RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)

When are you and him grabbing coffee

Are you sure it was '86? I was using IBM's BITNET in 88 from UMASS before Al Gore invented the Internet lol. Email took 2 days to go from Boston to London, passing thru a node in California before routing to the UK. I got on Usenet in 88 or 89, and had fun chats with professors at Caltech and elsewhere using the finger command and talk (with tee pipe to dev/tty and a file, so I can play back the whole session.) I am vague in my memory about how and when I went from being n BITNET to ARPANet/Internet, but I do remember Gore was busy promoting the Information Superhighway around that time, and it was the time the first iteration of excitement around neural networks was cooling off... Memories! Real Genius was a fun movie to watch and an inspiration for getting into lasers.

UPDATE according to ChatGPT:

ARPANET itself began in 1969 at a handful of research universities, so some US universities had access as early as the early 1970s. However, many institutions that didn’t have a direct ARPANET connection joined BITNET in 1981—a store‐and‐forward network that was easier and less expensive to join but often led to long email delays (sometimes on the order of a day or two, especially on international links). By the mid‑to‑late 1980s, with the emergence of NSFNET (which provided a TCP/IP backbone) and the broader adoption of Internet protocols, many universities transitioned from BITNET to the more immediate, real‑time connectivity of the Internet.

In other words, while ARPANET was available to some US universities from the early 1970s, widespread academic use via the modern Internet (with NSFNET and TCP/IP) really picked up in the mid‑1980s. The long delays you remember (such as a two‑day email from Boston to London) were more typical of BITNET’s store‑and‑forward mechanism rather than ARPANET’s near‑real‑time communications.

Good example fow how the internet is/was made to connect. The thought almost feels quaint by now...

I love this! So little effort for so much outcome. In fact, I'll try it ... long shot but I'd love to join too!

I think this is the vid you referred to, in case anyone else is curious (I was)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo0SWoqQ44w

Lots of authority-questioning…

From the perspective of conspiratorial thinking, fringe “I’m special because I see the surprising, simple real key to everything” economic schools, and anti-enlightenment politics :-(

Also a lot of lessons for the average tech employee - working long hours for some goal and then at the end realize it’s going to be used for evil and you’re all about to get laid off anyway.

You're absolutely right, and, while it's good for life-karma, it's not so good for HN-karma.

No one bullies harder than the nerds around here. Such a hateful bunch of ignorant fools.

Of course, that doesn't apply to everyone here, for sure -- some people are absolutely lovely, like DonHopkins -- but perhaps 90%.

But that's always the problem with majorities, they follow the lead of their leader, and damn their conscience and other points of view, wielding their power like a cudgel. They tend to bully minorities of every kind, especially ideological minorities.

"There is nothing more important than compassion, and only the truth is its equal."

But that would mean sacrificing my paycheck

Real Genius was one of the things that helped me to soldier on through my (terrible) high school experience surrounded by bullies and knuckleheads, knowing that if I was lucky, I could have at least a good four years afterwards "among my own people." And as you said, it also helped to lay the ethical foundation of always looking at the potential applications of technology before deciding to work on it. Too few software "engineers" have taken that lesson to heart.

Heavy lifting for a silly 80s comedy movie.

Pro tip look for an industry that works for big capable customers that can defend themselves. Helps to create a structure of accountability inside a company that you can connect to as someone trying to have a positive career. Doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it is easier than pushing against the stream in a company that "serves"[1] a disaggregated (and thus mostly defenseless) customer base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...

"It's a moral imperative". :-)

"A girl's got to have her standards." (Also from 80's memory)

Literally every line from that movie is so quotable.

"Would you classify that as a launch problem, or a design problem?"

"They're beauticians?!" "Not yet"

"These military types are so untrusting"

I never watched Real Genius, so when I read Andre Lamothe's game programming books I didn't get any of the jokes.

"I think I'm getting brain fry!"

"OK Mitch, I'm gonna make it up to you. Let's just pause...take a step back. No, I was wrong, I'm sorry: take a step forward. Now, take a step back...and now we're cha cha-ing!"

I still use this when pair debugging.

>where one of the kids at the study table stands up, screams repeatedly, and leaves, and with no reaction one of the kids

Also the part where they are gassing Kent in his dorm room, and another student passes them by with just a "hey" and keeps walking while they are wearing gas masks and clearly Up To No Good.

A classic "show, don't tell" example as you have all the information you need to know about the sort of place this school is from that scene.

“I never sleep I had a roommate once but I drove her nuts I mean really nuts they had to take her away in an ambulance I knitted you a sweater.” that’s from memory so probably not 100% but was my sister’s favorite line.

Heh when Mitch goes to her dorm in the middle of the night and she’s using one of those giant floor sanders to refinish her dorm room floor is pretty effing funny.

I still use the "I'm only saying this because I care: there are lots of decaffinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing" retort in work meetings that get too heated. That entire scene[1] is one of my favorites.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k9gI58sHa0

The Saint did have an awesome soundtrack, and I forgot all about that! Thanks!

I completely misinterpreted the title.

I thought "Real Genius" and "Film Nerd" was referring to "Val Kilmer", like it was saying "RIP Val Kilmer, a real genius and film nerd that culture deserves" instead of "RIP Val Kilmer, who worked at Real Genius, the film that nerd culture deserves".

I must say that I never heard about this movie and I'm happy that this is a recommendation of a 80s movie

"I'll be your huckleberry" – a great line in a tense scene.

I can always count on an eye-roll from my wife when I have the rare chance to drop the "I've not yet begun to defile myself" line, haha... ah great now I need to go re-watch Tombstone

I think he was always great, but found him especially hilarious in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang".

I love _Heat_, EXCEPT for the ending. (Spoilers) It just feels too forced as "the good guy has to win". So, I always stop it when the good guy cop says "He's gone!". It's much more in character with the bad guy; basically his entire career up to that point was being conservative and playing the long time, and I just didn't see the motivation for him to go after the cop and reverse his core policies. IMHO, it's a much better movie that way.

Me too!

I will get Deja Vu.

9 year old me was fascinated about what the Anal Intruder was.

The greatest practical joke I ever played was on my parents, and completely innocently, meaning NOT on purpose:

I recommended them to see "Top Secret" when I was in 9th Grade. My Catholic parents!

They came home and my mother said, "We are never listening to a movie recommendation from you ever again."

Skeet surfin! Skeet surfin!!!

I had a ticket to see his one-man show a few years ago in DC but he had to cancel for health reasons; whatever actually took him down had been going for a while now. I'm sorry we didn't get to see more of him.

If anyone has done a better "nerdy girl" I haven't seen that film.

"I never sleep, I don't know why. I had a roommate and I drove her nuts, I mean really nuts, they had to take her away in an ambulance and everything. But she's okay now, but she had to transfer to an easier school, but I don't know if that had anything to do with being my fault. But listen, if you ever need to talk or you need help studying just let me know, 'cause I'm just a couple doors down from you guys and I never sleep, okay?"

My first celebrity crush as a kid. She's also in _Revenge of the Nerds_. Those two movies made young-me think that being a geek could be cool.

It’s my very minor claim to fame that I am part of the voice-over in a couple of the singing scenes (the rat race club gypsies and the choir when he’s running for the embassy IIRC - haven’t seen the movie for a couple of decades). Made some sweet cash as a teenager doing it! :)

War games was incredibly unusual too. The script writers, this was their first screenplay, they had no idea thay no one in hollywood cared about technical accuracy in scripts and spent a whole lot of time trying to get the tech details correct.

Also, not sure if you missed it, but Manhattan Project was part of the trifecta for me from that era that fed my desire to grow up to do intellectually difficult things.

> Real Genius is a great film in many ways, marred only by the assumption that a military laser is a bad thing to be working on

I wouldn't call it "marred" like it was a small detail in an otherwise good movie. It's pretty much the central lesson of the movie. The whole third act was about the ethics of working on weapons, particularly how engineers, if they're not careful, will focus on the "cool technology" aspect and fail to account for the real application(s) of their work. If you really think working on weapons would be neat, I'm not sure what there is left for you to get out of Real Genius.

this post is more about the movie Real Genius

If you're cringing it's because it is accurate (and you and I were like that — or nearly so).

If anything I wish it had not been a comedy but rather a more serious film with the same cast. They only touched on but could have done more with the psychology of these young, awkward, hormone-fueled "geniuses" falling in among some of the most awkward and smartest other young people in the world. Those who have always been the smartest in school now finding themselves ranking maybe somewhere in the middle among their new cohorts. And of course all the heightened awkwardness of being away from your parents for the first time in co-ed living arrangements....

With my C64 arriving in 9th grade, and my being a pretty good wrestler, I was both.

My sophomore year, when getting a ride from my state champion teammate, I don't know what I said, but he just turned to me and said,

"McCall, you're a neeeerrrrrd."

It wasn't bullying, because I've never been bullied, but I was -- and am -- a nerd.

And, yeah, "Real Genius" got a lot of play on HBO back then. I especially loved the Lazlo storyline, and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is such a GREAT song.

I have to mostly agree with you, in the sense that the jocks were no less nice than anybody else, maybe even more so. That's a pretty low bar for teenagers, though. Furthermore, the jocks by and large didn't really understand the misery of bullying, so they treated it lightly, and they did more than their share.

In my typology of bullies, there's the archetypal "unhappy at home" kind of bully who is troubled and traumatized and takes it out on other people. After-school specials will teach you that all bullies are like that, but in my experience, they were relatively rare in real life. The more common type, who accounted for almost all of the bullying, were the "protecting community standards" bullies, who were happy and popular and bullied people as a public service, sometimes even for the good of the victim. When people did something disruptive or destructive to the community, like being gay, thinking they were as good as people that they weren't as good as, or talking to a jock's girlfriend, the community needed to be repaired, and the violator needed to be put on a more healthy path in life. As budding community leaders, the jocks naturally stepped into that role, especially when physical work was required.

I managed to escape bullying in high school by being incredibly bland and repressing any inappropriate social ambitions (i.e., any at all) but I could see from cases around me that if there had been anything socially disturbing about me, a strong effort would have been made to correct the situation.

So if I rowed crew and could calculate Hessians in my head, I was a?…