Chris

That's Levi! He's a good artist.

One of the toughest things for me about podcasting is that pretty much anything we say ends up being enshrined as a potential Strong Belief or All-Encompassing Opinion, and that's almost never the case for the stuff we say. I don't even remember what we (whoever it was) said about Tim & Eric, but I'm not especially down on them at all. I'm not trying to call you out--this sort of thing happens all the time, and it makes total sense why. But it's definitely super weird to realize that offhand remarks we thrown out that, to us, are often very disposable and incomplete, are actual Published Content that we release for the internet to judge.

It's not?? So it works different to all the other Halos?

haha video games

This is going to be an intimidating podcast to record.

For folks who remember the minor controversy around Jonathan Franzen getting uninvited from being on Oprah years ago, that was actually directly related to this topic. Franzen was concerned about how publishers of literature seemed to be giving up on male audiences, or at least valuing them considerably less, and (in a separate interview) expressed his mixed feelings about whether his book being part of Oprah's Book Club would only intensify that perception and/or reality. When that interview was published, his Oprah invitation was revoked.

I suspect they're marketed that way because it works; just like with video games. It's probably having a deleterious long-term effect on the reach of each medium, but I imagine it's hard for publishers to care about that if their experience shows a strong correlation between targeting a particular kind of femininity and seeing higher sales. Economics!

Well, that's definitely part of it. It's definitely not a household name by any means. And even allowing for multiple people being aware of a book, having all three of them having READ it and being clearly quite familiar with it, with no prior context to explain why that would be the case, just rang false to me. The idea of three guys being up in a zeppelin and one saying, "Of course we all know A Canticle for Liebowitz," and everyone saying "Oh yeah of course," apropos of basically nothing, was just silly. That kind of thing rarely happens even with works that are much more part of the zeitgeist, except (usually) in situations where you're self-selecting your friends based on mutual interest and taste--and in this case, if Archie and Gibson Goode and Gibson Goode's bodyguard have anything in common, it's vintage vinyl, but as I recall, they didn't even personally overlap all that much on that Venn diagram.

Literature, generally, is already targeted more towards women than men, especially literature written by women. The cover was surely also chosen before any of the award nominations started happening. I think in general people should simply strive not to be too scared of works that they think might not be completely targeted at them.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. As I said on the podcast, it strained credulity for me that all three of those characters in that situation would be familiar with the work. I didn't say I thought the work was poor; I haven't read it.

I think Sean was the one who brought that up so I don't want to speak for him, but I think he simply meant the not-infrequent references to the world of Marvel comics, including places like "Wakanda." I had never heard of that before reading Telegraph Avenue, but it was a fairly significant fictional reference in the book.

I've never even really experienced the threat of violence in any personal and direct sense.

I'm just taking a guess here, because I've never seen the word before, but I would assume "hemotechnics" to be a portmanteau of "hemoglobin" and "pyrotechnics," referring simply to extreme gushing blood effects and the like.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/04/sim-plicity-i-am-a-human-being/

Totally aside from this issue specifically with respect to this book, I think if you're a white guy it's a lot easier not to be obsessed with racial identity.

I don't think any of us realized that, no.

This is specifically the one we watched--the shorter length gives the skull moment a pretty different implication contextually:

The gold foil wizard logo shirt is backer-exclusive, but we're looking into selling other merchandise in the hopefully near future.

Lee is a legit fucking game development hero. The guy is possibly the single most talented in-the-trenches game developer I've ever worked with. That's saying something, having worked at Irrational and Double Fine and being surrounded by many people incalculably more talented than I am. Lee can basically do anything on a game, while being a great manager and a humble guy, and he makes everyone else look like a total scrub. It's unfair.

As someone who spent his college career studying music, I find it extremely difficult to believe you've even heard of, let alone heard examples of, every genre of music.

I don't think this should be a concern. None of us had read this book before this month, and none of us have read next month's either. It's not as though we're personally wrapped up in the works. For what it's worth, I probably fall somewhere in between the general feeling of disappointment in this thread and a full-fledged enjoyment of the book. I thought it had a number of problems (some of which I raised earlier) but wasn't a total failure of a novel; I derived a lot of pleasure out of it, interspersed with the frustrations.

Hey man, thanks for stopping by. I have to assume all the potential alternatives we batted around were discussed to death in the design pit during development. It's one of those seemingly intractable design problems.

Perhaps... some day... you can.

I could never bring myself to do this. I just toted around a bigass hardcover for two months.

I'm in the middle of the and running out of endurance. How long does it go on?