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.

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!

Haven’t Pixar and DreamWorks demonstrated that it’s entirely possible to make a well-constructed, entertaining film entirely with CGI? Hasn’t Hollywood’s studio machine demonstrated that it’s entirely possible to make a shallow, soulless film entirely with real actors? Remember the original reviews of Jurassic Park that accused the milestone CGI dinosaurs of being more lifelike than the actors?

It ain’t the CGI, folks.

The effects are top-notch. The visual design, even when referencing other films, is impressive. Acting. Directing. Writing. This is where Episodes I and II have broken down. And if you’ve seen the right movies, you know the leads can act—when they’re given a chance.

No, it’s the dialog and the directing—both primarily Lucas’ work, and both tasks he let others take on or at least polish in earlier films. From what I hear Tom Stoppard has polished the dialog in Episode III. One can only hope that Lucas’ “practice” directing the last two has given him the experience needed to make the final film stand out.

When I was in college, I was involved with a creative writing club / literary discussion group called the Literary Guild at UCI. I built a website to post club information and collect our writing projects, and we set up a listserv for online discussion and collaboration.

After a while we started getting complaints from people about how they never received their books, or they were sick of getting junk mail from us, etc. and it became pretty clear they were complaining about the Literary Guild Book Club, which at the time didn’t have a website.

Now think: You’ve signed up with a company that lets you order books from a catalog. The website you find is all about college students and weekly meetings on campus. No mention of catalogs, or ordering books, or even customer service (oops, I mean “customer care”). Don’t you think you might wonder if maybe, just maybe this wasn’t the same group of people?

So we put up a note on the home page stating “We are NOT affiliated with the book club!” Over time it became bold, and then red, and when we noticed the “other” Literary Guild had set up a home page we added a link, and occasionally people would still send us their complaints.

Fast forward to today. The company I work for, SpeedGate Communications, has a fairly generic domain name, speed.net. Since it doesn’t match our name exactly, people will occasionally send tech support requests to speedgate.com by mistake. This is understandable to an extent, but always annoying, especially when they complain “we emailed you three days ago with this urgent problem and you haven’t done anything!” Of course I have to explain they sent it to Korea or Alabama or someplace where we never had a chance of seeing it.

Then there’s speed.net.id, an Indonesian company which either allows its customers to send spam or has never bothered to secure its mail servers. Every once in a while someone will get spam which originated from speed.net.id and complain to us.

Today I had two cases to deal with. One was someone who, two weeks ago, had sent a tech support request to someone who hasn’t worked here in months. You’d think the “Message could not be delivered: user is no longer with company” would at least have clued him in that it didn’t get anywhere, if not why.

And the latest was a support request sent through our website. A month or two ago we got a few requests from people who seemed to think (despite the fact that they were mentioned nowhere) that we provided technical support for SpeedStream routers and modems. Now think about this one: On one hand: SpeedGate Communications, Internet service and hosting provider. On the other: SpeedStream modems and routers. Yes, they both have the word “speed” in them. And yes, they are both network related. But given that you could find the exact name, type of product and model number at Efficient Networks’ website or the SpeedStream website (the names that are printed on your router, the box it came in, and the manual, assuming you didn’t throw it away), wouldn’t you at least check there first?

After two of these in one week, we added a note to our support request form stating that “we do not manufacture or support SpeedStream network products” and linking to their website. Right now this is the only mention of the word “SpeedStream” anywhere on the website.

So what happens? Tonight someone sends us a nasty all-caps note – with an email reply trail – about problems with their SpeedStream router. Given that the attached emails from Speedstream include a mention of speedstream.com, how the hell did this guy come up with our website? And how the hell did he miss the sentence right above the form, stating that we don’t provide support for these products? I guess I’ll have to make it bold and red…

I wrote that this wasn’t the first time someone had made the mistake – that’s why we put up the notice, after all. I very much wanted to add “But you are the first person to make the mistake since we put up the notice.” It was so tempting, but I knew I couldn’t do it.

Well, now in a way I suppose I could after all.