Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

A fascinating game of exploration. You play an archaeologist sailing between “moons” in a habitable nebula linked by rivers, exploring ruins, interacting with townspeople, and translating ancient inscriptions. What starts as a simple quest to find a missing person ultimately reveals surprising truths about the history of the nebula and its people.

Aliya (the main character) is determined, snarky (to a lesser or greater extent depending on your dialog choices), and has complicated relationships with the people of the poor moon she came from and the wealthy moon where she now lives. She’s accompanied by a robot she calls Six, who manages to hold its own conversationally. When you’re out exploring or sailing, you can guide conversations between the two of them that can not only reveal lore to the player, but open different options for character actions as well.

The graphics are a mix of 3D environments and paper cut-out characters, the designs influenced by Middle Eastern architecture and clothing.

Translating Ancient

The Ancient script is hieroglyphic, with words that look like they’re made up of flowing letters. After a while you start recognizing the symbols that indicate concepts like all, place, water, person, or movement, as they appear in words meaning things like emperor, garden, or river. It helps that some of the glyphs have a connection between how they look and what they mean.

Translating is a fun challenge. When you find an inscription, you get a string of symbols and a set of words that the character knows or suspects, and try to fit the words to the symbols. As you translate more inscriptions, and she becomes more certain of words’ meanings, you also get more options.

Sailing and Exploring

Sailing between moons on the rivers is kind of a zen experience. You don’t need to dodge obstacles, though you do need to choose which fork to take to get to your destination. But they all loop back on each other in a complex web, so even if you didn’t have the option to back up when you take the wrong fork, it wouldn’t be a major problem.

The ruins contain puzzles (how to get through this locked gate?) and clues (what does this device do?), as do the towns (how do I convince this person to give me the information I need?) Sometimes it can be really tricky to steer a conversation the way you want it to go, and you don’t always get another chance.

Replayable

I’ve played through the game twice so far, and I’ve made different choices and different discoveries each time. There were things I learned the first time through that never even came up the second time around, and vice versa. For “new game plus” you also get to keep (some of?) the vocabulary you’ve built up, and you get longer phrases to translate.

While in most cases the choices you make have only subtle repercussions, there are some that can close off whole moons, or permanently block…or unlock…your ability to interact with certain characters.

There’s more than one way to reach the endgame, though, so you’re never completely locked out of progressing.

Loop Connections

The actual gameplay and story are completely different, but there are some conceptual similarities to Outer Wilds: Both involve traveling through space in a wooden ship within a small inhabited system, exploring ruins (and inscriptions!), and piecing together a history. Most people of the Nebula believe time is a Loop (and Aliya’s study of the past is either a waste of effort or actually a study of the future), while Outer Wilds takes place entirely within an actual time loop. And, well, there’s a bit more, but that would spoil the mysteries of both games.

It’s a little weird to start your book dedicated to the small community that took you in when you were exiled with several chapters about how superstitious and distrustful of outsiders the people here are. But this is Victor Hugo, and he doesn’t take the easy way out. (He does insist that he’s talking only about the Guernesey of several decades before his time, not his neighbors.)

It’s an interesting read, though, and a tighter structure than Les Misérables (unless the 1877 translation I read is seriously abridged, which it doesn’t indicate). The first half of the book builds up to a storm at sea and a shipwreck, and the rest is mostly one really determined man’s attempt to salvage the steamship’s engine, alone, out on the rocks in the middle of the channel. It takes him months, using only a handful of tools he brought and what parts he could salvage from the wreck, even building a makeshift forge in a hollow in the rocks.

Other characters include the steamship owner and his daughter, a former partner who ran off with half the money, and the captain who replaced him (and ultimately wrecks the ship). The build-up to the wreck is a bit of a slog until you start putting together the pieces that are deliberately left unsaid or appear contradictory, so that by the time the wreck happens you have a pretty good idea of why it happens.

It’s mostly man vs. nature, but this being Hugo, there’s social commentary too. Trusting or distrusting people for the wrong reasons, religious intolerance and superstitions, the hazards of overconfidence, misplaced righteousness, paying attention to what’s actually going on rather than what you expect to be going on, and so forth.

One bit that stuck in my head was the ruined steamship owner repeatedly rejecting advice from an old clergyman on where he can invest his remaining funds for a large return: selling weapons to Russia, where the Czar wants to put down a Polish peasant rebellion, or investing in these new plantations spreading into Texas (worked by slaves of course). The old clergyman just doesn’t understand why the guy won’t take his advice, while his younger colleague, newly arrived to the island, tries to explain that he’s listening to his conscience.

Over and Under

I remembered the novel being mentioned on the Les Misérables Reading Companion a few years back, and grabbed a copy when Standard Ebooks released their version. Then I forgot about it like a discounted Steam game for a couple of years, until I got to the point in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where the narrator admits he couldn’t even begin to describe what he saw, as it would need a poet like Victor Hugo to write something like Toilers of the Sea.

OK, sometimes I can take a hint!

Reading them back to back really brings out the difference in writing styles between Hugo and Verne. Verne wants to tell you what happened, maybe what the main character is thinking of (even if it’s a long list of fish), and what’s salient about the setting. Hugo wants to paint you a complete picture. Verne would write about a man clinging to a piece of wreckage floating in the middle of the ocean. Hugo would describe the expanse of the ocean, the color of the sky, how much cloud cover (and what kind of clouds), how strong the wind is, any birds or islands visible in the distance, are the waves slow and calm or choppy…then zoom in on the bit of wreckage…and only when the scene is fully painted zoom in on the figure clinging desperately to it.

I think Hugo spends more time describing how creepy an octopus can be before one seizes Gilliat than Verne spends on the whole battle between the Nautilus and the giant squid!

Even though marine science and geology have passed it by, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still a gripping episodic adventure through a strange, hidden world of marvels.

Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at least all three of them are distinct) and the crew is more or less faceless. (Aside from Nemo, the crew doesn’t speak to the passengers, so they’re never able to pick up the Nautilus’ private language.)

And Verne has really thought things through. Like, how did Nemo get something of this scale built without someone noticing? He farmed out different parts and systems to different factories scattered across the world. Ocean-based textiles, undersea mines, an isolated source of fuel that no surface-based ship will find.

Even the parts where he made up oceanography out of whole cloth, like the deeper outflow throgh Gibraltar (which as it turns out does exist, but not for the reasons Nemo suggests, which have since been found to be incorrect) or the open sea at the south pole (which doesn’t) – or Atlantis, for that matter, with the Canaries as the remnants of the sunken peaks – have at least some logic beyond the rule of cool.

I read an abridged version years ago, when I was in my early teens, and I’ve been meaning to read the whole thing ever since. I’m glad I finally got around to it! Though I suspect a lot of the abridgment had to do with the frequent (and lengthy) lists of fish.

Now I need to finally read The Mysterious Island…

Oh, one more thing: Verne name-checks Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, citing his poetic writing, which prompted me to pick that one up off the to-read pile. Reading them back to back really shows the stylistic differences between the two contemporaries.

Finding this Translation

The edition I read felt more modern than I expected. It turns out Frederick Paul Walter wrote his complete, unabridged translation in the 1990s and donated it to Project Gutenberg. From the license at the end of the book:

This particular work is one of the few individual works protected by copyright law in the United States and most of the remainder of the world, included in the Project Gutenberg collection with the permission of the copyright holder.

Older versions of the file didn’t clarify that it wasn’t legally in the public domain, and Standard Ebooks produced a nicely-formatted book from it somewhere along the line. That’s the version I downloaded and eventually read. The Project Gutenberg edition now contains a copyright notice, and Standard Ebooks has taken down their edition. They haven’t replaced it with another translation, stating that “the only public domain translations of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas are ones widely considered to be slapdash.”

I’ve been using LibreOffice, specifically the Writer and Calc parts of it, for years. It does everything I need a word processor or spreadsheet to do, and it doesn’t get in my way with nagware, or making sure I have enough licenses for all the family’s computers, or trying to monetize my data or convince me to move files to a cloud service.

There are probably a few Word and Excel features they don’t support, but none that I’ve noticed for a long time.

Back in the days before LibreOffice split off from OpenOffice, there were more problems with opening Microsoft file formats. I used to make sure we had at least one Microsoft Office installation on a Windows partition, just in case. That hasn’t been necessary for years.

I used to sometimes write in AbiWord and use Gnumeric for spreadsheets on Linux. They’re both faster and lighter than LibreOffice, but that’s also less important than it used to be, except on older or low-spec devices.

The only real trouble I’ve had recently is getting it to switch properly into dark mode on Linux. I can get it to show a dark document in a light window, or a light document in a dark window, or a light document in a light window, but I can’t reliably get it to show a dark document in a dark window. I’m not a total dark-mode fanatic, but I do prefer it in low-light situations.

LibreOffice also has presentation, database, and vector drawing applications. I’ve never had to use them for my home or hobbyist projects, though, so I can’t really say how Impress, Draw and Base compare to PowerPoint, Visio and Access.

If you include its predecessors OpenOffice and Star Office, I’ve been using it regularly for decades on Linux, years on Windows, and occasionally on macOS.

Most Linux distros include LibreOffice in their package repositories, or you can use the Snap, Flatpak (on Flathub) or AppImage. You can get it on the Microsoft and Apple app stores for a small charge. Free installers are available on their website for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Mobile

The core office suite doesn’t have a mobile version (unless you count the viewer for Android, which you can’t use for editing), but Collabora Office is built on LibreOffice. Their mobile app will open files on your phone, or on any storage service registered on your phone. If you have Nextcloud or Dropbox installed, it can seamlessly open, edit and save those files. Spreadsheets are a bit janky on my phone, but then it’s an older phone.

Online/Offline and Collaboration

The best part is: it still runs on my computer, even when offline. With a cloud-based app you have to trust that Google or Microsoft won’t be using your docs to train AI or something. With an app that runs directly on your machine, you know.

The downside is that it only runs directly on my computer. Which does make it hard to do online collaboration. But formats are compatible enough these days that you can usually open a file in something that does handle collaborative features when you need them.

There are a couple of online suites built on LibreOffice:

• Collabora Online is mainly aimed at businesses, but you can self-host their developer edition (a.k.a. CODE) of the web app for free.
• Nextcloud Office combines Collabora with Nextcloud, which makes it a lot easier to install if you already have Nextcloud. I’ve been experimenting with it a bit, and it works, but I may need to throw more memory at my self-hosted server for it to run well.

Neither works as easily as Google Docs when it comes to multiple authors, comments, and sharing permissions, unfortunately.

Google Workspace includes a fast, cloud-based office suite. It runs in most web browsers, the collaboration features are dead simple, and the mobile apps are decent. It auto-saves as you go and keeps a record of changes, so you can easily go back to an older version. Docs, Sheets and Slides are far less complete than Word, Excel or PowerPoint (or their LibreOffice counterparts), but they’re sufficient for most purposes. It’s the only online office suite I’ve used that allows you to share a document with comment-only permissions, which is kind of surprising.

Unfortunately it only runs in the cloud. (Even if you use the offline extension for Chrome, it’s still syncing to Google Drive when you go online.) And I don’t trust Google’s services any more than Microsoft’s these days. Back in the day I trusted that they wouldn’t use my writing for targeted advertising. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if they trained their LLMs on it even if they claimed otherwise, and it’s not at all clear in their privacy policy

I used it a lot during the 2010s, but I’ve switched back to using regular files and my own cloud sync when needed. Mostly plain text, Markdown and LibreOffice, except when I really need live sharing features.