By all rights I should have liked this book. I frequently like big epic fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. Actually, Wheel of Time is probably the best comparison, given the sweeping scope of the series, the number of viewpoint characters, the emphasis on political intrigue, and the length of the books.

On the other hand, no Robert Jordan book has taken me longer than a month to read.

About a year ago, a friend recommended the books to Katie, and gave her the series so far (4 books) for Christmas. It took a while before she got to them, but when she did, she tore through them in about a week. (It helped that she had the free time.) She recommended them to me, but I didn’t pick up the first book until sometime last November.

And I just couldn’t get into it. The characters I found most interesting seemed to get the least attention. Of those, one character’s chapters were difficult to read because she’s in the wrong genre: a girl of 10(?) who wants to grow up to be a warrior princess in a world that would casually kill her before she had the chance. And while I’m sure it’s a matter of morally gray=interesting, it’s basically “Kingdom of A—holes” (maybe not as poetic as “The Knights Who Say F—” but more accurate, at least for the first book). The only adult character who isn’t morally gray or worse is so stuck on honor that he can’t handle the compromises necessary in politics. So it’s not so much a question of who’s the best choice to be in charge, as who’s the least bad.

The first book is about 95% straight medieval-setting political/military drama, with hints at supernatural elements here and there. The prologue sets up an otherworldly menace that is subsequently ignored for most of the book, there’s the occasional sword described as magic, it gradually becomes clear that the dragons are a historical fact, rather than legends (the previous king had dragon skulls mounted along the walls of the throne room) and that seasons frequently last years. “Winter is coming” is a key phrase, and the motto of the family that provides all but two of the viewpoint characters.

After 400 pages of tedious setup establishing just how brutish, brattish, or manipulative everyone is, things start going off the rails. And boy, do they go off the rails. You know how, when reading a book, you get to a point where you figure it can’t get worse? It does. Repeatedly.

About 200 pages from the end I decided I was going to make an effort to finish the book and get it out of the way. So I had a marathon reading session one Sunday, then made an effort to read during lunch over the next week, and then finally finished it over this past weekend. (For contrast, with each of the first two or three Wheel of Time books, when I got within 150 or 200 pages of the end I had to finish, even if it meant staying up until 2am on a work night.)

Actually I guess it’s kind of like some of the later Wheel of Time books in terms of sheer detail and trudgery. Except those have the advantage that you’ve probably read the earlier ones, which were quite good. (I’ve often described the WoT series as 5 novels of one book each followed by one novel that spans 7 books.)

The last 50 pages or so, particularly the final chapter, are considerably more interesting. If it had stopped at 750 pages, I’d probably be inclined to just leave it there, but I might actually pick up the second book at this point.

Just not now. For now, I’m picking up Julie Czerneda’s stand-alone In the Company of Others.

I love the parts with Hiro, Ando, Daphne and Matt (except when Matt’s overdoing the “I saw you in the future and we’re in love!” bit). If they could make that into a show, I’d have no complaints. But the rest has slowly gotten bogged down in a mix of technobabble, melodrama, and an endless face-heel revolving door. “I’m evil!” “No, you’re good, I’m the one who’s evil!” “Wait, I thought it was my turn!”

Some specific comments, with spoilers, after the cut:

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SPOILERS!

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The woobification of Sylar. I realize they felt they had to do something to keep him around for the fan base, and they couldn’t keep him as the big bad after volume 1 finished, so he spent volume 2 powerless and volume 3 trying to figure out whether he was good or evil. And had an epiphany while he was powerless. You know, the way he was all last season? But that’s okay, it’s still not really his fault. He has The Hunger, you see, and really it’s all Bennet’s fault. Everything’s HRG’s fault! And Elle’s. Not poor little Gabriel’s fault, no!

Someone please tell me that either Claire or Noah — or heck, even Angela — stuffed garlic in his mouth and cut off his head before they left. Which reminds me, I have a hard time getting worked up over a pyrokinetic being trapped in a burning building. Especially one who has a history of escaping from a fire that “no one could possibly survive.” I expect she’ll show up somewhere in volume 4 to be used as leverage against Claire, and everyone will be so shocked to see her alive…except the audience.

While we’re at it, have we ever seen any indication that Meredith’s flame powers were involuntary, as in they would manifest while she was, say, unconscious? Noah could have asked her to aim her hands at the wall, then knocked her out with the butt of his gun, and they could have had plenty of oxygen while her system metabolized the adrenaline. And later, they could have gotten her out of the building without burning it down. With Peter, Mohinder, Nathan, or Matt, you kind of expect them to be carrying the idiot ball at times like this, but Bennet’s always been shown to be one of the few characters on the show with some consistent brains.

By the time Hiro was trying to steal the formula in the past, I was actually hoping that they were going to prevent the whole season from having happened, and normally I hate when stories do that.

Unfortunately it looks like volume 4, “Fugitives,” is going to be the kind of super-hero story that always annoys me, whether it’s well-told or not: the one in which the general populace turns against the heroes and either rounds them up or runs them out of town. (I guess there’s a reason I was never much of an X-Men fan.)

*sigh*

Holding out for Volume 5. Or the adventures of Hiro, Daphne, Ando and Matt in the Cretaceous.

If we’d known we had until 9, this would’ve been a much less stressful evening.

Edit: The rest of the evening went much better, and the actual episode was good. Most interesting bit: switching from flashbacks to flash-forwards really does change the dynamic of the show. (But I was seriously annoyed with the network for promoting the heck out of the “2-hour Lost Event!” and have it turn out that there was really only 1 hour of show.)

It opens a window, then opens a message box showing a progress meter as it checks for updates. Only one problem: It fills out the “New software is available” caption before it actually checks.

New software is available… oh, wait, no it isn’t.

This isn’t an issue on Mac OS X, because the progress meter is shown as a sheet, which drops down from the top of the main window and obscures the caption. But on Windows, that caption is visible from the moment the window appears, saying that you really do have something new available, raising your hopes that maybe, just maybe, Apple has finally gotten around to releasing that new version of Safari, or that security fix for the flaw you heard about a week ago, then dashing them to the ground.

Or, less dramatically, it’s jumping to conclusions, providing potentially false information.

And then, even if it turns out there isn’t anything new, the caption stays in place…leaving you with two contradictory statements as to whether any updates are really available.

Audio started playing, “Congratulations! You’ve been selected for…” Then a second round started in, “Congratulations! You’ve been sel…” A third round of the same ad had started, all of them overlapping, by the time I closed the window.

It’s 2007. People multitask. All modern web browsers have tabs available, not just the alternative ones. The time when you could assume you had the user’s undivided attention is long gone.

Note that I can’t tell you what the ad was for. I don’t know which tabs were playing it, so I didn’t even see the visual portion. It accomplished absolutely nothing that an advertisement is supposed to do—unless you want ads to drive people away from your site.

Oh, yeah, before I forget: Stardust!

But when I forward them a message with the comment, “Here’s a sample of a blatant phish,” is it really necessary to reply with the full two-page notice explaining, “This is a spoof, we didn’t send it, here’s how to avoid it, blah blah blah” and the entire body of the original message, complete with the links to the phishing site?

I’d think in this case a simple, “Thanks for the report, we’ve notified the authorities” note would be sufficient, especially since the “how to spot a phish” stuff is already in the auto-response. All it takes is giving their abuse staff an extra choice for the form letter.

And under no circumstances should they be including the full, original text of the phish. At best, it’s asking for the response to get lost in a spam box or blocked outright. At worst, it’s a security risk waiting to happen (since this copy really did come from eBay). Somewhere in the middle is the risk of mucking up adaptive filters as they try to reconcile the original message, which was spam, with the new message, which isn’t.

Even more annoying is the fan speculation that the twins will turn out to be one of two existing pairs of characters:

1. The Tornado Twins, who first appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes, or
2. Más y Menos, a pair of speedster twins from the Teen Titans cartoon.

Way back in their first appearance, the Tornado Twins were identified as descendants of Barry Allen. Barry’s series ended with him and Iris reunited in the future, and it was then revealed that Don and Dawn Allen were in fact Barry and Iris’ children, conceived during the short time between Barry’s arrival in the 30th Century and his death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Don also happens to be Bart Allen’s father. So not only are the characters established, there’s a direct connection between Barry and Bart that would be severely altered if the Allen twins turned out to be the West twins. Can you imagine Bart’s reaction to discovering that Wally West was his grandfather? (Or Wally’s reaction, for that matter?) This would be on the order of revealing that Bruce Wayne is actually Dick Grayson’s father.

As for Más y Menos… they’re two brothers. One of the West twins would need a sex change. Plus you’d have to explain why a pair of half-Caucasian, half-Asian kids would pick Spanish code names.

There’s one other set of super-speedster twins out there: Iris West II and Barry West from Kingdom Come and The Kingdom. They have the advantage of actually being Wally’s kids in at least one timeline.

I won’t mind if DC chooses to take them in an entirely new direction, but making them Más y Menos would be silly, and having them supplant Don and Dawn Allen would be insulting.

Pick one domain name for your business. Just one. Don’t use any other domains in your emails, even if you want to keep order confirmations separate from promotions. If you contract out for some other company to send out a newsletter or survey to your customers, insist that they send it out using your own domain name. If you’re using DomainKeys or SPF, make sure they’re authorized or send it yourself. And don’t even think of making the links through redirection scripts, even if you really want to track which subscribers are clicking.

Why?

Two words: Spam and fraud.

We, as email admins, want to separate the wheat from the chaff among the mail coming into our organization. Why, why do you insist on making your mailings look like chaff?

Banks—you know how rampant phishing is. You can make it easy for your customers to know whether a message came from you or from a fraud ring. If it comes from yourbank.com, and all the links are to yourbank.com, it’s legit. If it comes from anything else—even yourbankonline.com—it’s suspect. But when you can’t decide between citi.com, citibank.com, citicards.com, citicorp.com, and citibankcards.com, how are we to know that when some phisherman sets up citibankcardsonline.com, it’s not you?

And when you contract out to some third-party promo list and it comes from m0.net, and the login links redirect through them instead of going straight to you, what the hell are we supposed to think? How are we supposed to know that yes, this really did come from you and not some scam artist in Uzbekistan?

And those of you who insist on doing all the cutesy graphical tricks with HTML mail. If we know about you, we can whitelist you. But it helps if you don’t make yourselves moving targets! Yes, Deep Discount DVD, I’m talking to you. I have you whitelisted at deepdiscountdvd.com, so why on Earth would you take the risk of sending me mail as deepdiscountdvdpromotions.com? And why, why was this morning’s “Your order had shipped” message from DeepDiscountDVD[at]mail.infinityresources.com??? (OK, I figure that last bit was probably just misconfigured, and it was plain text, but still…) I know you have to keep your costs down, but you could at least hire a network consultant to make sure your mail servers are set up correctly!

Well, it’s worse than that. My Windows 2000 box at work was easy. I just went into Control Panel, opened the Java Plugin, and told it to update. At home, on our Windows XP box, I had to go through multiple reboots just to get the installer started.

It wasn’t XP that was the problem, though: It was Norton Internet Security. First it disabled all network access from Firefox when I installed the new version. Then it blocked access to the Java updater, so whenever I clicked on “Install” it would just disappear instead of launching the installer. I resolved it (for now) by disabling Norton while I did the install…but I had to reboot in order to get as far as the first step again.

Personally, MySpace bugs the heck out of me because it seems to have a culture that encourages embedding images from other sites. 18% of hits to hyperborea.org from other websites are from myspace. Admittedly that’s inflated by the fact that attempts to embed images from my Flash site redirect to the actual articles, so it’s probably more like 10%, but it’s still insane. Earlier this week I started blocking hits from MySpace to images posted on this blog, and I plan to do the same with the Flash images over the weekend. You like my photos? Great, link to my actual site! You like the scan I have of some movie logo? Great, copy it and upload it to your own site!

(via Slashdot)