Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 8

Sometime last year I saw eBooks.com on a list of bookstores rated by ethics where it was the highest rated eBook seller. (It’s still only 63/100, but it’s tied with Better World Books, and waaaay ahead of Amazon at ZERO. They’re a small company, and they only do books – they’re not part of a larger conglomerate – and they do write about their company ethics stances on their website.)

So I figured I’d give it a try and bought a few books from them.

The online store and help documentation is a bit sparse, but they have a good selection of books available, which is the more important part!

Reading Options

They don’t sell hardware (which simplifies a lot of supply chain questions!), but they have a mobile reader app for Android and iOS. On Android at least, it’s bare-bones compared to the Kindle or Kobo app. But it doesn’t get in your way: you can read books easily, whether side-loaded from your device or downloaded directly from your account. Frankly it’s kind of refreshing that the app isn’t trying to sell me more books! It runs fine on my Android-powered Boox Poke3 with an e-ink screen, as well as on my phone and tablet.

They also suggest PocketBook or Bluefire Reader as alternate apps, neither of which I’ve tried.

Of course, DRM-free books (from publishers that allow them, like Tor) can be read on anything.

Like Kobo, they have an online reader on the website. You can also read books on a desktop through Adobe Digital Editions. ADE only runs on Windows and macOS, but eBooks has a guide to running it on Linux using Wine, which I did manage to get working. Sort of.

Extremely customizable, capable, cluttered and complex. Also extremely frustrating to use, especially on a phone. Better on a tablet where there’s room for more columns at a time.

I like the ability to set up a “pseudo account” and follow the local feed on another server.

Interaction buttons are hidden by default like Phanpy. Unfortunately this includes the buttons to show the rest of a thread, which kept tripping me up.

Despite all the options, I could never quite get it configured the way I wanted, though.

The biggest problem I have is that in trying to avoid the pitfalls of other apps that are so easy to use that you can stay on them longer than intended after finding what you wanted, it’s got just enough roadblocks that I stay on it longer than I intended anyway, trying to find what I’m looking for.

I finally got around to watching the movie, having soured on the book by the time the adaptation came out. It was better than I expected!

It’s not a straight adaptation of the plot so much as taking the same premise and characters and finding more cinematic ways of hitting the same beats. And having Spielberg and real actors (or their voices, for the parts of the film that take place in virtual reality) definitely makes it more character-driven (shallow as the characters might be) than a book that mostly existed as an exercise in including as many pop culture references as possible.

My main problems with it are:

1. Expanding the nostalgia beyond the 1980s to include the 70s and 90s breaks the laser-focus of Halliday’s obsession, and the focus on Halliday/Morrow as Wozniak/Jobs analogs.

2. Some suspiciously convenient lapses in security. The guy with an easily-identifiable tattoo on his head, who doesn’t put on a hat when he acts against the giant surveillance company? The prison cell that can be opened from the inside by feel, relying on the prisoner not being able to see the opening mechanism?

3. Tacking on the moral about having to live in the real world too was…well, to be fair it was a very 80s thing to do, but it still felt tacked-on. The movie really emphasized the OASIS being an escape, whereas in the book it was made clear that people were using it for school, business, etc. along with the gaming. Y’know, like the actual Internet the whole thing is a metaphor for.

Hilly, with not much shade except in the lightly wooded areas along the intermittent streambeds. The higher areas have clear views of the LA Basin to the north and east (Downtown LA to Saddleback), but mostly you can see the golf course it wraps around, a couple of Little League fields, and the suburban neighborhoods that surround it. Lots of up and down, mostly scrub habitat with some grassy areas.

After this year’s comparatively dry winter (not as bad as some, but below average and way below the deluges of the previous two years) the grass was green, but the scrub was just kind of scrubby, and the streams were little more than a trickle. I did spot a couple of rabbits, some dragonflies and bumblebees, and some hawks, but not much else in the way of wildlife. (I imagine the noise from the baseball game didn’t help much.)

And peacocks! There’s a population of feral peafowl on the peninsula, dating back to the early 1900s, that I hadn’t run into on any of my hikes out at Point Vicente or up in the canyons. I did see some near the Malaga Cove library the last time I was in that area. But they were just wandering around the neighborhood! At least half a dozen. All males, though - I didn’t see any hens. I don’t know if they weren’t out, or if I just didn’t see them because they don’t stand out as much. I stopped to let one cross the street on the way in, and watched another strutting along the trail while I was hiking.

Where Else?

Unless it rains some more this spring, I don’t really have much interest in returning to this particular preserve this year. The habitat is similar to Entradero Basin (which is easier to get to), the view is better at Vista del Norte, there’s more shade at Valmonte/Frog Loop, and the canyons at George F. and Agua Amarga are interesting in the dry seasons too.

The Palos Verdes Land Conservancy operates a bunch of small preserves all over the peninsula where they could buy out some land, convince someone to donate it, or make arrangements with one of the cities. Mostly areas that are too steep or have historically been too unstable to build on. Chandler isn’t adjacent to any of the others, but several along the south side of the peninsula form a continuous wildlife corridor now.

Getting There

You have to go through winding residential streets. There’s a parking lot next to the baseball fields, and room for a few cars to park at the end of Buckskin Lane near the trailhead there. In addition there are connections to the bridle trails that riddle the peninsula. Dogs (leashed) and horses are allowed on the trails, so watch your step!

Soonish (2017) is a good overview of cutting-edge technologies, most of which are still in the near future, some of which have made dramatic progress in the last few years.

It took me several years to get around to actually reading it, which maybe wasn’t the best approach for something about the near future. So it’s been interesting to look at the chapters on space colonization, asteroid mining, robot swarms, automated construction, fusion and so on where things are either still just as far away or have otherwise turned out to be more complicated (as the Weinersmiths discovered when rearching their follow-up, A City on Mars)…

…and then there’s the chapter on augmented reality (AR), which they had to revise hastily just before print to account for the arrival of Pokémon Go in mid-2016…

…and the chapter on this cool new genetic modification technique called CRISPR…which has continued making headlines, with treatments for things like sickle cell disease approved and put into practice!

Some things have been moving faster than others.

Update (May 2025): They’re 3D printing Starbucks locations now.

Full of the authors’ trademark irreverent humor, with cartoons scattered throughout, it’s still worth reading even if it’s a bit late!