Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 19

A more serious take on Star Wars, with a bit more personal scope. It’s not just the Empire and Rebellion fighting each other, seen from the perspective of a few heroes and villains. It’s how oppression and corruption grind people down, even those enmeshed in it. And the high cost of doing the right thing, desperately hoping that the sacrifice is worth it. And sometimes, hoping that it really is the right thing.

Amazing cinematography, and a show that will make you think in addition to the sci-fi action you’d expect.

That said, it starts off slow. The first two episodes didn’t feel like a story yet, just bullet points in things going wrong for everyone, waiting for the other shoe to drop. By the third episode the shoe drops, the puzzle pieces start to connect, and by the end of the season, it’s thoroughly gripping.

I’d recommend letting each episode sit for a bit rather than binge-watching (unless you want to watch the first 3 episodes as a block). It helps to let the story sink in.

An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys, wrapped up in the cold war and tossing in the Golden Horde, a lost alien city and Russians with a mind-control ray.

Third in the Time Traders series, it stands alone pretty well even though it appears much more closely linked to the second book (which I haven’t read) than the first (which I have), largely because the setting has moved from Earth’s past to a distant world in the near future.

It’s kind of a mish-mash, but as an adventure it moves quickly. The characters’ memories are all scrambled, mixed with those of their ancestors (this is how the western and Mongol Horde tropes are brought into the future). But they’re still distinct characters, and when alliances shift they’re actually for character and cultural reasons, not just plot contrivances.

All that said, I’m a white guy reading a book written by a white woman in the 1960s. She treats the Apaches a lot better than most contemporary western stories, and one of the themes is the ongoing exploitation of indigenous people by powerful nations of white people. But I don’t know how cringe-worthy the depiction might be to people who are actually part of those cultures.

I liked season three of Discovery a lot better than season two. I think part of that was that it finally got to be its own Star Trek instead of trying to fill in the gaps between Enterprise and TOS. And it relies a lot less on the idiot ball, though I kept thinking they were very naive to simply assume the Federation still embodied the same ideals 700 years later.

Tonally, it amps up the Farscape: the madcap pace, the strange-to-the-heroes setting, and of course being the only ones with a rare travel tech that the ruthless villain wants. And it and adds a touch of Firefly: worlds are disconnected, with varying levels of technology, sometimes just scraping by.

Much as I missed Captain Pike, Saru really stepped up and continues to be one of my favorite characters. And while it’s still very much Michael Burnham’s show, the ensemble gets a lot more attention this season. The bridge crew finally feels like people and not just regular background characters.

As for the new characters: Adira manages to avoid the Wesley problem despite being a teenage genius, Book is so much more interesting than Ash, and Ossyra is an odd mix of ruthless and, well, casual. (There’s a great scene where she’s trying to psych out Tilly, and Tilly just throws everything back. It’s nothing she hasn’t already thought herself, and she’s learned from Mirror-Georgiou)

They did some really interesting things with the various ways familiar worlds adapted to the post-Burn galaxy (dilithium is scarce, the Burn destroyed most warp-capable ships, and no one knows if it will happen again), Discovery’s crew dealing with PTSD and overwhelming loss, and the importance of connection at every level from the minds in a Trill symbiosis to the worlds of a galaxy.

It would have been really weird to watch during 2020, when everything was still partially locked-down for the first year of Covid.

The original novel is a great read. Not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore. But for the way it’s built entirely out of diary entries, letters, news fragments, telegrams and so on. For the way it shows modern science coming to grips with ancient superstition and figuring out how to deal with it. For showing an early example of a woman participating in her own rescue. And for some of the parts that didn’t make it into general pop culture. (Count Dracula spends an awful lot of time in a shipping box.)

In some senses it’s the written-word equivalent of the “found footage” horror genre. Except the “sources” are wildly varying. John and Mina write their journals and letters to each other in shorthand. Business letters are of course written formally. Dr. Seward keeps an audio diary on a phonograph. Van Helsing’s speech is rendered with every quirk of his Dutch accent and speech patterns. And then halfway through the book, when all the major characters finally come together…they collate all the documents and Mina transcribes them on a typewriter, and they pass around the first half of the book so they can all read up on what the rest of them have been doing! (Literally getting them all on the same page.)

That’s not to say it’s flawless. It’s unclear why some victims rise again as vampires while others don’t. While the science/superstition contrast works well for the most part, eastern Europeans don’t exactly come off very well. Especially when they’d talk about the “gypsies” carrying Dracula around Transylvania. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, but it’s still jarring.

Overall, though, it’s an engaging read, whether approached as a book or, as Dracula Daily did, one day’s letters at a time from May 3 through November 7.

I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It’s more stable (and faster!) than Gnome Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I’ve since set it as my default on my main Linux system.