Ready Player One

by Ernest Cline

You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.

No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway.

Childish, I know. But virtual or not, this was still high school—the more childish an insult, the more effective it was.

For me, school had been a Darwinian exercise. A daily gauntlet of ridicule, abuse, and isolation.

It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence.

Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.

Why bother looking up the solution online? Why try to figure the problem out on your own when you could have someone else do your thinking for you?

Black Tiger had first been released in Japan under its original title Burakku Doragon. Black Dragon.

Supaidaman, the incarnation of Spider-Man who appeared on Japanese TV