Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 19

Imagine the Scooby-Doo gang encountering a Lovecraftian horror in Hill House. They manage about as well as you might expect – which is to say, not very well at all.

It’s an interesting mashup of tropes. The teenage detectives are used to traveling around, busting “supernatural” frauds, though they have more serious issues. (The stoner who loves dogs also has severe anxiety, for instance, which is why he avoids people and self-medicates.) And they’re just aging out of the demographic when one of them convinces the rest to take on one more case before the band breaks up.

Naturally it’s a creepy old haunted house on a cliff above a small, dying coastal New England town that’s slowly being eaten away by the sea. And the families disputing ownership of the house both have old claims, and they all seem just a bit off somehow…

You know from the start that they’re not all coming back from that last case before retirement as everything falls apart (or falls into place, depending on perspective). It’s not a question of if so much as how…and how badly.

To call The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport a cyberpunk version of Aladdin would be a disservice. It takes that as a starting point and gleefully launches into a tale of political upheaval, prize-fighting robots, kaiju and mechs, unwanted legacies, family secrets, betrayal, loyalty, a Not-Prince, oppression, opulence, AI rights, pervasive surveillance, masking who you are, and of course sufficiently advanced technology that can grant wishes (only three for the trial period, but unlimited wishes can be unlocked for…well, you get the idea), all set in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet where everyone’s sure the world is ending soon, but no one’s sure how or why, and it hardly matters because no one can afford to leave anyway.

It’s a glorious mishmash of all this and more, wrapped around the human Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador, filtered through a storytelling bot who has just woken up from being factory-reset and is trying to make sense of the totally illogical humans and bots, not to mention the city itself.

Great fun, highly recommended.

Basic calendar app that works with your phone’s local calendars. You can schedule events, set reminders, view monthly, weekly, daily, etc., handle multiple event types, all the usual things you want to use a calendar for on your phone.

It doesn’t clutter up your schedule with ads, and it doesn’t vacuum up your personal data and send it to some online service.

If you do want to sync your calendars with other devices, you can use an app like DAVx⁵, which is how I sync with my own Nextcloud server. (Or you can leave the Google Calendar app installed, and it’ll sync your Google account’s calendars in the background while you interact with them through this app.)

The only real frustration I have is that the homescreen widget for events can’t fit much in the 2x2 space I have available for it. But that’s partly because I bumped the system font size up a notch or two.

A delightful parody of every English countryside murder mystery trope, presented as a guidebook to a village that has them all. Written wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, illustrated like something out of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. A short, quick read. Funny if you’re slightly familiar with the genre, moreso if you’ve seen every trope in the book.

Basic, privacy-respecting contacts app for Android that works with all contacts accounts on your phone. Connects with whatever dialer and email apps you’re using. Will merge your view of contacts that appear in more than one account. Doesn’t send data anywhere else, which is more than I can be sure of with Google’s default Contacts app.

I use it with my Nextcloud contacts (synced through DAVx⁵) in addition to the handful I still have on my Google account.

The only problem I have with it is that when creating a new contact from another app “Add to existing” option doesn’t always work.