My great great aunt made me read the Bible so I’d be a good little Christian. Read it got the privileges for it, sucked right ass. My only conclusion is that I liked Samson and that most Christians are hypocritical asshats. But what was I expecting my great great aunt thought Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia were evil because they had magic.
Also if anyone is curious how well the good Christian aspect faired now that I’m 26 and not 8. Well hark to the ancestors, the spirits, and the gods, I’ll burn every last mega church to the ground and send them to their god to face a second judgement not my own.
You guys have never experienced JOHN RINGO.
The first book opens with Osama Bin Laden and the leader of Iran hatching a plot to kidnap sexy American coeds to rape and torture.
It then switches to the POV of our hero, a former SEAL who left the army due to his arthritis and has now enrolled in college. He is stalking a female student from his class whom he is thinking about raping, he lets the readers know that he is 100% a rapist and also that all these left-wing female students secretly desire to be raped by a strong conservative man.
But unfortunately for our hero, a white van pulls up and kidnaps the girl he was stalking right in front of him. Thinking quickly he follows the van and then ends up stowing away in the wheel well on an airplane that’s on it’s eay to Iran.
Long story short, he single-handedly rescues dozens of sexy coeds from the combined forces of al-queda and iran - killing Osama Bin Laden himself.
In the sequels, for which there are many, he travels to Georgia (the country not the state) and finds an isolated community descended from the Varangian Guard. These people recognize him as an alpha male and make him their leader The Kildar whoms job it is to lead them into battle and impregnate their daughters, most of whom are 14-18 year olds.
For everyone else’s reference, I searched this up and found that John Ringo is the author.
The specific book being talked about is named Ghost.
“John Ringo” sounds like he writes from his home in Mom’s spare room, when he’s not perusing the online manosphere.
That sounds like it has a direct to video adaption starring Steven Seagal.
Lord of the Rings. What incredibly boring, pompous blather.
Bible.
Freakonomics
I was in a horrible spot mourning for a close relative who had just hanged himself. I made the mistake of posting on Facebook and a friend from high school recommended “12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos”.
I was not in a good space and didn’t even look at the author before ordering it. When it arrived a few days later I only had to read the first page before realizing I’d been had. Jordan fucking Peterson. What a pile of shit that guy is.
I read “Jordan fucking Peterson” in the same voice as Crowder saying “Sam fucking Seder”
Steven Toast saying “Ray bloody Purchase” here.
The Bible
I skimmed it but all I ever saw was just a bunch of begat this and begat that with some quotations sprinkled in between.
And this fucking thing is partly responsible for why numerous things are going wrong with humans today and humans of history.
When I was around 20 and looking for purpose in life, I actually really tried to get into Christianity.
I mean, they seemed to have a light guiding them through life, something that takes away the feeling of senselessness and chaos in the world. I especially loved the idea that “you can never fall deeper than into god’s hand”.
So I prayed to god to show me the way to him, went to the local church every Sunday, and started reading the bible.
All of it. Cause I obviously wanted to know what I was supposed to believe in. And it completely killed my desire to become a Christian.The only way to make sense of it, for me, was to interprete the old testament as a collection of the stories that goat herders told each other to make sense of world history, followed by a heavily propagandized history of the Israelite people, legitimizing their claim to Israel after displacing and genociding the people who had lived there before.
The new testament is the story of a wandering preacher who tried to establish an early version of peaceful communism.
But when that became too popular, the Roman state embraced and co-opted the message and turned it into the basis of a hierarchical state church, which later turned into Christianity as we know it today.Since I read God’s book while praying to God and that was the interpretation I was left with, I have to assume, it’s the one God agrees with ;)
That’s mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
R crumb, the comics artist, has a fantastic graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate. This made genesis, the most boring and pedantic part of the Bible, more interesting.
The Bible has undoubtedly led to incalculable suffering as a cult, but just as a book, it’s nowhere near the worst piece of literature I’ve ever read.
It’s definitely not just the first chapter of Genesis. Like the entirety of First Chronicle is genealogy.
That’s mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
But then, don’t discount the chapter where the twelve Jewish tribes send their gifts to Moses (iirc), and the full account of the lavish gifts is given, per each tribe. I’ve read through the whole thing to confirm the madness that the list is identical for each tribe, and is repeated twelve times.
I’d like someone in a US church choose that chapter for their Sunday reading of the Bible, and then see the faces of the congregation sitting through it.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate
I have a long-standing dream of someone just adapting the Bible to the screen exactly as it’s written — at least the first parts up to and including Moses’ wanderings. I have a feeling that a direct retelling would cause more than a few butts to be hurt.
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini’s ‘nostalgia for belief’.
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini’s ‘nostalgia for belief’.
As a former Christian and current socialist, it makes sense for socialists/communists to have a romantic view of the life of Jesus. It’s the one part of my old beliefs that I can’t let go of, since it shaped the values that I have now. The values that Jesus preached are often the same values that lead people to socialism/communism.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It’s like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it’s the contents of the book itself.
That’s cool and dandy, but I still think that writing “every tribe brought exact same shit” would work swimmingly.
A direct retelling wouldn’t be allowed to air. Murdering your wife in Christ’s name for not cooking you dinner, divinely owning slaves as an entitled Christian, lobster sending you to christian hell; the production wouldn’t get very far.
what’s wild to me is the people who swear by it as the answer to all lifes questions and yet…they’ve never read it.
if i thought and all knowing all powerful being put answers to all lifes questions into a book i’d be reading the shit out of it
If you can get hold if it, look out for Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s the New Testament with all the spirituality, supernatural, etc edited out. Instead you’ve just got a book about morals and ethics as taught by some guy.
I assume he also edited out the slavery bits 🙄
"but Jesus never actually talked about slaves
Yeah, and that’s a major fucking problem
HE LIVED FOR 942
DAYSYEARS AND THEN HE DIED.Edit how incredibly stupid I am saying “days”.
Honestly it’s probably just a poor translation/carry-down from what would now be understood as “months”. That makes it 72 years which is entirely reasonable.
Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems
Ready Player One.
I laughed my ass off starting on like page five. It was such a hate read, total hail corporate nostalgia bait slop. Never took the coworker who recommended it serious again.
Having read the book, the movie is significantly better, and the movie wasn’t even that good really.
Neither were good. I’d argue the book was better for what it is, which is 80s 90s nostalgia porn for Gen X/Millennials. The book was just a string of cultural references and the movie was just bland grey action in the vein of the transformers movies.
That makes sense. Haven’t seen the movie yet but I imagine getting high and gawking at the color explosion could be a nice enough evening.
I loved it, but its not a work of art, its a tween drama book…but im obsessed with everything he wrote about in that book so it was just fun to read for me.
2nd one sucked bad. Movie wasn’t great for me
It was the worst twenty pages of masturbatory fanfiction I’ve ever read.
When i saw how bad the movie was, i kept hearing that the book was good. I finally read it and omg i couldn’t believe it. It was just like the movie, it was just a guy talking about things that the author liked.
The Fountainhead. Full stop. Purple prose by a Soviet hack writer with a serious r*pe kink, in praise of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism.
Any of the Reacher books. God, they’re terrible. They’re just about a guy who jumps to outrageous conclusions and is always right nlbecause he’s just so special. He’s also big and tough and the best sniper in Army history.
In the first one, a guy skips town because he’s a witness, and Reacher finds him in a hotel instantly because of the following logic:
Clearly he would have changed cities every night going in clockwise order or whatever - except for the one night after the place he was in was closer to the city he was fleeing - he’d rest 2 nights in the next city because sleeping thay close was so exhausting.
Because Reacher saw a Beatles album in the guy’s house, he just knew he’d be using the last names of the Beatles, but keeping his own first name (which was Paul iirc), cycling them at each hotel.
So he walks into a random hotel near a bus stop in a random city and asks for the room of Paul Lennon and finds him because Reacher is just so smart!
And in the second book, he comes upon a woman being raped, kills the rapist, and the woman has sex with Reacher instead because he’s a big, tough hero. And nothing like attempted rape puts you in the mood to fuck a stranger.
Sounds kinda like this great rant about the show ‘Sherlock’:
So apart from tumblr fanbase, why doesn’t /tv/ like this show?
Because it has smart characters written stupidly.
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written smart character. When Chigurh kills a hotel room full of three people he books to room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is there etc. This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how smart people think.
Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people. He’d enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He’d throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn’t live without eachother due to a faint scent of penis on each man’s breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesn’t kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he’s actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they’re undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. “But Sherlock!” Moriarty cries “That police officer blew his own head off, look at it, there’s skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?”. Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.
This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.
And I blame shit like sherlock for making idiots online think they can deduce shit based on random shit like this. Even if Sherlock is smartly written, he’s still written to be right and bases deductions on random tiny details. Not to mention, there’s tropes to writing that makes outcomes more easily predictable, and someone picking up on foreshadowing might think they can do what Sherlock can do and apply it to stupid shit on the internet, like if a story is real or if someone is telling an accurate version of the story for AITA type judgements.
Here’s a condensed version of all the books …
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
10/10 copypasta 🤌
Served al dente
And the acoustic guitar version for the uninitiated.
Wow haven’t seen that meme in so long I forgot about it, thanks!
Why did you read the second book lol
Holy shit that just sounds like some conservative, gun-toting, military cosplaying wanna-be tough guy’s wet dream in the form of a novel.
Except Childs also doesn’t know shit about guns.
In the first book Reacher carries a Desert Eagle, and anyone who knows anything about guns knows the Desert Eagle is a range queen. They’re unreliable, eject shells into your face, not terribly accurate, have a tiny ammo capacity and don’t make a person any more dead than a 9mm.
Then in the second book he shits on Glocks for being unreliable, and describes the Barrett 50 cal as a sniper’s weapon of choice. The Barrett isn’t a sniper rifle - it’s an anri-materiel rifle made to break shit. The only reason it even exists is because the Army wanted foot soldiers to be able to use the 50 BMG round to take out enemy equipment without having to carry a 130-pound gun that had to be assembled to use.
Basically, he gets his gun knowledge from video games.
To be fair here, the sniping distance record was made with a Barrett M82 multiple times. A Browning M2 also held the record for nearly 20 years.
Yeah, but those are shots that happened to hit. They could’ve missed by a ton just as easily. It does have a longer range than a typical precision rifle, but that’s just because it’s a really big projectile with a fuckton of powder behind it.
It’s a 1-2 MOA rifle, whereas a precision rifle might be 1/4 MOA.
Sounds like Republican erotica basically.
It’s definitely incel erotica. Saw a video once demonstrating that Reacher never actually needs to initiate anything with a woman, show any interest whatsoever, flirt, etc. He just sorta exists in proximity to women and they just sort of “give” him the sex that they apparently owe him for being the main character.
Haha, jeez i forgot about these.
I think I read the first three? Such a tropey train wreck i actually had fun for the first couple.
But I was well and done after two, I was like well this is just unhealthy now by the second book you can tell childs isn’t paying any attention to plot or character development or anything that would make a story interesting, he was actively shutting my brain down.
it felt like that episode of The boondocks where Huey exclusively watches UPN as a social cognitive experiment.
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=travis+mcgee
Travis McGee is what Reacher and Dirk Pitt dream of being. He lives on a houseboat he won in a poker game, and solves crimes when he finds himself low on cash.
The author died in 1986 and the books are still being published.
Wait, is this real? Fuck sake that’s bad.
Ready player one. If I wanted to read about a guy masturbating over memorizing 1980s Wikipedia I’d just go to forums.
It was the most boring Mary Sue-esque trash and I have no idea why it was so popular
Yeah, I was a third of the way through and realized it kinda sucked. I did stick it out to the end though.
One of the plot points has the main character literally act out scenes from classic movies. It’s never a good idea to remind the reader that there’s better entertainment that they could be enjoying right now.
I forced myself to finish foolishly hoping the ending would blow my mind. Now people keep telling me the movie is even better but I’m like that’s such a low bar I’ll just go read Annihilation again or something
I’ve perused both. The film is the same wank-fest over 80s references.
Same. I like Spielberg, but after reading the book I can’t imagine I’d like the movie!
There’s mind-blowingly bad stuff in the world building.
This is exactly what happened to me. I was reading it for a while like okay, I guess this is kind of fun, and then a third of the way through I thought “oh wait, this is just kind of boring”.
I like the part where they figured out the previously undiscovered secret in the race was to drive backwards. I tried that shit in Mario Kart when I was 8, you’re telling me NOBODY had tried it in that game before?
I still remember exactly how the announcer enunced “You’re Going The Wrong Way!”
I haven’t read the book, but yeah that really broke immersion for me in the movie.
The book’s first puzzle is solved by Wade playing the arcade game Joust against a bot. Then when he wins, he’s dropped into the movie WarGames, replacing Matthew Broderick’s character, and he has to act out every scene to progress.
Seriously, that’s it.
Eh, to each their own. I liked it. I also liked the different pacing than the movie. It made more sense.
The only Kindle book I’ve ever returned.
Ready Player One isn’t event the worst book Ernest Cline has written. lol
I enjoyed it as a fun YA adventure but Armada is so much worse.
I thought the movie was kinda fun. Never read the book though.
I liked the book a lot, but the movie looked bad. They made the MC white for some reason?
They made the MC white for some reason?
Yeah, if that’s the case I’m even more inclined to walk away.
I opened the comments to mention Ready Player One, and I was delighted to see you’ve beat me to it 😅 What a dumb piece of trash.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand hands down. it’s like normal economics except they stripped away the mask that makes it look human.
The main point of the book could have been summarised up in an email. I listened to it as an audio book just to know what it’s about and it’s just “communism bad” mixed with everything Margaret Thatcher could masturbate to.
But isn’t it better writing to summarize it in the climax radio speech that takes three hours to read aloud?
But who is John Galt???
I found a use for Atlas Shrugged, to kill wasps.
Mein Kampf. Apart from being a bad person, Hitler was a terrible writer. Low quality thoughts articulated badly. I only read it so I could nail neonazis when they came at me with their stupid arguments.
Adolf Hitler was a modern-day edgelord and an incel. He didn’t have any original thoughts, he stole the ideas from the magazines he read while he was poor and unemployed
It’s a good thing people don’t act like that any more /s
And when he finally did get laid he got syphilis. Loser.
Modern-day edgelords and incels are…edgelords and incels. Maybe “premodern” would be more accurate? Probably not, I’m not sure.
That was the modern era, we live in the postmodern era.
Who recommended it to you?
A friend of mine years ago. He was a history buff so he always tried to help me understand historical things better.
Was that helpful or necessary in the end? Or was is such trite that you could have done without?
It is extremely babble-minded and not at all worth reading or deconstructing.
I read it in the mindset of your first question.
Turns out, any argument you can think up in 2 seconds against bigotry is going to be more insightful and well-founded than a rebuttal against nascent nazi scribblings.
Well I’ll save myself the trouble of being put on some sort of list for reading it then, thanks.
You got it.
I finished it and was like omigod at least nobody I ever come across with the same morbid curiosity has to read this now.
Only way I can look at reading that book not being a complete waste of time.
If nothing else, it’s worth it just to see how brain-dead nazism really is. They’re not Machiavellian masterminds, they’re thugs with an ideology built on brainfarts. Also quoting from the book (in the original German) is a good way to kill a conversation with one of the modern spawn.
Many years ago, I posted about how horribly written it was, and right on cue, a neo-Nazi pipes in asking which translation it was, because apparently all the faithful translations are a Jewish trick, or something…
No reply when I posted the introduction in original German, of course.
Yeah, that’s probably the one thing that makes the book almost (ALMOST) worth reading. Using their own tripe against them.
I’m guessing it’s the same kinda situation as one having to actually read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to see for themselves that it’s a complete turd of a book.
A Friend of mine with similar political inclination keeps telling me I should read it, for the same “know thy enemy” kind of argument.
I just can’t bring myself to it, we all get bombarded enough with that shitty ideology, and have to push it back irl constantly, so I’d love to escape it, a bit, in my downtime.
It does in fact help a little bit, when you see how Rand portrayed the libertarian paradise for which she advocated: where everyone is a genius at the top of their game, and a few dozen of these geniuses build the shiny libertarian utopia. It’s juvenile, just like her other literary attempts. The ‘utopia’ wouldn’t stand against just a few real-life problems. It’s also notable that Rand herself was on social security and Medicaid in her late years.
Furthermore, it’s fun to read some of Aleister Crowley, e.g. ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’, compare it to Rand’s ‘objectivism’, and ponder as to how Crowley was called ‘the most wicked man’ while Rand became the torchbearer of USian unabashed corporatism. At least, Crowley actually could write, had a soul, and was generally a fun man — but he didn’t have a Red Scare to ride on.
I listened to parts of it as an audiobook. I felt like I was going insane. Helped me pass the time at work though.
I think it’s even worse in German. It comes across as a toddler trying to sound grown up.
I’m always a little bit scared that what I’m listening to will start blasting out of my phone speaker because I forgot to turn on my headset or something.
By the way, one big takeaway of ‘Triumph of the Will’ is that the Nazi rally was extremely fucking boring after the first ten minutes or so. But apparently seven hundred thousand people had nothing better to do than stand and listen to Nazis shout at them for hours.
I’m terrified of that personally
The Sword of Truth series.
I read the first book as a teenager. I was rather skeezed out by the roughly one-third of the book that was a poorly-disguised authorial kink fantasy.
Then the second book had a lovingly detailed description of a witch gaining demonic power by getting railed by a demon.
