Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 18

An extremely lightweight Linux distribution that still packs a lot of modern capabilities into it, including smooth package installation, removal and updates. I use it for small (1GB RAM) cloud servers because of its low resource requirements and smaller attack profile on installation. It would also be a good choice for old hardware or low-powered physical machines like a Raspberry Pi or a Pine Star64: it supports ARM (both 32-bit and aarch64) and RISC-V, and still supports older architectures like PowerPC and 32-bit x86 in addition to the more common x86_64.

Desktop environments work smoothly, though it does take a little effort to set one up.

The main things that have tripped me up:

• Remembering which set of commands I need to manage daemons. (openrc vs. system vs. systemctl vs…)*
• Remembering that apk uses add instead of install.
• Occasional compatibility issues when building (or trying to run precompiled) third-party software that doesn’t work well with musl.

On the last one, the two that stick in my mind are a bug where super-long threads crashed Snac on musl systems (the dev ended up adding a configurable limit to how far back it would try to fetch) and being unable to run Servo on a desktop VM I’ve been using for testing.

This is serious coffee.

They don’t even have WiFi – you come here for the coffee and food (and maybe to hang out), not to park your laptop for the day. The hours are a bit short (they mainly serve breakfast and lunch, and close by mid-afternoon), but they make up for it in quality.

Two Guns brought the Flat White here from New Zealand in 2011, long before Starbucks started serving it – and the authentic version is not to be missed! Their mocha is the perfect balance of coffee and chocolate (most places are too heavy one way or the other), with just enough sweetness and no more. Even their chai lattes are just sweet enough.

On the rare occasions I’m there for breakfast or lunch, I usually go for the Stanwich, but the veggie burrito is really good too.

The original Manhattan Beach location on PCH was one of my regular stops for years before the shopping center closed down to make way for new construction at the end of 2022. Thankfully they’d already expanded to a small chain in that time, and all the locations I’ve been to have been just as good as the original.

Locations

El Segundo: Lots of indoor seating and a good-sized patio across from the Civic Center. Next door to Rinaldi’s, which is a good sandwich place, though Two Guns has a full breakfast/lunch menu here. Lots of Pokémon Go stops and gyms in the area too. (321 Main St. / map)

Manhattan Beach Blvd: Mostly pickup only, though sometimes they put out one small table in front. (There isn’t room for any more than that!) A good place to stop while walking to or from Downtown Manhattan Beach from PCH. Street parking only. (875 Manhattan Beach Blvd, between Poinsettia and the Urgent Care / map)

Manhattan Beach/Highland I’ve never been to this one. (3516 Highland, just south of Rosecrans / map)

An indie* coffee shop that opened in a space vacated by CBTL a few years back. I’ve only been there a couple of times so far, but I’ll definitely be back! I’ve been “working” through their signature drinks. So far my favorite is the Cardigan (coffee with cardamom, a few other things and salt). One of these days I’ll get there early enough to try their pastries.

It looks small from the outside, but there’s actually quite a bit of room inside. Multiple booths and tables for socializing (though it gets echoey), and a counter for solo coffee drinkers and computing. Free WiFi. A few small tables out front.

The Word for World is Forest is infuriating to read…and that’s the point.

It makes an odd counterpoint to Little Fuzzy: In this case the humans from Earth recognized the natives’ sapience right away – barely – but decide to enslave them and clear-cut their world anyway.

The novella bounces between several viewpoints: one of the native Athsheans who has escaped from slavery, a sympathetic Terran scientist…and the villain, a gung-ho military type who’s also racist, misogynistic, totally on board with the enslavement, backstabbing, double-dealing, always jumps straight to violence first, has a terrible case of tunnel vision but thinks he knows better than everyone, and anyone who disagrees with him mush be insufficiently masculine, etc. Of course the natives can’t be fully human because they don’t even have villages, never mind cities (they do, he’s just not looking for them), and they’re so lazy (no, they have a different sleep cycle than Terrans, and a dual waking/dreaming consciousness), they’re barely even good enough for slave labor…And they’re wimpy pacifists to boot, they won’t even stand up for themselves (they have other ways of resolving conflicts than just hitting each other, but they don’t work against aliens who don’t understand their signals)…

I mean, it really lays it on thick.

And of course he thinks he represents the best of humanity.

In the 90s, conservatives would have complained about him being a straw man caricature. These days, they’d celebrate him as a pundit or run him for office.

What starts as a single raid to free slaves and retaliate for murder turns into an extended guerrilla conflict. It’s a tragedy, a train wreck, a slow-moving avalanche, and yet every time there’s a chance to pause and maybe resolve the situation, Davidson chooses to escalate things instead. Even when the higher-ups tell him not to, he convinces other soldiers to go rogue along with him.

Meanwhile, Selver and the Athsheans start losing themselves in the new experience of war. Even if they succeed, they’ll be changed forever.

Still Going On

While it’s directly a response to America’s actions in the Vietnam War, the themes of colonial exploitation, dehumanization, psyops, asymmetrical warfare and environmental degradation are still very topical. Pebble Mine. The Dakota Access Pipeline. Running freeways through disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conflict palm oil. Ongoing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Those are just off the top of my head, and not even getting into outright military conflicts.

I don’t know whether to be angry or sad that we’re still dealing with the same issues 50 years later.

It’s not nuanced. It won’t make you think about new ideas like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven. (The dream state is interesting, but not explored deeply and not the point of the story.) But it will make you angrier at the people who are still doing the exploiting.

Regarding the Title

It’s a contrast to the way we Terrans from Earth with places like England use words relating to dirt to refer to the place we live. (Even the Principality of Sealand, an offshore platform miles from the coast and claiming to be a sovereign state, has “land” in its name.) The Athsheans’ focus on forests and tree ecosystems instead of land provides a different perspective.

I don’t remember whether I read The Last Unicorn when I was younger. I know I saw the animated movie, but I don’t remember much of that either (and some of what I do remember is mixed up with fragments of Flight of Dragons). Sometime in the last decade or so, I stumbled upon the author at a comic convention* and bought a signed copy directly from him, intending to read it when I finished whatever I was in the middle of at the time.

Then, to my shame, it got lost in my to-read box.

I finally found it again!

And it’s well worth the read.

Whimsical and Melancholy

The world Beagle creates is in an in-between state, one where legends and magic are fading and the world is becoming the mundane one we know. Unicorns themselves are timeless, preserving a bit of that magic and fairy-tale reality wherever they live, or wherever they go…but with them almost gone, and the last traveling on her quest, we see the world shifting between one in which butterflies sing everything from Shakespeare to advertising jingles to a more ordinary one and back again. And then there are a few characters who understand the structure of stories, and what it means for the spells, prophecies, and other challenges they encounter.

The characters are well-drawn, too. The unicorn herself has such a different perspective on life and time, and it’s hard to fault her trustingness (it isn’t quite naivete) during the early part of the journey. The incompetent magician Schmendrick manages to shift by turns between pitiful and insufferable. Molly Grue, a character I don’t remember at all, is in some ways the most relatable: She’s an ordinary human, no magic, no expectations on her, but she sees things as they are, sees what needs to be done, and does it. And after the unicorn is transformed into a human woman, and they find themselves in King Haggard’s castle, it’s heartbreaking to watch Amalthea lose her true self bit by bit. Haggard himself is an odd villain, one whose success has broken him, causing him to sink into despair long before his castle will sink into the sea.

But in a sense neither Haggard nor the Bull is the real villain: it’s despair itself, and the desire to capture and hoard wonder. Because holding wonder captive destroys it.