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Slashback: Swiftness, Ender's, Streams
When it comes to records, context begets significance. Fandu writes: "In regards to the article about the new internet2 land speed record.. That is not correct, The Canadian CA*Net3 network is about 60X faster still. It may be a net speed record for Internet2, but it's certainly no new internet speed record. See the ABC Article about the network from a few years back and the NOC webpage."
And no one is in line for tickets yet? flea writes: "So, fans of orson scott card (to whom I was turned onto by luna) should be happy. The books Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are on the track to being made into a movie. Script is being written and OSC is involved in the process. It's being made by Wolfgan Petersen, who has a few hits and misses (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Petersen,+Wolfgang); Air Force One and Outbreak are, well, ya know ... To his credit though, he did Enemy Mine, the movie with Louis Gossett Jr. playing the speach impediment'd alien trapped on a rock after a battle with Dennis Quaid and then LGj gives birth (wtf). C'mon, we all liked that. Anyway, it hasn't even started filming yet and the script isn't done, but things look good. More info here."
Speak up for Ogg Vorbis! SgtChaireBourne writes: "The BBC's testing period for Ogg Vorbis is now finished, but they are still soliciting feedback.
Now's the chance to add any words of encouragement to the BBC regarding Ogg, especially since, perhaps by oversight, RealOne (formerly RealPlayer) is now only available for Windows 98, 2000, ME, NT and XP. Currently, the download page for older versions seem to turn up empty for all requests for Linux versions, but deep links can still get you there.
As far as I can tell, the BBC is the first large (or even medium) news service to try Ogg. Here is last year's announcment on Slashdot about the start of the test."
"Sounds cool." blocksetter writes: "Cool Chips plc appreciates the interest of the Slashdot community. We've made an effort to address the points raised in last week's discussion of our technology and we've posted the resulting FAQ on our site. In the interest of conserving bandwidth, a text-only version is available for your viewing pleasure. We would like to thank everybody whose questions and criticisms inspired us to do this.
If there is something we haven't covered, you can also write directly to Cool Chips President Isaiah Cox, or to myself, Company Wonky Chris Bourne."
Man, I hope they find a lot of good child actors. With the exception of the sixth Sence and the City of Lost Children I have yet to see an excellent job done by a child filling a more adult personality.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Personally, I don't really want to see the Ender series made into a movie. There is more to that series than just a kid fighting some aliens. The first book would be ok to see, but it will probably lose the political edge that was put in by Valentine and Peter.
The other books in that series are more along the lines of metaphysical texts. The whole aspect of religion and first contact and the concequences that go along with it. I thought they would be honored more to stay on text.
As far as the Ender's Shadow route... there is more hope for that series to (once it ends) make it on the silver screen. More of a political thriller / mystery, Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon would appeal to people that don't really enjoy science fiction.
It's really rather ironic. I was reading the Ender's game series (Speaker for the Dead, etc.) while on a religious retreat (curse you catholic school!) and the Ender's Shadow books around the September 11th events. I guess fate was all about putting me in the mood for these books.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
i hope you were joking. if not you are one of the first people to say that about that book. personally, i really liked it, but thats just me.
-- john
Ya know, I had the same impression the first time through. Borrowed it with a batch of high-fantasy sci-fi from a friend, read it in a couple days, and thought it was a nice piece of fluff.
It was after reading Speaker for the Dead and being totally blown away, that I went back and reread Ender's. The second time through, I noticed the themes and characters had much more depth than I'd perceived the first time. It really is quite well though-out, prophetic and moving. The ending section (after battle school) is a bit rough though, and contributed to the weak first impression.
Seems to me that by juggling things around a bit they could make two or three films out of the combined ender's Game/Ender's Shadow story.
eg:
Episode 1: Making it to Battle School, learning how to survive as launchies.
Episode 2: Battle School, Bonzo, return of Achilles.
Episode 3: Graduation and the battle with the Buggers (sorry, "Formics").
This would make *some* room for the missing story threads such as (presumably) Peter and Valentine. Without whom there is little possibility of a movie treatment of the subsequent books without a major departure from the book story.
Keep in mind that a 100-page book tells about as much story as a two-hour movie. Ender's Game is more than 300 pages. Some stuff has to be left out or changed. And also keep in mind that the very early draft that Card put online three or four years ago is NOT "the script thus far." It was written before he realized there were enough good child actors to keep the focus of the story on the children, and before he wrote Ender's Shadow.
Anderson is turned into a woman
So what? Point to one place in the book where Anderson's gender makes the slightest bit of difference. In a visual medium, Anderson works better as a foil to Graff as a woman.
Bean is more prominent in order to do the sequel
Bean is more prominent because he's an interesting character. Card regretted not doing more with him in the first place, that's why he wrote ES. Exploring the superficial similarities and subtle but important differences between Bean and Ender is interesting enough to warrant combining EG and ES into one movie--Card originally planned to do them separately.
As for Peter and Valentine, the reason EG is the book Card is trying to get filmed, instead of some of his other wonderful novels, is that the main storyline would work as a movie. Peter and Valentine aren't part of the main storyline. In Card's original short story, they didn't even exist. The story works without them, and their subplot would make for pretty boring cinema--all they do is talk and write. There's some stuff that works better in text, and some stuff that works better in drama. Peter and Valentine are firmly in the former category.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Fabulous? You've got to be kidding. I bought the book after being blown away by the movie Blade Runner. After reading "Do Androids...", my only thought was how did they make such a great movie out of that huge, steaming, stinking pile of doggy poo. The book is beyond bad. It's dreadful. It's crap. It's major shit. My god, I can't believe I wasted a couple of hours of my life on that garbage!
Perhaps it makes more sense to read Philip K. Dick's stuff sequentially, starting with his early short stories. That way you can get into his deliciously paranoid mindset. He was the pioneer and absolute master of that unique sense of foreboding that made films like Blade Runner and Total Recall so interesting.
That's not quite a valid comparison... Why not "I have 5600 Oggs"? I mean, you never hear people say "I have 5600 MPEG Layer 3 audio files." I kinda like "Ogg", personally.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I am on the side of the original poster, Do Androids... is an excellent book filled with great ideas.
:-(
Dick turned down big bucks when the studio wanted to suppress the original work and put of a piece-of-shit 'book of the movie' based on the script instead. That took guts and integrity on his part.
However, I'm not surprised that if you came to the book through the glitzy movie which homogenized the ideas in the original, you were disappointed. IMHO it doesn't reflect well on you that you would have been happy with a rehash of the script in the book (what would be the point? You already saw the film) and not the challenging and valuable document you got instead.
The long developmental time for films is a frustrating and, sometimes, sad thing. One of our greatest writers, Philip K. Dick, died just before getting to see the screen adaptation of his fabulous novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
That said, he apparently *loved* the bits of the unfinished film that he was shown. (My source: the rather excellent book "Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner", by Paul M Sammon).