Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous. Ernest Cline More Quotes by Ernest Cline More Quotes From Ernest Cline I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care. Ernest Cline quitting obsessed care Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds. Ernest Cline horse kings bird If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible. Ernest Cline player simple moving I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.' Ernest Cline growing-up stars morning Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation. Ernest Cline computer matter sex One person can keep a secret, but not two. Ernest Cline persons secret two I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the "A-Team" van or something. Ernest Cline team silly years I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge. Ernest Cline ammo bullets months I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them. Ernest Cline atari games kids ...now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists. Ernest Cline stars home reality I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done. Ernest Cline world-of-warcraft done world I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical. Ernest Cline teenage body noses I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear. Ernest Cline gears culture thinking I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation. Ernest Cline our-generation generations nostalgia "Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom. Ernest Cline light healing past I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER. Ernest Cline favorite-words games two Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective. Ernest Cline perspective stars life I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes. Ernest Cline vintage cereal civilization The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language. Ernest Cline force-fields nukes rockets A river of words flowed between us. Ernest Cline rivers
