Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 12

If I wanted to boil The Telling down to just one word, I’d choose “thoughtful.”

Reading it was a different experience from reading Le Guin’s other science fiction. Most of what I’d read up to this point was written in the 1960s and 1970s. This was published in 2000 – and the era it comments on is one I lived through.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it’s not the technology that’s the problem. It’s the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs, sequels and formulaic feel-good Hallmark specials…

We see it first in Sutty’s* memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she’s trying to understand, one that’s undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the technology of the one she left, as thoroughly and insistently as China transformed itself during and after the Cultural Revolution.**

She’s frustrated and depressed, and when she starts finding hints of the world banished in the name of modernity, she’s confused trying to piece together all the disparate and contradictory pieces.***

It’s largely a story of discovery: Sutty trying to figure out what the heck “The Telling” actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he’s trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there’s also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

Notes

Snac reminds me of an old Web 1.0 guestbook (minus the garish backgrounds and colors) – except it’s actually talking with the Fediverse!

It’s an extremely bare-bones social networking server that you can still use to post text and images, and follow and interact with people on the same or other servers using ActivityPub such as Mastodon, PixelFed, GoToSocial and so on.

There’s a simple web view for public posts and a simple view for logged-in users. And it works without cookies or JavaScript. It’ll even run on Dillo (a comparably bare-bones browser). Current versions are also compatible with Mastodon apps like Tusky or Elk.

It’s not ideal if you follow a lot of other people. In fact a lot of the design choices and missing features are to discourage you from spending too much time on social media. But it’s good if you want to take a deliberate, focused approach to networking.

Hosting Notes

It’s a single process, uses files instead of a database, and takes all of 10 seconds to compile from source. Updating is generally a matter of pulling the latest code and running make clean; make; sudo make install.

Last I looked, Mastodon required three Docker containers just to run. And updating? Major admin tax, there! (It’s even the prime example!) Even GoToSocial, which is quite capable of running well on a low-end machine and a heck of a lot simpler to manage, is bulky by comparison.

Snac? I once saw someone remark that they’d put it on a server that was doing something else, and the resource usage was “a rounding error.” And that’s part of why I’ve kept my test server running. You can see Snac in action at @KelsonTalksTech@snac24.keysmash.xyz.

GoToSocial and Snac are both designed for sites with a smallish number of local users who can talk to each other and the broader Fediverse. I ran test instances of both for several months before settling on GoToSocial for my particular use case, which involved longer threads and faster timelines than Snac is built for.

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to the author, Grunfink, who comes off as snarky in the documentation, but has been friendly and helpful whenever I’ve reported a bug or suggested a change.

My car was in the shop for a couple of weeks recently*. Fortunately I don’t need to drive every day, so I ended up renting just for the days I did need.

Ford Edge SUV

I needed to haul stuff around the first weekend, so I figured why not rent a bigger car? It did that quite well, but the extra height and mass meant I had to get used to it handling very differently. Extra stopping distance, feeling like I couldn’t see the road. And who came up with using a dial to change driving modes? That’s terribly inconvenient, especially when you’re making a 3-point turn.

Also, the sticker shock on filling the tank before I returned the car. I think it might have been cheaper to pay the fee to have the rental company pay for it.

Chevy Bolt EV

The second weekend I wanted something smaller and full electric. Of the three, I liked the Bolt best. It handled great, it felt familiar to drive, and I could charge it at home. It handles similarly to the Prius Prime in electric-only mode (which I should note is much more responsive than its hybrid mode). The button/lever switches felt more natural for shifting drive modes. But it’s got hardly any cargo space. You could fit maybe one suitcase in the back.

One of the things that I’m torn on is that the battery indicator doesn’t show you a percentage, it shows you the estimated number of miles it can go on the current charge. Which on one hand can be useful, because it can help you plan when you need to stop and charge! On the other hand it’s really imprecise, especially in an area with lots of hills and stop signs. It only took a mile up and down hills to bring down the distance remaining by five.

Also: I now have an appreciation for how long it takes to fully charge an electric car on regular house current. With the plug-in hybrid, I can let it charge overnight and it takes about 6 1/2 hours to fully charge it to roughly 25 (flat) miles capacity, and then I have the hybrid mode for longer trips and the equivalent of overdraft protection. A full-electric car charges at the same rate, but has a much higher capacity. 10x range = 10x time to charge. So I’d want to arrange for a 220V line in the garage if possible. Or make sure I allow extra charging time before longer trips.

Ford Mustang (2022)

I only needed a car for one day the next week, so I figured, I’ll just go for the “manager’s special” small car. They offered a 2-door Mustang. Overkill, but for $30/day plus gas? Might as well give it a try!

The problem was that all my driving was on city streets with stop signs and traffic signals every other block. This is a car that wants to move, and it jumps forward as soon as you step on the gas, and feels like it’s really pushing to get you up to speed – and then you hit a stop sign and you have to start all over again.

I think if I’d had the time to get it out on the open road, it would have been a better experience. (Sure, technically I drove it on Pacific Coast Highway, but around here, PCH is just another major city street, with all the traffic that entails.)

That said, it was tiny and uncomfortable, I kept hitting my head on the ceiling…and yet the bigger engine in front actually makes it longer than the Prius.

Computers, Am I Right?

Two things all three cars had in common:

First: They were all annoyingly insistent about things like opening the door while the car was still on so I could open (or close) the garage, or screaming about an imminent collision with…the side walls of the garage as I backed out. And I could swear one of them interpreted the building’s shadow on the driveway as a wall.

Second: I was never entirely certain I’d turned them off when I was done. They all kept large parts of the dashboard display on until I locked the doors, and I just had to assume that the fact that they let me lock the doors meant that they were sufficiently “off” that no one would be able to just hop in and drive off.

I picked up a set of this trilogy during the second year of Covid, based on some half-remembered appearances in one of Moorcock’s other stories, but not knowing much beyond that.

It’s kind of an odd mix: They’re deliberately old-fashioned, intending to evoke the adventure stories of the late 19th century down to the trope of the protagonist personally dictating his story to the author. But they also interrogate the assumptions of those stories, and of the real 20th century as compared to the alternate timelines involved.

A 19th-century British soldier in India – the kind who would read Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and take it seriously – finds himself flung into three wildly different futures and global wars, each of which disabuses him of some aspect of his worldview.

Warlord of the Air

European colonialism has continued well into the 1970s. At first, the time-lost Oswald Bastable thinks it’s a paradise, with airships and other advanced technology…until he starts noticing that, far from uplifting the colonized, society is still stratified, with the colonizers continuing to exploit the natives. Dissidents and an eastern warlord try to win him over to their cause.

The Land Leviathan

This world has been ravaged by biological warfare, and the story upturns racist narratives. While Europe slides into savagery and North America doubles down on racism, stable nations take shape in Africa, where one leader sets out on a mission to build an empire, conquer and re-civilize the west. It’s more visceral than the first, and hits closer to home for a white reader in the US…and it’s meant to. It’s basically Killmonger’s plan in the Black Panther movie, except the white guy has to admit he’s got a point. The title refers to a walking fortress.

The Steel Tsar

The least well-defined of the three, and the one least clear in what it’s trying to say. Bastable ends up stuck with an insurgency against a more democratic Russia. An insurgency led by an alternate Josef Stalin who is really taking the “steel” part too far. And this time around, the charismatic warlord isn’t right, or fair, or honorable, or fighting for anything resembling a just cause. He just wants to be a despot. And Bastable has finally learned to tell the difference.

Trilogy

All three novels are sprinkled throughout with real historical people in drastically different circumstances (Gandhi as the president of a multiracial South Africa that never went through apartheid or the various colonial wars, for instance), and characters like Una Persson from the larger Eternal Champion multiverse.

Bastable himself starts out kind of boring: he’s just this regular British soldier. Then he’s strung along as a combination audience’s tour guide and antagonist’s foil. But over the course of multiple realities he develops both a broader perspective on people and an ability to roll with the chaos and make the best of his circumstances, and he’s a more interesting character – as well as a much better person – by the end.

Recent editions bill the books as early steampunk. Maybe? OK, airships and colonialism, and a lead character from the late 1800s. I might call it proto-steampunk?

Anyway, they’re worth the read, but they’re also very dry, which is why I’ve given the trilogy 3.5 instead of 4 stars. (I need to update the site template to display half stars!)

I’ve hosted all my personal websites (including this one!) at DreamHost for over a decade now. Their VPS service (a virtual machine with a managed OS+web stack, but completely flexible within userspace, with an optional managed MySQL server) has been rock solid since the mid-2010s, and when problems do come up, tech support is on it quickly, friendly and informative. They support easy WordPress installs on their web hosting, plus a managed WordPress hosting service (that I haven’t tried).

Their cloud computing service has been less stable, though, and after waiting a while for problems to shake out, I tried out a few dedicated cloud providers and settled on Linode (review) for better stability, decent prices, and more datacenter choices.

Update: I’ve been mostly happy with DreamHost’s email service. It’s been reliable (despite seeing connectivity outage notifications on a regular basis, email is async so I haven’t been affected by it in the couple of years since I switched back to DreamHost from Gmail as my primary). The web interface is really usable and (since I’m already paying for the account) isn’t cluttered up with ads. The only problem I’ve had with is with spam filtering: I get a lot more false positives and false negatives than I did with Gmail, and just marking or moving the message isn’t enough to train the filters. And the way the filters work makes it difficult to report to SpamCop, even with mail sent directly to DreamHost and not via my forwarding address.