daddyholes posted:

just reminding everyone

The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.

Bud had a nice new pair of blades with a top speed of anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether or not you wore aero. Bud liked wearing skin-tight leather, to show off his muscles.

On a previous visit to the mod parlor, two years ago, he had paid to have a bunch of 'sites implanted in his muscles— little critters, too small to see or feel, that twitched Bud's muscle fibers electrically according to a program that was supposed to maximize bulk. Combined with the testosterone pump embedded in his forearm, it was like working out in a gym night and day, except you didn't have to actually do anything and you never got sweaty.

The only drawback was that all the little twitches made him kind of tense and jerky. He'd gotten used to it, but it still made him a little hinky on those skates, especially when he was doing a hundred clicks an hour through a crowded street. But few people hassled Bud, even when he knocked them down in the street, and after today no one would hassle him ever again.

did somebody say 3D Printing???

getfiscal posted:

"getting high... in a castle?" - tpaine (pbuh)

laughing thru the tears

roseweird posted:

hello acephalous, glad to be back in your good graces. how are you?

actually i only read the first page of this thread and didnt even notice there were two more, i can't be friends with anyone who doesn't like bladerunner, sry

daddyholes posted:

Haha

i don't see what is so stunning about the aesthetic, it's a grimy, crowded city with plenty of neon, and lots of blue lights and shadowy alleys, just the 80s paranoid nightmare of a new york or some other major american city turned into a hyperdense, decaying meat grinder.

I mean you can reduce any aesthetic experience by saying "oh it's just ____." But it's not "just the 80s paranoid nightmare," it created that nightmare. It created the cliches you're reducing it to.

don't get me wrong, it's a well executed film, aesthetically speaking, but if all you care about is the aesthetics and a plot reduced to sexy androids running around, with no regard for dades' exploration of empathy, emotion, love, or faith, you have Missed The Point

No, I entirely get that that's the point. I think that Bladerunner handles those things well too, and I don't think the plot is "reduced," I just think it deals with them in a different way. I didn't mean that Androids wasn't a complex book or whatever, it is, I just think Bladerunner is overall a better-executed work of art.

Regardless, saying "I love this aesthetic outside of its particular thematic expression" or whatever isn't "missing the point" it's just saying you don't particularly care about that point, which is entirely valid because art isn't a high school english class tedious exploration of "themes," it's creation of aesthetic experiences.

pkd's communications can hardly be reduced to "social commentary", half-baked or otherwise, and his book communicates an aesthetic of its own, just one that requires you to invest a little more mental energy than is required to clap at pretty pretty pictures. pkd is not a particularly visual writer, and given that the film is actually a straightforward action flick while the book is a paranoid wormhole, it's sort of weird to call it dreamlike compared to the book, which is actually genuinely difficult to visualize on account of its disjointedness.

PKD is a bad writer. I think a lot of the disjointedness is not on purpose. I actually did enjoy the elements of the book you described, though, especially the way he described things and then when you thought about them they were really funny/ridiculous but it doesn't come across immediately (similar to the way American Psycho does the thing with the food and clothes descriptions as it goes). Regardless, I experience these things much more deeply with the atmosphere of Bladerunner than with that of Androids, but that's just my aesthetic preference, so.

Reducing movies vs books as "dumb people clapping at pretty pictures vs smart people thinking with their imagination brains" is one of the most sophomoric and childish things you could possibly say about anything btw.

roseweird posted:

why would you approve of the part of this thread where i defend pkd's work, then turn around and say that you don't actually like his work compared to the gutted mess that has far outstripped it in popularity? smh @ u pal and everyone who thinks "blade runner" has anything to do with appreciation of the work of pkd

I do like his work, I just don't like that specific book as much as its movie counterpart (which isn't really a counterpart in any real way, as was said).

I don't at all think Bladerunner has anything to do with "appreciation of the work of PKD," that doesn't even make sense, Bladerunner has to do with appreciation of Bladerunner.

LOTTA WORDS ABOUT NERD SHIT HERE FOLKS SORRY

roseweird posted:

well i read an interview with him once and he talked about roleplaying games like d&d and their relation to his work, it came off pretty silly and embarrassing and imo in perdido it really shows badly in the very loose and inorganic episodic structure of the book (based around what read like Encounters) as well as his preoccupation with making up silly fantasy races with extremely narrowly defined cultures, characteristics, and Special Abilities, most of them transparent reinterpretations of fantasy staples passed off as scifi innovations. not too proud of the knowledge required to point these things out but as i mentioned once i played way too many computer games as a kid and i played a bunch of d&d based rpgs. and it reads like one of those games, basically.

fuck off

littlegreenpills posted:

i have literally no opinions on anything. no one can sell me anything unless i need it to eat or drink or keep myself warm. i am the freest man of all

Actually it sounds like you have Low T