Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

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.

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…

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

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.

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.