Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 15

Subway Tooter

★★★☆☆

Extremely customizable, capable, cluttered and complex. Also extremely frustrating to use, especially on a phone. Better on a tablet where there’s room for more columns at a time.

I like the ability to set up a “pseudo account” and follow the local feed on another server.

Interaction buttons are hidden by default like Phanpy. Unfortunately this includes the buttons to show the rest of a thread, which kept tripping me up.

Despite all the options, I could never quite get it configured the way I wanted, though.

The biggest problem I have is that in trying to avoid the pitfalls of other apps that are so easy to use that you can stay on them longer than intended after finding what you wanted, it’s got just enough roadblocks that I stay on it longer than I intended anyway, trying to find what I’m looking for.

Ready Player One (Movie)

Steven Spielberg

★★★★☆

I finally got around to watching the movie, having soured on the book by the time the adaptation came out. It was better than I expected!

It’s not a straight adaptation of the plot so much as taking the same premise and characters and finding more cinematic ways of hitting the same beats. And having Spielberg and real actors (or their voices, for the parts of the film that take place in virtual reality) definitely makes it more character-driven (shallow as the characters might be) than a book that mostly existed as an exercise in including as many pop culture references as possible.

My main problems with it are:

  1. Expanding the nostalgia beyond the 1980s to include the 70s and 90s breaks the laser-focus of Halliday’s obsession, and the focus on Halliday/Morrow as Wozniak/Jobs analogs.
  1. Some suspiciously convenient lapses in security. The guy with an easily-identifiable tattoo on his head, who doesn’t put on a hat when he acts against the giant surveillance company? The prison cell that can be opened from the inside by feel, relying on the prisoner not being able to see the opening mechanism?
  1. Tacking on the moral about having to live in the real world too was
well, to be fair it was a very 80s thing to do, but it still felt tacked-on. The movie really emphasized the OASIS being an escape, whereas in the book it was made clear that people were using it for school, business, etc. along with the gaming. Y’know, like the actual Internet the whole thing is a metaphor for.

Linden H. Chandler Preserve

(Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA)

★★★☆☆

A dirt trail curves around brush on the left and grass on the right, with hills and houses visible in the background.

A dirt trail curves around brush on the left and grass on the right, with hills and houses visible in the background.

Hilly, with not much shade except in the lightly wooded areas along the intermittent streambeds. The higher areas have clear views of the LA Basin to the north and east (Downtown LA to Saddleback), but mostly you can see the golf course it wraps around, a couple of Little League fields, and the suburban neighborhoods that surround it. Lots of up and down, mostly scrub habitat with some grassy areas.

After this year’s comparatively dry winter (not as bad as some, but below average and way below the deluges of the previous two years) the grass was green, but the scrub was just kind of scrubby, and the streams were little more than a trickle. I did spot a couple of rabbits, some dragonflies and bumblebees, and some hawks, but not much else in the way of wildlife. (I imagine the noise from the baseball game didn’t help much.)

A narrow trail runs along a white fence. Trees line the other side of the fence, their branches arching over the trail and meeting with the brush on the far side. A dirt trail runs down to a valley, flowering scrub on either side of it. Trees cluster along the middle of the valley, and an open grassy hillside rises across the way to a hilltop house.

And peacocks! There’s a population of feral peafowl on the peninsula, dating back to the early 1900s, that I hadn’t run into on any of my hikes out at Point Vicente or up in the canyons. I did see some near the Malaga Cove library the last time I was in that area. But they were just wandering around the neighborhood! At least half a dozen. All males, though - I didn’t see any hens. I don’t know if they weren’t out, or if I just didn’t see them because they don’t stand out as much. I stopped to let one cross the street on the way in, and watched another strutting along the trail while I was hiking.

A bright blue peacock struts along a dirt trail, greenery on either side of him, head turned slightly, probably to keep an eye on the human standing in the way and holding a camera. Hilltop view. A metal fence separates the greenery from a cow pen, with a few cows lazing about in the far corner. In the foreground is a signpost with three signs: The top one is wooden and proclaims EMPTY SADDLE TRAIL. Below that is a slickly printed sign with the nature preserve name and rules, and below that is a standard monochrome municipal code sign, printed in green on white, with trail rules (no motor vehicles or bikes, hikers yield to equestrians, etc.)

Where Else?

Unless it rains some more this spring, I don’t really have much interest in returning to this particular preserve this year. The habitat is similar to Entradero Basin (which is easier to get to), the view is better at Vista del Norte, there’s more shade at Valmonte/Frog Loop, and the canyons at George F. and Agua Amarga are interesting in the dry seasons too.

The Palos Verdes Land Conservancy operates a bunch of small preserves all over the peninsula where they could buy out some land, convince someone to donate it, or make arrangements with one of the cities. Mostly areas that are too steep or have historically been too unstable to build on. Chandler isn’t adjacent to any of the others, but several along the south side of the peninsula form a continuous wildlife corridor now.

Getting There

You have to go through winding residential streets. There’s a parking lot next to the baseball fields, and room for a few cars to park at the end of Buckskin Lane near the trailhead there. In addition there are connections to the bridle trails that riddle the peninsula. Dogs (leashed) and horses are allowed on the trails, so watch your step!

Soonish

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

★★★★★

Soonish (2017) is a good overview of cutting-edge technologies, most of which are still in the near future, some of which have made dramatic progress in the last few years.

It took me several years to get around to actually reading it, which maybe wasn’t the best approach for something about the near future. So it’s been interesting to look at the chapters on space colonization, asteroid mining, robot swarms, automated construction, fusion and so on where things are either still just as far away or have otherwise turned out to be more complicated (as the Weinersmiths discovered when rearching their follow-up, A City on Mars)



and then there’s the chapter on augmented reality (AR), which they had to revise hastily just before print to account for the arrival of PokĂ©mon Go in mid-2016



and the chapter on this cool new genetic modification technique called CRISPR
which has continued making headlines, with treatments for things like sickle cell disease approved and put into practice!

Some things have been moving faster than others.

Update (May 2025): They’re 3D printing Starbucks locations now.

Full of the authors’ trademark irreverent humor, with cartoons scattered throughout, it’s still worth reading even if it’s a bit late!

Kobo (eBook store and readers)

★★★★☆

I started buying eBooks from Kobo back in the early 2010s, when they were partnered with IndieBound to send a cut to local indie bookshops and I linked it with Mysterious Galaxy. (These days, Bookshop.org is IndieBound’s preferred choice for that.)

It took a bit to get the Android app configured nicely, and even now the service can still be pushy. Unlike Amazon, Kobo still offers in-app purchases, and it wants you to buy more books before you read the ones you have.

Which, I mean, ok, fair enough.

I turned off a lot of “features” early on - I don’t want recommended books to pop up in my notifications, and I certainly don’t need achievements like a Steam game to encourage me to read more. (I think they’ve since gotten rid of that one.) You know what encourages me to read more? Having time to read.

Anyway, once I got that settled, I’ve been reasonably happy with the app on a decade’s worth of phones, a tablet and a Boox Poke3 e-reader.

Reading Choices

The Kobo Clara e-reader is the best dedicated, single-bookstore e-reader I’ve used, but of course it doesn’t handle books bought from other stores unless they’re DRM-free. (Probably. It might be possible to side-load books from other sources that also use Adobe DRM. I should try that.) That’s the main reason I bought, and still use, the Boox tablet: I can install almost anything on it.

The Clara does, however, have advantages over a Kindle device:

In addition to the mobile app and dedicated devices, you can read most purchases directly on the website now. Any books that are DRM-free, you can just download as standard .ePub files and read on whatever device you want. Of course most of the books they sell are locked with DRM, and you can only “download” a link to Adobe Digital Editions.

While writing this up, I discovered there’s a desktop app for Windows and macOS. The Windows app you download from the website feels like a wrapper around the website. But there’s also a bare-bones app on the Microsoft Store that seems to have been built for the resounding flop that was the Windows 8 let’s-try-to-make-a-tablet-OS era.

Reviewing

Kobo encourages you to rate and review books as you finish them, even if you don’t have a decent keyboard on-hand. The way they’re displayed is also geared toward short reviews. This is another reason I usually cross-post only a summary there, rather than the full review.