Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 22

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

★★★☆☆

On rewatching years later, The Phantom Menace is better than I remember. Attack of the Clones…is not. To be honest, I think it’s the weakest of the prequels and of the six that George Lucas was actually involved in.

I could see what they were trying to do, but it doesn’t hold together as well, and the story hinges on a romance that is, frankly, unconvincing. It’s like an early draft of a script went into full-blown production, but no one could tell Lucas, hey, maybe you should try something different here, or keep working on the dialog there, etc.

The effects are amazing. The music – John Williams is still at the top of his game here, and “Across the Stars” is one of the best Star Wars pieces written (up there with “Duel of the Fates” IMHO). There are cool concepts and interesting characters, and good actors doing the best they can with what they have. (When they can.)

And there are great moments too! Like Dooku telling Obi-Wan the absolute truth about the Republic having fallen under the sway of a Sith Lord, just in a way that Obi-Wan can’t believe it. Or Padme quietly picking the lock on her handcuffs in the background while Anakin and Obi-Wan argue in the foreground.

Mainly I think it needed more script revisions. And to let someone else direct it.

First-Viewing Twist

There was one thing that I remember making a big impact the first time I saw the movie, way back when it was new and the Clone Wars were still some mysterious thing that we knew happened between The Phantom Menace and the rise of the Empire.

The moment the Jedi arrived on Geonosis with zillions of clone troopers, their armor evoking Imperial storm troopers, it hit me: The Jedi are on the wrong side. They’re helping build the Empire, and the Geonosians’ coalition is the precursor to the Rebellion!

It quickly became clear that it was more complicated. Dooku’s heavy involvement with the Separatists despite being Sith showed that, along with the preliminary Death Star designs. And of course we now have another movie and multiple seasons of cartoons making it clear that Darth Sidious was running both sides of the conflict. There was no “right” side, and the Jedi were unwitting pawns like everyone else.

But that weird feeling of wrongness stuck with me through the end of the movie.

Four Lost Cities

Annalee Newitz

★★★★★

Modern archaeology has drastically increased what we can learn from ancient ruins, and Newitz turns this lens on the history of how cities form, how they thrive, and how they die. The writing is engaging and accessible, flowing through what we know, how we know it, how certain we are about it, and the author’s first-hand experiences with archaeologists at the actual sites.

The book has added a lot to my understanding of Pompeii and Angkor. Çatalhöyük is fascinatingly weird. And I’d really like to know more about Cahokia. (So would the people studying it!)

Satellites and Microscopes

There’s a recurring theme of re-examining what we thought we knew, using either new technology or new perspective. Angkor is perhaps the best example: LIDAR surveys in the last 10-15 years have revealed the remains of building foundations and an irrigation network outside the walled temple complexes. It wasn’t a medium-sized city crammed into those stone walls. It was a large city built around them. And mundane records of things like workers’ shift assignments and rations, previously ignored by Western archaeologists, hint at changing political conditions in later years as the infrastructure failed.

Even Pompeii, with its ruins remarkably preserved under volcanic ash, and written records still available of not just administrative details but first-hand accounts of the eruption, benefits from taking a new look at records we already have: Cross-referencing census and death records for Pompeii and nearby towns reveals where survivors resettled.

There are no written records of Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkey) or Cahokia (in modern Illinois), only ruins and artifacts, but sometimes those artifacts have stored surprisingly detailed information: There are indications of a drought during the time the city was inhabited…and sure enough, residue from stews in cooking pots indicate that the people shifted to eating animals that need less water, and that the animals ate more drought-tolerant plants, around the same time.

Lifecycle of a City

Newitz makes a point of drawing parallels to modern cities. (Pompeii had fast food carts, ads, and sports riots!) Çatalhöyük is the most alien. It’s one of the oldest cities known, and it seems people were still figuring out how to make one. All the buildings are basically cubes attached to each other, accessed through doors in the roof, and they all seem to have pulled multiple duty as bedrooms, kitchens, storage, etc. Kind of like a Minecraft house, if you could bury your dead relatives under your bed. (Sometimes they’d keep the skull in a wall niche, though!)

It’s easy to think of these ancient cities as dead ends where civilizations failed. Unlike, say, Rome, where you can see a continuous line from the ancient city to the modern. But they weren’t all cataclysms, and the people didn’t just disappear. Cahokia seems to have been wound down when people were done with it, Çatalhöyük and Angkor slowly emptied out as people moved, and even Pompeii had survivors who resettled nearby.

They’re not dead ends. They’re stops along the way.

Annalee Newitz’ Non-Fiction (official site)

Under Alien Skies

Philip Plait

★★★★★

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about – our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface – and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we’ve spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There’s some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there’s a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I’d missed, things I’d known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I’d only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there’s an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn’t notice it until I got there, so I’d been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts:

  1. Martian sunsets are blue!
  2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.)
  3. Saturn’s rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places.
  4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side!
  5. It’s entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair – or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies!
  6. I’m still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Phil Plait writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter.

Night Watch (Discworld)

Terry Pratchett

★★★★★

It’s been ages since I read any Discworld, but it seems appropriate that I came back to it with a time travel story involving a rebellion and barricades. [1]

It’s an interesting mix of serious and silly, sometimes both at once, often treating serious things as comedy and vice versa. The situation is messy, with good cops, bad cops, really bad cops, time cops monks, and a rebellion that today’s Sam Vimes knows won’t accomplish what it hopes to, even if it nominally succeeds. There’s plenty of comedy in Vimes mentoring his younger self and trying to clean up the “old” watch just enough to keep history on track, how the ordinary citizens handle the rebellion [2], and yet it can still manage to punch you in the gut when you finally find out what the lilac sprigs in the present are all about.

Night Watch is in the middle of the City Watch series, but it takes enough time to establish the now that while I still spent a good chunk of the book wondering who I was supposed to already recognize, I had a good sense of what had changed over the years and the future Vimes is fighting to protect – and how hard it is to put it aside so he can focus on the job in front of him.

Definitely recommended even if you haven’t read the other Watch books!

Pebble 2 Smart Watch

★★★☆☆

Pebble watch showing 7:07 and a charging icon. Upside-down so it looks like LOL.

For a long time I’ve thought that if I wanted to get a smart watch, it would be a Pebble, because they actually understand that a smart watch needs to work as a watch. So when they announced their Kickstarter for the revamped Pebble 2 and Pebble Time lines this summer, I decided it was time to try out wearable computing. My Pebble 2 arrived in late October, just in time for LA Comic Con, and I’ve been figuring out how best to use it over the past month and a half. I feel like I haven’t really found the watch’s full potential yet.

Getting to Know the Smartwatch

Pebble 2 does work great as a wristwatch. You only need to charge it once every 5-6 days, and the screen is always on, so you can see the time and date at a glance. I’ve already gotten back into the habit of glancing at my wrist for the time instead of reaching into my pocket and pulling out a bulky phone.

Third-party watch faces range from the aesthetic (mimic classic designs) to the informative (cram every bit of time, weather, and health tracking data you can onto the main view) to the whimsical (show time using a binary counter, or Pac-Man, or the dots on a pair of dominoes). My six-year-old loves picking new designs and seeing them show up on my watch, but I keep coming back to the basic one because it works for the key thing a watch needs to do: let me tell the time quickly.

Notifications and calendar events are a key use case for a smart watch, but you have to manage them. I always pare down my phone’s audio notifications in order to avoid getting distracted, and that goes double for something that buzzes on my wrist. Once I got it down to just texts, calls and calendar appointments, it helped me avoid missing texts…for a while. Eventually I started missing them anyway. I’m not sure whether they’re not reaching the watch or my brain has started tuning it out.

When I do catch them, though, it is nice to see a preview of the message so that I know whether I should pull my phone out right away or it can wait a few minutes.

Fitness tracking is most useful if you have an actual workout routine (which I don’t) or you wear the watch constantly. It checks your heart rate every 10 minutes, counts steps, and tracks sleep and deep sleep. The watch shows your current status, and the phone app tracks daily, weekly and monthly stats. It’s interesting, but I can’t wear the watch 24/7 because the wristband ends up irritating my skin. A nicer watchband might help, but it might not, since I need to wear it tightly to keep the heart rate sensor in place.

I haven’t explored the Pebble app ecosystem as much as I could (but who knows how long it’ll be around). A few things I’ve looked at:

  • Music control is nice: you can pause and skip your phone’s music player using actual physical buttons.
  • I don’t want to play games by tilting my wrist.
  • Transit apps would be helpful if I rode the bus or train more often.
  • There’s a to-do list app that syncs with Google Tasks, which seemed great at first…but it’s a lot easier to pull up the tasks on my phone and look at a dozen items at a time than to scroll through three items on a tiny screen.

And that brings me what I think is key for smartwatches:

What a Smartwatch Needs to Do

To really be useful, a smart watch needs to be better than a phone at certain tasks. Cases where it definitely works:

  • Always-on at-a-glance info. Time/weather/step counts/etc. most of the time, with notifications and events as they occur.
  • Health/activity sensors.
  • Quick actions. Dismiss a reminder, or reply to a text message with a pre-canned “OK.” Menus are a pain, but I can imagine voice commands would help a lot.

If it takes longer to do something on the watch than to dig out your phone, unlock it, and do it there, the watch has failed at that task. If the watch makes it more convenient, then it’s succeeded.

October 2018

The company went under. Fitbit bought what was left and agreed to keep the cloud services up for a year or so, and they updated the firmware and phone app to reduce the watch’s dependency on those services when they finally shut them down.

I kept putting it on every morning for maybe eight months, using it for step and heart rate tracking, alerts, music control, and of course time. After a while, though, I got out of the habit of putting the watch on in the morning. I misplaced the Pebble, found it again, wore it for a few days, and forgot it again. Repeat.

Only a narrow range of the watch’s capabilities really appealed to me, and it turns out they weren’t enough to keep me using it.

Repurposed

Every once in a while, the kid would ask about the Pebble. I finally found it again and charged it, and decided to pair it with an old phone and give it to him instead of wearing it myself. He’s been wearing it 24/7 for a week now.

It’s basically a watch and fitness tracker only right now. Fitbit shut down the Pebble services over the summer, and I haven’t been able to get it working with Rebble (the volunteer group that’s put together a replacement server), so the marketplace with apps and watch faces aren’t available. And I only put limited apps on that phone, so there’s not much in the way of alerts. But he likes the step/heartrate tracking, and having a buzzing alarm that he can set.

Though he’s somehow learned to sleep through the tactile version of “Reveille” already! 🤦‍♂️

Update: I did eventually get it connected to Rebble. The first thing he wanted to do afterward: A round of random watch faces, for old time’s sake.

July 2019 (LOL)

Pebble watch showing 7:07 and a charging icon. Upside-down so it looks like LOL.I feel like it’s taunting me over not charging properly.

September 2020

The pebble still functions! I had to sideload the app, but Rebble has good directions and is still around with alternative services.

April 2023

Everything’s touchscreens now. Obviously a touch screen is the way to go for versatility, but key things you might want to do in a hurry without pausing to look closely and make sure your finger hits the right spot — like turning off your watch alarm when it goes off while you’re driving or biking — should really be tactile!