Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 24

Awesome!

This has always been one of the annoying things about remote interactions in Mastodon: While you can seamlessly follow remote users and reply, boost, etc. through your home instance, if you just visit a remote user or post in a regular browser window, you have to jump through a few hoops to pull it into your own account’s view.

This automates the hoops.

Setup is simple: You enter your home username and site in the preferences.

Incidentally: Remember your username is case-sensitive! If you have mixed case in it, you have to type the capitals correctly!

Very flexible, and can sync bookmarks across many different devices and browsers. You can use your own Nextcloud server, or store the bookmarks encrypted on Google Drive or another cloud service. Either way, you know who has access to them, which is a big bonus for privacy.

The desktop browser add-on is mostly set-and-forget and you just use your regular browser bookmarks. For as many browsers as you want. I’ve been using it to sync between Firefox and Chrome since 2020, and while it had some problems syncing early on, it’s been solid for so long I can’t even remember the last time I encountered a sync error. (Though it does sync faster with app-specific passwords.)

The mobile app syncs your bookmarks to itself, since most mobile browsers don’t let add-ons access their bookmarks. It took all of 30 seconds to set up the Android version with my Nextcloud, and the initial sync didn’t take much longer. The UI is simple, letting you do the basics of adding, removing, editing and moving bookmarks. They open in your default browser, and you can share a link from your browser to Floccus to bookmark it.

A fun, breezy story about unexpectedly landing a job at a secret scientific base on a parallel world studying giant Godzilla-like animals. Which is about as dangerous as it sounds. Plus, of course, not all humans are interested in the kaijus’ welfare, and the KPS has to step up the “Preservation” part of its name.

There’s some interesting world-building in terms of what kind of environment and ecosystem would actually support 100-meter-tall animals, what kind of biology would be able to handle the size, the energy, shooting beams of radiation, etc. And what might evolve to protect itself in a world with kaiju. And of course: what role nuclear explosions have in the whole thing, because these are kaiju after all!

It’s also weird because it takes place in 2020. Like, real 2020, complete with Covid-19 lockdowns and everything. The main character starts out working for a GrubHub competitor at the beginning of the pandemic.

What a mixed bag.

The first half of the season is mostly stand-alone episodes, vaguely linked by plot tokens in the form of faster-than-light signals from a winged being they dub the “red angel.” And those are the ones I liked best: Investigating a dark matter asteroid and finding the survivors of a ship thought lost during the war, with only one crew member responsive. Finding a small population of humans who were transplanted across the galaxy during World War III, and actually threading the line between interfering with a pre-warp culture and letting some of them know that yes, Earth survived and is thriving. Exploring what else lives in the ecosystem formed by the mycelial network*.

But after a while they start getting way too cavalier about changing the fates of entire planets without thinking the consequences through, doing things because the plot requires it, or because it would be more dramatic (regardless of whether it makes sense for the character to do it) and generally handing out idiot balls left and right.

Also: how big is Section 31, anyway?

Characterization

One of the things that gets better, though, is the Sarek/Amanda/Spock/Michael family relationship, both present-day and in flashbacks to Spock and Michael’s childhood on Vulcan. (And we get to see other biomes on Vulcan than just red-rock desert!) The season starts out with them dancing around some HORRIBLE SECRET™ of Michael’s, but once that’s out in the open (to the audience) and the two of them start having to work together, it’s interesting to watch them as they start dealing with their past and finally develop a rapport again.

Spock himself feels just a little bit off, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Partly it’s the voice. (Same with Sarek, actually.) But I think it’s also because Ethan Peck isn’t as intense as Leonard Nimoy (or Zachary Quinto) when Spock is just being himself. Then again, he is recovering from trauma at that point, reevaluating how he wants to balance his human and Vulcan sides, and technically on vacation rather than active duty, so a bit of uncertainty makes sense. I haven’t picked up Strange New Worlds yet, but I’m curious to see how his portrayal carries over.

Captain Pike is an incredible contrast to Captain Lorca from season one, coming onto a ship where…let’s just say everyone starts out with trust issues. And they managed to keep Georgiou around, in a way that Michelle Yeoh is clearly having fun with.

It was nice to get to know the other crew some more. Saru is still my favorite of the
second-level main characters. Even the third-level characters get a little more attention this time through, though in one case it’s a bit of too little, too late. And while we don’t see a lot of her, Reno is a great addition to the cast as someone who just cuts through the BS and calls things as she sees them.

Finale

As for the finale… The first half is tedious and all the worst aspects of this season are on display, plus an annoying display of two-dimensional thinking (on the parts of the characters, the writers, and the visual effects team) in a four-dimensional story.

Though let me say, once you get to see inside the Enterprise, they’ve done a great job of updating the aesthetics of the sets and costumes so it looks high-tech to modern audiences and still looks like the same ship we saw in the original show.

The second half actually moves really well and is (mostly) a satisfying conclusion, though one of the major dramatic threads in the battle just doesn’t make sense (apparently their blast doors are really strong). But the epilogue goes way further than necessary in explaining away why we never heard of Spock’s sister or the spore drive before. All you need to say is that Spock never mentioned Michael on camera and no one is known to have ever found another giant space tardigrade. Done.

The weird thing about reviewing Discovery is that I feel like I need to avoid revealing spoilers. That’s not something I’m used to with Star Trek, but there are so many twists in the first season, and it’s a continuous story where the twists make a difference.

Essentially it’s Star Trek with the pacing of Farscape, then tightening the season to feature only the arc episodes. The first two episodes set the story in motion, and then it jumps forward to pick up with the Discovery itself and its mission. It’s almost frenetic, and things change drastically over the course of the show. Edited to add: The Klingon tomb ship interiors really remind me of Moya!

Season one is focused on the Federation-Klingon war, ten years before the original show, and while they do get into cool science-fiction ideas, they’re still seen through that lens. And they do pull some interesting variations on time loops, hive-mind planets, etc. Even the younger, more dangerous Harcourt Fenton Mudd is seen in the context of the war and how it impacts civilians.

It’s also very much built around Michael Burnham and her efforts to redeem herself for her part in the events of the first two episodes. (Sonequa Martin-Green is really good at showing the changes from cold-and-logical to depressed to slowly rebuilding herself as a whole person.) But it also means that we don’t get to know the other characters as well as we would in a more fully-ensemble show. (Saru is one of the stand-outs, and shows a lot of growth between his first and second stints as acting captain when Lorca is off-ship.)

The spore drive is way over-powered. But it’s also a really interesting idea with a lot of possibilities. They strike a balance by establishing limits on how it can be used, explaining why they don’t use it all the time, and why it hasn’t become standard transportation by the time of the original series.

The second half of the season takes a swerve and a deep dive into some other concepts from the original series…and throws several twists that ride the line between “whoa, that was set up better than I thought” and “that makes no sense whatsoever.” They work if you willfully ignore some of the implied logistics and just go with it.

Unfortunately the finale wraps things up way too…not easily, but too simply. It’s the kind of resolution that you can see how easily it would unravel.

Continuity Notes

I didn’t have a problem with Burnham being retroactively established as Spock’s foster sister. If anything, it makes more sense to me than Sybok in Star Trek V. So she never came up on camera before. Fine. And while the fact that she’s closer to Sarek than Spock seemed weird at first, there was already a years-long rift between Spock and his father, so this fits right in.

The Klingon redesign took some getting used to, but after a few episodes I kind of went with it. At some point it occurred to me that if you just put hair on them, they’d look a bit more like the movie/TNG Klingons. Which is kind of funny, because they end up doing that in season 2.