Kelson Reviews Stuff

Mrs. Davis

2026-04-02T01:59:37Z

★★★★★

Mrs. Davis arrived at the perfect time: just as the Chat-GPT-fueled “AI” hype machine was shifting into high gear, here was a story of a surly nun battling a world-dominating AI with a folksy name.

Except…that’s not the story.

Considering the number of times it swerves to reveal that what you thought was going on is actually part of something completely different than you assumed? That’s appropriate!

Since the swerves are part of the fun, I’ll try not to reveal too much when I say it’s:

A…let’s say unique take on the Holy Grail mythology. (To put it mildly.)
A poignant tale about our modern dependence on technology.
The lengths people will go to feel appreciated.
The interplay between religion and spirituality.
The magic of misdirection (and vise-versa).
The difference between asserting your free will and just rebelling.
Ridiculously wacky, but in a way that makes sense.
Seriously absurd, and sometimes absurdly serious.

To give you an idea of what to expect, it opens with a castaway named Schrödinger and his cat being rescued from a deserted island, during which time no one knew if they were alive or not.

Betty Gilpin is riveting as Simone. Her co-stars and the ensemble cast rise to the challenge of an absurdity that takes itself seriously enough that it comes right back around to ridiculous again.

At the time, I thought Mrs. Davis “herself” was less an AI than a souped-up voice assistant/chatbot…but of course, that’s exactly what the “AI” industry has rolled out over the last three years in the form of various LLM services. She’s further advanced in that she’s actually self-aware and has her own motivations (unlike today’s chatbots), but she doesn’t control the world, just responds to questions.

People just assume Mrs. Davis has the right answer and go with it. Like following Google Maps, even when it sends you off onto a dirt road that ends in a collapsed bridge that was never updated on the map. Or a bunch of people going along with a prompt for a flash mob out of FOMO. Or a vibe coder assuming that the generated code is actually running and passing the tests, not just reporting that it did because that’s what logs should look like.

You never see a UI, never hear her voice directly. It’s always a conversation with a real person with a cell phone and earbuds who’s agreed to relay her words as a proxy for a minute or two. It makes her seem slightly more human, and the humans slightly more robotic.

Ultimately the question isn’t whether the technology is dangerous. (Unlike, say, Discovery Season 2.) It’s about finding the line between using technology and just offloading our thinking to it.

And I’ll never look at a coupon for “free wings” the same way again.

More info at Mrs. Davis.

Proverbs

2026-03-31T02:44:04Z

★★★★★

Proverbs is like a giant board of Minesweeper, only instead of marking explosives (and tiggering sudden death when you make a mistake), you slowly uncover a giant pixellated painting adapted from Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). And when I say giant, I mean giant. I’ve logged almost 15 hours since I first picked it up, and I’ve cleared less than half of the painting.

Calming, and weirdly addictive. It’s divided into sections based on the image, and as you complete each section the details will fill in, unlocking the specific proverb being illustrated. It auto-saves your progress at the pixel level, so you can fire it up for 5 minutes at a time, a half hour, or find yourself in the zone for longer than you intended and stop when you realize you haven’t actually refilled the glass of water on your desk even though you meant to 20 minutes ago…

The Wind that Sweeps the Stars

2026-03-17T03:55:35Z

Greg Keyes

★★★★☆

One of the things I like about Greg Keyes’ books is that he doesn’t stick to the ISO Standard European Medieval Fantasy setting. (In fact, the first time I read The Briar King I was disappointed that it was so clearly Renaissance Europe.) The Wind that Sweeps the Stars is high fantasy, but the setting, cultures and mythology are inspired by a mix of southwest indigenous American mythology and a vaguely Aztec-like empire.

Yash and Chej are an appealing pair of viewpoint characters: She’s matter-of-fact, a highly trained assassin sent to secure an alliance through marriage if the empire honors it, or take revenge if not. (The betrayal takes all of about five minutes: The empire is invading her country by page one.) He’s a hapless, but well-meaning prince who discovers just how little regard the rest of the aristocracy has for him.

The book’s a series of fights, some mostly physical (and very bloody), some mostly magical. Yash sets out to kill as many of her captors as she can before she’s discovered. (One of the back-cover blurbs compares it to Die-Hard with wizards. I’d also compare it to a dungeon crawl game.) Chej struggles to reconcile his loyalties to an empire that never really had much use for him and his new wife, who does.

Between fights we get brief conversations in which Yash and Chej attempt to catch their breath, some personal flashbacks, and fragments of mythological history. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of other people in the empire who, despite being thoroughly enmeshed in the imperial war machine, might have different priorities if circumstances were different.

It quickly becomes clear that the origin myths are true in the context of the book, as Yash has a second mission in addition to straight-forward vengeance. Her people’s land is in danger, and would still be even if the empire had honored their alliance. To save her future, she needs to take out the captive spirits the empire has used to secure its magical superiority. Not only does that need a different approach than simply killing as many magicians as possible, it turns out to be much bigger than anyone expected.

Spoilers

Mythological

Early on there's a reference to fossils in the context of the world's mythology. That comes back rather spectacularly near the end. It's also adds another layer (pun not intended) to the fact that the empire's power is derived by stealing the essense of others' land.

Gender

The empire's strict patriarchy and rigid gender roles are contrasted more and more strongly over the course of the book against Zeltah's more open sense of identity.

Chej thinks he's still alive because he's kept his secret, but they all know: they just don't want the scandal of admitting one of the royal family is gay, and they've been waiting for an excuse to kill him in a way that will turn his death to political advantage.

Yash, meanwhile, takes advantage of their dismissal of women as potentially dangerous, and is able to stay under the radar longer than she might otherwise. She also turns out to be gender-fluid (her body actually shifts physically, though the book continues referring to her as "she" when it does), but there's never any suggestion that her masculine aspect has anything to do with her ability to deal out violence. In fact, it's only as a man that she's captured at one point.

Among Yash's people, women and men can be leaders or warriors as they choose, and her changing is seen as just how she is. She's utterly baffled as to how Chej has absorbed so much self-loathing from his own culture.

By the end of the night the empire's rigidity is revealed as a weakness, and Chej has started to accept himself a bit more. Not much, but a start.

The Farthest Shore

2026-03-09T19:32:32Z

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★☆

Magic is failing, and a young prince sails the islands with Ged, now older and the Archmage of Earthsea, to seek the cause and resolve the crisis…if it can be resolved.

The Farthest Shore is my least favorite of the original Earthsea trilogy. Part of it is that Arren isn’t as interesting a main character as Ged (in book one) or Tenar (in book two). Part of it is that I was already tired of the return-of-the-king trope when I first read it. And part of it is that the problem is so vaguely defined.

But it’s still quite good (I rated it four stars, after all!), and this time through I appreciated it a lot more than on previous reads. Maybe it’s that I’m more familiar with depression than I was at twelve. Maybe it’s that I’m closer to Sparrowhawk’s age. Or maybe I’m just seeing more connections, now that I’ve read more of Le Guin’s work.

And there’s so much in this one! The people who live on huge rafts, following the ocean currents. Speaking with dragons. Journeying through the land of the dead. Ged being literally the most appropriate person to undo the damage that has been done, not because of the strength of his magic (which is necessary, but not sufficient), but because of what he did and learned in the first novel: The willingness to temper his ambition with full acceptance of who he is.

And this exchange, which has stuck in my head for years:

“The first lesson on Roke, and the last, is: Do what is needful. And no more!”

“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”

“They do.”

In the first book, we see Ged’s thirst for knowledge and power lead him astray. By this time he’s gained real wisdom, and it’s that wisdom that can save the archipelago.

It’s a fitting capstone on the trilogy, and the heroic phase of Ged’s life. And I can see why some readers would want to stop there. But I think it benefits from the perspective gained in the later books.

More info at The Farthest Shore.

Simplenote

2026-03-02T20:10:22Z

★★★★☆

Back when I used it, Simplenote was a solid alternative to Google Keep (cross-platform, but complicated) and iCloud Notes (simple, but only Apple platforms). It supports the basics (notes and tagging), syncs across multiple platforms (including mobile and desktop), and it’s run by a medium-tech platform rather than a big-tech platform. That said, you’re still trusting a cloud platform to not read your data. (It’s not encrypted at rest, only in transit.) I moved from Simplenote to Nextcloud Notes back in 2020 (where does the time go?) as part of my shift toward self-hosting as much as I can.

Simplenote’s future is cloudy, though. Automattic stopped developing new features last year, and they haven’t made any statement on how long they plan to continue maintaining the software or the sync service. On the plus side, the design goals were mostly met, although end-to-end encryption would have been nice.

More info at Simplenote.

Hex Fiend

2026-02-28T00:53:08Z

★★★★★

I’m impressed: Hex Fiend instantly opened an 8.5 gigabyte file I needed to extract some data from. No trouble searching for the starting bytes, no slowdown selecting or deleting multi-gigabyte section, no problem saving the multi-gigabyte result. Yes, this is on a machine with lots of RAM, but even here I’m used to apps choking on files this size. Even BBEdit gets slow when you hand it something that big.

More info at Hex Fiend. Available from Hex Fiend (Installer), GitHub (Source), App Store (Old).

VirtualBox

2026-02-27T05:19:53Z

★★★★☆

Good

Reliable, fast virtualization that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris(!) hosts, and can run lots of different guest operating systems. You can adjust the virtual hardware in a lot more detail than you can with Boxes.

It supports 3D hardware acceleration, and runs Windows 10/11 VMs on Linux hosts much faster than the native KVM system (Boxes, Virt Manager, etc) can. (I can’t even get a Windows 11 guest to run on KVM.) It’s still not as fast at running Windows games as Steam/Proton, but Minecraft (Bedrock Edition) is actually playable in a Windows 11 VM on my Linux host!

I’ve mainly used the RPMFusion packages on Fedora, and it’s been solid. And unlike VMWare, I can actually find it.

Bad

It’s Oracle. That’s another whole post, but thankfully the core application started out as Free Software under the GPL. That makes it easy to package for Linux, hard for Oracle to completely enclose, and legal to use without giving money one of my least favorite tech companies.

Also, it can’t emulate different hardware architectures, and from what I can tell, it’s x86_64 only except on macOS, where it’ll run on either Apple Silicon or Intel (for now).

Ugly

The user interface.

Mouse integration works perfectly until it doesn’t (I had to turn it off for Minecraft, for instance), and then you have to look up the host key (Right-Ctrl by default) to get out of it again.

Some features, like virtual USB devices and disk encryption, require an extension pack, which is licensed separately, either as a paid add-on for commercial use or free for personal use.

Weird, but OK

“Seamless Mode” is supposed to display the guest’s apps as windows directly on your main desktop, instead of putting the entire guest desktop in a window. (Similar to Parallels’ Coherence or VMWare’s Unity.) It doesn’t work that way on my system, probably because I’m running Wayland, and instead it works as an almost full-screen view, but with the GNOME top bar still visible. It makes it a lot easier to switch between guest and host than running it full screen.

More info at VirtualBox.

The Trouble With Oracle

2026-02-27T05:01:29Z

My first impression of Oracle, back in the 1990s, came when the web and Java were new. They were already talking up the idea of replacing the general-purpose personal computer with a thin client and setting up what we now call software as a service. As I got more involved in actually working with computers and client-server applications, I became aware of their flagship database software, which always struck me as overcomplicated.

And they keep buying things I like or use, and messing them up.

You can imagine how thrilled I wasn’t when they bought Sun in order to take over MySQL. That same acquisition brought them OpenOffice, Solaris, and Java. They squandered OpenOffice so badly that by the time they handed it off to Apache, most Linux distributions had already switched to the brand-new fork LibreOffice…and to MariaDB, an equally new fork of MySQL. (MySQL still has the name recognition, but it’s not what gets bundled with Linux distros anymore.) They also squandered Solaris, but it’s technically still around, and it’s not as if AIX or HP-UX or any of the other commercial Unixes have done better.

Don’t even get me started on Java licensing, or their copyright lawsuit against Google over programming APIs. (On the plus side, a decade later we finally got a Supreme Court ruling that programming to match an API is fair use, because that’s what APIs are for.)

There’s the poor usability of their website. The security alerts that consist of essentially “there’s a security alert, now go log into your account so you can find out if you’re using anything affected.” It’s one of those B2B companies that does some consumer business as almost an afterthought, like Broadcom. Their cloud service has multiple complaints of them arbitrarily canceling accounts in their free tier.

And then there’s Larry Ellison, who bought an entire Hawaiian island to be his personal resort. (OK, technically he “only” bought 98% of Lānaʻi, but I couldn’t help think of it when reading Invasive.) And who bought CBS/Paramount (and now Warner Bros/Discovery) to give his son something to do and, judging by its editorial interference, to suppress news coverage critical of the Trump administration.

Sure, they’re hardly the only tech company that’s on board with undermining democracy if it helps them turn a bigger profit, but even Google and Microsoft have some redeeming qualities.

Heaven's Vault (Novels)

2026-02-19T05:04:09Z

Jon Ingold

★★★★☆

There are many paths through the Nebula, and many ways to reach a destination. The novels based on Heaven’s Vault, by the same writer as the game’s narrative, tell the story of one such path, and what comes after (and before).

The first two books, The Loop and The Vault, follow archaeologist Aliya and her robot Six through a story close to, but not quite the same as a play-through of the game. Side quests are left out, some incidents are rearranged, and flashbacks tell the story of El and Oroi exploring the decaying buildings of Elboreth as orphan children, and how Aliya found the Nightingale. You get to meet a couple of her older robots, including the very talkative Three, and a (thematically appropriate) seventh robot from before Iox.

They’re different enough from an actual playthrough that it still feels like you’re experiencing something new if you’ve played the game, and tell a solid enough narrative that you don’t need to have played the game to read them (though I imagine the target audience is mainly people who have).

The second book diverges further from the game in details. In part it’s because a linear story can only have one path, so I think the author was trying to combine elements of different paths through the game that block each other out. (This is one reason the game is so replayable: you want to see what would have happened if you’d made a different choice.)

Sailing the rivers is much more physical than the calm, flow-state experience in the game, more like actually sailing a small boat. Aliya strains muscles, the boat crashes into the occasional rock (and moon), she gets injured, the boat needs to be repaired.

Translating Ancient

Ancient writing is woven throughout the books. Fragments introduce some chapters, along with the numerals. Scene breaks use the glyph for separation.

The experience of actively translating is, well, translated to prose by showing Aliya and Six puzzling out the meaning based on how the glyphs combine. Some bits are translated completely, others partially, some left as extras for the reader. At one point in book three Aliya spends several pages trying to work out whether it’s even possible to translate names from written Ancient to modern Ioxian or Elborethian, aside from the one name, Mazwai, that has survived the ages with context intact.

Occasionally a chapter is introduced with passages from Mazai’s writings, credited here as being translated by Huang or Aliya.

Before and After

The third book, The Flood, gets weird.

It picks up in the aftermath of one of the endgame choices (you can probably guess which one from the title), as the moons are cut off from each other, and Aliya and the people of Elboreth attempt to deal with their new reality of too much water instead of too little.

A secondary story thread follows Mazwai herself in another age. It gets into some of the bigger questions about the Loop: Is it real? If so, is time a literal loop in which the future becomes the past, or is it linear, but with similar events recurring? Are people really reborn time and time again in different ages? And just what does a robot’s Ethical Core mean, anyway?

Book four is coming later this year. I’m looking forward to reading it. For now, I’m playing through the game for the third time.

Available from Inkle Bookstore.

Bitwarden

2026-02-19T04:38:51Z

★★★★☆

As password managers go, I like Bitwarden better than LastPass. It’s got a better track record certainly, and it’s encrypted in a way that makes it really difficult for someone to break into your vault, but it’s still a cloud service, which carries some risks.

It’s got a web app, mobile app and browser extensions, of course, and the browser extension (Chromium-based, Firefox-based and Safari) has a convenient keyboard shortcut to auto-fill on demand. There’s also a desktop app, which is useful when logging into desktop or command-line applications. I haven’t used the mobile app, but the others run more smoothly than LastPass.

As well as passwords, it’ll store SSH keys and payment cards, and it can act as a TOTP authenticator. That’s certainly convenient, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having two-factor authentication, if you’re using the same vault for a password and its 2FA codes.

It does share the same problem I’ve found with LastPass and KeePassXC-Browser, which is when you generate a new password for a site that’s already in your vault, it doesn’t always get updated automatically. I’ve taken to copying the generated password to the clipboard just in case I need to paste it back into the login record.

Personal accounts have a free tier, and the current pricing is reasonable ($20/year individual, or $48/year for a family of up to 6). In addition to shared vaults, organizations can self-host their vaults, which provides more control and keeps the vault inside your network.

More info at Bitwarden.