Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

One that immediately comes to mind is "The Imitation Game", on the life of Alan Turing during WWII.

For something less tech-oriented, "Molly's Game" is inspiring for me. The characterization of Molly as being both smart and relentlessly hard working is motivating to me, while also showing the dangers of taking it to the nth degree.

In a similar vein to "Molly's Game", "The Queen's Gambit" series on Netflix is not about tech, but very much on being the best you can be at something, along with the dangers of taking it too far.

"The Hundred Foot Journey" has nothing to do with technology at all, but rather cooking (which I usually hate). But, it captures the feeling of iteration, hard work, and self-improvement, and the notion of dealing with adversarial people and eventually becoming allies.

While definitely silly and kid-friendly, "Real Steel" gives me similar "iteration and self-improvement" vibes that give me a mental boost.

Finally, on the anime side, I have one hugely overlooked recommendation that I LOVED and yet got very little recognition: Knights and Magic. It's standard "isekai" setup has a software developer transported to another world, but he very much captures the excitement of taking an engineering mindset to problem solving when coming up with new mechanical solutions to each new fight. It's not as technical as I wish it were, but in terms of capturing the spirit of tech and engineering in a stylized way, this show was a ton of fun for me!

I also found Imitation Game, Molly’s Game and Queens Gambit galvanizing. It’s interesting that those movies elicit that kind of response despite their ostensible message being the human cost of pursuing goals at the expense of everything else. In a similar vein a Beautiful Mind and The Social network also were motivating for me.

I’m not sure if I’m just taking away the wrong message (like the people who read Liar’s Dice and wanted to go into banking) or if the writer’s own subconscious admiration of these people permeated into the medium (or maybe they made it intentionally ambiguous). There is probably some deeper insight into how we all struggle with reconciling society’s veneration of individual success (monetary and/or reputational) with the social expectation that we conform to the norms of society (being social, not abusing drugs, placing social cohesion above everything else)

Even as I wrote my recommendations, I questioned whether other viewers take the same inspiration I take from them, given the negative consequences explored in each, so I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.

In addition to your points, I do think there is an aspect of human nature that is most strongly fascinated by people who achieve extraordinary things, but simultaneously have some major flaw or deficiency (especially a deficiency in something ordinary that we, ourselves, do not have).

It's as though, while we crave role models and achievements to aspire to, we are also comforted to think that our relative shortcomings with regards to our aspirations are made up for in other areas that our role models may lack.

The good stories always hit you in the subconscious bits. I don't think you can really write good stories from some kind of formula. It has to cut really deeply somehow.

In the same vein in anime: Dr. Stone is really damn good as well! Goes deep into inventing chemistry and tech from scratch. My wife is a chemist and couldn't find anything inaccurate about it!

Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi is a much better portrayal of Turing

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