This is the impression I get of virtually all quantium mechanics, as explained by xkcd:

I'm sure it makes more sense than that to other people, but it never has to me.

Yeah, I only figured it was Petra because it's a girl close to Bean. And it's gotta be Bean because it's the cover of Ender's Shadow. No one looks like what I expect, probably because OSC spends little to no time describing their looks apart from "small". To be honest, I expected Bean to l...

There was some discussion of this before, so I decided to look around and see various artists' interpretations. The internet tends to have the same few pictures repeated a hundred times, so I'm just posting the closest, highest-res versions of what I find. http://www.foxaxe.com/obrazky/enderova-hra-...

United how? If you looking for a weak central government, we already have it. The UN, WTO, WHO, and Red Cross unite virtually the whole world under a loose set of international rules. They allow for a lot of international chaos, even multiple wars between multiple combatant nations at once. But they...

I did not get all the good quotes from Graff in that first post. Here's another: "He didn't just beat him, he beat him deep. Like Mazer Rackham at the--" "Spare me." (Actually, I don't know if that's actually Graff. No one is identified in those chapter introduction dialogues, an...

I don't much like xkcd's depiction of Locke's chances, either. Locke and Demosthenes establish credibility on existing blogsites first until they're asked to write columns for them. It's plausible that someone could do that, perhaps Demosthenes writing for Hot Air and Locke being asked to write a re...

There are some flaws in that fanfic. 1) Hot Soup says "Besides [Bean], Ender was the youngest of us" That's not true. Hot Soup himself was a toon leader in Dragon Army, in which none of the soldiers were older than Ender. Crazy Tom, Vlad, and Dumper were also toon leaders and jeesh members...

It occurs to me that Gilmore Girls is far from the only TV show to refuse to dumb things down for the masses. Fraiser prattled on and on about art, fine dining, and opera since his days on Cheers. The Big Bang Theory actually employs a physicist to keep their obscure science references accurate. The...

The Ender Quartet is my favorite franchise period. Any medium, any creator, anything. It is simply awe in print. I can only name a handful of things (two books, a movie... that's all off the top of my head) that even compare, and none of them come in series. Come, lets not be silly here. You've cle...

The Ender Quartet is my favorite franchise period. Any medium, any creator, anything. It is simply awe in print. I can only name a handful of things (two books, a movie... that's all off the top of my head) that even compare, and none of them come in series. I suppose that won't be true anymore once...

SiF will hopefully resolve everything.

What franchise fiction in human history has ever resolved everything? I only know a tiny fraction of all fiction, but I can't name even one.

The influence gained by a pair of what would be considered today as online forum trolls was hard to swallow. The comparison to bloggers is more often made, and some bloggers are quite influential -- though not "rule the world" influential. Valentine actually mentions that in EG when Peter...

I had in mind that the only use of the Little Doctor was in the final battle when it was used on and around the Bugger home world itself. They were using it all along? :shock: Here is the text of their first real battle. Then the simulator field went blank, the ships disappeared, and everything cha...

If you're making that decision against their will, than yes, you are. Consider Prohibition. That was ostensibly done "for the own good" of the American people. "Yes, you are" what? Being malicious? Prohibition may have been wrong-headed, but it wasn't malicious. Do you think it ...

Psudo has again pre-empted my answer. :wink: I seem to have developed a reputation in only 10 posts. Wasn't it true they were unaware of the existence of the Little Doctor early enough to alter that strategy? The first battle after Mazer began "running" the "simulated" enemy was...

I'm vaguely planning on perhaps someday making an animated Ender's Game trailer to 1) practice making homemade animation, and 2) raise interest in getting the movie made. Because I don't know any kids who can voice act, and I can't do voices, I was thinking the script would stick mostly to quotes be...

Overall, I like it. The suit is awesome in design with or without the wires. It's tighter and sleeker than I imagined, and thus it's better than I imagined. It should be color-coded by team, though, shouldn't it? If not, how can you tell allies from enemies? Nothing in the book suggests that telling...

The Hive Queen speaks at one point (in Speaker?) of her absolute certainty of the inevitability of her own defeat after coming to know Ender. I don't think she let Ender destroy all the queens (but one) so much as she could see no way to prevent it, and thus planned as though it were inevitable. Why...

Dang it. This is two whole threads I've read through only two find you making my post for me at the end.

Thank you for the compliment.

He denied her the right of self-determination. That's a right awash with exceptions. You have a right to self-determination until it conflicts with absolutely any other right. That includes his own self-determined choice to protect her. If she forced him to take her, would you say she denied his ri...

I like OSC's cultural-diversity-by-worlds scheme much better than, say, Larry Niven's global uniform Earth culture in Ringworld. I agreed with Louis Wu when he was board of it and wanted to go looking for something else, anything else, just for contrast. That, however, is an aesthetic preference tha...

Having the Descoladores (Google says that's the correct spelling.) turn out to be the product of something else from the Enderverse's past (Bean, his engineer, or anything else) makes no sense. Were the piggies the product of something from humanity's past? Were the Buggers? No. They're all alien sp...

10,000 repetitions by Edison gave us the incandescent lightbulb because eventually he did get a different result. :) Those were variations on a theme rather than identical repetitions. Edison tried 10,000 different filament materials before he found one that lit well and lasted. Even so, we use dif...

Luckily I've been lurking long enough to know Jebus talks crap about everyone and everything, so I don't have to take his comments seriously.

Okay, I cannot listen to a discussion of "Dumb it down for mass appeal vs. smart it up but lose audience" and not interject the universal example that no such conflict need ever exist: GILMORE GIRLS. Fine, this is a room full of sci-fi fans, and most of you probably don't know or care much...