Book Club 2025: Fatzer by Bertolt Brecht

I read some Brecht as a teenager and I was very impressed (mostly impressed by myself, of course). Er… The Threepenny Opera? Yes, probably that one.

This little book is a curious construction — it’s based on notes left by Brecht, but also features various bits cribbed from other plays and stuff. So it’s a Frankenplay. I mean, it’s a piece written by Dr. Frankenplay.

But it works surprisingly well. It’s fascinating and kinda moving.

Fatzer (1926-31) by Bertolt Brecht (buy used, 3.57 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Let’s Get Criminal by Lev Raphael

I wanted to read something fun today…

… but this wasn’t it. The writing style doesn’t annoy me overly (lots of parentheses (but not parentheses within parentheses)), but it’s like the book just can’t get started. We get so much backstory, and when you think it’s safe, you get even more backstory. And ruminations about writing, which apparently boils down to the deep insight of “write what you know”.

I got to page 60 and found that I had started skimming Yet Another Backstory, and that’s when you know it’s time to ditch the book.

Let’s Get Criminal (1996) by Lev Raphael (buy new, buy used, 3.79 on Goodreads)

Trends In AI Scraping

While looking through some log files, I noticed that I had a whole bunch of referrers from sites like kfc.com and expedia.com in the Apache log file (for my non-blog server that hosts oodles of static content and “content” like eyesore and stuff).

I naturally assumed that I’d gone totally viral on a global scale!

Just kidding! “Referrer Spam” isn’t a new thing — back in the 90s, people used to display referrers on their web sites, so of course scum started faking the referrers to get more traffic to their scam sites.

But this is something I haven’t seen before — they’re stuffing well-known domains into the Referrer, and surely KFC isn’t paying for spam like this (especially not in 2025).

So what’s going on?

Well, the obvious guess is that some genius has invented a new AI scraper, and decided that it’s less suspicious if the visits have a referrer. But it’s not, of course — it’s much more suspicious, which is why I’m leaning even harder towards this being AI related, because there’s just so much natural stupidity going on in that camp.

The User-Agents say nothing about being a bot. Typical example:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

But where’s the traffic coming from?

Well, much of it is from Google Cloud, so it’s people renting CPU from Google, presumably. (And not Google itself.)

How much of the traffic towards this server comes from data centres, anyway? I copied over the access.log file from the last two days, and:

(with-temp-buffer
  (insert-file-contents "/tmp/access.log")
  (cl-loop with gcp = 0
	   with lines = 0
	   for line = (wse--read-apache)
	   while line
	   do
	   (when (and (not (wse--bot-p (plist-get line :user-agent)))
		      (not (equal (plist-get line :host) "kwakk.info")))
	     (cl-incf lines)
	     (when (wse--data-center-ip-p (plist-get line :ip))
	       (cl-incf gcp)))
	   finally (return (list (/ (float gcp) lines) lines gcp))))
=> (0.3933 350403 137815)

So 39%. If I filter out the traffic that announces that it’s a bot, that decreases to 29%. Filtering on specific providers, 9% of the traffic I get is from GCP, 5% is from Azure, 0.4% from AWS… and 15% from Cloudflare! Geez. It’s those edge workers? Or Cloudflare tunnels from China? I have no idea.

(Note that I’m filtering out traffic to kwakk.info, which uses Cloudflare itself, so I don’t know where the traffic to that site really comes from.)

OK, back to the original subject here — what percentage of hits come from data centres, and have non-bot User-Agent, and have a (presumably fake) Referrer header?

7%!

So there you have it — just when you thought AI scrapers couldn’t get more annoying, they found a way.

Rocket’s Blast & Comicollector vs. The Comics Journal

I was trolling Anna’s Archive for newly scanned magazines about comics for kwakk.info, and look: It’s a parody issue of RBCC (also known as Rocket’s Blast & Comicollector) where they take on The Comics Journal.

We’re not talking comedic genius here, but I thought it was mildly interesting… especially this article about Jim Shooter’s death, just a few decades too early.

Small-Airport Bookstore Trends

I just visited Up North, and as usual I had a gander at the book section at the airport.

It used to be pretty eclectic — up until, say, something like eight years ago, it was (of course) mostly mysteries and “dramas” (you know the ones — “handwritten” titles over a pastel background with a woman walking away), but also a substantial selection of World War II books. They had names like “The Battle Of [PLACE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF]” (pop. 23), which I found amusing. (Possibly because that section of Norway was the only part that saw substantial action during that war, so you get tourists that are interested in that stuff?)

In addition to those three genres, there was always a handful of what you’d call Actual Literature, and also some best-seller paperbacks in English.

Then the concession was apparently bought by a chain, and they put in some new shelves that said “Best Selling Now”, and you had the top forty or something. Which meant, of course, that all those WWII books were gone, but the selection was reasonable — mostly trivial literature, but with whatever mixed in.

And now they’ve redone it again. It’s smaller and the “Best Selling” thing seems to be gone, and the selection now is exclusively trash.

It’s just puzzling. I guess they probably know what they’re doing, but there’s not a single book there that I’d be remotely interested in reading, and I’m not picky, as you can see if you were to glance over at the book club series of posts. Lots of bad books!

But this is just… trash.

And there’s tons of tourists up there, and not a single book in English either? And nothing locally pertinent?

Oh well. It’s not like I was buying all my books there or anything.

I MEAN! THIS IS THE GREATEST OUTRAGE IN THE HISTORY OF OUTRAGES! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!!1!

(Sorry; I forgot I was on the Internet for a second there.)