Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 5

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a weird cartoon. In a lot of good ways.

It’s sort of a combination of the movie and the original comics, combining the art style (now animated!) with the movie’s voice cast and a longer run time (eight episodes on Netflix) that makes it possible to actually dig into the characters and story. It’s sort of a reunion show, sort of a remake, and sort of a “What If…”

Because at the end of the anime’s* first episode it, well, takes off into a totally new direction, telling a new story focusing this time on Ramona Flowers and her relationships with her various “evil exes,” reacting to, bouncing off of and critiquing the comics and movie. (Several characters actually start filming the movie during the show…which goes off the rails in yet another direction.)

The craziness is dialed up to 11, with video game, comic book and anime tropes used to reexamine who these characters are. Scott could easily have become the next Evil Ex, and he had a tendency to rewrite his own backstory to make him look better. And Ramona wasn’t entirely blameless in her past relationships either, and she has to come to terms with that. By the end, you even have a better handle on most of her exes as people who made some really bad choices after their breakups.

And an over-the-top super-hero/villain team-up against Scott’s real arch-enemy. Who isn’t Gideon Graves. (For that matter, Gideon Graves isn’t really Gideon Graves either.)

It’s both wackier and more introspective than the source material, brings to the surface some of the themes that tended to get glossed over, and makes it clear that yes, those character flaws are character flaws.

Bryan Lee O’Malley made a remark in an interview about how he started the comics in his mid-20s, finished them at 31, and came back to the story in his 40s with a new perspective. (Huh, in some ways it’s the Tehanu of Scott Pilgrim, only with extra hijinks instead of depression.)

Lots of fun, highly recommended, and ultimately a better story than the movie (which is still a lot of fun, just highly condensed and shallow).

Very flexible, and can sync bookmarks across many different devices and browsers. Floccus is a solid replacement for Xmarks, though you do have to choose your own cloud storage. On the plus side, you get to choose your own cloud storage, and whether you use your own Nextcloud server, or store the bookmarks encrypted on Google Drive or another supported service, 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, and more recently Vivaldi, since 2020. 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*.

When using Nextcloud for storage, it syncs faster with an app-specific password than with your regular login.

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.

An odd but appealing mix of whimsy and horror, turning portal fantasy tropes on their heads. Baba Yaga, the ultimate witch of Russian folklore, is the quest-giver. Summer’s home life is shaped by her mother’s severe anxiety. A wolf isn’t a threat, but a staunch ally (and a were-creature who turns into a migratory house at night – you thought Baba Yaga’s house was the only one that walked around?). A lich refuses to move on until he finishes his to-read list. Geese are fierce warriors (OK, that part’s realistic, except these geese carry spears too), which is fortunate, because 11-year-old Summer herself isn’t going to be able to take down the mysterious Queen-In-Chains causing the rot that’s slowly destroying Orcus all by herself…or is she?

It’s a bit less cohesive than some of Vernon/Kingfisher’s more recent YA/older kids’ novels like Illuminations and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, partly because it was originally a serial and partly because it’s a very kitchen-sink kind of fantasy world where anything goes, from an officious but kind-hearted goofy birds to creepy spider-horses. But it’s stuck in my head more than Minor Mage.

A cross-country road trip with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs.

I’ve mellowed on the subject of typos since this came out, but it was still an interesting read. The best road trip stories are not just a list of events and locations, they’re about how the travelers change over the course of the journey. Deck starts out so hyperbolic and grandiose that he comes off as pretentious, but quickly discovers the issue is more nuanced – and more socially fraught – than he’d expected.

Retail workers vs. corporate policy, trying to avoid stepping in racial stereotypes, indie shopowners who might be more interested in fixing a misspelling but not have the resources to get it fixed.

It’s also a bit more complex than the “two friends on a road trip.” He has three different companions, one on each leg of the trip, each of whom brings a new perspective, and they get into the prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar.

And in the end, the legal consequences of doing the occasional “stealth” correction without asking first, as the National Park Service pressed charges for “vandalism” of a sign at the Grand Canyon.

Personal Notes

When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”

So this seemed like a perfect choice when NPR ran an article on the book shortly before it was released in 2010, but I never got around to picking it up until 14 years later.

While I still collect photos of mistakes in signs, I tend to be more on the “at least you can tell what they meant” side of things these days, unless the typos themselves are funny. Autocorrect and autocomplete have made for an entirely new class of typos that look like they mean something else. Otherwise I’m much more inclined to snap a photo of a deliberately weird or funny sign.

My son, however, is currently in the “You mean ‘you’re’.” phase, and I’m surprised he hasn’t cracked it open himself.

Also, I may have actually seen the sign they corrected at the Grand Canyon, because I’m pretty sure my family stopped at the tower they mention back in the 1990s.

I wanted to like this keyboard. The other Fossify apps have worked out well, and unlike, say, GBoard, I know nothing’s leaving my device. And it does support multiple languages, which helps when I’m practicing Spanish in Duolingo. But it only supports tapping, not swipe gestures or auto suggest, and I just can’t seem to type reliably that way.

The problem is that I have a lot of trouble tapping the right letters with my thumbs. (I swear this has gotten worse over time – I’d assume my hands had just gotten clumsier, but I’ve gotten better at touch typing on a real keyboard in the same timeframe.) That’s been mildly annoying with GBoard, but GBoard also supports swiping gestures, and autosuggest usually includes the word I wanted if I’m a little bit off. And I think the hit boxes might be a bit bigger, or adjust based on what autocomplete thinks is more likely.

So with Fossify Keyboard, I frequently end up with severalbwordsblumpedntogethrt because I keep hitting “b” or “n” instead of space, and then I have to go back and fix it (which of course is a pain on a touchscreen).

I gave it about three weeks on my phone, during which I used it for all the usual text messaging, social networking, email, and so on. I’ve since switched back to GBoard.

It seems to work better for me with a tablet, though, where I can sort of touch type or hunt and peck. I’ll keep it on there for a while and see how it holds up.