Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

I did like this book, but not as much as I’d expected to.

At the level of plot, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of a pod person who’s been an alien all her life. On a character level, it’s about trying to go through life knowing you’re different from everyone around you. And thematically, it’s about friends and family vs. the world, and vs. each other, and figuring out where the lines are between who you can trust and who you can’t.

The main character has been certain since childhood that she’s actually an alien plant who replaced a little girl lost in the woods. (More of a classic changeling than the October Daye type.) And because of the kind of book it is, she’s right.

The prologue is not for the squeamish. But the rest of the novel is more eerie sci-fi and less horror.

It’s mostly told from Stasia’s point of view, with occasional fragments of letters, or teacher’s notes, or scientific articles between chapters. One of the problems I had was that most of the other characters aren’t…well, maybe I shouldn’t say “fleshed out” when half of them are plant people, but while Stasia’s puzzlement over their motivations supports the story thematically, it makes it less engaging. Though there is an interesting shift in perspective as the advance vanguard becomes less human and more plant.

Doomed

I can’t help but think of this as a more cynical, post-COVID take on some of the same themes as Newsflesh. It’s got the same kind of small group of found family vs. vast forces bigger than themselves (including improbable escapes from secret government facilities), wrapped in a body horror tale in which humans are being replaced and/or eaten by something that looks almost but not quite human. But in this version, we’ve been too busy tearing each other down to band together and protect humanity. The author doesn’t state so outright, but her response on a Reddit AMA regarding how she would write it differently now echoed through my mind repeatedly while reading it.

I would not write the Newsflesh trilogy. Being able to write that series required me to have a measure of faith in both a public health response and in the desire of my fellow humans to keep the people around them safe, and I have lost that faith, essentially completely. I am no longer optimistic enough for Newsflesh.

And while the humans of Newsflesh are able to fight back the zombie hordes and rebuild civilization, it quickly becomes clear that the best anyone can do here is salvage what’s worth preserving of humanity.

More Connections

I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: Overgrowth reminded me to finally read Interference, another book with intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances. Interference and The Downloaded both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. The Downloaded and When the Moon Hits Your Eye are both character studies in an apocalypse that can’t even be mitigated. Even Automatic Noodle opens with the main characters waking up long after a disaster (though it’s only months, and only a local disaster.)

An alternate web front-end for Mastodon and compatible servers. A bit more user friendly than Mastodon’s web interface, but ever so slightly buggier, especially on those non-Mastodon servers. Supports multiple accounts on the same or different servers. Like Phanpy and Pinafore, it runs in your browser and talks to your server so you’re not sending data. It’s a little more cluttered than Phanpy, but only because it shows you more.

Elk works well as a front-end to GoToSocial except for a minor bugs. First, it gets out of sync easily. It’ll tell me I have a notification, but when I look, it’s not there, and I have to reload the page.

(There’s also a rare bug, possibly GTS specific, where Elk will desync between what’s visible and where a click registers. I’ll try to click on “Load more” and it will register an action on a post instead. I haven’t narrowed down when it happens, but I haven’t seen it in a while, so maybe the issue’s been fixed. This of course means I’ll see it again as soon as I post this.)

The biggest problem I have with Elk is that its own support for parsing Markdown in posts to format them interacts badly with servers that parse Markdown themselves. Sometimes it converts characters it shouldn’t, and it alwasys loses inline links when editing. On more than one occasion I’ve had to add links back manually, and on more than one occasion I’ve canceled the edit and switched to another front-end that doesn’t try to second-guess the post format.

It’s a cool idea! Combine all your social networking feeds into a single app. Respond to posts and let the app choose the appropriate account. Cross-post easily. And I really like the typeface)!

My key takeaway is that to use it, you have to either be following a small enough number of people across services, or you need to be OK with not catching everything. (You kind of do anyway, but this takes all your sources and mixes them into the same firehose.)

Currently, it supports one each of Mastodon (and compatible servers including GoToSocial), Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads, plus RSS/Atom feeds and plans to add Tumblr. You can also set up multiple profiles, but each can only have one account of each type. That means if you have two Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account, you can’t set them all up on the same profile. (Update: Fread also supports both Bluesky and Mastodon, and can handle more than one of each type of account.)

Feeding Issues

RSS support finally launched last week, which is why I picked up the app again. Again, I do like the idea of being able to just follow websites instead of following a social media account that follows the website! It auto-detects feeds correctly, so you only need to enter the main website to subscribe to its feed. On your timeline it’ll show the title and summary, and tapping on it opens the article in a reader mode without all the extra clutter. The article view also has a button to just show the actual web page.

Downsides: If you’re following an site in a social context, you can’t comment, and if you’re following one in a news context, it gets lost in the shuffle.

Also, it doesn’t seem to do use the content of a full-text feed. It always loads the web page and then strips out what it thinks is unneeded. I can use Nextcloud News seamlessly in airplane mode. That’s not the case with OpenVibe, which will just sit there with a blank screen, trying to download.

And it’s been sending me snarky “reminders” to just add an RSS feed, already, even though I already have. I am not a fan of communication apps that send me promotional notifications.

Context Troubles

Unfortunately, it’s a whole new layer of context collapse, with the added bonus that the contexts get pulled apart too. Making a single cross-post is easy, but you’re stuck with the shorter size limit, and it doesn’t remember that the Bluesky and Mastodon versions are the same post. You still have to do followups manually, once per network. (Sure, you have to do that when you’re using separate apps too, but at least you expect to be able to do that, because the context you’re using it in is different.)

The biggest problem for me is that I’m already following too many people on the Fediverse to keep track without using lists. Bluesky accounts just get lost in the shuffle. What I’d really like to be able to do with this kind of combined app would be to combine custom timelines across accounts. Make a list for Science Talk and include people on both Bluesky and the Fediverse, that sort of thing. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of app they’re trying to build, at least not so far.

Well, that and the fact that the “Following” tab keeps getting stuck, but that seems to only be a problem with GoToSocial, not Mastodon. Either that or I really am following too many people!

A short, fast read built on the idea that while you can preserve people cryogenically, you have to actively keep their consciousness running in a virtual environment so it doesn’t dissipate before they’re thawed out. There’s not a lot of story, mostly just character studies, looking at how people with different VR experiences might react to waking up centuries after the fall of civilization. The astronauts who were supposed to be on their way to another star system basically experienced virtual heaven, while the convicted murderers served virtual prison time.

Structure

The Downloaded started as a full-cast audiobook, with the Covid-imposed constraint that [each scene feature only one actor]. (I don’t know why they did it that way instead of just mixing different recording sessions.) And it shows. It’s not a problem that each scene is an interview. That’s a time-honored narrative structure. But once you get to the middle and you find out who’s interviewing them, you start getting half-conversations with awkward “so, you’re saying ____?” to pass the information to the audience.

Maybe the voice actors sell it better than the plain text of the novel. Apparently Brendan Fraser voices Roscoe, which sounds like absolutely perfect casting. (I still haven’t seen The Whale, but I watched four seasons of Doom Patrol in which he delivers a surprisingly moving and nuanced portrayal of Cliff Steele.) I’ll have to see if the audio version is still exclusive to Audible or not.

Connections

Weirdly, I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: The Downloaded and When the Moon Hits Your Eye both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. This and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances. Even Automatic Noodle opens with the main characters waking up long after a disaster (though it’s only months, and only a local disaster.)

Mostly flat, with hills along the west and north. Views of the ocean and (on a clear day) Catalina Island. Not much shade except for one stand of trees at the foot of the hills, the garden around the visitor center, and the bunkers.

It’s not as geologically interesting as [Forrestal Reserve], and when I went there in August it was mostly dry grass and dry bushes, but there’s wildlife, and there’s a native plants garden around the visitor center that’s watered and maintained, and there’s the ruins if you’re interested in that.

Wait, Bunkers? Ruins?

During World War II, the land was seized from Japanese-American farmers. The farmers were sent to internment camps, and the land was turned into a military site for coastal defense. During the cold war it became an anti-aircraft missile site. The base was decommissioned in the 1970s, but you can still find concrete foundations and a handful of buildings…and up in the hills, two large concrete bunkers built into a ridge that you can walk right through. Internal doors look like they’ve been sealed, though. (I didn’t think to ask at the visitor center whether it was one of the remaining buildings from the base or whether it had been built later.)

Information boards scattered at points along the trails tell the story, along with the earlier history of the site back to the native Tongva villages and the Spanish ranchos.

Nearby

Across the road there’s a regular park that goes right up to the edge of the bluffs. You can look over the railing and see rocky tide pools and Royal Palms State Beach below. The park also has a playground, picnic tables, bathrooms and drinking water.

If you want to make a day of it, you could hike the preserve in the morning, have a picnic lunch at the park, and hit the beach in the afternoon.

Getting there

Follow Western all the way to the coast and then turn left. The road runs past the entrance to the beach parking and a park to the right, and there’s a gate on the left just at the end of the road that leads to a gravel parking lot for the nature preserve. You can also park along the street once you get past the park, or you can pay for beach parking.