Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 11

An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.

In the centuries since the human colonists left for Pax, Earth’s civilization collapsed and a fascist patriarchy took control and has rebuilt things to the point that they can check in on some of those outer-space colonies from before the fall.

Like the first book, each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view (including Stevland, of course!), though this time around it’s all focused on the arrival of the new expedition and the events leading up to it. The psychology of the bamboo’s and the Glassmakers’ perspectives is notably different from the humans’, and of course each species has its factions, and each faction has its priorities, and each person has what they do and don’t know and assume. (The chapter in which the Earth expedition arrives at the colony has the narrator repeatedly making and revising assumptions.)

And there are more factions in a war fought on plant timescale.

Despite it being more tightly compressed in time, it feels less focused than the first book. There’s a side expedition late in the story that’s both necessary thematically and narratively awkward. I’m not sure how I feel about the epilogue as an epilogue, but as I put the finishing touches on this review I’ve just discovered that Burke wrote some related short stories set during Semiosis…and a third book that picks up on those threads and was published just last year.

Connections

Interference has been on my to-read list ever since I finished Semiosis, but it was reading another book about sentient plants from outer space that finally bumped it to the top. Weirdly, both also involve minicry, invasions and shifting alliances. And I caught echoes of this book in The Downloaded, which also involves reconnecting with lost space expeditions.

Earth’s “NVA” setup of constantly tormenting one person for the supposed benefit of society brings to mind Omelas, but several things make it worse:

• It’s clearly a deliberate choice, not a “necessary” evil.
• They’ve trained the populace to enjoy NVA’s torment, unlike Omelas where it’s a secret shame. It’s more like the daily two minutes of hate.
• They keep swapping in new clones of the same person, using the threat of “She might be you!” as part of keeping women down.
• The society isn’t even that great anyway. At least with Omelas you can understand why people would want to rationalize their complicity in the system. That’s the point of the story, after all. Here? it’s explicitly fascist, though the characters from Earth noticeably don’t say so until they’re light-years away from it.

Before I discovered Elk and Phanpy, I used Pinafore as an alternate app for my Mastodon account, and later as a front-end when I was first testing GoToSocial. Like those, it’s a single-page web app (SPA) that runs entirely in your browser, talking to your server directly.

It’s fast and reliable, with a focus on privacy and accessibility, and an even more minimalist look than Phanpy. Lists are still kind of second-class UI, but you can pin one to your main toolbar replacing the Local timeline, which can be convenient.

Disco’ed

I kept using it off and on after the author discontinued it due to burnout, mainly because it doesn’t have Elk’s issues with Markdown on GoToSocial.

Semaphore picked up the project where the original author left off, but seems to have been abandoned somewhere along the line.

Current

I recently discovered Enafore, another fork that’s still being updated. Apparently it has “better support for Akkoma, glitch-soc, and Iceshrimp,” though I haven’t found a comparison yet. The main thing I’ve noticed is that it lets you choose a format type (plain, HTML, Markdown, BBCode etc.) per-post when writing on GoToSocial or Akkoma.

There are still a couple of baseline features I miss from other Mastodon web apps:

• Enafore only shows ALT text on hover (making it inaccessible on touch screens).
• Posts in the same thread show up separately in the main timeline.
• Filtered posts are straight-out removed, not just collapsed. Including my own.
• You can only log into one account per instance.

But simple is good for self-hosting, and the risk of hosting a few extra static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files is, like the cost Lawson mentions, basically zero. Of the three Mastodon-compatible web apps I’ve used, this the the only one I’ve seriously considered hosting myself as a dedicated front-end for my GTS site. That’ll be interesting, if I ever get around to it!

I did like this book, but not as much as I’d expected to.

At the level of plot, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of a pod person who’s been an alien all her life. On a character level, it’s about trying to go through life knowing you’re different from everyone around you. And thematically, it’s about friends and family vs. the world, and vs. each other, and figuring out where the lines are between who you can trust and who you can’t.

The main character has been certain since childhood that she’s actually an alien plant who replaced a little girl lost in the woods. (More of a classic changeling than the October Daye type.) And because of the kind of book it is, she’s right.

The prologue is not for the squeamish. But the rest of the novel is more eerie sci-fi and less horror.

It’s mostly told from Stasia’s point of view, with occasional fragments of letters, or teacher’s notes, or scientific articles between chapters. One of the problems I had was that most of the other characters aren’t…well, maybe I shouldn’t say “fleshed out” when half of them are plant people, but while Stasia’s puzzlement over their motivations supports the story thematically, it makes it less engaging. Though there is an interesting shift in perspective as the advance vanguard becomes less human and more plant.

Doomed

I can’t help but think of this as a more cynical, post-COVID take on some of the same themes as Newsflesh. It’s got the same kind of small group of found family vs. vast forces bigger than themselves (including improbable escapes from secret government facilities), wrapped in a body horror tale in which humans are being replaced and/or eaten by something that looks almost but not quite human. But in this version, we’ve been too busy tearing each other down to band together and protect humanity. The author doesn’t state so outright, but her response on a Reddit AMA regarding how she would write it differently now echoed through my mind repeatedly while reading it.

I would not write the Newsflesh trilogy. Being able to write that series required me to have a measure of faith in both a public health response and in the desire of my fellow humans to keep the people around them safe, and I have lost that faith, essentially completely. I am no longer optimistic enough for Newsflesh.

And while the humans of Newsflesh are able to fight back the zombie hordes and rebuild civilization, it quickly becomes clear that the best anyone can do here is salvage what’s worth preserving of humanity.

More Connections

I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: Overgrowth reminded me to finally read Interference, another book with intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances. Interference and The Downloaded both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. The Downloaded and When the Moon Hits Your Eye are both character studies in an apocalypse that can’t even be mitigated. Even Automatic Noodle opens with the main characters waking up long after a disaster (though it’s only months, and only a local disaster.)

An alternate web front-end for Mastodon and compatible servers. A bit more user friendly than Mastodon’s web interface, but ever so slightly buggier, especially on those non-Mastodon servers. Supports multiple accounts on the same or different servers. Like Phanpy and Pinafore, it runs in your browser and talks to your server so you’re not sending data. It’s a little more cluttered than Phanpy, but only because it shows you more.

Elk works well as a front-end to GoToSocial except for a few minor bugs. First, it gets out of sync easily. It’ll tell me I have a notification, but when I look, it’s not there, and I have to reload the page.

(There’s also a rare bug, possibly GTS specific, where Elk will desync between what’s visible and where a click registers. I’ll try to click on “Load more” and it will register an action on a post instead. I haven’t narrowed down when it happens, but I haven’t seen it in a while, so maybe the issue’s been fixed. This of course means I’ll see it again as soon as I post this.)

The biggest problem I have with Elk is that its own support for parsing Markdown in posts to format them interacts badly with servers that parse Markdown themselves. Sometimes it converts characters it shouldn’t, and it alwasys loses inline links when editing. On more than one occasion I’ve had to add links back manually, and on more than one occasion I’ve canceled the edit and switched to another front-end that doesn’t try to second-guess the post format.

It’s a cool idea! Combine all your social networking feeds into a single app. Respond to posts and let the app choose the appropriate account. Cross-post easily. And I really like the typeface)!

My key takeaway is that to use it, you have to either be following a small enough number of people across services, or you need to be OK with not catching everything. (You kind of do anyway, but this takes all your sources and mixes them into the same firehose.)

Currently, it supports one each of Mastodon (and compatible servers including GoToSocial), Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads, plus RSS/Atom feeds and plans to add Tumblr. You can also set up multiple profiles, but each can only have one account of each type. That means if you have two Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account, you can’t set them all up on the same profile. (Update: Fread also supports both Bluesky and Mastodon, and can handle more than one of each type of account.)

Feeding Issues

RSS support finally launched last week, which is why I picked up the app again. Again, I do like the idea of being able to just follow websites instead of following a social media account that follows the website! It auto-detects feeds correctly, so you only need to enter the main website to subscribe to its feed. On your timeline it’ll show the title and summary, and tapping on it opens the article in a reader mode without all the extra clutter. The article view also has a button to just show the actual web page.

Downsides: If you’re following a site in a social context, you can’t comment, and if you’re following one in a news context, it gets lost in the shuffle.

Also, it doesn’t seem to do use the content of a full-text feed. It always loads the web page and then strips out what it thinks is unneeded. I can use Nextcloud News seamlessly in airplane mode. That’s not the case with OpenVibe, which will just sit there with a blank screen, trying to download.

And it’s been sending me snarky “reminders” to just add an RSS feed, already, even though I already have. I am not a fan of communication apps that send me promotional notifications.

Context Troubles

Unfortunately, it’s a whole new layer of context collapse, with the added bonus that the contexts get pulled apart too. Making a single cross-post is easy, but you’re stuck with the shorter size limit, and it doesn’t remember that the Bluesky and Mastodon versions are the same post. You still have to do followups manually, once per network. (Sure, you have to do that when you’re using separate apps too, but at least you expect to be able to do that, because the context you’re using it in is different.)

The biggest problem for me is that I’m already following too many people on the Fediverse to keep track without using lists. Bluesky accounts just get lost in the shuffle. What I’d really like to be able to do with this kind of combined app would be to combine custom timelines across accounts. Make a list for Science Talk and include people on both Bluesky and the Fediverse, that sort of thing. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of app they’re trying to build, at least not so far.

Well, that and the fact that the “Following” tab keeps getting stuck, but that seems to only be a problem with GoToSocial, not Mastodon. Either that or I really am following too many people!