Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

Parable of the Sower is hard to put down. And it’s hard to pick up again. It’s certainly not a fun book, but it’s extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.

Octavia Butler presents it as a teenager’s diary entries, starting in what was then the somewhat distant future of 2024, ravaged by climate change and socioeconomic collapse. It follows the next few years as the gated neighborhood she lives in gradually breaks down – both the infrastructure and the community – until the desperately violent people of the streets outside, and the fires they set, tear down and consume what’s left.

The second half of the book follows Lauren and a handful of survivors as they travel north, walking the old freeways, hoping to find a place where they can settle and rebuild.

Through it all, Lauren has been developing a religion she calls “Earthseed,” built on the central idea that “God is change,” and that while that change influences you, you can – and should – also influence what that change is going to be.

Voice

What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything. It’s the world she grew up in, so it’s normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it’s unsustainable. There’s a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like back when water wasn’t prohibitively expensive, when more people had homes than not, when traveling outside your neighborhood wasn’t risking your life, grocery stores didn’t have snipers watching you shop, and police might actually investigate a crime rather than just charge you a fee for looking at the scene. When selling yourself and your family into indentured servitude in a company town didn’t seem like a path to a better future.

But all that is just history to her.

(Thinking about this, it’s markedly different from George in Mira Grant’s Feed, where she seems to be constantly comparing the historical and post-Rising society. Maybe it’s just the character’s journalist voice, but I remember it came off as a bit too well-tailored toward the present-day audience. Whereas Lauren, even when she does talk about the past, is focused on the present and future.)

Lauren’s present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn’t linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she’s focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.

Past Futures

Putting on my literary analysis hat for a moment: Dystopias and apocalyptic fiction tend to reflect the societal concerns of the time they were written.

The Reagan/Bush years stoked fears of crime, drug addiction, homelessness, more crime, racism, economic recession, foreign investment, and more crime, with a dash of arguing over whether immigration was good or bad. People were starting to actually think about climate change, despite fossil fuel companies trying to muddy the waters. Gated communities were either a good way to protect yourself from crime or a callous way to isolate yourself from those in greater need. And of course anyone who has lived in California for a while is well acquainted with drought.

Of course so many of those issues were (and still are) tied up in racism. Foreign investment was played up as more of a threat when it was coming from Japan. Inner cities were portrayed as a hotbed of drugs and crime, and white people with means had been fleeing them for those gated neighborhoods in the suburbs, leaving Black and brown people stuck both dealing with the problems and getting blamed for them.

Butler extrapolates these fears to a nightmare level, then turns the racial assumptions on their head. She centers her story on a young Black woman in a multiracial enclave. Everyone’s on the inside. Until they aren’t. Complicating matters is Lauren’s clinically acute hyper-empathy, which makes the struggle between compassion and safety something she has to navigate constantly, especially when their oasis collapses and she’s forced to live outside.

One reason the setting resonates so well today is that our present political climate is largely built by scaremongering over the same fears that defined the 80s (plus transphobia). Republican rhetoric about crime sounds like they never left the 1980s, and the way they talk about cities sounds like they got it from watching 1970s cop films. In reality, crime rates peaked in the 1990s and have dropped dramatically over the last ~30 years (with occasional blips upward, notably during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic).

And of course we’re dealing with an authoritarian President and major fires wiping out entire neighborhoods on Los Angeles, which seems a bit on the nose.

Strangely Familiar

That’s what finally pushed me to start reading it. The book and its sequel have been on my to-read list for years. (A lot of people made the same decision. I’ve read several articles on its sudden popularity, and it’s been a best-seller on several online bookstores.) The Olamina family lives in a fictional city near Los Angeles, and it’s hard not to think of it as a stand-in for Altadena, especially now.

On top of that, though, I’ve traveled a lot of the same route Lauren takes as her group makes its way north. I’ve been to Ventura, Santa Barbara, Salinas, even the route inland along the 156 around San Luis Reservoir…Mendocino is about the only place in the novel I don’t have a clear mental picture of. Sure, that’s mostly just having grown up in California and traveled the state, but anytime you recognize the place in a book as somewhere you’ve been, it makes it feel a bit more personal.

Mediterranean/Mexican fusion, right at the 3-way border between Torrance, Lawndale and Redondo Beach. You can get a wrap with shawarma or falafel at a lot of places, but where else can you get a falafel burrito with mozzarella, jalapeños and chipotle sauce, or a gyro quesadilla, or kebab nachos with pita chips and hummus?

I usually go for some variation on chicken shawarma, like the bowl or the burrito, but I’m informed the falafel is really good too. (Sadly I can’t eat falafel, hummus, or anything else made from chickpeas anymore due to allergies.)

They have loaded shawarma fries. I’ve only eaten them once, on a day I biked up and down a bunch of hills. I declared it retroactive carb loading.

I’m so glad this place made it through the 2020 pandemic lockdown. After Covid hit, they switched to window-only service and built out a patio, which makes it a good place to go if you’re still being cautious. Plus of course you can get takeout or delivery.

A more advanced WebKit-based browser for macOS and iOS (though I can only speak for the desktop version). Orion has a cleaner interface than most, only slightly more complex than Safari and a bit cleaner than Arc or Zen. It has a built-in ad blocker, and doesn’t have any telemetry. It’s probably comparable to Waterfox in terms of privacy: it removes the services that phone home, but doesn’t go out of its way to protect you from fingerprinting like LibreWolf or Brave.

Also like Waterfox, its vertical tabs can be structured as a tree, so you can see at a glance how the tabs are connected. It’s not as configurable, but the way it’s set up makes intuitive sense.

Sync and Extensions

Orion syncs only with other instances of itself, over iCloud. They’re talking about a Linux version, so presumably either it won’t sync to macOS or they’ll come up with another sync system.

“Programmable buttons” are simple toolbar buttons you can write yourself or share online. For things that don’t necessarily need a full extension, like tweaking a page’s style. (There are also “Page Tweaks.”)

Orion also supports most extensions built for Firefox, Chromium or Safari, though you have to go into settings first to enable the third-party add-on stores. I decided to enable Firefox add-ons rather than Chromium, partly for consistency and partly because Firefox still supports add-on [capabilities Google has been turning off].

• KeePassXC-Browser worked once I went into the browser’s settings and switched the password provider from “Orion keychain” to “3rd party provider.”
• Wallabagger works completely now. (When I first tried it on Orion a few weeks ago, the toolbar button worked, but it wasn’t added to the pop-up menu for links.)
• Floccus isn’t compatible yet due to some weirdness in the way Orion handles permissions. This means I probably won’t be sticking with it until I can

I haven’t managed to get Safari extensions working on it yet.

Money and Search

Orion is made by the same company that runs Kagi Search, which is a subscription-based search engine (instead of the usual advertising-based). The browser is free to use, though, whether you have a Kagi account or not.

They do point out that subscribing to Kagi, or to “Orion+” (which is currently more of a donation-with-perks than a proper freemium subscription), is one way you can support Orion’s continued existence.

I’ve been really impressed with it on macOS, and I may end up sticking with it as my main “alternate” on my work box. Though with all the browser-hopping I do, the incompatibility with Floccus is going to get annoying.

Postmarks is a public bookmarks/linkblogging server, kind of like Delicious or Pinboard, but built as a self-hosted server that can interact with others over ActivityPub. This means you can make a linkblog that people can follow on Mastodon, like this one, @interesting@bookmarks.kvibber.com, which I occasionally boost on my main Fediverse account. Unlike most Fediverse software, it’s built for a single person (or at least a single account).

Overall I like it: It has a decent search, each entry has room for a description/quote and tags, and there are Atom feeds for the full timeline, tags, and tag combinations. There’s also a bookmarklet that can be used to send it your open tab.

It does take a little effort to get it to run smoothly unless you’re using Glitch. I’m using the following script to auto-restart it when it crashes.

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
	npm run start
	echo "Program crashed"
	date
	sleep 1
done

The biggest drawback is that it hasn’t been updated much since the initial release. A patch to fix compatibility with non-Mastodon servers went in recently, so I can use it with GoToSocial and Snac now, and you can even follow on Bluesky through Bridgy Fed! But there are other problems that remain unaddressed, like new and pending comments not being easily visible, or edits not federating to other servers.

One of these days I’m going to hack together something to auto-publish starred items from Wallabag. For now I’ve got it going the other way: I can tag an item ToRead in Postmarks, and Wallabag will pick it up from the feed at /tagged/toread.xml.

Another someday goal: wrap it in a PWA so I can send links to it from other apps on my phone. The bookmarklet works on mobile Chromium browsers, but not on mobile Firefox (probably the fact that it’s trying to open in a new tab), and of course not in other apps.

Basic calculator with one-variable memory, like the cheap 16-key models you might find at the dollar store. Plus square roots and unit conversions. No trigonometry, no scientific notation, nothing fancy. But also no ads, no data mining, and no need to pay for a subscription. Probably not suitable for writing a lab report, but convenient for when you just need to split a bill or calculate a tip.