Corelli

Yeah I liked it a lot too. I have the sequel sitting on my desk and I've never got around to reading it, maybe now is the time!

Hilarious episode.

Anyone watching the LoL regional qualifiers? There have been some really good matches.

Edit: And now I sound like the crazy people I was mocking last page.

Spoilers for everything:

That is awesome. Pitch-perfect 80s VHS audio warp and all.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single space squid in possession of a vast warfleet must be in want of galactic conquest.

Also, spoilers for everything:

True, but winning a Lords Management game feels like a tangible victory (you can even check in on how many games you've won or lost); Planetside 2 doesn't really have the same kind of structured winning conditions.

That turns me off on Planetside 2 as well, although I do have to admit that the first few hours I played of it were really, really impressive. I'll probably still play off and on, but it didn't grip me the way Lords Management games seem to.

Oh absolutely. The density and complexity of the plotting is arguably the best part about it. But there are also theories like this:

Yep. But it sums up the crazy conspiracy culture the books have engendered really well.

Obviously I'd heard this before, but I never realized how ridiculously well written it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JauD5v9vY0E

That's a really good point! Most games are not mechanically dense enough for this to happen. You have to understand the majority of the mechanics or you can't progress through the game. But to answer your questions, learning about a mechanic in a game second hand doesn't hurt my enjoyment of it at all; in fact, many times I wouldn't know about interesting mechanics without reading about them somewhere else because I didn't figure them out on my own (first thing that comes to mind is killing elites in Halo before the grunts to make the grunts run away, something I had to be told about to figure out. I'm sure there are better examples than that. I mean almost everything in Dwarf Fortress counts, so there you go).

GSL is back! Is anybody watching? I don't know why, but I'm really getting back into competitive SC2. And gomtv has a twitch channel now! http://www.twitch.tv/gomtv

I think this is a really interesting argument, mostly because I literally could not care at all about spoilers. They mean almost nothing to me, so I'm pretty constantly surprised by the amount of carping that goes on around them. I can think of probably 3 cases where knowing a spoiler would have hurt my enjoyment of something, which is probably an indictment of those things.

Really excited that I'm an hour in and just a little bit more than halfway through.

Is Cloud Atlas post-modern? I haven't read it and I wonder how it might fit into this discussion for thumbs people who read it for the podcast.

The best crackpot theory is that Varys is a merling. Real spoilers on crazy theories here (don't read if you haven't read all the books):

Yeah, Infinite Jest is fantastic. I still haven't read Pale King, and I feel pretty bad about it.

I had to try a couple times. Then after reading it all the way through once, I went online and read a bunch of stuff about it. I'm not ashamed to say that I missed/didn't understand a solid quarter of the novel. Comparing what you figured out with what is actually going on is a big part of the fun. I don't love everything about GR, in fact there's some parts I'm not a huge fan of, but as a whole it's well worth the read, I think. But this is sort of the post-modern conundrum, right? Is it worth spending all the time to understand these puzzle tomes? Is it even fun or worthwhile to do so? (Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest?) For whatever it's worth, I think it is.

Have you read some of his other stuff? There really is a stark difference, I think, between Crying and something like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason and Dixon (both of which are supremely entertaining, in my opinion). Also, I should state that I love Crying of Lot 49 and I think Pynchon is kind of off his rocker to call it bad in any way. It inspired my XBox Live handle! I think if Pynchon knew that he would immediately self-immolate from despair.

I love this book. But if you're looking to get into Pynchon, it's not really a good place to start as basically every other book he wrote is drastically different. He has pretty much disavowed Crying of Lot 49, saying that (and I paraphrase) "I forget everything about writing good books when I wrote it".