Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 23

Jellyfin works great for playing music across my wireless LAN, and it stays on my wireless LAN. It doesn’t require me to connect to a remote cloud account, or constantly push me to buy a subscription to a remote streaming service. I tried Jellyfin out after getting frustrated with Plex doing both of those things.

The server turned out to be easier to install than Plex, allowing me to set it up on my Raspberry Pi without hooking up a local display+keyboard or resorting to SSH tunneling. The initial import handled albums better. And best of all, I didn’t have to hook up my local server to a cloud account.

The players are a little tricky to find, because they’re not on the download page (that’s just for the server), they’re on the clients page. That’s where you’ll find links to various store pages for Android, iOS, Roku, FireTV, and so on. And way down at the bottom, a link to the Github page for the desktop player, with Windows, macOS and Linux installers. (Because the installers aren’t signed by a “known developer,” you may need to jump through some hoops to give it permission on current macOS systems).

On the plus side: It works, the players are easy to find and install for multiple platforms and devices, and the server can even run on a Raspberry Pi.

On the minus side: You have to sign into their cloud account to do most things. And it’s constantly trying to push you into purchasing a subscription. Even if you’re only using it with your local collection.

If you want to use it for remote streaming, that’s one thing. But I just want to listen to my own library of music on my own network. It shouldn’t have to connect to a remote service, sending who knows what local data, just for that. I ended up using Jellyfin instead.

(Oh, and installing on a Pi? You need to either hook up a display to it or use an ssh tunnel to complete setup if you’re trying to run it as a headless server.)

A welcome return to the world of A Turn of Light (though shorter!)

One of the things Czerneda does really well in this series is balance the fantasy elements so that they’re both wondrous and dangerous at the same time. Like the Turn that happens daily wherever the normal and magical worlds intersect, it’s just a shift in which facet we’re seeing at the time.

There’s a political story dealing with fallout from the previous novel, but it’s a paper-thin wrapper around the real story: a character-driven family drama about healing from trauma and learning to handle uncontrollable magic and what dangers it might unlock.

A fast read with an intriguing concept that reverses multiple YA fantasy tropes: It’s a non-magical boarding school for teens who have experienced magic. And it’s not about the adventures they have going through the portal to a fantasy world, but about how they handle the trauma of coming back to the mundane one. The characters are interesting, and I’d like to read more about them, but halfway through it turns into a murder mystery. That gives it a plot, but it comes at the expense of the characterization. (And some of the characters.) It was entertaining, though, and it does make me want to check out the second book.

Entertaining, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny and sometimes sad collection of stories about the gods of Asgard and the elves, dwarves and giants around them, book-ended by the Norse creation myth and the world-ending battle of Ragnarok. It’s a storytelling approach, not a scholarly description. And it’s not the shiny, techno-magical Asgard of Marvel’s Thor, or the ethereal Olympus we’ve come to think of with Greek myths. For all the magic and impossible feats that get tossed around, it’s still a gritty, harsh world with wars, murders, lust, deception and betrayal.

The stories are mostly separate, but a pattern emerges: not just when stories refer back to earlier events, but the slow transformation of Loki from the kind of trickster who steals Sif’s hair, tricks rival smiths into creating fantastic gifts, and generally outwits his opponents (while finding ways to embarrass the other gods if he can) to the kind of trickster who thinks it would be hilarious to trick a blind man into killing his own brother.

In his introduction, Gaiman notes that we don’t actually have a thorough record of the stories. Like most myths, they were told and retold and changed through oral storytelling. The Norse didn’t write them down until well after Christianity had established itself in the region. And so there are a lot of figures who are mentioned in passing in one tale or another that we don’t really know much about.

And I realized that most of what I know of the mythology comes from modern works influenced by it. Comic books of course, not just Marvel’s Thor, but Vertigo’s Sandman and the manga and anime Ah! My Goddess. The Ring Cycle (by way of Bugs Bunny). Oddly enough, a lot of it by way of Neil Gaiman himself: Sandman, American Gods, Odd and the Frost Giants, probably a handful of short stories too.