Author: Andrew Huey

Subscription software, books, and comics

I found out this week that Day One is switching over to a paid subscription model, much like other Mac software has done over the last few years. (TextExpander and 1Password come to mind.)

Day One has said that they’ll continue to support users who have previously purchased the software, and not require that anyone switch over to a subscription, so that’s cool. (1Password did much the same thing. So did TextExpander, though they kind of stumbled into it after some backlash.)

I gave up on TextExpander, for various reasons, not long after they introduced subscriptions. I’m still using the non-subscription 1Password, and I’m pretty happy with it, though I’m thinking about switching over to a subscription. As to Day One, I guess I’ll keep using it for now. I definitely don’t get enough use out of it to justify a subscription. At some point, I may give up on it and just add a “journal” notebook to my Evernote account. I’m already paying for Evernote Premium, so that’s probably a good idea.

Meanwhile, it seems like subscription-based software and services are really getting pushed by a variety of companies. I got an email from O’Reilly today, saying that they’ll no longer be selling books directly, and pushing their Safari subscription instead. It’s still possible to buy their books from Amazon, so that’s good, but their own site was a pretty good place to buy ebooks, since they offered DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats (PDF, Mobi, and ePub). Oh well. It’s not clear from their FAQ if the ebooks you’d get from Amazon are DRM-free or not. Kindle books usually aren’t, but they can be. And I guess there’s no way to buy a DRM-free PDF of an O’Reilly book now. PDF is really the best format to have, if you’re using a book for reference.

Packt still sells DRM-free ebooks, but they also push their Mapt subscription service. The same goes for Apress: they still sell directly, but also push Apress Access, their subscription service.

On a semi-related subject, I think I may have accidentally signed up for a trial of Comixology Unlimited. I was trying to use the Comixology iOS app this weekend, and it was acting a bit funny. At some point, I briefly saw a screen saying that I’d activated a 7-day trial. I hadn’t purposely clicked on anything that should have done that, and I think the app crashed right afterwards. My account page says I don’t have a subscription, but I’ve noticed that eligible titles now have a “borrow” button underneath them, instead of an “add to cart” button. So, who knows? I have enough unread purchased comics in my Comixology account that I can’t really see myself ever needing Comixology Unlimited. I’ll just have to keep an eye on my account and make sure that, if I do actually have a trial, it doesn’t convert to paid.

Speaking of borrowing comics, I’m currently reading a well-worn copy of The Return of Bruce Wayne, borrowed from my local library. They have a pretty nice selection of graphic novels. And the Bridgewater Library (not far from here, and in the same library system) has an even better selection. So I could probably give up on buying comics altogether and just rely on the Somerset County Library System, if I wanted to.

Gmail Privacy

Well, this is typical. Right after I switch from Gmail to FastMail, Google announces that they’re no longer going to read your email. Privacy concerns weren’t the only reason I switched, of course. I also wanted to use my own domain, and do some other stuff that I couldn’t do with the free version of Gmail. But, really, if they announced this a few months ago, I might not have talked myself into giving up Gmail.

On a semi-related note, I’ve had to switch from DuckDuckGo back to Google at work, because we have, for some reason, blocked DuckDuckGo. I switched to DDG at home and work some time ago, partially for privacy reasons, and also because of all the crazy distracting logo graphics that Google uses. Today’s one, celebrating Oskar Fischinger, is nice, but these things are so distracting I get sucked into them and forget what I was going to search for in the first place.

Shrug

At work today, I decided that I needed to be able to more easily get the shrug symbol into my emails and messages. This probably says something bad about my attitude towards my job, but: (shrug).

I specifically wanted to use the multi-character text symbol, and the not single-character emoji. That symbol is a combination of simple ASCII characters, plus a couple of fancier UNICODE characters. This article has some interesting background on it:

Taking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the worldview to its logical conclusion, Foster makes the fatalistic argument that everything is predetermined and space-time is a false construction of the human mind.

Well, OK, maybe I’m not ready for that worldview, but it seemed like a good response to the guy who asked me if I could kill an out-of-control SQL process this morning. (Final determination: I could not.)

So I went to AutoHotKey and tried to define a little macro. My first attempt, which should probably have worked, didn’t. (Probably because my AHK script file is UNICODE, but the wrong kind of UNICODE?) Anyway, changing it so that the UNICODE characters are specified with their hex codes fixes it. So now I can type “backslash backslash shrug” anytime I need a shrug!

; doesn't work right.
; ::\\shrug::¯\_(ツ)_/¯
; works great!
::\\shrug::{U+00AF}\_({U+30C4})_/{U+00AF}

By the way, WordPress is kind of weird about displaying the shruggie too. It sometimes eats the backslash and sometimes doesn’t. It looks OK in the blockquote above, but when I tried using it directly in this post, not in a blockquote and not in a ‘pre’ block, it kept eating the backslash. Even when I entered the escape sequence instead of directly entering the backslash character. I think that’s a mystery for another day though. (Shrug!)

Gloria

My friend Gloria Zero passed away this morning. She was a good friend to my parents, and she’s been a good friend to me over the last several years.

She almost always ended our phone calls or visits by saying “I love you very much.” We were never big on saying “I love you” in my family, so it took me a little while to get used to that, but eventually I did, and started saying “I love you too” back to her. And I meant it. I’ll miss her company, and her cooking, and her personality and wit.

I have so much more I want to say about her, but I can’t quite organize my thoughts right now, and I don’t want to just ramble on aimlessly. I posted this same message to Facebook earlier, but I wanted to have it here too, for my friends who aren’t on Facebook, and also just for myself. I may write more about her at some point, but for now, this is the best I can do.

The Advocate

I’ve followed Mark Evanier’s blog for a long time, and I’ve been a fan of his writing for even longer, going back to his old CBG column. His blog is always interesting, frequently entertaining, and often informative. He recently wrote a very moving post titled The Advocate, about the role he had to play in helping his friend Carolyn in her last days, and more generally about the role of “the advocate” in general. I’ve been in this position a couple of times myself, and it’s not easy. I honestly think I did a lot of stuff wrong when I had to manage my Mom’s last few months of life. But I know I did a few things right, and I hope those are the things that really mattered. Anyway, his post is great, and very moving, and has some good advice in it. I recommend that everyone read it, though maybe hold off for a bit if you’re someplace where crying would be awkward, because there may be a little crying.

Comixology problems

Last week’s big Marvel sale was cool, but it doesn’t matter how cheap the books are, if you can’t read them!

 

Warren Ellis – a useful quote

I find myself collecting little quotes from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, as I read through the backlog that I’ve allowed to pile up in my email. Here’s a good one, from July 2016:

Remember – your internet has an off button, and so does your news.  It’s okay to turn the volume down, and even to turn it off. There’s no shame in self care and pausing to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.

…Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t skip work to watch the James Comey testimony today, if you want to.

Mysterious Marvel Kindle Sale

From Bleeding Cool:

A few days ago, unpromoted and for no apparent reason, Marvel titles on Amazon Kindle dropped. Really dropped. To between 70% to 97.5% off.

Very weird. Comics bought from Amazon for the Kindle can also be read through the Comixology app, and I’ve noticed in the past that the Amazon/Kindle price for a given book is often synced to the Comixology price. That’s definitely not the case here as, for instance, Comixology is running a one-day Spectacular Spider-Man sale, where most of their sale prices are more than the current Amazon prices.

I’m not sure what Amazon’s motive is here. It’s not an advertised sale, and the prices are so low, they can’t be making much money off it. Maybe they’re just trying to get more people interested in reading comics on the Kindle?

I bought twelve books on Friday, for a grand total of around $25. (I wasn’t going to buy any more, but I broke down and bought two more today.)

I’ve been trying to control my spending on digital comics. I buy a lot of stuff from Comixology (and Humble and Dark Horse Digital) when it’s on sale, then I just keep a running list in Evernote of what I’ve bought and what I’ve read. My Comixology unread list is at 99 items right now. Most of those entries are collections or runs of single issues, so it’s not 99 comics; it’s more like 999 comics.

But hey, as Dennis the Menace once said, “One thing I’ve learned in life is you can never have too many comic books!”

NY Times Magazine all-comics issue

The NY Times Magazine today is an all-comics issue.

It would have been impossible to imagine them doing something like this when I was a kid. Comics sure have come a long way, in my lifetime, in terms of mainstream acceptability. I haven’t read any of it yet, and the comics are mostly by people I haven’t heard of, but it looks interesting. There’s one story from Francesco Francavilla that looks promising. And one by David Mazzucchelli!

It appears that you can read the whole issue online, but I’m thinking about buying the dead-tree version of the paper today, just to have a physical copy of it. Though, as I look around my apartment, I think maybe the idea of bringing more paper ephemera into it is not a good one.

Nostalgia: Bleecker St, Tekserve, Blueberry iBooks, and old SF magazines

I went down a rabbit hole this morning, following a couple of threads from a couple of articles I was reading, which stirred up some old memories and made me do a bit of spelunking on the internet. I thought it was interesting enough to justify a blog post, so here we go.

I think the whole thing started with this article about all the empty storefronts on Bleecker Street in NYC. This led me into a reverie about the “old days” of cool record stores and book stores and computer stores. Which reminded me of Tekserve, which went out of business about a year ago. (Tekserve’s collection of old Apple hardware is now owned by MacPaw, an Apple development shop in the Ukraine, which seems kind of crazy to me, but that’s probably because I’m old.)

I’ve also been reading through old TidBITS newsletters, and hit one this week that mentioned Tekserve’s closing, and linked to this video from an old Sex and the City episode that includes a couple of scenes shot at Tekserve. I’ve never actually watched Sex and the City, but that clip is kind of fun.  Aasif Mandvi (from The Daily Show) plays the Tekserve employee who handles her laptop, and there’s a bit with a Blueberry iBook that made me a little nostalgic for my old Tangerine iBook.

And, going back to the Bleecker Street article, Sex and the City was apparently one of the main reasons for the beginnings of the real estate bubble on Bleecker Street, after Magnolia Bakery made an appearance on the show. And that got me thinking about the changes in Greenwich Village, in general, over the years, including Bleecker Bob’s getting replaced with a yogurt shop in 2013, and Kim’s Video closing down in 2014.

The Kim’s Video article includes this quote: “Manhattan in the 21st century is this Disneyland for the superrich,” from Richard Hell. And that reminded me of a science fiction story I read in 1989, which basically used that concept as its premise. The story was called “Do You Believe in Magic,” was written by Paul Di Filippo, and appeared in the January 1989 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And, no, my memory is not nearly good enough to have remembered any of that. I had to do a bit of searching to figure that out. (I’m glad to have found The Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index, by the way. I may need to use it again some day.)

I’d like to reread that story, but if I still have my copy of that issue, I have no idea where it is. (I looked around my apartment a bit, and did find some F&SF issues from 1964, but none from 1989. I can’t remember where I got those 1964 issues from, but the covers sure are nice.) I found that it’s contained in a collection titled Fractal Paisleys, which is available on the Kindle for a little over $5, and contains a bunch of other stories that are probably also pretty good.

So I think that brings me full-circle, back to 2017, where I use the internet to track down old SF stories and then buy DRM-protected digital copies of them from a giant global monopoly retailer, without ever leaving my apartment. (Which I guess is why we don’t have book stores, or record stores, or independent computer stores anymore…)