Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

Every once in a while I’m reminded of SyFy’s notoriously bad TV adaptation of Earthsea, and think, maybe I should watch it just once, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, to see not just how bad it is but how it’s bad. And then I remember I have better things to do, like washing the dishes or sorting my socks.

So this isn’t a review, because I still haven’t watched it after 20 years, so much as it’s a placeholder indicating why, despite having read and re-read the books so many times, I haven’t.

Early on, Phillipa Boyens was going to adapt it and they were going to do the original trilogy. That sounded promising!

By the time they announced casting, Boyens was no longer attached, and they were only going to adapt the first two books. And there were some oddities in casting, like making Sparrowhawk white (Shawn Ashmore). I wrote on my blog at the time that Danny Glover would be perfect for Ogion. And when I saw that Isabella Rosselini was playing Thar, she seemed a good choice as well. But my interest had dropped from enthusiasm to the line between cautiously optimistic and cynical.

When it aired on what was then the Sci-Fi Channel, it was clear that “adapted” was…an extremely loose description. In addition to whitewashing the entire population of the archipelago except for Ogion, they seemed to have cosmically missed the point, and the heart, of the stories, which are fundamentally about knowing yourself and seeking balance in the world.

Le Guin wrote a scathing article in which she described in meticulous detail why the people of Earthsea are mostly copper-red or black, with white people in the north and northeast, how it was a deliberate choice to set it apart from the genre conventions established by Northern European fantasy tradition. (Whoever captioned the photo as “a pale imitation of Le Guin’s protagonist,” I salute them.) She further described the miniseries’ story as a “generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.” and noted that she felt “very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard.” Other reviews were similarly unimpressed.

So I never got around to watching it, not even when it was released on home video and I could borrow or rent it. There didn’t seem much point. Eventually I read the summary on Wikipedia, which sounds…well, like a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on violence.

I’m currently about halfway through my latest re-read of the series. I paused after The Farthest Shore to read the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, and a bunch of current books. And while I sort of want to re-watch the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea (also a mishmash, this time of books three and four – but an earnest one at least), every time I contemplate watching this, the idea just slides off of my brain and lands in the “Nah, why bother?” bucket.

A park with open grassy area and drought-tolerant gardens, a few picnic tables, basketball and tennis courts, and playground. Ample parking, clean restrooms and a drinking fountain/water bottle-filling station at the community center. All the facilities are new within the past year or so. Not sure what’s going on with the larger fields past the tennis courts, but they seem to have been left to dry out over the summer. Nice view of Catalina Island.

It’s just downhill from the Forrestal Reserve trailheads and parking area, which makes it a good stop after a hike to refill water bottles, hit the restrooms, or have a picnic. (I took this photo from one of the trails at the nature reserve.)

A simple GUI application that wraps around Linux’s built-in QEMU and KVM support for running virtual machines. It’s similar to UTM on macOS (though Boxes predates UTM by a decade). Probably available in your distro’s package manager as gnome-boxes.

Good

It makes the easy things easy, like downloading, installing and running most Linux distros and BSD variants.

Most Linux guests run pretty well, in my experience. I’ve also never had trouble installing an unsupported Linux/BSD guest or a random OS like Haiku or ReactOS.

KVM guests can also be managed with other apps like virt-manager when you need to adjust advanced settings.

Snapshots are supported.

Bad

I’ve never managed to get hardware acceleration to run in it, so there’s no point using it for Windows gaming. (Fortunately, most of the Windows games I’ve wanted to play have been on Steam, and Proton’s really good at running them these days.)

The one time I got Windows 11 to finish installing, it was unusably slow. Like wait a few seconds for a menu to show up after clicking. I ended up deleting that VM and setting up Win11 in VirtualBox instead.

Ugly

Windows 10 does run, just kinda slow for desktop apps and too slow for gaming.

To get clipboard sharing and shared folders, you do need to install the SPICE guest tools yourself. On Linux guests you can usually just use the package manager (spice-vdagent and spice-webdavd), and any folders you add in the Boxes properties will show up in the Network section of whatever file manager you’re using. For Windows guests, you do need to download and install SPICE manually.

Cloning is possible, but the copy doesn’t always find its storage device.

If you need to adjust more advanced settings for a machine, it just opens the config file in a text editor. I’ve found it simpler to make those changes in another app like virt-manager.

Similarly, while Boxes can run a VM emulating a different architecture than your actual hardware, such as running an aarch64 guest on a x86_64 host, you need to use another app to set it up. (This will always be slower than using the same architecture and hardware virtualization, whether you’re using QEMU, VirtualBox or anything else.)

At first glance Fread looks like OpenVibe, because you can log into Bluesky and Mastodon-compatible services, plus follow RSS/Atom feeds. But it doesn’t try to merge them into a single timeline (yet?), and lets you add as many of any type as you want instead of limiting you to one of each type. It acts just like any other Fediverse app that lets you sign into multiple accounts. And it has the open-this-post-in-another-account feature I first saw in Tusky.

You can also assemble custom timelines, not tied to an account, made up of public feeds of all types, which is pretty cool! It’ll search by username, full feed URL or homepage URLs, though it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds. If you have an account on the same server as the one you’re following, it’ll use that one for replies, likes, and boosts.

Another advantage over OpenVibe is that its RSS/Feed support uses the feed content when you tap on the summary, so you can still read a post on a full-text feed if you’ve gone offline. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds, at least not if the site you’re trying to add also matches a Bluesky account.

Cross-posting is easy, but it has the same problems as OpenVibe: it’s limited by the account with the shortest text limit, and once the cross-post has been made, there’s no way to follow up on both posts together.

I like the overall look it applies to posts, but it strips out existing formatting (like Mastodon itself used to do), including bold/italic, block quotes, lists, etc. That’s frustrating.

It doesn’t seem to support any features beyond what’s in mainstream Mastodon/Bluesky, and it doesn’t offer features like direct messages (yet) or scheduled posts, but so far it seems to work with GoToSocial, PixelFed, Snac and Sharkey. (It can log into Akkoma, but can’t display the post timeline.)

When I read that Annalee Newitz’ next book was going to involve a group of robots opening up their own noodle shop in a future post-war San Francisco, I knew I had to read it. And it does not disappoint! It’s a short, joyful tale of creating the future you want out of the present you’ve been stuck with.

The main robots are all well-drawn, individual characters: The octopus-like search-and-rescue bot whose chemical sensors were perfect for analyzing taste and smell, who has fond memories of the falafel truck they worked at after the war (and is seriously into speculating cryptocurrency on the side). The bot with articulated arms and hands, who wants to make something worthwhile with them. The former bank teller, partly humaniform, who becomes more comfortable expressing her inner robot-ness as she explores logistics and supply chains. And the former combat robot, who finds himself tired of working in management and wants to get back into protecting people (both human and robot) and the restaurant, and discovers there are more ways to do that than just muscle (or rather servos) and ammo. The sentient car doing delivery gigs who has a thing for old media and will tell you exactly what’s wrong with the offensive robot stereotypes in, say, Transformers.

Great flavor, real substance to chew on. Portions sized to satisfy hunger, even if you’d cheerfully go for a second helping.

Retro Web

I love the concept that robots would be fascinated with early web design…and that the book’s official website was built using the aesthetic!

Last time I visited, I hadn’t noticed the merch. You can buy several varieties of “torso cover” (including the “formal torso cover” and a "cold weather torso cover with bonus head cover), a tote bag “perfect for takeout boxes, replacement limbs, and more,” or a hat that “goes mainly on human heads, but will also go hansdomely on many robot appendages. We’re not the bucket hat police. You do you.”

I may pick up one of those stickers, though I don’t know any sentient cars to give one to…

Reality Intrudes

The idea of an embattled California trying to provide civil rights for people (while still exploiting their tenuous legal status), while the rest of the US wants to treat them as objects, hits a bit harder than it would have last summer, but it’s not like we didn’t all see it coming.

I wasn’t expecting this to fit in with the cluster of oddly-related books I read this summer, but it opens with the robots waking up some time after a disaster has struck, and they have to both get themselves back online and figure out what happened…a lot like the opening chapters of The Downloaded, which I’d just read a couple of weeks earlier.