Author Archives: Craig

On “digital”

I’ve been stewing for some time about the mis-use of the term “digital” to mean something other than “represented as a series of ones and zeros.” Or even “able to express only discrete values.” In this usage, CDs are not “digital,” despite the indisputable fact that they bear digital data. DVDs may include, as a bonus, a “Digital Copy,” indicating that the DVD is somehow not “digital,” despite the fact that the first D in DVD stands for digital! So aside from clearly being an improper use of the word, what does “digital” mean? It can’t mean “not delivered on a physical medium,” as a “digital copy” can be delivered to you on a disk, and my complete Beatles digital collection was delivered to me on a lovely, custom-cased USB drive. It can’t reasonably mean “downloadable to your portable device,” because I can take the exact bits off of a CD and throw them on to my iPod (admittedly, this would be silly, since various lossless formats take up much less space). It can’t reasonably mean “lower quality” (though it usually does), since some artists (thank you, TMBG and Jonathan Coulton) are good enough to sell FLAC versions of their works (the complete Beatles USB drive includes 24-bit FLAC versions, which are even higher-fidelity than their CD equivalents, bless them), though—to further invalidate the “device-downloadable” hypothesis—the most popular portable device will not play FLAC versions.
Of course, my thesis here is that none of this usage is reasonable, but is it even consistent? Can a definition be articulated? What do people think it means?

Fat Vampire Review

Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story, Rex. No. This came highly recommended, and has plenty of positive traits (two in particular: it’s mechanically sound, an incorrect “whomever” notwithstanding; and it has largely believable characterization), but it has two (to me) fatal flaws: it has way too much explanation, and it strikes me as far too interested in amassing geek credibility. These two characteristics combine particularly gratingly in the Rocky Horror scene, which walks us torturously through nearly every nuance of the viewing experience. Granted, plenty of plot and character advancement is occurring during the sequence, but I have to believe every bit of it could have been accomplished better without the artificial framework imposed by having it happen at a night out at a movie—especially when the author feels it necessary to explain so much of the night out.
This book would have been much better if Rex had worked harder on not telling us so much.

Explosionist Review

The Explosionist, Davidson. Yes. There were a number of features of this book that annoyed me: it’s nearly tiresome in the same ways that Jo Walton’s “Small Change” series was nearly tiresome (it is conceptually similar to Walton’s work, too); I discovered that I do not much care for the taint of outright fantasy in my historical speculative fiction; and there was this:

Dismissed, Sophie slipped upstairs just in time to avoid the inevitable awkward encounter with Miss Gillespie in the hall.

On the other hand, that sentence was the only time Davidson’s writing pulled me completely out of the story, and I found the characters believable enough, and some moments were quite well executed.

More spam observations

I occasionally mean to make reporting on the email spam we are rejecting a more regular feature, but then I occasionally mean to do a lot of things that never happen. So, here is another installment of a category I have just dubbed “Spiced Ham.” (note: according to Hormel, it is mere speculation that SPAM is a portmanteau of/for “spiced ham”)
Very little spam actually gets through the defenses of forcedperspective.org. We are able to achieve this relative impregnability primary through the use of the zen.spamhaus.org DNS Black list (I note in reviewing earlier spam observations that this is a reversal from the strategy of four years ago, which relied primarily on IP block banning. While we still ban many, many blocks of IPs, we have gone away from that as a primary defense because of the increasing usefulness of Zen and the very high levels of false-positives we were seeing). For instance, since Sunday, 49 of the 59 spam attempts we have blocked were by virtue of Zen. Of the rest, 3 were refused because the domain of the envelope From address did not exist, 1 because the domain of the envelope From address did not resolve (an interesting distinction), 1 because it originated from res.rr.com (this also would have been caught by Zen, but I preemptively block res.rr.com), and the rest were from countries I’ve banned (2 from India, and one each from Germany, India, Singapore, and Spain). We are able to get away with banning so many countries (65!) by virtue of two facts: first, we don’t get a lot of international traffic; second, (aside from Korea, China, and Bangladesh) banned countries get a soft (4XX) failure, instead of a hard one. This applies to all the other non-Zen blacklisting we do, too. Spammers almost never try again; legitimate senders almost always do. It really amounts to selective manual graylisting, because I choose to monitor what is being blocked in order to see if there are any false positives. I believe automated graylisting would probably work nearly as well, but I dislike the idea of delaying such a large proportion of the legitimate mail we get.
While a bunch of the search-engine traffic that hits the blog is because of my long-ago article Who is johnsmitsvt?, I have not seen spam attempts to that address in quite some time. This week, the only address that I am nearly certain has never existed on the system is elliott, which seems to have taken over as the new johnsmithsvt.
Updated to add: another thing I can recommend is creating an SPF record for your domain. It may be only a coincidence, but we have not experienced a back-scatter spam attack since we created one (with a default-discard (“~all”, not “?all”)).

Fuzzy Sapiens Review

Fuzzy Sapiens (Note: link is to single-volume release of Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens (then titled The Other Human Race)), Piper. Yes. I read this as part of my ongoing quest to understand why the Fuzzy universe got rebooted, and in this sequel to Little Fuzzy, I am finally seeing why it might be desirable to leave large chunks of this canon behind. I wouldn’t presume to speculate that the things I would leave behind are the same ones that Scalzi will, but I will say that the constant and universal smoking is among the least jarring of things I would pretend never happened.

Little Fuzzy Review

Little Fuzzy, Piper. Yes. I read this mostly to find out whether there was anything about it that seemed to cry out for re-imagining. To cut to the chase, I didn’t find anything. It is very much of its time, and very reminiscent to me of Heinlein in its gender and other politics, so it is a bit quaint; but I found nothing that made me understand any better the impulse to dig up these bones and throw modern flesh over them

Alison Wonderland Review

Alison Wonderland, Smith. No. There was nothing egregiously objectionable in Smith’s writing, but there was no point throughout reading the book that I would have been unable to put it down. I found it difficult to care about any of the characters, and the intrigue just wasn’t very intriguing.
Note: This review is based on an advance reader’s copy provided by the publisher.

Tiassa Review

Tiassa, Brust. Yes. I give Brust full credit for mixing things up with his Vlad Taltos books: in this one, in addition to the usual narrative voice of our hero, we get traditional third-person as well as a visit from Paarfi, the Dumasian voice of the Khaavren romances. That said, it is overwhelmingly likely you already know whether you want to read this one. If you don’t, I recommend you start with Jhereg (linked book actually includes the first three novels).