Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 20

I don’t remember whether I read The Last Unicorn when I was younger. I know I saw the animated movie, but I don’t remember much of that either (and some of what I do remember is mixed up with fragments of Flight of Dragons). Sometime in the last decade or so, I stumbled upon the author at a comic convention* and bought a signed copy directly from him, intending to read it when I finished whatever I was in the middle of at the time.

Then, to my shame, it got lost in my to-read box.

I finally found it again!

And it’s well worth the read.

Whimsical and Melancholy

The world Beagle creates is in an in-between state, one where legends and magic are fading and the world is becoming the mundane one we know. Unicorns themselves are timeless, preserving a bit of that magic and fairy-tale reality wherever they live, or wherever they go…but with them almost gone, and the last traveling on her quest, we see the world shifting between one in which butterflies sing everything from Shakespeare to advertising jingles to a more ordinary one and back again. And then there are a few characters who understand the structure of stories, and what it means for the spells, prophecies, and other challenges they encounter.

The characters are well-drawn, too. The unicorn herself has such a different perspective on life and time, and it’s hard to fault her trustingness (it isn’t quite naivete) during the early part of the journey. The incompetent magician Schmendrick manages to shift by turns between pitiful and insufferable. Molly Grue, a character I don’t remember at all, is in some ways the most relatable: She’s an ordinary human, no magic, no expectations on her, but she sees things as they are, sees what needs to be done, and does it. And after the unicorn is transformed into a human woman, and they find themselves in King Haggard’s castle, it’s heartbreaking to watch Amalthea lose her true self bit by bit. Haggard himself is an odd villain, one whose success has broken him, causing him to sink into despair long before his castle will sink into the sea.

But in a sense neither Haggard nor the Bull is the real villain: it’s despair itself, and the desire to capture and hoard wonder. Because holding wonder captive destroys it.

Imagine the Scooby-Doo gang encountering a Lovecraftian horror in Hill House. They manage about as well as you might expect – which is to say, not very well at all.

It’s an interesting mashup of tropes. The teenage detectives are used to traveling around, busting “supernatural” frauds, though they have more serious issues. (The stoner who loves dogs also has severe anxiety, for instance, which is why he avoids people and self-medicates.) And they’re just aging out of the demographic when one of them convinces the rest to take on one more case before the band breaks up.

Naturally it’s a creepy old haunted house on a cliff above a small, dying coastal New England town that’s slowly being eaten away by the sea. And the families disputing ownership of the house both have old claims, and they all seem just a bit off somehow…

You know from the start that they’re not all coming back from that last case before retirement as everything falls apart (or falls into place, depending on perspective). It’s not a question of if so much as how…and how badly.

To call The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport a cyberpunk version of Aladdin would be a disservice. It takes that as a starting point and gleefully launches into a tale of political upheaval, prize-fighting robots, kaiju and mechs, unwanted legacies, family secrets, betrayal, loyalty, a Not-Prince, oppression, opulence, AI rights, pervasive surveillance, masking who you are, and of course sufficiently advanced technology that can grant wishes (only three for the trial period, but unlimited wishes can be unlocked for…well, you get the idea), all set in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet where everyone’s sure the world is ending soon, but no one’s sure how or why, and it hardly matters because no one can afford to leave anyway.

It’s a glorious mishmash of all this and more, wrapped around the human Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador, filtered through a storytelling bot who has just woken up from being factory-reset and is trying to make sense of the totally illogical humans and bots, not to mention the city itself.

Great fun, highly recommended.

Basic calendar app that works with your phone’s local calendars. You can schedule events, set reminders, view monthly, weekly, daily, etc., handle multiple event types, all the usual things you want to use a calendar for on your phone.

It doesn’t clutter up your schedule with ads, and it doesn’t vacuum up your personal data and send it to some online service.

If you do want to sync your calendars with other devices, you can use an app like DAVx⁵, which is how I sync with my own Nextcloud server. (Or you can leave the Google Calendar app installed, and it’ll sync your Google account’s calendars in the background while you interact with them through this app.)

The only real frustration I have is that the homescreen widget for events can’t fit much in the 2x2 space I have available for it. But that’s partly because I bumped the system font size up a notch or two.

A delightful parody of every English countryside murder mystery trope, presented as a guidebook to a village that has them all. Written wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, illustrated like something out of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. A short, quick read. Funny if you’re slightly familiar with the genre, moreso if you’ve seen every trope in the book.