Author Archives: Craig

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened Review

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), Lawson. Non-Fiction. For roughly the first third of this book, I kept thinking “This is a pretty bloggy.” This was not a surprise, since the online handle of the author is “The Bloggess,” and much of the material originated in blogdom. Either the effect became less pronounced or I just stopped noticing it. Let’s Pretend did for me what a good memoir does: made me glad that someone is having an interesting life, and similarly glad that the most interesting parts were happening to someone else.
Blogginess aside, I found the writing pleasant; I defy anyone not to be charmed by

… we were young and didn’t know how much it hurt to be shot yet …

An annoying spam trend

Because I block some breathtakingly wide swaths of the net from sending mail to FP, I temp-fail almost everything (the exception is anything in the zen.spamhaus.org RBL; they’ve proven consistent enough that I permanent-fail anything on their list). This has served me really well, as the stripped-down spam-sending software on the exploited machines treats a temporary failure the same as a permanent failure, and I can unblock legitimate senders before they give up. Unfortunately, the 419-scammers have started finding mail hosts that retry on temp-failures, so I have had to hard-block three bad actors (that apparently are not such bad actors that they made it into zen) so far.
On the other hand, the recent flood of phishing has died down.

Distrust That Particular Flavor Review

Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson. Non-fiction. Gibson spends quite a bit of the introduction telling us that despite non-fiction not being his strong suit, people keep paying him to create it. I found the collection of short pieces less interesting than his fiction, though interesting enough to finish it. In particular, I perceived that Gibson was not shy about revisiting the same themes for different commissions. And, really, why not get as much mileage out of a thought as you can? Unless you are a bigger Gibson fan than I am, I believe you can skip this without feeling like you’re missing anything vital.

Yet another crazy spam target

The traffic for johnsmithsvt has dropped off considerably in the last few years, mostly replaced by “elliott”, weirdly enough. This week, though, a new bizarre spam target entered the ring: idlok4.dlqvr. This has the added curiosity of being addressed to a domain that gets just about no mail. Spammers’ ways remain a mystery to me.

Song of Ice and Fire (so far) Review

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons; Martin. Yes. This series has been around for so long, and I have been only peripherally aware of it, so when I saw the four-volume paperback boxed set at Costco, I thought “Hey, I guess it’s complete; why don’t I just pick up a set?” Only to find later that not only is there a fifth volume recently released, but there are two more books to come. And each of the last two has taken more than five years in the writing! If you have seen the books, you have seen that they are not thin, either: each is in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. So I hope that by the time I retire, I will be able to have the last volume beamed into my brain by whatever device Microamazoogle has created for that purpose, and that the embedded ads don’t give me a stroke.
But on to the books themselves. I like them. They do not have break-neck pacing (as you might expect just from the page count), but they did keep my interest (volumes three and four do suffer somewhat from middle-game syndrome: you have all these pieces to get into place for the end game, and it’s hard to keep all their movements vital and involving). Martin does a good job with more point-of-view characters than one customarily sees, though I think I could do without the fanciful naming he introduces in (I believe) volume four.
In some ways, Martin is the anti-Tepper here: where Tepper’s characters are sometimes tiresomely black or white, Martin’s are almost all shades of grey, and in many ways that was refreshing.
Now let’s hope that the success of the TV series is enough motivation to get the last two books out (and not so much motivation that the series expands again).

Your comment spam of the day

I won’t approve the comment, since if you wanted some trendy headphones with the brand of a highly influential hip-hop artist, you would find them in your own way, but this is some of the best comment spam poetry I have seen in a long time:

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