Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 48

I’m not big on audiobooks, but I picked up a DC Comics-related Humble Bundle a few weeks ago and I “read” The Flash: Stop Motion by Mark Schultz. It’s kind of odd listening to a “Graphic Audio” adaptation (A movie in your mind!) of a prose novel based on a character who usually appears in visual media, but the full cast, sound effects, and music help to make up for the lack of actual visuals that I’ve found tends to hamper prose stories about superheroes.

I read the book when it came out in 2004, and I’d forgotten enough for it to be more-or-less “new.” It’s set during the Wally West/Keystone City era when the Flash’s identity was still public knowledge and he worked with Detectives Chyre and Morillo. A super-speed killer has been attacking people in the Keystone/Central area. Not only is it faster than the Flash, but every time it strikes, bits of other universes bleed into our own. Wally has to discover the nature of this “superluminoid,” its surprising connection to the West/Allen family, and unlock a potential beyond the speed force in order to stop it.

The familiar characters are handled well, and the concepts behind the superluminoid, quantum warriors and the Seventh Singularity are intriguing. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis as they take on super-speed, the metagene, the speed force and quantum physics. The ideas still hold up, and I think it would be fascinating to explore them further, though in the long run they would unbalance the Flash’s already over-powered abilities.

There are a few continuity issues that bugged me at the time I first read it. A lot of the story hinges on Iris and Wally being blood relatives, for instance, which they weren’t pre-Flashpoint. Those don’t bother me anymore, partly because continuity has been remixed so many times and partly because I’ve mellowed on that sort of thing. Though I still have trouble with the opening scene where the Flash is treading air to “fly” with the JLA. (And then there are oddities like the fact that the entire Justice League is in several scenes, but only Wonder Woman gets a detailed description. Hmmm…)

The audio adaptation works well. It’s got a full voice cast and sound effects in addition to the narration. Some of the voices work better than others, and some just don’t fit my head-voice for the characters. (Chyre, for instance, sounds more gravelly and world-weary in my mind than this version.) They really make use of effects and music in the battle sequences, though some of them might work better with headphones than listening in a car. I found it hard to pick out the words in the action scenes because there was so much going on. And some of the conversations that work in print go on way too long in audio.

The novel is worth reading, and the audio is worth listening to. Now I’m curious to hear how Graphic Audio adapted Infinite Crisis, 52 and Final Crisis.

I think I’ll skip Countdown, though.

Update 2020: None of the DC Comics adaptations are available on Graphic Audio’s site anymore. I’m guessing the license expired or something.

The sequel to Lock In is a fast read with an interesting mystery, fun characters, and intriguing concepts. More than the first book, it fully explores the societal impact of both large scale lock-in and the technology used to deal with it.

It continues with the POV of locked-in FBI agent Chris Shane, this time investigating the death of a locked-in athlete.

In this near-future, 10% of the world’s population have been locked into their brains by a pandemic. Virtual reality and remote robot piloting enable them to interact with the world, and there are even specially designed “threeps” (named after a well-known droid) for different tasks. Among them: the battle threeps used for a sport more violent than could be played with real human bodies.

Hadens spend most of their lives interacting through simulations or mechanical avatars, which changes a lot about identity presentation, travel, location, disability and prejudice. It’s the kind of thing that might be nodded to in another book that wanted to focus on the technology, but all these implications are woven throughout the story and key to a lot of it.

I read this when it was new, and thought it had some interesting ideas and was a fun trip down memory lane. But over time I kept seeing people point out problems, and I’d think back, and realize, yeah, there’s not a whole lot of substance there, and it’s got some serious issues.

Back then, the nostalgia and scavenger hunt were enough for me. Now, not so much.

Didn’t bother with the movie when it came out, but I caught it several years later and it was better than I expected.

Solo isn’t high art, and it’s got some rough edges, but it’s a fun ride. Star Wars movies from The Phantom Menace onward have been trying to be serious with a side of adventure and comic relief, not trying to be adventures that also have something to say.

That said, I liked The Last Jedi more than The Force Awakens, so YMMV.

Xmarks (originally Foxmarks) was a cross-browser bookmark sync service that I used for a long time to keep Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari on multiple computers using the same set of bookmarks. It almost shut down in 2010, but LastPass bought it and moved to a freemium model, which they kept running until May 1, 2018. By then it had been flaky for a while:

• Anytime I came back to a system without using it for a while, it would have trouble syncing and have to re-download everything.
• Sometimes it would get confused by the different folder layouts.
• After Firefox dropped their old extension API, the new extension never worked well with my scheme that drops all cookies when I close the browser except those on sites I want to stay logged into.

These days I use Floccus to sync bookmarks across browsers, which has the added bonus that I get to choose my own storage.