This is how I feel about playing Outer Wilds.
I need to play this. I get the same feelings with RPGs or really good open world games. Would love to add another to the list
That is outer worlds. Op said outer wilds. You are going to be disappointed (or maybe happy) if you pick up one thinking its the other lol.
Did you play with a mouse and keyboard? I started it on my PC and it said it needed a controller. So instead I switched to my Steam Deck, but I felt like the small screen wasn’t doing it justice, so I stopped.
Been meaning to pick it back up again.
Honestly you can play it with keyboard and mouse no problem. Don’t let it prevent you from playing!
Controller all the way.
I think it’s mostly the zero-G and ship controls where it matters.
I’m a Stephen king fan, so by the time I finish one of his books he’s written 3 more
Stephen King is the opposite of G. R. R. Martin
they should have a child together who writes at the perfect rate
But Stephen King already writes at the perfect rate.
someone should tell him not to write anything on Twitter though
or why is he tweeted what he did regarding the Epstein list
I feel like his completion of the dark tower is on par with grim’s GOT wrap up.
He defended The List recently, so fuck him.
Idk what that is
The Epstein list. He basically said it was fake. He’s always been an asshole as far as I’m concerned, but I’ve usually agreed with his political tweets (or whatever he uses that people post). I have no loyalty to him, and find it strange that he would claim it was made up.
Does it make his books worse?
It makes it suspect that the books may have been written by a pedophile (overlooking things like the orgy in IT). Odd thing to defend the Epstein files if you aren’t one.
It makes it suspect that the books may have been written by a pedophile (overlooking things like the orgy in IT).
Tbh IT is a pretty strong argument for that… I have only hazy memories from when I read it as a child (very age-appropriate book lol 👌), but I still remember several scenes of children doing sexual activities. Looking back, I don’t think any of it was needed for the story to work - if not a paedo, King was probably drugged out of his mind when he wrote it.
GNU Terry Pratchett
I’ve barely read any books since he died tbh.
Maybe try some sex instead
You are missing out. There is so much greatness out there
Try Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a wonderful story and has an underlying sense of humor in the way that Pratchett’s books did.
Giant Nosy Neighbor?
GNU STP
Dungeon Crawler Carl for all you video game nerds. Listen to the audiobook…
I’m lying. I’ve reread it multiple times and picked up new things each run.
The problem with DCC is the next book isn’t written yet :(
So you get that prolonged feeling with each new book. Same with he who fights monsters- another decent LitRPG series.
I’m lying. I’ve reread it multiple times and picked up new things each run.
Treating DCC like NetHack, I can dig it.
Easily my favorite thing I’ve ever read.
There’s Cradle too, not as “video gamey” but it’s a very easy read, almost feels like a shonen manga/anime.
I’ve been loving the series, just working my way through the last book now, and already getting the feeling in the OP from seeing that there’s not that much book left anymore :(
I somehow at the same time feel that it has no right being this good, but also enjoy it a ton. It’s a weird feeling but I’ll take it - it really appeals to my taste.
About to start another replay of The Last of Us both one and two. I would pay a lot of money to be able to forget the story and experience it again anew.
The second game is so good. So many people had a negative knee-jerk reaction to an event that happens early in the game, but I thought it was amazing.
And then playing from both Ellie and Abby’s povs was the perfect way to tell the subsequent story. By the end you’re just emotionally drained… But the story is so well told imo.
I had an experience with the part two and I liked/hated it but I don’t think I want to experience it again for the first time. Not the emotions I want in my life even though the game is great. Apart from the “experience” the gameplay was also top.
This for single player video games as well.
Being in a flow state is so nice and books and video games are both fertile places to achieve it.
Even 2+ years after playing it, I still wish I could experience Return of the Obra Dinn for the first time again 🥺 It had such mindblowing storytelling, despite (or because of) the 1-bit graphics, that I’ll never forget it enough to enjoy each revelation to the fullest like that first time. Gonna go listen to the soundtrack again…
Often. That why I don’t start a series of books unless there are at least like 4-5 in the series. But even then the series ends sometimes and it feels like you’ve lost a dear friend.
Heck yes. “What happens now!?” Where do the characters go? What happens next in the world the author built for us? Personally there’s even a slight bit of resentment to pick up another book about another character set in the same world, perhaps somewhere else in the timeline, because I got so into the part I’d read and don’t want to have to shift gears and learn about new characters, settings, and personalities.
The Magicians book series by Lev Grossman was really a big nice circle with a complete ending in my opinion. I read it twice and so truly immersed in the entire experience.
A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul was another deeply immersive experience of an entire life itself. And every person out there is living all this on their own. When I finished it I just thought “what an epic masterpiece!”
That’s also why I don’t like to watch a TV show when it first comes out, since it’s so common for them to get canceled partway through a major storyline. Got left hanging a few times and it sucked.
110% agree … It’s so frustrating to get hooked on a show and Netflix/Amazon cancels it because it was only slightly popular and didn’t have Stranger Things kind of numbers.
Case in point, I’m a huge Star Trek fan but I didn’t start Strange New Worlds until now after it had three seasons under its belt.
I still haven’t recovered from reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
I’m in the middle of the Dispossessed and I love The Left Hand of Darkness. I swear if these books were less sexual I’d want teenagers to have to read them. Left Hand to teach about cultural and gendered biases and the Dispossessed to teach that your ideology won’t create a utopia, but that doesn’t mean it won’t make things better. It’s an absolute shame that LeGuinn kinda requires nerdiness to be introduced to.
City of Illusions still haunts me as well and I keep bringing it up to my wife as we watch Three Body Problem. Its prequels Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile were good as the sci fi sword and sorcery followed by sci fi pocahontas (problematicness included) that they were. But City was a book about a Taoist against lies and liars and it hit hard for that.
Personally I found Omelas highly overrated though. It’s a visceral depiction of a common thought experiment but a common thought experiment it was
Teenagers shouldn’t be reading about sex? Am I reading your intention correctly?
I’m not going to be the one to advocate for teenagers having to read about sex
Well I think it needs done. But like many things…no one asked me so here I am! Have a good day, Comrade.
Bro when I was 16 all I thought about was sex
I read those Dispossessed and LHoD in the 80s, and then reread them more recently, and I’m amazed at how well they hold up. So often stories and sensibilities feel dated when you get to many decades from when they were written, but those two books could have been written yesterday. Both masterpieces, for sure. I’m not sure who you feel they’re inappropriate for teenagers though.
I never read City of Illusions - at least I don’t think I have. I’ll add it to my list. What do you think of Three Body Problem? I read the book and didn’t really care for it (I know I’m in the minority there).
I just finished the Dispossessed and yeah I think if I read it as a teenager I would’ve had a head start on where I was headed. My hesitation with recommending them for teenagers is not that teenagers shouldn’t read them but that I’m not comfortable being the one to call for books with sexual components to be part of the curriculi for them. Though both, especially had they been available as options for summer reading would have been enlightening.
I do think both feel dated though, but only in the gendered interactions. The terran on Winter having these gender issues makes sense, it’s the point of the story. But on Anarres the Odonians feel gender divisions in a way that feels like if written today would have explanations. Honestly i feel that even 10 years later, but definitely 20 LeGuinn would have written Odonians as seeing gender as trait only affecting that which it must rather than as a source of division, conflict, and frustration. And in that vein in both books the cold war is powerful and omnipresent lingering over every aspects of these books, especially the Vietnam war. In the Dispossessed it has to be, that’s the point, but it is dealt with in a way where you can feel the 1970s in it.
I don’t think these elements take from the stories though, it’s no different from how if you know what to look for you can see that Tolkien didn’t entirely leave WWI or Star Trek TOS is a product of the 60s while TNG is a product of the 80s and 90s (the lipstick choices alone). A work of fiction cannot be truly timeless as a person cannot be truly timeless. But a classic is one that draws you past it’s time and speaks regardless of its time, and eventually you find yourself cherishing your Shakespeare, your Homer, your epic of Gilgamesh all the more for it has grown fine with age. I feel LeGuinn is aging very well indeed.
I think there’s a big difference between overly graphic sexual descriptions and the simple fact of characters having sex. LeGuinn, to me, does the latter, not the former, and I think it’s fine for teenagers to read that. They know people have sex.
I didn’t feel that the characterization of gender roles felt dated because none of these places are earth, they’re alien worlds with their own norms being described. We, the readers of today, are left to think about those norms in comparison to our own, just as readers were at the time the books were written. Sure, there has been some shifting of our society’s norms since then, but I think the points being made still apply.
One of the things I think is most masterful about TLHoD is the initial underlying sexism of Ai, our narrator. He’s just a little dismissive of women and feminine things, and the subtlety of his evolution as he really comes to grips with a race who alternate between male and female is amazingly well done. I think that message is absolutely as relevant today as the day it was written, and can be applied to more than just gender.
City of illusions is to a degree a sequel to Planet of Exile (which is the only book of hers I think doesn’t hold up), which is kinda a sequel to Rocannon’s World so I definitely recommend reading all three.
I’m enjoying three body Problem but not to the degree I’d recommend it to people. Well made and all that, but it has issues that I feel come directly from cultural differences and from the writing.
I’ll put them on the reading list.
Yeah, I wondered if my problems with the 3BP book were culturally-based from the translation, though it was pretty universally lauded as masterful. The motivations and actions of some of the characters just seemed so unlikely to me.
Yeah I also just see a lot of the imperial propaganda that I had to learn to recognize being an American in it, but for China. It’s very, “support for China doing bad things is morally superior to opposition to it”. Like, you have a victim of the cultural revolution and you’re telling me that she’s wholly in the wrong for begging aliens to help saying that we cannot save ourselves.
The show leans away from some of it but the entire story revolves around the full villain status of people with reasonable criticisms and their blind faith that makes them to a certain degree uninteresting.
After watching Breaking Bad, I felt as if a part of my life had been torn away from me and I have been left with a hole.
Good thing we got an entire other show and movie to go along with it.
The Dark Tower.
That series is just amazing. I can’t imagine having to read them as they released, waiting that long for book four would have driven me to acts of terrorism.
I saw the movie when it came out, my ticket was for seat 19, it was the only connection to the books I got from the experience.
Of all the failings of that movie. Idris Elba as Roland Deschain was not one of them. Neither was McConaughey as Randall Flagg.
I KNOW! They were great casting for the characters, but they weren’t at all given the characters to portray. Idris Elba was my ideal pick to portray Roland long before the movie was announces, so I was excited until I saw the trailer, they did him so wrong. They did it all so wrong. I know King has a standard of shitty movie adaptations, but that wasn’t even the same fucking story or characters.
I know King has a standard of shitty movie adaptations,
Yeah but then again, you have Shawshank Redemption and The Shining… Two of the best films of all time.
you lucked out honestly. After book 4 (1997) when we werent sure if there was anything more coming, King got hit by a car in '99. It wasn’t until 2003 when we got the next book in the series, and I dont remember there being a bunch of hype beforehand. Just, King releasing stories again in 2001.
A 6 year wait was brutal, and then the last 3 books of the series came out as fast as most people could read them. (2000 pages of story in 2 years) It was an amazing sprint to the end of a story, that King wasnt sure he was going to be a part of. So it was really amazing to see.
I’m eternally thankful to have found the series after it was completed. Speculation would have been the death of me otherwise.
It’s been a very long time since I read them, but book 4 was the peak of the series anyway if I recall correctly. 5 isn’t bad, but it starts going off the rails. And then the last few books are kinda meh (though the very end was good and inevitable).
Just my opinion though. Those first four books were really good.
A million times this! I haven’t re-read it once, and I started in the 90s. This book series hada big impact on me. I named my son after a character, in fact!
Now it’s been like 20 years since the last three books came out I think I can read it almost fresh again. Obviously I know the major plot points, but I bet there’s so much I’ve forgotten.
Ive read the first three books about 4 times. The first book a dozen. Its so short that I can finish it in an evening if I want. I still havent finished wizards and glass, but the rest of the series, including wind through the keyhole are on my list for a revisit.
Wizard and Glass was the best one! It feels like the only story that King had a clear vision for lol. His stuff usually reads like he makes it up as he goes which is fine, but Wizard and Glass really stood out from the rest of the series to me.
Nah, I have to settle for sex instead. :'(
Many books have done this to me, but the most significant recent experience of this was Elden Ring.
How many hours did you put into it before you beat it? I visited every location and beat ebery boss across the base game and DLC and it took me about 120 hours. There’s probably some night time field bosses I missed but damn that game is the best bang for your buck.
that when I watch movies. even monty python life of brian. I ended up “I consumed that whole journey in about an hour seems taking too much of my energy”. So I never like watching movies.
Especially a more dramatic movies, I once watched a movie about the hussite war (forgot its name, same timeline to kingdom come deliverance) and it was more exhausting. Video games too sometimes.
I just keep reading The Neverending Story.
You mean the wandering inn webseries?
I stood up, hadn’t eaten or drank enough clearly, and passed out. Beaned my head on the desk but at just the right angle to not cause a serious injury.
Don’t forget to eat and drink, and stand up carefully!
Now you can enjoy the book again for the first time!
Loooool didn’t hit my head that hard, thankfully!
Thanks mate!
