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…)

online account management hall of shame

Since I’ve been changing my email address on so many different online accounts over the past few weeks, I’ve developed some strong feelings about best practices and worst practices for how companies handle this stuff.

It’s generally a good practice to send out notifications to both old and new email addresses, preferably with a confirmation link in the email sent to the new address. And it’s a good practice to avoid including any key details in the email sent to the old address, in case the user is changing the address because the old account has been compromised. That’s the way most services handle things, but I’ve seen some that send no confirmations at all, which is a little alarming, from a security standpoint.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far in that area is from one of my credit cards, which has sent me a daily notice that I’ve changed my email address every day for the last four days, to both addresses. I’m hoping that’ll stop eventually, but I think maybe they’re caught in a loop, and I’m going to get a notice every day for the rest of my life.

Another bad practice that a lot of companies seem to do relates to email newsletters. Changing your email address for an online account should really change over any newsletter subscriptions that are related to that account. What I’ve seen instead is usually one of the following:

  1. The systems are entirely separate, and changing the account address has no affect on newsletter subscriptions.
  2. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, but doesn’t stop the newsletters going to the old address.
  3. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, even if you’ve previously unsubscribed from newsletters at the old address.

And, also, most newsletter management systems don’t provide any way to change your email address. So you need to unsubscribe from the old address and resubscribe with the new one.

I found that the NY Times did a good job in this area, smoothly migrating over all of my newsletter subscriptions when I changed my email address on my account. The New Yorker, on the other hand, required me to unsubscribe and resubscribe to everything. And their subscription management system somehow subscribed me to all of their newsletters at my new address, so I’ve had to unsubscribe from a bunch of them.

Another bad practice is related to handling “plus alias” email addresses. These are supported in both Gmail and FastMail, and I often use them when subscribing to newsletters to make filtering a little easier. But I’ve found that a lot of online systems don’t recognize a plus sign as valid within an email address. (At this point, I could go down a rat hole, complaining about bad practices around email regex validations, but I’ll restrain myself.) It’s not so bad when the address is rejected on the front-end, but I’ve gotten into some situations where the email address is accepted initially, but then causes some problem later on down the line.

FastMail also supports something they call “subdomain addressing”, which allows you to get around the “plus sign” issue, but I didn’t want to start using that, since I didn’t want to set up a lot of stuff that would make it too hard to switch my domain from FastMail to a different provider. (Plus aliases are supported by multiple providers, including Google and ProtonMail, but I don’t think subdomain addressing is.)

Also, I just read the FastMail support doc that I linked above and noticed this statement:

If the part after the “+” matches the name of one of your folders (see below for how the matching works), the message will automatically be delivered there instead of your Inbox. You don’t even need to create an explicit rule!

That’s really cool, but I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t know about it until now, after I’ve already set up a bunch of rules. Oh well. I’ll keep it in mind for new stuff.

Speaking of rules, I now have about sixty of them set up in FastMail. I could probably cut that down a bit by getting a little creative with them, but that’s not a ludicrous number, I think.

Memorial Day, Mister X, and FastMail

I took the afternoon off from work today for a doctor’s appointment, which left me with a little time this afternoon to take care of a few other little things and to write a pointless blog post, so… here’s a pointless blog post.

Yesterday was Memorial Day. Much like last year, it rained, so there wasn’t a big turnout for the Tour Of Somerville. I didn’t really do much at all this weekend, aside from watching TV and reading comics.

I finished reading Mister X: The Definitive Collection, Vol. 1, which reprints the first six issues of the first series. Mister X was one of my favorite comic book characters from the late eighties, when there was a real explosion of cool stuff being published. The book has a checkered publication history, but the first several issues are a lot of fun, with some great art by the Hernandez brothers. The particular collection I just read isn’t great, though. Several pages are missing and/or out of order and the printing is pretty muddy. But I just noticed that Dark Horse’s Mister X: The Archives, which was published in hardcover back in 2008, and reprints the whole first series, is coming out tomorrow in softcover. So I’ll probably pick that up, so I can have those first issues in a nicer format, and also get the rest of the first series.

I also have the Mister X: Condemned miniseries waiting to be read, and I notice that there were two more minis after that, Mister X: Eviction and Mister X: Razed, that I should probably pick up. I think all three are reprinted in the Mister X: The Modern Age TPB, which should be published in September, so maybe I should wait for that. Either way, it’s cool to be able to revisit Mister X’s strange world.

I’ve continued making progress in converting everything over from Gmail to FastMail. I got a “Welcome to Outlook.com Premium” email today, which was kind of amusing, since I signed up for it almost a month ago. It still doesn’t seem like there’s any way to decouple my Outlook.com email account from my domain, so Outlook.com still thinks it’s handling the domain that FastMail is actually handling.

I’ve now converted nearly all of my online accounts over to my FastMail address, including my financial stuff. There are still a few accounts where I can’t change my email online, and I’ll have to contact support. I haven’t been in a hurry to do that, but I will eventually.

I haven’t had any major problems with FastMail yet. I think their iOS app might have crashed on me once, but it’s generally been pretty stable. I still haven’t bothered to hook the account up to the iOS Mail app, since the FastMail app is good enough for me (and even preferable to the standard iOS Mail app for some stuff).

 

more on FastMail, and playing catch-up

I’m still working on migrating from Gmail to FastMail. Since the last time I blogged about this, I’ve migrated nearly all of my online accounts over, and have converted from a trial to a paid subscription.

I have several problem accounts that I haven’t switched over yet, including some that don’t provide any way to change your email address, and some that do, but where it doesn’t seem to work. So I have to write some emails to various support addresses and see what I can do to straighten those ones out.

I’m keeping the inbox of the new account pretty clean. I’ve set up rules to move most incoming messages directly into folders, where I can more easily manage them. I just counted, and I have a little over 50 rules set up so far. (I could probably cut that number down if I got a little clever about it.)

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to catch up on the backlog of stuff in my Gmail “read/review” folder. I file certain newsletters away into that folder automatically, and I’ve let myself fall way behind. Here are a few notes on a few of my favorite newsletters.

I’ve really been enjoying Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter. He puts it out once a week, usually, and it contains a lot of stuff about his own writing projects, plus little reviews and pointers to other people’s books, comics, and music. I’ve added a bunch of books to my Amazon wish list based on his recommendations.

I’ve been subscribing to TidBITS for a long time. It’s been around for more than 25 years. It’s a weekly newsletter about all things Apple. There are plenty of Apple news blogs, and some of them are very good, but TidBITS is a great resource and has some great in-depth articles that you won’t find anywhere else.

The tor.com newsletter is another one of my favorites. A lot of their articles are fluff, honestly, but they publish one or two new pieces of fiction each week, and some of those are really good.

I also subscribe to several NY Times and New Yorker newsletters, and I pick up a lot of good articles from those. David Allen’s GTD newsletter is pretty good too.

As I work my way through my “read/review” backlog, I save longer articles to Instapaper to read later. Which means that, to some extent, I’m just shifting my backlog from email to Instapaper. But at least I’m separating wheat from chaff and saving only the “good stuff” to Instapaper.

I’m down to about 250 messages left in read/review in Gmail. But the read/review folder in FastMail is starting to fill up now, and will likely hit 100 messages by the end of this week. I think I may need to cut back on the number of NY Times and New Yorker newsletters I’m getting.

moving over to FastMail

I’ve been gradually working on moving all of my active online accounts over from Gmail to FastMail this week. I’d say that I’m maybe 60% done. (I have a lot of online accounts.) I’m liking FastMail and will likely pay for an account within the next week or two, before my 30-day trial ends.

FastMail has, so far, been entirely reliable, which is probably the most important thing with email. It’s easy to take reliability for granted if you’ve been using Gmail for years, but not all email providers are as reliable as Google can afford to be. FastMail has occasional problems, but they have a status page that they use to log any issues, and they seem to have been doing well recently.

As I’ve moved stuff over, I’ve been setting up rules in FastMail to file stuff into folders and keep my inbox clean. I should be able to use FastMail rules in place of OtherInbox Organizer. (Of course, I could also have used Gmail rules for that purpose, if I’d stuck with Gmail.) FastMail’s rule system is reasonably powerful, and compares well with Gmail’s system. If you really want to get fancy, you can actually write scripts in FastMail, though I don’t think I’ll need to do that. I do miss the flexibility of Gmail’s labels (vs. FastMail’s folders), but I think I can make a folder system work.

On iOS, I’ve been using FastMail’s iOS app. It’s good enough that I haven’t bothered setting up my FastMail account in the regular iOS mail app. I had always intended to do that at some point, but now I think I might just skip it.

I do want to add the account to Outlook on my desktop PC at some point, and I haven’t done that yet. I may do it at some point this weekend. FastMail uses app passwords for third-party mail clients, similar to Gmail’s system.

I’ve been reading through some old posts at MacDrifter to get some pointers on FastMail. Gabe has been a FastMail user for a while, and has blogged about it a few times, and also linked to other useful blog posts on FastMail.

When I’m done with all this, I should have a pretty clean system, and a pretty clean mailbox. I’m also using this as an opportunity to clean up my plethora of old online accounts. In cases where an account seems to be dead, I’m making a note of that in 1Password and moving the account to an archive folder. And in cases where I hadn’t updated my password in a long time, I’m trying to do that in addition to updating my email address. So that’s all a bit of a process. But it’s probably worth doing.

I’ve been thinking about the possibility that my new email address, since I’m using my own domain now, may be my last email address. Over time, I’ve gone through email addresses at CompuServe, GEnie, an old dial-up ISP, my current broadband ISP, Yahoo, and Gmail. The last three of those are all technically still active, though I only really use the Gmail account. But all of those have been my “primary” account at one point or another. I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with FastMail, but I think I’m likely to stick with my personal domain email for as long as I can, even if I switch it over to a different provider. This makes me think a little more about safeguarding it more than I ever did my Yahoo Mail account, for instance. There’s always a brief period, with a new mail account, where it really doesn’t attract any spam. We’ll see how long that lasts with my new account, and how good FastMail’s spam filters are, once the spam does start coming in. And we’ll see how long the account stays off Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned. I’m not too optimistic about that, but here’s hoping.