Ender's Game

This one is for you Val. It may be sometime until you read it though.

Today I finished reading "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. Before I start to read online commentary about the book I wanted to get some of my thoughts down first.

Around the last chapter of the book I decided that I wanted to and needed to reread the book. It's one of those habits I picked up from a college English lit course. You can't really understand a book before you read it a second time. Picking up on everything you missed and understanding how all the subtle events at the start of the book lead to the major events at the end of the book.

My first reactions after reading the last word of the book was "I like it!". There were some parts that were obvious like the big reveal the main character receives towards the end of the book, but all in all I completely enjoyed the experience. A second reaction I thought of after finishing it was "I want to read Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR". I think I have a copy of it somewhere, but if I don't I think I'm going to try to find a version of it with commentary; like a Norton Anthology version of it. Though I don't know much about Tzu's work, I feel that Ender's Game employed a lot of important battle strategies that probably came from Tzu. There was also a good amount of concepts of psychological behavioral that were used throughout the book. I found all of it very interesting.

A third reaction I am having after reading this book, is the same reaction I always have after reading a book that I felt has improved my way of thinking; and that is "how can I use what I have learned to somehow improve upon my own life". Its an odd thing to come about from reading fiction. But its mostly related to liking the main character so much, that I want to be or emulate that character in real life somehow. I guess its akin to the way kids like to dress up like their superheroes. Only instead of dressing up, I want to behave and think like them.

There are few fictional characters that I've experienced as of late that I have come away feeling like this. The most recently notable are Ender Wiggin of Ender's Game, Joe Ledger of Patient Zero, and L of the Death Note series. All of them extremely talented strategists. Beings that have the ability to think in a multitude of ways always ten steps ahead of their opponent; although L is the only one who is eventually defeated.

So other than just simply enjoying a piece of fiction for the simple satisfaction of having read a good story, How can I use this experience to improve my life?

KOT

Media

I see it slowly unraveling itself. All the intricate words and weaves that the advertising industry has given itself are slowly falling apart. Ratings used as currency. More than 80% of all the people who use it as currency know that its really worthless. All a big scam to make money. Money over something imagined. Only because it is the best thing that we have to go on. Newspaper companies so huge that they have spent billions of dollars in circulating their articles around the world. And slowly its all falling apart.

This economic downturn is destroying the advertising and marketing facade. Millions of people are loosing their jobs because the upper level crust know just how meaningless they all were to begin with. And now, with technology coming to a point where it is slowly wearing away at that small grasp that advertising still holds on society, all the old ways are becoming more and more unprofitable.

The only people who will emerge victorious in the advertising industry are the ones who are able to move with technology and embrace it, understand it, manipulate it, and use it. Sorry print, you're just a few more steps away from extinction. Sorry old Television advertiser, you're about to be outdone by some crazy new interactive web 3.0 advertiser who has a better understanding of the psychological behavior of the new WebConsumer or HybridConsumer. Everything will be connected to the Internet soon. The bubble may have burst in the early days of the web craze, but it has evolved into something completely different. And will continue to evolve. Those who try to stay away are only clinging to the last vestiges of a life style that is no longer as profitable.

We are all outside. But we're only starting to realize that we are just inside an even bigger box now.

Uncle Patrick's Official Expand-Your-Mind Reading List

When I was in college, one of my Marketing professors gave me a list of books to read sometime in my lifetime. I lost this list sometime after college, but after digging up my Professor's email address I asked him for the list again. Here it is below. As of today I have read 0 of these books.

Uncle Patrick's Official Expand-Your-Mind Reading List

1. Benjamin Franklin, "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin"
2. Plato, "The Apology of Socrates"
3. Frederick Douglas, "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglas"
4. Albert Einstein, "Ideas and Opinions"
5. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, "Why War?"
6. Confucius, "The Analects"
7. Booker T. Washington, "Up From Slavery"
8. Mohandas Gandhi, "The Story of My Experiment With Truth" (His
autobiography)
9. Mohandas Gandhi, "Gandhi on Non-Violence"
10. HG Wells, "The Outline of History" (read the interesting last
chapter)
11. R. Buckminster Fuller, "Critical Path"
12. The Dalai Lama, "The Art of Happiness"

Currently, the list contains the following, while other titles have come and gone.

15. James Lovelock, "Gaia: A new look at life on Earth"
16. Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring"

Keep safe,
Patrick Bishop

Patient Zero - Verdict: Awesome

So I finally Finished Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry and I am so glad I bought it.

It's funny how I came across this book too. Andrea and I were at Barnes and Noble one night and we were just going around looking at the genre tables. That’s when I came up with a fun game. “Find books we think the other person would enjoy”. And because I know how much Andrea enjoys bio-warfare / virus outbreak types of books, when I saw the title “Patient Zero” I thought that it would absolutely be the book for her. Of course when I picked it up and read the back cover to discover that it was a Zombie novel I realized that this was more my type of book. A few weeks later I finally gave in and bought it on Amazon.

Patient Zero, is probably one of my favorite takes on the Zombie genre, next to the Monster Trilogy by David Wellington. Unlike Monster Trilogy which uses a more paranormal ancient mystical origin, Patient Zero uses Terrorist Bio-warfare. A take on the zombie genre much different from the “gates of hell zombies just kinda happen” version of books. Patient Zero was much more reminiscent of Richard Preston’s Cobra Event and Hot Zone that dealt with engineered viruses created to terrorize the world; only without the science and history lesson chapters.

From beginning to end, the book had me anxious and fiending for more. There were a few items in the book that I wished were a little bit more obscure and mysterious rather than blatantly obvious, but they didn’t take too much away from the experience. Fight scenes and climaxes where done very well, so much so that my testosterone levels had me grunting in approval after every neck snap and bone crunch.

Although I love reading books like this, I think if this were ever to get picked up to be translated into a movie, it would be easily become one of the top zombie movies ever created.

Let me know if you want to borrow it.

Later.