Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

Hainish Stories

Most of Le Guin’s Hainish stories are about imagining different ways for human societies to live. These in particular are mostly about different ways for men and women to relate. They’re all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if you’ve already read The Left Hand of Darkness.

Coming of Age in Karhide

Left Hand… explored what an androgynous society might be like. This story answers any lingering questions you might have about sex among humans who only experience gender once a month (and never know for sure which they’re going to be ahead of time).

The Matter of Seggri

In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to “protect” them. On Seggri, the situation is reversed: Most people are women, and the few men are kept apart and guarded to make sure that there are enough around for procreation. They don’t really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still can’t decide whether the stereotyping is a weak link or a deliberate counterpoint to the way women get stereotyped in reality), and occasionally help someone get pregnant.

It’s told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left Hand…. Some of the stories are dry, while others get into forbidden romance territory.

Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways

Two stories set on the planet O, where marriages consist of four people: two men, two women, one each from two different divisions of society. As you’d imagine, setting one up is…complicated.

“Unchosen Love” is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the more satisfying of the two.

In “Mountain Ways,” the partners in a torrid affair try to pass one of the women off as a man so they can fill in the missing role, bending a strict tradition in one way in order to uphold it in another. It…sort of works…for a while.

Solitude

A society of introverts, where people stick to the absolute bare minimum connection needed to continue humanity. An Ekumen observer embeds herself and her children in one of the loose villages in order to understand it. This is one that sticks with you, and I’ve written about it in more detail.

Old Music and the Slave Women

The most brutal of the stories in what is now Five Ways to Forgiveness, in which a Hainish observer (Old Music is his name) is held captive for an extended period by the slave-owning side in a civil war.

Stand-Alone Stories

The Birthday of the World

It’s a good title, but it’s far from the best story in the collection. Mainly what sticks in my head is the low-tech interpretation of prophecies involving high-tech events. (A house falls in fire but still stands, for instance.)

Paradises Lost

A standalone novella about the middle generations of a multi-generation starship, and what happens when some of them come to believe that nothing outside of the ship actually exists. Well worth the read, and I’ve reviewed it in more detail already.

The people of Eleven-Soro live alone, isolated as much as possible. Women and children live in loose villages called “aunt-rings.” Men live as hermits. And no adult sets foot in another’s house.

Le Guin describes “Solitude” as a story about introverts.

An Ekumen observer, unable to get the adults to tell her anything, raises her children in one of the aunt-rings so they can learn how the culture functions and explain it to her. What she didn’t count on was that her daughter would want to stay, and not return with her to a noisy, overwhelming, crowded society that she barely remembers. (Too many people. She wants to stay where she can be a person and occasionally see another person.) The researcher sees this as a tragedy. Her daughter sees it as the only way she can stand living.

As someone who likes quiet and doing my own thing, and isn’t too fond of crowds, my sympathies are with the daughter. There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness, after all. Though Sorovian culture (such as it is) certainly goes a lot farther than I’d want to live in.

Through this story, Le Guin seems to be attempting to figure out what the bare minimum for human connection is…and what it would mean for those who try to limit themselves to it.

Avoid Magic

In a recent column at Reactor, Kristen Patterson describes it as the complete breakdown of human connection. She’s more viscerally repulsed by the way Sorovians live, and zeroes in on why the culture is so disconnected: They’ve attempted to remove every last remnant of obligation or control from human relationships. And while they’ve succeeded in removing power dynamics in most cases, they’ve also removed the mutual obligation that makes communities actually function.

“Solitude” is included in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories). It’s among the better stories in the collection, and one that sticks with you.

A front-end manager for Linux’s built-in virtualization/emulation (QEMU and KVM, using libvirt). More customizable than Boxes, but missing a few convenience features.

Good

It’s easy to set up a basic guest system.

It’s also easy to set up a basic emulated system running a different architecture: as long as you have the backend libraries installed for running ARM or RISC-V or whatever, they’ll show up in a drop-down when creating a new VM.

You can tweak the settings on a virtual machine in great detail.

You can hand off a virtual machine from Virt-Manager to Boxes and back more or less seamlessly, since the actual guest is being managed by the libvirt backend in both cases. Even while it’s running! (If you haven’t set a VM to run in the background, you can still pause it in one front-end and resume it in the other.)

Cloning and snapshots seem to work smoothly when I’ve used them, and I’ve on occasion reverted to a snapshot created in Boxes while running the machine in Virt-Manager.

Bad

Virt-Manager doesn’t support shared folders over SPICE, which is a weird choice. Workaround: set up network shares on the host and connect to them from the guest (or the other way around, depending on how you’ve set up your network).

Ugly

Clipboard sharing via SPICE works, but as with Boxes you have to install the guest tools yourself. On Linux guests you can usually just use the package manager (spice-vdagent). For Windows guests, you do need to download and install SPICE manually.

In theory it supports hardware accelerated graphics using VirGL, but I haven’t managed to get it to work.

Same as any other VM app, running emulated hardware will always be slower than using the same architecture and hardware virtualization. That’s not specific to Virt-Manager, it’s just the basic fact that software is slower than hardware.

A versatile on-screen keyboard for Android with local-only autosuggest and autocorrect dictionary for multiple languages, and optional gestures.

HeliBoard is extremely configurable, including autocorrect sources (you can give it access to your contact list or installed apps, but you don’t have to), and doesn’t “phone home” (as we used to say), so it’s a better choice than GBoard for privacy.

And it supports a whole boatload of writing systems! Not just Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek, but Hindi, Arabic and a bunch more alphabets. Even Korean (a syllabary, so it’s easily composed), though it doesn’t handle Chinese or Japanese, not even the kana. Emoji and accented characters are easy to get to.

Auto complete/correct mitigates the problem of my clumsy thumbs hitting letters instead of the space bar. Even after a month and a half, I’m still doing it at about the same rate as on GBoard. But the autocorrect rate (both overall and good/bad) seems to be comparable too, so it’s still an improvement over Fossify Keyboard. As with GBoard, backspace will undo a bad autocorrection.

There are cursor keys on the “functional” row that slides out to replace suggestions, which really helps with editing, and it’ll use the system speech recognition for voice “typing.” And you can customize the individual keyboard layouts to an almost ridiculous degree.

My typing is a bit worse with the number row always visible, but having to show/hide it is so inconvenient that I turned it back on. I tried adjusting the keyboard height (I did mention it’s super-configurable), but it didn’t make much difference.

Of course, it’s a different experience on a tablet-sized screen, where it’s almost (but not quite) possible to touch type.

Gestures

Built-in gesture support is in the works. For now it’s possible to install a compatible gesture library for swiping. That library isn’t open source, and it’s basically a binary blob extracted from GBoard, both factors in why I wanted to give the app a fair shake without gestures first. It’s a bit of a pain to download a file from GitHub onto your phone, but once you’ve loaded it, swiping works just like you’re used to.

Bottom line: Even without enabling gestures, it works about as well as Android’s default keyboard (unless you need to write Chinese or Japanese), but respects your privacy. With gestures, it’s a drop-in replacement. And it still isn’t sending your word choices to Google for whatever they’re doing with it now.

Heliboard isn’t available on the Play Store yet, though there’s some work being done on prerequesites now. But it is available on third-party app store likes F-Droid or Izzy.

The original Jurassic Park film is still great, more than 30 years later. The dinosaurs are still impressive, it’s well-paced and dramatic, and despite contemporary reviews accusing the actors of being less lifelike than their digital co-stars, the characters are engaging. The premise of the pre-opening tour (with grandkids!) is set up well enough (investors are spooked by a fatality, and Hammond is determined prove to the lawyers beyond any reasonable doubt that it’s safe).

And there are so many great moments.

“And then the attack comes, not from the front, but from the sides…”

“Just like a flock of birds evading a predator.” “They’re, uh, flocking this way.”

“Clever girl.”

It’s not perfect. Several actors’ talents are wasted in smaller roles, and it shamelessly glosses over Dr. Sattler’s expertise in paleobotany. (On the plus side, it was refreshing to see Muldoon recognize her as capable.)

And “chaos theory” was basically a buzzword for “things break” rather than the important part, which is that things break in ways that you can’t predict. The scene in the book where they use the camera to count all of the dinosaurs and it’s programmed to stop counting when it gets to the number they expect would have gotten the point across better (along with the fact that the people involved, however brilliant, have their blind spots), and wouldn’t have taken up too much time. As a result, Malcolm comes off as a lot more one-note than I remember.

Looking back, I was surprised at how much screen time is spent on selling the bird connection to the audience. Especially compared to the one line spent justifying the plot twist of these dinosaurs changing sex. I think it was a turning point in how the general public sees dinosaurs and birds, to the point where you can call a chicken a dinosaur and people will think it’s silly…but not entirely wrong!

Weirdly, I’ve never been particularly interested in watching the sequels. I mean, I did see The Lost World when it was new, and it was sorely disappointing (except that they filmed that T-Rex waterfall scene that was cut from the first movie). That might explain it!