An Uncertain Place: a Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery, Vargas, tr. Reynolds. Yes. I continue to be fond of Vargas’s hero, Commissaire Adamsberg, and the writing and (perhaps especially) translation are lovely, but I fear the plots are becoming more involved than I need. Vargas is not nearly on the thin ice that Tepper is, though.
Author Archives: Craig
More Apple License Info
This is now old news, but this post has been in draft for several months.
From the 5.0 license agreement:
When you use Siri, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple to process your requests. Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (e.g., “my dad”) of your address book contacts; and song names in your collection (collectively, your “User Data”)
Granted, they add
All of this data is used to help Siri understand you better and recognize what you say. It is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.
I don’t remember this from last time, though it would not have caught my eye last time, either:
9. Digital Certificates. The iOS Software contains functionality that allows it to accept digital certificates either issued from Apple or from third parties. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT TO RELY ON A CERTIFICATE WHETHER ISSUED BY APPLE OR A THIRD PARTY. YOUR USE OF DIGITAL CERTIFICATES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, APPLE MAKES NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, SECURITY, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO DIGITAL CERTIFICATES.
It’s the little things
A couple weeks ago, one of my Twitter accounts was followed by a spammer. This is not unusual; a huge percentage of Twitter accounts are spammers. The thing that caught my eye—though perhaps not quite as the spam machinery intended—was in the bio: “dip me over and fuck me doggystyle. Whatever you want I will try it (NO ANAL).”
Let’s say I am so naïve that I believe an actual person has set up this Twitter account, and has invited 267 other people to do her doggystyle; do I find her more enticing because her “Whatever you want” is qualified? Especially given that the qualification excludes a pretty mundane practice—am I to infer that she’s up for (in lieu of listing several other possibilities that would likely get the blog undesirable search engine attention, I’ll just say) bloodplay? I just don’t know.
Dead Mann Walking Review
Dead Mann Walking: A Hessius Mann Novel, Petrucha. Yes. Petrucha has created a unique (to my knowledge) first-person narrator in Hessius Mann. I am looking forward to the next installment to see if he can maintain the level of interest, given Tana French’s rationale in giving each of her Dublin Murder Squad books a different protagonist: it’s hard to justify life-changing events happening to the same person over and over. Some aspects of DMW resonate with another recent work I also enjoyed; I think it rather validates Petrucha’s vision that a different group of talented writers went in a similar direction given a related premise. The only passage that pulled me out of the narrative was the improper (and strained) use of “to coin a phrase.”
Reaper Man Review
Reaper Man: A Novel of Discworld®, Pratchett. Yes. Again, Pratchett provides reliable entertainment. This one introduces a particularly entertaining minor character, and Death can always be relied upon to add that certain something.
Goliath Review
I’m willing to believe there are 99, and it’s definitely photography; I’ll give them that
It has, again, been a while since we’ve had any good FP examples here, so I was initially thrilled to see this link to 99 self-declared “Excellent Examples of Forced Perspective Photography.” When I followed the link, though, I was disappointed to find that while several of the photographs are excellent, very few of them use FP very well, if at all.
Tears of Autumn Review
The Tears of Autumn, McCarry. Yes. I’m tempted to believe that every aspect of the theory presented in this 1974 political thriller is true, it hangs together so nicely. The writing is also very good.
Writing Movies for Fun and Profit Review
Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!, Garant & Lennon. Non-Fiction. This is a ruthlessly practical guide to selling screenplays to Hollywood studios. It also provides appalling and entertaining insight into what is required of a writer in order to make a living doing that. If you are at all interested in the business of writing Hollywood studio movies, I encourage you to read this book. Even if you’re not, it’s probably worth a look.
On “digital”
I’ve been stewing for some time about the mis-use of the term “digital” to mean something other than “represented as a series of ones and zeros.” Or even “able to express only discrete values.” In this usage, CDs are not “digital,” despite the indisputable fact that they bear digital data. DVDs may include, as a bonus, a “Digital Copy,” indicating that the DVD is somehow not “digital,” despite the fact that the first D in DVD stands for digital! So aside from clearly being an improper use of the word, what does “digital” mean? It can’t mean “not delivered on a physical medium,” as a “digital copy” can be delivered to you on a disk, and my complete Beatles digital collection was delivered to me on a lovely, custom-cased USB drive. It can’t reasonably mean “downloadable to your portable device,” because I can take the exact bits off of a CD and throw them on to my iPod (admittedly, this would be silly, since various lossless formats take up much less space). It can’t reasonably mean “lower quality” (though it usually does), since some artists (thank you, TMBG and Jonathan Coulton) are good enough to sell FLAC versions of their works (the complete Beatles USB drive includes 24-bit FLAC versions, which are even higher-fidelity than their CD equivalents, bless them), though—to further invalidate the “device-downloadable” hypothesis—the most popular portable device will not play FLAC versions.
Of course, my thesis here is that none of this usage is reasonable, but is it even consistent? Can a definition be articulated? What do people think it means?