Bad Robots

This is the little guy’s latest obsession. Well, not pixellated webcomics per se, but the subject matter above: bad robots. Not only does he bring them up often (and almost equally often, apropos of nothing) but they show up in the freestyle artwork he brings home from daycare. At this stage in his neuro-motor development his renderings consist entirely of monochromatic marker scribbles, but when we ask him “oh, what is this a picture of?” the answer is generally some variation on “bad robots”.

On one hand I find this really fascinating because it taps into an interesting element of geek morality. With all the tropes of action-adventure and problems-solved-through-violence inherent in everything from comic books to video games, there comes a point at which you have to ask if it’s really ok for the supposed hero to deal so heavily in carnage and death (perhaps exemplified best in the Clerks-esque discussions of all those faceless stromtroopers who are annihilated when the Death Star explodes). But there are ways around that kind of moral thorniness. Zombies are a standout example, embodying bad guys who are (a) already dead and (b) impossible to stop without destroying and also (c) capable of making the case that destroying them is actually a kind of mercy. Robots, or certain versions thereof, are very similar: lifeless, mindless, and plausible enough to throw at the good guy in automaton hordes, allowing the good guy to cut loose with wild abandon and dismantle them with untroubled hyperviolence.

The little guy has the capacity for hyperviolence, of that I have little doubt. He’s been known to very calmly, sweetly even, confess to my wife, “Mommy … I just like hitting.” So by all means, if he wants to channel that aggression toward the destruction of bad robots, this is in my view something to be encouraged (as long as the boundaries implied are rigorously observed). But the funny thing is, I certainly didn’t plant this particular idea in the little guy’s head. I have no idea from whence it springs. I have to assume he picked it up at school, the only time he’s really receiving ideas unobserved by either his mother or myself. Some other little boy who has an older sibling into Transformers no doubt suggested fighting bad robots on the playground and it just clicked into the little guy’s receptive imagination.

At the Super Bowl party we all attended, my buddy Clutch dragged out many toys (his own, for he’s a man after my own heart) for the kids, including Rock’em Sock’em Robots, which the little guy was of course instantly drawn to. I was amused by the fortuitous coincidence myself, and acquiesced several times when the little guy wanted to pull me away from the football game in the living room and over to the robo-deathmatch game in the playroom. The game was one of the newer editions, not an antique from the 60’s, yet inevitably still prone to the same mechanical limitations as always. I found these worked to my advantage, though. The little guy and I would both flail away at the punch controllers in a very loud stalemate, and whenever I decided I had had enough I would just shake the movement lever back and forth as hard as I could, which was generally sufficient to unhook the catch inside my robot’s head and cause it to sproing upward, at which point I could tell the little guy “You win!” and everyone was happy. Of course, this is a matter of some contention in the household at the moment, whether or not three, almost three-and-a-half is an age at which we shouldn’t always let the little guy win, and at which we should expect him to play games by their established rules and not make up his own, but that’s something to be settled another day (or which very well may simply settle itself).

Laughing last

I’ve been having a bit of a tough time concentrating today, as the weather forecast was for snow, which tends to play havoc with the VRE and its exposed-to-the-elements rails. Said havoc generally takes the form of a slow crawl, true, but today is one of my days to pick up the kids from daycare and therefore getting home expediently is kind of important. At this very moment, it hasn’t started snowing yet, and if it holds off for another hour or so I should be all right. But in the meantime, I keep glancing nervously out the window every twenty minutes or so, and a profound and meaningful blog post has (unsurprisingly) failed to materialize under those circumstances.

So lacking anything really deep to haul out and overthink, I might as well weigh in on the latest geekosphere brouhaha, which is the recent announcement that DC Comics is going to publish new stories set in the world of the Watchmen, set (by necessity) in the same time periods as some of the flashback sequences in the landmark original series, since a true sequel set after the events in the seminal story would be (even more) pointless. The original creators of Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, are not involved creatively with these prequel-y tie-in naked cash grabs. Gibbons is supposedly pretty cool with them, though; notoriously cranky Moore is not.

I’m of two minds about it. They are transparent attempts to milk fans for more money. They may very well be inferior, head-scratcher trifles at best or aggravatingly awful at worst. I don’t think they represent an artistic crime against Moore as a person or Watchmen as a book, and would just as soon see them judged on their own merits and flaws as opposed to whether or not they stand up to comparison with their forebear (doubtful) or whether or not they tarnish its legacy (only if you let them, is my pre-emptive take).

I’m also certainly not going to rush out and buy all of the new Before Watchmen comics as they’re released, not only because I’m really out of the weekly comics shop habit but because the idea of exploring or deepening that world doesn’t appeal to me all that much. I’m not standoffish from the idea because I’m taking some kind of moral highground about creators’ rights or the integrity of classics or anything like that. I’m just not salivating at the thought of Watchmen spinoffs, not even to the same minor degree I was salivating in anticipation of the Watchmen movie a couple years ago (which I ended up acquiring the director’s cut of on DVD, but have yet to actually get around to viewing, read into that what you will).

But at the same time, it’s such an unusual, arguably unique moment in the history of American comics, that I have a high level of curiosity about the execution, if not the content. And, admittedly, a little bit of that undying collector’s need to hold a bit of the moment physically in my hands. And if I were going to fork over a few bucks just to get my own first-hand experience of what-were-they-thinking, I already know which title would end up in my collection:


And not because it’s the perviest cover (not just because of that, at any rate). What occurs to me is that, within the narrative of the original Watchmen, Comedian is the archetypal sellout. When the conflict came down to the government on one side and masked mystery men on the other, Comedian betrayed his teammates and became a lackey of The Man. It’s one of the dominant themes that defines him in the story.

Now we get Before Watchmen, which is fully deserving of having the term “sellout” bandied about in the same breath. Just how meta will the sellout miniseries about the most sellout character in Watchmen end up being? It’s very possible that it could wind up subtext-free and just superficially expound upon how Eddie Blake became a high-level CIA assassin and put on some weight. But there’s also the potential there for some crazy self-aware inside jokes – it is the Comedian, after all. I could see giving that a whirl.

Extra tech support

Right then, after yesterday’s victory dance, let’s get back to talking about work, shall we? Don’t get me wrong, I could keep talking quite a bit about the Super Bowl party (spirited discussions of Bill Belichick’s coaching strategies to inspire championship performance, including black bag operations against players’ loved ones and dealings with dark eldritch soul-thiefs) and the fallout of the party (my wife and I were in headed for bed by 9:30 last night, and that was later than we had intended) but at a certain point even I acknowledge enough is enough already.


OK, now it’s enough.

I’ve long accepted the fact that the specialist knowledge-gap between myself and my co-workers is a double-edged sword. I’m indispensible (as much as that means anything in our insecure modern economy) because no one else knows how to do what I do, and I’m given lots of leeway to do what I do in my own way and on my own time because, again, no one else knows the nuts and bolts of what I’m doing, how long it should take, &c. On the other hand, I’m isolated, and when I run into a problem there’s no one else I can turn to for assistance (or even sympathy, really). But, as I said, that’s my lot, and I will take it, even when attempting to bridge the aforementioned gap gets odd.

It’s not that odd when I have to perform contorted mental translations while discussing things with my contracting boss, who for example will refer to a web application as a database, which to me only refers to one component of the application but to him basically sums up the whole purpose of the app as a collection of information. At least I can wrap my head around how he defines terms, and I’m not so screamingly pedantic as to try to correct him. We manage to overcome the point-of-reference barrier more often than not.

It’s also not that odd when I get asked questions about things which are epically outside of my expertise, because if no one understands exactly what I do, then no one is going to understand where what I do stops and other things, similar only by virtue of being “techie”, begin. I’m so used to this phenomenon by now that I have a fairly robust set of boilerplate replies to deploy at a moment’s notice which convey that I understand the question but can’t speak to the answer, which I regret while simultaneously completely understanding why the question was brought to me in the first place. I may think like the stereotypical Office Computer Guy but I strive not to project those thoughts too loudly.

No, what’s odd is when I get the creeping feeling that I’m the only one in the room who knows the most fundamental basics of computer operation. Elementary web programming is almost laughably easy, once you take the time to learn the ropes, but I can understand how baffling it may seem to an outsider. And the intricacies of relational databases, or the various mutable factors affecting server performance, those really are things which a non-specialist has absolutely no reason to possess any insight into whatsoever. But in this far-flung outpost of the computer age known as the year 2012, I guess I expect everyone who works in the Big Gray’s office setting to know his or her way around Microsoft Windows and its productivity software. Yet just this week my boss was expressing some concerns to me about updating one of our web apps, which would require a review and rewrite of the content, although the original storyboards for the content seemed to be locked such that people couldn’t update them. He forwarded the material to me and it turned out that the storyboards were just PowerPoint slides and the files in question were read-only. It’s really not that hard to get around that, yet I found myself explaining to my boss how Save As would do the trick while hoping that I wasn’t going to have to pay later for being condescending. It looks like I needn’t have worried about the last bit, which is right back to the double-edge again: I’m happy to help, I just can’t believe anyone else needs that kind of assist.

The good news overall, of course, is that if all of this mystifying file editing gets sorted out, I may end up with actual updates to make to an actual web application, which is always good for my intermittent efforts to rack up accomplishments I can put on my next annual review. But as with all things government agency-related, there’s an awful lot of ground to cover between where we are now and that hypothetical future point, so we shall see.

The sweet smell of Lombardi

There’s really not much to tie the Super Bowl last night to work today, except how dreadful it was to hear the alarm go off this morning after the unstinting overindulgence of the night before. I think (amazingly enough) that I’ve gone all these years here at the blog without mentioning this, but for years I maintained a very serious position that three new, secular holidays should be added to the corporate year: Ash Wednesday, March 18th, and the Monday after the Super Bowl. That way people could go out and enjoy Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day and the NFL Championship as they were intended to, relatively unmindful of the consequences. Now that I have two children and don’t drink-drank-drunk the way I used to, I’ve softened quite a bit on the Ash Wednesday and March 18th propositions, but I’m still fairly certain post-Super Bowl Monday should be a national day of rest.

Of course, as alluded to given my happy family-man lifestyle shift, the overindulgence last night for me consisted of drinking two whole beers and eating lots of chicken wings and various other snacks. I actually felt more fryer-fat-hungover than alcohol-hungover this morning. Neither one makes it easy to roll out of bed at 5 a.m., though. Thank goodness for my mindless daily routines which allowed me to autopilot through one step at a time and get to the office in approximate normalcy. But again, that’s pretty much all I can say work-related, though hopefully you won’t blame me because come on GIANTS WOOOHOOOOOO!

The game was good, although I was slow to warm up to it, as I had a tough time shaking off the feeling that the Giants’ hot streak would finally fall apart and the Patriots would mercilessly dismantle everything that had previously been working for them. I completely missed the coin toss and the kickoff, as I was still circulating through the kitchen and grazing, but once the Giants started showing evidence of some gas still being left in the tank, I got progressively more and more into it – at least as much as juggling the little guy and littler girl allowed. My wife actually did a huge amount of the kid-wrangling, and I can only hope to repay her by running myself ragged during next year’s Super Bowl party which I am simply going to assume will feature the Steelers in the title game because that’s the way it seems to go around here. I do wholeheartedly believe that my wife’s bandwaggoning for the G-Men was a crucial element of their winning formula, and I hope I’ve been sufficiently expressive of my thanks for that. At any rate, the four members of my nuclear family cheering section made it all the way to the end of the party (which, apparently, means not just the end of regulation but the MVP award, although our consensus was that the defensive corps deserved it more than Eli, but you know, drop in a bucket); the little girl fought sleep with all her miniature might and didn’t pass out until the waning minutes of the fourth quarter, whereas the little guy seemed ready to talk to me for the entire car ride home until he finally conked out maybe fifteen minutes shy of pulling into the garage. As an added bonus, both kids stayed asleep going from car seats to respective bed/crib. I walked the dogs, turned on SportsCenter to watch the highlights of the game I had just finished watching live, and tried to go to sleep at about 11:45 (although I was so wired that when the baby started crying at about 12:30 a.m. I had only barely dozed off). See above re: alarm clock pain.

I understand from the online chatter today that it was not the best of years for Super Bowl commercials, which was the distracted impression that I got as well. I did spot one trend which no one else seems to be talking about: urban zip lines? Was it just me who noticed that not only was an urban zip line the piece de resistance in Seinfeld’s Acura ad, but also that there was a random zip line running through the street party in the “I Believe In a Thing Called Love” Samsung spot? Is this a thing the kids who live in the hipster neighborhoods are actually setting up, which I would know about if I didn’t live in the boonies subordinate to a notoriously unhip city?


I go back and forth between loving it when people take the piss out of Apple and feeling that it is (pun unavoidable) pretty low-hanging fruit. Just the fact that Apple managed to run a tv campaign for years which was supposed to highlight all the awesome ways in which Macs were superior to PCs and which will always be fondly remembered for how much people loved the guy who played PC and wanted to punch the kid who played Mac, that tells you something right there about how insufferable Apple is. But the Samsung-users-passively-rub-their-gadgets-in-the-faces-of-hipsters-waiting-in-line-for-iPhones ads were getting played out, too … until last night when they brought in not just The Darkness but The New and Improved Darkness With Waxed Curlicue Handlebar Moustache. There is nothing in that overall concept I am not a sucker for.

Also I would be remiss if I did not point out that I was at a party populated by folks who were well-disposed to geek out over the Avengers movie trailer. Which is probably not a huge surprise, but I point it out because it was personally heartening. These friendships of mine go back to my early 20’s, some even earlier, and now that we all have jobs and families and have spread out a bit more geographically, we don’t all see each other as often as we used to, the occasional Holy Day of Football Obligation notwithstanding. So it was gratifying that, once the Avengers trailer had run, the reactions were not simply variants on “looks rad” but more in the vein of “we are all going to need to go see that TOGETHER and we have exactly three months to figure out how to make that work” which is arguably within even our meager event-planning capabilities. But as I say, sometimes it’s just nice to know that everyone still cares about getting together and hanging out and experiencing things communally instead of in our own overstressed little silos.

And now we must enter into that darkest time of the year between the NFL season and the beginning of spring training for the MLB. But at least there’s a world championship to ease the pain.

Book Store No More

Lately, when I’ve been getting off the train in the morning, it’s either been uncomfortably cold or warmer but rainy, so I’ve been making a beeline for the underground shops entrances and following that semi-indirect route to my office building in order to hide from the elements. But today it was dry and chilly but not frostbite-inducing, so I walked down Crystal Drive outside.

I often am reminded of one particular afternoon when I walk down the main drag, an afternoon which at this point is years gone. I was working at my first contract gig for my present employer, which was also located more or less on Crystal Drive, a bit closer to the VRE station than my present assignment (at this point I now think of all the time I spent in Rosslyn as just a brief interregnum in the Crystal City phase of my professional life). One day at lunch I decided to stroll down to a small, independent bookstore and pick up some new reading material. I bought a paperback and then crossed the street to Chipotle, where the noontime line was long enough that I cracked open the book and started reading while shuffling ever closer to the counter. I continued reading at a table by myself while I ate my burrito. And then I went back to work, and continued reading that book as I commuted back and forth over the next week or two. This was the old commute, before we moved, even before the little guy was born, in July of 2008. (I know this because I am so weirdly list-obsessed that I have, in a notebook on my desk at work, a complete inventory of every book I’ve read while commuting since May of 2007, broken out by month.)

I made the whole new-book-entered-into-over-burrito association again this morning, which is unsurprising when you consider a few factors. One, the independent bookstore in question closed up not long after I made that purchase, and I’ve always thought that was a shame. And I just finished reading a book about David Foster Wallace, which is really a long transcript, with very minimal editing, of the tape-recorded back and forth between DFW and David Lipsky, a novelist doing an assignment for Rolling Stone, about the book tour DFW undertook for Infinite Jest. Lipsky decided to publish the unvarnished accidental portrait, with DFW’s family’s blessing, after DFW’s death. There’s occasional insertions of Lipsky “now” looking back at the conversation he had a decade prior, and one thing he keeps mentioning is that a lot of those manifestations of the late-millennial publishing world, like independent bookstores and public readings and so on, have gone away.

And the book in question, which I’m being so coy about, was A Game of Thrones. As I mentioned recently, I’m planning on rereading A Song of Ice and Fire soon, and with the completion of the DFW interview book, I’m that much closer. I’ve basically finished all the big books I got for Christmas and the few others I had picked up here and there (at the Borders GOOB sale &c.) so, there’s that. Sorry to keep harping on this but what can I say, it's top-of-mind partly because of the novelty (to me) of deliberately having a second go at something for a reason other than "I was probably too young to really get this at the time I first read it."


Anecdote-within-this-anecdote: when I picked up the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire three and a half years ago it was just yet another series of epic fantasy novels. Now thanks to the HBO series its popularity and general pop visibility has increased exponentially. Back then it was just generic nerd-bait. I still clearly recall bringing it up to the bookstore counter and the girl working the register telling me “Oh, great book. Great book. I resisted reading it for a long time even though a bunch of my friends told me it was awesome, but then one of my friends started running a roleplaying campaign in this setting? So I figured I’d better familiarize myself with the environment. So glad I did. Now I just can’t wait for the next one to come out.” Bear in mind, I was on my lunch hour from work, the work for which I am required to dress like a grown-up in a shirt and tie and everything. So I was not wearing my Justice League of America ringer t-shirt, is what I’m getting at. But this girl assumed I would know all about roleplaying campaigns based on specific properties – which of course I do, but I’ve never really known what it is about me that just screams this to the world. I don’t wear glasses or a crystal dragon pendant or anything. I just have the face of a geek, I guess.

Also, at the time the girl mentioned her eager anticipation for volume five, I thought to myself “Well, I’ll just pace myself and work my way through the older books as the newer ones are coming out, and spare myself that waiting.” This did not work as Martin is legendarily slow, and A Dance With Dragons just came out this past July, three years after my transaction in the bookstore. I had long since finished the first four by then, obviously.

At any rate, it’s a shame that bookstore didn’t survive but in a selfish way I should be grateful. If it were still around, now that I’m back to working on Crystal Drive, I probably would have spent way too much time in both the bookstore and the facing Chipotle, and my house would be overflowing with impulsively obtained clearance table hardcovers while my weight climbed somewhere up around my age times ten. A little deprivation is definitely a good thing in my case.

Threenage Wasteland

How have I not already used this as a blog post title? I suspect the fact that the little guy has only been 3 for about five months has something to do with it.


The little guy has always been what his mother and I would describe as “intense”, and once he transitioned from baby to walking/talking toddler that intensity became more and more manifest as “willfulness”. I’m very used to it by now, and I’ve accepted the fact that I’m always going to have to find ways to either work with it or around it. So the fact of him being willful (contrary, ornery, &c.) no longer surprises me – but sometimes the specific manifestations still do.

Some time in the last few months (the exact timing eludes me) the little guy underwent a subtle transformation from pure rampaging id to a … ok, honestly, I have no idea what to label him as now, and maybe that’s all for the best. The rampaging id is easy to identify, because it’s the little guy throwing himself on the ground and kicking and screaming and repeating things over and over and over again (either the thing he wants which he’s being denied, or just the word “no” if he’s fighting with me or my wife over something we want him to do). And the only thing we ever did with the rampaging id was allow itself to burn out its furiosity and then lead the way in calmly moving on. Recently, though, the tantrums seem to end (or at least change gears ) much more quickly, and with minimal prompting from us. The little guy will yell and shout his protest and then just kind of collapse, seeming to go from anger to sadness complete with burying his weeping face on the couch, thrusting a rejecting stiffarm in our general direction, and saying “Go away! Just leave me alone!” And of course, I can’t help but wonder … is this his evolving emotional profile showing itself to us? Is he genuinely becoming the kind of person who feels brief anger followed by a devastating sadness, and who needs to shut everything down and step back to get a grip? And is he figuring out the rudimentary parameters of this at age three? OR … is he totally playing us, and figuring out the rudimentary parameters of manipulating us into feeling sorry for him? (Because we do, for the most part. I don’t think there’s been an instance yet where he’s reached the “Go away!” point and we haven’t said “Awww … poor little guy.”) Is one or the other of those possibilities – more sophisticated self-management, or more sophisticated exploitation of parental concern – more likely at his age? Or is “I can’t help but wonder” a cover for me saying “I can’t help but project” which, in fact, we all know I’m guilty of on a frighteningly regular basis?

Yet another possibility is that it’s all three; the little guy is getting somewhat more nuanced in the way he interacts with the world (because he has to be, he’s growing up little by little every day) and some of those new facets of his personality will be more desirable, and some less so, and through it I’m constantly looking for myself in him because (a) he really is bright (and still intense) for his age and (b) I fall a little too easily into the trap of not thinking of him as a small child but as a short, occasionally spastic potential peer and (c) it’s just an inherent weakness of mine, I’m not made of stone here people, come on.

A much more recent addition to the little guy’s repertoire only complicates the issue even further. Lately he’s taken to responding to any firm drawing-the-line by me or my wife with the following cri-du-coeur: “You guys NEVER let me do ANYTHING I want!” Additionally complicated by the fact that that particular gem doesn’t make us go “awww”, it makes us laugh (which we take great pains to stifle and/or hide). Again, it’s slightly more nuanced than just digging his heels in, and it also smacks of attempted guilt-trippery (however ill-conceived for its blatant untruthfulness), and it also makes him sound exactly like he’s about fourteen years old. Kids, they grow up so fast.

But then again, you know, just this morning my wife sent me a phone picture message with a shot of our son sporting a ridiculously adorable and age-appropriate smeared-chocolate Vandyke. That was on the heels of a picture of our daughter pulling herself to a standing position on the edge of the little guy’s train table. So I can probably put off completely recalibrating my expectations of the little guy’s interpersonal sophistication a little bit longer, which is convenient since I’m apparently thiiiiis close to several months of chasing a wobbly little girl around the house and making sure she doesn’t pull too many heavy things down on top of her head.

Gonna use almost all my tags on this post (Ready Player One)

In the novel Ready Player One, Ernest Cline sidesteps quite a few narrative challenges by setting most of the plot’s action inside a virtual world known as the OASIS. One major aspect of the book facilitated by the OASIS is the ability to showcase multiple pop culture mash-ups in ways which might otherwise violate suspension of disbelief, whether due to the logistics of physics or simple genre incompatibility; within the confines of a giant, immersive video game, all of those concerns can be handwaved away because none of it is “real” anyway. Another benefit of the computer-simulation conceit is that it provides the means by which our first-person narrator and protagonist, Wade Watts, can shade ever so slightly into a touch of omniscience, as he sometimes knows what other characters in remote locations are doing, thanks to the fact that he and they are all playing the same game and the Scoreboard is always virtually accessible. In honor of the Scoreboard, I’m going to go ahead and assign (and deduct) points for Ready Player One as a means of reviewing it.

+20 points for Wade’s name. I admit I am a sucker for fictional monikers that try to pack in the allusions, and this one is a doozy. Always a strong move to give the hero of the tale a first name which is a verb, as Wade is, especially one which can reference something brave and righteous, such as “wading into the enemy lines”. Of course on the flipside, there are other non-mighty connotations (like wading pools) so that helps give the hero a relatable, not-altogether-badass aspect. A watt is a unit of power, which is useful both for conveying the potential derring-do of the hero and also evoking the electric dreamland in which his quest unfolds, and yet Watts still sounds like a believable last name, so all in all the kid has a good handle.

+5 bonus points for lampshading the alliteration. Very early on Wade mentions that his dad was a big comic book fan and wanted his son to have a double-initial name like Peter Parker. Works for me.


+50 points for the premise and premise-within-the-premise of the book. The outer-layer premise is this: by the middle of the 21st century the Earth is in full-on hell-in-a-handbasket mode, with fossil fuel reserves depleted, global warming out of control, a worldwide recession dragging everyone down except the super-rich, and life in general a big bowl of crap. The one bright spot for civilization is the OASIS, the ultimate manifestation of cyberspace as an interactive virtual reality that resembles a cross between MMORPGs, YouTube, Facebook, and every other major internet trend and/or destination. Logging on to (and losing oneself in) the OASIS is most people’s reason for living, with poor people working as indentured servants to obtain the access fees for the OASIS’s minimal functionality and rich people indulging every whim a programmable environment (and high-end high-priced experience-enhancing accessories) can afford. The premise of the story, building off that foundation, goes like this: James Halliday, a Gen X-er who created the OASIS and became a reclusive billionaire, died without heirs, and his will stipulated that his entire fortune (and, essentially, control of the OASIS) will go to whichever OASIS user can find an Easter egg he hid within the program. Five years later, during which time he has pored over the biography and pop culture obsessions of Halliday, Wade Watts manages to decipher a clue Halliday left behind, which sets him down the path to claiming the ultimate prize, although of course he has to race against others intent on the same goal.

So it’s a classic dystopia wrapped around an archetypal hero’s quest (a tripartite quest, no less, with three keys and three gates and everything) and at the same time it’s a love letter to geeky 80’s pop culture, justified by the fact that a genius programmer who died of cancer as an old man in 2040-something would have been born in 1972 and spent the ages of eight to seventeen as a geek in the 80’s. All of these are fantastic ingredients for a book that is so very much in my wheelhouse that it is all but collapsing the wheelhouse floor under its weight. In theory.


+10 points to you if you have already guessed that I don’t think it quite came together to live up to its potential. I know this is totally unfair of me. Just the other night my wife and I were watching Top Chef and I was lamenting the judges’ tendency to judge how far away a dish was from the judge’s expectations, as opposed to judging what was actually in front of them in and of itself. But I do think there’s a difference between Cat Cora dissing a dish because she personally does not care for tarragon, and my sense that Ready Player One missed some huge opportunities to deliver more solidly on its dual premises. Moving on …

-15 points for the toothlessness of the dystopia. A few dozen pages into the book it occurred to me that Ready Player One was more or less a YA novel. There are two ways to handle a dystopian setting: make it a truly grim and dangerous place, or make it a cardboard backdrop to justify whatever unreal plot elements you care to incorporate in the tale. Ready Player One is the latter, content to assert that the real world sucks which is why the OASIS is so popular and important. Wade is part of the poor underclass, orphaned because his father was shot during a looting riot and his mother later overdosed, raised by a wicked aunt who hoards his food vouchers for himself. And yet he is perfectly healthy both emotionally and physically, the usual teen angst and nerdy weight-struggles notwithstanding. He manages to feed himself by doing odd jobs in computer repair, somehow. The government conveniently gives all children free OASIS access and hardware so that they can go to virtual school. It’s all a very by-the numbers Dystopia For Kids, by which I mean a dystopia which children could read about without having nightmares. Everything is dirty and run-down and non-ideal, but nothing is truly horrifying. Wade even has a kindly elderly neighbor, Mrs. Gilmore, who validates him as a nice young man. A true dystopia brings out the worst in everyone; a dystopia that has sweet little old ladies in it speaks for itself.

+10 points for killing off Mrs. Gilmore. Of course, right when I was thinking that it would not be hard to make a G-rated movie out of Ready Player One, Cline ramps up the vilification of his main antagonist by having the heavy blow up a good chunk of the shantytown trailer park where Wade lives in a legitimate attempt to kill Wade. Granted, by narrative necessity, Wade is somewhere else at the time, but Mrs. Gilmore isn’t as lucky. (Nor is Wade’s aunt but she was already unsympathetic enough for deserved-to-die status.) So, maybe not completely toothless, if there’s a genuine bodycount.

+88 points for the focus on the 80’s. I give full (maybe even excessive) credit for the ballsy move of setting a story in the future but populating it almost entirely with decades-old referents, right down to the décor including wood paneling. I mentioned above the justification of Halliday’s age, and the unspoken axiom that the golden age for any entertainment is “when you were 12”, but I know some people still found the relentless 80’s vibe jarring. Not me (though obviously I too was 12 right in the midst of said decade), because I can get behind committing to a concept 110% as well as writing what you know, which Cline clearly does.

+9 points for not going exclusively 80’s. On the other hand, Cline wisely concedes that even in a virtual universe where the deity-figure loved the 80’s and most of the denizens reverently follow suit, there are going to be some people clamoring for other touchstones which came later. Including the Whedonverse and quidditch were touches which I personally appreciated.


-20 points for a complete lack of originality. But, arrgh, here’s where it starts to go a bit pear-shaped. As presented over the course of the novel, the OASIS represents an inescapable dearth of creative thinking. It is literally a limitless realm of unencumbered possibilities, and the only thing people use it for is recreating existing intellectual properties. I offer absolutely no argument against the fact that it would be surpassingly cool to fly on Falkor the Luckdragon’s back with a lightsaber hanging on your hip and Green Lantern’s ring on your finger while on your way to visit the Sky City of the Hawk Men. But there should be some new IP in the mix somewhere, shouldn’t there? Considering that the story is set a few decades in the future, there are two potential sources, really: individual OASIS users could have invented their own worlds and creatures, vehicles and weapons, and so on; OR, since Cline makes reference to “movie stars” as still being a thing in the future, he as author could have invented new movie and tv franchises which people could be copying in the OASIS. But no, every fantastical element seen in the novel is either determinedly generic or a specific reference to a real-world bit of pop culture. I know, I know, there’s a certain purity to that, and it’s a presumptuous trap of arrogance an author can fall into to start making assertions like “The interactive Battle of the Sarlacc Pit (from Return of the Jedi) was an all-time favorite among OASIS users, but the Last Stand Against the Cyborg Demons (written by Jacques Trebuchet of Halifax in 2037) was even more popular”. Maybe it’s best to avoid the temptation altogether. I’d argue the converse, though.

-10 points for ignoring comic books other than the aforementioned double-initials thing. I mentioned the GL ring above but that’s my own personal mash-up fantasy. In Ready Player One, no one so much as sports Batman’s utility belt as part of their ensemble (unless I missed it). Yes, to a certain extent I take this as a personal slight, that comics get no love amidst the thick swarms of movie, tv, video game and music references making up the novel’s literal pop culture landscape. But I think it’s worth a ding in the points tally because it represents a kind of unfired Chekov’s Gun, too. Wade mentions early on that Halliday was a renowned comic book collector, and the whole quest-structure of the plot revolves around Halliday’s obsessions, but nothing ever comes down to knowing the convoluted history of a legacy Spider-Man villain or anything. Disappointing.

-30 points for the ending. I’ve got nothing against a happy ending, but not only does everything work out perfectly for Wade, but it does so in a completely uncomplicated manner. I’ll go ahead and give a spoiler warning, but does it count as spoilers if there are no surprises to ruin whatsoever? There’s a battle at the last gate, but Wade makes it through, with the bad guys on his heels. Inside the gate, instead of a single challenge as at the first two gates, there are three – one similar to the first gate’s, one similar to the second’s, and one requiring a minimal amount of applied trivia-knowledge. Wade completes the challenges, finds the Easter egg, meets an AI simulation of Halliday, and inherits the OASIS fortune. Also he gets the girl. The end. No twists, no reversals, it’s hard to even call the whole extended setpiece a climax because the outcome is never in doubt.


-100 points for the hollowness of all the references. OK, this is where we get down to the nuts and bolts of what totally drove me crazy over the course of the book. This is a book for and about Gen X-ers, a great unselfconscious whooping declaration of passionate love for the entertainment of our youth. But it also seems shockingly unaware of a certain negative reputation that nostalgic Gen X-ers (rightfully) have accrued, namely that our pop culture memories mean something to us not because of what they represent or taught us or convey, but simply because they existed. All it takes to make a Gen X-er happy is to say “Oh, dude, remember Manimal?” The relative quality and/or meaning of Manimal is irrelevant. It existed, and we remember it, and we can talk about that endlessly, in infinite variations. Remember that thing? Yup, that sure was a thing. And that’s pretty much the unironic approach that Ready Player One takes.

I’m not saying that every fleeting reference to a bit of pop culture flotsam that passed through Wade’s peripheral consciousness in the book needed to be fraught with philosophical significance. But even at the heart of the book, Halliday’s Quest, everything just sat there pretty inertly. Here’s a list of the specific touchstones Halliday incorporated into the Easter egg’s trail of clues and keys and gates: Tomb of Horrors (a D&D module), Joust (an arcade game), War Games (a movie), Zork (an interactive-text computer game), Captain Crunch (a real-world hacker/phreaker named after a breakfast cereal), Blade Runner (a movie), Black Dragon (an arcade game), 2112 (an album by Rush), Schoolhouse Rock (Saturday morning educational cartoon interstitials), Tempest (an arcade game), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a movie), Adventure (an Atari game). It’s a solid, eclectic mix which certainly evokes the 80’s with a fairly heavy nerd-slant. But why those artifacts specifically? Could the exact same story have been told with a different set of movies, video games, and assorted references (and therefore without the song “Subdivisions” getting stuck in my head for days on end)? I would have to say it could, and whenever that’s the case it does not tend to reflect well on the story in question.

And the part that sets my geek-teeth a’gnashing is that a lot of the specific choices Cline made have so much potential for analysis and deconstruction and thematic connection, but he never goes that far. To a certain extent, all right, Halliday is described in the novel as being a little bit of an undiagnosed Aspergers/autistic type, and so it’s plausible that he likes War games because he likes it, in a superficial way, and included it in the quest because he wanted other people to interface with it. (Halliday wanting people to share his obsessions becomes something of a mantra throughout the book.) War Games is a movie about video games and computer hacking and so on, all of which seem to make it a natural for Halliday’s favorites, but it also raises some real questions about over-reliance on technology (the WOPR/Joshua computer with the potential to start World War III) as well as the wisdom of dropping out of society altogether (as Professor Falken has done at the outset, only to be dragged back into the military-industrial complex by the crisis at hand) and setting up some kind of metatextual dialogue between those ideas and the nature of the OASIS would have been not just interesting but super-awesome. Or what about Blade Runner, with its replicants and its probing into what it truly means to be alive? Or Tomb of Horrors, which is essentially about fighting the undead (and also has a reputation – never mentioned in Ready Player One - of being practically impossible for characters to survive) but could easily become a meditation on mortality and the weird nature of the OASIS and whether or not user avatars ever “die”?


I could go on and on, but it would at this point just be overcompensating for the fact that Cline doesn’t get into any of that stuff at all. I can understand not wanting to be ham-fisted about narrative themes, and expecting the reader to do some of the cognitive work without holding his or her hand, but I don’t think Cline’s showing that kind of restraint, really. I think he just set out to write a shiny adventure story crammed with a ton of pop culture references that make him happy in and of themselves, and did so and called it a day. It just aggravates me to no end (because that’s just the way I am, I suppose).

So all told, where do we end up? +7. That’s terrible if we were grading on a scale of 1 to 100, but I never claimed to be doing that. A +7 magical item in Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, is nothing to sneeze at, and maybe that’s the best way to regard Ready Player One: a magical entertainment weapon with a +7 bonus against boredom. It’s a fun, quick read very well-suited to sitting down and consuming cover-to-cover in a single afternoon, with some flaws in the form of squandered potential and missed opportunities, but that likely only matters if you are some kind of ridiculous, compulsively overthinking pop culture obsessive.