Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

You’d think that “don’t change the stuff that the user isn’t changing” would be a low bar, but most image editors I’ve used on Android handle EXIF data in one of three ways:

1. Ignore It

Some apps might preserve the metadata, or might not, or might keep some of it but not all, depending on what edits you make, resulting in it being discarded haphazardly. Often including the time the photo was taken!

2. Remove It All

A lot of the time you do want to strip out location when posting or otherwise sharing a photo, for privacy reasons. But not always.

Scrambled EXIF is great, but it removes everything, and when I upload a photo to iNaturalist, I want to keep at least the timestamp and (if it’s present) location.

3. Preserve It…With Bugs

Google Photos forgets the time zone if you’re not syncing with their cloud, so I ended up with photos stamped with the right location, but the time off by the difference from UTC. I had to use a desktop anyway to fix all the timestamps.

Sly has an option to save metadata, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Image Toolbox will keep the EXIF intact, but sometimes it’ll shrink the image even when you don’t want it to.

Why So Difficult?

Again, you’d think this would be simple. Just leave it alone!

And yet somehow it isn’t.

At this point, the only offline app in which I can reliably crop a photo without discarding more information than I want to is Fossify Gallery (since the bug’s been fixed), but its editor is very limited in what it can do. And the only offline app in which I can reliably rotate a photo or adjust its levels is Image Toolbox…as long as I don’t use it to crop the image.

Sort of hidden in the back of a building along Embarcadero, this tiny shop serves multiple flavors of cookie dough to eat (and mixes to take home), as well as actual cookies, brownies and “brookies” (cookies baked around brownies). The flavors are great, and they were helpful accommodating my food allergies by suggesting some of the pre-packed flavors.

When I stopped by, they had a seasonal cookie that was something like maple bourbon cardamom with espresso filling, which tasted like a dirty chai in cookie form.

I don’t get to Morro Bay often, but I’ll definitely want to stop here again the next time I’m in town.

The nature reserve runs along the coastal bluffs. Wide trails run along the tops and through scrub habitat. The trails are fenced, graded, and mostly flat, suitable for an easy stroll and probably wheelchairs. A good place to spot seabirds as well as scrubland birds like white-crowned sparrows. No shade, but plenty of ocean breezes.

On clear days you can easily see all of Catalina Island across the channel to the south, and the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, across the bay to the northwest.

Around the corner is the Point Vicente Lighthouse, which is visible from most parts of the park and the southern part of the reserve. The actual lighthouse grounds are managed by the Coast Guard. They run tours once a month, but I always think of going sometime other than the second Saturday of the month…so I still haven’t managed to tour the tower!

Between the lighthouse grounds and nature reserve there’s a city park with grass, trees, and picnic areas. (The park has shade!) A visitor center features restrooms, drinking water, a few maritime and nature exhibits, and a curated native plants garden, and is sometimes used for event space.

The park isn’t part of the reserve, but a trail with interpretive signs runs along the edge of the cliffs from from the south edge of the park to the north end of the nature reserve, wrapping around several coves that make for interesting views.

I have a Flickr album with more photos from walks over the years.

Nearby

At the north end, the trail winds between the clifftops and a very expensive-looking residential neighborhood until it reconnects with Palos Verdes Drive. At the south end, the next stop along the road is Pelican Cove, which has some interesting geology that I still haven’t gotten around to checking out.

Uphill and across the road, there’s Alta Vicente Reserve which offers slightly wilder hiking with…let’s say a lot more vertical variation.

Getting There

You can drive around the peninsula from either end, and turn into the parking lot from either direction, though the signage isn’t very clear either way.

Heading south from Torrance it’ll be the first right tern past Hawthorne Boulevard and Golden Cove shopping center. And yes, that’s the same Hawthorne Boulevard, so if you prefer driving over the hill instead of around it, you can do that.

Coming from San Pedro, it’ll be past Terranea and Pelican Cove (which has a large rock formation sticking up between the road and the cliffs), and it’ll be a left turn toward the ocean. (This would also mean driving over the landslide, which is its own kind of trip.)

Leaving, you can only turn right, so if you’re heading for Torrance, you’ll need to make a U-turn at Terranea.

This Indian/pizza fusion place opened in the spot where Union Pizza used to have a second location (and Neno’s Café before that), right off the freeway on Artesia. You can get pizza and calzones, you can get curry and tandoori, or you can get them combined. So far I’ve tried the chicken tikka and tandoori chicken pizzas with curry sauce, and they’re both really good.

The traditional pizzas are good too. We got pepperoni with regular tomato sauce as a backup one time in case the teenager didn’t like the curry (spoiler alert: he did). Just nothing with ham, since they’re halal. They also assured me the first time I ordered that they don’t use lentils or chickpea flour in the pizzas, which was something I’d been concerned about for allergy reasons.

There are a couple of tables, but it’s small, more suited for take-out and delivery.

Written in the aftermath of several controversies over racism and sexism in the science-fiction community in the early 2010s, The Old Iron Dream traces the strain of of military authoritarianism and white male supremacy through the history of the genre. From John W Campbell’s days editing Astounding Science Fiction, through Robert Heinlein’s polemics and Jerry Pournelle’s hyper-military eugenicist advocacy, right up to Ted Beale’s blatantly racist and sexist remarks getting him kicked out of the SFWA. (This would be followed up by Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, Gamergate, Comicsgate, and the 2016 US Presidential race.)

The title is drawn from Norman Spinrad’s satirical 1972 novel, The Iron Dream, which takes that strain to its logical (and gory) conclusion. Spinrad drives the point home by crediting it in a framing sequence to an alternate-reality Adolf Hitler, who became a science-fiction writer instead of a dictator, but with the same twisted ideals…ideals that were no strangers to pulp science fiction.

Elitist With a Thousand Faces

I’ve been aware of the broad strokes for a while now. That Campbell had a very limited view of who should count as a hero, or a writer, or generally as a person, and he used his editorial power to shape the genre. That Heinlein got really wrapped up in militarism and libertarianism. (Starship Troopers is a fascinating book, but there really isn’t a way to read it where it isn’t advocacy for military dictatorship and beating your kids so they don’t grow up too soft.) That Pournelle tended to prefer military stories and didn’t approve of “soft sciences,” like sociology, and that he and Larry Niven were involved in Reagan-era government-adjacent think tanks. (I lost a lot of respect for Niven when I found out he’d suggested spreading conspiracy theories to discourage “illegal aliens” from seeking medical care.) Orson Scott Card’s homophobia is well-known, and Gregory Benford shared Campbell’s limited perspective on the genre.

But there are a lot of specifics that I didn’t know. Pournelle’s connection to Newt Gingrich, for instance. Or Heinlein campaigning for more nuclear weapons testing. Or Card claiming that President Obama would elevate street gangs and send them after his personal enemies. Or that Benford, who couldn’t bring himself to look past his own subgenre, accused feminist science fiction writers of having a limited imagination. And other details I’d forgotten, like the cannibal army in Lucifer’s Hammer being largely made up of Black people. (On the other side, there’s the absolutely vicious criticism Michael Moorcock leveled against this viewpoint back in the 1970s!)

Seeing them all tied together in a continuous thread is…enlightening.

That’s Not Optimism

I’ve often thought it’s ironic that people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen would get techno-fascism and an utter disdain for democracy and for people who aren’t like them out of the “genre of ideas.” But this is a clear reminder that some readers (and writers, and editors) aren’t interested in expanding their thinking so much as they are in finding new ways to dominate others, and justify themselves in doing so.