Being able to quickly write replies to email, real actual email, was very valuable. That was the core of what drew me to Delta Chat.
There are plenty of proprietary email apps set up around that feature but in the free world, not so much. Delta Chat was it and it was a gem because it was in many ways better than those other sparks and spikes and whatever they were called. Not to mention the incredible leap of faith it takes to go for a proprietary mail app since they can read the emails.
Delta Chat is rapidly moving away from being usable for that. If someone forks it or finds a good alternative (that’s FOSS, obvs), I would love to know.
I know I’ve worked a little on Notmuch, and I’ve talked a little bit with the people who make aerc, but for all their conveniences they’re still traditional mail apps where the threads look like files that you have to open up and enter into and work with. The few extra clicks involved with using a normal mail app might sound like no big deal but it really adds up. All the opening, searching, archiving, threads management… Whereas with Delta Chat in its prime, you just see the message right away and can reply right away. Easy peasy.
Maybe K-9 but it got bought out by Mozilla and they hate autocrypt which I don’t. I think WKD is better, sure, but I try to use both. K-9 used to be one of the best autocrypt clients out there.
Last night as I was lying in bed I was thinking “wait, wasn’t there some book I was reading that I wanted to continue?” and that thought made me happy but then I became sad because I remembered that I already had finished it that morning. Reading this was a mistake because it was so much better than all the, I dunno, eighteen or nineteen other books I’m currently reading and now I almost don’t wanna go back to them.
Yes, it is very derivative of True Grit so if you’ve ever wanted to read a version of True Grit that’s actually good, well, here you are.
Except for the copaganda ending which I didn’t like (I oppose prisons, and the Phantom Zone is a nightmarish version of that), this was a fantastic read.
You really get to feel that you’re Supergirl’s friend on this long odyssey through space. The pacing and scope is masterful. This beats any other novel in the areas this is good at.
Okay, this one was a disappointment. Not that bad but not good either. 3 out of 10.
Having an ingenious timeline and a clever solution and an eccentric detective and a very video-gamey setup are all plusses in my book. The meta-stuff “let us admit we are characters in a novel and not make excuses” is tired now but perhaps wasn’t when this book came out in the thirties.
But what then sinks the book somewhat—not all the way to the bottom, but down from the lofty perches of modern classics, is unclear, dense, overly witty writing without clear attribution to who is saying what when. This would work better as a comic book since it’s a formless of talking heads where you always need to keep careful track of parity to know who is saying what.
There’s only a decade between Lord of the Rings and Dune but the latter is way more post-modern. Not that LotR isn’t pomo, because it is, but Dune takes it a couple of notches further.
It’s so wild to me that this book came out in 1965, a few years before the six days war and on the bleeding edge of LSD hyperawareness, because this book is a trip and a half. Then again, it’s three years after the Lawrence of Arabia movie.
It’s a bummer that, also like LotR, the dose has been so diluted by the osmosis effect of knowing the gist of the story through video games, movies (it’s been adapted directly three times—I had seen the first half of the second movie of the 2020s version—but so many of its ideas have been in other movies like Star Wars), and board games. The “War for Arrakis” game pretty much spoils the entire thing. Because finding this book off a shelf without knowing anything about it and just taking a deep dive into the text as it is would’ve been such an experience.
Even diluted by the aforementioned pre-exposure through osmosis, this book packs a heckuva punch. I’ve been diving into New Wave SF lately (K. Le Guin, Tiptree… and I’m running a new-wave–inspired D&D campaign) and loving it, and wow is this book a tour de showcase for the new wave! Strong worldbuilding, fresh new perspectives, out with the old.
Except not entirely. Some moldy old baggage is still in here. Not only do we have the tired old evil “white, blue-blooded savior with the Magical Royal Bloodline” tropes that plagues Star Wars, there’s also a Cerberus-esque idea about “the only man born to a tribe of women and he is immediately a Marty Stu Messiah of Ganondorfian proportions” with inner lights and voids that seems ripped from the pages of Reads. Not into it!
The translation by Gabriel Setterborg is also hard to review since for the first several chapters it seemed the work of a true poet and then for the latter half of the book it seems he completely dropped the ball and phoned a first-draft in (inluding the glossary at the end, which has several errors). Overall it’s okay and the book definitively stays readable, compelling even.
I’m gonna land on an overall reco for the book and the less you’ve been exposed to Dune already (through other media versions) the more I recommend it. I’m giving it a 7/10 and I immediately started reading the next book in the series (and I’m fifteen pages in on that as of writing this).
I feel like the big difference between the Pluribus hivemind vs either of the two most obvious comparisons—Meta’s social networks and LLM’s like ChatGPT—is that those two are corporate-owned. Pluribus is “imposed” in a lot of the ways they are but not all: if the “psychic glue” description ends up being true that’s a lot more grassrootsy, a lot more like “just a really, really good language”, like the Tower of Babel undone and human communion healed and perfected. And unlike the fantastic Body Snatcher’s trilogy or misguided and un-thought-through “upload” transhumanist fiction, the “that’s fun for my copy, but how about me?” template doesn’t apply either. It’s less getting “scanned and copied” and more “joining up”.
And if those descriptions of “oh it’s so great we’re all still here we’re just swimming around lovingly in each other’s thoughts so happily” are not true, if that’s a rugpull waiting to happen, we’re getting closer to the kind of science fiction I don’t like. We’ve seen the hivemind be duplicitous and work surreptiously and deceptively already so there’s no guarantee that they’re telling te truth, but, if the story is gonna be about whether or not they’re telling the truth, that’s gonna be a so much more boring story than if it’s a “okay here is how it works; we’ve been honest about how it works, would you join and if no why not and if yes why” story which to me is much a more interesting dilemma and situation to explore. And Rhea Seehorn is great. I’m so happy that she gets a new vehicle to really shine in.
Compile is a game-with-content since the basic ludemic operations (flip, shift, cover, draw etc) are concatenated in various combinations into cards so that they can sell cards endlessly. I don’t like that. But for a game-with-content it’s unbelievably bland. Cards don’t have their own flavor or even their own name.
But oh, how fun and good the core game play is inspite of that (and the off-putting AI theme). I love playing it.
Another drawback is that it’s also a challenging game of memory and prediction and tempo/sente that I wouldn’t pick when I just wanted light-hearted fun with a friend that’s not that into games. But Forth programmers should feel right at home.
What makes it so much more fun than Battle Line et al is the protocol limitation and how you can rearrange protocols. A version of this with the regular French-suited deck would still be fun; you can only play cards for their full face-up value in the matching lines but if you have control you can rearrange protocols when you refresh or compile.
Like a bridge over troubled water
—Simon & Garfunkel
Yay, a novel written in the first person! Yeah, yeah, present tense which isn’t wholly my jam but compared to the limited third person that’s been every single book for the past hundred years this is a every welcome breath of fresh air. I’ve read a couple of Kadefors’ earlier books and I love them. This is her most recent (that I know of) and I recommend it as a good starting point as sort of a greatest hits of a lot of her earlier tropes.
Her specialty is people whose values lead them astray or who can’t live up to their own ideals and often with main PoV chars that are clearly messed up and there’s no risk of conflating them with being spokespeople for the author. They’re just so starkly self-important running 10000 mph into their own walls and fences. But it’s not a “laughing at them” style of writing, either. We feel for them and with them.
I recently read Jennette McCurdy’s autobiography (which I bought the same day as I bought Silver) and that one had a rhythm to it where at the end of each chapter the knife would twist further. That’s not what this is; Silver (which is fiction) has more of a symphonic descent into hecked-up–ness.
An editor (or the author herself) has decided to italicize English words that are common in Swedish but not lexicalized yet, like “pipe” and “make” which are spelled like they are in English. While others like “hike” are spelled “hajk” which has been a Swedish for for longer. But it’s only handful of words in the entire 246 page book i.e. nothing I need to write a whole essay about. The 246 is an awkward page count since it means the last ten pages are blank to get to an even printing signature count. Write your own ending?♥︎ This is Piratförlaget so pages are miscut and reading the book quickly gives a jittery and uneven appearance as the page number sometimes is precariously close to falling off the page and other times sit comfortably in the margin.
After reading a bunch of 20th century classics it’s jarring to read a 2024 book that’s unambiguously 2024:
Just thinking about giving up hair dye makes me feel like I’m losing control. I can’t do anything about melting glaciers, oil leaks, fish death, Ukraine, Gaza, civil wars, Huthi rebels, gun violence, racism, fascism, extremism, or Donald Trump, but I can do something about my hair.
It’s a book about hair but also a book about writing, being stuck in art, and being alone and navigating rejection. It doesn’t wind its strings as tight as Kadefors’s own Fågelbovägen 32 or the aforementioned McCurdy bio let alone standing at the end of all things staring a the salt dunes as in The Drought, but it’s about it’s own flavor of calamity and a wonderful read in its own right. Really what I needed right now and I’m grateful for it.
I wish I could’ve seen it when you blew up your television
—Baxter
So this review is going to be very spoilery so please just go read the book; start with other Gibson books (like Burning Chrome, which is referenced and spoiled here in Count Zero) before this one, though, unless you really want to jump in the deep end first.
This is the kind of book that makes me happy all day because I know I’m soon going to get to get back to reading it. Like “Lalala I’m washing the dishes and existence is pain but that’s okay because soon I’m gonna get to sit down for a few chapters of Count Zero so it’s a good day.”
Just iconic genre fun like a good super hero comic. Yeah, yeah, there are issues of Spider-Man that are like truly profound but I wouldn’t be reading Spidey if it weren’t for how just the average day of swinging webs and hanging out with Felicia and Jonah is just inherently fun.
Count Zero is the second book in the Sprawl trilogy but some of the short stories in Burning Chrome is also set in that world and my reco would be to start there. The Sprawl books were notoriously dense with its own lingo of slang and brand names, both of them both real and made up, and had a reputation of being hard to understand back in the day.
Maybe that reputation wasn’t entirely unearned because just look at how much the back copy of my edition got wrong. Even the publisher’s apparently didn’t really know what they had on their hands. Buckle up for spoilers for the first several chapters:
Hallucination by consensus
Okay, maybe that’s fine, an improvement even. The line in the book is “consensual hallucination” as a sort of Stanisław Lem–like metaphor for the internet in a book that came out six years after Usenet and the same year that IETF was founded. (Hold on, I shouldn’t be so 1986 about it because Burning Chrome was 1981 and that’s where a lot of the themes were already established.)
When the Angels pulled Count Zeor out of the matrix there wasn’t much left of him. The centipede did a good job on his face though—and now Two-a-Day was going to let him in on the really big stuff…
He gets pulled out of the matrix by someone else, which is one of the mysteries the book gradually reveals—and that’s part of why I love Gibson’s books so much; the framework is super weird but it’s not the tension driver, there are always real and clear stakes and mysteries. Sometimes cheap McGuffin’s like the clip in Pattern Recognition or the goggles in Virtual Light or the boxes, job, and mysterious saviour here, but it works.
Then he gets cut up IRL by some gangers and that state of bleeding out on the pavement is what the Angels (Rhea and Jackie) pull him out of. Much to the consternation of Two-a-Day; it’s not him that’s “letting” Count Zero in on anything voluntarily.
And the centipede fixes up Count Zero’s back and chest, not face.
Unlike Turner:
Turner woke up in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him. They let him recuperate for a while in Mexico, then Hosaka reactivated his memory for the most dangerous mission of all: to make Mitchell defect from Maas Biolabs…
Yep, he more or less does get a new body but then he decides on his own to go to Mexico and he meets Allison there. And while she’s beautiful, the limited third person narration (yeah I know…) makes a point of how she isn’t the cookie-cutter model type he’s usually been hooking up with. And while it’s a surprise reveal late first chapter that she’s a field psych on retainer for Hosaka, Turner isn’t shown to have had his memory “inactive”. They show up and bring him in for a job; not to “make” (convince) Mitchell to defect, but to bring him in safely since he is trying to defect.
It seemed that the rich had long ceased to be recognisably human. Like Virek, whose body was suspendend in a vat somewhere while his hologram told Marly that he wanted her to find some Art Works for him. And that she was on the payroll for life…
(CW body horror for this part.) Suspended less like a person floating in a bacta tank and more like how a sugar cube is “suspended” in hot coffee cell by cell.
The capitalization of “Art Works” is def on this back copy writer and what Virek wants is the artist that made them. Marly’s only on payroll for that one mission. “On the payroll for life” sounds so ominous but when reading the book (I read the book before I read the back copy, which I always waint until last, since some books, like Vian’s L’Automne à Pékin, spoil the entire ending on the back copy, which I think is bad practice but unfortunately common enough. Yeah, yeah, this review is pretty spoileriffic too but my reviews aren’t as much meant as pre-reading consumer guidance as they are, uh, ways for me to reflect on what I’ve read and what I like and don’t like about it, and what writers can learn from it) I actually thought “wait she’s on all-expenses-paid on very expensive and luxurious mission but what about her own future after the mission is done? Does she get salary or a reward fee or something?”
Also (but this is a nitpick among nitpicks) in the novel’s setting, holograms (which project into IRL, for ads or religious iconography or porn) are distinct from the type of brain-local simstim Virek appears through.
In the matrix of cyberspace—where zaibatsus fought it out for world domination and the computer jocks risked their minds scuffling for fat crumbs—the lives of three human beigs were inextricably scrambled.
Okay, this was the last paragraph of the back copy and it’s pretty accurate. No notes. I love the redudancy of “in the matrix of cyberspace”. It’s actually weird to me how in the novel, cyberspace a.k.a. the matrix (both terms are used interchangeably) is simultaneously this vast giga space of a bajillion users, while also being something that only hotdoggers and cowboys can go on (at one point Count Zero gets hold up three hours in customs just for the audacity of having a means to go online with), while also being explicitly geographic. You need to literally fly around in there in some low-rez Vectrex game with electrodes on your head. You can’t just type in alt.cyberpunk and teleport there. And that ginormous world is so small so you might accidentally end up in LA when you’re heading to Japan and you always run into people you know on there like elephants in a phonebooth.
Another indication that this book might’ve been more than the publisher could handle was that there are a lot of small errors (in my 1987 paperback copy) like a “two” that should’ve been a “too”, a “however” that became a “whoever”, inconsistent capitalization, and things like that that would’ve slipped through a spellcheck and an overwhelmed, zonked-out, future-shocked editor. This book must’ve been a mind bomb for ‘em!
It sounds like I’m making fun of the book and I am a little—I can’t help it, it’s so fun, this world of broadcast simstim, telefaxes, newsloops, music cassettes, and mono-molecule everything, written in an era before CDs and Netscape, but there’s really a lot to seriously like here, too. Everyone’s in a while you find these fun anachronisms (which Gibson himself caricatured with such precision in The Gernsback Continuum), postcards from a world that could’ve been but wasn’t, but that’s not the brunt of the text.
Okay, yeah, references are the brunt of the text but they’re of four kinds:
So while yes, the main “plot” of the novel is a distant second to cramming in a zillion references a minute, but those references are a delight because only a tiny li’l mini fraction of them are in that fourth “wrong guess” category (and they’re much more fun than they are annoying). Gibson didn’t set out to only be a futurologist. This is a novel, and it does work as novel with great character work and real tension drivers, and it also works as poetry with these dense sentences in a language all his own.
There’s only a few crumbs that get stuck like how Jackie has decorated her hair with antique resistors; beats like that come across as a fetishization of tech that’s uncharacteristic of the rest of the novel.
The latter Pattern Recognition (one of my favorite books of all time) is in many ways a remake of the Marly section of Count Zero. Excentric curator gets sponsored by even excentricker ultra rich but problematic guy to find anonymous creator of tightly curated art where the journey is more interesting than the destination. Not that either book is a shaggy-dog exactly; there is an interesting-enough pot of gold at the end of these rainbows but in both cases, the real treasure is the friends we made along the way. (And I need to go on AO3 to search for Marly/Rez ship fics.)
In the case of Count Zero, that might be underselling it a little because I really did think that was a beautiful and curious and interesting revelation scene for the artist at work, marred a little by (spoiler for dumb ending detail but it’s not the whole thing) Virek’s completely misguided attempt to somehow upload into a computer.
I also almost never get bugged by characters making mistakes like I’m not the one to shout “nooo don’t go into the basement” when watching a horror movie because usually I’m myself slow-witted enough to be three steps behind the movie characters so I never think of realizing that they’re making mistakes, so it’s a rare exception that here I felt that Marly’s policy of not reading the provided reports because they might “interfere with my intuition” got annoying after that policy had blown up for the second time and it kept blowing up a couple of more times after that until it through a couple of ex machinas stopped blowing up. I was like “okay, yeah, you’ve learned by now that those reports have some pretty vital info so read them now, please”. I get that the policy from an authorial standpoint was great because it made us get the highlights as infodumps from side characters instead of like how in Rice’s latter The Witching Hour there’s “read this report, please” followed by a couple of hundred pages of the actual report that the reader has to slog through, so I’m glad Gibson tried something else here, but it started putting a starin on both the story’s credibility and Marly’s likeability.
Conclusion: a banger book that I absolutely loved and will probably reread many times. My reco is, and I hope this doesn’t come across as gatekeeping because if you wanna dive in here you can, is to instead start with other Gibsons, like the Burning Chrome short story that’s featured in the collection of the same name, or books from the Bridge trilogy or the Blue Ant trilogy, but if you have, then this is another great one.
I live by the ocean and during the night
— Björk
Let’s sail all the way out to the sea to a tiny speck of an island where we can explicate and externalize and incarnate our hitherto unspoken grawing worries and fears, Liminalize the subliminal, break on through to the other side, scratch and breach the subdermal in a land of shortening days and dwindling lamp oil.
That’s what the Moomin family does in this 1965 classic, penultimate in the Moomin series and sort of a sister book to the 1970 Moominvalley in November. At least, that’s how I always thought of it because the Moomin books, the eight illustrated prose novels (well, one of them, the best one, is a short story collection) are presented as one set, the full-on picture books as one set, and the comics (Newspaper strips) as one set.
These last two books really feel like her bookend on the Moomin series, and her own run on the comics are all from in between the previous books and she had passed that baton by the time of Moominpappa at Sea, but I think one or two of the picture books are actually later. I should make an “intertwined timeline” at one point mostly for my own benifit so I can see where each comic storyline was published in between which novel and so on.
I had read one or two of the Moomin books as a very young girl but when I was twelve I checked out the entire set from the library and read them more coherently. These two last book (this one is the seventh out of eight) really felt like a “aargh, to heck with this! Let’s twist the dagger in this series” sort of like The Silver Chair is to the Narnia series.
And as I told some of y’all the other day, this book was always the scariest and creepiest to me for how it’s liminal, how it’s twilight to the last book, Moominvalley in November being full dark no stars and easier to understand and grasp and dive into, especially after having made it through this one.
But the sea isn’t just dark and drowning. It’s also glistening and sparkling and fresh. There is a dawn after this twilight and the way it’s set up and delivered is note by note perfect. This book can be your map through the dusk and into the new and unhurried, unworried life. A timeless classic.
It’s just coindence that I wrapped up two 1965 books just after one another, this and The Drought. Both similarly liminal and would make great companion pieces for each other.
I will watch the last sunrise
—The Handsome Family, “If the world should end in fire”
So The Drought, from 1965. I loved The Crystal World and I love how different this is. Crystal World came after but is absolutely no retread. Ballard grows as an author in my appreciation for creating two masterpieces that are so different from each other. That’d be like if Mondrian had also made The Last Supper in between his haunting plastic visions.
Years ago I bought a box of a hundred postcards depicting paper back covers. The four that made the biggest impression on me were a collection of Heine poems with a mindblowing op art cover, Iris McCullough’s A Severed Head with that just-manic-enough stare, and the contrasting dichotomy of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and The Drought. I always wanted to read them. Turned out that it’s not just two books, it’s an entire series. I managed to read The Crystal World a few years ago, in Swedish; this copy of The Drought was in English.
The fact that it’s in English meant it was rough going at first since I had been spoiled of reading a whole bunch of novels in Swedish lately. I read way slower in English (not that I’m that good at Swedish either). It was also rough going because of how bleak it is and how close to home it hits in this era of climate desolation and stubborn denial. We’re currently living in The Burning World and our World Leaders are still pouring gallons of gasoline on those flames.
J.G. Ballard crams his prose ful of comparisons. Everything is like something else. Sometimes it just falls flat and looks dumb like when mud looks like lava or whatever but often it adds to the experience more often than not. One of my faves is an early description of how car drivers are throwing their cigarettes out the window as they’re crossing the bridge and that act of poisonous littering looks somehow beautiful.
That’s a theme for the entire novel. Making ugly things beautiful and vice versa. There’s a “drowned” aquarium (an aquarium where the water hasn’t been changed) and the tropical fish are fraying like gossamer. It’s a meditative and enriching read.
That’s why it stings so much that the main character is such a racist, ableist, ageist, and cissexist (and initially fatphobic but he gets over that). Some of the secondary progragonists are African American, old, hydrocephalic, blind, or (shock horror) female, and the third-person narration never shies away from expressing that in slurs. Not only through slurs for those particular groups (but there’s a lot of that) but also “collateral slurs” like one of the worst words for Artic First Nations women that someone else gets compared to.
I wonder if it had been more palatable if this book instead just had been a first person account by this Dr Ransom main character because the third person voice makes it seems like the author himself is down with the sickness. The choice of third person is effective when it comes to barfing forth apocalyptica (and yes the book makes me wanna run TRPGs) in all its ugly beauty, and the book has three parts and each part starts more “zoomed out” and the third-person-ness makes that seamless; it can describe the lay of the land and then jump right onto the shoulder of a PoV char. But I have no idea of knowing that. Maybe it would be even worse.
And maybe this is just J.G. Ballard’s own language of blood purity and strong river men coming at us through the ages. It’s been sixty years since the book was written but I would hope that even then this would’ve been beyond the pale.
The particular flavor of apocalypse is haunting and timeless. I was lightly teasing Count Zero the other day for its telefaxes and rooftop antennae (all in good fun because that one does seems like a marvelous books) but this has almost nothing like that. I never get jarred awake from “this could happen”. Okay yeah one thing: mosquitos would decrease in number during a drought, not increase. But that’s just one sentence.
I’m giving this book a strong reco if you can stomach the assorted slurs. I’m not excusing them or saying “it was a different time”—the book would 100% have been better without them. But there’s enough “here” here in the location work and themes that carries the book into an unforgettable nightmare that our noble leaders are dragging us towards in real life.
Sometimes a movie that comes out later in the series takes place before the ones that came earlier. One of the best examples I could find was The Scorpion King 2. It’s got a number in the title, is intended to be watched after The Scorpion King pt 1, only makes sense if you watch it after, but takes place before.
I’m gonna call these kinds of movies “prequels”. Watch after, takes place before. Easy peasy. And there are many, many other examples of prequels without a number in the title. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind. Watch after Raiders of the Lost Ark but takes place before. (Or maybe don’t watch it. I’m maybe not the biggest fan of the two first Indy movies.)
Contrasted with them are “lost episodes”. Made after, or at least published after, but totally makes sense to be seen before. These are rarer.
I’m not going to police anyone else’s usage of these concepts, but please don’t “carrot and cigarette” me either: I am making a distinction between these two types of movies for the purpose of this essay only. “Takes place before but should be seen after” (prequels) vs “Takes place before and can, if you want, be seen before”, or even “should be seen before” (lost episodes). I need two words (and I went with “prequels” vs “lost episodes” here) for two concepts. But I don’t mean to from now on and for all time be the source of a bunch of “well actually” if other people use these words more loosely or even oppositely.
Okay, with definitions sorted, now it’s time for Star Wars talk! Yes, that’s right, as per ushe it’s the 50 year old science fantasy franchise that’s completely out of fashion and keeps losing money and I can’t stop talking about because I love it so much!
When Star Wars came out it had an “opening crawl” akin to the old Flash Gordon serials. “This is what has come before, this is what’s in the episodes you missed”. Then when the sequel came out, it wasn’t called Star Wars two. It was called Star Wars five! Episode V! And the original was rereleased with an “Episode IV” added in!
Then many years later episodes I, II, and III were made. I’m not here to pile on the hate against them. I’m personally not a fan of their look and atmosphere and the space ship designs in them or the milieus and world building but I love the characters. That’s right, I’m a Jar Jar Binks yaysayer! Okay, okay, Hayden sucks in II and III but he was just a kid, the director needs to have some responsibility too. And there are some dumb plot points here and there. Uh, wait, if I’m gonna start listing everything I don’t like about the prequels we’re gonna be here all day. Or if I’m gonna start defending them against totally unfair and exaggerated take downs like Plinkett then we’d also be here all days.
Let’s narrow it down to just “prequel” vs “lost episode” talk.
They suck as lost episodes. Completely do not do the job. In the eigthies, we were daydreaming about things from the past like those “clone wars” mr Obi-Wan was talking about (or was he a clone? His name sounds a li’l OB1-like!). Or I should say in the 90s from me because my first experience with the original Episode IV (outside of getting to hear a few glimpses of the audio book version from the older kids in the eighties—I was born in 1980) was the 1992 Game Boy game. That’s right, I first heard Cantina theme as a chip tune and it’s still caught in my head to this day. And it’s really cool that we got to see all this stuff finally. That scene especially when, uh, sorry, almost spoiled end of Episode III but it’s a scene I had heard about since 80s (yes, since before Game Boy game, in the “playground lore” era of my Star Wars experience).
They don’t work as lost episodes. You’re supposed to watch IV and V before I, II, and III, and given that, the title scheme is indulgent and dumb. Why don’t they work? Because not only do they spoil a couple of key beats of the original prequel, they undermine so many more. It’s really cool when such-and-such first show up but it’s less cool when you’ve seen a way more baller version of them in the preq, or even when it’s a way dorkier version of them as it in some cases!
So, not hating on the preqs, but just saying there’s a reason why IV, V, VI is called the original trilogy and that I, II, and III is called the prequel trilogy. If they had been made as true lost episodes, maybe they would’ve gotten the appellation “original trilogy”. Origin of the story, first three episodes. And then IV, V, and VI would’ve been called the “Luke trilogy” or something. But obviously that didn’t happen because the prequels are not lost episodes in this sense.
Neither is Solo. It’s a prequel. It’s Han Solo’s origin story, it’s a movie I really enjoy, have watched it a bunch of times and look forward to watching it again, but it’s full of in-jokes that’s gonna be way more fun if you’ve seen the original movies first and vice versa it spoils and undermines a couple of beats from them.
Now, how about Andor and Rogue One? They’re lost episodes. Not only do they fill in the gap of what happened in the opening crawl of episode IV, which a prequel could also have done, they really do work as lost episodes. They don’t spoil or undermine a single character. All things that are chilling or amazing when they first show up in the original movies? That’s just built up in Andor and Rogue One, not torn down or deconstructed or outshone. I did find one single counter example and that’s the AT-AT. That’s the sole undermined thing. A vehicle that’s supposed to look cool when you first see it, and you get now that reaction in Rogue One rather than in Empire. Contrasted with the millions of things that’d be spoiled or undermined by watching preqs first, both the quantity and the magnitude of those things. Other things that are in Andor or Rogue One but show up in the original trilogy, they’re only made even more fearsome by their depictions in Andor and Rogue One.
It’s lost-episode-recursion since Rogue One is a lost episode to what was made and published before it (episode IV), and then Andor is a lost episode again, this time to Rogue One. And Andor is a true lost episode (rather than just a prequel) to Rogue One and then the whole package is a true lost episode to Episode IV. You can watch the three (the Andor series as a whole, Rogue One, and then the original 1977 Star Wars later numbered “episode IV”) in any order and they’ll make sense and not ruin anything, and they things you recognize from what you saw before is only going to make what you see after more awesome. If you want chronological order, i.e. Andor first, then Rogue One, then Episode IV? It works. Five out of the six possible permutations (AR4, RA4, 4RA, R4A, to a lesser extent 4AR, and probably not A4R) work as rewarding first-watch-orders. It’s great. It’s a remarkable achievement.
Now, there’s one really good reason to do publication order, and that’s demographic. Star Wars (1977) is a pew pew space opera with wide appeal. Andor is a grown-up John le Carré, Patricia Highsmith, Jean-Paul Sartre slow-moving high-stakes, “gritty” story in the grim darkness of the faraway galaxy where there is only war. It’s too cruel, it’s too scary, it’s too subtle sometimes, it’s too intense other times. I think Andor is the best show ever made and Rogue One is a perfect movie. But I’m not sure they have the same wide appeal as Star Wars did that summer of 1977. I’ve heard Andor called a boring show and it lost a ton of money. Which, while it’s always great to hear about megacorporations losing money, says something about the limited audience for it. Don’t mistake that as “I’m such a special girl for liking hard-to-like things” bragging. I’m not happy about being a weirdo. I never signed up for it.
I don’t like burying the lede and I try to make sure to get my main point across early, even in the title if possible. But in this case we’re talking about a major spoiler to the novel Shutter Island so I’m being deliberately vague.
I know that even knowing that a work is unusually spoilable and twist-laden is in and of itself a spoiler so I’m hoping the title I chose, “How Shutter Island got the name wrong”, doesn’t ruin that much for people who haven’t read it and are just scrolling through a list of essay titles.
Because this essay is gonna talk about stuff that only makes sense if you do know the ending to this book (and as I understand it, the movie does follow the book very closely). So from now on, read on at your own peril.
Okay, here we go.
One thing that would’ve made a lot more sense in Shutter Island would’ve been if the patient’s real name would’ve been the same as the detective; Edward Daniels.
Because it makes more sense medically that someone would forget two years of their life and why they’re on the island and why they’re no longer a US marshal, than that someone would forget all of that and also their name. For example, anterograde amnesia could explain the time gap but even then he’d still know his own name.
Global amnesia (having retrograde and anterograde amnesia at the same time) is common but in this particular case the patient does seem to mostly remember his own past. The name thing is so out of place from the rest of the symptoms.
And it’s strange how small the fix would’ve been and how little else in the book would’ve changed. He could still have been looking for “Andrew Laeddis” since all the clues were in anagrams. He never even looked at the intake form so that could’ve said “Edward Daniels” all along.
Talking about Light Phone 3 and Mudita Kompakt while having seen neither device, and also some talk about InkPalm Plus, Nokia 8210, iPad Pro, and the old Mudita Pure, all of which I’ve used extensively.
The Mudita Kompakt is shipping April 2025.
I like that it can read epubs and I like the offline button.
The one thing it’s really missing is a hotspot feature! The original Pure made a big deal of how it had a wired equivalent of a hotspot, letting you do email on a computer in a focused way then unplug it when you were on the go. You work through your emails with a real keyboard at a real work station, and don’t get sucked into jankily thumbing at them on the train when you could be reading. That was a great idea… that didn’t work with iPad, only with laptops. Having a hotspot feature would be a way to realize that dream. Maybe there is a hotspot feature, it’s just not clear from the Kickstarter campaign.
I preordered Light Phone 3 which (if everything stays on track) is shipping January. My current Nokia dumbphone is a mess that keeps crashing—today was especially rough as I was dealing with a family emergency and my Nokia phone kept crashing so hard that I had to take out the battery to restart it, so January can’t come soon enough.
And (please please please don’t boo me too much, I’m already regretting it so much) I got an InkPalm Plus too, as a “companion device”. It sucks—the battery life on the InkPalm is really really bad (and this is a brand new device… And the battery is not replaceable so this InkPalm is a living piece of e-waste) and Delta Chat crashes so my only hope for doing email from it is ConnectBot. It’s actually really really good at reading books, but I had Simon’s decade-old used Kindle to do that. While the InkPalm is much much better at it, I didn’t need “better” when I already had “good enough”. I use the InkPalm currently to listen to podcasts but the LP3 will handle podcasts when it comes.
If-and-only-if there is a hotspot feature on the Kompakt (and it otherwise delivers on its promises), that makes me really kick myself for going with the LP3+InkPalm combo. Because this seems like both-in-one in a good way. The dimensions of the Kompakt, 128 x 70 x 12.6 mm, are really great for me. (That’s also why I don’t have Fairphone, the new ones are way too big.)
I still have my Mudita Pure (I helped work on it♥︎) in a drawer here. I love the shape of it but the build quality (button feel, slider quality etc) was not good and I had lots of dropped calls and audio issues. It’s one of my few phones that never broke—I keep it “as a spare”—but it’s just too janky to use. But there’s nothing to say that the Mudita Kompakt will make the same mistakes. They might and they mightn’t, but I’d be willing to risk getting “fooled again”, betting that they learned from the Pure. We’ll see. 💁🏻♀️
Camera: while the Kompakt’s 8MP camera is nothing compared to LP3’s 50 MP camera, it’s way better than my Nokia 8210s crappy 0.3 MP camera and even the 2DS’ 0.5 MP camera, although they’re worse than my iPad’s 12 MP. And I’m fine with the photos being in eink on-device, they’ll be in color when moved to another device.
Now to the second best part (after reading ebooks):
Unlike the Light Phone, but like the InkPalm, you can sideload some APKs onto the Mudita Kompakt. It requires ADB and a separate computer. Hacking an LP2, and most likely LP3, you can jump out into Android itself and run other apps that way, but what sucks is they don’t show up in the LP3 UI and app list, but they do on InkPalm and Kompakt, which is great.
So you can put AntennaPod and ConnectBot on there. The InkPalm doesn’t even require any ADB hoops, you can just download F-Droid from the device itself.
Now, because there are no Google services, there are many apps that just don’t work even if they’re in Aurora, and because of e-ink being e-ink, even some F-Droid apps (like TextFiction) don’t work, but some do work really well.
There’s an upside to having to do ADB hoops to install apps: you can keep apps like email and web firmly uninstalled for your day-to-day life when you, at some point during your normal week, will have access to a computer and focused email time, and then when you’re about go on a longer trip away from your computer, that’s when you can connect the phone to ADB and put those apps on there. Then those apps become like a foldable travel toothbrush: way too janky for home use but wonderful for a light and small bag. Emailing on phone might be janky, but if that means not having to bring the entire computer, it can make for a lighter packed bag and an easier journey. Sometimes just being able to do something at all can be be enough.
Conclusion:
Actually pondering if I can some how wriggle out of the LP3 preorder (and just chalk the InkPalm up as a mistake) and switch to the Kompakt. One factor in my self-kicking regret will be how well the sideloading situation is on LP3. LP3 has six gigs of RAM while the InkPalm has two, which might be why Delta Chat is crashing. (Even though having two entire gigabytes is mindblowing to me as a Xennial.)
While I like the ability to just bring the LP3 and leave the InkPalm at home, the Kompakt is small enough.
Now the fact that I have a tablet instead of a laptop (since I hate laptops) makes the InkPalm an even more stupid and redundant part of my combo setup and an even bigger mistake. I should just have bought a bigger bag 🤦🏻♀️. But there is something about the iPad (maybe the screen?) that makes me fatigued and addicted—I can’t put it down. I need it if I want to do computer work, like programming (everything I’ve posted the three years whether writings, images, or code, I’ve done on it), but I always feel much better when I’ve been away for it for a few weeks or even a few days.
Going on a trip away from home but bringing the iPad would be pointless because it wouldn’t be getting away from anything. The destination would have to be killer, like visiting loved ones always is 🥰 (iPad or no iPad), but when traveling without bringing the iPad, even just going to a café or a random subway station or neighboring city feels awesome and liberating.
I get hypnotized by the screen somehow, I dunno. That sounds like woo; I don’t know what’s going on, it just is this way and an Android tablet had the same problem, when inheriting grandma’s Android tablet ended my dumbphone experience in 2020. My new apartment is too small for a desktop.
I thought one pro about the “combo setup” would’ve been to use the companion device for podcasts on long, multi-hour train trips to make sure I don’t eat up the battery of the phone I need to call my host when I arrive to their city, but since the battery life of InkPalm is so weak, that plan is pretty flawed.
I have since heard about the Unihertz Jelly Star. So that means that there are three phones, either of which might be a good fit for me. I’ve decided to stick with the Light Phone III. It has been delayed to shipping in March which probably means an April or May arrival for me here in Sweden. I’m really looking forward to having some of the smart phone conveniences available again.
And I still regret getting that InkPalm Plus. It’s so clunky as a work tool. It works well as an entertainment device, but I already had plenty of those.
I’m going to try to cancel my preorder. Not to get a Jelly Star or a Kompakt either. I don’t know what I’ll do. The new ad from Light Phone, and the reaction from the existing fan base, made it clear that trusting the privacy story for any of these phones is a huge ask. Without auditable FOSS code and signed builds what do we even have?
Here is a rando blogger pointing out how digital minimalism and privacy is not the same.
And I knew that. And I was more into unplugging than cypherpunk bonafides so that’s why these three phones were on my radar. But seeing the so-called community (on Reddit) bite the heads off of anyone who brings up the very real privacy asks here after the ad makes inexplicable claims really reminds me that maybe it is something I do care about.
And, I’m already in a situation where my entire setup is compromised as heck. I am typing this on a Debian machine, sure—but SSH’d from an iPad. Apple could be keyloggin every password for all I know. That goes for Xiaomi’s InkPalm too. If I really want to start caring about this again I’d have a lot of work ahead of me. But that’s no excuse for piling more straws onto that camel back.
I thought these guys were clueless about infosec, but that they were “good guys” who would “probably” not do anything bad, and that text messages and contact lists were inherently insecure anyway. I still kind of think or hope that’s the case. But don’t then make an ad trying to say that infosec is an USP with your phone.
MMS texts or even any texts with links are sent via their cloud (so they can be emailed to you for some reason…?!), even voice-to-text input does, and so do direction queries. And putting music files on this thing, that goes over their cloud too, right? Pretty much everything does. Even your contacts list apparently. “No, don’t worry, we don’t do anything with it.”
I canceled the Light Phone preorder. I’m sad about it because it still feels like least bad in many ways. But not good enough. None of the ones that exist are good enough. I hate iPad and InkPalm too, and Linode/Akamai. Everything is bad, everything feels gross and untrustworthy.
I then cancelled my cancellation but that’s based on the hope that the hacker community will put something good on there.
Rebirth is the new Knizia tile layer that just came out. It’s a tile laying game in the vein of Samurai, Through the Desert, Blue Lagoon, and Havalandi—I’ve also seen comparisons to Kingdom Builder, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.
It’s great.
I mentioned on BGG that it had easy rules.
Someone said that Blue Lagoon had more straight-forward rules which made me reply:
That’s true. We had an issue in our first game when my friend didn’t know whether the wood pieces counted for majorities like longest coastline or surrounding cathedrals (they don’t—only cardboard counts).
But with Rebirth you can just start playing and explain the rules as you go (on the Scotland side) which isn’t possible with Blue Lagoon because since there are two phases, you need to know what you’re going for, and it’s even more point salady which, while that adds to the game’s depth and replayability it also means that it’s hard to do your best right out of the gate without having gotten a feel for the relative values of things. Basically you need to understand the entire game, both phases, the four different placement rules, and down to the detailed multi-step scoring sheets before you can start playing. I love Blue Lagoon, I just like Rebirth better.
I do have an OK teach for Blue Lagoon, but with Rebirth it’s way easier since all I need to do is give someone their supply, tell them to remove two pieces and say “you don’t have these but you can look at them”, then as everyone pulls pieces one by one you can explain the three types of pieces as you go, and explain castles and cathedrals as they get activated, and soon enough you’ll have explained all three types and they know the game.
The problem is how tie-breaking inside the game works—something you do all the time when playing, for scoring castles and settlements.
This one is on the dev team for explaining it weird.
It would’ve been more consistent and easy if a farm (whether energy farm or food farm) was worth ten houses. Then you’d just tally up and you’d only need the “playing first is good” tie breaker. That would not be isomorphic with how the game works currently because in the game as released, a 2-house is the same as a 4-house for castles but not for settlements.
Also instead of ties being broken in the order of who played there first, which would’ve been great but introduced memory state, it’s almost-but-not-quite that since it’s “last loses ties so being clockwise next after the last player is good”.
This means that if Moira, Charles, and Max are playing and Charles plays first, then Moira, then Max, if they all used the same house-amount, Moira will win the tie since she’s clockwise next to Max even though Charles played first. This is really bad. It’s worse than Samurai’s end game scoring.
So the tiebreak system I’d want is instead:
So if beige has an energy farm, a food farm, and a 2-house settlement, that’s 22 houses worth for controlling a castle and if blue then has three food farms there, that’d be 30 for the win of that castle.
This is a huge flaw in the game. 😔
What’s good is how easy it is to understand where I can play and how I best can use the tiles I draw in a multipurpose way that feels like I’ve got options. There’s no camels-and-leaders system or huts-and-settlers system, just random tiles but only three types (and the Ireland side has many more either-food-or-energy-can-go-here spaces) and instead of a rule like camel riders or huts (or ice holes like Hey That’s My Fish or Meridians) to promote go-like grouping, it’s the chain scoring system (you get more points when placing your new farms next to your old farms of the same type).
This is my favorite new game so it’s too bad about that clunkiness around ties. 😔
Penelope, more reacting to the reactions and reviewing the reviewers, so there’s gonna be ending talk here, talking about the last couple of minutes of the season:
I can’t believe people are saying that “It looks like she already knew and that’s why she left”. She looks obviously surprised! Her jaw drops, she blinks a bunch of times in a row. It’s a natural, real-looking take as something like that sinks in. What world of over-ham takes are these so-called reviewers living in!?
Now, the idea that “this is why she left”, well, I can see why people are looking for a reason for her leaving. That’s the one part of this insane interpretation that does make some sense except it doesn’t because all of those other flashbacks, and her conversations with the other characters have hinted that there’s something else. She wouldn’t’ve needed a fake name, for example.
And the whole “yeah yeah she was texting with her mom but nothing is as it seems in this multilayered show”. Dear reviewers: LSD is not a toy!
In one sense, we’ve got two options:
This is a show about a girl who faces some changes in her life by heading out to the woods. The show never ever talks about those changes so the whole “spiritual journey to face this past” becomes everything but. And for the sake of just being twisty for twists sake, unreliable narrator for the hell of it without any clues and hindsight “oh of course!” moments, that thing she was running from (as much as the show kept hammering over and over again that she wasn’t running from anything) gets revealed at the show’s very end.
Or, this is a show where someone who left home thinking it was temporarily, in a fit of dramatic irony worthy of Aristophanes, found out that sometimes there is no going back.
Not only does option B make total sense and is awesome from an existentialist narrative perspective horror perspective, Camus and Sartre can’t touch this, and option A would be cheap and chintzy, the one thing that would make even less sense than option A would be to deliberately make it ambiguous which of the two options there is.
If it had been option A, there could’ve easily been more explicit signs that she actually knew. Like, it could’ve been revealed through something she was carrying. Or she could’ve had an info dump convo with someone.
Instead, there are so many signs that it’s option B. Not only did she look surprised—again, if the reviewers are looking for ham, why wouldn’t they ask for an overly “oh yes I knew” take?—there was also how she tried to call them, she was looking for emails, anything.
Now, there is gonna be season 2 probably so we’ll see then.
Reviewers push these wild theories for clicks and water cooler talk, I guess. Literature is dead in the age of controversy. And in this case it worked because here I am, talking about it. I got provoked into talking about this wacko fan theory. It must suck to make TV shows if even when you tell them clearly and straight-forwardly, the press gets it 100% backwards.
Spoilerific comparison of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with Piranesi and Three-Body Problem (with a bonus slag at The Da Vinci Code):
One of my favorite books of all time is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s exploring a weird world, fully and marvelously realized in amazing Scheherazade detail, but from the first page to the last it’s all about what the people in this weird world choose to do. Their follies and their temptations and their strength. It’s a twenty out of ten for me.
Piranesi has some of that strength with an amazing main character and it has some wonderful things to say about our own world.
But it goes about its telling by presenting its setting as if it were a mystery; so for the first hundred pages I’m like “The book is trying to get me to care about all this weirdness but it might was well be lol random”—all the beautiful moments in the main character’s explorations and routines, and all interesting glimpses and beautiful statues and bones, do land but they land in spite of how the book is ratcheting up tension by weirdness.
Then there’s a tiny handful of pages where I finally do figure out what’s going on and it actually does manage to be exciting and make me feel clever. Then the book becomes beyond tedious because I’ve figured it all out and am now just waiting for the outcome to unfold in the inevitable way. On a good day when I had been more clever, that turning point would’ve come sooner, and on a bad day it might’ve taken me longer.
I’m sure I’d love it more on a reread. And a reread that dives in, skips around, just enjoys the scenery and all the Narnia references. It was a charming li’l thing but I end up giving it a two out of ten. All my friends love it, it’s just me that has this “weird framework” hangup that robs me of enjoying otherwise awesome books.
I read The Three-Body Problem shortly after Piranesi. It had the same “aha!-moment turning point” structure and problem; comparing them the Three-Body Problem feels even more lolrandom before the turning point which is to its detriment, but then after the turning point the conflict and story has more uncertainty, making it more readable there. And in Piranesi my turning point came pretty early, making me feel clever-but-bored, whereas in Three-Body Problem, I didn’t figure it out until after the book pretty much spelled it out for me, making me feel stupid-and-bored. I liked it less than Piranesi.
Overall all three books are miles better than something like The Da Vinci Code, which, for all its merits, has the frustrating structure of “I looked down at the puzzle. Truly the most unsolvable puzzle of all time!” then thirty pages later “I saw the puzzle again. Hopeless and fiendish!” then thirty pages later it finally shows you the puzzle and it’s mirrored text or something and then thirty more pages later the main detective figures it out.
Gustav L frågade om jag använder Delta Chat för alla mejl eller om jag har en separat mejladdress eller hur jag gör.
Det finns tre sätt:
Antingen ha en helt annan mejladdress bara för Delta Chat. Har en bekant som kör så. Jag tycker inte att det verkar så klokt; det är ju en fördel att chattarna också är normal mejl så att säga! Delta Chat har iofs börjat pusja den linjen lite med sina “chatmail”-servrar.
Eller så plockar Delta Chat bara upp tjattar och låter all annan mejl vara. Tjattar betyder både trådar man har startat inifrån Delta Chat även med dom som inte använder Delta Chat, och också meddelanden från andra som använder Delta Chat. Har flera bekanta som kör så. Nackdelen med den metoden är att meddelandet kan poppa upp i ens vanliga mejlapp och ge notifieringar där innan Delta Chat hinner ta dom. Det vore iofs en nackdel som inte jag själv skulle märka för jag har inga notifieringar på min andra mejlapp.
Eller så som jag själv kör: alla mejl in i Delta Chat.
Det finns några begränsingar för den “alla mejl in i Delta Chat”–linjen:
Alltså med “kryptering” nedan så menar jag pgp-kryptering, e2ee, för dom är ju alla krypterade s2s med hjälp av SSL.
Med Delta Chat kan jag läsa pgpmime-krypterade meddelanden men jag kan bara själv kryptera om mottagaren använder autocrypt.
Det betyder att:
Trådar som är med autocrypt (ex vis trådar med andra Delta Chat-användare) där kan jag svara som vanligt. Och det går att känna igen dom trådarna för det finns ett pyttelitet hänglås som är rätt svårt att se, jag måste kolla noga.
Okrypterade trådar, där ska jag också bara svara som vanligt. Det blir inte krypterat men i övrigt funkar det lika bra.
Trådar som är krypterade med vanliga pgpmime, om jag då svarar som vanligt så blir mitt svar okrypterat! Det är en katastrof för här har nån skickat ett krypterat mejl till mig och så svarar jag med ett vykort utan kuvert så att säga! Och nu till det värsta: det finns inget sätt att inifrån Delta Chat se skillnad på den här tredje sortens tråd (pgp), och den andra/mellersta sortens tråd (okrypterat)! Det här är kasst!
Och jag har väldigt många trådar av alla tre sorterna så jag behöver helt enkelt minnas i huvudet vilka som är i dom tre olika kategorierna! Det är asjobbigt och stressigt att gå och jonglera den mentala databasen! (Hur kan jag ha så himla många trådar med vanliga pgpmime undrar kanske vän av kunskap? Jo, det är så att Proton Mails system är kompatibelt med min WKD-server; jag använder inte Proton själv men alla mejl från dom som ramlar in är e2ee pgpmime. Men då vanliga pgpmime och inte autocrypt.)
Det blir då att för dom trådarna så är Delta Chat bara en sorts biff, att jag ser att “aha, Alice har skickat ett nytt pannkaksrecept” och jag kan läsa det och fundera på det men sen måste jag starta upp min vanliga mejlapp (notmuch heter den) när jag vill svara. Men jag måste då själv komma ihåg att Alice använder pgpmime för det ser ut som ett vanligt meddelande i Delta Chat. Urdumt!
Min högsta dröm med Delta Chat är alltså att kunna importera folks nycklar manuellt om dom inte använder autocrypt så jag kan svara till dom från Delta Chat!
När det kommer till gamla pgp-formatet som inte är pgpmime, det är en fjärde sorts tråd. Dom är inget problem, dom sticker ut helt för dom kan inte Delta Chat tolka av så det kommer bara in ett mejl med en massa ASCII-bepansrad rotvälska. Jag har inte jättemånga såna kontakter men tre av mina vänner. Det är Flowcrypt, Mailvelope och Roundcube som bara stöder det äldre pgp-formatet. Och jag har en kompis av varje konstigt nog! Det är kanske bra att Delta Chat inte har allt för bra stöd för det formatet är mycket osäkrare och sämre.
Hur dålig Delta Chat är på att blocka mejl är en annan nackdel. Den kan bara sortera på sending email, vilket inte funkar så bra för typ Linodes invoices eftersom dom har en ny mailavsändare varje månad.
Jag använder en separat nyhetsbrevsläsarapp för att läsa nyhetsbrev så då vill jag ju blocka alla dom mejlen från Delta Chat och det är hemskt pilligt. Notmuch är mycket bättre där för där går det att göra mycket smartare “sparade sökningar”.
Men det finns ännu större brist och det är om en avsändare skickar till flera olika mottagare eller om Delta Chat på nåt annat sätt får för sig att “det här är en mejllista” då går det inte att blocka?!?! Delta Chat var asdålig på mejllistor så då gjorde dom ett mailing list mode och det modet är… inte direkt moget än! Det är urdåligt! Och ännu värre när den får för sig att saker är mejllistor som inte är det. Nu vill jag inte vara den som hackar och klagar på den app jag använder solklart mest och helst av alla appar.
Och för riktiga mejllistor är det ännu värre. Jag är med på utvecklarmejlinglistan för notmuch. Jag vill gärna blocka alla dom mejlen i Delta Chat och bara läsa dom i notmuch (för att det är inget som behöver pinga mig mitt i frukosten direkt) men det går inte för Delta Chat är så sjukt dålig på att blocka!
Ang pinga så går det att mjuta vissa kontakter så dom inte dyker upp i notifications men dom syns i tjattlistan sen ändå. Jag skulle vilja ha en tillåtslista, alltså en allowlist heller än en blocklist, för vilka personer som får notifiera. Men det går inte! Istället är det tvärt om! Kreti och till och med pleti får notifiera tills jag mjutat dom. Och konstigt nog går det att mjuta mejllistor men inte blocka dom så jag har åtminstone lyckats mjuta notmuchs utvecklarmejlinglista.
Jag startar ofta nya trådar hellre via notmuch. Alltså mejlar nya personer därifrån. Säg att jag läser nåns blogg och vill mejla in med lite tips eller frågor. Då kommer både tråden och kontakten in i Delta Chat på ett bra sätt.
Och varför gör jag det, jo av tre-och-en-halv anledningar:
Det är mycket smidigare i notmuch, trycker bara på “nytt mejl” knappen och klistrar in deras mejladdress och skriver ett subjekt och en text och trycker på skicka. I Delta Chat går det, med massor av klick, att starta nya tjattar och det händer att jag gör det men det brukar jag ofta få ångra därför att:
Delta Chat verkar ha två sorters trådar. En som är för den kontakten och som heter som den kontakten. Jag väljer “Bob” när jag vill öppna samtalet med Bob och kan svara där. Och om Bob skickar ett nytt mejl med ett nytt topic så kommer det in i samma tråd och jag ser det nya topicet en gång, som en del av Bobs mejl (det finns tyvärr en bugg i Delta Chat kring det här och det är om han gör det med ett mejl som bara har en bild och inget annat; då märker jag på Delta-Chat–sidan ingenting). Och vill jag själv starta en ny mejltråd med ett nytt ämne men att det på Delta Chat-sidan ska fortfarande bara ligga under “Bob”, då kan jag bara göra det från notmuch-sidan.
Den andra sortens tråd är en tråd per topic. Jag kan starta en tjatten med Carol och kalla den tjatten för “Kvartalsrapportering 2013” eller nåt. Prydligt och ordning och reda men då måste jag varje gång jag ska skicka nåt till Carol från delningsarket på iPad komma ihåg att nej nej hon heter inte Carol hon heter “Kvartalsrapportening 2013”. Och om jag startar en ny tråd med henne kommer det i en separat tjatt, inte under Carol.
Att starta nya person-specifika ist för trådspecifika trådar går visserligen från Delta Chat men det går inte att sätta topic då, det kommer bara heta “Meddelande från Sandra Snan”. Urtöntigt. Så det gör jag helst aldrig.
En del som jag har Delta Chat på min sida men dom använder en vanlig mejl-app på sin sida, är väldigt duktiga på att hålla olika separata trådar med rätt valt ämnesrad osv. Det var jag också innan jag började använda Delta Chat. Men problemet är att om jag bara skickar nåt till dom i skrivfönstret längst ner, då kommer det bli ett svar på deras senaste mejl. Men om jag har flera trådar med den personen, då skulle jag ju vilja svara specifikt på ett visst tidigare meddelande så att det på deras sida dyker upp i rätt tråd och det går faktiskt! (Man svajpar högerut på det av deras meddelande man vill svara på.)
Men! Då kommer det bli ett citat. Det är ofta vad jag vill iofs, att svara på ett specifikt meddelande och då ha med ett citat, men ibland vill jag inte det, jag vill bara svara på just meddelandet för trådsorteringsartighetssyften för att det ska se rätt ut på deras sida men jag vill på min sida bara skicka texten och inte ha nån quote.
Dessutom blir det bara så kallad “bottom posting” när man använder citatfunktionen i Delta Chat. Det har ju sina nackdelar, dels att det kan vara svårt för folk att stega igenom ett 1000-radigt citat av sin egen goja innan dom kommer till min ett mening långa svar, och dels med vissa typ kundtjänstbottar där dom förväntar sig och rent av kräver att jag toppostar mina svar. Då får jag damma av notmuch i dom situationerna.
En sak jag har lärt mig av bitter erfarenhet är att aldrig använda
Delta Chat för kodgenomgång på srht och andra devplattformar som
använder liknande stajl (dvs mejlinglistor med git send-email). Det
kan tyckas som att det går bra att svara “ja OK jag fattar jag ska
fixa” eller nåt men det blir typ alltid fel på srht-sidan. Delta Chat
bara rör till det.
Det går inte att välja egna avatarer på sina kontakter utan dom enda som visar nån avatar, det är dom som skickar med en jättefet avatarbild inlajnad i headern på meddelandena. Så mejlen blir alltså jättejättetjock rent byte-mässigt om man har valt en avatar. Så i min app har jag typ inga avatarer förutom min egen och en annan kompis som lagt in en. Resten heter bara bokstav bokstav färg. Jag hatar detta och skulle mycket hellre ha valda bilder! Typ att jag skulle kunna lägga in bilder själv som jag förknippar med personerna.
Så nu undviker jag då avsiktligt att ta upp alla dom många tidigare, nu mera fixade buggar. Jag kan nämna den värsta av dom för det var när vi hade ett dödsfall i familjen och höll på att arra begravningen och jag bytte topic på tråden efter ett tag och Delta Chat då fick för sig att “hjälpsamt” informera alla i tråden med ett “Sandra byter namn på gruppen”-meddelande till alla. Ist för att bara i och med nästa meddelande använda det nya namnet. 🤦🏻♀️
Sen är det väl lite iffy att Delta Chat mer eller mindre är sponsrat av ett EU-projekt. Hur kan man lita på det när det kommer till en krypterade trådar? Om dom vill stoppa Telegram och Signal varför ska jag då tro på dom när det kommer det här?
Fast jag skriver ju via en iPad och det är ju ett ännu större tillitsproblem. Dom avkrypterade filerna kommer in i iPaden och där kan dom kommas åt av Apple eller Pegasus eller andra snokande typer. Notmuch hjälper inte direkt eftersom jag använder den över SSH-appen Blink Shell och Apple skulle kunna logga varenda knapptryckning. Tvi vale! Skulle ha skaffat en FOSS-tablet! Jag har världens minsta lägenhet och min dator står headless ovanpå kylskåpet och jag använder tabletten som tunnklient där. Och inte helt tunn för jag använder också en hel del tablett-appar—så som då Delta Chat.
Som sagt, jag vill inte hacka och klaga på den app jag typ förlitar mig mest på. Mer eller mindre all kommunikation med familj och vänner, framförallt IRL-vänner (för när det kommer till internetvänner är det en del som är på IRC eller som jag bara har på Fedi) går via mejl och mycket av den mejlen är då via Delta Chat. Med dom många “biff”-begränsningarna jag rabblat upp ovan. Jag har nästan inga andra meddelningsappar eller sociala media.
Jag tycker om det nya reactions-systemet, jag tycker om att det går att skicka röstmeddelanden, stickers, bilder, och på iPad även handskrift (genom att exportera från Notes-appen till Photos-appen och från den till Delta Chat).
Men jag har ju som sagt ändå en hel del problem med Delta Chat. Varför använder jag då inte bara notmuch direkt? Av två anledningar: dels att kunna skicka saker från delningsarket på iPad. Alltså “share sheet”, jag trycker på en bild och väljer “skicka till Alice”. Det finns iofs två buggar där.
Den ena buggen är att jag bara kan välja mellan dom typ tjugo senaste tjattarna. Men det tror jag är en tillfällig bugg för så var det inte förut. Det finns en sökruta för att hitta äldre tjattar att skicka till, men den har slutat fungera (efter att jag valt en av dom äldre så kommer den ändå inte in i mottagarfältet). Jag borde rapportera in den här buggen, har glömt det! Så var det inte förut för då funkade det.
Den andra delningsarksbuggen är inte så farlig men det är att förut kunde man bara välja Delta Chat-ikonen i delningsarket och sen från den välja en mottagare. Numera poppar det också upp specifika personer i var sin liten Delta Chat-ikon så jag kan välja dom, typ dom tre fyra senaste, direkt från delningsarket. Men det funkar inte! Det blir bara samma sak som om jag hade valt den generella Delta Chat–ikonen, dvs jag måste ändå välja en mottagare sen. Men det gör ju inget; enda nackdelen för mig är att det kommer upp några fula och useless ikoner.
Ah och så finns det ett tredje problem med delningsarket också och det är att det blir alltid som ett svar på personens senaste mejl. Och jag vet ju inte om dom har skickat nåt mer eller börjat på nån ny tråd sen sist. Hur trådsorteringsartig jag än försöker vara och svara noggrant på deras trådar osv så det ska se snyggt och prydligt på deras sida… Om jag vill använda delningsarket för att skicka till dom så är trådsorteringsprydlighet bara att glömma. Det blir kaos mer eller mindre direkt eftersom det inte går att skicka bilagan som ett svar på ett äldre meddelande utan bara på det allra nyligast inkomna.
Så även om delningsarket typ är den största anledningen till att jag fortfarande använder Delta Chat (jag avinstallerade Apple Mail och iMessage direkt när jag köpte tabletten och har aldrig konfat eller använt dom apparna) så har det ju en hel del problem 😰
Den andra anledningen är att jag kodade in så att notmuch kan använda autocrypt men… Det funkar inte?! Jag behöver trouble shoota det… Kanske genom att ha en till mejladdress bara för att testköra Delta Chat ifrån? Men då skulle jag behöva en helt separat Delta-Chat–installering… Har inte orkat!
Gustav skrev sen:
Det dumma med den nuvarande situationen är att alla håller varandra gisslan på en massa urusla meddelandetjänster.
Men Delta Chat löser ju det. Om man använder standardinställningen att bara tjattarna ska in dit. Dom tusentals orden jag skrev om alla problem och allt strul och hur kasst det är, mycket av dom problemen har jag ju bara drabbats av för att jag använder den rätt så omogna “all min mejl ska in i Delta Chat”–inställningen, att jag använder Delta Chat som en dålig mejlapp och inte bara som en bra tjattapp.
Så du kan öppna Delta Chat, starta en tjatt med si-och-så och om dom inte använder Delta Chat så blir det en mejltråd för dom (ingen gisslan alltså!), och för dig blir det en tjatt. Och om dom också använder Delta Chat så blir det en tjatt för dom.
Medan dina andra mejl, dom förblir som dom alltid varit, normala mejl.
Det löser det för de som kan tänka sig att använda e-post.
En stor del av min bekantskapskrets använder mejl nån gång i månaden (oftast för att de bara har det på en stationär dator som de sällan startar), då går det inte att använda det som ett kommunikationsverktyg.
OK, nu fattar jag vad du menar.
Jag har också det problemet med en del personer.
Många många av dom har börjat använda mejl mer för dom vet att jag
finns där (och en hel del av dom har installerat Delta Chat rakt av).
Andra vägrar och vill bara SMS:a. Vilket är ett jävla helvete för mig som har en buggig och krashig Nokia 8210 utan tangentbord.
Den inbyggda meddelandeappen däremot använder alla, den har en unik ställning bland de enheter som används i samhället
Den har jag aldrig någonsin använt. Jag tolkade dig som om problemet var WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, ICQ, AIM och liknande gegga.
Jag tycker för min del det vore bra om lösningen hade två tiers: meddelanden som plongar i fickan bara för dom allra närmaste och artigastes allra mest tidskritiska meddelanden (“jag missade bussen!” och liknande) och en annan tier för saker som jag kan läsa i lugn och ro när jag kommer hem.
Jag har senaste året återknutit till två tidigare väldigt nära vänner och jag har lyckats återknyta till dom för att jag har gått med på att SMSa med dom. Men det är ett rätt kasst kommunikationsverktyg för dels kan SMS komma när som helst när jag är ute eller när jag ligger och sover eller är på begravning eller vad som helst. Mejl är bättre för mig för det kan jag läsa när jag vill. Och då dels också för att jag kan skriva mejl med ett riktigt tangentbord. Och det sämsta då att det finns noll säkerhet. Ett “okrypterat” mejl år 2020 har mycket mycket mycket mycket mycket mycket bättre säkerhet än ett SMS eftersom nästan alla mejl har åtminstone SSL.
Men jag känner att det blir lite målflytt här eller så missförstod jag dig från början för om du vill ha en gisslansfri tjattapp så är ju Delta Chat ett alternativ, vilket WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, ICQ, AIM och liknande gegga inte är.
Att dom ser det en gång i månaden är bättre än inget.
In the theater, knowing nothing about it (I hadn’t even seen the poster, a friend wanted to see the movie and I sometimes enjoy experiencing books from page one and films from frame one, without any posters, covers, or back-of-book blurbs), I loved it. I thought it was so good.
Coming home from the theater and finding out that there were many rightwingers and anti-SJW folks who loved the movie, that didn’t bother me since I thought they were misunderstanding the movie. Like the scene where she’s clashing with a class of students who are on the progressive side… they’re caricatures, sure, but she isn’t coming across as “owning” them, she’s depicted as completely out of touch, cruel, out to sea, lost. The rest of the movie makes that clear. Again, those students’ perspectives aren’t necessarily 100% endorsed but the movie takes her side much less than it takes their side. That was my thinking.
Movies that try to be these intricate puzzle boxes with some non-linear elements rarely come together but this one did. That one scene where she returns to her old home… So great. Everything was great.
But then finding out that many of Tár’s biographical details were literally lifted out of Marin Alsop’s life soured me on the movie. That is wrong. That made me hate the movie and now I hate the movie. Yep that’s how I am! I can turn on a dime with these things.
I liked The Acolyte a lot.
I’m putting it A-tier if Andor is S and Ahsoka and Obi-Wan are B. (Update: And now Skeleton Crew is also an easy S-tier.)
I really like that it leaned a li’l more heavily into new ideas over reincorporation of old ideas. Every Star Wars project need to strike the right balance there because we need both; it needs to be the galaxy far far away that we’re all familiar with, and that galaxy needs to be large enough to still have new things to discover, and I like where The Acolyte landed there.
Now, some of the following thoughts include ending spoilers so turn away now if you’re still thinking of seeing the show. (It’s also maybe not gonna make sense if you haven’t seen the show.)
One awesome thing about episodes 1, 2 and 4 of The Acolyte is how whenever it looks like something obvious and boring is going to be stretched out over the season, like I’d think “oh no, now she’s gonna clear her name and she’s obviously gonna succeed but it’ll take all season”, I immediately get proven wrong and it instead happens right away and something new more interesting also happens. The show keeps going “yes, and” in a great way.
I know that that’s the sort of thing Pitch Meeting guy makes fun of as if were barely an inconvenience, but it’s a step in the right direction for TV and comics. I hope we’re finally seeing a pendulum swing away from the hyperdecompressed era that almost killed comics.
Unfortunately, the Rashōmon-style flashback episodes 3 and 7 completely undermined that momentum. They involved the sort of “let’s make clear what we’ve hinted about earlier” and though that’s a really common narrative device, two kinds of things tend to happen. Either people got the hints and then seeing the full story is a tedious eye-roll (the excruciating movie 21 Grams is my goto example for this problem). Or we didn’t get the hints and only understood the full story when it was revealed, and in that case the hints were the parts that was the waste of time. Redundancy and repetition can be beautiful and poetic but it can also be a drag.
While those flashbacks were still good since we got to see the Jedi in action, especially them messing up, and we got to see a different side to Mae and Osha, the non-linearity contrasted the otherwise great pace of the series.
The memo wipe seemed dumb to me or at least it didn’t properly explain to me as viewer how that is not an even worse outcome than the stranger taking both.
Yes, I understood that they didn’t wanna leave with him. They didn’t want that, we as the audience didn’t want that, Sol wouldn’t’ve wanted that. And then the compromise was that Osha would go with him. And then the compromise on top of that compromise was that Mae would get the memo wipe. But to me it seems that combining those two compromises you end up with something much much worse for all three involved, whether considering it together or separately, than if they both had left with him.
That’s not just a lesson for writers, it’s a lesson for thinkers and reasoners of all stripes: when making a decision, take a step back. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.
There were no good guys in the show. The Jedi were killers and colonializers, the coven were mind controllers, Osha and Mae were like Frank Castle in space. I wanna see a Star Wars where compassion and non-violence is depicted positively.
I feel like if the purpose of a review is to serve as a guide for which movies to watch, which books to read, which games to play, they need to tread carefully with spoilers. I usually don’t like writing these beyond a “I liked this one” or “I was a li’l disappointed in that one”.
There is another type of review that discusses all aspects of the work, including endings and twists, not for the presumtive “do I wanna watch this” audience but for the purposes of creators of future works. So they can know what worked and what didn’t. And for non-creators (I know, I know, “those who can’t, teach”) who are just curious about literature study and aesthetic philsosophy.
I love writing that kind of review. I always feel a li’l embarrassed and self-conscious when I try to, though. Like, “who am I to say that a particular actor’s performance was good when I can’t act? A painting was beautiful when mine are so grotesque?” That’s the sort of shame and doubt that comes like birds in spring when I put pen to paper about this stuff.
But it’s just a way for me to sort out my thoughts on something, help sublimate it, help remember it, help deal with it, and… I’m also in an environment where I get a lot of flak for liking stuff other people hate and vice versa so I feel a li’l more sane at least in my own mind’s eye if I can justify my thoughts about a work like this.