The book Ender’s Game has a psychological component that it’s nigh-impossible to nail in a visual medium with child actors. The story works in book form because books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, but it’s harder to do in a visual medium simply because visual storytelling is different from written storytelling.
You could probably do the movie with really good adult actors–but most of the cast are children. And really good child actors are rare to come by–you’re lucky to have one, much less multiple. And when the cast is made entirely up of children who are all supposed to be geniuses, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get the casting and talent you need.
The Ender’s Game movie wasn’t terrible–it was surprisingly watchable compared to other adaptations of other books–but it didn’t come close to nailing the feel of the book.
(And here I go, talking about the stuff I don’t want to listen to other people harp on about! Haha.)
It’s mostly because I used to handle regulatory documentation for a food company, and as a part of that I read a LOT of mommy blogs/health blogs/etc. and discovered people are shockingly uneducated about the actual science of nutrition–but more than happy to talk about their ignorant misinformation at length, and gather followings online for it. People are also uneducated about the history of nutrition and food regulatory agencies and say a lot of stupid things there too.
You kinda see the same sort of problems arising that caused the anti-vaxx mindset. Anti-vaxxers come about because vaccines were so effective at preventing once-prevalent childhood diseases that people grow up without actually knowing people who got sick from those things, and they start tilting at windmills instead due to a lack of personal experience with the deadliness of certain diseases. (They attack the vaccine helping them, instead of having the experience to be scared of the disease.)
Likewise with food, food safety with pasteurization and such has been SO effective that you have things like raw-milk advocates crawling out of the woodwork because they’ve never actually heard about a toddler’s kidneys being damaged for life from salmonella. Apparently to them, their “freedom” to eke out…oh, some tiny unconfirmed extra “nutrition” from unpasteurized raw milk…somehow outweighs the very real risk of actual human beings becoming ill and dying. But historically back in the day tainted milk was a very real danger, killing kids and elderly and making others sick, it was a public health menace. The discovery of pasteurization was ground-breaking because it fixed that public health issue. But people who don’t know their history and haven’t seen with their own two eyes someone getting really sick from raw unpasteurized milk get fixated on some hypothetical damage being done to them or their freedoms if they can’t get or drink their raw, unpasteurized milk due to laws or regulations. They’re completely willing to let real people die on their minor molehill. Mostly because, as with anti-vaxxers, they haven’t seen what life is like when people are getting sick left and right from this stuff.
I also come from a background of trauma and abuse, and I’m extremely aware of how quickly control of food by someone antagonistic towards you can physically make you ill or sick very, very quickly. A lot of people have hot takes they think only affect them but which can fuck up other people if they were applied more broadly. There’s this disconnect that food is actually needed for people to live…probably because the people flapping their gums have never missed a meal.
Yeah, I kind of oops’d my way into this. Have a plastic tub, and I use…not zip ties, but reusable variants of them…to keep various cables together.
It’s mostly SATA cables, HDMI or DVI cables, and computer power cables and a few small power/USB strips. There’s a weird satisfaction to needing a cable for something, opening the tub, and being able to just lift the right one out without dealing with a rat’s nest of whatever.
People like to say things like, “It’s so inspiring you got through XYZ! I could never do that!” The news sites run a lot on that sentiment.
But if you look through history, people of all stripes actually are good at surviving through stuff, simply because there’s no choice. You just go forward. You see this in action in war-torn countries…everyone, of all different stripes and different personalities, surviving in one way or another. It’s not all that unusual to survive shitty things.
So I feel like the worth is in what you learned from those experiences, as some people survive them but don’t learn much from it, while others wring the crappy experience of every scrap of knowledge it can possibly offer.
But you can wring experience from good experiences just as well as bad ones, so wouldn’t it be nice if nobody had to have bad experiences?
Basically, I don’t think suffering brings any sort of grace, but if you are forced to suffer, it seems important to wring any scrap of knowledge from it you can. Tear the silver lining out with your fingernails if you have to, haha.
I don’t feel pride for past hard stuff I’ve made it through, not really. But I am grateful for the things I learned from the hard experiences.
I think the event that was most “useful” to me, and that I learned the most from, was running away from home when I was 16. It led to an immediate bettering of my situation.
I will caveat and say I was lucky in that my crappy family had a relatively upper-middle-class wealthy city gentrify around us, and I got to reap the reward of that well-funded support system because the foster system in my county was well-funded and capable. I hear that this is not necessarily the case in poorer communities, and people in other areas can end up in more of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation. I definitely made a jump out of the frying pan onto the relatively clean and stable counter.
But going from a situation where I was a minor and without money or access to things I needed to survive, to a situation where I had a job and could use MY money on whatever I wanted (including a living situation that was safe) was far superior than relying on abusive people to feed and shelter me.
It’s always funny to me when people hearken back to their teenage years when “everything was provided for them” and they could just do school and have fun without any worries. I never experienced that. A job and bills was a step UP from my previous situation where every bite of food I ate was flavored with fear and every blanket I fell asleep under had the potential to be ripped off of me while I slept if some adult decided they were mad at me for some petty, cruel reason.
I know of two couples that dabble in it to some extent. One as far as I know is unicorn-hunting, because their rules for it suggest a 3rd member genuinely capturing someone’s heart would lead to relationship implosion of epic proportions, and I suspect that couple isn’t mature or stable enough to be doing what they’re doing without leaving people open for hurt. Not that I have any say in it, lol. But I feel sorry for any thirds that interact with them thinking there’s even a chance of them being an equal partner.
The other couple has much better communication skills, and claim they’re poly, but as far as I can tell from the outside “poly” has happened as an attempt to save the marriage. Maybe they’ll make it work, but I’ve watched them make some dumb mistakes, and the wife has jealous behaviors when women interact with the husband and a history of bending to his needs before her own so I think even if she says they’re poly she might have talked herself into it as a way to attend to him.
I think healthy poly is possible–but it requires extremely mature individuals with exceptional communication skills, and that’s rare even in monogamous couples.
You know, a “randomize me” choice that was fair (that is to say, not obviously offloading the worst stuff or stinting on portions or giving you the same “random” thing every time) is something I might actually use for meals if I could.
There’s this tea place online I buy tea from, what-cha.com , and they have a “mystery” tea section that’s really awesome for trying out new stuff. And the reason it works is because the “mystery teas” are still decent quality.
But I imagine fast food places don’t implement this because some jerk would harass the workers over it.
I just kept critiquing myself after a negative interaction and trying to figure out why I got angry or frustrated.
This bit really is key.
Some of our emotions are legit. Sometimes someone really did try to screw you over or something. But a lot of times…our feelings are based on assumptions that aren’t true, and when you pick at the emotion a bit you start to realize you assumed the wrong thing, or didn’t consider something else.
So it’s important to critique yourself, and think about what happened, and try to dig down into the true root of the situation, separate truth from fact.
I grew up in an abusive home and generally am laid-back so it’s hard to get me angry. I had to learn that in my case, the anger I felt actually was valid and not just something I was blowing out of proportion–most people who talk a lot about anger are approaching from the other angle, and have to learn the opposite, that not everything is worth getting angry about.
But both of us, regardless of our “natural starting point”, have to learn how to think about stuff that happened, and ask questions, and try to figure out what happened and why.
My belief is yes and no. Like many biological things it’s both nurture and nature.
Many people think that the way they act is their “personality”, when it seems more accurate that they have feelings/urges/likes/dislikes that manifest in a certain way and don’t know any other way to act.
And because they might not have known a “them” where they were able to channel those urges in another direction (because they’re young, or never tried, or have never seen an example at home to follow because their family is shitty or out of control) they think that manifestation IS their personality and is completely out of their control. Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you think something can never change you won’t even try, and then it CERTAINLY won’t change.
Changing how your own urges manifest is within your power. It’s not always easy, but it is within your power. (Mental illnesses do make it harder, as mental illness often messes with things like emotional control or executive function, both of which are helpful to have when changing how you react to things. But I have known people with mental illnesses who made an effort to try, and those who did not, and even then there’s a difference when it comes to actually “trying”, and even with mental illness those who try and learn and grow get further than those who do not…although it does not magically “cure” the illness.)
Basically, it’s possible to skill up when it comes to self-awareness, emotional control, and even understanding what is and isn’t a threat, and all those things change how various aspects of your personality manifest in the real world.
But, beneath that, there are “the big five” personality traits that seem “real” to the extent that science pursuing investigation into them. Those are:
<span style="color:#323232;">* Openness to experience (includes aspects such as intellectual curiosity and creative imagination)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Conscientiousness (organization, productiveness, responsibility)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Extroversion (sociability, assertiveness; its opposite is Introversion)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Agreeableness (compassion, respectfulness, trust in others)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Neuroticism (tendencies toward anxiety and depression)
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People who are interested in and have the drive towards self-improvement can gain and practice skills that help them redirect behavior and urges within themselves that they don’t like. For example, maybe someone who gets angry really easily starts to recognize when they’re feeling like that, and instead of shouting at others and ruining relationships, they go out running and get some exercise. Or, the reverse–someone who never stands up for themselves learns to.
I don’t think it’ll eradicate some tendency towards certain personality traits–but it can bring them under control so you stop holding yourself back due to it.
I have a friend, and he and I have made opposite journeys when it comes to anger. He’s had to learn how to channel it back, tone it down. I’ve had to learn that my anger is “okay” to express sometimes. We were opposite ends of the spectrum and have each made progress more towards the center. We still default back to what seems our “inborn personality”, but we also have a lot of times when we act different ways because we’ve chosen to and have better control over ourselves. And when you do that all the time? Well, it’s a pattern, and it’s “you” just as much as anything is.
I’m generally soft-spoken IRL, and quiet, and a loner. But I’m also a writer, and because I wanted to progress in that Craft, I learned to write and “speak” with authority, because a writer who quivers and wrings their hands every other sentence and seems to lack confidence isn’t going to be interesting or compelling to read.
This is not a natural talent of mine–but I worked on it. And I worked. And I worked. And I did eventually gain skill in “sounding” confident in myself–to the extent it sometimes causes trouble because people expect one thing when they’ve read my writing, but get someone who is much quieter and much less talkative in person. Obviously, I have not put the same work into my in-person speech, and have not worked on dispelling my wallflower status there, but having seen how things turned around for me in writing because I kept trying, I imagine I could turn it around in person if I wanted to.
…IF I wanted to.
“Wanting” to change is probably the biggest thing when it comes to self-improvement. If you don’t like who you are and want to change it, it’s really important to cultivate that desire, because that DESIRE to change is the thing that keeps you going through the hard, frustrating parts of changing and gaining skills in self-understanding and self-control.