Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

I first read the original Earthsea triology during my personal “golden age of science-fiction” (i.e. around 12), and I find myself re-reading it about once a decade or so, along with the later novels.

The first book is a coming-of-age story: How a goatherd boy discovered his aptitude for magic, how his pride and arrogance led him astray, how he learned to master his abilities and seek out a way to make up for the terrible evil he unleashed through his recklessness. (Modern readers will probably compare the “boy at a wizard school” aspect to Harry Potter, but that only takes up a couple of chapters.)

The World

It’s also to some extent a travelogue of a world with no known continents, only islands, where magic consists of naming someone’s or something’s true essence, and (more or less) renaming it so as to change it. There’s a reason spells are made of words. And it’s woven through every part of life, scaling from the simple charms a poor village sorcerer or witch might cast to protect a house from fire, or binding charms to reinforce the joins and seals of a small boat, all the way up to the grand deeds of wizards.

Earthsea feels lived-in, not just a few castles and a bunch of ISO standard medieval villages scattered through the wilderness.

Le Guin never shies away from showing the lives of ordinary people in this world. There’s a meme going around about how in Lord of the Rings, Sam is the only member of the Fellowship who isn’t at least landed gentry if not aristocracy or royalty (not to mention a literal angel). As mentioned above, Ged starts out as a poor boy (from a poor family), son of a smith who spends his days working the bellows and herding goats. As he travels, he meets sailors, tradesmen and -women, pays for passage on a ship by rowing, and settles for a time in an ordinary fishing village. To be fair, the fishing village does have a dragon problem.

Characters

The story and characters hold up well.

I’d forgotten just how much of a jerk Sparrowhawk starts out as, before his harsh lesson in humility sets him on the path to becoming the thoughtful wizard seen in the rest of the series. His school rival Jasper isn’t that much worse than he is, and I can read between the lines now as to how they actually get along as friends, especially with Vetch as peacemaker between the two. That he unleashes his shadow while trying to outdo his mirror seems especially appropriate to the story that unfolds.

Part of the purpose of the Roke school is to drum ethics into the heads of people who can literally change reality with a word, along with giving them the knowledge of how to do it effectively. It doesn’t always work, and only of a fraction of those with magic ability make it into the school, and some students, like Sparrowhawk, have to learn the lesson the hard way.

I’d also forgotten how briefly Ogion actually appears in the novel. He makes a powerful impression, both on his own terms and as a key figure in Ged’s life, despite only appearing for one early chapter and in one scene later on. (We see more of him later on in Tehanu and in the short story “The Bones of the Earth.”)

Regarding Names

When I finally started reading the rest of Le Guin’s work, I looked on her website for a recommended Hainish Cycle reading order (turns out it’s very flexible). I also found her pronunciation guide and discovered that while I’d gotten most of the Earthsea names right, I’d been pronouncing Ged and Ogion wrong for decades:

You have to take your chances with G, but usually it’s G as in get, not G as in gem. So Ged is Ged not Jed, Ogion rhymes with “bogey on.”

Oops! Could be worse, it could be the name of a giraffics file format.

Anyway, while she says “Don’t worry about it,” I’ve made a conscious effort to mentally pronounce both names with a hard ‘G’ this time through!

…As Women’s Magic

The main flaw in the original trilogy is the misogyny running through Earthsea’s culture. Le Guin comes back in Tehanu and the later books and examines how it got there and what effect it has on Earthsea’s women (and men). Knowing that it eventually gets challenged mitigates it somewhat, but also makes it stand out more starkly in the books where it’s presented at face value.

In the 1960s, the fantasy genre still made certain demographic assumptions, and Le Guin, early in her career, was already pushing things by making the main characters, and most of the population, not be white.

I do appreciate Yarrow, Vetch’s sister, who treats the great mage Sparrowhawk so casually because of how well she and her wizard brother get along. Something I noticed on this summer’s re-read of The Farthest Shore is that she’s one of the handful of people to whom Ged eventually entrusts his true name.

Another Kind of Epic

Ged’s quest at first is to flee his curse, then to make up for it, and finally to pursue it. What he needs to do isn’t what you might expect from high fantasy of the 1960s, though it might be exactly what you expect from reading more Le Guin as she continued to explore themes of duality, balance and responsibility throughout her body of work.

The Earthsea books are epic like The Odyssey, not epic like Lord of the Rings. There are dragons, and monsters, and swordsmen and pirate raids, and the occasional wizard’s duel. But the big problems aren’t solved with great battles. To paraphrase Lorien in Babylon 5, they’re the kind of thing you have to understand your way out of.

iNaturalist is sort of like Pokémon Go for real animals and plants.

It’s a “citizen science” project that asks regular people to look for and report observations of wildlife (and wild plants, fungi, etc), submitting photo, sound or video evidence, wherever you happen to be: Out in the woods, on a farm, on an urban street, in your kitchen where you spot a spider under the sink. The idea is to get people looking everywhere, not just where expected, and crowd-source a map of where a species shows up over time.

For identifying what you’re looking at, there’s image-recognition software that can usually help narrow it down, and other users who might have more expertise than you at telling hummingbirds apart can look at your photo and say, “Oh, that’s definitely an Anna’s hummingbird.”

I got into it before the Covid-19 lockdowns, but ramped up my activity during 2020, when there wasn’t anywhere to go except walking around outside.

Mobile App

The Android app streamlines the basic use case of posting an observation from your phone, and it uses the image-recognition AI to help you narrow it down.

I haven’t used the iPhone app, but I assume it’s similar.

I’ve tried a number of phone-based image editors for cropping and enhancing photos before uploading them, but the only one I’ve found that doesn’t mangle location or time metadata is Image Toolbox.

Perspective

Before iNaturalist: “Wow, that yard is completely overrun with weeds!” (See also: “plant blindness.”)

After iNaturalist: “Wow, that yard is completely overrun with stork’s-bills and mallows! And a bunch of barley over there by the edge…Ooh, what are those tiny yellow flowers…?”

I’ve also gotten a lot better at recognizing the differences among local birds, too. I used to classify them as:

• pigeon
• seagull
• crow
• duck. or maybe goose?
• um, small bird?

Now I can tell pigeons from doves, several types of sparrows from each other and finches, ducks from geese from coots from wigeons, starlings from blackbirds, and more.

Fun Facts on Ferals

• Most of the pigeons we see in cities are classified as feral, descended from domesticated pigeons derived in turn from rock pigeons who live on the sides of sea cliffs. Buildings serve as a nice substitute.
• Southern California has several well-established feral populations of parakeets descended from escaped pets! I’ve seen at least two different types of plumage (yellow faces on the peninsula, red faces in the South Bay), and the ones a few miles further inland sound different from the ones near the coast.
• The Palos Verdes Peninsula has a feral peafowl population that occasionally gets enough out of hand that the local cities trap and relocate a bunch of them. #
• There isn’t a solid difference between a pigeon and a dove. There are just some species we call doves and others we call pigeons.
• Starlings were deliberately introduced to North America in New York by fans of Shakespeare who wanted to bring every bird the Bard ever mentioned across the Atlantic.

Every once in a while I’m reminded of SyFy’s notoriously bad TV adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and I think, maybe I should watch it just once, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, to see not just how bad it is but how it’s bad. And then I remember I have better things to do, like washing the dishes or sorting my socks.

So this isn’t a review, because I still haven’t watched it after 20 years, so much as it’s a placeholder indicating why, despite having read and re-read the books so many times, I haven’t.

Early on, Phillipa Boyens was going to adapt it and they were going to do the original trilogy. That sounded promising!

By the time they announced casting, Boyens was no longer attached, and they were only going to adapt the first two books. And there were some oddities in casting, like making Sparrowhawk white (Shawn Ashmore). I wrote on my blog at the time that Danny Glover would be perfect for Ogion. And when I saw that Isabella Rosselini was playing Thar, she seemed a good choice as well. But my interest had dropped from enthusiasm to the line between cautiously optimistic and cynical.

When it aired on what was then the Sci-Fi Channel, it was clear that “adapted” was…an extremely loose description. In addition to whitewashing the entire population of the archipelago except for Ogion, they seemed to have cosmically missed the point, and the heart, of the stories, which are fundamentally about knowing yourself and seeking balance in the world.

Le Guin wrote a scathing article in which she described in meticulous detail why the people of Earthsea are mostly copper-red or black, with white people in the north and northeast, how it was a deliberate choice to set it apart from the genre conventions established by Northern European fantasy tradition. (Whoever captioned the photo as “a pale imitation of Le Guin’s protagonist,” I salute them.) She further described the miniseries’ story as a “generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.” and noted that she felt “very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard.” Other reviews were similarly unimpressed.

So I never got around to watching it, not even when it was released on home video and I could borrow or rent it. There didn’t seem much point. Eventually I read the summary on Wikipedia, which sounds…well, like a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on violence.

I’m currently about halfway through my latest re-read of the series. I paused after The Farthest Shore to read the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, and a bunch of current books. And while I sort of want to re-watch the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea (also a mishmash, this time of books three and four – but an earnest one at least), every time I contemplate watching this, the idea just slides off of my brain and lands in the “Nah, why bother?” bucket.

A park with open grassy area and drought-tolerant gardens, a few picnic tables, basketball and tennis courts, and playground. Ample parking, clean restrooms and a drinking fountain/water bottle-filling station at the community center. All the facilities are new within the past year or so. Not sure what’s going on with the larger fields past the tennis courts, but they seem to have been left to dry out over the summer. Nice view of Catalina Island.

It’s just downhill from the Forrestal Reserve trailheads and parking area, which makes it a good stop after a hike to refill water bottles, hit the restrooms, or have a picnic. (I took this photo from one of the trails at the nature reserve.)

A simple GUI application that wraps around Linux’s built-in QEMU and KVM support for running virtual machines. It’s similar to UTM on macOS (though Boxes predates UTM by a decade). Probably available in your distro’s package manager as gnome-boxes.

Good

It makes the easy things easy, like downloading, installing and running most Linux distros and BSD variants.

Most Linux guests run pretty well, in my experience. I’ve also never had trouble installing an unsupported Linux/BSD guest or a random OS like Haiku or ReactOS.

KVM guests can also be managed with other apps like virt-manager when you need to adjust advanced settings.

Snapshots are supported.

Bad

I’ve never managed to get hardware acceleration to run in it, so there’s no point using it for Windows gaming. (Fortunately, most of the Windows games I’ve wanted to play have been on Steam, and Proton’s really good at running them these days.)

The one time I got Windows 11 to finish installing, it was unusably slow. Like wait a few seconds for a menu to show up after clicking. I ended up deleting that VM and setting up Win11 in VirtualBox instead.

Ugly

Windows 10 does run, just kinda slow for desktop apps and too slow for gaming.

To get clipboard sharing and shared folders, you do need to install the SPICE guest tools yourself. On Linux guests you can usually just use the package manager (spice-vdagent and spice-webdavd), and any folders you add in the Boxes properties will show up in the Network section of whatever file manager you’re using. For Windows guests, you do need to download and install SPICE manually.

Also, some guests don’t seem to support the shared clipboard on the login screen, so choose an account password you’re willing to type, not one that you’ll want to just leave in a password manager.

Cloning is possible, but the copy doesn’t always find its storage device.

If you need to adjust more advanced settings for a machine, it just opens the config file in a text editor. I’ve found it simpler to make those changes in another app like virt-manager.

Similarly, while Boxes can run a VM emulating a different architecture than your actual hardware, such as running an aarch64 guest on a x86_64 host, you need to use another app to set it up. (This will always be slower than using the same architecture and hardware virtualization, whether you’re using QEMU, VirtualBox or anything else.)