works were intended as anything more than pulp entertainment. His literary influence, historic relevance and posthumous reverence just make people want his works to be far more serious than they actually are. Don't let the archaic language fool you, his writings are full of gay puns, sexual innuendo, dirty jokes and scathing insults.

The dignified image people have of most historic figures is largely the result of scholars retroactively portraying them that way because they want their field to be taken seriously.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C78HBp-Youk

EXACTLY, it always annoys me to see theater idiots doing his work in these overly dramatic styles when I think he was sitting there writing all these plays giggling to himself as he imagines people taking them way too seriously. Guess he had the last laugh in the end.

 

[peachlover669]

Souls games aren't about the heckin turbo-hard assrape difficulty, they're about having fun.

No you missed the point as well. All games are made to be fun but Dark souls was specifically made to be a unique experience where unlike most games where your power progression is linear and tied to ingame powerups, Dark soul's difficulty would be entirely vested in the player itself. There are many items which do let you grow stronger however most of the actual progression of the player is based on the players skill and how they choose to utilize the items given to them.
Here is a blurb from the back of the xbox 360 version of dark souls that talks about this very thing, it is written in poor english but you can tell what they're going for.

It's for this very reason that I do not like dark souls as they base the game on this idea and then throw complete bullshit at you that does not test your skills in the slightest however I will refrain from ranting about the capre demon as this thread is not even about videogames.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Add The Fountainhead in there while we are at it which I also read for all my sins.

People think its some grand ode to individualism? Nah, its just a thinly veiled vehicle for Rand's rape fantasies.

Not read that one. I heard the film was better, but never seen it in the wild.

Lolita is NOT about a romance between an underage girl and a man in his 40s. It is a window into twisted world of a pedophile

And on the opposite end of the scale. Leon. I've been told repeatedly that it's a paedophile movie about a 40 year old man and a teenager girl. But no. Her family is killed and she survives because she was buying groceries at the time. He takes her in and trains her to kill, both to get revenge, and because it's the only trade he knows. I think at one point she tries to be romantic and he slaps that down immediately. Though it's been a while since I've seen it.

In a way, it's part of a more general trend where any friendly relationship between men in fiction is read as them being gay.

The combat was fun in Dark Souls but I mostly liked the metroid style world and the exploration. None of the other soulslikes I've played have bothered with that part of it.

This is partly why I don't get the criticism of The Surge and Lords of the Fallen 2.0. They do that part of the game way more than Dark Souls does. There's a great section in The Surge 1 where the bonfire is on a lift and you have to move it around. That kind of thing is way more creative than "I kick down a ladder that loops back x1000".

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

It amuses me to see people still treat the "idea" of reading as a high end hobby, but then I never see a lot of the people that get swelled heads over it ever talk about what they enjoy reading. It's often people who talk about whatever modern work's been hyped by the critics/press. I don't often run into people that just deeply enjoy a genre or author any more, outside of romantasy smut lovers trying to pretend they're respectable.

Jeez, I wish Twilight and 50 Shades didn't exist.

 

[Grub]

This is partly why I don't get the criticism of The Surge and Lords of the Fallen 2.0. They do that part of the game way more than Dark Souls does. There's a great section in The Surge 1 where the bonfire is on a lift and you have to move it around. That kind of thing is way more creative than "I kick down a ladder that loops back x1000".

I've never played the Lords of the Fallen. I'm not sure about the surge but it sounds familiar. I think I might have played that one. If it's the one i'm thinking of it's a sort of futuristic rundown robot facility or something like that. I remember that one feeling very samey everywhere. Like everything just looked the same everywhere. But I might be thinking of a different game.

 

[VIPPER?]

Souls games aren't about the heckin turbo-hard assrape difficulty, they're about having fun. They just require a considerable amount of free time to play that not a lot of people have. I played Sekiro a while back and it took me a fair amount of time to get through, but I would absolutely play it again if I had a week or so to throw away.

I'll be honest and say I have never once ever played a souls game but for hard games in general I agree. It isn't just "lol u die 4evah" it is about the freedom in just trying shit out until it works and refining the execution you need to do it. And NOT in an opaque setting, but the opposite; hard games are fun because they present clear problems that may not have obvious solutions but are "easy" to solve in that you know more or less what you are trying to do.

For that matter, fightan has the opposite problem -- everyone approaches it as a pure execution barrier knowledge check kusoge genre and they're right
but most of the issues people have with that genre are mostly solved by "play literally any other game than the one you're complaining about" or are complaints about something they already do in another genre and have no issue with.

 

[Judge Dredd]

It amuses me to see people still treat the "idea" of reading as a high end hobby, but then I never see a lot of the people that get swelled heads over it ever talk about what they enjoy reading. It's often people who talk about whatever modern work's been hyped by the critics/press. I don't often run into people that just deeply enjoy a genre or author any more, outside of romantasy smut lovers trying to pretend they're respectable.

I'm stuck in the situation as the smut lovers. I've after low brow action-adventure entertainment, maybe with a little smut thrown in too and while such books are supposedly widely available, I've yet to see them.

I don't think I'm alone in this. I remember a while ago some hand wringing because YA fiction (Young Adult) was the most popular genre among adults. Cue lots of people proclaiming people are getting dumber, no one wants depth, yadda yadda yadda blah blah. Then I heard the reverse. YA was the most popular genre because it was the only genre where you were allowed to have a fantasy adventure, an action story, or basically anything that wasn't just woke politics and wordy attempts at being deep.

I think there's a large audience for trash. Romance novels show that much. But there's nothing really for men. Supposedly The Martian was snubbed by publishers until it exploded online. That was the last traditional novel I read. Just today I was reading a single issue "magazine" that was basically a book about unsolved mysteries. Being a "magazine", there are lots of pictures, the articles can be a bit thin, but they get straight to the point. Again, it's likely intended for kids, but it's exactly what I wanted. Fun casual reading. Something I can dip into while waiting for the washing machine or while on the shitter. I can read couple paragraphs about an unsolved art theft, or an in depth (or as much as 10 pages of a magazine allow) analysis of DB Cooper.

These days YA has supposedly fallen too. Books aimed at young people are all about trans lesbians fisting each other and general wokeshit. Best I can do is listening to audio versions of weird tales from the 30s-60s. But I'm not always wanting a ghost story.

If it's the one i'm thinking of it's a sort of futuristic rundown robot facility or something like that. I remember that one feeling very samey everywhere. Like everything just looked the same everywhere. But I might be thinking of a different game.

It could be. Looks like District 9, and you could cut off enemy limbs to gain loot.

But the surge 1 has one bonfire per zone, and I think about 5 or 6 zones for the entire game.

 

[Grub]

It could be. Looks like District 9, and you could cut off enemy limbs to gain loot.

But the surge 1 has one bonfire per zone, and I think about 5 or 6 zones for the entire game

Yeah I looked it up. It is the game I was thinking of. I never got very far into it. I didn't really like it. It was one of those ones that seemed like it was going to be cool but it started getting repetitive before I even finished the first area and I remember it really lacked in environmental variety. Everything was just the same broken up factory looking environment with the same few goofy looking Michael bay transformers style robots.