Hacker Cinema
Ender's Game
2013 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Gavin Hood
Science FictionActionAdventure
Based on the classic novel by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game is the story of the Earth's most gifted children training to defend their homeplanet in the space wars of the future.
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67 comments on Hacker News
Gotcha, I haven't actually seen the movie I just meant the concept of tricking and silo'ing genius kids to make them think they are playing a game when they're actually doing war/genocide is similar to the Ender's Game book. I don't know if this was just an idea floating around in the air or if it was inspired by Ender's Game, just interesting
It's interesting, maybe to be a contrarian, or maybe because I read a lot so my personal optimization is in the other direction. Sometimes I don't know why I read. I've read a dozen or so history books, and not entirely sure what I got out of them. I've read some tech books, but could probably get the same thing from dissecting a few blog posts. I've probably seen a thousand movies or tv shows, and I don't know that I've read a book that I think made me "empathize" better or whatever you're supposed to get out of fiction, better than a movie.
Given all the ways people can consume information, why is it important that people keep reading?
Like I liked to book Ender's game, and I thought the movie was a piece of shit. I got more out of the book than the movie, but I don't know that I got anything out of the book I didn't get from a good movie.
Things like that is why I too always tried to avoid reading back covers or jackets. Way too often they reveal crucial parts about the story. Spoiling Ender's Game makes reading the book 90% pointless.
I also avoid film trailers like the plague, except for pure zero-content entertainment and visuals-only stuff like Marvel movies (to the extent I even bother with them anymore). Every other type of trailer I block or avoid watching. One problem I remember having with British TV series, in particular Doctor Who, is that they would spoil the next episode by showing a trailer of it in the previous one. In the end it made me stop watching it altogether.
For books of (to me) unknown authors I'll read the first couple of pages, that'll quickly reveal if they're of the "show" or "tell" type of authors, and other things about their writing style. Other than that I'll try to skim the headline of the summary but avoiding reading more than the bare minimum to get an idea about what it's about but nothing more. Sometimes I read books completely without any idea about what's it going to be about.
> The only exception I can think of for fiction is the movie "Her,"
I think there is a wealth of fiction out there that features AI without robot bodies. The sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, comes to mind immediately (because I re-read it last week).
2001: A Space Odyssey, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neuromancer (I think, haven't read it in a while), I think some of of the short stories from Ray Bradbury and Ted Chiang, etc, etc
For an intentionally terrible book, there's Atlanta Nights (https://archive.org/details/atlantanights0000teat ). A bunch of authors got together to write the worst book possible. It has pretty much every kind of awful prose in existence, including an early case of AI generation.
For awful but readable books:
Most anything by Dan Brown, but for the audience here, Digital Fortress will make you tear your hair out in frustration if you know anything at all about cryptography. The climax of the book seems to be made for a movie and is a completely nonsensical sequence in which people stare at a screen showing attackers bypassing a firewall, as if it were a wall that can be slowly drilled through.
For me that was the book that did it. If Dan Brown couldn't take 10 minutes to research the simplest basics of the subject he based his book around, imagine what the quality of the rest of the work is like.
Ender's Game I rate as a fairly enjoyable but puerile teenage power fantasy. But after that comes Speaker for the Dead, which to me is absolutely awful. Ender turns into this insufferably saintly martyr, who acts as some sort of Gordon Ramsay, only fixing an awful colony instead of a restaurant. Everyone in the book is insufferable and a complete moron, except for Ender of course who knows how to fix all those awful people.
And maybe Battlefield Earth. I've never read the entire thing, but here's a quote:
“His valet! In the rush of getting him off, his clumsy damned valet had put the wrong boots on him. Oh, when he got home ... when he got home he would have the oaf punctured! Worse. Dragged through the streets and bitten to death by small children.”
Blade Runner, Avatar, Ender's Game (which sucked, but still), Aliens movies/Predator movies, Edge of Tomorrow, Matrix movies, Star Trek movies. There are plenty of "not Star Wars" examples out there, some of which are extremely successful.
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
> If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
To be honest, I think I would be more horrified. There is something surreal and disgusting about the thought of killing in such a way. Similar to the horror of the Rube Goldbergesque devices used in the Saw films. However, if you put it through a filter to make it look like a game and pull and Ender's Game on the user, you may get the psychological distancing you mention.
To spoil Ender's Game a bit: the bugs were initially hostile, in a very "we genuinely don't understand non-hive species" way such that they were intensely horrified when they realized that all the people they killed were individuals. They were then purely on the defensive as humanity launched the second war.
In Starship Troopers (this varies between the book and the movie), as I recall, the bugs are more or less a peer species to humanity. They're engaged in territorial struggle, which escalates to war. (The movie version engenders a lot of debate over whether the inciting incident of the war was a false flag by the earth government.)
When I was a kid, Ender's Game.
The movie is garbage, it's not worth watching. The most interesting stuff happens in the main character's internal dialogue.
The main character is an intelligent outcast and that thinks differently, very enticing to a kid that feels the same way.
Ender's Game was on the U.S. Marine Corps' reading list.
(I might have read Ender's Shadow two or three times as well.)
This may be true, but it invites escalation. Ender's Game revolved around this philosophy from what I can remember, and in the end..well...I won't spoil it if you haven't read it or watched the movie. but betting on preventing future aggression != guaranteed peace.
reminds me of Ender's Game (the book, not the movie).
I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too.
He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).
I loved Ender's Game[0] for the tight story line coupled with well place special effects and the crucial moment of empathy Ender Wiggin shows for the Formics. Its a pity that chances of a sequel are pretty low.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/
Ender's Game, at around age 13, made me realize books could be just as gripping and thrilling as movies.
dude what?? excellent
> Orson Scott Card (born August 24, 1951) is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. He is currently the only person to win both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in consecutive years, winning both awards for both his novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) back-to-back. A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker (1987–2003).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card
The movie was sorely disappointing, which was itself disappointing because Ender's Game isn't at all unfilmable (except that the main characters are all children in a really messed-up environment).
It really is similar to Neon Genesis Evangellion in many respects. If NGE had existed first as a novel, it's hard to think that the TV adaptation would be anywhere near as good as what was actually made.
I highly recommend the book, with almost no reservations. It's not very long, and a very stimulating read.
If you enjoy that one, and want to read more, then I'd recommend reading either one or both of the immediate sequels (Ender's Shadow and Speaker for the Dead). Iff you read either of those, and enjoyed it, and want to read more, then (and only then) should you concern yourself with the trails of sequels.
I never read the books, I only saw the Ender's Game movie that came out like 8 years ago. I remember thinking that the premise itself had promise, but that the movie was this rushed, hard-to-follow piece of crap that was borderline unwatchable.
For years people have told me that the books in the series are way better than the movie but I still haven't gotten around to reading it. Maybe I should.
Time dilation is used to great effect in the Ender series by Orson Card, though not in the first book (Ender's Game). Highly recommend reading the rest of them if you've only read the first (or seen the movie).
No, you don't have to compromise at all.
Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us.
Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen?
The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.
Ready Player One was competently directed by freaking Steven Spielberg with a "$155–175 million" budget and still sorta disappointed lots of us who had read the book.
Perhaps some awesome scifi books are just better left to the imagination?
Edit: I felt the same after watching "Ender's Game" (2013).
Edit 2: I felt that the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" featuring David Tennant and Michael Sheen was absolutely brilliant. I hadn't gotten around to reading the book yet though...
I guess the obvious thing to point out are the multiplayer modes for Call of Duty, Battlefront, Overwatch, etc.
Short films have been made about this, and of course Ender's Game.
Quite a few on this list are sci-fi legends.
Indeed.
"The Machine Stops" is a must-read. It's over a century old and is not dated.
I've always liked "With the Night Mail". Kipling wrote two SF stories, and this is one of them.
"A Logic Named Joe" - the Internet and Google, from 1946.
"Ender's Game", the short story, was of course expanded into a series of books and a movie. The original short story is better.
That's also true of "Farewell to the Master", not on the list. That's the basis for "The Day the Earth Stood Still". The original short story is very rarely seen. Nor is the ending well known. It should be. Wikipedia summarizes it.
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.
The movie didn't even come close to doing it justice, the book presents so many cool problems and solutions that it just failed to convey. The book is phenomenal for sparking out of the box thinking.
I don't read much. But movies and TV shows (and Anime) have tons of mysterious libraries.
* Terry Pratchet's Discworld -- `nuff said.
* The Pagemaster (90s film about kid getting trapped inside of adventure books)
* Beauty and the Beast -- The library was the only non-magical part of the enchanted castle, ironically.
* "National Treasure" movie has a few important library scenes
* A Certain Magical Index -- Anime / Light Novel: the female lead "Index" is literally a character who had a library implanted inside of her.
* The Mystic Archives of Dantalian -- Anime / Light Novel: Another one where the female lead is a library of sorts. She's more bookwormish than Index, and actually hangs out at a normal Library most of the time.
* Read or Die -- Another anime with library / paper themed superpowers
* Harry Potter -- So many shenanigans happen in the Hogwarts library, I don't even know where to start.
* Full Metal Alchemist -- The librarian was instrumental to the plot. Its mostly an action show, but there was a period where they had to research some stuff at the Alchemist's library.
* The Ancient Magus' Bride -- I wasn't too fond of the show in general, so I haven't seen it all yet. But there was a very memorable magical library episode. Effectively, the magic library was a trap which can only be escaped if the human receives something from inside. The lead character kept returning to the library (her personal life sucked, so she needed an escape), while the Librarian would continuously give her something so that she could escape each time. When the Librarian ran out of things to give her, he rips up the magical library card (hoping she never returns again). Unfortunately, the lead character is adept in magic and finds her way back even without the library card, to a disastrous consequence.
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- A classic, is it not? I guess its a single book that they're working with, but the singular book is magic-space tech that has all the information you could ever need. So its basically a library.
* Ender's Game -- Honorable Mention. Ender's video game with the giant that he plays by himself effectively functions as a library. Its where Ender has self-reflection, and where the malevolent forces push Ender towards one direction of his psyche. Its as much of a "Library" as the "Pagemaster" was IMO.
--------
EDIT: Apparently 'The Pagemaster' is a book in of itself, and is listed in the article. I didn't know that. Harry Potter was also on their list.
> Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit.
Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.
Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.
edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.
TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.
I actually like I, Robot even if it has nothing to do with the books at all. It's a decent action sci-fi movie.
I'm more worried it might be like Ender's Game and remove all substance from it.
Wow, this is topical. I'm about 2/3 through book 3 from Audible.
It will be interesting to see how it deals with so man different characters and settings. And also, if it bothers to emphasize the political and cultural differences between the Foundation, the Traders, and the Empire.
The books are very steeped in politics and could potentially make for a boring TV show but at the same time I hope they don't go full Ender's Game on it and remove politics and any form of political commentary entire. Which is why I hated the Ender's Game movie... they made it into an action flick and removed all the moral ambiguity.
The biggest strength of Ender's Game is how many of us as a child could identify with it. Before the Internet a bookish nerd kid very often had a very hard time finding anyone even remotely similar. Ender called to us and gave us hope that if there's a book then perhaps there are others out there. Translating this into a movie is near impossible but also the time for it has passed.
Ender's Game, another sci-fi book turned movie, is also recommended reading for military personnel including the Marine corps - http://guides.grc.usmcu.edu/content.php?pid=408059&sid=5775651
> the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel
I disagree entirely. In fact I would claim that the movie fails precisely because it deviates from the novel in exactly the way that makes the novel great.
Spoilers follow.
The whole point of Ender's Game as a novel is the way it leads you into a comfortable, safe zone. You think you're just reading another "child overcomes tough conditions, grows as an individual and succeeds at hard task" novel a la Heinlein. Oh no. Just when you are comfortable, when you've been set up to think, ah, at last, the war, let's watch him think circles around the bugs with his well trained superior brain... you get slapped in the face so hard with the plot twist it leaves you reeling and then the book ends and you can't stop thinking about it for weeks.
In the movie, the plot twist is pretty much revealed near the beginning. My memory is fuzzy but I remember Harrison Ford communicating with the army and exchanging status updates as the point where I "deduced" that they were at war and not travelling to it. It was very important that the novel be entirely from Ender's point of view as the military conspired to create the illusion that he was training, because the illusion was key to his being able to make the final decision of the war.
To reveal that the war was actually ongoing, and that there was no waiting time, was a major early spoiler, perhaps to allow the audience to digest the idea, trading the comfort of an hour and a bit of "training" for the tension of knowing something Ender doesn't (that it's not a game). This tension has much less of an emotional impact on the viewer than surprise would have had, especially since it is one of the most overused plot devices both in Hollywood and in print.
So you are left with (very) nice visuals, fairly good acting from heavyweights, and a typical Hollywood plot. A summer movie. So disappointing.
I think adapting the original Ender's Game novella rather than the novel would have made a lot of sense and would have made for a much tighter movie. I think there's just too much stuff in the full novel and trying to cram it all into the film made it impossible to pace things well.
I've long been of the opinion that novella-length stories are the best match for movie length (2-ish hours) adaptations and that novels usually just have too much stuff for a faithful adaptation. The Ender's Game movie just happens to be a really good recent example.
You may be right about Ender's Game. I'm not sure what was exactly wrong with it; I just found it flat and fairly uninteresting while the original novella is one of the best.
Of course, it's tough in SF where there's always a loud contingent (of what is your most natural constituency) over pretty much any deviations from a beloved book. Yet, there are aspects to novels that don't translate well into film and, in most cases, films need to simplify--dropping characters and streamlining plots.
One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential to the film of the same name:
If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film.
I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was.
Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.
Or be honest: "I'm not interested in a relationship" or "I'm not interested in you that way."
Courting is what humans do. Flirting is what humans do. Being polite shows interest to most people. Be rude. Be absolutely disinterested. Tell them to fuck off. They aren't going to magically read your mind and know you aren't interested if you are either signalling that you are interested or they aren't picking up the (usually weak, when I read stories like this one) signal that you aren't interested. If you send a strong signal of your disinterest or communicate clearly (not trying to "signal") there are only two types of people who keep pushing on:
1) Actual harassers (far and few between)
2) People who think you're playing hard to get (which is an actual thing that people actually do) unfortunately this is equivalent to (1) for some portion of society
I've mistakenly sent that "I'm interested" signal to others while trying to be polite. When Ender's Game came out I was speaking with a coworker and seeing as we were both interested in the book, she had asked if I wanted to see the movie when it came out. Not wanting to be rude, I said OK. It turns out she thought I had accepted a date. She was quite dressed up when we met up, while I was in extremely casual attire. And guess what? That was my fault not hers. I had accidentally communicated interest in some way, although unintentionally. She wasn't a harasser, it wasn't "her fault". She couldn't read my mind and know I wasn't interested.
Almost every story I see about these scenarios (which often boil down to "unwanted flirting") I think of the above and I pity the person being made out to be a harasser when, in almost every scenario I've read, they were only "misreading the signals" if there were any signals at all.
Her perspective: "He's obviously flirting and I'm just trying to be polite, I wish he would stop."
His perspective: "I'm flirting and she's obviously playing along or she wouldn't be so polite! This is going well."
I need to rewatch Primer - it managed to twist my mind into a knot, so I honestly say I didn't understand much of what was happening. Moon is on my list, of Pandorum I haven't heard. Thanks for the titles, I'll definitely see them :).
RE shortening, I remember watching Ender's Game and leaving cinema angry, because the movie had compressed the book so much that I felt it won't make any sense for a person who hadn't read the novel. I now imagine that the Martian may have seemed similarly poor to you because of that. If you happen to read the book and find the text being crap, please get back to me, I'd really like to hear your perspective.
We, or rather - some of us - are talking not books, but book+movie combo. The Martian was quite a thing among space geeks even before the movie was announced, and doubly so after the story broke - so, like me, they probably implicitly assume others read the original too. I guess it's a lesson for me for the future, to bring up explicitly whether one had or had not read the book :).
A controversial choice, not only because the movie was only out a while ago, but I'd LOVE to see a TV show set in the Ender's Game universe. It's the kind of thing that Netflix could probably do really well.
The movie covered some parts well, and the vision was more or less there, but I still left the cinema annoyed. One movie isn't long enough to cover the book, and there's enough content in the books to make many series without having to pad episodes out.
Yeah ... I'm not sure whether it's a good trait or not! When I was young, I could entirely live in my mind if I was bored (or being bullied) and if I hadn't got a job that required me to "play the extrovert", I'd probably be writing fiction. At a minimum I'd be the introverted engineer that looked at his own shoes when I talked to you.
I still have a fondness for books that I might not otherwise have. Some movies seem to be plucked right out of my mental images (The Hobbit and LoTR movies) but others are really disappointing (Ender's Game was way better as visualized in my head).
- Brave New World (dystopia/utopia, short read)
- Pandora's Star (futuristic (2380), humans are immortal through rejuvenation and are colonizing new worlds using worm hole tech(I think they have 50 or so worlds), long read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)
- Ender's game (futuristic, the movie cuts off 1/2 the book that revolves around Ender's 2 siblings, both also are geniuses, short read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)
AD. your issue with Ender's Game - mine was a bit similar. The whole movie felt like the book on fast-forward (you know, videotapes and FFWD button). I saw my friends who haven't read the book beforehand come out of cinema with confusion and not being really sure what the movie was about.
I keep thinking what the lead-up to the last big battle would look like. (You know what I'm talking about.) It's usually set to electronica in my head.
I think you could tell most of the story non-verbally: a good character actor should be able to get across most of the emotions. Put some more of that into conversations and I think you could get there.
(Aside: my issue with Ender's Game was that it felt "small": the whole movie felt like it occurred over a long weekend or something. There was no sense of complexity or time.)
I've been thinking the same thing. Worm would be great on HBO or Netflix, an extended drama that could give proper time to let the world and characters be expanded.
At the same time I wonder how they could convey all the details of rational thinking, internal dialogue and the like. I think it has the same issue the film of Ender's Game had in that it's just hard to include those details from an external perspective.
I'm on the Westside and add some more anecdotes:
A friend's wife is a master seamstress. She did all the costumes Ender's Game with 3 other people (I bellieve). Being in the union means you get at least 1 gig a year. Another poster here talked about Hollywood being the dominant driver, and that is completely true. Many of the small engineering firms here (not Boeing, etc) are focused on cameras and other movie tech. Heck, most of the investment community here is in movies. Part of that driver means that the culture comes along with it. That means failure is not tolerated here.
My buddy just graduated UCLA dentistry. Its a 4 year program. He likes to study in coffee shops. He said when he first got to LA, the shop were half full of people trying to pitch a script or movie idea. Now? He said half the people here are CEOs of some sort.
Last year they had a mixer for Silicon Beach people at a bar in Santa Monica. I went, as I can at least code my way out of a paper bag, though not much more. Ok, chit chat, free beer, appetizers, etc. Then you realize that you and 2 other guys are the only engineers there. The other 50 people are all CEOs of some baby start-up or another, half with NDAs in the pockets. I talked to about 15 and not one of them knew to code, wanted me to work, and were looking to give out ~10% of the company for the work. No thanks.
Went to a thing for UCLA grads centered on start-ups. It was a panel discussion with UCLA alumni and then a meet and greet. Good cookies though. I asked the question: What is your work-life balance like. All laughed. One of the guys said his boss was a good example: 5-7am workout, 7-8am kids to school, 8-5pm work, 5-9pm play with kids, dinner, HW, 9-1am email, repeat. I pointed out that meant he slept 4 hours at that rate and, though he may be able to sustain this, it's statistically impossible other people can.
Buddy got an interview for a coding job around the corner from Snapchat. Nice loft, great looking secretaries, good free lunch, etc. Problem was, he couldn't figure out what they actually did as a business. He figured they were just looking for acqui-hire, something he was not interested in due to the stink of failure Hollywood fears.
Traffic sucks. I grow plants on the balcony. About every week I need to spritz them down from the exhaust ash that accumulates on the leaves. Not really about tech, I know, but still, I can see just how much of a car culture LA is on my carrots.
* We pay 12 for a nice little 2 bedroom. It's a steal. The westside is really going up in costs now. I talked to the apartment manager and she says when we move they'll rent for 17. The 2 new buildings going in cat-corner to us are 3k for their 1 bedrooms. LA may be cheap now, but the westside is going to SF levels soon. My lawyer friend in Los Feliz is going long on Compton. Rents are cheap there and it's 3 miles from the beach, just like the westside used to be and Venice is now. Hes got 3 units already.
Did you guys see the movie Ender's Game? He was typing on a touch screen by doing little swipes with his fingers. I would imagine that it functioned like this DataHand one, but virtually.
Found something on GitHub: https://github.com/henrahmagix/enders-keyboard
Ender's Game, for the 8th time or so, which I wanted to re-read again before watching the movie
Incidentally, the way the kids were typing in the recent Ender's Game movie is interesting. Does anyone know how deeply they designed that system/interface? (i.e., was it just random keystrokes or did the chording actually matter?)
> Ender's Game is 30 years old.
Not everybody has read the book (or heard of it), but may have been exposed to marketing for the movie and be interested in watching it (or reading the book first). I think it's fair to show a spoiler warning for a movie that came out just this month.
I was disappointed to see Bean get such a short stick in the new Ender's Game movie.
But I understand sacrifices must occur during the book -> movie translation, and the movie was good on the whole.
At the end of the audiobook, Card talks at length about the difficulties getting an Ender's Game movie made.
One problem was that the studios always wanted to make Ender an older teenager and to give him a love interest.
Another was that the screenplay was always challenging because most of the book takes place inside Ender's head. Once he figured out that he could tell Ender's thought processes through Bean, it finally opened up the screenplay.
Ok - now that we've had Ender's Game made into a pretty decent movie can we get Use of Weapons? :-)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/11/sci_fi_poll/
I think it's important that we revisit this and remind people with the upcoming release of the Ender's Game movie.
I'm not sure I entirely sign off on this complete lack of separation between art and artist. I understand that context is important, but does the artist really need to be a good person for his or her work to make you think, or feel an emotion, or be entertained?
I don't think it's entirely fair to assume an inherent bias or hidden agenda in the work based solely off beliefs the creator is believed to hold. What if Card felt this way, but just kept those feelings to himself? I understand that people don't want to support or empower those like Card, so I'm personally conflicted now as to whether I will see this film.
As an interesting personal side note, I went to high school in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, when the state was at the forefront of progress for same-sex marriage, and Ender's Game was required reader for every English class during the summer before sophomore year. I suspect it still is, and it's probably required at other schools. We spent weeks discussing the book, and it still comes up in conversation every now and then, since we all had to read it, and this is the first I've heard about Card's homophobic beliefs.
I'm of two minds about this.
On the one hand, I don't like OSC's personal views about gays.
On the other hand, it's Ender's Game. As a movie!
The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin. It's a sci-fi set a couple hundred years in the future where everyone is incorporated at birth. Just like you can own shares in a company, you can own shares of another person. It's my second favorite novel. It has some interesting ideas.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Don't let the movie fool you. The book is very good. It was at one point it was on the suggested reading list for the United States Marine Corps.
I must have missed the mecha robots and godzillas in Ender's Game! Got no beef with that book, rather enjoyed it. The book was not about mindless action, so it's not the kind of movie I was talking about.
I really liked Ender's Game and can not wait for the movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/
Maybe the Ender's Game movie will open the gate for Player of Games.
Here is my list of ideas:
1. Problem: Difficult to implement shipping for any business, website, store, etc. You only have UPS/FedEx
Solution: Kayak for Shipping - Developer implements shipping API, which enables back end to do a rate shopping engine for shipping, which taps into APIs for FedEx, USPS, UPS, and allows local shippers to qualify for the program, including PostMates and any other Joe Schmo interested in shipping...
2. Problem: I can't play paintball with my friends. Solution: Ender's Game - Computers v. Humans
3. Problem: People die because they can't get organ donations. Solution: Create a co-op where people join a market for organ donations.
4. Problem: Scheduling things with friends is really hard, there is too much back and forth over SMS and email Solution: Set up a centralized service through your phone that schedules for you, but is totally automated, no human beings, just machines, so that virtual assistants don't have to waste time scheduling
5. Problem: There are no parking spots in the city Solution: Price out illegal parking zones by multiplying the probability of ticket * ticket cost. Using a mobile app, a user pays for parking insurance at differing rates, but allows them to find a parking spot where there previously wasn't one
6. Problem: why is it that you can only bookmark pages or urls Solution: delicious 2.0 - be able to micro-bookmark. i should be able to save things at the sub page level and consume that content later: a post in a block, a newsfeed post on facebook, a photo in a webpage, a section of an article. etc
7. Problem: Sending direct mail is hard - you need good lists, need to process with mailhouses, and you don't know whether the mail you send is reaching the right audience Solution: Create a digital application to send mail as easily as email, complete with analytics of the funnel, and the ability to unsubscribe from the mail you're sent. Make mail, like e-mail.
8. Problem: Animated GIFs are the new LolCat, where can I find the best animated GIFs? Solution: Use animated gifs as a medium for snipping video that you can easily see over your mobile phone
9. Problem: What happens to all my digital stuff when I die? Or when I want something killed... Solution: future me, death switch - go through with my credentials and find usernames and passwords and have ways to kill the accounts.
10. Problem: I can't listen to radio broadcasts, etc. with my friends Solution: Social listening with friends. Suggestions from friends of articles or things to listen to with their commentary in their words.
11. Problem: Mobile data sucks sucks sucks. I want to watch something on demand or download a movie. Solution: BitTorrent for mobile. Allow the sharing of mobile data amongst subscribers, but you have leech and seed at the same time...
12. Problem: Keeping in touch with people is REALLY hard. Solution: Create retention method of keeping in touch with people that uses a computer to help you keep in touch with people who matter.
13. Problem: Buying billboard ads sucks Solution: Create billboard ad marketplace
13. Problem: Retail locations have captive audiences and it's hard enough to monetize the location. Why doesn't everything turn into a Times Square? Solution: Give them a TV, stream over the internet, and do ads. You can break up with television advertising model by guaranteeing the location and zip code.
14. Problem: Shipping takes time. Solution: Establish network of 3D printers to print things on demand for same-day shipping.
15. Problem: People get stabbed in the Mission Solution: 1) Crowd-sourcing police cameras, we pay people to stream live their local areas and videotape people walking around. Instead of just letting police see it, everyone sees what's going on, but the difference is that the owner and we hold the rights to the content. Assumption that more cameras means less stabbings. 2) You could even SMS a number and it would follow your location on your way home so that you are recorded every step of the way. Kind of like a virtual sentry and you could have an individual nearby to escort you if need be for a digital amount. 3) Text Message app where if a crime has been committed. It texts me that one has happened near me. Uses increasingly open government data apis and police blotters.
16. Problem: Where are all the hot people? How can we take the local tracking phenomenon to an even deeper degree... Solution: Hot or Not of Local. People take pics of other folks and they can rate those people relatively around them.
17. Problem: I can't have dinner with my family in Colorado, HK, etc. Solution: Hack the Kinect to create the Farenheit 451 wall. We can actually have real conversations with people. I somehow feel MSFT will do this with Skype and Kinect, but whatevz.
18. Problem: Receipts suck. Yet, we still need them. Solution: Make it easy to create a hardware or software solution that takes receipts and mails them in a way that is easy for Quickbooks, quicken, or whoever needs to keep track of expenses. I hate Oracle.
19. Problem: I want to watch movies with friends. Solution: Have a way to watch a movie with a friend and have them put commentary on the movie and for me to also enjoy watching the movie. Annotations and real social. Spotify meets Netflix.
20. Problem: Water is expensive for large utilities. Solution: Smart grid for water utilities: OPower, but for water utilities. The issue here is that water is cheap, but a very large industry, so where could I make the delivery of water much more efficient.
21. Problem: I hate buying new computer equipment Solution: Lease electronic equipment - Apple products are uniquely suited to this. New ones are released every 12 months, old ones have a high resale value, iCloud syncs all your documents for when you buy a new device, and there's a large population of people who always want to own the latest one. You could charge a flat monthly rate to people who always want to have the newest iPad, then send them a new one every 12 months with a prepaid box to return their old one. There's even a 3rd party warranty company that covers drops and spills for a reasonable rate -- http://www.squaretrade.com.
22. Problem: Payroll is DOMINATED by two guys - ADP and PayChex, they suck Solution: Kill them. Do better with a product that values people as people.
23. Problem: [w] why can't you buy something online and pick it up in a store (this currently is verticalized) Solution: make product search -> purchase and pickup in store easy. build the amazon for local pickup
24. Problem: AirTime sucked because it didn't let you Hot or Not people Solution: It would be awesome if you could... AirTime with HotOrNot... social and virtual currency. Allowing pretty people to make money from their beauty.
>"It’s a tiny bit violent"
A child kills several other children barehanded.
Then goes on to stamp out an entire intelligent life form - Card's view on this is pretty apparent in the first two sequals; Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide.
It's always surprising how non-analytical we can be when it comes to violence - an entire planet is destroyed and millions of people screams are heard across the galaxy in A New Hope. Yet, the movie so ingrained in children's culture, it was an uphill battle to prevent my son from watching it when he was three [I felt like it was a victory that he didn't see it until he was five].
That said, Ender's Game is appropriate reading for 14 year olds, and the idea of it as pornographic is asinine. Same could be said of Bloom's Forever of my youth.
Along the same lines, I had a paperback copy of Battlefield Earth in the mid 80's with a "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!" emblem and a tear-out card to order the soundtrack.
Hopefully waiting decades for an Ender's Game movie turns out better than waiting decades for Battlefield Earth did.
...or waiting decades for the Star Wars prequels.
Maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up - but LotR turned out well!
I received this email from Hattrack today:
Want to Be in Battle School? Open Casting Call for Extras in New Orleans This Weekend
Ender's Game open casting call being held at the Hilton Garden Inn located in the Warehouse District of New Orleans on Saturday, January 14th from 11am to 3pm.
Alexis Allen, along with Batherson Casting, are seeking bright and talented kids and teens ages 10-17 of varying ethnic background for the feature film production of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"; based on one of the most famous science fiction novels of the last 40 years.
The film stars Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin. Oscar-winning Director Gavin Hood will be filming Ender's Game in New Orleans from February until June 2012, providing those selected with up to 8 weeks of work.
To be considered, please come to the open call this weekend, located at the address below between 10am and 2pm
Hilton Garden Inn 1001 South Peters St New Orleans 70130
Please also bring a recent snapshot of yourself. Homeschooled students are especially encouraged, because of the work during school hours.
Please visit this site at <A HREF="http://www.hatrack.com>www.hatrack.com</A>
Yeah, I'm hoping this doesn't turn into a Star Trek-esque prolonged battle in space. Ender's Game is a character-driven story; let's hope the movie is as well.
I am going to tirelessly promote this movie because it is one of my favorite books from when I was a kid, but even more so because I really want to see the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, get made into a movie. Speaker for the Dead is a much more mature, thought provoking book, in which a grown up Ender struggles to come to terms with his actions from the first book. Speaker won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and if you havent read it, you should go do so immediately.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812550757/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=httpthesame-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0812550757 (yes, it is an affiliate link)
Fun fact: Orson Scott Card (author) had the idea for Speaker for The Dead before writing Ender's Game, and essentially wrote the first novel simply to set up the complex universe that unfolds in the sequel.
The cast looks great, but I'm honestly not sure about Gavin Hood. His XMen movie was fairly campy, and there will be a lot of pressure to do the same with the Ender's Game movie. I have my doubts.
An Ender's Game movie is in pre-production now actually. Apparently it finally happened because Orson Scott Card got a deal which included the level of creative control he required.
A lot of films never make it past pre-production so whether this film is actually finished is yet to be seen.
most of those got turned into movies. Speaking of which, I'd love to see Ender's game movie but it'll probably suck since it'll be a bunch of new young actors