Mainly the difference is that the book has a big battle in the middle that the movie doesn’t have at all, and the movie has a love story that’s nowhere in the book. See below for complete plot summaries of the book and movie.
The subtitle of this copy is “The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.” An alternate subtitle I’ve seen is “The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently.” But I see the book as being more of a history of autism and less of a prophecy or practical manual. That being said, it was fascinating. It’s no wonder the book won an award (the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize).
Genre: psychology Date started / date finished: 05-Feb-25 to 22-Feb-25 Length: 486 pages ISBN: 9780399185618
Originally published in: 2015/2016
Amazon link: Neurotribes
I didn’t know anything about this movie before watching it, except that it looked colorful; my husband watched a trailer, and I got a glimpse of it. In particular, I didn’t know this was an origin story about Optimus Prime and Megatron. It took me waaaay too long to figure that out! However, I’m proud that on my own I identified the voice of Laurence Fishburne (who played Morpheus in The Matrix).
Characters
Orion Pax (a younger Optimus Prime) is curious, brave, and loyal, but I wouldn’t choose him for a friend. He has about 500% too much spontaneity for my taste. D-16 (a younger Megatron), his best friend, is sadly lacking in resilience, it turns out. Elita-1 is ambitious and hardworking, and somehow gets tangled up in Orion Pax’s drama in spite of her strong preference for doing things by the book. B-127 (a younger Bumblebee, or as he calls himself, “Badassatron”) is awkward, energetic, and irrepressibly talkative.
Setting
The story takes place on Cybertron, a whole planet of transformers. Orion Pax, D-16, and Elita-1 work in the energon mines. B-127 works sorting trash, also deep below the city. The dynamic, metallic surface of the planet is home to some robot-like animals, some ruins, some actual green plants, and a colony of outcasts. And it’s visited by aliens from another world… Why?
Premise
Cybertron was defeated in an interplanetary war, and its guardians, the primes, were all destroyed, except Sentinel Prime, who periodically leaves the city to search for the Matrix of Leadership, an important object of power that was lost in the war. Orion Pax is looking for it too, because he dreams of being a hero; he feels his potential is being wasted.
Theme
There’s a very explicit theme: a rejection of “Might makes right.” Subsidiary messages have sensible things to say about the importance of friendship, truth, and self-actualization.
Style
It’s a PG-rated animated science-fiction action/comedy with a slick, bright neon color palette that manages to suggest the 1980s.
Overall?
I hope we get more of these! I was so disappointed with the Michael Bay series (I think I only watched the first two), for their trashy tone, meh choice of lead actor, and loud chaotic action. Therefore, it pleases me that someone has, uh, transformed the source material in a manner appreciably more watchable.
Item description / significance This is a winged dragon carved from wood, made in Indonesia. Size: Height 22 cm x Depth 19 cm x Width 12 cm. Attached paper price tag says Rp 275,000 (~US$17). No damage.
Bought where
in China on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app
Age and origin age unknown, made in Bali, Indonesia
What I like about it It’s a dragon! With wings! The detail is good.
Other notes This is actually the third second-hand Balinese wooden dragon I’ve bought! I found the other two in Singapore on the second-hand marketplace app Carousell. They’re a little bigger.
My reading is about half fiction and half non-fiction; among non-fiction books, there are a lot of pop-science books; among the pop-science books, there are a lot of pop-psychology books. Some of the pop-psychology books have made interesting (but rather isolated) statements about twin studies. These statements intrigued me; surely the scientific study of twins deserved to be described in more depth. Finally, I’ve read a whole book about twin studies!
Author Nancy L. Segal is a researcher (and a twin) with an early 2000s-style website and a number of books to her name; this book, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior, isn’t the most recent book she’s published, but seems to be the most general. It may actually be the most accessible, general book on twin studies in existence. So if the topic interests you, read on.
FINALLY I'm reading a book that I hope will shed more light on my understanding of the nature/nurture debate from the perspective of twin studies. Once in a while I read a sentence that suggests a surprising amount of similarity between identical twins is innate (twin brothers separated at birth both walk backwards into the sea?), but of course the reality is complex. And maybe after this I can read a book that's more recent than 1999, lol.
Genre: biology Date started / date finished: 28-Dec-24 to 04-Feb-25 Length: 337 pages ISBN: 0525944656 Originally published in: 1999 Amazon link: Entwined Lives
I recently read seven works by E.M. Forster in order of publication:
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
The Longest Journey (1907)
A Room with a View (1908)
Howards End (1910)
A Passage to India (1924)
Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971)
Aspects of the Novel (1927)
Forster is known for the mantra “Only connect,” a quote from Howard’s End. Perhaps his best-known novel, which I read previously, is A Passage To India. My favorite of the novels is A Room with a View, which I read and posted about previously.
Item description / significance
The seller labeled this as a horse, one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals, but this is obviously a donkey. Approx. 13 cm tall, 24 cm long.
I say “obviously”, but why, exactly? Upon consideration, I can say: It’s a donkey first and foremost because the ears are long. Moreover, the face is short, and the tail is rope-like, like a lion’s tail. Also, there’s not much mane, and although many donkeys are brown, gray is possibly the most typical donkey color. I rest my case.
I have named him Eyeore, because he seems a bit downcast.
Bought where
on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app
Age and origin
like new, age and origin unknown
What I like about it
The realism. He looks like he could get up and walk away, but doesn’t want to. His form and coloring are natural. He isn’t cartoony or cutesey or anthropomorphized. He isn’t decorated with colorful abstract patterns.
The lack of accessories. He’s not wearing a halter, saddle, or saddlebags. He’s not pulling a cart. He’s at rest. Perhaps he belongs in a nativity scene…
See below for something surprising I learned, plus photos from the seller.
“We do not know why we are here. We do not know who built the Silo. We do not know why everything outside the Silo is as it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that that day is not this day.”
Silo is the grown-up version of City of Ember, which I love (the book version, at any rate). It’s also based on a book series. It’s sci-fi dystopia in which 10,000 people live in a city consisting of an underground silo. The world of the Silo, stratified vertically into different classes of citizens with different roles and lifestyles, is interesting in itself, but the characters bring it to life and drive the plot. The characters all have goals that motivate and explain their decisions (and conflict with other characters’ goals), and they all learn as they go, shifting their allegiance, or not, as suits their aims and principles and the information they happen to have.
Like all good sci-fi, Silo is about big questions made into relatable stories…
If you lived in an underground Silo, wouldn’t you want, first of all, to prevent your fellow citizens from threatening the existence of your world, even if it meant following orders and not asking questions, or concealing (or distorting) the truth? If the stakes are survival, don’t the ends justify the means? Curiosity killed the cat; it could kill you too—and 10,000 others with you! Is knowing the truth so important? On the other hand, is it possible for humans to happily ignore huge unanswered questions? What kind of truth requires such secrecy that people have to die for it? Aren’t we better off finding out whatever there is to find out, and knowing whatever there is to know? And anyway, isn’t it our nature that we will inevitably seek the truth, even if it doesn’t make us better off?
Who do you identify with: those who are willing to kill for the sake of secrecy in the name of safety, or those who are willing to die for the sake of solving a mystery? In probably every dystopia story, the audience is meant to side with the rebels. Silo, while clearly siding with the characters who seek the truth (as per the tagline), makes a pretty strong case for the local tyrant: there’s no twirling of mustaches here. Every issue has as many sides as there are characters, because every character has his or her own individual perspective. And yet, in the end, the truth matters.
Season 1 kicks off with a couple of mysterious deaths, but the greater mystery is whether the world outside the Silo is as inhospitable as the residents have been led to believe. Juliette, a gifted engineer responsible for the health of the Silo’s generator, is thrust into a new role that she leverages to find the answers to increasingly dangerous questions. Above all, she’s tenacious. Whatever she does, you root for her.
Season 2 is gripping in the sense that you want to know what happens to the people you met in Season 1, but it’s less gripping in the sense that the biggest mystery of Season 1 has been revealed. Moreover, Season 2 bounces between two separate plotlines. Circumstances are more strained; Season 1, even when people die, is more about solving intellectual puzzles, some of them political and all of them secret; Season 2 is more political rather than less so, but now there are many more overt physical conflicts: explosions, gunshots, arrows, and more than enough water to drown in!
There’s not yet any release date for Season 3, but it will probably start airing in 2026. I’m tempted to read the books, but I also believe that would be a terrible idea, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished watching the show; then I’ll read the book series and compare.
This was fun. Silly, but with strong themes of hope, friendship, and family.
Wikipedia says: Polygon said Carrey’s “gloriously deranged one-man, two-character musical” contrasted with the “utter sincerity” of Reeves, who made Shadow a “weirdly likable little ball of pain”. Sounds about right.
I understand almost no written Chinese. But my eyes and brain still pay attention to text in my environment in China. The result is that English text jumps out at me wherever there is any. English text appears even in places where there are few if any people who might be expected to read it. And since there are few if any people who do read it, getting it exactly correct is not a priority; thus it doesn’t tend to turn out exactly correct, though usually it’s clear what was meant, just from the context.
The fun is spotting surprises.
Surprises include signs that give instructions that I usually don’t see on signs; signs that are so badly translated that the meaning is totally lost; signs from The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; signs that display lorem ipsum or other placeholder text; strange ways of writing familiar ideas; spellings that reveal how people write or pronounce English words when they don’t really know which letters and sounds should be there; and grammar, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes that highlight how difficult English is from the perspective of someone whose language follows different principles altogether.
(As you can see, much fun is also in the analysis!)
Meanwhile, English words on clothing can be surprising because they aren’t necessarily expected to mean anything at all! In the English-speaking world, my impression is, the people who create or wear clothing decorated with Asian writing are mainly anime/manga geeks who’d be likely to know what it says—although, to be fair, there are amusing corners of the internet dedicated to photos of mirrored, error-ridden, insulting, or nonsensical Asian-language tattoos, which you’d think people would be more careful with than clothing! But in Asia, many people wear stuff with English words on it, and even if they can read it, maybe they don’t always bother to: the English is just decoration.
Below are three samples of weird English: two safety stickers (those are almost always good for a laugh) and a garment featuring decorative (rather than correct) English.
I’m tempted to read the books, but I also believe that would be a terrible idea, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished watching the show; then I’ll read the book series and compare.
