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In a future where Earth is at war with neighboring aliens on the widening frontier of mankind, recruits are no longer the young. Now the elderly enlist, with the promise of youth and longer life. The first book in the series was solid on its own, although the ending was more rushed than I expected. I probably won't listen to the next 5 in the series.
The Martian started as a self published book on Amazon before eventually being picked up by a publisher, and now has a movie in the works with Matt Damon scheduled for late 2015. The easiest way to describe it is Castaway meets Apollo 13. It was a gripping story with enough realism to keep things interesting.
I appreciate the premise: How do you do the least amount of work possible? For any developer that's a goal. That's not the goal because then you can take off though - it's so you can get more done. Most of the projects suggested in the book contribute nothing to society, and are usually self serving.
If you ever listened to the Radiolab episode about high frequency trading, you should give this a listen. Lewis goes into much more detail on the same subject, including the concept of “dark pools” which I was unaware of. It's crazy how differeny things are from when I learned about the stock market in high school, but this one does an entertaining job of explaining why.
I remember getting a Nintendo for Christmas in the late 80s and it shaping my entire childhood. Later on I'd go onto to get a Super Nintendo, a Genesis and a Playstation before heading to college and eventually buying any system I wanted. The systems that truely shaped my gaming experience were, without a doubt NES, SNES and PSX.
Console Wars goes into the history of Nintendo, Sega and Sony with the rise of the console industry in America. Having been a kid at the time, I did't know show much of an underdog Sega was at the time – and how badly managed Sega was in Japan. Nintendo had it's problems as well. The story behind the creation of Donkey Kong Country was amazing and made me surprised the game even got made – better yet that it was (possibly) the best game for that system.
Having seen every Star Trek episode and being a huge fan of Galaxy Quest, this one was amazing. The story revolves around a space ship (like the Enterprise) where a surprising number of crew members are dying on away missions – especially those lower on the totem pole. Once the bit characters begin to realize this trend they divise ways to take advantage of the situation.
Much of what made this great was how meta it was. Almost like a darker version of Glaxy Quest.
A short story by Sanderson which earned a Hugo award. Much of the feel from this seemed to be the inspiration for the soulcasters in his Stormlight Archives series. Like other worlds, this has a magic element which allows for “forging” – modifying the history of an object to change how it appears today. For instance – rewriting the history of a neglected table to have been cared for in order to make it strong a beautiful today. What about rewriting the past of a person? Would that change their soul?
One of the first computer games I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D on my moms Packard Bell 386 computer. Eventually I also played Doom on it as well. At the time I didn't realize what was behind those games. Masters is more a biography of John Carmack and John Romero - the technical and design talent behind these games and id software.
It's crazy to me how this company got started – “borrowing” computers from their day job to program on them at night and eventually release Wolfenstein. The small group of guys working in their house part time ended up impacting the world of video games as much as anyone else has, and this is the rise and fall of that empire.
The movie preview for this story drew me into to check it out before release. With a lot of recent young adult novels in a similar world being made into movies (Hunger Games, Enders Game), this one looked like it could be another hit.
The book though seemed like a copy of too many other stories – namely the above two. Without storyline spoilers though, the feel from the book is similar, but the connection to the characters was limited. I'm undecided if I'll listen to the other two books in the series.
This was written in 1953, but feels like it could have been written this year – which shows how timeless Clarkes style of science fiction is. The story is familiar if you've watched the movie Independence Day. But what happens if the aliens seem inteligent and malevolent? How long does it take for humans to accept aliens? This relatively short novel was beat out for Retro Hugo Award by Fahrenheit 451.
The full title for this one is “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration”. Hearing the title and knowing it was written by Ed Catmull, one of the cofounders of Pixar, was enough to draw me in. As someone who works in technology, but also leans towards ways of managing projects, this one hit on a long list of points that were relavant to working at Code School. Although on a completely different level, the way Pixar puts out pictures each year with multiple teams and different departments is similar to Code Schools monthly course structure. Page after page I saw problems that were familiar to me, and how they solved them at Pixar.
In high school, my sister sent me Wizards First Rule as a Christmas gift. Sadly, I never did get around to reading it back then, missing out on a great fantasy world. This is the first in over a dozen books in Goodkinds Sword of Truth which was also made into a TV series: The Legend of the Seeker. The confessors were the most interesting part for me – women who can touch a person and control them for the rest of the their lives. The wizards of this story seemed all powerful and not powerful at once, which left me confused on their abilities.
With the TV series for this book coming out later this year, and this being one of Marilyns favorites, I knew I had to read it before that. Although the characters were intresting, for a story about someone who lived through World War II, and time travels 200 years back to Scotland, this was surprisingly boring. The story is interesting, but I wanted more sci-fi/fantasy/time travel and less romance and political intrigue.
After hearing about this one for well over a decade, I decided to give it a shot. If I had read this one when it came out, it might have hit much closer to the target. As it stands now, I's mostly a refresher of things already heard. Now – I wouldn't be surprised if wherever I heard them from were originally from this book, as it is a design classic.
This is the book I wish I had read in grade school. Growing up, I always thought of the largest difference between introverts and extroverts to be quiet vs outgoing. The difference though is much more complex. The premise of this book is the idea that extroverts get energy from crowds, while it costs introverts energy to interact. The idea that some introverts even enjoy speaking because they value getting their message across more than their distake for public speaking hit close to home for me.
A short one, which I was able to listen to on the way to JSConf. I felt as though it only goes skin deep into the problems facing education – reiterating issues I've heard discussed many times before. The group education concept and self directed learning this one promotes are clearly useful, but falls short of showing how it might help reframe our current systems.
One of the best fantasy books I've ever read. The concept in this one is a fantasy world that is slightly different from our own with the inclusion of allomancers, people born with a special ability to manipulate the world (or themselves) in some way. These include things like being able to push/pull steel, refine your senses or incease your strength. “Mistborns” can use all of these abilities.
The characters and world drew me in with its mysteries and hints at epic problems rotating around our central players. The magical element for this world was the most memorable I can imagine, and I would highly recommend it. You could go with this one on your own, but books 2 & 3 expand on the world.
