Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 27

Amazon and I have very different ideas of what this app is for. I see it as a way to listen to music I’ve chosen, whether I’ve purchased it from them, imported it from another source, or selected from their current Prime offerings. Amazon sees it as a way sell me more subscription services.

I mainly still use it because I can play music I’ve bought through Amazon without using my phone storage, and I can look for and listen to music from their Prime catalog. Until it gets dropped.

But I don’t want to have to tap through three ads just to get at media I’ve already paid for.

At least I can turn off auto-starting Car Mode. It’s fine for the middle of a playlist, but it’s simplified too far to do basic tasks like choosing what music I want to listen to when I start the car and haven’t left the driveway yet.

And that’s the root of its problems: It’s not optimized for my choices, it’s optimized for Amazon’s.

Non-profit git services for free/libre/open-source software projects. Familiar interface, works well, and easy to migrate from GitHub and other forges. Keep in mind that they only host FOSS projects, so you’ll want to look elsewhere to host proprietary projects.

Impressed at how smoothly it works, especially with multiple accounts on both Mastodon and Pixelfed. Sharing from another app asking which account you want to post as is a particularly nice touch - I’ve had trouble with other apps (such as Instagram) where I share a photo and discover at the last stage of editing that it’s on the wrong account. The only thing I miss is having a dedicated space for DMs.

Apparently I’m still a sucker for time travel stories. The Time Traders (1958) is a cold war spy novel, but it’s a temporal cold war – more accurately, it’s a temporal front in our cold war. Both sides have time travel, the “Reds” have been plundering another era for technology, and the west is trying to find the source and shut it down.

I wouldn’t accuse it of being deep. About the only philosophical point is that today’s misfits blend in better with other times. It’s also very rooted in the cold war mentality. But it’s a satisfying adventure through the arctic and bronze age Europe, with characters who have modern knowledge and goals, but are making do with bronze-age technology. There is a swerve toward the end, but it works.

I enjoyed Star Born (1957) a lot more than Star Hunter. The main characters are more interesting, the world is more fleshed out and has more to do with the story itself, and the story actually has a point to it beyond “cool stuff happens!”

Again there are two main characters: one the descendant of humans who fled an oppressive Earth decades ago and were stranded on another world. The other, a member of a modern survey team from a freer Earth. The colonists befriended an ocean-dwelling species that helped them survive, but the survey team is focused on the cities built by the planet’s other intelligent species, one that looks more human and has more complex technology, but is far more brutal and warlike than the mer-people.

On one level it’s an adventure: the human born on this world is going through a rite of passage with his best friend from the mer-people. The city-builders are sifting through the ruins of their own nuclear war for lost technology. There are giant beasts to fight and so on. But woven through it are themes of colonialism, prejudice, and cultural identity, sometimes nuanced, sometimes ham-handed, but ultimately more important than the space opera.

It’s a sequel to The Stars are Ours, but I didn’t know that going in and didn’t feel like anything was missing. The book stands well on its own.