gregbrown

I have to say that hearing the Templar-Barbarian interactions all game has been my favorite part because they slip into so-bad-they're-amusing mode. So great to fight evil with you bro. Sure is great to knock back some demons huh. Battling is cool. Love the smell of justice in the morning.

Hopefully this will shame me into getting back on pace: http://www.goodreads.com/gregbrown

Basically the nerd version of embarrassing teen poetry.

Yeah, I'd recommend this one as well and the Baroque Cycle is a great follow up if you enjoyed it. Knowing you enjoyed The Name of the Rose makes me think you'll love the Baroque Cycle, but Cryptonomicon is probably a good first step to wash the bad taste of Snow Crash out of your mouth. Anathem is also a great one but best digested with more Stephenson experience. The Diamond Age is the only one of his works (from what I recall) that doesn't have action sequences, so you might dig that as well. However, it's set in The Future and has a weird subplot that suddenly lurches into the foreground for the ending. But it's definitely not the bro-as-fuck action movie that Snow Crash becomes at times. God, I need to read the Baroque Cycle again this summer. Such a great work.

Have you checked out Marie Antoinette? It's a totally awesome tone poem of a movie.

It's one of the tougher ones to tackle because Stephenson separates the two central threads that tend to drive his plots—slow-payoff systemic thinking and quick-payoff wacky antics—into two separate characters… and leads off with the slow-payoff character. The first 100 pages look like historical dithering, but they set up the driving concerns of the whole cycle and pay off in a big way by the third book. It's also the example I always pull out when I explain the difference between science-fiction and science-fantasy, because it's a brilliant example of the former under the guise of historical fiction. Just no pew pew laser beams.

Some buildings are over old wooden ships, such that they'll occasionally find one during construction, and some people even have basements that are cleared-out hulls. Strata of the Anthropocene Era.

2007 was such a crackerjack year for films. There WIll Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Hot Fuzz—all amazing.

Same here; as a long-time Stephenson reader it was great to go in blind, trusting that he'd work himself into an interesting place and being shocked each time he changed-up. (And as a philosophy major, pleased to see he didn't butcher anything as he sort of borrowed and reworked some of that field's history.) I think the Baroque Cycle is still my favorite, but Anathem isn't far behind.

His piece on Federer is a good place to start and see if you'll enjoy his style: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

For a second there, I was confused as to why you were comparing him to Paul W.S. Anderson and going "yeah, I guess he's in a rut of weird bad movies".

The narrative impact of act III is lessened somewhat when you notice the main demon dude essentially has the face of a pug, oversized smiley mouth and all.

Looks great! Also forced me to get off my butt and upload an actual avatar, which was a bit difficult since it kept erroring out with a too-big file but wouldn't tell me how big was too big. EDIT: Whoa, there are statuses? ex: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/statuses/id/1682/

The new Battleship film is very rad. I highly recommend it if you're looking for an unexpectedly interesting high-CGI action film. http://gregbrown.tumblr.com/post/23438293210/a-plea-to-give-battleship-a-chance

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Diablo 3 excels here, especially with the introduction of the Skeleton King.

Zodiac has permanently fixed my idea of San Francisco in the '70s

CDT here, so I'm going with the sleep-super-early-and-game-before-work plan myself. (Hopefully the servers won't be as crazy then too.)

Hah, that was the one thing that really stuck out to me as well. The algorithm just choked on the hand-drawn look they used for most of the cinematic. It was so jarring.

If you have a digital copy from Blizzard (or your physical copy arrived early), you can install as of a few hours ago, and I'd recommend it to avoid the launch-day crowds.

I would caution that you can sort of tell that The Broom of the System is Wallace's first book, and owes the most to the sort of '60s writers like Pynchon and Barthelme that Wallace took inspiration from. It's distinctively Wallace, but after reading it I understood why he later thought it was trying too hard to be liked. (The Girl with the Curious Hair is mostly weird unless you know whose writing Wallace is reacting to in each piece, and even then I didn't really dig it.) I'm also totally in love with Brief Interviews, which I think shocked me even more than when I first read Wallace in Consider the Lobster. The titular stories are pretty amazing, and the range displayed between "Forever Overhead" and "Octet" alone is absolutely stunning. I like it a lot more as a whole than Oblivion, even though some pieces there like "Grand Old Neon" are stunning in their own right. And since no one's mentioned it yet, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is also a good starter with the state fair and cruise ship pieces (though I love the television essay there most of all). The math book Everything and More is really cool too if you like math or want more DFW, but be warned that it really is trying to teach you the mathematical concepts involved and you gotta pay attention.

Idle Thumbs Progresscast The Ninth One Progress continues to be made, and pods continue to be cast. The new website's in progress (thanks Mike and Doug!), and this very weekend we hope to actually put a table in the office so we can set our microphones and mixer down on something. Our postcards came in from the printer (they look lovely), final art came in from Vincent Perea (it looks beautiful), and we're working on finalizing recording date for the EP (so get ready for that). So, things are progressing nicely, and we continue to be excited as hell. But, without a lot of concrete Kickstarter news for you, we fell back on old habits and decided to talk about games for the entirely of this week's Progresscast. We hope you don't mind! Enjoy discussion of Eminent Domain, Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Minecraft, Legend of Grimrock, Guess Who, the ramifications of playtesting, and that summer Jake went to Scout Camp. If you're looking for A SWEET DIRECT DOWNLOAD LINK, it was right there. Also, like last week, this is a public cast, so feel free to pass it around if you'd like! Didn't see a thread yet, and it's a pretty sweet episode so I made one!

I'm with Remo on this one; I think the capital-G Good part of reading books is wrestling with them in some way, and being sort of changed in the process. Escapism and being dragged along by a plot is certainly nice, but it's also ultimately solipsistic. I'd certainly draw a line between literary fiction and genre/YA fiction, and it's not just the differing tropes but the very way they seek to function. Typically, if you're operating on a level that's accessible to most teenagers, you're probably not quite there. There are certainly YA books that tackle tough themes, are well-crafted, etc. but I still feel like they don't fulfill my central criterion except for those readers just beginning to delve into books. This certainly isn't a settled truth in my mind, and I spent most of last night trying to wrestle and articulate why I feel this way. I won't deny that part of my fervency is from a knee-jerk reaction against some of the opposing arguments people levied on Twitter and elsewhere, such as"All reading is good reading!" or "Telling people that they shouldn't do something they enjoy is bad." I do a Books & Beer Podcast where I shoot the shit with my fiancee about books, and I can guarantee you that an upcoming episode will be just one long battle about this very issue. I showed her the link last night, and even our long discussions feel like we're only scraping the surface. This subject just ties into so many unsettled issues in literature. How are genres defined? (Surely YA books aren't just those with YA-ish protagonists! Could you imagine the Hal storyline in IJ broken off into a YA book?) Why should we read? (The typical pluralist approach may fail here.) What makes a book a good book? (Is it redundant to say it's a high-quality book that you should read? Why or why not?) I certainly don't think less of readers who choose to try reading YA—I'm about to do the same for the sake of that podcast—but I worry about those who willfully stagnate in YA or other genre fiction. In Mieville's takedown of Tolkien, he paraphrases a quip by Michael Moorcock: "Jailers love escapism—what they don't like is escape." I worry about how our fiction impinges on the real world and ourselves, but then again I may just be overly prone to worrying about these bigger issues. In the last episode of The Idle Thumbs Podcast (about an hour in), I asked a question about whether games could achieve the same effects as literary fiction given how they're (self-)limited to their own systems they've trained the player in. Remo was worried about it too, so maybe I should just move to SF and we can do a Worrywarts podcast for the new network, where we catalogue the moral and ethical shrapnel of modernity and Late Capitalism.