Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

Nightmare fuel, but a compelling read.

This isn’t the kind of book I’d usually read: I’m not big on thrillers or horror, and it’s sort of (but not really) a sequel to another book I haven’t read, but it stands on its own, and the characters are intriguing.

I always appreciate characters who suffer from chronic general anxiety but manage to function anyway, and Dr. Hannah Stander does both in spades.

The private Hawaiian island research facility where much of the book takes place is a perfect intersection of James Bond villain, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison (who actually has bought most of Lānaʻi).

And I know just enough about ant biology and society that the swarms of killer ants are frighteningly plausible. The chapters where they inevitably get loose are…intense.

The best thing about Git is that multiple people can work on the same file at the same time without worrying about someone else having the file checked out, or keeping their working copy up to date. As long as the changes are in different parts of the file, Git will happily merge them. The second best thing is that you can do just about anything with it. But the syntax is so cryptic, you’ll only remember the commands you use most often, and you’ll want to bookmark the documentation.

As usual, XKCD sums it up.

So: 5 stars for capability, 5 for flexibility, 2 for usability, averaging out to 4.

There are a lot of more usable tools built on top of it, GitHub being the most well-known (though I prefer Codeberg for my side projects). Ironically, though, I keep going back to the command line, since it’s faster to do the basics, and it’s often easier to look up how to tell the CLI to do something than to figure out how to get a GUI to do what I want. That said, I’ve been quite happy with JetBrains’ git integration in IntelliJ, particularly their interface for resolving merge conflicts.

When I first heard of Little Fuzzy, long before I read the first book, I had no idea there were any sequels. I think I may have also gotten them mixed up with the Hokas (with perhaps good reason). After reading Piper’s original and Scalzi’s reboot, I got curious about how Piper continued the original story.

There’s a loose plot following a kidnapping investigation, but it’s mostly there as a framework to explore the human/fuzzy relationship and how the colony is changing. With the question of sapience established, it gets into the politics of shifting from a company town to an eventual democracy, the ethics of human colonization and native relations with the Fuzzies, and biology, considering where the Fuzzies fit in the planet’s food web and why they’re so fond of a particular prey animal and a particular brand of human-made emergency rations.

Many of the original characters return, but shifted into new roles and new alliances. Jack Holloway is an official liaison between humans and Fuzzies. Victor Grego, the corporate boss who fought so hard to keep the Fuzzies from being recognized as people, has adapted to the new normal and discovered that he actually quite likes their newly-contacted neighbors. People of both species are picking up the others’ language, and factories are gearing up to mass-produce devices to shift the Fuzzies’ voices into human-audible range.

It’s still very much the Mad Men approach to ecological space colonization: All the humans smoke, cocktail hour is a sacrosanct ritual, most of the active, in-charge people are men, and even the good guys treat the Fuzzies like children. But at least they’re trying to work on the Fuzzies’ behalf, unlike the traffickers and opportunists. And there’s a female scientist who shows up her egotistical boss quite well. But within that context, it’s an interesting read.

Today I played a couple of levels of the original Dark Forces and then the first level of the remaster.

Basically, imagine that they replaced all the sprites and textures with more detailed images, and enabled it to run with modern screen resolutions. Same with the cut scenes.

Otherwise it’s exactly the same.

It really is like remastering a song from the original audio channels.

Back when the Star Wars Special Editions came out, one of the things they did was redo compositing in a lot of the effects where you could see the mattes in the original print. (This being Lucas, they’d saved the components). Someone at Lucasfilm said of this that it would be “the movie you remember, not the movie that it was.” (Not counting all of the other changes made to the trilogy).

This is sort of like that. I could have sworn the original ran at better than 320x200, but apparently it didn’t. And at first glance, the remaster is in fact closer to the game I remember than the original game is.

Finally got around to trying this place, and it’s definitely going on the list for repeat take-out! Mostly they have variations on chicken and rice plates, so you may want to plan on eating all vegetables the next day to make up for the carbs and meat, but the chicken, rice, and sauces are all really good.