Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 15

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.

Not quite as fun as the first book, but it’s just as absurd and chaotic.

I started reading at the beginning of October, in the final weeks of the 2024 election, thinking: wow, this is exactly what I need right now! As things went along it got more cynical, and the story read like a bunch of totally disconnected threads, each with its own flavor of absurdist despair, and I just felt like I do not need this book right now.

And then at the end, everything came together in a moment of catharsis, and I found myself thinking yes, this is exactly what I need right now.

Life is beautiful. And life is stupid.* And we could all benefit from a read-through of Gorecannon’s list of Unkillable Facts.

Same basics as the built-in Android launcher: a home screen for app icons, optional additional screens, grouping multiple apps in a folder – and it doesn’t push a “news” screen or force a Google search bar on you!

Unfortunately it’s not quite ready for prime time. As of version 1.0.0:

• It doesn’t rotate. Always running in portrait mode is fine for my phone, but I often use my tablet in landscape mode.
• Widget support needs a lot more work. Sometimes they disappear, sometimes they get stuck in the background of all screens, and sometimes they just disappear the moment I add them.

I’ll probably try it out again after the next release, though!