No holodeck adventures, no hiding in space clouds, no musical dance numbers, no soap operas ( just a tiny bit ) and no less than subtle modeling of how people should behave.

Stories that were actually interesting and that held your attention.

Some of episode 5 was derivative from other Star Trek's and other sci-fi series, but it was done well.

Episode 6 was engrossing and with a surprise ending. I like the slow buildup of King Arthur ( Kirk ) eventually pulling the sword out of the stone ( taking command of the Enterprise ).

Episode 7. I knew people in college like Beto. I thought the actor did a great portraying such a person. I even found myself getting irritated though Star Fleet is fiction. I loved how Uhura handled him. She was kind, but she completely unmasked what he was behind his behavior.

Cas' Short Slices were a series of reviews for my favorite short stories, previously posted on reddit. Each comes paired with a full length novel or novella that comes stylistically or thematically close. These are #1 to #5 (by date of posting, not ranking!).

• Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

There are stories to read and forget. There are stories that linger in my head long after, shouting to be remembered. Then there are stories that haunt me like a ghost, that don’t need to shout for me to never let them go.

Selkie Stories… draws you into the heartbreak of a teenage girl lost in the mysteries of her broken home and the stories she tells herself to make sense of it all. It carves a window into her burgeoning relationship with her co-worker Mona and her own darknesses. In the narrator, Sofia writes pain and hope and grief and the reckless desperation only young love can bring.

Even for a short story this piece is brief, spanning a mere three thousand words. But those words pack a hell of a punch, enough to leave me breathless – and that’s a magic of its own.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out How To Be Both by Ali Smith, a Man Booker-nominated novel with similar themes running throughout, gorgeous prose and characters that’ll make you cry.

• Love Is Never Still, by Rachel Swirsky

Sometimes when you chase after something, you find in the end that what you’ve been looking for only exists in the figment of your imagination. Inside your head, the object takes on a life of its own until it diverges from real life. It’s always painful to realize what you wanted all along was never really there in the first place.

Rachel Swirsky takes the classic story of Galatea and Pygmalion and casts all players under scrutiny. Not just the artist and his sculptor but behind them, the affairs of Aphrodite who gave life to a statue and her contentious relations with the remaining Greek pantheon. It’s a love story, but also more than that. This story explores how nature shapes who we are, the many faces of desire and how it can change into something darker, something unpleasant.

I tend to wax over good prose but it’s such a hard quality to define, let alone master, that I have to give it mention here. The descriptions are vivid and strong, each scene painted clear without falling into the pitfall of purple prose. And these words aren’t window dressing – the author knows what she wants to say and how to say it. This story is a long one – more novelette than short story – but definitely well-worth the read.

Read it yourself here at Uncanny Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out Glimpses by Lewis Shiner.

This is a book I really love, and it’s all but unknown in these parts. Ray works as a radio repairman in 90s’ Texas, who finds one day an album by The Doors appearing in his workshop. Only thing is, the album’s never been recorded and released. Over time, Ray learns to walk down alternate timelines into the past – where he has the possibility to change things and make a difference.

Lewis tackles difficult themes such as the obligations of someone trapped in a loveless marriage, alcoholism and the struggle not to project your needs onto others. What’s more, he does them justice.
On surface level, these two are nothing alike but the parallels are there in the characters of Ray and Pygmalion, both of them are looking for something more without knowing what it is they really want.

Want something closer to Love Is… in theme? Try Galatea, by Emily Blunt. A different take on the story, presented in the unusual form of interaction fiction. It’s well-written and considered to be one of the best in it’s genre. Available online here.

• The Dancer On The Stairs, by Sarah Tolmie

There's been a lot of clamour recently for stories that aren't entrenched in darkness and grit. We're all tired of seeing depressing things in social media, in the news. Sometimes all you want is to see a ray of light shining at the end.

Enter The Dancer... where a young woman finds herself awakening on an empty flight of stairs, stretching forever in both directions. She's thrust into another world with no preparation, not even sharing a common language with the people there. Without crichtén - the coin of the stairway - she has no way past the guards stationed on each floor. And crichtén isn't something that can be bargained for. So she wanders on, lost and hungry and desperate to learn and navigate a culture entirely alien from her own.

Why I love The Dancer... is that ultimately, it's a story about kindnesses. From the guard sympathizing with her plight to the old pilgrim sharing his knowledge of the world with someone hapless as a newborn, it tells you that while the world may be cold, it isn't cruel. There are people out there who are willing to reach out to those in want, and to extend a hand into the dark.

Read it yourself here at Strange Horizons.

Hungry for more? Check out The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Much lauded by /r/fantasy, this book contains much the same warm tones and hope carried by The Dancer... If you haven't checked it out yet, I'm adding my voice to the chorus telling you to do so now!

• Fox Magic, by Kij Johnson

Throughout mythologies there are countless variations of the story of the changeling wife. Selkies, huldras and crane wives play on the theme of captive spirits lured into the world of men by force or trickery.

In Fox Magic, Kij Johnson allows us a glimpse of the inverse through the eyes of a kitsune, or fox maiden. The unnamed narrator grows infatuated with the master of the property on which she and her family resides. The man is married with a wife and son. She is a fox, she does not care. And in this way the story delves into the quiet horror of seeing a person trapped in a waking dream, in what another thinks is love.

The nature of magic is that it's often cruel, giving power to one and not another - easy enough to parallel in the real world. So we have to not just look but see, and realize when it's past time to let things go.

Read it yourself here at Kij Johnson's website.

Hungry for more? Check out The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld by Patricia McKillip. Though she writes with a lighter touch than Kij, Forgotten Beasts... is very much in line with the themes in this short story - how strongly magic tempts when it promises to give you your heart's desire, how affection needs to be a two-way street.

• Second Person, Present Tense by Daryl Gregory

Nobody can choose the circumstances of their own birth, and some people come into being in more unusual ways than others. Most of us create an identity for ourselves through the passing of time and gathered experience. For Terry, it's nowhere near that simple.

The moment Terry comes into existence her parents are waiting to claim her, parents she doesn't remember. The doctor informs her that the drug Zen is responsible for stripping away her knowledge of who she was. Whoever inhabited her body before the overdose, she's gone now and left Terry there in her place. And already she's started to form memories of her own, disparate from the expectations of the people calling her their daughter and wanting her back again.

Second Person... is centered around the themes of self-actualization despite the expectations of those around you. Whoever you were is unimportant, what matters is who you are in the now and in the end, it's up to you to make your identity.

Read it yourself here at Clarkesword Magazine.

Hungry for more? Check out The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker. Chava, the titular golem, comes to life during a voyage to a promised future in New York. But the one who's commissioned her dies in an unexpected manner, she's left unmoored to find her own way in a strange new city.

Overview

Background

Why I chose the Minimal Phone by Minimal Company

• while more expensive than a cheap android that I do software limitations on, it felt like I was getting a device that worked for me, rather than doing a bunch of configuration to get one to work for me
• Minimal phone was significantly cheaper than the Lite Phone, and had Google Playstore access to add some apps not included that I may need
• RCS support (it is just running Google Messages)
• eInk felt like a good fit for me
• The physical keyboard intrigued me

Experience ordering the phone

Software Impressions

Hardware

Summary

I didn’t expect to be saying this, but Kpop Demon Hunters surprised me.

Going in, I figured it was going to be a niche kids animated movie trying to cash in on a trend, but put it on in the background.

I’m not into Kpop, and nothing about the marketing really pulled me in. But within ten minutes, it completely won me over.

The animation style is great. Same team that worked on Into the Spider-Verse, and it shows, bringing the same kind of energy and attention to detail when it comes to character design and world building. The way they handled anime-inspired expressions and visual effects in 3D actually worked, and it gave the movie a really unique feel.

What surprised me most was how strong everything else was. The plot isn’t an afterthought, the humor lands, and the songs are ridiculously catchy. I had no reason to expect this to be as well-rounded and satisfying as it is, but here we are.

I’m a 34-year-old man with no interest in Kpop, and this is now a comfort movie for me.

Strange New Worlds Season 3 is out. So far 2 episodes have been released. I have seen the first episode.

I have some thoughts about the underlying themes of Strange New Worlds. This will not have spoilers because most of what I'm talking about appeared in previous seasons and in the trailer for season 3.

The main theme that I see in the show is that the people in the crew are actualized adults. They have empathy and compassion. If they do something heroic, it is in the spirit of self sacrifice for their friends and colleagues and the human race in general. They have some flaws, but when they find out about the flaws they try to work on self-improvement.

This is most completely embodied in Captain Pike. He expends much of his energy getting feedback from his crew. He gets opinions from experts in various fields, and then makes a decision without doubt. He is open to criticism and fights for what he believes in. He is the opposite of an authoritarian leader.

I would contrast this somewhat to the behavior of Captain Kirk from the original series. Kirk would go to his advisors (mostly Spock and McCoy), but usually as a secondary source. Pike makes a much larger effort to check with the crew first, and relies on more different opinions.

It can also be contrasted with the behavior of Captain Picard. Picard is much more authoritarian and has a very rigid moral code which seems largely based on tradition and values like honor and service.

I enjoy Strange New Worlds very much. I am aware that it is extremely "woke", and that I am being given an example how how we should treat each other and solve problems. I don't mind this at all, and it seems completely in line with the morality which has always driven the best Star Trek.

There is one other thing I noticed in S3e1: Captain Pike takes a moment to pray. I don't remember seeing this in Star Trek before (but it probably has happened). I haven't decided yet why the writers included this. It could be to show a little background about Pike's upbringing (he mentions his dad before doing it). It could be a concession to conservatives who watch the show. It could be that Pike will try all possible avenues in case they may help.

Note: This is NOT a sponsored post. I'm just a happy customer.

Background

When the G'AIM'E Kickstarter was announced, I got the itch to play light gun games again. I grew up playing Time Crisis on my PSX, stepping on a controller plugged into port 2 which acted as a makeshift pedal so I could mimic the arcade experience. A local pizza place near me had an Area 51 machine that I could play for a quarter, and over time I memorized the enemy layouts for that game so that I could play further and further on one coin.

There are a variety of modern light gun models available now, though all of them are at the hobbyist/tinkerer level. There isn't one that "just works" smoothly and easily.

The most well known is the Sinden, which achieves calibration on games by setting up a white border around the game on the screen. This allows the gun to establish its position within that border and "know" where it's shooting.

Unfortunately, when I looked into the Sinden, it seemed like reviews were very mixed, with many mentioning that the border can be kind of a mess to get working. Apparently it can require a lot of legwork and messing around with settings and external programs and whatnot.

After searching around for alternatives, I landed upon a different line of modern light gun and decided to, well, pull the trigger.

Gun4IR Intro

Gun4IR on its own isn't a standalone product so much as it is a framework for making a modern light gun. You can buy the individual components and put them all together in a gun casing, making a functional light gun of your choosing. For example, see the User Guide which goes into detail about which boards you'll need, pin guides, etc. People have made them in Nerf cases and 3D printed ones.

Now, if I'm going to ding the Sinden for requiring too much tinkering, surely soldering wires onto PCBs is a step in the wrong direction?

That's absolutely correct! The good news is that you can sidestep all of this. Gun4IR has some official pre-build sellers, meaning you can buy an already made gun -- no soldering needed! Their site sells builds for the UK, while, RPEG Electronics is their official pre-build seller for the US.

From RPEG, I picked up a pre-built Gun4IR setup in a Guncon 2 housing.

Gun4IR Basics

As is implied by the name, Gun4IR uses 4 different IR clusters for calibration. You can buy a pack of LED sensors that plug into the USB port of your TV. You stick these, facing out, to the midpoint of the top, bottom, left, and right of your TV. The LEDs are black and their light can't be seen with the naked eye but can with a camera (you can check to make sure they're working with your phone).

The gun comes with calibration software that gives you lines on your TV to show the mount points for the LEDs, check how the gun is seeing the sensors, line up shots, etc.

I'm happy to report that, once calibrated, my gun is VERY accurate. I was honestly expecting a bit of jank, but it's genuinely spot on. There's a small bit of jitter that's noticeable when you have a crosshair on (some of that also might be coming from my unstable hands), but when you're playing a game without a crosshair, it's not enough to make you miss shots. The shots I've missed have been because I'm, well, bad at videogames.

Games

Because I wasn't wanting to tinker, I found a big download pack that promised me a pre-configured set of ROMs and emulators that were turnkey and compatible with Gun4IR. I spent days downloading all the individual parts from one of those sketchy download sites, getting all the parts of a multi-part RAR file.

And when I started extracting it, wouldn't you know, it was INFESTED with viruses. I uploaded one of the .exes to VirusTotal and I've never seen so much red.

Shame on me, though. I'm not an internet newbie, and I should know better than to trust random executable files, especially on Windows.

So, I went seeking an alternate solution.

Batocera

Batocera is a Linux distribution focused on retro-gaming. You wouldn't use it as your daily driver, but you would use it if you want to just boot into something so you can play games. Additionally, Batocera has built-in light gun support! Perfect!

I did my usual "setup emulation" dance that I've done so many times before: looking up worthwhile games to play, locating ripping ROMs, getting the right extracting BIOSes, etc. I also bought an external hard drive and attached it to my Windows TVPC. I can now boot off the hard drive to go into Batocera directly (because I didn't want to try to figure out dual booting with Windows).

Batocera is like booting into an arcade cabinet, loading right into ES-DE. It doesn't really expose its file system to you by default, but it's got a killer feature that makes setup easy: Batocera automatically sets up a network share for you. This lets you access all of its folders from another device, meaning I could set everything up on my laptop and transfer it over easily to Batocera.

Furthermore, Batocera automatically knows when you've got a light gun attached and will show a gun icon on games that are compatible. In theory, I'm able to navigate the interface just using my light gun, but in practice I also paired a bluetooth controller. (See Caveats section below for more on this.)

You don't HAVE to use Batocera of course, but it ended up being so easy that it became my preferred setup.

Gaming

So, I got the gun calibrated, and I got my games set up in Batocera. It's time to shoot!

I'm happy to report that the gun works fantastically. Like, seriously good.

For most games and emulators, it "just works" which is exactly what I wanted. I tested out several different games on several different platforms, and it worked on stuff ranging from the Atari 2600 to Naomi arcade cabinets.

I played through the first 10 rounds of Duck Hunt on the NES without missing a shot before getting bored and moving to something else. Time Crisis on the PlayStation (my original light gun love) plays wonderfully.

I had a friend over this weekend who also loves light gun games and has nostalgia for TC (though his is for TC2 and TC3). We traded off rounds playing Time Crisis 2 (which ended up being a good way to do it, as I forgot how my arms and eyes need a rest after 15 minutes of light gun gaming). We beat the full campaign in 2 and almost beat 3.

I also tried the gun out in some Windows games off of Steam, just to make sure that my Batocera success wasn't a fluke. Sure enough, it worked just fine!

I now have an accurate, easy-to-use light gun setup that works on my large, modern LCD TV. I have hours of light gun gameplay ahead of me, and I'm thrilled.

Caveats

Wow, kfwyre, this sounds great! I can't wait to get one for myself!

Easy there, cowboy/cowgirl/cowthem! Let me surface some of the rough edges, lest you think that this is too good to be true.

Conclusion

I am quite fond of my Gun4IR so far. It works better than I hoped it would, and it's unlocked a type of gaming that I thought was extinct. (For some reason, light gun games have a different feel to me than VR shooting gallery games. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I like them a lot more?)

I would recommend it ONLY if you're someone who knows they're going to get their money's worth out of it and are also willing to put up with the mostly minimal tinkering required to get it working. I say mostly minimal because, no matter what gun you're using, you're still going to have to set up emulators and ROMs and whatnot. The configuration that is specific to Gun4IR is really just installing the sensors, using the calibration app, and making sure your gun isn't catching other LEDs.

Compared to the G'AIM'E (which is a bit of a fool's errand at this point because that one's still theoretical while this one's here to kiss you in real life), Gun4IR doesn't offer the "plug and play" promise, but it also is compatible with far more games. If you're in the market for the G'AIM'E, however, it's probably worth waiting out that release to see how it fares (and whether people can get it working with more games besides the included ones).

On the other hand, if you're like me and need some light gun fun NOW then I give the Gun4IR a pretty strong recommendation, with a secondary recommendation for Batocera. The two of them together are really great, and I'm delighted that I have hours upon hours of shooting games ahead of me.

If anyone has any additional questions or wants me to test specific games/systems, let me know. I'm happy to report back and help in whatever way I can.

Haven't seen anyone mention that project in a few years, but now I'm in the unique position to talk about it. I live somewhere where I can't get any proper internet service - mobile broadband is slow, DSL or fibre lines are not brought out to where I live, and the only other option is cable internet access, which I've 1. had bad experiences with in the past and 2. where I live is operated by a company with laughably bad reviews at exorbitant prices for what they offer. We are talking about 60 USD (eq) a month for 100 megabit service.

So I shopped around to see what other options there are, and Starlink made me an offer. Free equipment, which is usually 400 bucks, delivered to my house, and then an unlimited data plan at whatever speeds I can get where I live for 50 a month, with a one month free trial. I said yes, paid with Apple Pay (seriously, did not have to fill out a single form or sign anything) and the dish arrived the next day.

Now, I know, Starlink is run by Musk, who is somewhere around the top 10 of my nightmare blunt rotation and also pretty likely to be an actual neo-Nazi, but I say whatever. It's not like the alternatives are much better, and at least SpaceX has some actual value for humanity, if you ask me. I might put a "I bought this before Elon went crazy" on my router, though.

I got the dish delivered and set it up on my roof. The app - which is excellent - tells you to orient it north if you're on the northern hemisphere, and to roughly point it up. I built my own mounting solution - a wooden board with mounting holes that snaps in place on my roof - and set everything up, not expecting much.

I was absolutely blown away. The app, once more, is stellar and incredibly easy to use, and a joy to play around with. I got a satellite connection in minutes, and did a speed test. I got 200 down and 50 up in the Starlink app, but independent speed tests as well as my own experience routinely hit 400 down and around 80 up. Genuinely impressive. Ping around 30, by the way. Consistent as well.

The next few days were a similar experience, although I did notice a drop in speeds if there was heavy rain. The speeds dropped however to around 150 over 30, which is still more than usable, and latency was not impacted at all as far as I can tell.

Honestly, it's a super compelling package. Setup was so simple my grandma could have done it, the hardware is beautifully made and very robust, and the designers really did think of a lot here. The cables are just weatherproofed Ethernet and you can bring your own (although they don't recommend it), the router is Wifi 6 and looks damn snazzy, the dish can even heat itself up to melt snow in winter.

If you're looking for reliable internet service, I really can't recommend Starlink enough. If where you're planning on running it is within the service area and you're fine with the 50 dollar a month price point (no speed or data caps, by the way) I'd say go for it.

Now, there are people who will say that it's a good option for remote places, but not that great for densely populated areas in buildings that could get for example cable service, and you shouldn't rely on it. But, well, I haven't been completely honest here:

The real sting in the tale is that I live in one a large European city with plenty of access to other internet methods (just unlucky in terms of my specific building, which is getting fibre next year), and mounted the dish on top of my townhouse in one of the most dense districts in town. It works flawlessly, and it's been the fastest internet service I've ever had, period.

Course, it can't compete with a fibre line, sure, but many people don't have those - and then, service or hardware might still add large costs on top of that. And with Starlink, I can just take it with me whenever I move, and don't need to ever worry about ISPs again.

I don't have many sufficiently nerdy friends to talk about this with, so if you're curious or have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have Starlink too and feel like I missed something, feel free to contribute to the conversation.