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Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

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Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#911

Cormac McCarthy. Finally started "bingeing" his books from the local library and not since Virginia Woolf has a writer's use of words to paint pictures made such an impression on me.

Blood Meridian is a top 3 book for me. Just fantastic. With one of those endings that takes the book from a 4.5/5 to a 5/5

If anyone takes this book up, avoid at all costs the foreword in the 25th anniversary edition. It gives away the ending !

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#914
post #360

It’s a Wonderful Life. As a father of little ones now, there are some scenes in that movie that cut me to the core like nothing else. The Iliad. Hard to put my finger on one thing in particular, but after having finally read it earlier this year I continually find myself doing some task and randomly thinking about it, pausing, and just saying “wow”.

> The Iliad.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how the Iliad was hyped. The thing is 3000 years old. Or we are not talking about [0]?

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#915

The Illiad. As the foundation of Western literature, it may have received the greatest amount of hype that it is possible to receive. I had attempted to read it and The Odyssey when I was much younger, in middle school, maybe too young, and failed miserably. But as it is always with cultural touchstones, references to it are inescapable, and a few years ago, in my mid 50s I overcame the reluctance accumulated in the…

Try The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. By Nikos Kazantzakis, a true bonafide genius of a writer whose imagery in exploring the life of Odysseus after her returns home and finds it less than fulfilling after 20 years if adventure & struggle, with a son he sees as week and I unprepared for the world... It's poetry is as dense as either if Homer's works, and while I hesitate to say it, perhaps almost as good.

Madeline Miller's book Circe touches on the same themes for parts of it. It was a very good read. I haven't read Song of Achilles yet.

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#916
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good companion piece is Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory , which gave David Simon much of his inspiration for The Wire. Excellent film.

Paths of Glory is one of my favorite films, after hearing David Simon speak about how it's essentially a movie about middle management and the dangers of being giving a task that's impossible to complete yet will still let down the people who look up to you!

Much better than movies or shows on the subject is Herbert Simon's work on Administrative Behavior. Unlike David Simon's work it gives people a way to think about problems and approaches to problems where their skills, resources, rationality aren't enough - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#917
post #155

The Wire. I'd tried to watch it a few times, but only a few months ago actually got past the first two episodes. I think it helped that I quite quickly saw it as a morally ambiguous discussion of the institutional ineptitude of conservative western cultures in mitigating the effects of crime, rather than a typical 'good vs bad' cop show. With that mindset, the possibly-underwhelming finale of S1 is much more effectiv…

The wire absolutely blew my mind and raised the bar on how great television can be. I have trouble getting past the first few episodes of Game of Thrones, how does it stack up to The Wire in terms of sucking you into the storyline and committing, looking forward to each new episode and pondering over episodes during your day to day like I experienced with The Wire?

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#918
post #288

Factorio!!! (It wasn't really hyped, but if it was, it would have lived up to it.) Actual video from the game doesn't qualify as hype! And the code is rock solid and wicked efficient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI&ab_channel=Facto... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8&ab_channel=Facto... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqaAjgpsoW8&ab_channel=Facto...

how factorio compares to rimworld? it seems to focus more on the factory aspect instead of the social, but besides that they seem pretty similar

They're the opposite. Factorio is an extreme about having control. Rimworld is an extreme about control being ripped from your hands.

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to Satisfactory and Shapez.io (which is sold as a minimalistic factorio). I bought shapezio on steam some time and realized just yesterday i already collected 60h playtime on it... Now I'm thinking about digging sonewhere deeper.

I’ve played all three games and for me factorio is easily the best. Designing big factories in Satisfactory feels awkward - it’s very hard to refactor and redesign because the buildings are so big and you need to build them one by one. The engineer in me is always vaguely dissatisfied with what I make in satisfactory. Satisfactory’s world is beautiful to explore - but that makes it a different sort of game. And shape…

That was my experience with Satisfactory as well. Factorio's greatest gameplay achievement is taking away mundane things once you've mastered them to the point of mind-numbing repetition. It's a sliding window, whereas Satisfactory just keeps piling on more layers of complexity without really abstracting anything away, save only for the running around with a chainsaw to keep your generators running.

Re: Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Interesting that people are substituting the hard question (what has been hyped and has lived up to it) I think it's the way you're reading the answers (and the question). If you look at it as "What was hyped to you and lived up to the hype when you finally experienced it", then the answers make sense and there's no confusion.

Maybe. I'm not sure who's really hyping up ancient texts like the Bible these days, or some of the other answers as well.

I didn't see that post, but I'm sure the poster meant they had huge expectations based on it's reputation as 'the book' or it's place in popular culture and it lived up to that hype when they did read it. The original question is ambiguous and can be answered both ways.
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