Inspired by several others (such as Alex Schroeder s post and Szcze uja s prompt), as well as a desire to get this down for my kids, I figure it s time to write a bit about living through the PC and Internet revolution where I did: outside a tiny town in rural Kansas. And, as I ve been back in that same area for the past 15 years, I reflect some on the challenges that continue to play out. Although the stories from the others were primarily about getting online, I want to start by setting some background. Those of you that didn t grow up in the same era as I did probably never realized that a typical business PC setup might cost $10,000 in today s dollars, for instance. So let me start with the background.

Nothing was easy This story begins in the 1980s. Somewhere around my Kindergarten year of school, around 1985, my parents bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (aka CoCo II). It had 64K of RAM and used a TV for display and sound. This got you the computer. It didn t get you any disk drive or anything, no joysticks (required by a number of games). So whenever the system powered down, or it hung and you had to power cycle it a frequent event you d lose whatever you were doing and would have to re-enter the program, literally by typing it in. The floppy drive for the CoCo II cost more than the computer, and it was quite common for people to buy the computer first and then the floppy drive later when they d saved up the money for that. I particularly want to mention that computers then didn t come with a modem. What would be like buying a laptop or a tablet without wifi today. A modem, which I ll talk about in a bit, was another expensive accessory. To cobble together a system in the 80s that was capable of talking to others with persistent storage (floppy, or hard drive), screen, keyboard, and modem would be quite expensive. Adjusted for inflation, if you re talking a PC-style device (a clone of the IBM PC that ran DOS), this would easily be more expensive than the Macbook Pros of today. Few people back in the 80s had a computer at home. And the portion of those that had even the capability to get online in a meaningful way was even smaller. Eventually my parents bought a PC clone with 640K RAM and dual floppy drives. This was primarily used for my mom s work, but I did my best to take it over whenever possible. It ran DOS and, despite its monochrome screen, was generally a more capable machine than the CoCo II. For instance, it supported lowercase. (I m not even kidding; the CoCo II pretty much didn t.) A while later, they purchased a 32MB hard drive for it what luxury! Just getting a machine to work wasn t easy. Say you d bought a PC, and then bought a hard drive, and a modem. You didn t just plug in the hard drive and it would work. You would have to fight it every step of the way. The BIOS and DOS partition tables of the day used a cylinder/head/sector method of addressing the drive, and various parts of that those addresses had too few bits to work with the big drives of the day above 20MB. So you would have to lie to the BIOS and fdisk in various ways, and sort of work out how to do it for each drive. For each peripheral serial port, sound card (in later years), etc., you d have to set jumpers for DMA and IRQs, hoping not to conflict with anything already in the system. Perhaps you can now start to see why USB and PCI were so welcomed.

Sharing and finding resources Despite the two computers in our home, it wasn t as if software written on one machine just ran on another. A lot of software for PC clones assumed a CGA color display. The monochrome HGC in our PC wasn t particularly compatible. You could find a TSR program to emulate the CGA on the HGC, but it wasn t particularly stable, and there s only so much you can do when a program that assumes color displays on a monitor that can only show black, dark amber, or light amber. So I d periodically get to use other computers most commonly at an office in the evening when it wasn t being used. There were some local computer clubs that my dad took me to periodically. Software was swapped back then; disks copied, shareware exchanged, and so forth. For me, at least, there was no online to download software from, and selling software over the Internet wasn t a thing at all.

Three Different Worlds There were sort of three different worlds of computing experience in the 80s:

1. Home users. Initially using a wide variety of software from Apple, Commodore, Tandy/RadioShack, etc., but eventually coming to be mostly dominated by IBM PC clones
2. Small and mid-sized business users. Some of them had larger minicomputers or small mainframes, but most that I had contact with by the early 90s were standardized on DOS-based PCs. More advanced ones had a network running Netware, most commonly. Networking hardware and software was generally too expensive for home users to use in the early days.
3. Universities and large institutions. These are the places that had the mainframes, the earliest implementations of TCP/IP, the earliest users of UUCP, and so forth.

The difference between the home computing experience and the large institution experience were vast. Not only in terms of dollars the large institution hardware could easily cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars but also in terms of sheer resources required (large rooms, enormous power circuits, support staff, etc). Nothing was in common between them; not operating systems, not software, not experience. I was never much aware of the third category until the differences started to collapse in the mid-90s, and even then I only was exposed to it once the collapse was well underway. You might say to me, Well, Google certainly isn t running what I m running at home! And, yes of course, it s different. But fundamentally, most large datacenters are running on x86_64 hardware, with Linux as the operating system, and a TCP/IP network. It s a different scale, obviously, but at a fundamental level, the hardware and operating system stack are pretty similar to what you can readily run at home. Back in the 80s and 90s, this wasn t the case. TCP/IP wasn t even available for DOS or Windows until much later, and when it was, it was a clunky beast that was difficult. One of the things Kevin Driscoll highlights in his book called Modem World see my short post about it is that the history of the Internet we usually receive is focused on case 3: the large institutions. In reality, the Internet was and is literally a network of networks. Gateways to and from Internet existed from all three kinds of users for years, and while TCP/IP ultimately won the battle of the internetworking protocol, the other two streams of users also shaped the Internet as we now know it. Like many, I had no access to the large institution networks, but as I ve been reflecting on my experiences, I ve found a new appreciation for the way that those of us that grew up with primarily home PCs shaped the evolution of today s online world also.

An Era of Scarcity I should take a moment to comment about the cost of software back then. A newspaper article from 1985 comments that WordPerfect, then the most powerful word processing program, sold for $495 (or $219 if you could score a mail order discount). That s $1360/$600 in 2022 money. Other popular software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was up there as well. If you were to buy a new PC clone in the mid to late 80s, it would often cost $2000 in 1980s dollars. Now add a printer a low-end dot matrix for $300 or a laser for $1500 or even more. A modem: another $300. So the basic system would be $3600, or $9900 in 2022 dollars. If you wanted a nice printer, you re now pushing well over $10,000 in 2022 dollars. You start to see one barrier here, and also why things like shareware and piracy if it was indeed even recognized as such were common in those days. So you can see, from a home computer setup (TRS-80, Commodore C64, Apple ][, etc) to a business-class PC setup was an order of magnitude increase in cost. From there to the high-end minis/mainframes was another order of magnitude (at least!) increase. Eventually there was price pressure on the higher end and things all got better, which is probably why the non-DOS PCs lasted until the early 90s.

Increasing Capabilities My first exposure to computers in school was in the 4th grade, when I would have been about 9. There was a single Apple ][ machine in that room. I primarily remember playing Oregon Trail on it. The next year, the school added a computer lab. Remember, this is a small rural area, so each graduating class might have about 25 people in it; this lab was shared by everyone in the K-8 building. It was full of some flavor of IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and Netware. There was a dedicated computer teacher too, though I think she was a regular teacher that was given somewhat minimal training on computers. We were going to learn typing that year, but I did so well on the very first typing program that we soon worked out that I could do programming instead. I started going to school early these machines were far more powerful than the XT at home and worked on programming projects there. Eventually my parents bought me a Gateway 486SX/25 with a VGA monitor and hard drive. Wow! This was a whole different world. It may have come with Windows 3.0 or 3.1 on it, but I mainly remember running OS/2 on that machine. More on that below.

Programming That CoCo II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. It came with a large manual, which served as a BASIC tutorial as well. The BASIC interpreter was also the shell, so literally you could not use the computer without at least a bit of BASIC. Once I had access to a DOS machine, it also had a basic interpreter: GW-BASIC. There was a fair bit of software written in BASIC at the time, but most of the more advanced software wasn t. I wondered how these .EXE and .COM programs were written. I could find vague references to DEBUG.EXE, assemblers, and such. But it wasn t until I got a copy of Turbo Pascal that I was able to do that sort of thing myself. Eventually I got Borland C++ and taught myself C as well. A few years later, I wanted to try writing GUI programs for Windows, and bought Watcom C++ much cheaper than the competition, and it could target Windows, DOS (and I think even OS/2). Notice that, aside from BASIC, none of this was free, and none of it was bundled. You couldn t just download a C compiler, or Python interpreter, or whatnot back then. You had to pay for the ability to write any kind of serious code on the computer you already owned.

The Microsoft Domination Microsoft came to dominate the PC landscape, and then even the computing landscape as a whole. IBM very quickly lost control over the hardware side of PCs as Compaq and others made clones, but Microsoft has managed in varying degrees even to this day to keep a stranglehold on the software, and especially the operating system, side. Yes, there was occasional talk of things like DR-DOS, but by and large the dominant platform came to be the PC, and if you had a PC, you ran DOS (and later Windows) from Microsoft. For awhile, it looked like IBM was going to challenge Microsoft on the operating system front; they had OS/2, and when I switched to it sometime around the version 2.1 era in 1993, it was unquestionably more advanced technically than the consumer-grade Windows from Microsoft at the time. It had Internet support baked in, could run most DOS and Windows programs, and had introduced a replacement for the by-then terrible FAT filesystem: HPFS, in 1988. Microsoft wouldn t introduce a better filesystem for its consumer operating systems until Windows XP in 2001, 13 years later. But more on that story later.

Free Software, Shareware, and Commercial Software I ve covered the high cost of software already. Obviously $500 software wasn t going to sell in the home market. So what did we have? Mainly, these things:

1. Public domain software. It was free to use, and if implemented in BASIC, probably had source code with it too.
2. Shareware
3. Commercial software (some of it from small publishers was a lot cheaper than $500)

Let s talk about shareware. The idea with shareware was that a company would release a useful program, sometimes limited. You were encouraged to register , or pay for, it if you liked it and used it. And, regardless of whether you registered it or not, were told please copy! Sometimes shareware was fully functional, and registering it got you nothing more than printed manuals and an easy conscience (guilt trips for not registering weren t necessarily very subtle). Sometimes unregistered shareware would have a nag screen a delay of a few seconds while they told you to register. Sometimes they d be limited in some way; you d get more features if you registered. With games, it was popular to have a trilogy, and release the first episode inevitably ending with a cliffhanger as shareware, and the subsequent episodes would require registration. In any event, a lot of software people used in the 80s and 90s was shareware. Also pirated commercial software, though in the earlier days of computing, I think some people didn t even know the difference. Notice what s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world after all, he worked at MIT and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I m getting ahead of myself. I want to say again: FLOSS never really entered the DOS and Windows 3.x ecosystems. You d see it make a few inroads here and there in later versions of Windows, and moreso now that Microsoft has been sort of forced to accept it, but still, reflect on its legacy. What is the software market like in Windows compared to Linux, even today? Now it is, finally, time to talk about connectivity!

Getting On-Line What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.

The telephone system By the 80s, there was one communication network that already reached into nearly every home in America: the phone system. Virtually every household (note I don t say every person) was uniquely identified by a 10-digit phone number. You could, at least in theory, call up virtually any other phone in the country and be connected in less than a minute. But I ve got to talk about cost. The way things worked in the USA, you paid a monthly fee for a phone line. Included in that monthly fee was unlimited local calling. What is a local call? That was an extremely complex question. Generally it meant, roughly, calling within your city. But of course, as you deal with things like suburbs and cities growing into each other (eg, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex), things got complicated fast. But let s just say for simplicity you could call others in your city. What about calling people not in your city? That was long distance , and you paid often hugely by the minute for it. Long distance rates were difficult to figure out, but were generally most expensive during business hours and cheapest at night or on weekends. Prices eventually started to come down when competition was introduced for long distance carriers, but even then you often were stuck with a single carrier for long distance calls outside your city but within your state. Anyhow, let s just leave it at this: local calls were virtually free, and long distance calls were extremely expensive.

Getting a modem I remember getting a modem that ran at either 1200bps or 2400bps. Either way, quite slow; you could often read even plain text faster than the modem could display it. But what was a modem? A modem hooked up to a computer with a serial cable, and to the phone system. By the time I got one, modems could automatically dial and answer. You would send a command like ATDT5551212 and it would dial 555-1212. Modems had speakers, because often things wouldn t work right, and the telephone system was oriented around speech, so you could hear what was happening. You d hear it wait for dial tone, then dial, then hopefully the remote end would ring, a modem there would answer, you d hear the screeching of a handshake, and eventually your terminal would say CONNECT 2400. Now your computer was bridged to the other; anything going out your serial port was encoded as sound by your modem and decoded at the other end, and vice-versa. But what, exactly, was the other end? It might have been another person at their computer. Turn on local echo, and you can see what they did. Maybe you d send files to each other. But in my case, the answer was different: PC Magazine.

PC Magazine and CompuServe Starting around 1986 (so I would have been about 6 years old), I got to read PC Magazine. My dad would bring copies that were being discarded at his office home for me to read, and I think eventually bought me a subscription directly. This was not just a standard magazine; it ran something like 350-400 pages an issue, and came out every other week. This thing was a monster. It had reviews of hardware and software, descriptions of upcoming technologies, pages and pages of ads (that often had some degree of being informative to them). And they had sections on programming. Many issues would talk about BASIC or Pascal programming, and there d be a utility in most issues. What do I mean by a utility in most issues ? Did they include a floppy disk with software? No, of course not. There was a literal program listing printed in the magazine. If you wanted the utility, you had to type it in. And a lot of them were written in assembler, so you had to have an assembler. An assembler, of course, was not free and I didn t have one. Or maybe they wrote it in Microsoft C, and I had Borland C, and (of course) they weren t compatible. Sometimes they would list the program sort of in binary: line after line of a BASIC program, with lines like 64, 193, 253, 0, 53, 0, 87 that you would type in for hours, hopefully correctly. Running the BASIC program would, if you got it correct, emit a .COM file that you could then run. They did have a rudimentary checksum system built in, but it wasn t even a CRC, so something like swapping two numbers you d never notice except when the program would mysteriously hang. Eventually they teamed up with CompuServe to offer a limited slice of CompuServe for the purpose of downloading PC Magazine utilities. This was called PC MagNet. I am foggy on the details, but I believe that for a time you could connect to the limited PC MagNet part of CompuServe for free (after the cost of the long-distance call, that is) rather than paying for CompuServe itself (because, OF COURSE, that also charged you per the minute.) So in the early days, I would get special permission from my parents to place a long distance call, and after some nerve-wracking minutes in which we were aware every minute was racking up charges, I could navigate the menus, download what I wanted, and log off immediately. I still, incidentally, mourn what PC Magazine became. As with computing generally, it followed the mass market. It lost its deep technical chops, cut its programming columns, stopped talking about things like how SCSI worked, and so forth. By the time it stopped printing in 2009, it was no longer a square-bound 400-page beheamoth, but rather looked more like a copy of Newsweek, but with less depth.

Continuing with CompuServe CompuServe was a much larger service than just PC MagNet. Eventually, our family got a subscription. It was still an expensive and scarce resource; I d call it only after hours when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Everyone had a numerical username separated by commas; mine was 71510,1421. CompuServe had forums, and files. Eventually I would use TapCIS to queue up things I wanted to do offline, to minimize phone usage online. CompuServe eventually added a gateway to the Internet. For the sum of somewhere around $1 a message, you could send or receive an email from someone with an Internet email address! I remember the thrill of one time, as a kid of probably 11 years, sending a message to one of the editors of PC Magazine and getting a kind, if brief, reply back! But inevitably I had

The Godzilla Phone Bill Yes, one month I became lax in tracking my time online. I ran up my parents phone bill. I don t remember how high, but I remember it was hundreds of dollars, a hefty sum at the time. As I watched Jason Scott s BBS Documentary, I realized how common an experience this was. I think this was the end of CompuServe for me for awhile.

Toll-Free Numbers I lived near a town with a population of 500. Not even IN town, but near town. The calling area included another town with a population of maybe 1500, so all told, there were maybe 2000 people total I could talk to with a local call though far fewer numbers, because remember, telephones were allocated by the household. There was, as far as I know, zero modems that were a local call (aside from one that belonged to a friend I met in around 1992). So basically everything was long-distance. But there was a special feature of the telephone network: toll-free numbers. Normally when calling long-distance, you, the caller, paid the bill. But with a toll-free number, beginning with 1-800, the recipient paid the bill. These numbers almost inevitably belonged to corporations that wanted to make it easy for people to call. Sales and ordering lines, for instance. Some of these companies started to set up modems on toll-free numbers. There were few of these, but they existed, so of course I had to try them! One of them was a company called PennyWise that sold office supplies. They had a toll-free line you could call with a modem to order stuff. Yes, online ordering before the web! I loved office supplies. And, because I lived far from a big city, if the local K-Mart didn t have it, I probably couldn t get it. Of course, the interface was entirely text, but you could search for products and place orders with the modem. I had loads of fun exploring the system, and actually ordered things from them and probably actually saved money doing so. With the first order they shipped a monster full-color catalog. That thing must have been 500 pages, like the Sears catalogs of the day. Every item had a part number, which streamlined ordering through the modem.

Inbound FAXes By the 90s, a number of modems became able to send and receive FAXes as well. For those that don t know, a FAX machine was essentially a special modem. It would scan a page and digitally transmit it over the phone system, where it would at least in the early days be printed out in real time (because the machines didn t have the memory to store an entire page as an image). Eventually, PC modems integrated FAX capabilities. There still wasn t anything useful I could do locally, but there were ways I could get other companies to FAX something to me. I remember two of them. One was for US Robotics. They had an on demand FAX system. You d call up a toll-free number, which was an automated IVR system. You could navigate through it and select various documents of interest to you: spec sheets and the like. You d key in your FAX number, hang up, and US Robotics would call YOU and FAX you the documents you wanted. Yes! I was talking to a computer (of a sorts) at no cost to me! The New York Times also ran a service for awhile called TimesFax. Every day, they would FAX out a page or two of summaries of the day s top stories. This was pretty cool in an era in which I had no other way to access anything from the New York Times. I managed to sign up for TimesFax I have no idea how, anymore and for awhile I would get a daily FAX of their top stories. When my family got its first laser printer, I could them even print these FAXes complete with the gothic New York Times masthead. Wow! (OK, so technically I could print it on a dot-matrix printer also, but graphics on a 9-pin dot matrix is a kind of pain that is a whole other article.)

My own phone line Remember how I discussed that phone lines were allocated per household? This was a problem for a lot of reasons:

1. Anybody that tried to call my family while I was using my modem would get a busy signal (unable to complete the call)
2. If anybody in the house picked up the phone while I was using it, that would degrade the quality of the ongoing call and either mess up or disconnect the call in progress. In many cases, that could cancel a file transfer (which wasn t necessarily easy or possible to resume), prompting howls of annoyance from me.
3. Generally we all had to work around each other

So eventually I found various small jobs and used the money I made to pay for my own phone line and my own long distance costs. Eventually I upgraded to a 28.8Kbps US Robotics Courier modem even! Yes, you heard it right: I got a job and a bank account so I could have a phone line and a faster modem. Uh, isn t that why every teenager gets a job? Now my local friend and I could call each other freely at least on my end (I can t remember if he had his own phone line too). We could exchange files using HS/Link, which had the added benefit of allowing split-screen chat even while a file transfer is in progress. I m sure we spent hours chatting to each other keyboard-to-keyboard while sharing files with each other.

Technology in Schools By this point in the story, we re in the late 80s and early 90s. I m still using PC-style OSs at home; OS/2 in the later years of this period, DOS or maybe a bit of Windows in the earlier years. I mentioned that they let me work on programming at school starting in 5th grade. It was soon apparent that I knew more about computers than anybody on staff, and I started getting pulled out of class to help teachers or administrators with vexing school problems. This continued until I graduated from high school, incidentally often to my enjoyment, and the annoyance of one particular teacher who, I must say, I was fine with annoying in this way. That s not to say that there was institutional support for what I was doing. It was, after all, a small school. Larger schools might have introduced BASIC or maybe Logo in high school. But I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C by the time I was somewhere around 12 years old. So I wouldn t have had any use for that anyhow. There were programming contests occasionally held in the area. Schools would send teams. My school didn t really send anybody, but I went as an individual. One of them was run by a local college (but for jr. high or high school students. Years later, I met one of the professors that ran it. He remembered me, and that day, better than I did. The programming contest had problems one could solve in BASIC or Logo. I knew nothing about what to expect going into it, but I had lugged my computer and screen along, and asked him, Can I write my solutions in C? He was, apparently, stunned, but said sure, go for it. I took first place that day, leading to some rather confused teams from much larger schools. The Netware network that the school had was, as these generally were, itself isolated. There was no link to the Internet or anything like it. Several schools across three local counties eventually invested in a fiber-optic network linking them together. This built a larger, but still closed, network. Its primary purpose was to allow students to be exposed to a wider variety of classes at high schools. Participating schools had an ITV room , outfitted with cameras and mics. So students at any school could take classes offered over ITV at other schools. For instance, only my school taught German classes, so people at any of those participating schools could take German. It was an early Zoom room. But alongside the TV signal, there was enough bandwidth to run some Netware frames. By about 1995 or so, this let one of the schools purchase some CD-ROM software that was made available on a file server and could be accessed by any participating school. Nice! But Netware was mainly about file and printer sharing; there wasn t even a facility like email, at least not on our deployment.

BBSs My last hop before the Internet was the BBS. A BBS was a computer program, usually ran by a hobbyist like me, on a computer with a modem connected. Callers would call it up, and they d interact with the BBS. Most BBSs had discussion groups like forums and file areas. Some also had games. I, of course, continued to have that most vexing of problems: they were all long-distance. There were some ways to help with that, chiefly QWK and BlueWave. These, somewhat like TapCIS in the CompuServe days, let me download new message posts for reading offline, and queue up my own messages to send later. QWK and BlueWave didn t help with file downloading, though.

BBSs get networked BBSs were an interesting thing. You d call up one, and inevitably somewhere in the file area would be a BBS list. Download the BBS list and you ve suddenly got a list of phone numbers to try calling. All of them were long distance, of course. You d try calling them at random and have a success rate of maybe 20%. The other 80% would be defunct; you might get the dreaded this number is no longer in service or the even more dreaded angry human answering the phone (and of course a modem can t talk to a human, so they d just get silence for probably the nth time that week). The phone company cared nothing about BBSs and recycled their numbers just as fast as any others. To talk to various people, or participate in certain discussion groups, you d have to call specific BBSs. That s annoying enough in the general case, but even more so for someone paying long distance for it all, because it takes a few minutes to establish a connection to a BBS: handshaking, logging in, menu navigation, etc. But BBSs started talking to each other. The earliest successful such effort was FidoNet, and for the duration of the BBS era, it remained by far the largest. FidoNet was analogous to the UUCP that the institutional users had, but ran on the much cheaper PC hardware. Basically, BBSs that participated in FidoNet would relay email, forum posts, and files between themselves overnight. Eventually, as with UUCP, by hopping through this network, messages could reach around the globe, and forums could have worldwide participation asynchronously, long before they could link to each other directly via the Internet. It was almost entirely volunteer-run.

Running my own BBS At age 13, I eventually chose to set up my own BBS. It ran on my single phone line, so of course when I was dialing up something else, nobody could dial up me. Not that this was a huge problem; in my town of 500, I probably had a good 1 or 2 regular callers in the beginning. In the PC era, there was a big difference between a server and a client. Server-class software was expensive and rare. Maybe in later years you had an email client, but an email server would be completely unavailable to you as a home user. But with a BBS, I could effectively run a server. I even ran serial lines in our house so that the BBS could be connected from other rooms! Since I was running OS/2, the BBS didn t tie up the computer; I could continue using it for other things. FidoNet had an Internet email gateway. This one, unlike CompuServe s, was free. Once I had a BBS on FidoNet, you could reach me from the Internet using the FidoNet address. This didn t support attachments, but then email of the day didn t really, either. Various others outside Kansas ran FidoNet distribution points. I believe one of them was mgmtsys; my memory is quite vague, but I think they offered a direct gateway and I would call them to pick up Internet mail via FidoNet protocols, but I m not at all certain of this.

Pros and Cons of the Non-Microsoft World As mentioned, Microsoft was and is the dominant operating system vendor for PCs. But I left that world in 1993, and here, nearly 30 years later, have never really returned. I got an operating system with more technical capabilities than the DOS and Windows of the day, but the tradeoff was a much smaller software ecosystem. OS/2 could run DOS programs, but it ran OS/2 programs a lot better. So if I were to run a BBS, I wanted one that had a native OS/2 version limiting me to a small fraction of available BBS server software. On the other hand, as a fully 32-bit operating system, there started to be OS/2 ports of certain software with a Unix heritage; most notably for me at the time, gcc. At some point, I eventually came across the RMS essays and started to be hooked.

Internet: The Hunt Begins I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?

Learning Link and Gopher ISPs weren t really a thing; the first one in my area (though still a long-distance call) started in, I think, 1994. One service that one of my teachers got me hooked up with was Learning Link. Learning Link was a nationwide collaboration of PBS stations and schools, designed to build on the educational mission of PBS. The nearest Learning Link station was more than a 3-hour drive away but critically, they had a toll-free access number, and my teacher convinced them to let me use it. I connected via a terminal program and a modem, like with most other things. I don t remember much about it, but I do remember a very important thing it had: Gopher. That was my first experience with Gopher. Learning Link was hosted by a Unix derivative (Xenix), but it didn t exactly give everyone a shell. I seem to recall it didn t have open FTP access either. The Gopher client had FTP access at some point; I don t recall for sure if it did then. If it did, then when a Gopher server referred to an FTP server, I could get to it. (I am unclear at this point if I could key in an arbitrary FTP location, or knew how, at that time.) I also had email access there, but I don t recall exactly how; probably Pine. If that s correct, that would have dated my Learning Link access as no earlier than 1992. I think my access time to Learning Link was limited. And, since the only way to get out on the Internet from there was Gopher and Pine, I was somewhat limited in terms of technology as well. I believe that telnet services, for instance, weren t available to me.

Computer labs There was one place that tended to have Internet access: colleges and universities. In 7th grade, I participated in a program that resulted in me being invited to visit Duke University, and in 8th grade, I participated in National History Day, resulting in a trip to visit the University of Maryland. I probably sought out computer labs at both of those. My most distinct memory was finding my way into a computer lab at one of those universities, and it was full of NeXT workstations. I had never seen or used NeXT before, and had no idea how to operate it. I had brought a box of floppy disks, unaware that the DOS disks probably weren t compatible with NeXT. Closer to home, a small college had a computer lab that I could also visit. I would go there in summer or when it wasn t used with my stack of floppies. I remember downloading disk images of FLOSS operating systems: FreeBSD, Slackware, or Debian, at the time. The hash marks from the DOS-based FTP client would creep across the screen as the 1.44MB disk images would slowly download. telnet was also available on those machines, so I could telnet to things like public-access Archie servers and libraries though not Gopher. Still, FTP and telnet access opened up a lot, and I learned quite a bit in those years.

Continuing the Journey At some point, I got a copy of the Whole Internet User s Guide and Catalog, published in 1994. I still have it. If it hadn t already figured it out by then, I certainly became aware from it that Unix was the dominant operating system on the Internet. The examples in Whole Internet covered FTP, telnet, gopher all assuming the user somehow got to a Unix prompt. The web was introduced about 300 pages in; clearly viewed as something that wasn t page 1 material. And it covered the command-line www client before introducing the graphical Mosaic. Even then, though, the book highlighted Mosaic s utility as a front-end for Gopher and FTP, and even the ability to launch telnet sessions by clicking on links. But having a copy of the book didn t equate to having any way to run Mosaic. The machines in the computer lab I mentioned above all ran DOS and were incapable of running a graphical browser. I had no SLIP or PPP (both ways to run Internet traffic over a modem) connectivity at home. In short, the Web was something for the large institutional users at the time.

CD-ROMs As CD-ROMs came out, with their huge (for the day) 650MB capacity, various companies started collecting software that could be downloaded on the Internet and selling it on CD-ROM. The two most popular ones were Walnut Creek CD-ROM and Infomagic. One could buy extensive Shareware and gaming collections, and then even entire Linux and BSD distributions. Although not exactly an Internet service per se, it was a way of bringing what may ordinarily only be accessible to institutional users into the home computer realm.

Free Software Jumps In As I mentioned, by the mid 90s, I had come across RMS s writings about free software most probably his 1992 essay Why Software Should Be Free. (Please note, this is not a commentary on the more recently-revealed issues surrounding RMS, but rather his writings and work as I encountered them in the 90s.) The notion of a Free operating system not just in cost but in openness was incredibly appealing. Not only could I tinker with it to a much greater extent due to having source for everything, but it included so much software that I d otherwise have to pay for. Compilers! Interpreters! Editors! Terminal emulators! And, especially, server software of all sorts. There d be no way I could afford or run Netware, but with a Free Unixy operating system, I could do all that. My interest was obviously piqued. Add to that the fact that I could actually participate and contribute I was about to become hooked on something that I ve stayed hooked on for decades. But then the question was: which Free operating system? Eventually I chose FreeBSD to begin with; that would have been sometime in 1995. I don t recall the exact reasons for that. I remember downloading Slackware install floppies, and probably the fact that Debian wasn t yet at 1.0 scared me off for a time. FreeBSD s fantastic Handbook far better than anything I could find for Linux at the time was no doubt also a factor.

The de Raadt Factor Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? The short answer is Theo de Raadt. Somewhere in this time, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, I asked some questions comparing NetBSD to the other two free BSDs. This was on a NetBSD mailing list, but for some reason Theo saw it and got a flame war going, which CC d me. Now keep in mind that even if NetBSD had a web presence at the time, it would have been minimal, and I would have not all that unusually for the time had no way to access it. I was certainly not aware of the, shall we say, acrimony between Theo and NetBSD. While I had certainly seen an online flamewar before, this took on a different and more disturbing tone; months later, Theo randomly emailed me under the subject SLIME saying that I was, well, SLIME . I seem to recall periodic emails from him thereafter reminding me that he hates me and that he had blocked me. (Disclaimer: I have poor email archives from this period, so the full details are lost to me, but I believe I am accurately conveying these events from over 25 years ago) This was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. I was trying to learn, and while it is possible I didn t understand some aspect or other of netiquette (or Theo s personal hatred of NetBSD) at the time, still that is not a reason to flame a 16-year-old (though he would have had no way to know my age). This didn t leave any kind of scar, but did leave a lasting impression; to this day, I am particularly concerned with how FLOSS projects handle poisonous people. Debian, for instance, has come a long way in this over the years, and even Linus Torvalds has turned over a new leaf. I don t know if Theo has. In any case, I didn t use NetBSD then. I did try it periodically in the years since, but never found it compelling enough to justify a large switch from Debian. I never tried OpenBSD for various reasons, but one of them was that I didn t want to join a community that tolerates behavior such as Theo s from its leader.

Moving to FreeBSD Moving from OS/2 to FreeBSD was final. That is, I didn t have enough hard drive space to keep both. I also didn t have the backup capacity to back up OS/2 completely. My BBS, which ran Virtual BBS (and at some point also AdeptXBBS) was deleted and reincarnated in a different form. My BBS was a member of both FidoNet and VirtualNet; the latter was specific to VBBS, and had to be dropped. I believe I may have also had to drop the FidoNet link for a time. This was the biggest change of computing in my life to that point. The earlier experiences hadn t literally destroyed what came before. OS/2 could still run my DOS programs. Its command shell was quite DOS-like. It ran Windows programs. I was going to throw all that away and leap into the unknown. I wish I had saved a copy of my BBS; I would love to see the messages I exchanged back then, or see its menu screens again. I have little memory of what it looked like. But other than that, I have no regrets. Pursuing Free, Unixy operating systems brought me a lot of enjoyment and a good career. That s not to say it was easy. All the problems of not being in the Microsoft ecosystem were magnified under FreeBSD and Linux. In a day before EDID, monitor timings had to be calculated manually and you risked destroying your monitor if you got them wrong. Word processing and spreadsheet software was pretty much not there for FreeBSD or Linux at the time; I was therefore forced to learn LaTeX and actually appreciated that. Software like PageMaker or CorelDraw was certainly nowhere to be found for those free operating systems either. But I got a ton of new capabilities. I mentioned the BBS didn t shut down, and indeed it didn t. I ran what was surely a supremely unique oddity: a free, dialin Unix shell server in the middle of a small town in Kansas. I m sure I provided things such as pine for email and some help text and maybe even printouts for how to use it. The set of callers slowly grew over the time period, in fact. And then I got UUCP.

Enter UUCP Even throughout all this, there was no local Internet provider and things were still long distance. I had Internet Email access via assorted strange routes, but they were all strange. And, I wanted access to Usenet. In 1995, it happened. The local ISP I mentioned offered UUCP access. Though I couldn t afford the dialup shell (or later, SLIP/PPP) that they offered due to long-distance costs, UUCP s very efficient batched processes looked doable. I believe I established that link when I was 15, so in 1995. I worked to register my domain, complete.org, as well. At the time, the process was a bit lengthy and involved downloading a text file form, filling it out in a precise way, sending it to InterNIC, and probably mailing them a check. Well I did that, and in September of 1995, complete.org became mine. I set up sendmail on my local system, as well as INN to handle the limited Usenet newsfeed I requested from the ISP. I even ran Majordomo to host some mailing lists, including some that were surprisingly high-traffic for a few-times-a-day long-distance modem UUCP link! The modem client programs for FreeBSD were somewhat less advanced than for OS/2, but I believe I wound up using Minicom or Seyon to continue to dial out to BBSs and, I believe, continue to use Learning Link. So all the while I was setting up my local BBS, I continued to have access to the text Internet, consisting of chiefly Gopher for me.

Switching to Debian I switched to Debian sometime in 1995 or 1996, and have been using Debian as my primary OS ever since. I continued to offer shell access, but added the WorldVU Atlantis menuing BBS system. This provided a return of a more BBS-like interface (by default; shell was still an uption) as well as some BBS door games such as LoRD and TradeWars 2002, running under DOS emulation. I also continued to run INN, and ran ifgate to allow FidoNet echomail to be presented into INN Usenet-like newsgroups, and netmail to be gated to Unix email. This worked pretty well. The BBS continued to grow in these days, peaking at about two dozen total user accounts, and maybe a dozen regular users.

Dial-up access availability I believe it was in 1996 that dial up PPP access finally became available in my small town. What a thrill! FINALLY! I could now FTP, use Gopher, telnet, and the web all from home. Of course, it was at modem speeds, but still. (Strangely, I have a memory of accessing the Web using WebExplorer from OS/2. I don t know exactly why; it s possible that by this time, I had upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 and was able to reinstall OS/2 on the old 25MHz 486, or maybe something was wrong with the timeline from my memories from 25 years ago above. Or perhaps I made the occasional long-distance call somewhere before I ditched OS/2.) Gopher sites still existed at this point, and I could access them using Netscape Navigator which likely became my standard Gopher client at that point. I don t recall using UMN text-mode gopher client locally at that time, though it s certainly possible I did.

The city Starting when I was 15, I took computer science classes at Wichita State University. The first one was a class in the summer of 1995 on C++. I remember being worried about being good enough for it I was, after all, just after my HS freshman year and had never taken the prerequisite C class. I loved it and got an A! By 1996, I was taking more classes. In 1996 or 1997 I stayed in Wichita during the day due to having more than one class. So, what would I do then but enjoy the computer lab? The CS dept. had two of them: one that had NCD X terminals connected to a pair of SunOS servers, and another one running Windows. I spent most of the time in the Unix lab with the NCDs; I d use Netscape or pine, write code, enjoy the University s fast Internet connection, and so forth. In 1997 I had graduated high school and that summer I moved to Wichita to attend college. As was so often the case, I shut down the BBS at that time. It would be 5 years until I again dealt with Internet at home in a rural community. By the time I moved to my apartment in Wichita, I had stopped using OS/2 entirely. I have no memory of ever having OS/2 there. Along the way, I had bought a Pentium 166, and then the most expensive piece of computing equipment I have ever owned: a DEC Alpha, which, of course, ran Linux.

ISDN I must have used dialup PPP for a time, but I eventually got a job working for the ISP I had used for UUCP, and then PPP. While there, I got a 128Kbps ISDN line installed in my apartment, and they gave me a discount on the service for it. That was around 3x the speed of a modem, and crucially was always on and gave me a public IP. No longer did I have to use UUCP; now I got to host my own things! By at least 1998, I was running a web server on www.complete.org, and I had an FTP server going as well.

Even Bigger Cities In 1999 I moved to Dallas, and there got my first broadband connection: an ADSL link at, I think, 1.5Mbps! Now that was something! But it had some reliability problems. I eventually put together a server and had it hosted at an acquantaince s place who had SDSL in his apartment. Within a couple of years, I had switched to various kinds of proper hosting for it, but that is a whole other article. In Indianapolis, I got a cable modem for the first time, with even tighter speeds but prohibitions on running servers on it. Yuck.

Challenges Being non-Microsoft continued to have challenges. Until the advent of Firefox, a web browser was one of the biggest. While Netscape supported Linux on i386, it didn t support Linux on Alpha. I hobbled along with various attempts at emulators, old versions of Mosaic, and so forth. And, until StarOffice was open-sourced as Open Office, reading Microsoft file formats was also a challenge, though WordPerfect was briefly available for Linux. Over the years, I have become used to the Linux ecosystem. Perhaps I use Gimp instead of Photoshop and digikam instead of well, whatever somebody would use on Windows. But I get ZFS, and containers, and so much that isn t available there. Yes, I know Apple never went away and is a thing, but for most of the time period I discuss in this article, at least after the rise of DOS, it was niche compared to the PC market.

Back to Kansas In 2002, I moved back to Kansas, to a rural home near a different small town in the county next to where I grew up. Over there, it was back to dialup at home, but I had faster access at work. I didn t much care for this, and thus began a 20+-year effort to get broadband in the country. At first, I got a wireless link, which worked well enough in the winter, but had serious problems in the summer when the trees leafed out. Eventually DSL became available locally highly unreliable, but still, it was something. Then I moved back to the community I grew up in, a few miles from where I grew up. Again I got DSL a bit better. But after some years, being at the end of the run of DSL meant I had poor speeds and reliability problems. I eventually switched to various wireless ISPs, which continues to the present day; while people in cities can get Gbps service, I can get, at best, about 50Mbps. Long-distance fees are gone, but the speed disparity remains.

Concluding Reflections I am glad I grew up where I did; the strong community has a lot of advantages I don t have room to discuss here. In a number of very real senses, having no local services made things a lot more difficult than they otherwise would have been. However, perhaps I could say that I also learned a lot through the need to come up with inventive solutions to those challenges. To this day, I think a lot about computing in remote environments: partially because I live in one, and partially because I enjoy visiting places that are remote enough that they have no Internet, phone, or cell service whatsoever. I have written articles like Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances based on my own personal experience. I instinctively think about making protocols robust in the face of various kinds of connectivity failures because I experience various kinds of connectivity failures myself.

(Almost) Everything Lives On In 2002, Gopher turned 10 years old. It had probably been about 9 or 10 years since I had first used Gopher, which was the first way I got on live Internet from my house. It was hard to believe. By that point, I had an always-on Internet link at home and at work. I had my Alpha, and probably also at least PCMCIA Ethernet for a laptop (many laptops had modems by the 90s also). Despite its popularity in the early 90s, less than 10 years after it came on the scene and started to unify the Internet, it was mostly forgotten. And it was at that moment that I decided to try to resurrect it. The University of Minnesota finally released it under an Open Source license. I wrote the first new gopher server in years, pygopherd, and introduced gopher to Debian. Gopher lives on; there are now quite a few Gopher clients and servers out there, newly started post-2002. The Gemini protocol can be thought of as something akin to Gopher 2.0, and it too has a small but blossoming ecosystem. Archie, the old FTP search tool, is dead though. Same for WAIS and a number of the other pre-web search tools. But still, even FTP lives on today. And BBSs? Well, they didn t go away either. Jason Scott s fabulous BBS documentary looks back at the history of the BBS, while Back to the BBS from last year talks about the modern BBS scene. FidoNet somehow is still alive and kicking. UUCP still has its place and has inspired a whole string of successors. Some, like NNCP, are clearly direct descendents of UUCP. Filespooler lives in that ecosystem, and you can even see UUCP concepts in projects as far afield as Syncthing and Meshtastic. Usenet still exists, and you can now run Usenet over NNCP just as I ran Usenet over UUCP back in the day (which you can still do as well). Telnet, of course, has been largely supplanted by ssh, but the concept is more popular now than ever, as Linux has made ssh be available on everything from Raspberry Pi to Android. And I still run a Gopher server, looking pretty much like it did in 2002. This post also has a permanent home on my website, where it may be periodically updated.

Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July 2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911, but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outside actors like Cloudflare which seem to point at an internal BGP failure. Its impact on the economy has yet to be measured, but it probably cost millions of dollars in wasted time and possibly lead to life-threatening situations. Apart from holding Rogers (criminally?) responsible for this, what should be done in the future to avoid such problems? It's not the first time something like this has happened: it happened to Bell Canada as well. The Rogers outage is also strangely similar to the Facebook outage last year, but, to its credit, Facebook did post a fairly detailed explanation only a day later. The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted. The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized. I believe the solution to the problem of large, private, centralised telcos and ISPs is to replace them with smaller, public, decentralised service providers. The only way to ensure that works is to make sure that public money ends up creating infrastructure controlled by the public, which means treating ISPs as a public utility. This has been implemented elsewhere: it works, it's cheaper, and provides better service.

A modest proposal Global wireless services (like phone services) and home internet inevitably grow into monopolies. They are public utilities, just like water, power, railways, and roads. The question of how they should be managed is therefore inherently political, yet people don't seem to question the idea that only the market (i.e. "competition") can solve this problem. I disagree. 10 years ago (in french), I suggested we, in Qu bec, should nationalize large telcos and internet service providers. I no longer believe is a realistic approach: most of those companies have crap copper-based networks (at least for the last mile), yet are worth billions of dollars. It would be prohibitive, and a waste, to buy them out. Back then, I called this idea "R seau-Qu bec", a reference to the already nationalized power company, Hydro-Qu bec. (This idea, incidentally, made it into the plan of a political party.) Now, I think we should instead build our own, public internet. Start setting up municipal internet services, fiber to the home in all cities, progressively. Then interconnect cities with fiber, and build peering agreements with other providers. This also includes a bid on wireless spectrum to start competing with phone providers as well. And while that sounds really ambitious, I think it's possible to take this one step at a time.

Municipal broadband In many parts of the world, municipal broadband is an elegant solution to the problem, with solutions ranging from Stockholm's city-owned fiber network (dark fiber, layer 1) to Utah's UTOPIA network (fiber to the premises, layer 2) and municipal wireless networks like Guifi.net which connects about 40,000 nodes in Catalonia. A good first step would be for cities to start providing broadband services to its residents, directly. Cities normally own sewage and water systems that interconnect most residences and therefore have direct physical access everywhere. In Montr al, in particular, there is an ongoing project to replace a lot of old lead-based plumbing which would give an opportunity to lay down a wired fiber network across the city. This is a wild guess, but I suspect this would be much less expensive than one would think. Some people agree with me and quote this as low as 1000$ per household. There is about 800,000 households in the city of Montr al, so we're talking about a 800 million dollars investment here, to connect every household in Montr al with fiber and incidentally a quarter of the province's population. And this is not an up-front cost: this can be built progressively, with expenses amortized over many years. (We should not, however, connect Montr al first: it's used as an example here because it's a large number of households to connect.) Such a network should be built with a redundant topology. I leave it as an open question whether we should adopt Stockholm's more minimalist approach or provide direct IP connectivity. I would tend to favor the latter, because then you can immediately start to offer the service to households and generate revenues to compensate for the capital expenditures. Given the ridiculous profit margins telcos currently have 8 billion $CAD net income for BCE (2019), 2 billion $CAD for Rogers (2020) I also believe this would actually turn into a profitable revenue stream for the city, the same way Hydro-Qu bec is more and more considered as a revenue stream for the state. (I personally believe that's actually wrong and we should treat those resources as human rights and not money cows, but I digress. The point is: this is not a cost point, it's a revenue.) The other major challenge here is that the city will need competent engineers to drive this project forward. But this is not different from the way other public utilities run: we have electrical engineers at Hydro, sewer and water engineers at the city, this is just another profession. If anything, the computing science sector might be more at fault than the city here in its failure to provide competent and accountable engineers to society... Right now, most of the network in Canada is copper: we are hitting the limits of that technology with DSL, and while cable has some life left to it (DOCSIS 4.0 does 4Gbps), that is nowhere near the capacity of fiber. Take the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee: in 2010, the city-owned ISP EPB finished deploying a fiber network to the entire town and provided gigabit internet to everyone. Now, 12 years later, they are using this same network to provide the mind-boggling speed of 25 gigabit to the home. To give you an idea, Chattanooga is roughly the size and density of Sherbrooke.

Provincial public internet As part of building a municipal network, the question of getting access to "the internet" will immediately come up. Naturally, this will first be solved by using already existing commercial providers to hook up residents to the rest of the global network. But eventually, networks should inter-connect: Montr al should connect with Laval, and then Trois-Rivi res, then Qu bec City. This will require long haul fiber runs, but those links are not actually that expensive, and many of those already exist as a public resource at RISQ and CANARIE, which cross-connects universities and colleges across the province and the country. Those networks might not have the capacity to cover the needs of the entire province right now, but that is a router upgrade away, thanks to the amazing capacity of fiber. There are two crucial mistakes to avoid at this point. First, the network needs to remain decentralised. Long haul links should be IP links with BGP sessions, and each city (or MRC) should have its own independent network, to avoid Rogers-class catastrophic failures. Second, skill needs to remain in-house: RISQ has already made that mistake, to a certain extent, by selling its neutral datacenter. Tellingly, MetroOptic, probably the largest commercial dark fiber provider in the province, now operates the QIX, the second largest "public" internet exchange in Canada. Still, we have a lot of infrastructure we can leverage here. If RISQ or CANARIE cannot be up to the task, Hydro-Qu bec has power lines running into every house in the province, with high voltage power lines running hundreds of kilometers far north. The logistics of long distance maintenance are already solved by that institution. In fact, Hydro already has fiber all over the province, but it is a private network, separate from the internet for security reasons (and that should probably remain so). But this only shows they already have the expertise to lay down fiber: they would just need to lay down a parallel network to the existing one. In that architecture, Hydro would be a "dark fiber" provider.

International public internet None of the above solves the problem for the entire population of Qu bec, which is notoriously dispersed, with an area three times the size of France, but with only an eight of its population (8 million vs 67). More specifically, Canada was originally a french colony, a land violently stolen from native people who have lived here for thousands of years. Some of those people now live in reservations, sometimes far from urban centers (but definitely not always). So the idea of leveraging the Hydro-Qu bec infrastructure doesn't always work to solve this, because while Hydro will happily flood a traditional hunting territory for an electric dam, they don't bother running power lines to the village they forcibly moved, powering it instead with noisy and polluting diesel generators. So before giving me fiber to the home, we should give power (and potable water, for that matter), to those communities first. So we need to discuss international connectivity. (How else could we consider those communities than peer nations anyways?c) Qu bec has virtually zero international links. Even in Montr al, which likes to style itself a major player in gaming, AI, and technology, most peering goes through either Toronto or New York. That's a problem that we must fix, regardless of the other problems stated here. Looking at the submarine cable map, we see very few international links actually landing in Canada. There is the Greenland connect which connects Newfoundland to Iceland through Greenland. There's the EXA which lands in Ireland, the UK and the US, and Google has the Topaz link on the west coast. That's about it, and none of those land anywhere near any major urban center in Qu bec. We should have a cable running from France up to Saint-F licien. There should be a cable from Vancouver to China. Heck, there should be a fiber cable running all the way from the end of the great lakes through Qu bec, then up around the northern passage and back down to British Columbia. Those cables are expensive, and the idea might sound ludicrous, but Russia is actually planning such a project for 2026. The US has cables running all the way up (and around!) Alaska, neatly bypassing all of Canada in the process. We just look ridiculous on that map. (Addendum: I somehow forgot to talk about Teleglobe here was founded as publicly owned company in 1950, growing international phone and (later) data links all over the world. It was privatized by the conservatives in 1984, along with rails and other "crown corporations". So that's one major risk to any effort to make public utilities work properly: some government might be elected and promptly sell it out to its friends for peanuts.)

Wireless networks I know most people will have rolled their eyes so far back their heads have exploded. But I'm not done yet. I want wireless too. And by wireless, I don't mean a bunch of geeks setting up OpenWRT routers on rooftops. I tried that, and while it was fun and educational, it didn't scale. A public networking utility wouldn't be complete without providing cellular phone service. This involves bidding for frequencies at the federal level, and deploying a rather large amount of infrastructure, but it could be a later phase, when the engineers and politicians have proven their worth. At least part of the Rogers fiasco would have been averted if such a decentralized network backend existed. One might even want to argue that a separate institution should be setup to provide phone services, independently from the regular wired networking, if only for reliability. Because remember here: the problem we're trying to solve is not just technical, it's about political boundaries, centralisation, and automation. If everything is ran by this one organisation again, we will have failed. However, I must admit that phone services is where my ideas fall a little short. I can't help but think it's also an accessible goal maybe starting with a virtual operator but it seems slightly less so than the others, especially considering how closed the phone ecosystem is.

Counter points In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

I don't want the state to control my internet One legitimate concern I have about the idea of the state running the internet is the potential it would have to censor or control the content running over the wires. But I don't think there is necessarily a direct relationship between resource ownership and control of content. Sure, China has strong censorship in place, partly implemented through state-controlled businesses. But Russia also has strong censorship in place, based on regulatory tools: they force private service providers to install back-doors in their networks to control content and surveil their users. Besides, the USA have been doing warrantless wiretapping since at least 2003 (and yes, that's 10 years before the Snowden revelations) so a commercial internet is no assurance that we have a free internet. Quite the contrary in fact: if anything, the commercial internet goes hand in hand with the neo-colonial internet, just like businesses did in the "good old colonial days". Large media companies are the primary censors of content here. In Canada, the media cartel requested the first site-blocking order in 2018. The plaintiffs (including Qu becor, Rogers, and Bell Canada) are both content providers and internet service providers, an obvious conflict of interest. Nevertheless, there are some strong arguments against having a centralised, state-owned monopoly on internet service providers. FDN makes a good point on this. But this is not what I am suggesting: at the provincial level, the network would be purely physical, and regional entities (which could include private companies) would peer over that physical network, ensuring decentralization. Delegating the management of that infrastructure to an independent non-profit or cooperative (but owned by the state) would also ensure some level of independence.

Isn't the government incompetent and corrupt? Also known as "private enterprise is better skilled at handling this, the state can't do anything right" I don't think this is a "fait accomplit". If anything, I have found publicly ran utilities to be spectacularly reliable here. I rarely have trouble with sewage, water, or power, and keep in mind I live in a city where we receive about 2 meters of snow a year, which tend to create lots of trouble with power lines. Unless there's a major weather event, power just runs here. I think the same can happen with an internet service provider. But it would certainly need to have higher standards to what we're used to, because frankly Internet is kind of janky.

A single monopoly will be less reliable I actually agree with that, but that is not what I am proposing anyways. Current commercial or non-profit entities will be free to offer their services on top of the public network. And besides, the current "ha! diversity is great" approach is exactly what we have now, and it's not working. The pretense that we can have competition over a single network is what led the US into the ridiculous situation where they also pretend to have competition over the power utility market. This led to massive forest fires in California and major power outages in Texas. It doesn't work.

Wouldn't this create an isolated network? One theory is that this new network would be so hostile to incumbent telcos and ISPs that they would simply refuse to network with the public utility. And while it is true that the telcos currently do also act as a kind of "tier one" provider in some places, I strongly feel this is also a problem that needs to be solved, regardless of ownership of networking infrastructure. Right now, telcos often hold both ends of the stick: they are the gateway to users, the "last mile", but they also provide peering to the larger internet in some locations. In at least one datacenter in downtown Montr al, I've seen traffic go through Bell Canada that was not directly targeted at Bell customers. So in effect, they are in a position of charging twice for the same traffic, and that's not only ridiculous, it should just be plain illegal. And besides, this is not a big problem: there are other providers out there. As bad as the market is in Qu bec, there is still some diversity in Tier one providers that could allow for some exits to the wider network (e.g. yes, Cogent is here too).

What about Google and Facebook? Nationalization of other service providers like Google and Facebook is out of scope of this discussion. That said, I am not sure the state should get into the business of organising the web or providing content services however, but I will point out it already does do some of that through its own websites. It should probably keep itself to this, and also consider providing normal services for people who don't or can't access the internet. (And I would also be ready to argue that Google and Facebook already act as extensions of the state: certainly if Facebook didn't exist, the CIA or the NSA would like to create it at this point. And Google has lucrative business with the US department of defense.)

What does not work So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet. But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

Legal pressure and regulation In 1984 (of all years), the US Department of Justice finally broke up AT&T in half a dozen corporations, after a 10 year legal battle. Yet a decades later, we're back to only three large providers doing essentially what AT&T was doing back then, and those are regional monopolies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (not counting T-Mobile that is from a different breed). So the legal approach really didn't work that well, especially considering the political landscape changed in the US, and the FTC seems perfectly happy to let those major mergers continue. In Canada, we never even pretended we would solve this problem at all: Bell Canada (the literal "father" of AT&T) is in the same situation now. We have either a regional monopoly (e.g. Videotron for cable in Qu bec) or an oligopoly (Bell, Rogers, and Telus controlling more than 90% of the market). Telus does have one competitor in the west of Canada, Shaw, but Rogers has been trying to buy it out. The competition bureau seems to have blocked the merger for now, but it didn't stop other recent mergers like Bell's acquisition one of its main competitors in Qu bec, eBox. Regulation doesn't seem capable of ensuring those profitable corporations provide us with decent pricing, which makes Canada one of the most expensive countries (research) for mobile data on the planet. The recent failure of the CRTC to properly protect smaller providers has even lead to price hikes. Meanwhile the oligopoly is actually agreeing on their own price hikes therefore becoming a real cartel, complete with price fixing and reductions in output. There are actually regulations in Canada supposed to keep the worst of the Rogers outage from happening at all. According to CBC:

Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.

I could personally confirm that my phone couldn't reach 911 services, because all calls would fail: the problem was that towers were still up, so your phone wouldn't fall back to alternative service providers (which could have resolved the issue). I can only speculate as to why Rogers didn't take cell phone towers out of the network to let phones work properly for 911 service, but it seems like a dangerous game to play. Hilariously, the CRTC itself didn't have a reliable phone service due to the service outage:

Please note that our phone lines are affected by the Rogers network outage. Our website is still available: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/contact/

https://mobile.twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041 I wonder if they will file a complaint against Rogers themselves about this. I probably should. It seems the federal government is thinking more of the same medicine will fix the problem and has told companies should "help" each other in an emergency. I doubt this will fix anything, and could actually make things worse if the competitors actually interoperate more, as it could cause multi-provider, cascading failures.

Subsidies The absurd price we pay for data does not actually mean everyone gets high speed internet at home. Large swathes of the Qu bec countryside don't get broadband at all, and it can be difficult or expensive, even in large urban centers like Montr al, to get high speed internet. That is despite having a series of subsidies that all avoided investing in our own infrastructure. We had the "fonds de l'autoroute de l'information", "information highway fund" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) and "branchez les familles", "connecting families" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) which subsidized the development of a copper network. In 2014, more of the same: the federal government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called connecting Canadians to connect 280 000 households to "high speed internet". And now, the federal and provincial governments are proudly announcing that "everyone is now connected to high speed internet", after pouring more than 1.1 billion dollars to connect, guess what, another 380 000 homes, right in time for the provincial election. Of course, technically, the deadline won't actually be met until 2023. Qu bec is a big area to cover, and you can guess what happens next: the telcos threw up their hand and said some areas just can't be connected. (Or they connect their CEO but not the poor folks across the lake.) The story then takes the predictable twist of giving more money out to billionaires, subsidizing now Musk's Starlink system to connect those remote areas. To give a concrete example: a friend who lives about 1000km away from Montr al, 4km from a small, 2500 habitant village, has recently got symmetric 100 mbps fiber at home from Telus, thanks to those subsidies. But I can't get that service in Montr al at all, presumably because Telus and Bell colluded to split that market. Bell doesn't provide me with such a service either: they tell me they have "fiber to my neighborhood", and only offer me a 25/10 mbps ADSL service. (There is Vid otron offering 400mbps, but that's copper cable, again a dead technology, and asymmetric.)

Conclusion Remember Chattanooga? Back in 2010, they funded the development of a fiber network, and now they have deployed a network roughly a thousand times faster than what we have just funded with a billion dollars. In 2010, I was paying Bell Canada 60$/mth for 20mbps and a 125GB cap, and now, I'm still (indirectly) paying Bell for roughly the same speed (25mbps). Back then, Bell was throttling their competitors networks until 2009, when they were forced by the CRTC to stop throttling. Both Bell and Vid otron still explicitly forbid you from running your own servers at home, Vid otron charges prohibitive prices which make it near impossible for resellers to sell uncapped services. Those companies are not spurring innovation: they are blocking it. We have spent all this money for the private sector to build us a private internet, over decades, without any assurance of quality, equity or reliability. And while in some locations, ISPs did deploy fiber to the home, they certainly didn't upgrade their entire network to follow suit, and even less allowed resellers to compete on that network. In 10 years, when 100mbps will be laughable, I bet those service providers will again punt the ball in the public courtyard and tell us they don't have the money to upgrade everyone's equipment. We got screwed. It's time to try something new.

Updates There was a discussion about this article on Hacker News which was surprisingly productive. Trigger warning: Hacker News is kind of right-wing, in case you didn't know. Since this article was written, at least two more major acquisitions happened, just in Qu bec:

• Bell acquired Distributel
• Qu becor acquired vMedia

In the latter case, vMedia was explicitly saying it couldn't grow because of "lack of access to capital". So basically, we have given those companies a billion dollars, and they are not using that very money to buy out their competition. At least we could have given that money to small players to even out the playing field. But this is not how that works at all. Also, in a bizarre twist, an "analyst" believes the acquisition is likely to help Rogers acquire Shaw. Also, since this article was written, the Washington Post published a review of a book bringing similar ideas: Internet for the People The Fight for Our Digital Future, by Ben Tarnoff, at Verso books. It's short, but even more ambitious than what I am suggesting in this article, arguing that all big tech companies should be broken up and better regulated:

He pulls from Ethan Zuckerman s idea of a web that is plural in purpose that just as pool halls, libraries and churches each have different norms, purposes and designs, so too should different places on the internet. To achieve this, Tarnoff wants governments to pass laws that would make the big platforms unprofitable and, in their place, fund small-scale, local experiments in social media design. Instead of having platforms ruled by engagement-maximizing algorithms, Tarnoff imagines public platforms run by local librarians that include content from public media.

(Links mine: the Washington Post obviously prefers to not link to the real web, and instead doesn't link to Zuckerman's site all and suggests Amazon for the book, in a cynical example.) And in another example of how the private sector has failed us, there was recently a fluke in the AMBER alert system where the entire province was warned about a loose shooter in Saint-Elz ar except the people in the town, because they have spotty cell phone coverage. In other words, millions of people received a strongly toned, "life-threatening", alert for a city sometimes hours away, except the people most vulnerable to the alert. Not missing a beat, the CAQ party is promising more of the same medicine again and giving more money to telcos to fix the problem, suggesting to spend three billion dollars in private infrastructure.

Review: Still Not Safe, by Robert L. Wears & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Copyright:	November 2019
ISBN:	0-19-027128-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	232

Still Not Safe is an examination of the recent politics and history of patient safety in medicine. Its conclusions are summarized by the opening paragraph of the preface:

The American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly said that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The reform movement to make healthcare safer is clearly a great cause, but patient safety efforts are increasingly following Hoffer's path.

Robert Wears was Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida specializing in patient safety. Kathleen Sutcliffe is Professor of Medicine and Business at Johns Hopkins. This book is based on research funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for which both Wears and Sutcliffe were primary investigators. (Wears died in 2017, but the acknowledgments imply that at least early drafts of the book existed by that point and it was indeed co-written.) The anchor of the story of patient safety in Still Not Safe is the 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine entitled To Err is Human, to which the authors attribute an explosion of public scrutiny of medical safety. The headline conclusion of that report, which led nightly news programs after its release, was that 44,000 to 120,000 people died each year in the United States due to medical error. This report prompted government legislation, funding for new safety initiatives, a flurry of follow-on reports, and significant public awareness of medical harm. What it did not produce, in the authors' view, is significant improvements in patient safety. The central topic of this book is an analysis of why patient safety efforts have had so little measurable effect. The authors attribute this to three primary causes: an unwillingness to involve safety experts from outside medicine or absorb safety lessons from other disciplines, an obsession with human error that led to profound misunderstandings of the nature of safety, and the misuse of safety concerns as a means to centralize control of medical practice in the hands of physician-administrators. (The term used by the authors is "managerial, scientific-bureaucratic medicine," which is technically accurate but rather awkward.) Biggest complaint first: This book desperately needed examples, case studies, or something to make these ideas concrete. There are essentially none in 230 pages apart from passing mentions of famous cases of medical error that added to public pressure, and a tantalizing but maddeningly nonspecific discussion of the atypically successful effort to radically improve the safety of anesthesia. Apparently anesthesiologists involved safety experts from outside medicine, avoided a focus on human error, turned safety into an engineering problem, and made concrete improvements that had a hugely positive impact on the number of adverse events for patients. Sounds fascinating! Alas, I'm just as much in the dark about what those improvements were as I was when I started reading this book. Apart from a vague mention of some unspecified improvements to anesthesia machines, there are no concrete descriptions whatsoever. I understand that the authors were probably leery of giving too many specific examples of successful safety initiatives since one of their core points is that safety is a mindset and philosophy rather than a replicable set of actions, and copying the actions of another field without understanding their underlying motivations or context within a larger system is doomed to failure. But you have to give the reader something, or the book starts feeling like a flurry of abstract assertions. Much is made here of the drawbacks of a focus on human error, and the superiority of the safety analysis done in other fields that have moved beyond error-centric analysis (and in some cases have largely discarded the word "error" as inherently unhelpful and ambiguous). That leads naturally to showing an analysis of an adverse incident through an error lens and then through a more nuanced safety lens, making the differences concrete for the reader. It was maddening to me that the authors never did this. This book was recommended to me as part of a discussion about safety and reliability in tech and the need to learn from safety practices in other fields. In that context, I didn't find it useful, although surprisingly that's because the thinking in medicine (at least as presented by these authors) seems behind the current thinking in distributed systems. The idea that human error is not a useful model for approaching reliability is standard in large tech companies, nearly all of which use blameless postmortems for exactly that reason. Tech, similar to medicine, does have a tendency to be insular and not look outside the field for good ideas, but the approach to large-scale reliability in tech seems to have avoided the other traps discussed here. (Security is another matter, but security is also adversarial, which creates different problems that I suspect require different tools.) What I did find fascinating in this book, although not directly applicable to my own work, is the way in which a focus on human error becomes a justification for bureaucratic control and therefore a concentration of power in a managerial layer. If the assumption is that medical harm is primarily caused by humans making avoidable mistakes, and therefore the solution is to prevent humans from making mistakes through better training, discipline, or process, this creates organizations that are divided into those who make the rules and those who follow the rules. The long-term result is a practice of medicine in which a small number of experts decide the correct treatment for a given problem, and then all other practitioners are expected to precisely follow that treatment plan to avoid "errors." (The best distributed systems approaches may avoid this problem, but this failure mode seems nearly universal in technical support organizations.) I was startled by how accurate that portrayal of medicine felt. My assumption prior to reading this book was that the modern experience of medicine as an assembly line with patients as widgets was caused by the pressure for higher "productivity" and thus shorter visit times, combined with (in the US) the distorting effects of our broken medical insurance system. After reading this book, I've added a misguided way of thinking about medical error and risk avoidance to that analysis. One of the authors' points (which, as usual, I wish they'd made more concrete with a case study) is that the same thought process that lets a doctor make a correct diagnosis and find a working treatment is the thought process that may lead to an incorrect diagnosis or treatment. There is not a separable state of "mental error" that can be eliminated. Decision-making processes are more complicated and more integrated than that. If you try to prevent "errors" by eliminating flexibility, you also eliminate vital tools for successfully treating patients. The authors are careful to point out that the prior state of medicine in which each doctor was a force to themselves and there was no role for patient safety as a discipline was also bad for safety. Reverting to the state of medicine before the advent of the scientific-bureaucratic error-avoiding culture is also not a solution. But, rather at odds with other popular books about medicine, the authors are highly critical of safety changes focused on human error prevention, such as mandatory checklists. In their view, this is exactly the sort of attempt to blindly copy the machinery of safety in another field (in this case, air travel) without understanding the underlying purpose and system of which it's a part. I am not qualified to judge the sharp dispute over whether there is solid clinical evidence that checklists are helpful (these authors claim there is not; I know other books make different claims, and I suspect it may depend heavily on how the checklist is used). But I found the authors' argument that one has to design systems holistically for safety, not try to patch in safety later by turning certain tasks into rote processes and humans into machines, to be persuasive. I'm not willing to recommend this book given how devoid it is of concrete examples. I was able to fill in some of that because of prior experience with the literature on site reliability engineering, but a reader who wasn't previously familiar with discussions of safety or reliability may find much of this book too abstract to be comprehensible. But I'm not sorry I read it. I hadn't previously thought about the power dynamics of a focus on error, and I think that will be a valuable observation to keep in mind. Rating: 6 out of 10

Munnar is a hill station in Idukki district of Kerala, India. Home to 2nd largest tea plantation in the country. Lot of people visit here on summer and in winter as well. I live in the neighboring district of Munnar though I never made a visit. In my mind I pictured Munnar as a Tourist trap with lots of garbage lying around. I recently made a visit and it changed my perception of this place.

Little background I never liked tea much. I am also not a coffee person either. But if I have to choose over two that will be coffee because of the strong aroma. Going to relatives house, they always offered hot tea defacto. I always find difficult say no to their friendly gesture. But I hate tea. A generation before me drinks lot of tea here at my place. You can see tea stalls in every corner and people sipping tea. I always wondered why people drink lot of tea on a hot country like India. The book I am currently trying to read has a chapter about Munnar and how it became a Tea plantation under the British rule. Well, around the same time. I watched a documentary program about the tea and Munnar.

Munnar Too much word here and there I decided to do a visit. I took a motorbike and started a journey to Munnar. Due to covid restrictions there weren t much tourists, so this was to my advantage. There are many water falls on the way to Munnar. Some are very close to road and some are far away but can be spotted. Munnar travel is just not about the destination because its never been a single spot. Enjoying the journey that the ride has to offer. I stayed at a hotel, little far away from town, though I never recommend hotels in Munnar. Try to find home stays and small establishments away from the town. There are British Era bungalows inside the plantations still maintained in good condition which can be booked per room or entire property. The lush greenery on the Mountains of tea plantation is very refreshing and feast to our eyes. The mornings and evenings of Munnar is something to watch, mountains wrapped in mist slowly uncovering with sunlight and again slipping to mist by dark evening. I planned only to visit places which are less explored by tourists. People here live a simple life. Most of them are plantation workers. The native people of Munnar are actually tribal folks but since the plantation boom many people from Tamil Nadu(neighboring state) and other parts of Kerala settled here. The houses of this plantation workers resembled Hobbit homes in Shire from Lord of the Rings as they are in the hill slides. The Kannan Devan hills, the biggest hill in area covers more than half of Munnar. Two famous Tea companies from Munnar are Tata Tea and KDHP(Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company (P) Limited) tea. KDHP is actually an employee owned Tea company ie a good share of this company is owned by the employees working there. This was interesting to me, so I bought a bag of speciality tea from KDHP store on my return. I don t drink tea on a daily basis but I will try it on special occasions.

This took a while to arrive! After the success of the reissue of Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark, it was inevitable that the second edition would also be reissued. The pre-order opened late November 2021 and mine arrived in late April this year. I was toying with the idea of ordering one of the most exclusive editions direct from DAIS Records, in particular the glow in the dark one, but with international shipping the cost was pretty high. I went with a UK distributor (Boomkat) instead, who had their own exclusive edition: black-in-purple-in-clear. I'm happy with my decision: it's one of the most interesting variants I own, and from what I've read, glow in the dark vinyl never sounds great anyway. (I think I have at least one glow in the dark 7" single somewhere) Stand-out track: Tiny Golden Books Since I didn't say so last time, the stand-out track on volume one is Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night, but both volumes are full of really interesting moments ( One day, your eggs are going to hatch and some very strange birds are going to emerge. )

Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Series:	Radiant Emperor #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
Printing:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-62179-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	414

In 1345 in Zhongli village, in fourth year of a drought, lived a man with his son and his daughter, the last surviving of seven children. The son was promised by his father to the Wuhuang Monastery on his twelfth birthday if he survived. According to the fortune-teller, that son, Zhu Chongba, will be so great that he will bring a hundred generations of pride to the family name. When the girl dares ask her fate, the fortune-teller says, simply, "Nothing." Bandits come looking for food and kill their father. Zhu goes catatonic rather than bury his father, so the girl digs a grave, only to find her brother dead inside it with her father. It leaves her furious: he had a great destiny and he gave it up without a fight, choosing to become nothing. At that moment, she decides to seize his fate for her own, to become Zhu so thoroughly that Heaven itself will be fooled. Through sheer determination and force of will, she stays at the gates of Wuhuang Monastery until the monks are impressed enough with her stubbornness that they let her in under Zhu's name. That puts her on a trajectory that will lead her to the Red Turbans and the civil war over the Mandate of Heaven. She Who Became the Sun is historical fiction with some alternate history and a touch of magic. The closest comparison I can think of is Guy Gavriel Kay: a similar touch of magic that is slight enough to have questionable impact on the story, and a similar starting point of history but a story that's not constrained to follow the events of our world. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan doesn't change the names of places and people. It's therefore not difficult to work out the history this story is based on (late Yuan dynasty), although it may not be clear at first what role Zhu will play in that history. The first part of the book focuses on Zhu, her time in the monastery, and her (mostly successful) quest to keep her gender secret. The end of that part introduces the second primary protagonist, the eunuch general Ouyang of the army of the Prince of Henan. Ouyang is Nanren, serving a Mongol prince or, more precisely, his son Esen. On the surface, Ouyang is devoted to Esen and serves capably as his general. What lies beneath that surface is far darker and more complicated. I think how well you like this book will depend on how well you get along with the characters. I thought Zhu was a delight. She spends the first half of the book proving herself to be startlingly competent and unpredictable while outwitting Heaven and pursuing her assumed destiny. A major hinge event at the center of the book could have destroyed her character, but instead makes her even stronger, more relaxed, and more comfortable with herself. Her story's exploration of gender identity only made that better for me, starting with her thinking of herself as a woman pretending to be a man and turning into something more complex and self-chosen (and, despite some sexual encounters, apparently asexual, which is something you still rarely see in fiction). I also appreciated how Parker-Chan varies Zhu's pronouns depending on the perspective of the narrator. That said, Zhu is not a good person. She is fiercely ambitious to the point of being a sociopath, and the path she sees involves a lot of ruthlessness and some cold-blooded murder. This is less of a heroic journey than a revenge saga, where the target of revenge is the entire known world and Zhu is as dangerous as she is competent. If you want your protagonist to be moral, this may not work for you. Zhu's scenes are partly told from her perspective and partly from the perspective of a woman named Ma who is a good person, and who is therefore intermittently horrified. The revenge story worked for me, and as a result I found Ma somewhat irritating. If your tendency is to agree with Ma, you may find Zhu too amoral to root for. Ouyang's parts I just hated, which is fitting because Ouyang loathes himself to a degree that is quite difficult to read. He is obsessed with being a eunuch and therefore not fully male. That internal monologue is disturbing enough that it drowned out the moderately interesting court intrigue that he's a part of. I know some people like reading highly dramatic characters who are walking emotional disaster zones. I am not one of those people; by about three quarters of the way through the book I was hoping someone would kill Ouyang already and put him out of everyone's misery. One of the things I disliked about this book is that, despite the complex gender work with Zhu, gender roles within the story have a modern gloss while still being highly constrained. All of the characters except Zhu (and the monk Xu, who has a relatively minor part but is the most likable character in the book) feel like they're being smothered in oppressive gender expectations. Ouyang has a full-fledged case of toxic masculinity to fuel his self-loathing, which Parker-Chan highlights with some weirdly disturbing uses of BDSM tropes. So, I thought this was a mixed bag, and I suspect reactions will differ. I thoroughly enjoyed Zhu's parts despite her ruthlessness and struggled through Ouyang's parts with a bad taste in my mouth. I thought the pivot Parker-Chan pulls off in the middle of the book with Zhu's self-image and destiny was beautifully done and made me like the character even more, but I wish the conflict between Ma's and Zhu's outlooks hadn't been so central. Because of that, the ending felt more tragic than triumphant, which I think was intentional but which wasn't to my taste. As with Kay's writing, I suspect there will be some questions about whether She Who Became the Sun is truly fantasy. The only obvious fantastic element is the physical manifestation of the Mandate of Heaven, and that has only a minor effect on the plot. And as with Kay, I think this book needed to be fantasy, not for the special effects, but because it needs the space to take fate literally. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan does not use the writing style of epic fantasy, but Zhu's campaign to assume a destiny which is not her own needs to be more than a metaphor for the story to work. I enjoyed this with some caveats. For me, the Zhu portions made up for the Ouyang portions. But although it's clearly the first book of a series, I'm not sure I'll read on. I felt like Zhu's character arc reached a satisfying conclusion, and the sequel seems likely to be full of Ma's misery over ethical conflicts and more Ouyang, neither of which sound appealing. So far as I can tell, the sequel I assume is coming has not yet been announced. Rating: 7 out of 10

Google did some interesting research on the impact of discrimination on code reviers [1]. It turns out that this is a bigger problem than most white men would have ever suspected and it even has an adverse effect on Asian people. nothello.net is an amusing site to make the point that you shouldn t use IM to say hello separately from asking the question [2]. A good link to share on your corporate IM system. TechCrunch has an amusing article about the Facebook farewell to Sheryl Sandburg [3]. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about a bug-bunty program from a crime syndicate offering up to $1M in crypto-currency [4]. Among other things finding the real first and last names of the crime lord gets you $1M. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about how deepfakes are being used to apply for work from home jobs [5]. I wonder whether the people doing that intend to actually do any of the work or just get paid for doing nothing while delaying getting sacked for as long as possible. I have read about people getting a job they don t want to do that has a long training period so that they can quit at the end of training without working apparently call center work is a good option for this. BleepingComputer has an interesting article about phishing attacks that use a VNC remote desktop connection to trick a user into authenticating using the attacker s PC [6]. The real problem here is getting humans to do things that computers do better, which is recognising the correct foreign party. Fortune has an interesting article about the problems with Tesla self-driving and the possibility of a recall [7]. The main issue is apparently Teslas driving at full speed into emergency services vehicles that are parked while attending an incident. Having a police car unexpectedly occupying a lane of traffic is something you just have to deal with, either stop or change lanes. Teslas have been turning off autopilot less than one second before impact so Telsa can claim that it didn t happen with autopilot engaged but in reality a human can t take over in less than one second, a pilot I know says it takes 2-3 seconds to take over the controls in a plane. BonAppetit has an interesting and amusing article about protest foods [8] which starts by explaining why Ukrainians are throwing pasta at the Russian consulate. The NVidia blog has an informative post about how Pony.ai optimised their pipeline for sensor data for autonomous cars [9]. Matt Crump wrote an educational and amusing blog post about his battle with cheaters in university tests he administered [10]. The Cricket Monthly has an insightful article about how a batsman manages to see and hit a cricket ball that s going well in excess of 100KM/h [11]. One particularly noteworthy part of this article is the comparison of what amateur cricketers do with what anyone who wants to be a contender for the national team must do. Darker Shades of Blue is an insightful paper by Tony Kern about the needless crash of a B52 at Fairchild air base in 1994 [12]. This is specifically written to teach people about correct and effective leadership.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2699msyj
• [2] https://nohello.net/en/
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2aqw4jq9
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2boyx72h
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/29zm7m4c
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/y9v9vme2
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2yah3vez
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/ye96qhoc
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/22kmmpjg
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2ntfw3ow
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2aprn3w6
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/29bexyah

Review: The Seeress of Kell, by David Eddings

Series:	The Malloreon #5
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	May 1991
Printing:	May 1992
ISBN:	0-345-37759-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	374

The Seeress of Kell is the conclusion of the five-book Malloreon series and a direct sequel to Sorceress of Darshiva. You do not want to begin the series here (or, to be honest, at all). We have finally finished the relaxed tour of Mallorea, the second continent of Eddings's remarkably small two-continent world. The heroes have gathered all of their required companions and are headed for Kell, where the seeress Cyradis awaits. From there, they and the new Child of Dark must find their way to the Place Which Is No More for the final confrontation. By "find," I mean please remain seated with your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle. The protagonists have about as much to do with the conclusion of this series as the passengers of a roller coaster have control over its steering. I am laughing at my younger self, who quite enjoyed this series (although as I recall found it a bit repetitive) and compared it favorably to the earlier Belgariad series. My memory kept telling me that the conclusion of the series was lots of fun. Reader, it was not. It was hilariously bad. Both of Eddings's first two series, but particularly this one, take place in a fantasy world full of true prophecy. The conceit of the Malloreon in particular (this is a minor spoiler for the early books, but not one that I think interferes with enjoyment) is that there are two competing prophecies that agree on most events but are in conflict over a critical outcome. True prophecy creates an agency problem: why have protagonists if everything they do is fixed in prophecy? The normal way to avoid that is to make the prophecy sufficiently confusing and the mechanism by which it comes true sufficiently subtle that everyone has to act as if there is no prophecy, thus reducing the role of the prophecy to foreshadowing and a game the author plays with the reader. What makes the Malloreon interesting (and I mean this sincerely) is that Eddings instead leans into the idea of a prophecy as an active agent leading the protagonists around by the nose. As a meta-story commentary on fantasy stories, this can be quite entertaining, and it helps that the prophecy appears as a likable character of sorts in the book. The trap that Eddings had mostly avoided before now is that this structure can make the choices of the protagonists entirely pointless. In The Seeress of Kell, he dives head-first into the trap and then pulls it shut behind him. The worst part is Ce'Nedra, who once again spends an entire book either carping at Garion in ways that are supposed to be endearing (but aren't) or being actively useless. The low point is when she is manipulated into betraying the heroes, costing them a significant advantage. We're then told that, rather than being a horrific disaster, this is her important and vital role in the story, and indeed the whole reason why she was in the story at all. The heroes were too far ahead of the villains and were in danger of causing the prophecy to fail. At that point, one might reasonably ask why one is bothering reading a novel instead of a summary of the invented history that Eddings is going to tell whether his characters cooperate or not. The whole middle section of the book is like this: nothing any of the characters do matters because everything is explicitly destined. That includes an extended series of interludes following the other main characters from the Belgariad, who are racing to catch up with the main party but who will turn out to have no role of significance whatsoever. I wouldn't mind this as much if the prophecy were more active in the story, given that it's the actual protagonist. But it mostly disappears. Instead, the characters blunder around doing whatever seems like a good idea at the time, while Cyradis acts like a bizarre sort of referee with a Calvinball rule set and every random action turns out to be the fulfillment of prophecy in the most ham-handed possible way. Zandramas, meanwhile, is trying to break the prophecy, which would have been a moderately interesting story hook if anyone (Eddings included) thought she were potentially capable of doing so. Since no one truly believes there's any peril, this turns into a series of pointless battles the reader has no reason to care about. All of this sets up what has been advertised since the start of the series as a decision between good and evil. Now, at the least minute, Eddings (through various character mouthpieces) tries to claim that the decision is not actually between good and evil, but is somehow beyond morality. No one believes this, including the narrator and the reader, making all of the philosophizing a tedious exercise in page-turning. To pull off a contention like that, the author has to lay some sort of foundation to allow the reader to see the supposed villain in multiple lights. Eddings does none of that, instead emphasizing how evil she is at every opportunity. On top of that, this supposed free choice on which the entire universe rests and for which all of history was pointed depends on someone with astonishing conflicts of interest. While the book is going on about how carefully the prophecy is ensuring that everyone is in the right place at the right time so that no side has an advantage, one side is accruing an absurdly powerful advantage. And the characters don't even seem to realize it! The less said about the climax, the better. Unsurprisingly, it was completely predictable. Also, while I am complaining, I could never get past how this entire series starts off with and revolves around an incredibly traumatic and ongoing event that has no impact whatsoever on the person to whom the trauma happens. Other people are intermittently upset or sad, but not only is that person not harmed, they act, at the end of this book, as if the entire series had never happened. There is one bright spot in this book, and ironically it's the one plot element that Eddings didn't make blatantly obvious in advance and therefore I don't want to spoil it. All I'll say is that one of the companions the heroes pick up along the way turns out to be my favorite character of the series, plays a significant role in the interpersonal dynamics between the heroes, and steals every scene that she's in by being more sensible than any of the other characters in the story. Her story, and backstory, is emotional and moving and is the best part of this book. Otherwise, not only is the plot a mess and the story structure a failure, but this is also Eddings at his most sexist and socially conservative. There is an extended epilogue after the plot resolution that serves primarily as a showcase of stereotypes: baffled men having their habits and preferences rewritten by their wives, cast-iron gender roles inside marriage, cringeworthy jokes, and of course loads and loads of children because that obviously should be everyone's happily ever after. All of this happens to the characters rather than being planned or actively desired, continuing the theme of prophecy and lack of agency, although of course they're all happy about it (shown mostly via grumbling). One could write an entire academic paper on the tension between this series and the concept of consent. There were bits of the Malloreon that I enjoyed, but they were generally in spite of the plot rather than because of it. I do like several of Eddings's characters, and in places I liked the lack of urgency and the sense of safety. But I think endings still have to deliver some twist or punch or, at the very least, some clear need for the protagonists to take an action other than stand in the right room at the right time. Eddings probably tried to supply that (I can make a few guesses about where), but it failed miserably for me, making this the worst book of the series. Unless like me you're revisiting this out of curiosity for your teenage reading habits (and even then, consider not), avoid. Rating: 3 out of 10

Review: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #18
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	1995
Printing:	February 2014
ISBN:	0-06-227552-6
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	360

Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect you could pick it up as you went if you wanted. This is a sequel of sorts to Lords and Ladies, but not in a very immediate sense. Granny is getting distracted and less interested in day-to-day witching in Lancre. This is not good; Granny is incredibly powerful, and bored and distracted witches can go to dark places. Nanny is concerned. Granny needs something to do, and their coven needs a third. It's not been the same since they lost their maiden member. Nanny's solution to this problem is two-pronged. First, they'd had their eye on a local girl named Agnes, who had magic but who wasn't interested in being a witch. Perhaps it was time to recruit her anyway, even though she'd left Lancre for Ankh-Morpork. And second, Granny needs something to light a fire under her, something that will get her outraged and ready to engage with the world. Something like a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes attributed to the Witch of Lancre. Agnes, meanwhile, is auditioning for the opera. She's a sensible person, cursed her whole life by having a wonderful personality, but a part of her deep inside wants to be called Perdita X. Dream and have a dramatic life. Having a wonderful personality can be very frustrating, but no one in Lancre took either that desire or her name seriously. Perhaps the opera is somewhere where she can find the life she's looking for, along with another opportunity to try on the Perdita name. One thing she can do is sing; that's where all of her magic went. The Ankh-Morpork opera is indeed dramatic. It's also losing an astounding amount of money for its new owner, who foolishly thought owning an opera would be a good retirement project after running a cheese business. And it's haunted by a ghost, a very tangible ghost who has started killing people. I think this is my favorite Discworld novel to date (although with a caveat about the ending that I'll get to in a moment). It's certainly the one that had me laughing out loud the most. Agnes (including her Perdita personality aspect) shot to the top of my list of favorite Discworld characters, in part because I found her sensible personality so utterly relatable. She is fascinated by drama, she wants to be in the middle of it and let her inner Perdita goth character revel in it, and yet she cannot help being practical and unflappable even when surrounded by people who use far too many exclamation points. It's one thing to want drama in the abstract; it's quite another to be heedlessly dramatic in the moment, when there's an obviously reasonable thing to do instead. Pratchett writes this wonderfully. The other half of the story follows Granny and Nanny, who are unstoppable forces of nature and a wonderful team. They have the sort of long-standing, unshakable adult friendship between very unlike people that's full of banter and minor irritations layered on top of a deep mutual understanding and respect. Once they decide to start investigating this supposed opera ghost, they divvy up the investigative work with hardly a word exchanged. Planning isn't necessary; they both know each other's strengths. We've gotten a lot of Granny's skills in previous books. Maskerade gives Nanny a chance to show off her skills, and it's a delight. She effortlessly becomes the sort of friendly grandmother who blends in so well that no one questions why she's there, and thus manages to be in the middle of every important event. Granny watches and thinks and theorizes; Nanny simply gets into the middle of everything and talks to everyone until people tell her what she wants to know. There's no real doubt that the two of them are going to get to the bottom of anything they want to get to the bottom of, but watching how they get there is a delight. I love how Pratchett handles that sort of magical power from a world-building perspective. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City, the center of political power in most of the Discworld books, and Granny and Nanny are from the boondocks. By convention, that means they should either be awed or confused by the city, or gain power in the city by transforming it in some way to match their area of power. This isn't how Pratchett writes witches at all. Their magic is in understanding people, and the people in Ankh-Morpork are just as much people as the people in Lancre. The differences of the city may warrant an occasional grumpy aside, but the witches are fully as capable of navigating the city as they are their home town. Maskerade is, of course, a parody of opera and musicals, with Phantom of the Opera playing the central role in much the same way that Macbeth did in Wyrd Sisters. Agnes ends up doing the singing for a beautiful, thin actress named Christine, who can't sing at all despite being an opera star, uses a truly astonishing excess of exclamation points, and strategically faints at the first sign of danger. (And, despite all of this, is still likable in that way that it's impossible to be really upset at a puppy.) She is the special chosen focus of the ghost, whose murderous taunting is a direct parody of the Phantom. That was a sufficiently obvious reference that even I picked up on it, despite being familiar with Phantom of the Opera only via the soundtrack. Apart from that, though, the references were lost on me, since I'm neither a musical nor an opera fan. That didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book in the slightest; in fact, I suspect it's part of why it's in my top tier of Discworld books. One of my complaints about Discworld to date is that Pratchett often overdoes the parody to the extent that it gets in the way of his own (excellent) characters and story. Maybe it's better to read Discworld novels where one doesn't recognize the material being parodied and thus doesn't keep getting distracted by references. It's probably worth mentioning that Agnes is a large woman and there are several jokes about her weight in Maskerade. I think they're the good sort of jokes, about how absurd human bodies can be, not the mean sort? Pratchett never implies her weight is any sort of moral failing or something she should change; quite the contrary, Nanny considers it a sign of solid Lancre genes. But there is some fat discrimination in the opera itself, since one of the things Pratchett is commenting on is the switch from full-bodied female opera singers to thin actresses matching an idealized beauty standard. Christine is the latter, but she can't sing, and the solution is for Agnes to sing for her from behind, something that was also done in real opera. I'm not a good judge of how well this plot line was handled; be aware, going in, if this may bother you. What did bother me was the ending, and more generally the degree to which Granny and Nanny felt comfortable making decisions about Agnes's life without consulting her or appearing to care what she thought of their conclusions. Pratchett seemed to be on their side, emphasizing how well they know people. But Agnes left Lancre and avoided the witches for a reason, and that reason is not honored in much the same way that Lancre refused to honor her desire to go by Perdita. This doesn't seem to be malicious, and Agnes herself is a little uncertain about her choice of identity, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like Agnes got steamrolled by both the other characters and by Pratchett, and it's the one thing about this book that I didn't like. Hopefully future Discworld books about these characters revisit Agnes's agency. Overall, though, this was great, and a huge improvement over Interesting Times. I'm excited for the next witches book. Followed in publication order by Feet of Clay, and later by Carpe Jugulum in the thematic sense. Rating: 8 out of 10

As promised, on this post I m going to explain how I ve configured this blog using hugo, asciidoctor and the papermod theme, how I publish it using nginx, how I ve integrated the remark42 comment system and how I ve automated its publication using gitea and json2file-go. It is a long post, but I hope that at least parts of it can be interesting for some, feel free to ignore it if that is not your case

Hugo Configuration

Theme settingsThe site is using the PaperMod theme and as I m using asciidoctor to publish my content I ve adjusted the settings to improve how things are shown with it. The current config.yml file is the one shown below (probably some of the settings are not required nor being used right now, but I m including the current file, so this post will have always the latest version of it):

config.yml

baseURL: https://blogops.mixinet.net/
title: Mixinet BlogOps
paginate: 5
theme: PaperMod
destination: public/
enableInlineShortcodes: true
enableRobotsTXT: true
buildDrafts: false
buildFuture: false
buildExpired: false
enableEmoji: true
pygmentsUseClasses: true
minify:
  disableXML: true
  minifyOutput: true
languages:
  en:
    languageName: "English"
    description: "Mixinet BlogOps - https://blogops.mixinet.net/"
    author: "Sergio Talens-Oliag"
    weight: 1
    title: Mixinet BlogOps
    homeInfoParams:
      Title: "Sergio Talens-Oliag Technical Blog"
      Content: >
        ![Mixinet BlogOps](/images/mixinet-blogops.png)
    taxonomies:
      category: categories
      tag: tags
      series: series
    menu:
      main:
        - name: Archive
          url: archives
          weight: 5
        - name: Categories
          url: categories/
          weight: 10
        - name: Tags
          url: tags/
          weight: 10
        - name: Search
          url: search/
          weight: 15
outputs:
  home:
    - HTML
    - RSS
    - JSON
params:
  env: production
  defaultTheme: light
  disableThemeToggle: false
  ShowShareButtons: true
  ShowReadingTime: true
  disableSpecial1stPost: true
  disableHLJS: true
  displayFullLangName: true
  ShowPostNavLinks: true
  ShowBreadCrumbs: true
  ShowCodeCopyButtons: true
  ShowRssButtonInSectionTermList: true
  ShowFullTextinRSS: true
  ShowToc: true
  TocOpen: false
  comments: true
  remark42SiteID: "blogops"
  remark42Url: "/remark42"
  profileMode:
    enabled: false
    title: Sergio Talens-Oliag Technical Blog
    imageUrl: "/images/mixinet-blogops.png"
    imageTitle: Mixinet BlogOps
    buttons:
      - name: Archives
        url: archives
      - name: Categories
        url: categories
      - name: Tags
        url: tags
  socialIcons:
    - name: CV
      url: "https://www.uv.es/~sto/cv/"
    - name: Debian
      url: "https://people.debian.org/~sto/"
    - name: GitHub
      url: "https://github.com/sto/"
    - name: GitLab
      url: "https://gitlab.com/stalens/"
    - name: Linkedin
      url: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergio-talens-oliag/"
    - name: RSS
      url: "index.xml"
  assets:
    disableHLJS: true
    favicon: "/favicon.ico"
    favicon16x16:  "/favicon-16x16.png"
    favicon32x32:  "/favicon-32x32.png"
    apple_touch_icon:  "/apple-touch-icon.png"
    safari_pinned_tab:  "/safari-pinned-tab.svg"
  fuseOpts:
    isCaseSensitive: false
    shouldSort: true
    location: 0
    distance: 1000
    threshold: 0.4
    minMatchCharLength: 0
    keys: ["title", "permalink", "summary", "content"]
markup:
  asciidocExt:
    attributes:  
    backend: html5s
    extensions: ['asciidoctor-html5s','asciidoctor-diagram']
    failureLevel: fatal
    noHeaderOrFooter: true
    preserveTOC: false
    safeMode: unsafe
    sectionNumbers: false
    trace: false
    verbose: false
    workingFolderCurrent: true
privacy:
  vimeo:
    disabled: false
    simple: true
  twitter:
    disabled: false
    enableDNT: true
    simple: true
  instagram:
    disabled: false
    simple: true
  youtube:
    disabled: false
    privacyEnhanced: true
services:
  instagram:
    disableInlineCSS: true
  twitter:
    disableInlineCSS: true
security:
  exec:
    allow:
      - '^asciidoctor$'
      - '^dart-sass-embedded$'
      - '^go$'
      - '^npx$'
      - '^postcss$'

Some notes about the settings:

• disableHLJS and assets.disableHLJS are set to true; we plan to use rouge on adoc and the inclusion of the hljs assets adds styles that collide with the ones used by rouge.
• ShowToc is set to true and the TocOpen setting is set to false to make the ToC appear collapsed initially. My plan was to use the asciidoctor ToC, but after trying I believe that the theme one looks nice and I don t need to adjust styles, although it has some issues with the html5s processor (the admonition titles use <h6> and they are shown on the ToC, which is weird), to fix it I ve copied the layouts/partial/toc.html to my site repository and replaced the range of headings to end at 5 instead of 6 (in fact 5 still seems a lot, but as I don t think I ll use that heading level on the posts it doesn t really matter).
• params.profileMode values are adjusted, but for now I ve left it disabled setting params.profileMode.enabled to false and I ve set the homeInfoParams to show more or less the same content with the latest posts under it (I ve added some styles to my custom.css style sheet to center the text and image of the first post to match the look and feel of the profile).
• On the asciidocExt section I ve adjusted the backend to use html5s, I ve added the asciidoctor-html5s and asciidoctor-diagram extensions to asciidoctor and adjusted the workingFolderCurrent to true to make asciidoctor-diagram work right (haven t tested it yet).

Theme customisationsTo write in asciidoctor using the html5s processor I ve added some files to the assets/css/extended directory:

1. As said before, I ve added the file assets/css/extended/custom.css to make the homeInfoParams look like the profile page and I ve also changed a little bit some theme styles to make things look better with the html5s output:

   custom.css

   /* Fix first entry alignment to make it look like the profile */
   .first-entry   text-align: center;  
   .first-entry img   display: inline;  
   /**
    * Remove margin for .post-content code and reduce padding to make it look
    * better with the asciidoctor html5s output.
    **/
   .post-content code   margin: auto 0; padding: 4px;  

2. I ve also added the file assets/css/extended/adoc.css with some styles taken from the asciidoctor-default.css, see this blog post about the original file; mine is the same after formatting it with css-beautify and editing it to use variables for the colors to support light and dark themes:

   adoc.css

   /* AsciiDoctor*/
   table  
       border-collapse: collapse;
       border-spacing: 0
    
   .admonitionblock>table  
       border-collapse: separate;
       border: 0;
       background: none;
       width: 100%
    
   .admonitionblock>table td.icon  
       text-align: center;
       width: 80px
    
   .admonitionblock>table td.icon img  
       max-width: none
    
   .admonitionblock>table td.icon .title  
       font-weight: bold;
       font-family: "Open Sans", "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;
       text-transform: uppercase
    
   .admonitionblock>table td.content  
       padding-left: 1.125em;
       padding-right: 1.25em;
       border-left: 1px solid #ddddd8;
       color: var(--primary)
    
   .admonitionblock>table td.content>:last-child>:last-child  
       margin-bottom: 0
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon [class^="fa icon-"]  
       font-size: 2.5em;
       text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px var(--secondary);
       cursor: default
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon .icon-note::before  
       content: "\f05a";
       color: var(--icon-note-color)
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon .icon-tip::before  
       content: "\f0eb";
       color: var(--icon-tip-color)
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon .icon-warning::before  
       content: "\f071";
       color: var(--icon-warning-color)
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon .icon-caution::before  
       content: "\f06d";
       color: var(--icon-caution-color)
    
   .admonitionblock td.icon .icon-important::before  
       content: "\f06a";
       color: var(--icon-important-color)
    
   .conum[data-value]  
       display: inline-block;
       color: #fff !important;
       background-color: rgba(100, 100, 0, .8);
       -webkit-border-radius: 100px;
       border-radius: 100px;
       text-align: center;
       font-size: .75em;
       width: 1.67em;
       height: 1.67em;
       line-height: 1.67em;
       font-family: "Open Sans", "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;
       font-style: normal;
       font-weight: bold
    
   .conum[data-value] *  
       color: #fff !important
    
   .conum[data-value]+b  
       display: none
    
   .conum[data-value]::after  
       content: attr(data-value)
    
   pre .conum[data-value]  
       position: relative;
       top: -.125em
    
   b.conum *  
       color: inherit !important
    
   .conum:not([data-value]):empty  
       display: none
    

3. The previous file uses variables from a partial copy of the theme-vars.css file that changes the highlighted code background color and adds the color definitions used by the admonitions:

   theme-vars.css

   :root  
       /* Solarized base2 */
       /* --hljs-bg: rgb(238, 232, 213); */
       /* Solarized base3 */
       /* --hljs-bg: rgb(253, 246, 227); */
       /* Solarized base02 */
       --hljs-bg: rgb(7, 54, 66);
       /* Solarized base03 */
       /* --hljs-bg: rgb(0, 43, 54); */
       /* Default asciidoctor theme colors */
       --icon-note-color: #19407c;
       --icon-tip-color: var(--primary);
       --icon-warning-color: #bf6900;
       --icon-caution-color: #bf3400;
       --icon-important-color: #bf0000
    
   .dark  
       --hljs-bg: rgb(7, 54, 66);
       /* Asciidoctor theme colors with tint for dark background */
       --icon-note-color: #3e7bd7;
       --icon-tip-color: var(--primary);
       --icon-warning-color: #ff8d03;
       --icon-caution-color: #ff7847;
       --icon-important-color: #ff3030
    

4. The previous styles use font-awesome, so I ve downloaded its resources for version 4.7.0 (the one used by asciidoctor) storing the font-awesome.css into on the assets/css/extended dir (that way it is merged with the rest of .css files) and copying the fonts to the static/assets/fonts/ dir (will be served directly):

   FA_BASE_URL="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.7.0"
   curl "$FA_BASE_URL/css/font-awesome.css" \
     > assets/css/extended/font-awesome.css
   for f in FontAwesome.otf fontawesome-webfont.eot \
     fontawesome-webfont.svg fontawesome-webfont.ttf \
     fontawesome-webfont.woff fontawesome-webfont.woff2; do
       curl "$FA_BASE_URL/fonts/$f" > "static/assets/fonts/$f"
   done

5. As already said the default highlighter is disabled (it provided a css compatible with rouge) so we need a css to do the highlight styling; as rouge provides a way to export them, I ve created the assets/css/extended/rouge.css file with the thankful_eyes theme:

   rougify style thankful_eyes > assets/css/extended/rouge.css

6. To support the use of the html5s backend with admonitions I ve added a variation of the example found on this blog post to assets/js/adoc-admonitions.js:

   adoc-admonitions.js

   // replace the default admonitions block with a table that uses a format
   // similar to the standard asciidoctor ... as we are using fa-icons here there
   // is no need to add the icons: font entry on the document.
   window.addEventListener('load', function ()  
     const admonitions = document.getElementsByClassName('admonition-block')
     for (let i = admonitions.length - 1; i >= 0; i--)  
       const elm = admonitions[i]
       const type = elm.classList[1]
       const title = elm.getElementsByClassName('block-title')[0];
   	const label = title.getElementsByClassName('title-label')[0]
   		.innerHTML.slice(0, -1);
       elm.removeChild(elm.getElementsByClassName('block-title')[0]);
       const text = elm.innerHTML
       const parent = elm.parentNode
       const tempDiv = document.createElement('div')
       tempDiv.innerHTML =  <div class="admonitionblock $ type ">
       <table>
         <tbody>
           <tr>
             <td class="icon">
               <i class="fa icon-$ type " title="$ label "></i>
             </td>
             <td class="content">
               $ text 
             </td>
           </tr>
         </tbody>
       </table>
     </div> 
       const input = tempDiv.childNodes[0]
       parent.replaceChild(input, elm)
      
    )

   and enabled its minified use on the layouts/partials/extend_footer.html file adding the following lines to it:

    - $admonitions := slice (resources.Get "js/adoc-admonitions.js")
       resources.Concat "assets/js/adoc-admonitions.js"   minify   fingerprint  
   <script defer crossorigin="anonymous" src="  $admonitions.RelPermalink  "
     integrity="  $admonitions.Data.Integrity  "></script>

Remark42 configurationTo integrate Remark42 with the PaperMod theme I ve created the file layouts/partials/comments.html with the following content based on the remark42 documentation, including extra code to sync the dark/light setting with the one set on the site:

comments.html

<div id="remark42"></div>
<script>
  var remark_config =  
    host:   .Site.Params.remark42Url  ,
    site_id:   .Site.Params.remark42SiteID  ,
    url:   .Permalink  ,
    locale:   .Site.Language.Lang  
   ;
  (function(c)  
    /* Adjust the theme using the local-storage pref-theme if set */
    if (localStorage.getItem("pref-theme") === "dark")  
      remark_config.theme = "dark";
      else if (localStorage.getItem("pref-theme") === "light")  
      remark_config.theme = "light";
     
    /* Add remark42 widget */
    for(var i = 0; i < c.length; i++) 
      var d = document, s = d.createElement('script');
      s.src = remark_config.host + '/web/' + c[i] +'.js';
      s.defer = true;
      (d.head   d.body).appendChild(s);
     
   )(remark_config.components   ['embed']);
</script>

In development I use it with anonymous comments enabled, but to avoid SPAM the production site uses social logins (for now I ve only enabled Github & Google, if someone requests additional services I ll check them, but those were the easy ones for me initially). To support theme switching with remark42 I ve also added the following inside the layouts/partials/extend_footer.html file:

 - if (not site.Params.disableThemeToggle)  
<script>
/* Function to change theme when the toggle button is pressed */
document.getElementById("theme-toggle").addEventListener("click", () =>  
  if (typeof window.REMARK42 != "undefined")  
    if (document.body.className.includes('dark'))  
      window.REMARK42.changeTheme('light');
      else  
      window.REMARK42.changeTheme('dark');
     
   
 );
</script>
 - end  

With this code if the theme-toggle button is pressed we change the remark42 theme before the PaperMod one (that s needed here only, on page loads the remark42 theme is synced with the main one using the code from the layouts/partials/comments.html shown earlier).

Development setupTo preview the site on my laptop I m using docker-compose with the following configuration:

docker-compose.yaml

version: "2"
services:
  hugo:
    build:
      context: ./docker/hugo-adoc
      dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
    image: sto/hugo-adoc
    container_name: hugo-adoc-blogops
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - .:/documents
    command: server --bind 0.0.0.0 -D -F
    user: $ APP_UID :$ APP_GID 
  nginx:
    image: nginx:latest
    container_name: nginx-blogops
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    ports:
      -  1313:1313
  remark42:
    build:
      context: ./docker/remark42
      dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
    image: sto/remark42
    container_name: remark42-blogops
    restart: always
    env_file:
      - ./.env
      - ./remark42/env.dev
    volumes:
      - ./remark42/var.dev:/srv/var

To run it properly we have to create the .env file with the current user ID and GID on the variables APP_UID and APP_GID (if we don t do it the files can end up being owned by a user that is not the same as the one running the services):

$ echo "APP_UID=$(id -u)\nAPP_GID=$(id -g)" > .env

The Dockerfile used to generate the sto/hugo-adoc is:

Dockerfile

FROM asciidoctor/docker-asciidoctor:latest
RUN gem install --no-document asciidoctor-html5s &&\
 apk update && apk add --no-cache curl libc6-compat &&\
 repo_path="gohugoio/hugo" &&\
 api_url="https://api.github.com/repos/$repo_path/releases/latest" &&\
 download_url="$(\
  curl -sL "$api_url"  \
  sed -n "s/^.*download_url\": \"\\(.*.extended.*Linux-64bit.tar.gz\)\"/\1/p"\
 )" &&\
 curl -sL "$download_url" -o /tmp/hugo.tgz &&\
 tar xf /tmp/hugo.tgz hugo &&\
 install hugo /usr/bin/ &&\
 rm -f hugo /tmp/hugo.tgz &&\
 /usr/bin/hugo version &&\
 apk del curl && rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
# Expose port for live server
EXPOSE 1313
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/hugo"]
CMD [""]

If you review it you will see that I m using the docker-asciidoctor image as the base; the idea is that this image has all I need to work with asciidoctor and to use hugo I only need to download the binary from their latest release at github (as we are using an image based on alpine we also need to install the libc6-compat package, but once that is done things are working fine for me so far). The image does not launch the server by default because I don t want it to; in fact I use the same docker-compose.yml file to publish the site in production simply calling the container without the arguments passed on the docker-compose.yml file (see later). When running the containers with docker-compose up (or docker compose up if you have the docker-compose-plugin package installed) we also launch a nginx container and the remark42 service so we can test everything together. The Dockerfile for the remark42 image is the original one with an updated version of the init.sh script:

Dockerfile

FROM umputun/remark42:latest
COPY init.sh /init.sh

The updated init.sh is similar to the original, but allows us to use an APP_GID variable and updates the /etc/group file of the container so the files get the right user and group (with the original script the group is always 1001):

init.sh

#!/sbin/dinit /bin/sh
uid="$(id -u)"
if [ "$ uid " -eq "0" ]; then
  echo "init container"
  # set container's time zone
  cp "/usr/share/zoneinfo/$ TIME_ZONE " /etc/localtime
  echo "$ TIME_ZONE " >/etc/timezone
  echo "set timezone $ TIME_ZONE  ($(date))"
  # set UID & GID for the app
  if [ "$ APP_UID " ]   [ "$ APP_GID " ]; then
    [ "$ APP_UID " ]   APP_UID="1001"
    [ "$ APP_GID " ]   APP_GID="$ APP_UID "
    echo "set custom APP_UID=$ APP_UID  & APP_GID=$ APP_GID "
    sed -i "s/^app:x:1001:1001:/app:x:$ APP_UID :$ APP_GID :/" /etc/passwd
    sed -i "s/^app:x:1001:/app:x:$ APP_GID :/" /etc/group
  else
    echo "custom APP_UID and/or APP_GID not defined, using 1001:1001"
  fi
  chown -R app:app /srv /home/app
fi
echo "prepare environment"
# replace  % REMARK_URL %  by content of REMARK_URL variable
find /srv -regex '.*\.\(html\ js\ mjs\)$' -print \
  -exec sed -i "s % REMARK_URL % $ REMARK_URL  g"   \;
if [ -n "$ SITE_ID " ]; then
  #replace "site_id: 'remark'" by SITE_ID
  sed -i "s 'remark' '$ SITE_ID ' g" /srv/web/*.html
fi
echo "execute \"$*\""
if [ "$ uid " -eq "0" ]; then
  exec su-exec app "$@"
else
  exec "$@"
fi

The environment file used with remark42 for development is quite minimal:

env.dev

TIME_ZONE=Europe/Madrid
REMARK_URL=http://localhost:1313/remark42
SITE=blogops
SECRET=123456
ADMIN_SHARED_ID=sto
AUTH_ANON=true
EMOJI=true

And the nginx/default.conf file used to publish the service locally is simple too:

default.conf

server   
 listen 1313;
 server_name localhost;
 location /  
    proxy_pass http://hugo:1313;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
  
 location /remark42/  
    rewrite /remark42/(.*) /$1 break;
    proxy_pass http://remark42:8080/;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
   
 

Production setupThe VM where I m publishing the blog runs Debian GNU/Linux and uses binaries from local packages and applications packaged inside containers. To run the containers I m using docker-ce (I could have used podman instead, but I already had it installed on the machine, so I stayed with it). The binaries used on this project are included on the following packages from the main Debian repository:

• git to clone & pull the repository,
• jq to parse json files from shell scripts,
• json2file-go to save the webhook messages to files,
• inotify-tools to detect when new files are stored by json2file-go and launch scripts to process them,
• nginx to publish the site using HTTPS and work as proxy for json2file-go and remark42 (I run it using a container),
• task-spool to queue the scripts that update the deployment.

And I m using docker and docker compose from the debian packages on the docker repository:

• docker-ce to run the containers,
• docker-compose-plugin to run docker compose (it is a plugin, so no - in the name).

Repository checkoutTo manage the git repository I ve created a deploy key, added it to gitea and cloned the project on the /srv/blogops PATH (that route is owned by a regular user that has permissions to run docker, as I said before).

Compiling the site with hugoTo compile the site we are using the docker-compose.yml file seen before, to be able to run it first we build the container images and once we have them we launch hugo using docker compose run:

$ cd /srv/blogops
$ git pull
$ docker compose build
$ if [ -d "./public" ]; then rm -rf ./public; fi
$ docker compose run hugo --

The compilation leaves the static HTML on /srv/blogops/public (we remove the directory first because hugo does not clean the destination folder as jekyll does). The deploy script re-generates the site as described and moves the public directory to its final place for publishing.

Running remark42 with dockerOn the /srv/blogops/remark42 folder I have the following docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose.yml

version: "2"
services:
  remark42:
    build:
      context: ../docker/remark42
      dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
    image: sto/remark42
    env_file:
      - ../.env
      - ./env.prod
    container_name: remark42
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./var.prod:/srv/var
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:8042:8080

The ../.env file is loaded to get the APP_UID and APP_GID variables that are used by my version of the init.sh script to adjust file permissions and the env.prod file contains the rest of the settings for remark42, including the social network tokens (see the remark42 documentation for the available parameters, I don t include my configuration here because some of them are secrets).

Nginx configurationThe nginx configuration for the blogops.mixinet.net site is as simple as:

server  
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  server_name blogops.mixinet.net;
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/blogops.mixinet.net/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/blogops.mixinet.net/privkey.pem;
  include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/blogops.mixinet.net-443.access.log;
  error_log  /var/log/nginx/blogops.mixinet.net-443.error.log;
  root /srv/blogops/nginx/public_html;
  location /  
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
   
  include /srv/blogops/nginx/remark42.conf;
 
server  
  listen 80 ;
  listen [::]:80 ;
  server_name blogops.mixinet.net;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/blogops.mixinet.net-80.access.log;
  error_log  /var/log/nginx/blogops.mixinet.net-80.error.log;
  if ($host = blogops.mixinet.net)  
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
   
  return 404;
 

On this configuration the certificates are managed by certbot and the server root directory is on /srv/blogops/nginx/public_html and not on /srv/blogops/public; the reason for that is that I want to be able to compile without affecting the running site, the deployment script generates the site on /srv/blogops/public and if all works well we rename folders to do the switch, making the change feel almost atomic.

json2file-go configurationAs I have a working WireGuard VPN between the machine running gitea at my home and the VM where the blog is served, I m going to configure the json2file-go to listen for connections on a high port using a self signed certificate and listening on IP addresses only reachable through the VPN. To do it we create a systemd socket to run json2file-go and adjust its configuration to listen on a private IP (we use the FreeBind option on its definition to be able to launch the service even when the IP is not available, that is, when the VPN is down). The following script can be used to set up the json2file-go configuration:

setup-json2file.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
BASE_DIR="/srv/blogops/webhook"
J2F_DIR="$BASE_DIR/json2file"
TLS_DIR="$BASE_DIR/tls"
J2F_SERVICE_NAME="json2file-go"
J2F_SERVICE_DIR="/etc/systemd/system/json2file-go.service.d"
J2F_SERVICE_OVERRIDE="$J2F_SERVICE_DIR/override.conf"
J2F_SOCKET_DIR="/etc/systemd/system/json2file-go.socket.d"
J2F_SOCKET_OVERRIDE="$J2F_SOCKET_DIR/override.conf"
J2F_BASEDIR_FILE="/etc/json2file-go/basedir"
J2F_DIRLIST_FILE="/etc/json2file-go/dirlist"
J2F_CRT_FILE="/etc/json2file-go/certfile"
J2F_KEY_FILE="/etc/json2file-go/keyfile"
J2F_CRT_PATH="$TLS_DIR/crt.pem"
J2F_KEY_PATH="$TLS_DIR/key.pem"
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
# Install packages used with json2file for the blogops site
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y json2file-go uuid
if [ -z "$(type mkcert)" ]; then
  sudo apt install -y mkcert
fi
sudo apt clean
# Configuration file values
J2F_USER="$(id -u)"
J2F_GROUP="$(id -g)"
J2F_DIRLIST="blogops:$(uuid)"
J2F_LISTEN_STREAM="172.31.31.1:4443"
# Configure json2file
[ -d "$J2F_DIR" ]   mkdir "$J2F_DIR"
sudo sh -c "echo '$J2F_DIR' >'$J2F_BASEDIR_FILE'"
[ -d "$TLS_DIR" ]   mkdir "$TLS_DIR"
if [ ! -f "$J2F_CRT_PATH" ]   [ ! -f "$J2F_KEY_PATH" ]; then
  mkcert -cert-file "$J2F_CRT_PATH" -key-file "$J2F_KEY_PATH" "$(hostname -f)"
fi
sudo sh -c "echo '$J2F_CRT_PATH' >'$J2F_CRT_FILE'"
sudo sh -c "echo '$J2F_KEY_PATH' >'$J2F_KEY_FILE'"
sudo sh -c "cat >'$J2F_DIRLIST_FILE'" <<EOF
$(echo "$J2F_DIRLIST"   tr ';' '\n')
EOF
# Service override
[ -d "$J2F_SERVICE_DIR" ]   sudo mkdir "$J2F_SERVICE_DIR"
sudo sh -c "cat >'$J2F_SERVICE_OVERRIDE'" <<EOF
[Service]
User=$J2F_USER
Group=$J2F_GROUP
EOF
# Socket override
[ -d "$J2F_SOCKET_DIR" ]   sudo mkdir "$J2F_SOCKET_DIR"
sudo sh -c "cat >'$J2F_SOCKET_OVERRIDE'" <<EOF
[Socket]
# Set FreeBind to listen on missing addresses (the VPN can be down sometimes)
FreeBind=true
# Set ListenStream to nothing to clear its value and add the new value later
ListenStream=
ListenStream=$J2F_LISTEN_STREAM
EOF
# Restart and enable service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl stop "$J2F_SERVICE_NAME"
sudo systemctl start "$J2F_SERVICE_NAME"
sudo systemctl enable "$J2F_SERVICE_NAME"
# ----
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

Warning: The script uses mkcert to create the temporary certificates, to install the package on bullseye the backports repository must be available.

Gitea configurationTo make gitea use our json2file-go server we go to the project and enter into the hooks/gitea/new page, once there we create a new webhook of type gitea and set the target URL to https://172.31.31.1:4443/blogops and on the secret field we put the token generated with uuid by the setup script:

sed -n -e 's/blogops://p' /etc/json2file-go/dirlist

The rest of the settings can be left as they are:

• Trigger on: Push events
• Branch filter: *

Warning: We are using an internal IP and a self signed certificate, that means that we have to review that the webhook section of the app.ini of our gitea server allows us to call the IP and skips the TLS verification (you can see the available options on the gitea documentation). The [webhook] section of my server looks like this:

[webhook]
ALLOWED_HOST_LIST=private
SKIP_TLS_VERIFY=true

Once we have the webhook configured we can try it and if it works our json2file server will store the file on the /srv/blogops/webhook/json2file/blogops/ folder.

The json2file spooler scriptWith the previous configuration our system is ready to receive webhook calls from gitea and store the messages on files, but we have to do something to process those files once they are saved in our machine. An option could be to use a cronjob to look for new files, but we can do better on Linux using inotify we will use the inotifywait command from inotify-tools to watch the json2file output directory and execute a script each time a new file is moved inside it or closed after writing (IN_CLOSE_WRITE and IN_MOVED_TO events). To avoid concurrency problems we are going to use task-spooler to launch the scripts that process the webhooks using a queue of length 1, so they are executed one by one in a FIFO queue. The spooler script is this:

blogops-spooler.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
BASE_DIR="/srv/blogops/webhook"
BIN_DIR="$BASE_DIR/bin"
TSP_DIR="$BASE_DIR/tsp"
WEBHOOK_COMMAND="$BIN_DIR/blogops-webhook.sh"
# ---------
# FUNCTIONS
# ---------
queue_job()  
  echo "Queuing job to process file '$1'"
  TMPDIR="$TSP_DIR" TS_SLOTS="1" TS_MAXFINISHED="10" \
    tsp -n "$WEBHOOK_COMMAND" "$1"
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
INPUT_DIR="$1"
if [ ! -d "$INPUT_DIR" ]; then
  echo "Input directory '$INPUT_DIR' does not exist, aborting!"
  exit 1
fi
[ -d "$TSP_DIR" ]   mkdir "$TSP_DIR"
echo "Processing existing files under '$INPUT_DIR'"
find "$INPUT_DIR" -type f   sort   while read -r _filename; do
  queue_job "$_filename"
done
# Use inotifywatch to process new files
echo "Watching for new files under '$INPUT_DIR'"
inotifywait -q -m -e close_write,moved_to --format "%w%f" -r "$INPUT_DIR"  
  while read -r _filename; do
    queue_job "$_filename"
  done
# ----
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

To run it as a daemon we install it as a systemd service using the following script:

setup-spooler.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
BASE_DIR="/srv/blogops/webhook"
BIN_DIR="$BASE_DIR/bin"
J2F_DIR="$BASE_DIR/json2file"
SPOOLER_COMMAND="$BIN_DIR/blogops-spooler.sh '$J2F_DIR'"
SPOOLER_SERVICE_NAME="blogops-j2f-spooler"
SPOOLER_SERVICE_FILE="/etc/systemd/system/$SPOOLER_SERVICE_NAME.service"
# Configuration file values
J2F_USER="$(id -u)"
J2F_GROUP="$(id -g)"
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
# Install packages used with the webhook processor
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y inotify-tools jq task-spooler
sudo apt clean
# Configure process service
sudo sh -c "cat > $SPOOLER_SERVICE_FILE" <<EOF
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
[Unit]
Description=json2file processor for $J2F_USER
After=docker.service
[Service]
Type=simple
User=$J2F_USER
Group=$J2F_GROUP
ExecStart=$SPOOLER_COMMAND
EOF
# Restart and enable service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl stop "$SPOOLER_SERVICE_NAME"   true
sudo systemctl start "$SPOOLER_SERVICE_NAME"
sudo systemctl enable "$SPOOLER_SERVICE_NAME"
# ----
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

The gitea webhook processorFinally, the script that processes the JSON files does the following:

1. First, it checks if the repository and branch are right,
2. Then, it fetches and checks out the commit referenced on the JSON file,
3. Once the files are updated, compiles the site using hugo with docker compose,
4. If the compilation succeeds the script renames directories to swap the old version of the site by the new one.

If there is a failure the script aborts but before doing it or if the swap succeeded the system sends an email to the configured address and/or the user that pushed updates to the repository with a log of what happened. The current script is this one:

blogops-webhook.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
# Values
REPO_REF="refs/heads/main"
REPO_CLONE_URL="https://gitea.mixinet.net/mixinet/blogops.git"
MAIL_PREFIX="[BLOGOPS-WEBHOOK] "
# Address that gets all messages, leave it empty if not wanted
MAIL_TO_ADDR="blogops@mixinet.net"
# If the following variable is set to 'true' the pusher gets mail on failures
MAIL_ERRFILE="false"
# If the following variable is set to 'true' the pusher gets mail on success
MAIL_LOGFILE="false"
# gitea's conf/app.ini value of NO_REPLY_ADDRESS, it is used for email domains
# when the KeepEmailPrivate option is enabled for a user
NO_REPLY_ADDRESS="noreply.example.org"
# Directories
BASE_DIR="/srv/blogops"
PUBLIC_DIR="$BASE_DIR/public"
NGINX_BASE_DIR="$BASE_DIR/nginx"
PUBLIC_HTML_DIR="$NGINX_BASE_DIR/public_html"
WEBHOOK_BASE_DIR="$BASE_DIR/webhook"
WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR="$WEBHOOK_BASE_DIR/spool"
WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED="$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR/accepted"
WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED="$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR/deployed"
WEBHOOK_REJECTED="$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR/rejected"
WEBHOOK_TROUBLED="$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR/troubled"
WEBHOOK_LOG_DIR="$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR/log"
# Files
TODAY="$(date +%Y%m%d)"
OUTPUT_BASENAME="$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.%N)"
WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH="$WEBHOOK_LOG_DIR/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.log"
WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_JSON="$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.json"
WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_LOGF="$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.log"
WEBHOOK_REJECTED_TODAY="$WEBHOOK_REJECTED/$TODAY"
WEBHOOK_REJECTED_JSON="$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.json"
WEBHOOK_REJECTED_LOGF="$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.log"
WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_TODAY="$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED/$TODAY"
WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_JSON="$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.json"
WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_LOGF="$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.log"
WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_TODAY="$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED/$TODAY"
WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_JSON="$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.json"
WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_LOGF="$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_TODAY/$OUTPUT_BASENAME.log"
# Query to get variables from a gitea webhook json
ENV_VARS_QUERY="$(
  printf "%s" \
    '(.             @sh "gt_ref=\(.ref);"),' \
    '(.             @sh "gt_after=\(.after);"),' \
    '(.repository   @sh "gt_repo_clone_url=\(.clone_url);"),' \
    '(.repository   @sh "gt_repo_name=\(.name);"),' \
    '(.pusher       @sh "gt_pusher_full_name=\(.full_name);"),' \
    '(.pusher       @sh "gt_pusher_email=\(.email);")'
)"
# ---------
# Functions
# ---------
webhook_log()  
  echo "$(date -R) $*" >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH"
 
webhook_check_directories()  
  for _d in "$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR" "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED" "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED" \
    "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED" "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED" "$WEBHOOK_LOG_DIR"; do
    [ -d "$_d" ]   mkdir "$_d"
  done
 
webhook_clean_directories()  
  # Try to remove empty dirs
  for _d in "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED" "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED" "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED" \
    "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED" "$WEBHOOK_LOG_DIR" "$WEBHOOK_SPOOL_DIR"; do
    if [ -d "$_d" ]; then
      rmdir "$_d" 2>/dev/null   true
    fi
  done
 
webhook_accept()  
  webhook_log "Accepted: $*"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE" "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_JSON"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_LOGF"
  WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH="$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_LOGF"
 
webhook_reject()  
  [ -d "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_TODAY" ]   mkdir "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_TODAY"
  webhook_log "Rejected: $*"
  if [ -f "$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE" ]; then
    mv "$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE" "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_JSON"
  fi
  mv "$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" "$WEBHOOK_REJECTED_LOGF"
  exit 0
 
webhook_deployed()  
  [ -d "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_TODAY" ]   mkdir "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_TODAY"
  webhook_log "Deployed: $*"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_JSON" "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_JSON"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_LOGF" "$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_LOGF"
  WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH="$WEBHOOK_DEPLOYED_LOGF"
 
webhook_troubled()  
  [ -d "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_TODAY" ]   mkdir "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_TODAY"
  webhook_log "Troubled: $*"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_JSON" "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_JSON"
  mv "$WEBHOOK_ACCEPTED_LOGF" "$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_LOGF"
  WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH="$WEBHOOK_TROUBLED_LOGF"
 
print_mailto()  
  _addr="$1"
  _user_email=""
  # Add the pusher email address unless it is from the domain NO_REPLY_ADDRESS,
  # which should match the value of that variable on the gitea 'app.ini' (it
  # is the domain used for emails when the user hides it).
  # shellcheck disable=SC2154
  if [ -n "$ gt_pusher_email##*@"$ NO_REPLY_ADDRESS " " ] &&
    [ -z "$ gt_pusher_email##*@* " ]; then
    _user_email="\"$gt_pusher_full_name <$gt_pusher_email>\""
  fi
  if [ "$_addr" ] && [ "$_user_email" ]; then
    echo "$_addr,$_user_email"
  elif [ "$_user_email" ]; then
    echo "$_user_email"
  elif [ "$_addr" ]; then
    echo "$_addr"
  fi
 
mail_success()  
  to_addr="$MAIL_TO_ADDR"
  if [ "$MAIL_LOGFILE" = "true" ]; then
    to_addr="$(print_mailto "$to_addr")"
  fi
  if [ "$to_addr" ]; then
    # shellcheck disable=SC2154
    subject="OK - $gt_repo_name updated to commit '$gt_after'"
    mail -s "$ MAIL_PREFIX $ subject " "$to_addr" \
      <"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH"
  fi
 
mail_failure()  
  to_addr="$MAIL_TO_ADDR"
  if [ "$MAIL_ERRFILE" = true ]; then
    to_addr="$(print_mailto "$to_addr")"
  fi
  if [ "$to_addr" ]; then
    # shellcheck disable=SC2154
    subject="KO - $gt_repo_name update FAILED for commit '$gt_after'"
    mail -s "$ MAIL_PREFIX $ subject " "$to_addr" \
      <"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH"
  fi
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
# Check directories
webhook_check_directories
# Go to the base directory
cd "$BASE_DIR"
# Check if the file exists
WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE="$1"
if [ ! -f "$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE" ]; then
  webhook_reject "Input arg '$1' is not a file, aborting"
fi
# Parse the file
webhook_log "Processing file '$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE'"
eval "$(jq -r "$ENV_VARS_QUERY" "$WEBHOOK_JSON_INPUT_FILE")"
# Check that the repository clone url is right
# shellcheck disable=SC2154
if [ "$gt_repo_clone_url" != "$REPO_CLONE_URL" ]; then
  webhook_reject "Wrong repository: '$gt_clone_url'"
fi
# Check that the branch is the right one
# shellcheck disable=SC2154
if [ "$gt_ref" != "$REPO_REF" ]; then
  webhook_reject "Wrong repository ref: '$gt_ref'"
fi
# Accept the file
# shellcheck disable=SC2154
webhook_accept "Processing '$gt_repo_name'"
# Update the checkout
ret="0"
git fetch >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1   ret="$?"
if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]; then
  webhook_troubled "Repository fetch failed"
  mail_failure
fi
# shellcheck disable=SC2154
git checkout "$gt_after" >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1   ret="$?"
if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]; then
  webhook_troubled "Repository checkout failed"
  mail_failure
fi
# Remove the build dir if present
if [ -d "$PUBLIC_DIR" ]; then
  rm -rf "$PUBLIC_DIR"
fi
# Build site
docker compose run hugo -- >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1   ret="$?"
# go back to the main branch
git switch main && git pull
# Fail if public dir was missing
if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]   [ ! -d "$PUBLIC_DIR" ]; then
  webhook_troubled "Site build failed"
  mail_failure
fi
# Remove old public_html copies
webhook_log 'Removing old site versions, if present'
find $NGINX_BASE_DIR -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name 'public_html-*' -type d \
  -exec rm -rf   \; >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1   ret="$?"
if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]; then
  webhook_troubled "Removal of old site versions failed"
  mail_failure
fi
# Switch site directory
TS="$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
if [ -d "$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR" ]; then
  webhook_log "Moving '$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR' to '$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR-$TS'"
  mv "$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR" "$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR-$TS" >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1  
    ret="$?"
fi
if [ "$ret" -eq "0" ]; then
  webhook_log "Moving '$PUBLIC_DIR' to '$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR'"
  mv "$PUBLIC_DIR" "$PUBLIC_HTML_DIR" >>"$WEBHOOK_LOGFILE_PATH" 2>&1  
    ret="$?"
fi
if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]; then
  webhook_troubled "Site switch failed"
  mail_failure
else
  webhook_deployed "Site deployed successfully"
  mail_success
fi
# ----
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

I first heard Virginia Astley via Lauren Laverne, who played (I think) "With my eyes wide open" from her first album, "From Gardens Where We Feel Secure". Mostly ambient, a conceptual piece about a garden in an English Summer, spanning dawn to dusk. Bucolic ambient, dream pop. It was a little outside my wheel-house, but I loved it, and wanted to find out more. I soon learned that official, physical copies of it were rare and expensive. Some time later I stumbled across her second album "Hope in a Darkened Heart" (which is possibly the most commonly available of her albums) and bought it blind. It's quite different, with a lot more singing, but whatever drew me to Gardens is present. I love this. It was produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Only this week I was enormously pleased to discover a chunk of her discography on Bandcamp, including the two aformentioned albums. Highlights from Darkened:

• Love's A Lonely Place To Be
• A Summer Long Since Passed (re-recording of a highlight from Gardens)
• Darkness Has Reached It's End (Fantastic. I found the 12" of this somewhere, too)

I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet. Surely, we have seen a generation that we call digital natives grow up with the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on. And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering

Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are usability and user experience design . Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

What do kids in 2022 really know about the internet? So, what do kids of that generation really know about the internet, beyond purely using services they do not control? In order to find out, I decided to interview children between 10 and 18. I conducted 5 interviews with kids aged 9, 10, 12, 15 and 17, two boys and three girls. Two live in rural Germany, one in a German urban area, and two live in the French capital. I wrote the questions in a way to stimulate the interviewees to tell me a story each time. I also told them that the interview is not a test and that there are no wrong answers. Except for the 9 year old, all interviewees possessed both, their own smartphone and their own laptop. All of them used the internet mostly for chatting, entertainment (video and music streaming, online games), social media (TikTok, Instagram, Youtube), and instant messaging. Let me introduce you to their concepts of the internet. That was my first story telling question to them:

If aliens had landed on Earth and would ask you what the internet is, what would you explain to them? The majority of respondents agreed in their replies that the internet is intangible while still being a place where one can do anything and everything . Before I tell you more about their detailed answers to the above question, let me show you how they visualize their internet.

If you had to make a drawing to explain to a person what the internet is, how would this drawing look like? Each interviewee had some minutes to come up with a drawing. As you will see, that drawing corresponds to what the kids would want an alien to know about the internet and how they are using the internet themselves.

Movies, series, videos The youngest respondent, a 9 year old girl, drew a screen with lots of people around it and the words film, series, network, video , as well as a play icon. She said that she mostly uses the internet to watch movies. She was the only one who used a shared tablet and smartphone that belonged to her family, not to herself. And she would explain the net like this to an alien:

"Internet is a er one cannot touch it it s an, er [I propose the word idea ], yes it s an idea. Many people use it not necessarily to watch things, but also to read things or do other stuff."

User interface elements A 10 year old boy represented the internet by recalling user interface elements he sees every day in his drawing: a magnifying glass (search engine), a play icon (video streaming), speech bubbles (instant messaging). He would explain the internet like this to an alien:

"You can use the internet to learn things or get information, listen to music, watch movies, and chat with friends. You can do nearly anything with it."

Another planet A 12 year old girl imagines the internet like a second, intangible, planet where Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Ebay, or H&M are continents that one enters into.

"And on [the] Ebay [continent] there s a country for clothes, and ,trousers , for example, would be a federal state in that country."

Something that was unique about this interview was that she told me she had an email address but she never writes emails. She only has an email account to receive confirmation emails, for example when doing online shopping, or when registering to a service and needing to confirm one s address. This is interesting because it s an anti-spam measure that might become outdated with a generation that uses email less or not at all.

Home network A 15 year old boy knew that his family s devices are connected to a home router (Freebox is a router from the French ISP Free) but lacked an imagination of the rest of the internet s functioning. When I asked him about what would be behind the router, on the other side, he said what s behind is like a black hole to him. However, he was the only interviewee who did actually draw cables, wifi waves, a router, and the local network. His drawing is even extremely precise, it just lacks the cable connecting the router to the rest of the internet.

Satellite internet A 17 year old girl would explain the internet to an alien as follows:

"The internet goes around the entire globe. One is networked with everyone else on Earth. One can find everything. But one cannot touch the internet. It s like a parallel world. With a device one can look into the internet. With search engines, one can find anything in the world, one can phone around the world, and write messages. [The internet] is a gigantic thing."

This interviewee stated as the only one that the internet is huge. And while she also is the only one who drew the internet as actually having some kind of physical extension beyond her own home, she seems to believe that internet connectivity is based on satellite technology and wireless communication.

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about? A 10 year old boy said he d like to know how big are the servers behind all of this . That s the only interview in which the word server came up. A 12 year old girl said I would ask how to earn money with the internet. I always wanted to know how this works, and where the money comes from. I love the last part of her question! The 15 year old boy for whom everything behind the home router is out of his event horizon would ask How is it possible to be connected like we are? How does the internet work scientifically? A 17 year old girl said she d like to learn how the darknet works, what hidden things are there? Is it possible to get spied on via the internet? Would it be technically possible to influence devices in a way that one can listen to secret or telecommanded devices? Lastly, I wanted to learn about what they find annoying, or problematic about the internet.

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first? Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children. Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn t want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away. The 15 year old boy had different ambitions. He told me he would change:

"the age of access to the internet. More and more younger people access the internet ; especially with TikTok there is a recommendation algorithm that can influcence young people a lot. And influencing young people should be avoided but the internet does it too much. And that can be negative. If you don t yet have a critical spirit, and you watch certain videos you cannot yet moderate your stance. It can influence you a lot. There are so many things that have become indispensable and that happen on the internet and we have become dependent. What happens if one day it doesn t work anymore? If we connect more and more things to the net, that s not a good thing."

The internet - Oh, that s what you mean! On a sidenote, my first interview tentative was with an 8 year old girl from my family. I asked her if she uses the internet and she denied, so I abandoned interviewing her. Some days later, while talking to her, she proposed to look something up on Google, using her smartphone. I said: Oh, so you are using the internet! She replied: Oh, that s what you re talking about? I think she knows the word Google and she knows that she can search for information with this Google thing. But it appeared that she doesn t know that the Google search engine is located somewhere else on internet and not on her smartphone. I concluded that for her, using the services on the smartphone is as natural as switching on a light in the house: we also don t think about where the electricity comes from when we do that.

What can we learn from these few interviews? Unsurprisingly, social media, streaming, entertainment, and instant messaging are the main activities kids undertake on the internet. They are completely at the mercy of advertisements in apps and on websites, not knowing how to get rid of them. They interact on a daily basis with algorithms that are unregulated and known to perpetuate discrimination and to create filter bubbles, without necessarily being aware of it. The kids I interviewed act as mere service users and seem to be mostly confined to specific apps or websites. All of them perceived the internet as being something intangible. Only the older interviewees perceived that there must be some kind of physical expansion to it: the 17 year old girl by drawing a network of satellites around the globe, the 15 year old boy by drawing the local network in his home. To be continued

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• gensim: use datapath consistently, enable a test, rm cruft
• git-remote-hg: option to test installed code, fix shebang handling, check for Python/Mercurial
• mpv-mpris: add CPPFLAGS, smoke tests
• purple-discord: fix dead store, fix crash
• zxing-cpp: drop code copy, fix crash, spelling
• iotop: URL cleanup, hide SWAPIN/IO when data collection is disabled, promote iotop-c, distro packages
• duck: indicator phrases (1 2 3)
• apt: bugscript cleanup
• Debian DDPO: fix regex
• Debian package uploads: mpv-mpris, sptag, glewmx, purple-discord (1 2), gensim (1 2), git-remote-hg, python-wsproto
• Debian wiki pages: DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, ipw2200, PrivacyIssues, RISC-V, StaticLinking, Teams/Community

Issues

• Crashes in fwupd/libusb (1 2)
• Test failure in git-remote-hg
• Features in gh
• New release needed for wsproto
• Update to build config and postinst needed in smartmontools
• Breakage caused by cgroupv2 in needrestart
• Conffile removal in fwupd
• Broken links in DiskANN
• Outdated license references in cloudflared
• Outdated dependency in DiskANN
• Proprietary dependency in DiskANN
• Embedded copies in boost1.74, DiskANN (1 2)
• Conflict marker in DiskANN
• Missing links in awesome-ld-preload (1 2)
• Inconsistent permissions in rasdaemon
• Source code in binary packages for gensim
• Regressions in reportbug

Review

• Spam: reported 4 Debian bug reports and 63 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved afterstep apparmor beef bless confy cream ctorrent darktable ddnet dolphin engrampa featherpad ffmpeg fnt fontforge-extras fonts-aenigma fonts-beng-extra fonts-lohit-beng-assamese fonts-lohit-beng-bengali fvwm-icons gammastep gnome-activity-journal gnuit gromit-mpx hsbrainfuck kde-config-cddb kde-config-cron kde-config-plymouth kde-config-screenlocker kde-config-sddm kde-plasma-desktop konsole kontrast ksnip ktikz labelme labelme-examples laserboy lazpaint-gtk2 libjs-schoolkit magicrescue nbsdgames os-prober prepaid-manager-applet rawtherapee remind xmonad
  • rejected fontconfig/fonts-beng (no UI), dnsmasq (artwork), tesseract-ocr (random game), ktikz (generic file chooser), texlive-latex-extra/msc-generator (Windows), gcc (help output), chromium-browser/hicolor-icon-theme (photograph)

Administration

• Debian BTS: fix usertags for some users, unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: horae dh-haskell shutter logging-tree openstreetmap-carto gnome-commander
• Debian servers: restore wiki data from backup, restarted bacula director for TLS cert update
• Debian wiki: restore wiki account from backup, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord, gensim, DiskANN, SPTAG, wsproto work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Welcome to the January 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try outline the most important things that have been happening in the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
An interesting blog post was published by Paragon Initiative Enterprises about Gossamer, a proposal for securing the PHP software supply-chain. Utilising code-signing and third-party attestations, Gossamer aims to mitigate the risks within the notorious PHP world via publishing attestations to a transparency log. Their post, titled Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem goes into some detail regarding the design, scope and implementation of the system.
This month, the Linux Foundation announced SupplyChainSecurityCon, a conference focused on exploring the security threats affecting the software supply chain, sharing best practices and mitigation tactics. The conference is part of the Linux Foundation s Open Source Summit North America and will take place June 21st 24th 2022, both virtually and in Austin, Texas.

Debian There was a significant progress made in the Debian Linux distribution this month, including:

• Roland Clobus continued work on reproducible live images in the past month, and some of his work was merged into live-build itself. The ReproducibleInstalls/LiveImages page on the Debian Wiki as well as the existing/custom Jenkins hooks were updated to match.
• Related to this, it is now possible to create a bit-by-bit reproducible chroots using mmdebstrap when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set. As of Debian 11 Bullseye, this works for all variants, except for the variant that includes all so-called Priority: standard packages where fontconfig caches, *.pyc files and man-db index.db are unreproducible. (These issues have been addressed in Tails and live-build by removing *.pyc files, in addition to removing index.db files as well. (Whilst index.db files can be regenerated, there is no straightforward method to re-creating *.pyc files, and the resulting installation will suffer from reduced performance of Python scripts. Ideally, no removal would be necessary as all files would be created reproducibly in the first place.)
• Further to this work, Roland wrote up a comprehensive status update about live-build ISO images to our mailing list as well.
• The PackageRebuilder instance running at beta.tests.reproducible-builds.org is now aware/capable of building packages for Debian bookworm.
• A longstanding issue around fontconfig s cache files being unreproducible saw some progress this month. Debian bug number #864082 (originally filed in June 2017) was NMU d by josch, although this resulted in a small number of minor side-effects which have already been addressed with a follow-up patch.
• 120 reviews of Debian packages were added, 272 were updated and 31 were removed this month, all adding to our index of identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too [ ][ ][ ][ ].
• kpcyrd blogged this month about Debian binary NMUs and .buildinfo files in a post entitled, Reproducible Builds: Debian and the case of the missing version string.

Other distributions kpcyrd reported on Twitter about the release of version 0.2.0 of pacman-bintrans, an experiment with binary transparency for the Arch Linux package manager, pacman. This new version is now able to query rebuilderd to check if a package was independently reproduced.
In the world of openSUSE, however, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 199, 200, 201 and 202 to Debian unstable (that were later backported to Debian bullseye-backports by Mattia Rizzolo), as well as made the following changes to the code itself:

• New features:
  • First attempt at incremental output support with a timeout. Now passing, for example, --timeout=60 will mean that diffoscope will not recurse into any sub-archives after 60 seconds total execution time has elapsed. Note that this is not a fixed/strict timeout due to implementation issues. [ ][ ]
  • Support both variants of odt2txt, including the one provided by the unoconv package. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Do not return with a UNIX exit code of 0 if we encounter with a file whose human-readable metadata matches literal file contents. [ ]
  • Don t fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test). [ ][ ]
  • If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as an ImportError. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems. [ ]
  • Even if a Sphinx .inv inventory file is labelled The remainder of this file is compressed using zlib, it might not actually be. In this case, don t traceback and simply return the original content. [ ]
• Documentation:
  • Improve documentation for the new --timeout option due to a few misconceptions. [ ]
  • Drop reference in the manual page claiming the ability to compare non-existent files on the command-line. (This has not been possible since version 32 which was released in September 2015). [ ]
  • Update X has been modified after NT_GNU_BUILD_ID has been applied messages to, for example, not duplicating the full filename in the diffoscope output. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Tidy some control flow. [ ]
  • Correct a recompile typo. [ ]

In addition, Alyssa Ross fixed the comparison of CBFS names that contain spaces [ ], Sergei Trofimovich fixed whitespace for compatibility with version 21.12 of the Black source code reformatter [ ] and Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek fixed JSON detection with a new version of file [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Fr d ric Pierret (fepitre):
  • Add Debian bookworm to package set creation. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Install the po4a package where appropriate, as it is needed for the Reproducible Builds website job [ ]. In addition, also run the i18n.sh and contributors.sh scripts [ ].
  • Correct some grammar in Debian live image build output. [ ]
  • Shell monitor improvements:
    • Only show the offline node section if there are offline nodes. [ ]
    • Colorise offline nodes. [ ]
    • Shrink screen usage. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Node health check improvements:
    • Detect if live package builds encounter incomplete snapshots. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Detect if a host is running with today s date (when it should be set artificially in the future). [ ]
  • Use the devscripts package from bullseye-backports on Debian nodes. [ ]
  • Use the Munin monitoring package bullseye-backports on Debian nodes too. [ ]
  • Update New Year handling, needed to be able to detect real and fake dates. [ ][ ]
  • Improve the error message of the script that powercycles the arm64 architecture nodes hosted by Codethink. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Use the new --timeout option added in diffoscope version 202. [ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Update the build scripts now that the hooks for live builds are now maintained upstream in the live-build repository. [ ]
  • Show info lines in Jenkins when reproducible hooks have been active. [ ]
  • Use unique folders for the artifacts from each live Debian version. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Switch the Debian armhf architecture nodes to use new proxy. [ ]
  • Misc. node maintenance. [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. In January, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Leonidas Spyropoulos:
  • freeplane (timestamps, file order)
  • opensearch (timestamps, file order)
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • cosign (date)
  • gnome-todo (discover fix for single-CPU build failure)
  • gstreamer-plugins-good (build fails without debuginfo)
  • jogl2 (parallelism-related issue)
  • libkolabxml (ASLR)
  • monero-gui (CPU)
  • python-pyudev (date)
  • rekor (date)
  • rivet (FTBFS-j1 has unreleased fix upstream)
  • skaffold (date)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1003159 filed against dh-raku.
  • #1003203 filed against libgtkdatabox.
  • #1003385 filed against qcelemental.
  • #1003646 filed against node-ramda.
  • #1003929 filed against ncurses.
  • #1004391 filed against python-fluids (forwarded upstream).
  • #1004676 filed against node-istanbul.
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • MR !9 filed against dash
  • #1004557 filed against dpkg.
  • #1004558 filed against python3.10.
• Roland Clobus:
  • #1003449 filed against texlive-base.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1003316 filed against python-cooler.
  • #1003319 filed against insighttoolkit5.
  • #1003368 filed against dino-im.
  • #1003370 filed against libxtrxll.
  • #1003371 filed against libavif.
  • #1003373 filed against go-for-it.
  • #1003375 filed against clfft.
  • #1003379 filed against last-align.
  • #1003430 filed against gkrellm-leds.
  • #1003488 and #1003489 filed against last-align.
  • #1003494 filed against binutils-xtensa-lx106.
  • #1003495 filed against gcc-xtensa-lx106.
  • #1003500 and #1003501 filed against gcc-sh-elf.
  • #1003787 filed against pesign.
  • #1003802 filed against upb.
  • #1003803 filed against paho.mqtt.c.
  • #1003804 filed against imath.
  • #1003808 filed against libvcflib.
  • #1003809 filed against pkg-js-tools.
  • #1003912 filed against vdeplug4.
  • #1003914 filed against kget.
  • #1003915 filed against mathgl.
  • #1003919 filed against apulse.
  • #1003920 filed against akonadi.
  • #1003922 filed against recastnavigation.
  • #1003923 filed against soundkonverter.
  • #1003924 filed against indi.
  • #1003978 filed against akonadi-mime.
  • #1003980 filed against akonadi-import-wizard.
  • #1003992 filed against akonadi-contacts.
  • #1003993 filed against cryptominisat.
  • #1003995 filed against hipercontracer.
  • #1003997 filed against libksba.
  • #1003999 filed against leatherman.
  • #1004002 filed against segyio.
  • #1004004 filed against darkradiant.
  • #1004005 filed against openmm.
  • #1004034 filed against bagel.
  • #1004053 filed against kallisto.
  • #1004057 filed against evolution-ews.

And finally If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' novels that I enjoyed reading the most in 2021. But in the very last of my 2021 roundup posts, I'll be going over some of my favourite movies. (Saying that, these are perhaps less of my 'favourite films' than the ones worth remarking on after all, nobody needs to hear that The Godfather is a good movie.) It's probably helpful to remark you that I took a self-directed course in film history in 2021, based around the first volume of Roger Ebert's The Great Movies. This collection of 100-odd movie essays aims to make a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema, and I watched all but a handul before the year was out. I am slowly making my way through volume two in 2022. This tome was tremendously useful, and not simply due to the background context that Ebert added to each film: it also brought me into contact with films I would have hardly come through some other means. Would I have ever discovered the sly comedy of Trouble in Paradise (1932) or the touching proto-realism of L'Atalante (1934) any other way? It also helped me to 'get around' to watching films I may have put off watching forever the influential Battleship Potemkin (1925), for instance, and the ur-epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) spring to mind here. Choosing a 'worst' film is perhaps more difficult than choosing the best. There are first those that left me completely dry (Ready or Not, Written on the Wind, etc.), and those that were simply poorly executed. And there are those that failed to meet their own high opinions of themselves, such as the 'made for Reddit' Tenet (2020) or the inscrutable Vanilla Sky (2001) the latter being an almost perfect example of late-20th century cultural exhaustion. But I must save my most severe judgement for those films where I took a visceral dislike how their subjects were portrayed. The sexually problematic Sixteen Candles (1984) and the pseudo-Catholic vigilantism of The Boondock Saints (1999) both spring to mind here, the latter of which combines so many things I dislike into such a short running time I'd need an entire essay to adequately express how much I disliked it.

Dogtooth (2009) A father, a mother, a brother and two sisters live in a large and affluent house behind a very high wall and an always-locked gate. Only the father ever leaves the property, driving to the factory that he happens to own. Dogtooth goes far beyond any allusion to Josef Fritzl's cellar, though, as the children's education is a grotesque parody of home-schooling. Here, the parents deliberately teach their children the wrong meaning of words (e.g. a yellow flower is called a 'zombie'), all of which renders the outside world utterly meaningless and unreadable, and completely mystifying its very existence. It is this creepy strangeness within a 'regular' family unit in Dogtooth that is both socially and epistemically horrific, and I'll say nothing here of its sexual elements as well. Despite its cold, inscrutable and deadpan surreality, Dogtooth invites all manner of potential interpretations. Is this film about the artificiality of the nuclear family that the West insists is the benchmark of normality? Or is it, as I prefer to believe, something more visceral altogether: an allegory for the various forms of ontological violence wrought by fascism, as well a sobering nod towards some of fascism's inherent appeals? (Perhaps it is both. In 1972, French poststructuralists Gilles and F lix Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus, which plays with the idea of the family unit as a metaphor for the authoritarian state.) The Greek-language Dogtooth, elegantly shot, thankfully provides no easy answers.

Holy Motors (2012) There is an infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 film collaboration between Luis Bu uel and famed artist Salvador Dal . A young woman is cornered in her own apartment by a threatening man, and she reaches for a tennis racquet in self-defence. But the man suddenly picks up two nearby ropes and drags into the frame two large grand pianos... each leaden with a dead donkey, a stone tablet, a pumpkin and a bewildered priest. This bizarre sketch serves as a better introduction to Leos Carax's Holy Motors than any elementary outline of its plot, which ostensibly follows 24 hours in the life of a man who must play a number of extremely diverse roles around Paris... all for no apparent reason. (And is he even a man?) Surrealism as an art movement gets a pretty bad wrap these days, and perhaps justifiably so. But Holy Motors and Un Chien Andalou serve as a good reminder that surrealism can be, well, 'good, actually'. And if not quite high art, Holy Motors at least demonstrates that surrealism can still unnerving and hilariously funny. Indeed, recalling the whimsy of the plot to a close friend, the tears of laughter came unbidden to my eyes once again. ("And then the limousines...!") Still, it is unclear how Holy Motors truly refreshes surrealism for the twenty-first century. Surrealism was, in part, a reaction to the mechanical and unfeeling brutality of World War I and ultimately sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Holy Motors cannot be responding to another continental conflagration, and so it appears to me to be some kind of commentary on the roles we exhibit in an era of 'post-postmodernity': a sketch on our age of performative authenticity, perhaps, or an idle doodle on the function and psychosocial function of work. Or perhaps not. After all, this film was produced in a time that offers the near-universal availability of mind-altering substances, and this certainly changes the context in which this film was both created. And, how can I put it, was intended to be watched.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) An absolutely devastating portrayal of a character who is unable to forgive himself and is hesitant to engage with anyone ever again. It features a near-ideal balance between portraying unrecoverable anguish and tender warmth, and is paradoxically grandiose in its subtle intimacy. The mechanics of life led me to watch this lying on a bed in a chain hotel by Heathrow Airport, and if this colourless circumstance blunted the film's emotional impact on me, I am probably thankful for it. Indeed, I find myself reduced in this review to fatuously recalling my favourite interactions instead of providing any real commentary. You could write a whole essay about one particular incident: its surfaces, subtexts and angles... all despite nothing of any substance ever being communicated. Truly stunning.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Roger Ebert called this movie one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come. But whilst it is difficult to disagree with his sentiment, Ebert's choice of sad is somehow not quite the right word. Indeed, I've long regretted that our dictionaries don't have more nuanced blends of tragedy and sadness; perhaps the Ancient Greeks can loan us some. Nevertheless, the plot of this film is of a gambler and a prostitute who become business partners in a new and remote mining town called Presbyterian Church. However, as their town and enterprise booms, it comes to the attention of a large mining corporation who want to bully or buy their way into the action. What makes this film stand out is not the plot itself, however, but its mood and tone the town and its inhabitants seem to be thrown together out of raw lumber, covered alternatively in mud or frozen ice, and their days (and their personalities) are both short and dark in equal measure. As a brief aside, if you haven't seen a Roger Altman film before, this has all the trappings of being a good introduction. As Ebert went on to observe: This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. Furthermore, we can see some of Altman's trademark conversations that overlap, a superb handling of ensemble casts, and a quietly subversive view of the tyranny of 'genre'... and the latter in a time when the appetite for revisionist portrays of the West was not very strong. All of these 'Altmanian' trademarks can be ordered in much stronger measures in his later films: in particular, his comedy-drama Nashville (1975) has 24 main characters, and my jejune interpretation of Gosford Park (2001) is that it is purposefully designed to poke fun those who take a reductionist view of 'genre', or at least on the audience's expectations. (In this case, an Edwardian-era English murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, but where no real murder or detection really takes place.) On the other hand, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is actually a poor introduction to Altman. The story is told in a suitable deliberate and slow tempo, and the two stars of the film are shown thoroughly defrocked of any 'star status', in both the visual and moral dimensions. All of these traits are, however, this film's strength, adding up to a credible, fascinating and riveting portrayal of the old West.

Detour (1945) Detour was filmed in less than a week, and it's difficult to decide out of the actors and the screenplay which is its weakest point.... Yet it still somehow seemed to drag me in. The plot revolves around luckless Al who is hitchhiking to California. Al gets a lift from a man called Haskell who quickly falls down dead from a heart attack. Al quickly buries the body and takes Haskell's money, car and identification, believing that the police will believe Al murdered him. An unstable element is soon introduced in the guise of Vera, who, through a set of coincidences that stretches credulity, knows that this 'new' Haskell (ie. Al pretending to be him) is not who he seems. Vera then attaches herself to Al in order to blackmail him, and the world starts to spin out of his control. It must be understood that none of this is executed very well. Rather, what makes Detour so interesting to watch is that its 'errors' lend a distinctively creepy and unnatural hue to the film. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud used the word unheimlich to describe the experience of something that is not simply mysterious, but something creepy in a strangely familiar way. This is almost the perfect description of watching Detour its eerie nature means that we are not only frequently second-guessed about where the film is going, but are often uncertain whether we are watching the usual objective perspective offered by cinema. In particular, are all the ham-fisted segues, stilted dialogue and inscrutable character motivations actually a product of Al inventing a story for the viewer? Did he murder Haskell after all, despite the film 'showing' us that Haskell died of natural causes? In other words, are we watching what Al wants us to believe? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the film succeeds precisely because of its accidental or inadvertent choices, so it is an implicit reminder that seeking the director's original intention in any piece of art is a complete mirage. Detour is certainly not a good film, but it just might be a great one. (It is a short film too, and, out of copyright, it is available online for free.)

Safe (1995) Safe is a subtly disturbing film about an upper-middle-class housewife who begins to complain about vague symptoms of illness. Initially claiming that she doesn't feel right, Carol starts to have unexplained headaches, a dry cough and nosebleeds, and eventually begins to have trouble breathing. Carol's family doctor treats her concerns with little care, and suggests to her husband that she sees a psychiatrist. Yet Carol's episodes soon escalate. For example, as a 'homemaker' and with nothing else to occupy her, Carol's orders a new couch for a party. But when the store delivers the wrong one (although it is not altogether clear that they did), Carol has a near breakdown. Unsure where to turn, an 'allergist' tells Carol she has "Environmental Illness," and so Carol eventually checks herself into a new-age commune filled with alternative therapies. On the surface, Safe is thus a film about the increasing about of pesticides and chemicals in our lives, something that was clearly felt far more viscerally in the 1990s. But it is also a film about how lack of genuine healthcare for women must be seen as a critical factor in the rise of crank medicine. (Indeed, it made for something of an uncomfortable watch during the coronavirus lockdown.) More interestingly, however, Safe gently-yet-critically examines the psychosocial causes that may be aggravating Carol's illnesses, including her vacant marriage, her hollow friends and the 'empty calorie' stimulus of suburbia. None of this should be especially new to anyone: the gendered Victorian term 'hysterical' is often all but spoken throughout this film, and perhaps from the very invention of modern medicine, women's symptoms have often regularly minimised or outright dismissed. (Hilary Mantel's 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost is especially harrowing on this.) As I opened this review, the film is subtle in its messaging. Just to take one example from many, the sound of the cars is always just a fraction too loud: there's a scene where a group is eating dinner with a road in the background, and the total effect can be seen as representing the toxic fumes of modernity invading our social lives and health. I won't spoiler the conclusion of this quietly devasting film, but don't expect a happy ending.

The Driver (1978) Critics grossly misunderstood The Driver when it was first released. They interpreted the cold and unemotional affect of the characters with the lack of developmental depth, instead of representing their dissociation from the society around them. This reading was encouraged by the fact that the principal actors aren't given real names and are instead known simply by their archetypes instead: 'The Driver', 'The Detective', 'The Player' and so on. This sort of quasi-Jungian erudition is common in many crime films today (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Layer Cake, Fight Club), so the critics' misconceptions were entirely reasonable in 1978. The plot of The Driver involves the eponymous Driver, a noted getaway driver for robberies in Los Angeles. His exceptional talent has far prevented him from being captured thus far, so the Detective attempts to catch the Driver by pardoning another gang if they help convict the Driver via a set-up robbery. To give himself an edge, however, The Driver seeks help from the femme fatale 'Player' in order to mislead the Detective. If this all sounds eerily familiar, you would not be far wrong. The film was essentially remade by Nicolas Winding Refn as Drive (2011) and in Edgar Wright's 2017 Baby Driver. Yet The Driver offers something that these neon-noir variants do not. In particular, the car chases around Los Angeles are some of the most captivating I've seen: they aren't thrilling in the sense of tyre squeals, explosions and flying boxes, but rather the vehicles come across like wild animals hunting one another. This feels especially so when the police are hunting The Driver, which feels less like a low-stakes game of cat and mouse than a pack of feral animals working together a gang who will tear apart their prey if they find him. In contrast to the undercar neon glow of the Fast & Furious franchise, the urban realism backdrop of the The Driver's LA metropolis contributes to a sincere feeling of artistic fidelity as well. To be sure, most of this is present in the truly-excellent Drive, where the chase scenes do really communicate a credible sense of stakes. But the substitution of The Driver's grit with Drive's soft neon tilts it slightly towards that common affliction of crime movies: style over substance. Nevertheless, I can highly recommend watching The Driver and Drive together, as it can tell you a lot about the disconnected socioeconomic practices of the 1980s compared to the 2010s. More than that, however, the pseudo-1980s synthwave soundtrack of Drive captures something crucial to analysing the world of today. In particular, these 'sounds from the past filtered through the present' bring to mind the increasing role of nostalgia for lost futures in the culture of today, where temporality and pop culture references are almost-exclusively citational and commemorational.

The Souvenir (2019) The ostensible outline of this quietly understated film follows a shy but ambitious film student who falls into an emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man. But that doesn't quite cover the plot at all, for not only is The Souvenir a film about a young artist who is inspired, derailed and ultimately strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is also partly a coming-of-age drama, a subtle portrait of class and, finally, a film about the making of a film. Still, one of the geniuses of this truly heartbreaking movie is that none of these many elements crowds out the other. It never, ever feels rushed. Indeed, there are many scenes where the camera simply 'sits there' and quietly observes what is going on. Other films might smother themselves through references to 18th-century oil paintings, but The Souvenir somehow evades this too. And there's a certain ring of credibility to the story as well, no doubt in part due to the fact it is based on director Joanna Hogg's own experiences at film school. A beautifully observed and multi-layered film; I'll be happy if the sequel is one-half as good.

The Wrestler (2008) Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is long past his prime, but he is still rarin' to go in the local pro-wrestling circuit. Yet after a brutal beating that seriously threatens his health, Randy hangs up his tights and pursues a serious relationship... and even tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter. But Randy can't resist the lure of the ring, and readies himself for a comeback. The stage is thus set for Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is essentially about what drives Randy back to the ring. To be sure, Randy derives much of his money from wrestling as well as his 'fitness', self-image, self-esteem and self-worth. Oh, it's no use insisting that wrestling is fake, for the sport is, needless to say, Randy's identity; it's not for nothing that this film is called The Wrestler. In a number of ways, The Sound of Metal (2019) is both a reaction to (and a quiet remake of) The Wrestler, if only because both movies utilise 'cool' professions to explore such questions of identity. But perhaps simply when The Wrestler was produced makes it the superior film. Indeed, the role of time feels very important for the Wrestler. In the first instance, time is clearly taking its toll on Randy's body, but I felt it more strongly in the sense this was very much a pre-2008 film, released on the cliff-edge of the global financial crisis, and the concomitant precarity of the 2010s. Indeed, it is curious to consider that you couldn't make The Wrestler today, although not because the relationship to work has changed in any fundamentalway. (Indeed, isn't it somewhat depressing the realise that, since the start of the pandemic and the 'work from home' trend to one side, we now require even more people to wreck their bodies and mental health to cover their bills?) No, what I mean to say here is that, post-2016, you cannot portray wrestling on-screen without, how can I put it, unwelcome connotations. All of which then reminds me of Minari's notorious red hat... But I digress. The Wrestler is a grittily stark darkly humorous look into the life of a desperate man and a sorrowful world, all through one tragic profession.

Thief (1981) Frank is an expert professional safecracker and specialises in high-profile diamond heists. He plans to use his ill-gotten gains to retire from crime and build a life for himself with a wife and kids, so he signs on with a top gangster for one last big score. This, of course, could be the plot to any number of heist movies, but Thief does something different. Similar to The Wrestler and The Driver (see above) and a number of other films that I watched this year, Thief seems to be saying about our relationship to work and family in modernity and postmodernity. Indeed, the 'heist film', we are told, is an understudied genre, but part of the pleasure of watching these films is said to arise from how they portray our desired relationship to work. In particular, Frank's desire to pull off that last big job feels less about the money it would bring him, but a displacement from (or proxy for) fulfilling some deep-down desire to have a family or indeed any relationship at all. Because in theory, of course, Frank could enter into a fulfilling long-term relationship right away, without stealing millions of dollars in diamonds... but that's kinda the entire point: Frank needing just one more theft is an excuse to not pursue a relationship and put it off indefinitely in favour of 'work'. (And being Federal crimes, it also means Frank cannot put down meaningful roots in a community.) All this is communicated extremely subtly in the justly-lauded lowkey diner scene, by far the best scene in the movie. The visual aesthetic of Thief is as if you set The Warriors (1979) in a similarly-filthy Chicago, with the Xenophon-inspired plot of The Warriors replaced with an almost deliberate lack of plot development... and the allure of The Warriors' fantastical criminal gangs (with their alluringly well-defined social identities) substituted by a bunch of amoral individuals with no solidarity beyond the immediate moment. A tale of our time, perhaps. I should warn you that the ending of Thief is famously weak, but this is a gritty, intelligent and strangely credible heist movie before you get there.

Uncut Gems (2019) The most exhausting film I've seen in years; the cinematic equivalent of four cups of double espresso, I didn't even bother even trying to sleep after downing Uncut Gems late one night. Directed by the two Safdie Brothers, it often felt like I was watching two films that had been made at the same time. (Or do I mean two films at 2X speed?) No, whatever clumsy metaphor you choose to adopt, the unavoidable effect of this film's finely-tuned chaos is an uncompromising and anxiety-inducing piece of cinema. The plot follows Howard as a man lost to his countless vices mostly gambling with a significant side hustle in adultery, but you get the distinct impression he would be happy with anything that will give him another high. A true junkie's junkie, you might say. You know right from the beginning it's going to end in some kind of disaster, the only question remaining is precisely how and what. Portrayed by an (almost unrecognisable) Adam Sandler, there's an uncanny sense of distance in the emotional chasm between 'Sandler-as-junkie' and 'Sandler-as-regular-star-of-goofy-comedies'. Yet instead of being distracting and reducing the film's affect, this possibly-deliberate intertextuality somehow adds to the masterfully-controlled mayhem. My heart races just at the memory. Oof.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) I ended up watching three films that feature sand this year: Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Woman in the Dunes. But it is this last 1964 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara that will stick in my mind in the years to come. Sure, there is none of the Medician intrigue of Dune or the Super Panavision-70 of Lawrence of Arabia (or its quasi-orientalist score, itself likely stolen from Anton Bruckner's 6th Symphony), but Woman in the Dunes doesn't have to assert its confidence so boldly, and it reveals the enormity of its plot slowly and deliberately instead. Woman in the Dunes never rushes to get to the film's central dilemma, and it uncovers its terror in little hints and insights, all whilst establishing the daily rhythm of life. Woman in the Dunes has something of the uncanny horror as Dogtooth (see above), as well as its broad range of potential interpretations. Both films permit a wide array of readings, without resorting to being deliberately obscurantist or being just plain random it is perhaps this reason why I enjoyed them so much. It is true that asking 'So what does the sand mean?' sounds tediously sophomoric shorn of any context, but it somehow applies to this thoughtfully self-contained piece of cinema.

A Quiet Place (2018) Although A Quiet Place was not actually one of the best films I saw this year, I'm including it here as it is certainly one of the better 'mainstream' Hollywood franchises I came across. Not only is the film very ably constructed and engages on a visceral level, I should point out that it is rare that I can empathise with the peril of conventional horror movies (and perhaps prefer to focus on its cultural and political aesthetics), but I did here. The conceit of this particular post-apocalyptic world is that a family is forced to live in almost complete silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound alone. Still, A Quiet Place engages on an intellectual level too, and this probably works in tandem with the pure 'horrorific' elements and make it stick into your mind. In particular, and to my mind at least, A Quiet Place a deeply American conservative film below the surface: it exalts the family structure and a certain kind of sacrifice for your family. (The music often had a passacaglia-like strain too, forming a tombeau for America.) Moreover, you survive in this dystopia by staying quiet that is to say, by staying stoic suggesting that in the wake of any conflict that might beset the world, the best thing to do is to keep quiet. Even communicating with your loved ones can be deadly to both of you, so not emote, acquiesce quietly to your fate, and don't, whatever you do, speak up. (Or join a union.) I could go on, but The Quiet Place is more than this. It's taut and brief, and despite cinema being an increasingly visual medium, it encourages its audience to develop a new relationship with sound.

Updates 24.01.2022: What I love about the community is the playful creativity that inspires a game like Wordle and that in turn inspires others to create fun tools around it: Robert Reichel has reverse engineered the Wordle application, so in case you want to play tomorrow's word today .. you can. Or have that one guess "Genius" solution experience. JP Fosterson created a Wordle helper that is very much the Python version of my grep-foo above. In case you play regularly and can use a hand. And Tom Lockwood wrote a Wordle solver also in Python. He blogged about it and ... is pondering to rewrite things in Rust:

I ve decided to explore Rust for this, and so far what was taking 1GB of RAM in Python is taking, literally 1MB in Rust!

Welcome to 2022. 01.02.2022: OMG. Wordle has been bought by the New York Times for "for a price in the low seven figures" (Source). Joey Rees-Hill put it well in The Death of Wordle:

Today s Web is dominated by platforms. The average Web user will spend most of their time on large platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google Drive/Docs, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Gmail, and Google Calendar, along with sites operated by large publishers such as The New York Times or The Washington Post. [..]
The Web wasn t always this way. I m not old enough to remember this, but things weren t always so centralized. Web users might run their own small website, and certainly would visit a good variety of smaller sites. With the increasing availability of internet access, the Web has become incredibly commercialized, with a handful of companies concentrating Web activity on their own properties.
Wordle was a small site that gained popularity despite not being part of a corporate platform. It was wonderful to see an independent site gain attention for being simple and fun. Wordle was refreshingly free of attention-manipulating dark patterns and pushy monetization. That s why it s a shame to see it absorbed, to inevitably become just another feature of one large media company s portfolio.

Still kudos to Josh Wardle, a Million Pounds for Wordle. Well done! It was fun while it lasted. Let's see what the next Wordle will be. This one has just been absorbed into the borg collective.

Review: Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots

Publisher:	William Morrow
Copyright:	September 2020
ISBN:	0-06-297859-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	403

Anna Tromedlov is a hench, which means she does boring things for terrible people for money. Supervillains need a lot of labor to keep their bases and criminal organizations running, and they get that labor the same way everyone else does: through temporary agencies. Anna does spreadsheets, preferably from home on her couch. On-site work was terrifying and she tried to avoid it, but the lure of a long-term contract was too strong. The Electric Eel, despite being a creepy sleazeball, seemed to be a manageable problem. He needed some support at a press conference, which turns out to be code for being a diversity token in front of the camera, but all she should have to do is stand there. That's how Anna ends up holding the mind control device to the head of the mayor's kid when the superheroes attack, followed shortly by being thrown across the room by Supercollider. Left with a complex fracture of her leg that will take months to heal, a layoff notice and a fruit basket from Electric Eel's company, and a vaguely menacing hospital conversation with the police (including Supercollider in a transparent disguise) in which it's made clear to her that she is mistaken about Supercollider's hand-print on her thigh, Anna starts wondering just how much damage superheroes have done. The answer, when analyzed using the framework for natural disasters, is astonishingly high. Anna's resulting obsession with adding up the numbers leads to her starting a blog, the Injury Report, with a growing cult following. That, in turn, leads to a new job and a sponsor: the mysterious supervillain Leviathan. To review this book properly, I need to talk about Watchmen. One of the things that makes superheroes interesting culturally is the straightforwardness of their foundational appeal. The archetypal superhero story is an id story: an almost pure power fantasy aimed at teenage boys. Like other pulp mass media, they reflect the prevailing cultural myths of the era in which they're told. World War II superheroes are mostly all-American boy scouts who punch Nazis. 1960s superheroes are a more complex mix of outsider misfits with a moral code and sarcastic but earnestly ethical do-gooders. The superhero genre is vast, with numerous reinterpretations, deconstructions, and alternate perspectives, but its ur-story is a good versus evil struggle of individual action, in which exceptional people use their powers for good to defeat nefarious villains. Watchmen was not the first internal critique of the genre, but it was the one that everyone read in the 1980s and 1990s. It takes direct aim at that moral binary. The superheroes in Watchmen are not paragons of virtue (some of them are truly horrible people), and they have just as much messy entanglement with the world as the rest of us. It was superheroes re-imagined for the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, for the end of the Cold War when we were realizing how many lies about morality we had been told. But it still put superheroes and their struggles with morality at the center of the story. Hench is a superhero story for the modern neoliberal world of reality TV and power inequality in the way that Watchmen was a superhero story for the Iran-Contra era and the end of the Cold War. Whether our heroes have feet of clay is no longer a question. Today, a better question is whether the official heroes, the ones that are celebrated as triumphs of individual achievement, are anything but clay. Hench doesn't bother asking whether superheroes have fallen short of their ideal; that answer is obvious. What Hench asks instead is a question familiar to those living in a world full of televangelists, climate denialism, manipulative advertising, and Facebook: are superheroes anything more than a self-perpetuating scam? Has the good superheroes supposedly do ever outweighed the collateral damage? Do they care in the slightest about the people they're supposedly protecting? Or is the whole system of superheroes and supervillains a performance for an audience, one that chews up bystanders and spits them out mangled while delivering simplistic and unquestioned official morality? This sounds like a deeply cynical premise, but Hench is not a cynical book. It is cynical about superheroes, which is not the same thing. The brilliance of Walschots's approach is that Anna has a foot in both worlds. She works for a supervillain and, over the course of the book, gains access to real power within the world of superheroic battles. But she's also an ordinary person with ordinary problems: not enough money, rocky friendships, deep anger at the injustices of the world and the way people like her are discarded, and now a disability and PTSD. Walschots perfectly balances the tension between those worlds and maintains that tension straight to the end of the book. From the supervillain world, Anna draws support, resources, and a mission, but all of the hope, true morality, and heart of this book comes from the ordinary side. If you had the infrastructure of a supervillain at your disposal, what would you do with it? Anna's answer is to treat superheroes as a destructive force like climate change, and to do whatever she can to drive them out of the business and thus reduce their impact on the world. The tool she uses for that is psychological warfare: make them so miserable that they'll snap and do something too catastrophic to be covered up. And the raw material for that psychological warfare is data. That's the foot in the supervillain world. In descriptions of this book, her skills with data are often called her superpower. That's not exactly wrong, but the reason why she gains power and respect is only partly because of her data skills. Anna lives by the morality of the ordinary people world: you look out for your friends, you treat your co-workers with respect as long as they're not assholes, and you try to make life a bit better for the people around you. When Leviathan gives her the opportunity to put together a team, she finds people with skills she admires, funnels work to people who are good at it, and worries about the team dynamics. She treats the other ordinary employees of a supervillain as people, with lives and personalities and emotions and worth. She wins their respect. Then she uses their combined skills to destroy superhero lives. I was fascinated by the moral complexity in this book. Anna and her team do villainous things by the morality of the superheroic world (and, honestly, by the morality of most readers), including some things that result in people's deaths. By the end of the book, one could argue that Anna has been driven by revenge into becoming an unusual sort of supervillain. And yet, she treats the people around her so much better than either the heroes or the villains do. Anna is fiercely moral in all the ordinary person ways, and that leads directly to her becoming a villain in the superhero frame. Hench doesn't resolve that conflict; it just leaves it on the page for the reader to ponder. The best part about this book is that it's absurdly grabby, unpredictable, and full of narrative momentum. Walschots's pacing kept me up past midnight a couple of times and derailed other weekend plans so that I could keep reading. I had no idea where the plot was going even at the 80% mark. The ending is ambiguous and a bit uncomfortable, just like the morality throughout the book, but I liked it the more I thought about it. One caveat, unfortunately: Hench has some very graphic descriptions of violence and medical procedures, and there's an extended torture sequence with some incredibly gruesome body horror that I thought went on far too long and was unnecessary to the plot. If you're a bit squeamish like I am, there are some places where you'll want to skim, including one sequence that's annoyingly intermixed with important story developments. Otherwise, though, this is a truly excellent book. It has a memorable protagonist with a great first-person voice, an epic character arc of empowerment and revenge, a timely take on the superhero genre that uses it for sharp critique of neoliberal governance and reality TV morality, a fascinatingly ambiguous and unsettled moral stance, a gripping and unpredictable plot, and some thoroughly enjoyable competence porn. I had put off reading it because I was worried that it would be too cynical or dark, but apart from the unnecessary torture scene, it's not at all. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction and fiction I enjoyed in 2021. But in the last of my 2021 book-related posts, however, I'll be going over my favourite classics. Of course, the difference between regular fiction and a 'classic' is an ambiguous, arbitrary and often-meaningless distinction: after all, what does it matter if Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (from 1951) is a classic or not? The term also smuggles in some of the ethnocentric gatekeeping encapsulated in the term 'Western canon' too. Nevertheless, the label of 'classic' has some utility for me in that it splits up the vast amount of non-fiction I read in two... Books that just missed the cut here include: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (moody and hilarious, but I cannot bring myself to include it due to the egregious antisemitism); Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (so angry! so funny!); and finally Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Of significant note, though, would be the ghostly The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who accepts an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African interior, and the novella is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa. Loosely remade by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now (1979), I started this book with the distinct possibility that this superb film adaptation would, for a rare treat, be 'better than the book'. However, Conrad demolished this idea of mine within two chapters, yet also elevated the film to a new level as well. This was chiefly due to how observant Conrad was of the universals that make up human nature. Some of his insight pertains to the barbarism of the colonialists, of course, but Conrad applies his shrewd acuity to the at the smaller level as well. Some of these quotes are justly famous: Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares, for example, as well as the reference to a fastidiously turned-out colonial administrator who, with unimaginable horrors occurring mere yards from his tent, we learn he was devoted to his books, which were in applepie order . (It seems to me to be deliberately unclear whether his devotion arises from gross inhumanity, utter denial or some combination of the two.) Oh, and there's a favourite moment of mine when a character remarks that It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Tired of resting! Yes, it's difficult to now say something original about a many-layered classic such as this, especially one that has analysed from so many angles already; from a literary perspective at first, of course, but much later from a critical postcolonial perspective, such as in Chinua Achebe's noted 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa. Indeed, the history of criticism in the twentieth century of Heart of Darkness must surely parallel the social and political developments in the Western world. (On a highly related note, the much-cited non-fiction book King Leopold's Ghost is on my reading list for 2022.) I will therefore limit myself to saying that the boat physically falling apart as it journeys deeper into the Congo may be intended to represent that our idea of 'Western civilisation' ceases to function, both morally as well as physically, in this remote environment. And, whilst I'm probably not the first to notice the potential ambiguity, when Marlow lies to Kurtz's 'Intended [wife]' in the closing section in order to save her from being exposed to the truth about Kurtz (surely a metaphor about the ignorance of the West whilst also possibly incorporating some comment on gender?), the Intended replies: I knew it. For me, though, it is not beyond doubt that what the Intended 'knows' is that she knew that Marlow would lie to her: in other words, that the alleged ignorance of everyday folk in the colonial homeland is studied and deliberate. Compact and fairly easy-to-read, it is clear that Heart of Darkness rewards even the most rudimentary analysis.

Rebecca (1938) Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier creates in Rebecca a credible and suffocating atmosphere in the shape of Manderley, a grand English mansion owned by aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter. Our unnamed narrator (a young woman seemingly na ve in the ways of the world) meets Max in Monte Carlo, and she soon becomes the second Mrs. de Winter. The tale takes a turn to the 'gothic', though, when it becomes apparent that the unemotional Max, as well as potentially Manderley itself, appears to be haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the titular Rebecca. Still, Rebecca is less of a story about supernatural ghosts than one about the things that can haunt our minds. For Max, this might be something around guilt; for our narrator, the class-centered fear that she will never fit in. Besides, Rebecca doesn't need an actual ghost when you have Manderley's overbearing housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, surely one of the creepiest characters in all of fiction. Either way, the conflict of a kind between the fears of the protagonists means that they never really connect with each other. The most obvious criticism of Rebecca is that the main character is unreasonably weak and cannot quite think or function on her own. (Isn't it curious that the trait of the male 'everyman' is a kind of physical clumsiness yet the female equivalent is shorthanded by being slightly slow?) But the na vete of Rebecca's narrator makes her easier to relate to in a way, and it also makes the reader far more capable of empathising with her embarrassment. This is demonstrated best whilst she, in one of the best evocations of this particular anxiety I have yet come across, is gingerly creeping around Manderlay and trying to avoid running into the butler. A surprise of sorts comes in the latter stages of the book, and this particular twist brings us into contact with a female character who is anything but 'credulous'. This revelation might even change your idea of who the main character of this book really is too. (Speaking of amateur literary criticism, I have many fan theories about Rebecca, including that Maxim de Winter's estate manager, Frank Crawley, is actually having an affair with Max, and also that Maxim may have a lot more involvement in Mrs Danvers final act that he lets on.) An easily accessible novel (with a great-but-not-perfect 1940 adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca is a real indulgence.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess One of Stanley Kubrick's most prominent tricks was to use different visual languages in order to prevent the audience from immediately grasping the underlying story. In his 1975 Barry Lyndon, for instance, the intentionally sluggish pacing and elusive characters require significant digestion to fathom and appreciate, and the luminous and quasi-Renaissance splendour of the cinematography does its part to constantly distract the viewer from the film's greater meaning. This is very much the case in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as well whilst it ostensibly appears to be about a Saturnalia of violence, the 'greater meaning' of A Clockwork Orange pertains to the Christian conception of free will; admittedly, a much drier idea to bother making a film around. This is all made much clearer when reading Anthony Burgess' 1962 original novel. Alex became a 'true Christian' through the experimental rehabilitation process, and even offers to literally turn the other cheek at one point. But as Alex had no choice to do so (and can no longer choose to commit violence), he is incapable of making a free moral choice. Thus, is he really a Man? Yet whilst the book's central concern is our conception of free will in modern societies, it also appears to be a repudiation of two conservative principles. Firstly, A Clockwork Orange demolishes the idea that 'high art' leads to morally virtuous citizens. After all, if you can do a bit of the old ultra-violence whilst listening to the glorious 9th by old Ludvig van, then so much for the oft-repeated claims that culture makes you better as a person. (This, at least, I already knew from personal experience.) The other repudiation in A Clockwork Orange is in regard to the pervasive idea that the countryside is a refuge from crime and sin. By contrast, we see the gang commit their most horrific violence in rural areas, and, later, Alex is taken to the countryside by his former droogs for a savage beating. Although this doesn't seem to quite fit the novel, this was actually an important point for Burgess to include: otherwise his book could easily be read as a commentary on the corrupting influence of urban spaces, rather than of modernity itself. The language of this book cannot escape comment here. Alex narrates most of the book in a language called Nadsat, a fractured slang constructed by Burgess based on Russian and Cockney rhyming slang. (The language is strange for only a few pages, I promise. And note that 'Alex' is a very common Russian name.) Using Nadsat has the effect of making the book feel distinctly alien, but it also prevents it from prematurely aging too. Indeed, it comes as bit of a shock to realise that A Clockwork Orange was published 1962, the same year as The Beatles' released their first single, Love Me Do. I could probably say a whole lot more about this thoroughly engrossing book and its movie adaptation (eg. the meta-textual line in Kubrick's version: It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen... appears verbatim in the textual original), but I'll leave it there. The book of A Clockwork Orange is not only worth the investment in the language, but is, again, somehow better than the film.

The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald I'm actually being a little deceitful by including this book here: I cannot really say that The Great Gatsby was a 'favourite' read of the year, but its literary merit is so undeniable (and my respect for Fitzgerald's achievement is deep enough) that the experience was one of those pleasures you feel at seeing anything done well. Here you have a book so rich in symbolic meaning that you could easily confuse the experience with drinking Coke syrup undiluted. And a text that has made the difficulty and complexity of reading character a prominent theme of the novel, as well as a technical concern of the book itself. Yet at all times you have in your mind that The Great Gatsby is first and foremost a book about a man writing a book, and, therefore, about the construction of stories and myths. What is the myth being constructed in Gatsby? The usual answer today is that the book is really about the moral virtues of America. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Indeed, as James Boice wrote in 2016:

Could Wilson have killed Gatsby any other way? Could he have ran him over, or poisoned him, or attacked him with a knife? Not at all this an American story, the quintessential one, so Gatsby could have only died the quintessential American death.

The quintessential American death is, of course, being killed with a gun. Whatever your own analysis, The Great Gatsby is not only magnificently written, but it is captivating to the point where references intrude many months later. For instance, when reading something about Disney's 'princess culture', I was reminded of when Daisy says of her daughter: I hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing of a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . Or the billboard with the eyes of 'Doctor T. J. Eckleburg'. Or the fact that the books in Gatsby's library have never been read (so what is 'Owl Eyes' doing there during the party?!). And the only plain room in Gatsby's great house is his bedroom... Okay, fine, I must have been deluding myself: I love this novel.

In my two most recent posts, I listed the memoirs and biographies and followed this up with the non-fiction I enjoyed the most in 2021. I'll leave my roundup of 'classic' fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite fiction. Books that just miss the cut here include Kingsley Amis' comic Lucky Jim, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (although see below for McCarthy's Blood Meridian) and the Complete Adventures of Tintin by Herg , the latter forming an inadvertently incisive portrait of the first half of the 20th century. Like ever, there were a handful of books that didn't live up to prior expectations. Despite all of the hype, Emily St. John Mandel's post-pandemic dystopia Station Eleven didn't match her superb The Glass Hotel (one of my favourite books of 2020). The same could be said of John le Carr 's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which felt significantly shallower compared to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again, a favourite of last year. The strangest book (and most difficult to classify at all) was undoubtedly Patrick S skind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and the non-fiction book I disliked the most was almost-certainly Beartown by Fredrik Bachman. Two other mild disappointments were actually film adaptions. Specifically, the original source for Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac didn't match Alfred Hitchock's 1958 masterpiece, as did James Sallis' Drive which was made into a superb 2011 neon-noir directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. These two films thus defy the usual trend and are 'better than the book', but that's a post for another day.

A Wizard of Earthsea (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin How did it come to be that Harry Potter is the publishing sensation of the century, yet Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is only a popular cult novel? Indeed, the comparisons and unintentional intertextuality with Harry Potter are entirely unavoidable when reading this book, and, in almost every respect, Ursula K. Le Guin's universe comes out the victor. In particular, the wizarding world that Le Guin portrays feels a lot more generous and humble than the class-ridden world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just to take one example from many, in Earthsea, magic turns out to be nurtured in a bottom-up manner within small village communities, in almost complete contrast to J. K. Rowling's concept of benevolent government departments and NGOs-like institutions, which now seems a far too New Labour for me. Indeed, imagine an entire world imbued with the kindly benevolence of Dumbledore, and you've got some of the moral palette of Earthsea. The gently moralising tone that runs through A Wizard of Earthsea may put some people off:

Vetch had been three years at the School and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.

Still, these parables aimed directly at the reader are fairly rare, and, for me, remain on the right side of being mawkish or hectoring. I'm thus looking forward to reading the next two books in the series soon.

Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian follows a band of American bounty hunters who are roaming the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s. Far from being remotely swashbuckling, though, the group are collecting scalps for money and killing anyone who crosses their path. It is the most unsparing treatment of American genocide and moral depravity I have ever come across, an anti-Western that flouts every convention of the genre. Blood Meridian thus has a family resemblance to that other great anti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West: after making a number of gun-toting films that venerate the American West (ie. his Dollars Trilogy), Sergio Leone turned his cynical eye to the western. Yet my previous paragraph actually euphemises just how violent Blood Meridian is. Indeed, I would need to be a much better writer (indeed, perhaps McCarthy himself) to adequately 0utline the tone of this book. In a certain sense, it's less than you read this book in a conventional sense, but rather that you are forced to witness successive chapters of grotesque violence... all occurring for no obvious reason. It is often said that books 'subvert' a genre and, indeed, I implied as such above. But the term subvert implies a kind of Puck-like mischievousness, or brings to mind court jesters licensed to poke fun at the courtiers. By contrast, however, Blood Meridian isn't funny in the slightest. There isn't animal cruelty per se, but rather wanton negligence of another kind entirely. In fact, recalling a particular passage involving an injured horse makes me feel physically ill. McCarthy's prose is at once both baroque in its language and thrifty in its presentation. As Philip Connors wrote back in 2007, McCarthy has spent forty years writing as if he were trying to expand the Old Testament, and learning that McCarthy grew up around the Church therefore came as no real surprise. As an example of his textual frugality, I often looked for greater precision in the text, finding myself asking whether who a particular 'he' is, or to which side of a fight some two men belonged to. Yet we must always remember that there is no precision to found in a gunfight, so this infidelity is turned into a virtue. It's not that these are fair fights anyway, or even 'murder': Blood Meridian is just slaughter; pure butchery. Murder is a gross understatement for what this book is, and at many points we are grateful that McCarthy spares us precision. At others, however, we can be thankful for his exactitude. There is no ambiguity regarding the morality of the puppy-drowning Judge, for example: a Colonel Kurtz who has been given free license over the entire American south. There is, thank God, no danger of Hollywood mythologising him into a badass hero. Indeed, we must all be thankful that it is impossible to film this ultra-violent book... Indeed, the broader idea of 'adapting' anything to this world is, beyond sick. An absolutely brutal read; I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Bodies of Light (2014) Sarah Moss Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage within an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, this poignant book follows the studiously intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. You can read my full review from July.

House of Leaves (2000) Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves is a remarkably difficult book to explain. Although the plot refers to a fictional documentary about a family whose house is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, this quotidian horror premise doesn't explain the complex meta-commentary that Danielewski adds on top. For instance, the book contains a large number of pseudo-academic footnotes (many of which contain footnotes themselves), with references to scholarly papers, books, films and other articles. Most of these references are obviously fictional, but it's the kind of book where the joke is that some of them are not. The format, structure and typography of the book is highly unconventional too, with extremely unusual page layouts and styles. It's the sort of book and idea that should be a tired gimmick but somehow isn't. This is particularly so when you realise it seems specifically designed to create a fandom around it and to manufacturer its own 'cult' status, something that should be extremely tedious. But not only does this not happen, House of Leaves seems to have survived through two exhausting decades of found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are, to an admittedly lesser degree, doing much of the same thing as House of Leaves. House of Leaves might have its origins in Nabokov's Pale Fire or even Derrida's Glas, but it seems to have more in common with the claustrophobic horror of Cube (1997). And like all of these works, House of Leaves book has an extremely strange effect on the reader or viewer, something quite unlike reading a conventional book. It wasn't so much what I got out of the book itself, but how it added a glow to everything else I read, watched or saw at the time. An experience.

Milkman (2018) Anna Burns This quietly dazzling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is full of intellectual whimsy and oddball incident. Incongruously set in 1970s Belfast during The Irish Troubles, Milkman's 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister ), is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a Victorian-era novel in her hand. It's usually an error for a book that specifically mention other books, if only because inviting comparisons to great novels is grossly ill-advised. But it is a credit to Burns' writing that the references here actually add to the text and don't feel like they are a kind of literary paint by numbers. Our humble narrator has a boyfriend of sorts, but the figure who looms the largest in her life is a creepy milkman an older, married man who's deeply integrated in the paramilitary tribalism. And when gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, the milkman beings to invade her life to a suffocating degree. Yet this milkman is not even a milkman at all. Indeed, it's precisely this kind of oblique irony that runs through this daring but darkly compelling book.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) Claire North Harry August is born, lives a relatively unremarkable life and finally dies a relatively unremarkable death. Not worth writing a novel about, I suppose. But then Harry finds himself born again in the very same circumstances, and as he grows from infancy into childhood again, he starts to remember his previous lives. This loop naturally drives Harry insane at first, but after finding that suicide doesn't stop the quasi-reincarnation, he becomes somewhat acclimatised to his fate. He prospers much better at school the next time around and is ultimately able to make better decisions about his life, especially when he just happens to know how to stay out of trouble during the Second World War. Yet what caught my attention in this 'soft' sci-fi book was not necessarily the book's core idea but rather the way its connotations were so intelligently thought through. Just like in a musical theme and varations, the success of any concept-driven book is far more a product of how the implications of the key idea are played out than how clever the central idea was to begin with. Otherwise, you just have another neat Borges short story: satisfying, to be sure, but in a narrower way. From her relatively simple premise, for example, North has divined that if there was a community of people who could remember their past lives, this would actually allow messages and knowledge to be passed backwards and forwards in time. Ah, of course! Indeed, this very mechanism drives the plot: news comes back from the future that the progress of history is being interfered with, and, because of this, the end of the world is slowly coming. Through the lives that follow, Harry sets out to find out who is passing on technology before its time, and work out how to stop them. With its gently-moralising romp through the salient historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, I sometimes got a whiff of Forrest Gump. But it must be stressed that this book is far less certain of its 'right-on' liberal credentials than Robert Zemeckis' badly-aged film. And whilst we're on the topic of other media, if you liked the underlying conceit behind Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle yet didn't enjoy the 'variations' of that particular tale, then I'd definitely give The First Fifteen Lives a try. At the very least, 15 is bigger than 7. More seriously, though, The First Fifteen Lives appears to reflect anxieties about technology, particularly around modern technological accelerationism. At no point does it seriously suggest that if we could somehow possess the technology from a decade in the future then our lives would be improved in any meaningful way. Indeed, precisely the opposite is invariably implied. To me, at least, homo sapiens often seems to be merely marking time until we can blow each other up and destroying the climate whilst sleepwalking into some crisis that might precipitate a thermonuclear genocide sometimes seems to be built into our DNA. In an era of cli-fi fiction and our non-fiction newspaper headlines, to label North's insight as 'prescience' might perhaps be overstating it, but perhaps that is the point: this destructive and negative streak is universal to all periods of our violent, insecure species.

The Goldfinch (2013) Donna Tartt After Breaking Bad, the second biggest runaway success of 2014 was probably Donna Tartt's doorstop of a novel, The Goldfinch. Yet upon its release and popular reception, it got a significant number of bad reviews in the literary press with, of course, an equal number of predictable think pieces claiming this was sour grapes on the part of the cognoscenti. Ah, to be in 2014 again, when our arguments were so much more trivial. For the uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman that centres on Theo Decker, a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when a terrorist bomb goes off whilst visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother among other bystanders. Perhaps more importantly, he makes off with a painting in order to fulfil a promise to a dying old man: Carel Fabritius' 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years (and almost 800 pages), the painting becomes the only connection to his lost mother as he's flung, almost entirely rudderless, around the Western world, encountering an array of eccentric characters. Whatever the critics claimed, Tartt's near-perfect evocation of scenes, from the everyday to the unimaginable, is difficult to summarise. I wouldn't label it 'cinematic' due to her evocation of the interiority of the characters. Take, for example: Even the suggestion that my father had close friends conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality that I didn't know how to respond it's precisely this kind of relatable inner subjectivity that cannot be easily conveyed by film, likely is one of the main reasons why the 2019 film adaptation was such a damp squib. Tartt's writing is definitely not 'impressionistic' either: there are many near-perfect evocations of scenes, even ones we hope we cannot recognise from real life. In particular, some of the drug-taking scenes feel so credibly authentic that I sometimes worried about the author herself. Almost eight months on from first reading this novel, what I remember most was what a joy this was to read. I do worry that it won't stand up to a more critical re-reading (the character named Xandra even sounds like the pharmaceuticals she is taking), but I think I'll always treasure the first days I spent with this often-beautiful novel.

Beyond Black (2005) Hilary Mantel Published about five years before the hyperfamous Wolf Hall (2004), Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is a deeply disturbing book about spiritualism and the nature of Hell, somewhat incongruously set in modern-day England. Alison Harte is a middle-aged physic medium who works in the various towns of the London orbital motorway. She is accompanied by her stuffy assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, who is invisible to everyone but Alison. However, this is no gentle and musk-smelling world of the clairvoyant and mystic, for Alison is plagued by spirits from her past who infiltrate her physical world, becoming stronger and nastier every day. Alison's smiling and rotund persona thus conceals a truly desperate woman: she knows beyond doubt the terrors of the next life, yet must studiously conceal them from her credulous clients. Beyond Black would be worth reading for its dark atmosphere alone, but it offers much more than a chilling and creepy tale. Indeed, it is extraordinarily observant as well as unsettlingly funny about a particular tranche of British middle-class life. Still, the book's unnerving nature that sticks in the mind, and reading it noticeably changed my mood for days afterwards, and not necessarily for the best.

The Wall (2019) John Lanchester The Wall tells the story of a young man called Kavanagh, one of the thousands of Defenders standing guard around a solid fortress that envelopes the British Isles. A national service of sorts, it is Kavanagh's job to stop the so-called Others getting in. Lanchester is frank about what his wall provides to those who stand guard: the Defenders of the Wall are conscripted for two years on the Wall, with no exceptions, giving everyone in society a life plan and a story. But whilst The Wall is ostensibly about a physical wall, it works even better as a story about the walls in our mind. In fact, the book blends together of some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, increasing isolation, Brexit and other widening societal divisions. If you liked P. D. James' The Children of Men you'll undoubtedly recognise much of the same intellectual atmosphere, although the sterility of John Lanchester's dystopia is definitely figurative and textual rather than literal. Despite the final chapters perhaps not living up to the world-building of the opening, The Wall features a taut and engrossing narrative, and it undoubtedly warrants even the most cursory glance at its symbolism. I've yet to read something by Lanchester I haven't enjoyed (even his short essay on cheating in sports, for example) and will be definitely reading more from him in 2022.

The Only Story (2018) Julian Barnes The Only Story is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old boy who falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, a married woman with two daughters who are about Paul's age. The book begins with how Paul meets Susan in happy (albeit complicated) circumstances, but as the story unfolds, the novel becomes significantly more tragic and moving. Whilst the story begins from the first-person perspective, midway through the book it shifts into the second person, and, later, into the third as well. Both of these narrative changes suggested to me an attempt on the part of Paul the narrator (if not Barnes himself), to distance himself emotionally from the events taking place. This effect is a lot more subtle than it sounds, however: far more prominent and devastating is the underlying and deeply moving story about the relationship ends up. Throughout this touching book, Barnes uses his mastery of language and observation to avoid the saccharine and the maudlin, and ends up with a heart-wrenching and emotive narrative. Without a doubt, this is the saddest book I read this year.

Just as I did for 2020, I won't publically disclose exactly how many books I read in 2021, but they evidently provoked enough thoughts that felt it worth splitting my yearly writeup into separate posts. I will reveal, however, that I got through more books than the previous year, and, like before, I enjoyed the books I read this year even more in comparison as well. How much of this is due to refining my own preferences over time, and how much can be ascribed to feeling less pressure to read particular books? It s impossible to say, and the question is complicated further by the fact I found many of the classics I read well worth of their entry into the dreaded canon. But enough of the throat-clearing. In today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books filed under memoir and biography, in no particular order. Books that just missed the cut here include: Bernard Crick's celebrated 1980 biography of George Orwell, if nothing else because it was a pleasure to read; Hilary Mantel's exhilaratingly bitter early memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and Patricia Lockwood's hilarious Priestdaddy (2017). I also had a soft spot for Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing (2012) as well, despite not knowing anything about the author in advance, likely a sign of good writing. The strangest book in this category I read was definitely Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. Based on a highly-recommended 2018 essay in the New Yorker, its rich broth of genuine yearning for a departed mother made my eyebrows raise numerous times when I encountered inadvertent extra details about Zauner's relationships.

Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020) Laura Tunbridge Whilst it might immediately present itself as a clickbait conceit, organising an overarching narrative around just nine compositions by Beethoven turns out to be an elegant way of saying something fresh about this grizzled old bear. Some of Beethoven's most famous compositions are naturally included in the nine (eg. the Eroica and the Hammerklavier piano sonata), but the book raises itself above conventional Beethoven fare when it highlights, for instance, his Septet, Op. 20, an early work that is virtually nobody's favourite Beethoven piece today. The insight here is that it was widely popular in its time, played again and again around Vienna for the rest of his life. No doubt many contemporary authors can relate to this inability to escape being artistically haunted by an earlier runaway success. The easiest way to say something interesting about Beethoven in the twenty-first century is to talk about the myth of Beethoven instead. Or, as Tunbridge implies, perhaps that should really be 'Beethoven' in leaden quotation marks, given so much about what we think we know about the man is a quasi-fictional construction. Take Anton Schindler, Beethoven's first biographer and occasional amanuensis, who destroyed and fabricated details about Beethoven's life, casting himself in a favourable light and exaggerating his influence with the composer. Only a few decades later, the idea of a 'heroic' German was to be politically useful as well; the Anglosphere often need reminding that Germany did not exist as a nation-state prior to 1871, so it should be unsurprising to us that the late nineteenth-century saw a determined attempt to create a uniquely 'German' culture ex nihilo. (And the less we say about Immortal Beloved the better, even though I treasure that film.) Nevertheless, Tunbridge cuts through Beethoven's substantial legacy using surgical precision that not only avoids feeling like it is settling a score, but it also does so in a way that is unlikely to completely alienate anyone emotionally dedicated to some already-established idea of the man to bring forth the tediously predictable sentiment that Beethoven has 'gone woke'. With Alex Ross on the cult of Wagner, it seems that books about the 'myth of X' are somewhat in vogue right now. And this pattern within classical music might fit into some broader trend of deconstruction in popular non-fiction too, especially when we consider the numerous contemporary books on the long hangover of the Civil Rights era (Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, etc.), the multifarious ghosts of Empire (Akala's Natives, Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, etc.) or even the 'transmogrification' of George Orwell into myth. But regardless of its place in some wider canon, A Life in Nine Pieces is beautifully printed in hardback form (worth acquiring for that very reason alone), and it is one of the rare good books about classical music that can be recommended to both the connoisseur and the layperson alike.

Sea State (2021) Tabitha Lasley In her mid-30s and jerking herself out of a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley left London and put all her savings into a six-month lease on a flat within a questionable neighbourhood in Aberdeen, Scotland. She left to make good on a lukewarm idea for a book about oil rigs and the kinds of men who work on them: I wanted to see what men were like with no women around, she claims. The result is Sea State, a forthright examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an unsparing portrayal of loneliness, masculinity, female desire and the decline of industry in Britain. (It might almost be said that Sea State is an update of a sort to George Orwell's visit to the mines in the North of England.) As bracing as the North Sea air, Sea State spoke to me on multiple levels but I found it additionally interesting to compare and contrast with Julian Barnes' The Man with Red Coat (see below). Women writers are rarely thought to be using fiction for higher purposes: it is assumed that, unlike men, whatever women commit to paper is confessional without any hint of artfulness. Indeed, it seems to me that the reaction against the decades-old genre of autofiction only really took hold when it became the domain of millennial women. (By contrast, as a 75-year-old male writer with a firmly established reputation in the literary establishment, Julian Barnes is allowed wide latitude in what he does with his sources and his writing can be imbued with supremely confident airs as a result.) Furthermore, women are rarely allowed metaphor or exaggeration for dramatic effect, and they certainly aren t permitted to emphasise darker parts in order to explore them... hence some of the transgressive gratification of reading Sea State. Sea State is admittedly not a work of autofiction, but the sense that you are reading about an author writing a book is pleasantly unavoidable throughout. It frequently returns to the topic of oil workers who live multiple lives, and Lasley admits to living two lives herself: she may be in love but she's also on assignment, and a lot of the pleasure in this candid and remarkably accessible book lies in the way these states become slowly inseparable.

Twilight of Democracy (2020) Anne Applebaum For the uninitiated, Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine who won a Pulitzer-prize for her 2004 book on the Soviet Gulag system. Her latest book, however, Twilight of Democracy is part memoir and part political analysis and discusses the democratic decline and the rise of right-wing populism. This, according to Applebaum, displays distinctly authoritarian tendencies, and who am I to disagree? Applebaum does this through three main case studies (Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States), but the book also touches on Hungary as well. The strongest feature of this engaging book is that Appelbaum's analysis focuses on the intellectual classes and how they provide significant justification for a descent into authoritarianism. This is always an important point to be remembered, especially as much of the folk understanding of the rise of authoritarian regimes tends to place exaggerated responsibility on the ordinary and everyday citizen: the blame placed on the working-class in the Weimar Republic or the scorn heaped upon 'white trash' of the contemporary Rust Belt, for example. Applebaum is uniquely poised to discuss these intellectuals because, well, she actually knows a lot of them personally. Or at least, she used to know them. Indeed, the narrative of the book revolves around two parties she hosted, both in the same house in northwest Poland. The first party, on 31 December 1999, was attended by friends from around the Western world, but most of the guests were Poles from the broad anti-communist alliance. They all agreed about democracy, the rule of law and the route to prosperity whilst toasting in the new millennium. (I found it amusing to realise that War and Peace also starts with a party.) But nearly two decades later, many of the attendees have ended up as supporters of the problematic 'Law and Justice' party which currently governs the country. Applebaum would now cross the road to avoid them, and they would do the same to her, let alone behave themselves at a cordial reception. The result of this autobiographical detail is that by personalising the argument, Applebaum avoids the trap of making too much of high-minded abstract argument for 'democracy', and additionally makes her book compellingly spicy too. Yet the strongest part of this book is also its weakest. By individualising the argument, it often feels that Applebaum is settling a number of personal scores. She might be very well justified in doing this, but at times it feels like the reader has walked in halfway through some personal argument and is being asked to judge who is in the right. Furthermore, Applebaum's account of contemporary British politics sometimes deviates into the cartoonish: nothing was egregiously incorrect in any of her summations, but her explanation of the Brexit referendum result didn't read as completely sound. Nevertheless, this lively and entertaining book that can be read with profit, even if you disagree with significant portions of it, and its highly-personal approach makes it a refreshing change from similar contemporary political analysis (eg. David Runciman's How Democracy Ends) which reaches for that more 'objective' line.

The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Julian Barnes As rich as the eponymous red coat that adorns his cover, Julian Barnes quasi-biography of French gynaecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846 1918) is at once illuminating, perplexing and downright hilarious. Yet even that short description is rather misleading, for this book evades classification all manner number of ways. For instance, it is unclear that, with the biographer's narrative voice so obviously manifest, it is even a biography in the useful sense of the word. After all, doesn't the implied pact between author and reader require the biographer to at least pretend that they are hiding from the reader? Perhaps this is just what happens when an author of very fine fiction turns his hand to non-fiction history, and, if so, it represents a deeper incursion into enemy territory after his 1984 metafictional Flaubert's Parrot. Indeed, upon encountering an intriguing mystery in Pozzi's life crying out for a solution, Barnes baldly turns to the reader, winks and states: These matters could, of course, be solved in a novel. Well, quite. Perhaps Barnes' broader point is that, given that's impossible for the author to completely melt into air, why not simply put down your cards and have a bit of fun whilst you're at it? If there's any biography that makes the case for a rambling and lightly polemical treatment, then it is this one. Speaking of having fun, however, two qualities you do not expect in a typical biography is simply how witty they can be, as well as it having something of the whiff of the thriller about it. A bullet might be mentioned in an early chapter, but given the name and history of Monsieur Pozzi is not widely known, one is unlikely to learn how he lived his final years until the closing chapters. (Or what happened to that turtle.) Humour is primarily incorporated into the book in two main ways: first, by explicitly citing the various wits of the day ( What is a vice? Merely a taste you don t share. etc.), but perhaps more powerful is the gentle ironies, bon mots and observations in Barnes' entirely unflappable prose style, along with the satire implicit in him writing this moreish pseudo-biography to begin with. The opening page, with its steadfast refusal to even choose where to begin, is somewhat characteristic of Barnes' method, so if you don't enjoy the first few pages then you are unlikely to like the rest. (Indeed, the whole enterprise may be something of an acquired taste. Like Campari.) For me, though, I was left wryly grinning and often couldn't wait to turn the page. Indeed, at times it reminded me of a being at a dinner party with an extremely charming guest at the very peak of his form as a wit and raconteur, delighting the party with his rambling yet well-informed discursive on his topic de jour. A significant book, and a book of significance.