Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

El Tarasco is a small local Mexican fast food chain in the South Bay area. Their newest location, on Artesia in Redondo Beach, has turned out to be a great spot for takeout, almost on par with El Amigo. (And they’re open later!) I usually get one of their enchiladas. Last time I picked up from there I noticed they have a chile relleno burrito*, which I’m going to have to try next time! (Though I’ll have to ask whether they use peanuts in their mole or something else. I’m sure I can substitute another kind of sauce, though.)

One of these days I’ll actually eat at the restaurant: they built a patio as big as the indoor space, and the entire front wall rolls up when the weather’s good, so even if you’re inside, you might as well be outside. (I pay a lot more attention to ventilation these days than I did before 2020.)

I’ve been to a couple of their other locations. The downtown El Segundo one used to be a go-to spot for work lunches, but I’m rarely in the area these days. The original is a takeout window on the front of a tiny building on Rosecrans in Manhattan Beach that looks like the kind of Minecraft shelter you build the first day in a new world. They also have locations in Hermosa Beach (on Pier, also with a good-sized patio), south Redondo (on PCH), Westchester (on Sepulveda) and Hawthorne (on Imperial Highway somewhere). I thought they had one in Lawndale too, but on looking it up, that restaurant appears to be completely unrelated.

Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg.

All three are solidly in the “here’s a weird idea” vein of science-fiction. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q

Short, bird’s eye view of a “war” fought entirely using remote controlled drones…on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain

This came up in Analee Newitz’ recent book, Stories are Weapons, in part because Smith, under his real name of Paul Linebarger, literally wrote the book on Psychological Warfare. (Yes, Gutenberg has that one too!) Newitz draws a direct connection between the way a science-fiction story shows you the key elements of an alternate world, letting you connect the dots so the ideas feel more natural, and the way psy-ops do the same thing.

The story itself is very much worth reading. The main character is a “scanner,” a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the “pain of space,” a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He’s called up for an emergency meeting while “cranched,” a meeting that calls the scanners’ whole purpose into question. And he’s the only one there who’s in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

I still think “cranch” sounds like an unholy combination of cranberry and ranch dressing, though.

The Game of Rat and Dragon

Not as serious a story as “Scanners…” but fun and still thought-provoking.

There’s something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths – and it’s faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human.

This one starts off being very coy about the “Partners,” but manages to avoid “tomato surprise” territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot. Let’s just say that Smith was a cat person.

The show/exhibit is back this winter, which reminds me I meant to write a review after I went last year!

The South Coast Botanic Garden is already one of my favorite places to go walking in the South Bay/Palos Verdes Peninsula area. For Astra Lumina, they map out a nighttime path through the gardens with a series of different types of light shows that you walk through. Each is set to music and runs in a short loop, and you can stay as long as you like before moving onto the next. There’s a loose story about stars coming down to meet us.

It’s a cool, immersive experience, and I’d definitely recommend seeing it!

Apparently the studio that runs it, Moment Factory, runs the same event in several other US cities as well.

The first time through “Subspace Rhapsody” my reaction was: OK, that was fun. Better than “Immortimas” but not on the level of “Once More With Feeling” or even some of the Magicians musical episodes.

I watched it again after seeing the behind-the-scenes feature, and appreciated it a lot more. Enough that I immediately tracked down and bought the soundtrack.

They did a good job of focusing on the cast members who could sing well. Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh) and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) are the standouts, pouring their hearts into their solos. At the other end they found something more talky for Anson Mount (Pike), and let Babs Olusanmokun (M’Benga) stick with just a couple of lines. “…and I do not sing.”

Every song meant something to the people singing it, too. The classic way to do a musical, if it’s not sung-through, is to have the songs burst from the characters when their emotions are so high that they can’t contain them – when just speaking, or stewing in silence, isn’t enough. And I appreciated that the characters were genre-savvy enough to recognize and harness it!

I find it highly appropriate that Spock, of all people, would be the first one to sing. Because he’s normally the most emotionally self-controlled person on the ship, and he starts singing? Something weird is definitely going on! And the contrast between Chapel’s big song-and-dance number “I’m Ready” and his buttoned-down solo “I’m the X” (using the same melody) makes both songs better. I found myself thinking of what Russell Crowe tried to do as Javert. He and Spock are both very tightly-controlled characters, but Ethan Peck managed to convey Spock’s inner turmoil through the outer layer of control, while I think Crowe was just out of his depth musically.

The finale gets a bit glurge-y in places, but the only song that I thought fell flat was Number One’s song about “Keeping Secrets.” It should have worked better than it did.

“Connect To Your Truth,” OTOH, was absolutely dead-on Rogers and Hammerstein, and the Klingons’ brief pop verse about how they’ll “make your blood scream!” cracks me up every time I hear it.

And Paul Wesley (Kirk) is certainly a better singer than William Shatner. Though I have to admit, Shatner’s cover of “Common People,” is a trip!

VMWare Fusion worked great on my Intel-based MacBook for work for years. I ran Windows and Linux virtual machines, sometimes several at a time. It more or less seamlessly integrated the Windows environment into macOS, and the Linux VMs I ran were stable. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it did the job. I’d give it 4 stars for that period of time.

Unobtainable

After Broadcom bought VMWare, though, I can’t seem to find it. Not an individual license for work. Not a free license for home. The website still lists it and Workstation (the Windows counterpart), though I haven’t found any links to that page on the website – only external search results. And it doesn’t help.

• The download links there just go to the Broadcom customer login.
• The customer site won’t let me see anything unless I fill in corporate purchasing info that only makes sense in an enterprise business-to-business context.
• The only way I can get it to show download links is to back to the old blog post and click on the links there.
• Those download links won’t work without me answering more screening questions.
• The site won’t acknowledge that I already answered those questions.

On top of that, while Broadcom’s website let me register an email address with a + in it, it uses one of those multi-step login forms where you enter just the username/email first, click a button, and then enter the password…but it keeps trying to decode the + as a space, so I have to reload the login form in a way that it’ll keep the correct username when I enter my password.

I suppose it could be a browser compatibility thing, but I spent at least an hour at a time on three different occasions across two and half months on two different computers (one macOS, one Linux) with both Firefox and Vivaldi.

Meanwhile I missed the November announcement that it’s now free for everyone, which, OK, great…but it still won’t show me the products in my account unless I go back to May’s blog post, and it still won’t let me download without answering the screening questions, and it still won’t acknowledge that I’ve answered those screening questions, so I still can’t download it.

Technically Available

It’s almost like Broadcom didn’t notice that VMWare had a consumer software division when they bought the company, and they don’t know how to deal with that. So they’ve made it available…in the sense that the plans for demolishing Arthur Dent’s house were “on display.”

So I have no idea how well it runs on Apple Silicon. And it doesn’t matter whether I like the product or not, because I can’t use it.

Alternatives

I was able to download and install Parallels for my new ARM work MacBook in a matter of minutes. I didn’t even have to wait for IT to purchase the license, just install the trial edition and add the license afterward.

As for home, I think I’ll experiment with UTM a bit. I prefer one-time purchases over subscriptions (and of course free is nice!), but the home edition of Parallels is at least a reasonable price for what it does.