Reamde
Reamde is a speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2011. The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian Mafia and Islamic terrorists.
Stats for nerds
56recommend
176mentions
146people
2011–2026years
37% recommend48% neutral15% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For me it was Termination Shock that finally convinced me to stop reading his books. He just likes to write really long, repetitive and wildly overly detailed books. I was entertained by SevenEves and Reamde but I'm open to the possibility that I might very well react as I did to Termination Shock if I tried rereading them.
Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.
- My favourite take on this was by Neal Stephenson in his excellent novel Reamde - wherein we have several pages building up to an argument between a linguist and a fiction-creator about the (mis)use of apostrophe in an online game's fictional language.
"The Apostropocalypse is to the current realignment in T’Rain what the Treaty of Versailles was to the Second World War,” said Richard, deliberately mocking the tone of a Wikipedia contributor in hopes that the others would get it."
- Good old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it was that good, and years later read it again and got more from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness", how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.
- Yeah, I loved Reamde by Neal Stephenson, but I had to put down Termination Shock, which takes place about 100 miles from my house, because I didn't recognize the area at all, even accounting for future climate change. He described Waco as an overgrown forest and said that fire ants were eating electrical wires (it's crazy ants).
- A friend of mine and sometimes contractor is a venezuelan I met online in WoW classic because he was always farming dungeons we wanted to run, so we'd party with him a lot. Pretty interesting to learn about gold selling and leveling market from him.
I thought blizzard would find it easy to crack down on gold selling but I guess not, every once in a while he'd dump these massive amounts of gold to some random player he'd never interacted with and wouldn't get banned for it.
These days the way it works is he'd basically be a stringer for some big gold farming site. He'd farm, dump some big chunk to one of their sock accounts, and then they'd take that into bigger blobs of gold that would get banked or eventually parceled off into whatever amount a customer wanted.
The per hour price for his labor was pretty shit, better than in Venezuela of course but if I remember correctly not close to USA's 7$ or whatever it was at the time. It gave him access to USD though which was important, as USD can be used to buy more critical goods than venezuelan cash. Like computer components for example. And it's easily turned into local currency. So any time he could get his hands on usd he was keen.
It seemed like the better money was in levelling, where he'd log in onto your account and just level your character. In wow classic this was worth it cause the leveling gets insanely tedious around 48 to 58 (level cap 60). If you think it's silly to pay someone to play a game for you you're mostly right, but retail wow (the non classic redo) iirc sells level up potions, and so does guild wars 2, so presumably people buy them. Some people are more interested in end game than levelling.
Anyway for level up work he'd have to find a client through personal relationships, so harder to do, but more money cause no middleman. Plus he's just playing the game then which is more fun than grinding for gold.
Right now it sounds like the gold market is bereft, he's saying he can't find buyers right now, not sure what's happening there, but he hasn't grinded gold in months last I checked.
I now hire him on when I can for admin assist work, which I highly recommend doing even if you think you don't need an admin assist. I read Tim Ferris' "4 hour workweek" ages ago and remember him mentioning how an admin assist can save you time in ways you don't realize until you hire one on.
So far for me he's done asset placement in a tile map generator with data entry for a game dev contract we had, some project management related cleanup and admin work, photo editing of RAWs in Darktable (a skill he picked up in about 3 hours and became remarkably good at within two sets of photos), basic accounting and cleanup with data entry, and research with compilation. All for between 10-20usd/hour depending on what he feels comfortable charging (he wanted to charge less than 10 which is just too low for me to be comfortable with). Tldr I highly recommend exploring this sometime, I can recommend my buddy personally of course but there's also agencies and the like. Actually side note, incredibly, his venezuelan bank lets me make payments from my credit card. I have no idea what's happening in that country. I used to have to pay him in eth.
It's really remarkable the ingenuity folks in places like Venezuela have to have to make any kind of money. My buddy will be sniffing out these online working opportunities I'd never have dreamed of.
A good related book is Neal Stephenson's "Reamde," plot of which somewhat revolves around the transfer of digital games currency to real currency.
- I like that Snow Crash doesn't take itself too seriously. Reamde was also a not too heavy Stephenson read.
