Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

I don’t know how I missed a time-travel comic book published by DC (through its short-lived Helix imprint) when it was new, but apparently I did. And I didn’t stumble on it over the next ~30 years until I read about the crowd-funded hardcover re-release last year.

Time Breakers flips the familiar time-cop trope on its head: Instead of protecting time from paradoxes, the protagonists are trying to create more paradoxes, convinced that the very existence of life depends on it.

The main characters are intriguing, as are the ever-more-convoluted tangles of timeline dependency loops, but the villains don’t have much in the way of depth, and I can barely remember them even after a second read.

Weston’s art is detailed, bringing to life the settings and costumes of different eras ranging from prehistory to the near future.

The story feels a bit choppy and unbalanced, spending more time on setup than I’d expect from something this length, and diving into the resolution faster than expected. It makes me wonder if it was originally intended to be a longer story, or an ongoing series that would allow more room for characters, and then shortened to 5 issues.

The 2024 hardcover collection includes a new cover and commentary by Weston, along with two earlier commentaries by Pollack (who died the year before, and to whose memory this edition is dedicated) from 1997 and 2017.

Regarding Helix Comics

Helix was a science fiction imprint that DC used for a couple of years in the mid-to-late 1990s. Its best-known title, Transmetropolitan (a futuristic take on Hunter S. Thompson by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson), moved over to Vertigo after the label was retired.

I only remember picking up a couple of them at the time: Sheva’s War because of its painted artwork, and The Dome: Ground Zero for its early computer-generated art. A few years later when I finished reading the main Elric books I picked up the collection of Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, and I eventually got around to reading most of Transmet. One of these days I’ll read the rest of it. There were more, of course, but Cyberella is the only other title that rang a bell when I read that list.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I skipped most of the Helix line. I was reading a lot of comics (mostly super-heroes, but some media tie-ins), and I was reading a lot of science-fiction books, and I was obviously aware of Helix…so why didn’t I check out more of the science-fiction comics? I can only assume that most of them just didn’t grab my attention enough to look more closely. Even the one about time paradoxes.

Incredibly good ice cream with flavors and combinations not usually found here in the US. The Ube malted crunch and Vietnamese coffee rocky road (which doesn’t have nuts, so I can actually eat it!) are my favorites of their standard flavors, and I always make sure to try some of the seasonal flavors when I’m in. The Japanese neapolitan (matcha/cherry blossom/Hokkaido milk) is a reliable standby as well.

I’ve only been to the Venice (California) location, but they apparently have several other locations around the Los Angeles area, and are opening one in Torrance soon.

The second book in the series is a decent adventure story from the anything-goes era of science fiction. Like book three, it handles Native Americans better than I would expect from its contemporaries. (Though I did cringe at the two white guys and modern Apache being spray-tanned to pass as prehistoric Native Americans.)

About a third of it is a quasi-military time travel mission to retrieve an alien spaceship that crashed in the distant past, before it decays to ruins. Mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, volcanoes, etc. That part goes by too quickly, because Norton is using it to pivot from time travel to space travel. The rest is an outer space adventure as the team is dragged around the galaxy by the ship’s autopilot…in the present day…after the civilization that built it has been dead for millennia.

There’s a lot of improvising and jerry-rigging, with a crew stuck in a spaceship without sufficient provisions, not sure how long they’ll be up there. At times I was reminded of Apollo 13, which of course hadn’t happened yet when Norton was writing this in the late 1950s!

It drags after a while, though. With the ship being on autopilot, it feels like the characters are just along for the ride. They can’t even explore too far when the ship stops along its route, because they can’t be 100% certain when it will lift off again.

Reading Order

I ended up reading the Time Traders series out of order for the simple reason that books 1, 3 and 4 have passed into the public domain, but this one hasn’t. Despite the drastically different circumstances, each gives you enough information that you don’t need to read them in order, though it does help to start with book one, since the rest of the series hinges on the plot twist near the end.

I use Windows, macOS, Linux and Android on a regular basis, and these are the web browsers I like better than Chrome, Edge and Safari. (I don’t have any iOS devices, so I can’t really speak to how well these run on there.)

Recommended

Vivaldi

I’ve been quite happy with Vivaldi for the past few years. It’s the spiritual successor to the original Opera browser, built on Chromium, and they’ve committed to not cluttering up your experience with “AI” (though you can clutter it up with power-user features if you want). Vivaldi runs on Windows, macOS and Linux (on both x86_64 and ARM) as well as Android and iOS. The Android version is noticeably faster than Firefox.

Orion

Orion Browser has been quite nice as well. It’s more advanced than Safari, and can run extensions made for Safari, Chrome or Firefox, but tries to keep a simpler, less cluttered design. Currently it’s only on macOS (and maybe iOS, I forget), but they’re working on a Linux version.

I should add that I don’t have a problem with Safari, I just usually want a bit more than it can provide, like the ability to sync with my non-Apple devices.

Firefox Variants: Waterfox and Zen

Mozilla…seems to be flailing about these days, chasing ad revenue and investor-friendly buzzwords. While I still like Firefox overall, I haven’t been happy with the direction it’s been going.

Waterfox has been solid: it’s basically Firefox minus Mozilla, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as Android. The macOS version is universal, the Windows version is x86_64-native but runs well under emulation on ARM systems, and the Linux version is x86_64-only. The Android version is slower than Vivaldi, but it can run extensions.

I also like Zen Browser, which is trying to build “a calmer internet” experience. Zen is sort of like rebuilding Arc using Firefox instead of Chromium, and runs on all major desktop platforms.

Waterfox, Zen and Librewolf have all committed to removing the “generative AI” features Firefox has been adding lately.

Special Use Cases

Privacy

LibreWolf (desktop) and IronFox (Android) both use Firefox as a base and make a bunch of trade-offs to make it harder for sites to track you. Tor Browser is the gold standard, and bounces your traffic around the world to hide where you’re connecting from…but that also slows things down a lot. Tor also bluntly rejected gen AI as “inherently un-auditable from a security and privacy perspective.”

Slow hardware

Falkon has a decent balance between capability and leanness. It mainly on Linux, but if you’re running on old or low spec hardware, Linux is going to run a lot better on it than Windows anyway. And then there’s the extremely minimalist Dillo, which doesn’t support JavaScript but is blazing fast at loading and displaying web pages.

Avoid

Edge tries very, very hard to lock you into Microsoft’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Chrome tries very, very hard to lock you into Google’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Brave has experimented with some interesting tech, but it’s wrapped up in the crypto/venture capital/exploitation side of Silicon Valley.

Opera seems to just be chasing buzzwords these days. I much prefer Vivaldi, which picked up where the old Opera left off.

Dia feels like a chatbot with a web browser bolted on, rather than the reverse. I haven’t tried OpenAI’s Atlas, but from what I’ve read, they dispensed with the web part as much as they could.

More

I’ve tried and reviewed a lot of web browsers over the past year, if you’re curious about what didn’t make my best / worst list here.

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.