I'd read plenty of thinkpieces explaining ways that Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One was shallow, bad, and/or problematic, but I had an evening to burn, so I went to go see it with a friend of mine.

I'm glad that I did; I enjoyed it a lot. (I'm going to say ~nothing about the 'and/or problematic'; just not going to go there today.)

(1a)

On its face, it's a effects-rich action-romp. And in that genre, it felt reasonably well-done, if not particularly deep (though it had its thematic notes, see 2A below). It would have been super easy for the plot to get stuck in a side-quest, but it somehow never really seemed to fall into that trap, and the pacing felt brisk throughout. The visual effects managed to be on the right side of intentionally-oversaturated without Hobbit levels of oh-come-on. My advice is to get a giant bucket of popcorn and sit back to just enjoy the show. (For more notes on what I enjoyed about the visual style, see 2B below.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the occasional witty quip of dialogue that dropped out of the blue -- the consistency was well below films or TV series that

i. e., Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle; excluding Perhaps the Stars

I have many wonderful friends who consume far more media than I can ever hope to keep up with, so I'm pretty much always inundated with recommendations that I know I'll never get to. But when the same book is independently recommended to me by a (grad student in philosophy) old friend from college and a (mathy, rationalist-y) work colleague, I'll sit up and listen. And shortly thereafter, buy the entire trilogy on my Kindle for airport reading almost on the spot. Which turned out to be a good choice.

My spoiler-free recommendation is that the trilogy is extant first three books of the quartet are a brilliant feat of worldbuilding with a triple-helping of shockingly clever philosophy stirred in, clearly pitched at nerds by a dyed-in-the-wool nerd sci-fi fan. Its stylistic quirks are sometimes charming and sometimes frustrating, but it never really gets bogged down long enough for me to despair of getting back to the good parts soon (and yes, they keep coming, through all three books). Rarely have I felt such absolute joy at discovering piece after piece of an author's world.

(1)

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and its sequels share much of what I enjoyed about Anathem -- incessant, rich, clever worldbuilding, characters who deeply believe that ideas matter (and aren't utterly stupid about it), and a sort of wish-fulfillment adventure for

including a review of The Idealist, by Justin Peters

You haven't seen a roomful of students' eyebrows shoot up simultaneously until you begin your CS50 section with a content warning for suicide.

(1)

It was the week we were covering web development and walking through a project that had students scraping an RSS feed to extract news stories geotagged as local. It was also Aaron Swartz's birthday.

And so it seemed wrong not to include, in that lesson, some words for the young visionary who was no older than some of my students when he invented the protocol we'd be using that week. It seemed wrong not to take the occasion to remind my students that the things they were learning could be used to literally change the world. And it seemed wrong not to tell the story about how federal prosecutors enforcing unjust laws hounded that young man until he took his own life.

And so I took a few minutes to talk about the activist, hacker, and visionary who invented Rich Site Summary as a way of allowing websites to share their content with the world. I talked a bit about how Aaron's projects -- RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, Reddit, the anti-SOPA movement -- each drove forward in their own way his vision of an Internet, and a world, built for the creation and exchange of ideas. I talked about how the tools they were learning to use could be used to change the world, given passion and a willingness to bounce back from failure. And I talked about how Aaron's pursuit of a better world led

(1)

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that at one stage in my life, my favorite book was Ender's Game. This is, as I understand it, downright conventional for intellectually gifted children of a particular age, if not actually a rite of passage. As Orson Scott Card writes in the foreword to the 1991 edition of Game:

[A] woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender’s Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it... [T]he criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that.

...

The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, "The only reason you don’t think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you"... Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. (...)

And just so,