Category: comics

Love & Rockets & Claude

Today, I bought a fairly large Humble Bundle of Love & Rockets comics. I then tried using Claude to help me download and organize the bundle, with mixed success. So I thought this would be a good topic for a blog post, since it allows me to talk about my two favorite things at once: comic books and tech.

Love & Rockets

I’ve been reading Love & Rockets, on and off, since the early eighties. I’m pretty sure the first I issue I bought was #2, from 1983. I think I have most of that original run, through to issue 50. (That was magazine zine, in black and white.) I think I also have the first ten or so trade paperbacks, from the original run of those. After that, things get a little fuzzy. Here’s a bibliography from 2021 and a How to Read Love and Rockets article that was last updated in 2024, both from the Fantagraphics site. I think I probably have all of the volume 2 run (comic-book size, early 2000s). I think I have all of the New Stories run in my Comixology library. (That one was done in a larger “book” format, rather than the magazine/comic format of the earlier volumes.) And I didn’t have any of the current volume 4 run, which I think is back in the original b&w magazine format.

And, in terms of what I’ve actually read, I know I’ve read all of the volume 1 run, either in the original format or the collections (and probably both, for the earlier issues). And I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of volume 2, in the original comics format. I haven’t ready any of the volume 3 (New Stories) stuff yet. Which is why I haven’t bothered buying any of volume 4.

The Humble Bundle includes 57 items, and as usual with Humble, they don’t really do any of the organizational work for you. After getting some help from Claude (more on that later), I see that it has 15 volumes of the L&R library. That might be the whole series to date. It also has 17 issues of volume 4, which is probably all of that to date too. And then it has… a bunch of other stuff. The Hernandez brothers have done so much work over the years, and it’s appeared in some many different formats, it’s really hard to figure out what you’ve read and what you haven’t, past a certain point. But, just from a reading perspective, for me, I now have all of volume 4 in a DRM-free format that I can read whenever I want, so that’s a big win. And I think I probably now have most (or all?) of volumes 1, 2, and 3 in the L&R library volumes, so that’s convenient.

Claude Cowork

So where does Claude come in? I thought there might be a few things it could help me with:

  1. Humble doesn’t give you a simple text-format list of the items in your bundle. In the past, I’d copy and paste the text from the bundle page into Notepad++, then do a bunch of frenzied deletion until I wound up with a simple list. So I thought Claude might help there.
  2. Downloading all of the items in a bundle is always a pain. There’s are various ways to help out with that, but I had some hope that maybe I could just point Claude at the download page and say “grab all this stuff for me.”
  3. After downloading the stuff, I usually spend some time renaming files and organizing stuff into sub-folders. I thought Claude might help with that too.

So here’s my actual experience with all that, starting with the simple task of trying to get a plain-text list of the books in the bundle. First, I tried giving Claude the URL to the main (public) web page for the bundle, and asking it to scrape the list of books are reformat it for me. That didn’t work, as apparently Claude is blocked from browsing the Humble site. (Looking at their robots.txt file, I guess that makes sense, and I appreciate Anthropic/Claude for respecting that.) So I then copied the text from the page myself, pasted it into Claude, and asked it to make me a list of the books. It did a good job of that, so that was one thing done.

In terms of trying to get Claude to help me download the books, that was a bust. I tried getting Claude Cowork to do it for me, but again there was the robots.txt exception. It did then generate a Python script for me that should have allowed me to download the books, but (long story short), I couldn’t get it working. So I gave up and used the “bulk download” option on the Humble download page, which succeeded in downloading most (but not all) of the files. So I then asked Cowork to look at the downloaded files, and the list it had made for me, and tell me which ones I’d missed. And it did a good job of that! So that saved a little time.

So then, having all 57 items in a single folder, I talked Cowork through doing a few things for me. First, I created a Markdown file in the folder with the list it had generated. I asked it to go out to the web and create a revised list, categorizing the various books in the bundle into groups, and adding publication date and some other summary info. It did a pretty awesome job there, creating a well-formatted Markdown file with headings and tables, separating the Jaime volumes from the Gilbert volumes, filling in publication dates, and including short summaries of what’s in each volume. I then also had it rename the files to look nicer, e.g. “pennycentury.pdf” to “Penny Century.pdf”. It did a really good job with that too. I also had it separate out all of the L&R library volumes into a sub-folder, and put the volume number at the start, so “Penny Century.pdf” became “08 Penny Century.pdf”. I did a bit more fiddling around there, and now I have a pretty well-organized collection of books, where I know which ones are which, rather than just 57 badly-named PDF files.

So that’s all pretty cool. I asked it to do one more thing for me, and that didn’t work out too well. One of the files was, for no particular reason, an EPUB instead of a PDF, so I asked Cowork to convert it into a PDF. It took a lot of spinning to get there, but it eventually did. But the resulting PDF was basically unusable. I may come back to that at some point, since I have other EPUBs that would work better as PDFs or CBZs, and I’ve done some work on that already. (I don’t think I’ve ever written a post about that. Maybe I will, when I get back to it.)

So, at the end of the day, I think I have a better idea about stuff where Claude Cowork can help me out, and stuff where it’s going to be mostly useless. I think I might point it at some of the other stuff I’ve downloaded from Humble over the years, and let it clean up and organize some files, in cases where I haven’t gotten around to it. And also ask it to create a nice summary Markdown file, the way I did here.

Future possibilities

There’s one other thing that would be useful, but that I haven’t tried. It would be great to have a way to automate getting all of the books added to my Goodreads account, and tagged appropriately. It would also be cool to have it create a Goodreads list with all of the books. But I’m about 99% sure that Claude won’t be able to automate that. If it can’t even read the Humble pages, I really doubt it’ll do work on the Goodreads site for me. I could probably mess around with it, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. I know there’s a Claude add-in for Chrome that can do some interesting stuff, but I use Firefox, and I don’t want to have to go through setting up Chrome right now. I could also try one of the fancy new AI browser tools, like Dia or Comet or something, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now either.

Maybe I could get Claude to create a CSV file that I could import into Goodreads. Hmm, that might be worth trying. But maybe not today. It’s fairly warm out today, so I should probably go out for another walk, and stop wasting time in front of the computer.

New Year’s Day 2026

Well, here we are, with another New Year’s Day post. I’ve been doing these posts since 2008 or thereabouts. It occurs to me now that I should create a category for these posts, so I can see them all together. So I just did that. The category is NYD, and I have added it to all (or most) of my previous New Year’s Day posts.

Health

2025 was a bit of a rough year. Honestly, it didn’t start well, and it didn’t end well. I started the year sick, and I ended the year sick. There were a good number of healthy days in between, of course, but right now I’m fighting a cold (or flu or whatever) that’s been on and off since Thanksgiving. And I had my second bout of COVID in 2025, in July. That was unpleasant.

Travel

I don’t think I left NJ at all in 2025. No trips to NYC or anywhere else. I didn’t even go too far within NJ. I finally closed my E-ZPass account and returned my tag last month. I hadn’t used it since 2019.

Weight

I started the year at 165 pounds, and ended it at 167. (It’s gone as high as 169, but hasn’t stayed that high for more than a day or two.) I’d hoped to keep it at 165, but I haven’t quite managed to do that. In 2024, I went from 160 to 165, and the year before that, from 150 to 160. So I’ve cut my yearly increase from 10, to 5, and to 2 pounds. So that’s progress!

Exercise

It’s kind of funny that Apple Fitness doesn’t have a fancy “year in review” function the way so many other apps/services do. Going into the Health app, and looking at some yearly graphs, here’s what I see:

  • I’m averaging around 500 move calories per day over the last year.
  • I’m getting an average of 7800 steps in per day.
  • I’m averaging 28 minutes per day of exercise.

I also just downloaded an app called Fitness Wrapped, which is supposed to generate a year-in-review, but it requires payment before showing me the 2025 summary. It looks interesting, but I don’t know if I want to pay for it.

Either way, I think I did fine on exercise in 2025. It seems to be down from 2024 (550 move calories and 45 minutes exercise per day), but it’s fine.

Work

We didn’t do performance reviews this year, but I did get a small raise. It was slightly bigger than 2024’s raise, but smaller than 2023’s, for what that’s worth.

In January 2025, I transitioned to a new boss. (My previous boss is now my boss’s boss, so he’s moved up a bit.) The new boss is someone I’ve worked with for years, and I think we have a good relationship. It can be hard to tell, when you don’t have a formal performance review or any other structured review, but I think I’m doing OK.

Learning

My 2024 performance review included a goal (from my previous boss) that I pursue a SAFe Certification. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but I figured I should give it a try, so I did a bunch of e-learning around it, including a long series of videos on O’Reilly Learning. The cert exam is pretty expensive, and I never got an OK to go through with it, so I dropped it at some point and concentrated on other stuff.

I also mentioned in interest in pursuing an AZ-204 certification in my New Year’s post for 2025. I did actually go through with that one, and two other Microsoft certs. I passed the AZ-900 in April, the AZ-204 in June, and the GH-300 in December. So I’m a bit proud of getting all of that done.

This year, I’ll need to renew the AZ-204, if I want to keep my “Azure Developer Associate” status. I have until June to do that. And the renewal test is simpler than the initial one; you can do it without all of the Pearson OnVUE nonsense. So I’ll probably do that.

Books

Now onto some fun stuff. My Goodreads 2025 reading challenge shows me as having read 60 books. I think it was actually more like 50; the challenge picks up stuff from my Kindle that it probably shouldn’t, but I’m not going to try to clean that up.

I finished reading A Memory of Light in January, so that finished up the Wheel of Time series that had taken up so much of my time in 2024. I didn’t take on a similar project in 2025; I just read a bunch of random stuff, really.

  • I read a few Robert A. Heinlein novels that I thought I hadn’t read before, but which I discovered that I had read, probably in my teens. So that was interesting.
  • I was going to read a few Kurt Vonnegut books, but I see I only read one, Breakfast of Champions. Maybe I’ll get to a few more this year.
  • I managed to finish The Stand, by Stephen King, which I’d started in 2019, and then abandoned. That’s a very long book, and took a good chunk of time to get through.
  • I got on a Star Trek kick near the end of the year, and finished the Rise of the Federation series. I also started the Prey series. I’m almost done with that. (I was going to try to finish off the last book yesterday, but didn’t quite make it.)
  • I didn’t do a lot of self-help reading this year. I did finally manage to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but that’s about it.
  • And I didn’t do much book reading for professional purposes. I read one random book on AI, and started another. I’ll probably mark that second one as “abandoned” on Goodreads and give up on it. I wasn’t getting much out of it. At this point, I guess I’m mostly doing all of my professional learning in video form, via O’Reilly and Pluralsight.
  • My comic book reading this year was pretty random. I read through a few volumes of Greg Rucka’s Lazarus series. I’m enjoying that, and should get back to it soon. I read all three volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Velvet series. I really enjoyed those too.

For next year, I’d like to maybe make some progress on my backlog of Dresden Files novels, Laundry Files novels, or maybe Discworld. (I said the same thing in last year’s post, and didn’t do any of that. So maybe in 2026.)

Summary

2025 felt like a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. I don’t blog about politics much, but… geez. And my health has been up and down. I’m hoping 2026 will be better, on several fronts, but I’m not sure it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it though. I’ll end with links to a couple of funny New Year’s Day comic strips: Over the Hedge and Lio.

reading comics, and (maybe) done with COVID

I took my last dose of Paxlovid today, and got a negative result on a COVID test this morning, so I think I’m over COVID. (Unless the Paxlovid rebound thing hits me, like it did in 2023.) I think I’m probably OK to go over to the farmers market a little later, which will be the first time I’ve mingled with other people in a week. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, I read a lot of comics this week. I didn’t have enough energy, initially, to read prose, so I stuck with comics. Then, I got on a kick, and kept going. I read a really random assortment of stuff, mostly from old Humble bundles, but from other sources as well.

Here’s a list of most of the stuff I read:

  • American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
  • Superman: Earth One, Vol. 1-3 (JMS)
  • Vampirella Masters Series Vol. 4: Visionaries
  • Mind the Gap, vol 1-3
  • Angel Omnibus
  • Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection
  • C.O.W.L. Vol. 1
  • Detective Comics 471-476 (Englehart/Rogers)
  • Velvet, Vol. 1-3 (Brubaker/Epting)

All of it was quite good.

I also just bought yet another Humble bundle, this one containing a bunch of stuff from James Tynion IV. Most of the stuff in the bundle is DRM-free PDFs, but there are a couple of oddball items in it.

One book is redeemable only through DSTLRY, which is a company I’d heard of before, but hadn’t really investigated. And another two are redeemable through Neon Ichiban, which I hadn’t heard of, and isn’t live yet. They seem to be related to each other, and are both founded by a couple of ex-Comixology guys. I guess DSTLRY is more of a “publisher” and Neon Ichiban is more of “platform”. Here’s an article from Comics Beat about Neon Ichiban. So now I’ve signed up for a DSTLRY account, and put myself on the Neon Ichiban waitlist, though I’m not really enthusiastic about jumping on any new bandwagons.

Right now, I read all of my DRM-free books with Panels, which has evolved into a really nice app, and seems to be under continued active development. I read all of my Comixology books with the Kindle app, of course. And that’s about it.

I did also use the Comics Plus app this past week to read a book. That app is tied to my library card, and lets you read a fairly impressive catalog of comics, for free. I’m not really sure how the licensing works, but it’s different from Overdrive/Libby. With Overdrive, your library “owns” a set number of digital copies of a book, and you may have to get on a waitlist before you can read something. With Comics Plus, there are no limits. If it’s in their catalog, you can read it. So that’s great. Unfortunately, the user interface for the app is pretty bad. It froze up on me a number of times, and I couldn’t move from page to page without force quitting and going back in. And it doesn’t have good functionality for zooming in, which is something I need.

Somewhere along the line this week, I also started looking at Global Comix, which has been around for a couple of years. I’m pretty sure I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t looked into it. Here’s an article on them from Comics Beat. I’m definitely leery of getting too involved with any digital comics platform other than Amazon/Comixology, as it doesn’t seem like any of them are likely to be around for the long term. I notice that Omnibus shut down last year. They only lasted a year or two, so I’m glad I didn’t get too involved with them. And of course Dark Horse Digital shutting down was a big pain for me.

Well, regardless of all that, I have quite a lot of comics to read. Certainly enough, at this point, that I won’t run out before I die, even if I don’t ever buy any more. It’s interesting (if a little morbid) to start thinking about things from that perspective.

Well, that’s probably enough pointless rumination for today. Here’s hoping I have a nice COVID-free week.

rough weekend

I’m supposed to be taking the AZ-204 test next Friday, so I had planned to do some studying this weekend. I had Friday off (for Juneteenth), and no other specific plans, so I figured I could do a bit of studying and maybe catch up with the Cloud Academy videos I’ve been watching.

Instead, I woke up with a cold on Thursday, and had to call in sick. I was pretty useless that day, not even having enough energy to read anything challenging, so I found myself reading The Flintstones at the New York World’s Fair, a comic published in 1964 or 65 to promote the NY World’s Fair. It was dumb, but a good thing to read when you barely have enough energy to stay awake.

I then read Keif Llama: Mindset, a self-published comic from Matt Howarth. That was a bit more of a challenge than the Flintstones comic, but was still a very light read. (Side note: I couldn’t find that in Goodreads, since it’s self-published, and since it doesn’t have an ISBN number, I couldn’t add it to Goodreads either. You used to be able to add pretty much anything to Goodreads, which is probably why that random Flintstones comic was in there, but not any more. This bothered me a lot, but I got over it, I guess. End side note.)

I felt a little better on Friday, and did manage to leave the apartment, albeit only to go to the optician a few doors down from my apartment and get the lenses in my glasses replaced. (They got scratched up after my fall on June 1.) Just replacing the lenses (no new frames) cost me $900. So, yeah, I’ve got bad eyesight.

I felt, again, a bit better on Saturday, but still not enough for anything challenging. So, again, I mostly just watched TV and read comics.

Today, I felt a lot better, and even got out for a 25 minute walk this morning. I got through one module in the Cloud Academy series I’m working on, and did the compatibility test on my laptop for the exam, so I can say I did at least a little prep work. But I’m nowhere near ready for the exam, to be honest.

I finished reading Maggie the Mechanic on Friday, read Project Superpowers on Saturday, and then Legenderry today, so I got through some pretty weird and random comics this weekend. So that’s something. And I binge watched Dept. Q and AARO on Netflix, so I got through some pretty weird and random TV too.

I feel a little bad about not getting much useful work done, but I know my own limitations. When I’m sick, I can push myself if I really need to, but then I have to pay for it later. Better to take it easy for a few days, then start the next week fresh.

I guess I’m ready to start a regular work week tomorrow. I hope I can hold myself together. It’s going to be very hot, and I’m not really equipped for 100° weather. I may need to look into rescheduling my exam. I’m pretty sure I need to do that at least 24 hours before the scheduled time, so I should decide on that by Wednesday night. The main reason I scheduled it for June 27 is that the voucher I had expires at the end of June. I’m pretty sure that the voucher expiration date doesn’t prevent me from rescheduling the exam for July. I don’t know. I might just take the exam for the experience, and consider it a kind of “live fire” practice run.

status update

I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”

First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.

The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.

I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.

Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.

I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.

Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.

Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

GoComics changes and other random topics

OK, I guess I’m going to write two posts today. (See my previous one for details on why I’m home with nothing much to do this afternoon.)

GoComics announced a while back that they’d be doing a site redesign. It seems like, at some point in the distant past, an announcement of a site redesign on a website I use frequently might have been good news rather than “oh god, how much worse is it going to get?” news.

The last time GoComics did a site redesign, they dropped one of my favorite features, which let you create little collections of strips around various topics. So I had a “coffee” collection, for funny strips mentioning coffee, for instance, and a “tech” collection, for funny strips about tech stuff. They kept a single “favorites” collection, but dropped the ability to keep multiple named collections. This time, they dropped any ability to save a collection of strips. And they didn’t (as far as I can tell) mention that in advance, so I had no opportunity to save my favorites page out to a PDF file, or convert it into raindrop.io bookmarks or whatever. Oh well. I shouldn’t get too worked up about that. (Comic strips are supposed to be ephemeral, right?)

They’re also raising prices, from $20/year to $35/year, but I have the old price locked in for another year. I still want to support the comic strip business, and even $35/year isn’t much, but it’s annoying to lose features and have the price go up. I guess that’s about enough complaining about GoComics for today.

One thing they seem to have gotten right is that they haven’t messed up their URL scheme, so any links I’ve included on this blog should still work, and I can still find (for instance) the Peanuts strip from the day I was born pretty easily. (Which made me wonder if any other strips on their site go back that far… I tried a few, and no dice. Oh well, I’m too old, I guess.) On the other hand, while the links still work, you need to be a subscriber to see older strips now, so the links work for me, but probably won’t work for many other people. (I can’t really blame them for doing that. I’m sure they need the money.)

On another subject, I was looking at my “on this day” widget, and see that I came back from WonderCon on this day in 2019. And I had a nice day out in NYC on this day in 2017. I haven’t been on a plane since that trip to WonderCon in 2019. And I haven’t been in to NYC in quite a while now. This year’s WonderCon just wrapped up, and the reports I’ve seen make it sound like it was a good one. (See here for Mark Evanier’s write-up.) But, at this point, I don’t think I’m getting on a plane any time soon, without a really good reason for doing so. Even getting on a train to NYC is going to require a very good reason. I just get sick way too easily these days.

Dark Horse, Kindle, DRM, etc.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post on the stuff that’s been going on with Amazon and Kindle lately, and it seems like more stuff keeps happening, and I never get around to writing that post. So now here I am, writing a post about a bunch of semi-related stuff.

I’ll start with the news that Dark Horse Digital is shutting down. I’ve actually been expecting them to shut down DHD at some point, ever since they started making their books available through Comixology, which happened back in 2015. I had hoped that, when they did it, they’d strike a deal with Amazon/Comixology to transfer their user’s libraries over to Amazon. Or, for certain books, make them available as DRM-free downloads. (I can understand where they wouldn’t be able to make some of their old stuff available DRM-free, due to licensing issues, but they should be able to make stuff like Hellboy and BPRD available, since those have already been sold DRM-free through Humble.) Well, they didn’t do any of that.

I had around 300 books in my DHD library, with about half of them unread. Some of those books were single-issue comics, and some were 400-page omnibus volumes, so it was really all over the place. I found a TamperMonkey script that let me download the books as DRM-free CBZs from the DHD web site, so I went ahead and used it to download most of my library. You need to download the books one at a time, so it was time-consuming. Initially, I was going to limit myself to downloading just my unread books, but at some point, my OCD kicked in, and I decided to download almost everything. I managed to stop myself from downloading various random freebie issues, but I grabbed nearly everything else, including stuff that I’m pretty sure I have from Humble bundles. So that’s taking up a little more than 20 GB. I actually feel pretty good about this now; I have a bunch of good DRM-free books that I can read in Panels, which probably works better than the old DHD iPad app anyhow.

This process triggered something else I’ve been putting off: figuring out what to do about the growing library of DRM-free comics and other stuff that’s filling up my PC hard drive. I’ve got it all in OneDrive, but I’ve always had OneDrive configured to keep all my stuff local (on my desktop PC). But space on my PC has been getting a little tight. I have a 1 TB SSD in there, and I’ve been dropping below 100 GB free. Which seems like plenty, but I want to keep at least 10% free. So I finally bit the bullet and turned on the files on-demand feature in OneDrive. Then, I let it offload some of my bigger CBZ files, and got myself back to 150 GB free.

I also set up my backup program to skip trying to backup offline files, otherwise it would have tried to pull them back down every time I ran a backup. That was another mental hurdle to get past. Now, I won’t necessarily have a local backup of some files either. But, hey, I trust OneDrive, I guess. Oh, and I still have plenty of space in OneDrive itself. I’m using around 370 GB of my 1 TB, so that’s about 35%.

On a related topic, there’s been a lot going on around Amazon and Kindle lately. First, there has been a lot of talk on Mastodon and Reddit around people wanting to drop out of the Amazon ecosystem, due to Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump. That’s been going on for a while now, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m not ready to set fire to my Kindle just yet.

Second, there’s a lot of anger around Amazon’s recent decision to discontinue the “download and transfer” option for Kindle books. I already faced that issue when I traded in my Paperwhite for a Colorsoft, since download & transfer never worked for the newest Kindles. If I still had the old Paperwhite, I probably would have spent some time this week downloading a bunch of my Kindle books, removing the DRM, and pulling them into Calibre, for safekeeping. But I didn’t really have any good options for that this week.

Just out of curiosity, I tried copying a few books directly from my Colorsoft into Calibre, to see if I could strip the DRM that way, but it didn’t work. I think there may be a way for me to get around that, but it’s probably not worth the effort.

So, for now, I’m still “all in” on the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, for better or worse. I have a ton of books and comics in my library there, and no obvious way of getting them back out. Which is fine. I like the Colorsoft a lot, and reading my comics via the Kindle app on my iPad is a pretty good experience too. And I don’t expect Amazon to shut any of this down any time soon. So hopefully I’m good there.

I have been thinking a bit about how I should approach new book purchases though. I still need to stick with ebooks, for the most part, due to my failing eyesight. I can buy stuff for the Kobo instead of the Kindle, and that at least takes a few dollars away from Amazon and gives them to somebody else. Mind you, I have no idea who the CEO of Kobo is, or what their political leanings are. (And now that I’ve written that, I’ve realized that I can probably find out… OK, so it’s this guy apparently. Seems like a decent guy? And he’s Canadian, so that helps…)

I did buy one book for Kobo recently, and thought about buying some more, but then I realized that I’m going to have to overhaul my system for tracking my wishlist and my list of purchased books if I move away from Amazon. And I have some thoughts on that. (Which should probably be in their own blog post, but I’m on a roll now…)

My current system is all-Amazon, basically. I have a Kindle wishlist in Amazon. If I’m interested in a book, I add it to that wishlist. If I decide to buy it, I do it on Amazon, and it gets removed from my wishlist automatically. Then, I add it to Goodreads from the handy “Amazon book purchases” screen there. And, if I ever forget I own it and try to buy it again, there will be a banner on the Amazon page saying “you bought this book already dummy” or words to that effect.

So that got me thinking about alternate wishlist and book-tracking systems. For my wishlist, Bookbub might work. The main purpose of it is to let you know about deals on books you want, but it seems like it could work as a general wishlist tool. And it links to both the Kindle and Kobo stores, so that’s good. For replacing the Amazon-owned Goodreads, a lot of people seem to be going to StoryGraph. It looks like it could work well as a Goodreads replacement. Of course, if I do any of this, my life inevitably gets more complicated. Honestly, right now, I think I’m going to keep one foot in the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem and one foot in the Kobo/etc world.

I could keep going on this stuff, but I just noticed that the sun has gone down, and it’s time to eat dinner. So I’ll stop here.

The Gaiman situation

Welp, I saw the There Is No Safe Word article on the Vulture web site on Monday, and I guess I’m still processing it. To be clear, I didn’t read the whole thing. I skimmed a good bit of it, then gave up once it was clear that there was enough bad stuff in it that I didn’t need to read anymore to decide how I felt about it. Having seen some further discussion of it on social media, I’m glad I didn’t read all of the details and will not be going back and doing so.

I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since the early days of Sandman, which started up in 1988, so that’s a long time. I knew about the earlier article/podcast from Tortoise, about six months ago, but I guess I was kinda hoping it was an exaggeration? I don’t know. Anyway, I guess the Vulture / New York Magazine article pretty much confirms that, yep, there’s a big problem here, and Gaiman isn’t the guy so many of us thought he was. It’s heartbreaking.

I took a look at my Goodreads account today, and I see that I have around 35 Gaiman books/comics on it, with about 6 of them unread. I probably have several other unread Gaiman books/comics/audiobooks, both physical and digital, that I haven’t added to Goodreads. So let’s say a dozen or maybe twenty items.

It’s hard to figure how I should feel about his work now. Do I still want to read the stuff that I have? I picked up my copy of The Graveyard Book graphic novel this afternoon, and stared at it for a bit. I bought it in 2016, and still haven’t read it. The art is by P. Craig Russell, who is maybe my very favorite comic book artist. So I’m not going to toss that one. On the other hand, I’ve got some random Gaiman stuff from an old Humble Bundle that I’m probably not going to bother reading now.

I also went through my Amazon wish list, and my Overdrive wish list, and purged most of the Gaiman stuff off of them. I don’t really need to buy any more of his stuff. (I left a couple of American Gods graphic novels on there, since Russell is involved with those, so I might decide that it’s OK to buy them to support Russell’s work. I don’t know.)

Gaiman has posted a statement on his blog, basically refuting all of the allegations. I’d love to be able to believe him, but at this point, I don’t think I can.

In terms of figuring out how to engage with work you love that was created by a guy who turns out to be a monster: I’ve seen a couple of good takes on this on social media, but I didn’t bookmark them, and can’t find them now. It comes down to deciding that, if you love a certain work, and it inspired you, or just made you happy, the guy who created it doesn’t get to take that away from you. If the work still makes you happy, that’s fine. I’m probably not expressing that too well. Here’s an article from The Paris Review that covers this kind of thing pretty thoroughly.

converting EPUB files to CBZ, and ripping DVDs

Here’s a follow up to my post from earlier today. I went ahead and decided to see if I could write a PowerShell script to convert an EPUB file to a CBZ file. I thought this would be a quick process, but of course it got a bit out of control.

I started by asking ChatGPT to write one for me, given some fairly specific parameters. I asked it to use the 7-Zip command line tool to zip and unzip the files. And I told it where to find the images in the EPUB, and gave it the steps to follow to complete the process. It spit out a script that looked pretty good but (of course) didn’t work.

Long story short: I spent an hour or two tweaking the script and eventually came up with this one. It worked fine, and I used it to convert about a dozen EPUBs to CBZ.

I gave up on calling 7-Zip, since passing parameters into 7-Zip from PowerShell turned out to be a very annoying process that I could never quite get right. (And which gave me a bit of deja vu, when I remembered that I’d had this problem at least once before, when I was trying to write a backup script for my dev VM at work, probably ten years ago.) I switched to the built-in Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive commands, which was probably the better path anyway.

On a separate (but semi-related) subject, I decided to watch a Doctor Who DVD this afternoon. I was going to watch the second DVD from my A Key To Time box set, which I bought in 2022. I watched the first disc in 2023, then never got around to the second. Well, now it’s 2024, so I decided I should probably make some progress with it. But my Xbox refused to play disc 2. So I checked another disc, and it was fine. So it’s not that the Xbox Blu-ray drive is broken. The DVD seems to load fine on my PC though. So now, I’m using Handbrake to rip it, so I can watch it via my Apple TV.

All in all, I’m spending way more time in front of my PC than I intended to today. And whatever disc space I saved by futzing with my comic book files is going to get eaten up by the rip of the Doctor Who DVD. Oh well. I guess this is still more fun than work!

using up my PTO

I’m taking three days of PTO this week, to use up the last few days that I can’t roll over to next year. I’m counting it as a bit of an accomplishment that I actually have a few days left to burn, and that I never got sick enough this year to use them up on sick time. (Unlike last year, when I got COVID.)

Of course, I’m sick right now, so I’m taking it easy, and not doing much. I spent some time yesterday messing around with my DRM-free comic book files again. (See previous post.) This time, I decided to see if I could replace some very large CBZ files from an old Star Trek Humble bundle with smaller EPUB files.

This sent me down a rabbit hole, messing around with iPadOS comic book and EPUB reader apps, Calibre, and some other random stuff. I was briefly mad at myself for wasting so much time on it, but then I realized that (a) I’m taking PTO, (b) I’m  sick enough that I didn’t want to do much else, and (c) I actually enjoy messing around with stuff like this, from time to time. So here are some notes on what I did and where I left things.

First: I’m not sure if there’s a good reason why these specific Star Trek comic book files were so big as CBZs and so much smaller as EPUBs. I think Humble doesn’t necessarily put a lot of work into optimizing their files. CBZ files are compressed, so it’s not a lack of compression. (The “Z” is for “Zip”.) And EPUB files are also compressed, so I guess the only thing that would account for the difference would be image file size. So maybe they made the CBZ with high-resolution images, and the EPUB with lower resolution images.

Anyway, I downloaded some EPUBs and tried them out with my usual comic book reading app on the iPad, Panels. They were pulled into the app with no problem, and are readable, but the covers wouldn’t show. I probably should have stopped there and said “fine”, but I decided to mess around some more.

First, I pulled one of the EPUBs into Calibre, and let that mess with it a bit. I verified that the cover was visible in Calibre, so I exported Calibre’s version of the EPUB and pulled that into Panels. That version didn’t work at all though. So I gave up on that.

Then I tried the EPUB in some of my other ebook reading apps:

  • I tried GoodReader, but that doesn’t support EPUBs, only PDFs.
  • I tried the Kindle app, but that doesn’t support large EPUBs.
  • I tried Apple Books, and that worked, but the page size & page turning was a bit wonky.
  • I tried the Kobo app. That worked, but was also wonky about page size/turning.
  • I used to have an app called Marvin that was my go-to app for reading DRM-free EPUBs, but that app was discontinued and is no longer in the app store, so I couldn’t even get it loaded on my iPad.
  • I still have BlueFire Reader, and it still works, but I’m pretty sure it’s not being maintained, so I didn’t even bother trying it.

Most EPUB reading apps are meant to be used for books that are mostly text, so I guess they don’t work great with comic book files. Panels still seems to be the best app overall for reading comics, regardless of file format.

So now I can maybe mess around with the EPUB a bit and see if I can get Panels to recognize the cover. EPUBs are basically just a compressed bundle of HTML and image files. Maybe I just need to tweak something in the HTML? Or I could decompress the EPUB and recompress it as a CBZ file maybe. That would give me a file with the lower-res images from the EPUB but in the better-supported CBZ format.

Stepping back a bit, I remember that I’m messing around with files from a Humble bundle that I bought back in 2016. I haven’t read anything from it yet, and probably won’t, any time soon. So none of this is a big deal.

Meanwhile, I also bought this Hellboy bundle this week, which is actually the third Hellboy-related bundle I’ve bought from Humble. So now I’ve got a ton of Hellboy comics files on my drive, more than I’ll probably ever get around to reading. I just have to remember that having too much to read is a good thing… better that, than not having enough.