In 2022, much to my surprise, I finished and reviewed 51 books, a substantial increase over last year and once again the best year for reading since 2012. (I read 60 books that year, so it's a hard mark to equal.) Reading throughout the year was a bit uneven; I avoided the summer slump this year, but still slowed down in early spring and September. As always, the tail end of the year was prime reading time. The best book of the year was the third and concluding book of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series, The Golden Enclaves. I thought she nailed the ending of an already excellent series, propelling it to the top ranks of my favorite fantasy series of all time. I'm a primarily character-driven reader, and El's first-person perspective was my favorite narrative voice in a very long time. The supporting characters are also wonderful (Liesel!). Highly recommended. Fiction highlights of the year were plentiful. It started off strong with Natalie Zina Walschots's cynical and biting superhero novel Hench and continued in a much different vein with Guy Gavriel Kay's Children of Earth and Sky, which has a bit less plot focus than some of his other fantasies but makes up for it in memorable character relationships. Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars is a moving story of what it means to truly support someone else and should have won the best novel Hugo. And, finally, Miles Cameron's Artifact Space was a delight; one of the best military SF novels I've read in a long time. There was no true stand-out non-fiction book this year, but the first book I finished in 2022, Adam Tooze's Crashed, is now my favorite story of the 2008 financial collapse, in large part because he extends the story to the subsequent European financial crisis. Jo Walton's collection of book discussion columns, What Makes This Book So Great, also deserves a mention and is guaranteed to add to your reading backlog. My large review project of the year was finally making substantial inroads into Terry Pratchett's long Discworld series. That accounted for eight of the books I read this year, and is likely to account for a similar number next year since I'm following the Tor.com Discworld re-read. I think my favorite of that bunch was Maskerade, but I also enjoyed all of the Watch novels in the group (Feet of Clay, Jingo, and The Fifth Elephant). My other hope for the year was to mix in older books from my reading backlog and not just focus on new (to me) acquisitions. A little bit of that happened, but not as much as I had been hoping for. This continues to be a goal in 2023. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

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

Some books that I had preordered, plus various other things that I failed to resist. There was a whole wave of new book releases this spring, most of which I have not yet read (in part because of the detour to re-read and review the Chronicles of Narnia). Becky Chambers The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (sff)
Richard Ben Cramer What It Takes (nonfiction)
J.S. Dewes The Last Watch (sff)
Anand Giridharadas Winners Take All (nonfiction)
Lauren Hough Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing (nonfiction)
S.L. Huang Burning Roses (sff)
Jane McAlevey A Collective Bargain (nonfiction)
K.B. Spangler Stoneskin (sff)
K.B. Spangler The Blackwing War (sff)
Natalie Zina Walschots Hench (sff)
Martha Wells Fugitive Telemetry (sff)

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Modified LetsEncrypt's "certbot" tool (previously the Let's Encrypt Client) to ensure that the documentation is built reproducibly. The issue was that a Python default keyword argument was non-deterministic and was appearing in documentation with the function's definition. (#3005)
• Sent a pull request to Mailvelope, a browser extension for GPG/OpenPGP encryption with webmail services, to ensure that passphrase field is cleared when entered incorrectly. (#385)
• Proposed an optional addition to django-enumfield, a custom Django web development field for type-safe named constants, that automatically enumerations to the template context to save DRY violations in views, etc. (#33)
• Fixed an issue in the cdist configuration management's build system to ensure that the documentation builds reproducibly. It was previously including various documentation sections non-deterministically depending on the filesystem ordering. (#437)
• Various improvements to django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework:
  • Raise more specific exception types (instead of the more generic ValueError) wherever possible so that clients can detect specific error conditions. (#45)
  • Pass through arbitrary Python keyword arguments to the backend, allowing custom behaviour for special case. (#46)
  • Ensure that the backend result is returned by the Celery distributed task queue wrapper. (#47)
• Updated my Strava Enhancement Suite, a Chrome extension that improves and fixes annoyances in the web interface of the Strava cycling and running tracker, to hide more internal advertisements. (#49)
• Sent a pull request to the build system for gtk-gnutella (a server/client for the Gnutella peer-to-peer network) to ensure the build is reproducible if the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable is available. (#17)
• Updated the SSL certificate for try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.

---

Here are some tweaks to git log that I have found useful. It might depend on the workflow of individual projects how applicable this is. Git stores separate author and committer information for each commit. How these are generated and updated is sometimes mysterious but generally makes sense. For example, if you cherry-pick a commit to a different branch, the author information stays the same but the committer information is updated. git log defaults to showing the author information. But I generally care less about that than the committer information, because I m usually interested in when the commit arrived in my or the public repository, not when it was initially thought about. So let s try to change the default git log format to show the committer information instead. Again, depending on the project and the workflow, there can be other preferences. To create a different default format for git log, first create a new format by setting the Git configuration item pretty.somename. I chose pretty.cmedium because it s almost the same as the default medium but with the author information replaced by the committer information.

[pretty]
cmedium="format:%C(auto,yellow)commit %H%C(auto,reset)%nCommit:     %cn <%ce>%nCommitDate: %cd%n%n%w(0,4,4)%s%n%+b"

Unfortunately, the default git log formats are not defined in terms of these placeholders but are hardcoded in the source, so this is my best reconstruction using the available means. You can use this as git log --pretty=cmedium, and you can set this as the default using

[format]
pretty=cmedium

If you find this useful and you re the sort of person who is more interested in their own timeline than the author s history, you might also like two more tweaks. First, add %cr for relative date, so it looks like

[pretty]
cmedium="format:%C(auto,yellow)commit %H%C(auto,reset)%nCommit:     %cn <%ce>%nCommitDate: %cd (%cr)%n%n%w(0,4,4)%s%n%+b"

This adds a relative designation like 2 days ago to the commit date. Second, set

[log]
date=local

to have all timestamps converted to your local time. When you put all this together, you turn this

commit e2c117a28f767c9756d2d620929b37651dbe43d1
Author: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
Date:   Tue Apr 5 08:16:01 2016 -0700

into this

commit e2c117a28f767c9756d2d620929b37651dbe43d1
Commit:     Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
CommitDate: Tue Apr 5 11:16:01 2016 (3 days ago)

PS: If this is lame, there is always this: http://fredkschott.com/post/2014/02/git-log-is-so-2005/

Can t believe its almost 7 years since my first sponsored upload of Dibbler to Debian archive. I did it cause upstream promised to maintain it and fix any bugs submitted by Debian users. Unfortunately after 3-4 years he stopped to do it. Well since I was the sponsor of it, then I should feel responsible for these packages after him. It s quite hard to do it, cause I m not using these packages at all Anyway, I finally found some time and reviewed them. It wasn t easy cause in the meantime whole build process totally changed. To whom it may concern: Dibbler is an IPv6 DHCP client, relay and server. I ve just uploaded the newest upstream version. Changelog follows: dibbler (0.8.1-1) unstable; urgency=low * ACK previous NMUes thanks!
* New upstream version (Closes: #629685)
uses correct example adsress pool in examples (Closes: #544323)
corrects scope of stateless in manpage (Closes: #615165)
* Fix pending l10n issues. Debconf translations:
Danish courtesy of Joe Hansen (Closes: #597767)
Dutch courtesy of Jeroen Schot (Closes: #632628)
* Fixes handling of children processes using resolvconf (Closes: #627317)
* Doesn t conflict with other resolver configuration daemons (Closes: #627786)
* Correctly handles multiselect values from debconf (Closes: #629681)
* Debianized almost from scratch, uses new source format.
* New Standards-Version (no changes needed). Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:37:13 +0100 Yep, it fixes 8 bugs, and brings the newest upstream version with huge number of new features to Debian. Enjoy!

The increasing storm of localization NMUs and uploads, related to debconf translations, has an interesting effect: some teams are now incredibly active at pushing translations for their language towards the magic 100%. So, after Danish (effort lead by Joe Hansen) and Dutch (effort lead by Jeroen Schot) which I already mentioned, it seems that the Italian localization team started engines and is now taking off. It will be interesting to watch these teams competing (in a friendly way) to climb in statistics over next months..:-) So, if you're Italian (or speak it well) and want to help, please join the Italian l10n mailing list (debian-l10n-italian on lists.debian.org. If you're Danish or Dutch and want to stay ahread the two others, please joind debian-l10n-danish or debian-l10n-dutch. PS: why did I write "Zou" in this post's title? Because this is a common French interjection for "Whoooosh" and because this is part of the nickname of the tireless and incredibly active, in many places, Francesca Ciceri, aka MadameZou, who's is doing so much for Italian localization (and many other areas in Debian such as the publicity and web team). And that really deserves some lights, trumpets, etc.

This article could become one of my recurring "let's make noise about translators work" articles. You've been warned. In Squeeze, a few languages reached full completion of debconf strings, those "questions" that are asked during packages installation or upgrades. This can be followed here (for unstable: we don't have an online status page for testing).. Many of you, particularly those who aren't bored at reading me, know that I like pushing this friendly "competition" as a good way to encourage progress in localization of that part of Debian. As of now, we have really good and active teams that are able to maintain a great completion in this. Several of them are likely to reach full 100% completion for wheezy. Let's look at the current status:

• Seven languages are currently the best candidates for full completion: Czech, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, German and French. They will definitely reach 100% in unstable and I'm tracking the status in testing, which is currently excellent.
• The status for Japanese is a bit unclear to me. Though the completion is quite high, I don't witness a constant effort to bring what's incomplete to the complete status. So, I unfortunately doubt it can make it to 100% (Japanese translators, you know what to do to prove me wrong...)
• Vietnamese which is next in the ranking has a specific situation. Its main (by far) contributor, Clytie Siddall (who is a very well known figure in the l10n community for free software as she contributed to Vietnamese l10n of many end-user software), cannot currently do the highly dedicated work she was doing, because real life sucks. There have been tentatives by the local community in Vietname to take this effort over, but they're probably more focused on end-user software than Debian work.
• Dutch and Danish are the best suspects for joining the 100%-fighters club. Both now have at least one very very motivated contributor who's "jumping" on each and any pending l10n work. So, yes, Jeroen Schot and Joe "Dalton" Hansen, you can make it!
• Effort for Italian is not as constant as it could be. It is maybe missing a noisy and hardworking "leader". Still, I know that the team is very active in other areas of localization such as the DDTP (where Italian is leading) so, maybe one person could diverge his her attention for debconf work..:-)
• A few next languages see a more hectic activity: Galician, Finnish and Basque used to have one very active contributor, but recent activity is much much lower.
• Brazilian Portuguese sees some effort but the situation is similar to Italian, here. The pt_BR team is more focused on the DDTP (and does well in this). It might only need a motivated volunteer, but 100% is quite far and the effort would be focused on wheezy+1
• Slovak is indeed one of the good candidates for "could be 100% some day". Progress is currently quite regular but Slavko is starting from very far away and it will take time. Keep going on!
• Other in the ranking are really mostly stalled, so if you language is among them....then, you known what to do!

I hope this maybe gave you the idea of joining these efforts. Please pop up on one of the i18n mailing lists if you're interested, and if you don't know where to start, then debian-i18n< is what you're looking for. See you soon!

The following selected bibliography showcases only a small portion of the academics who have demonstrated that while it may take two to tango, it only takes one to give a scholarly paper a silly cliche title: There are also a few hundred groups who have demonstrated that larger groups can so as well.

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Menezes, Oorschot, Vanstone; 2001) is now available as a free (as in beer) download. It's from 2001, so it wouldn't include all the latest stuff like MD5 being broken and SHA1 being slowly weakened, also estimates on how long a computer takes to break DES will be seriously outdated, but the fundamentals haven't changed. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I guess now's the time to close that gap.