December Music

Music I’ve bought in December.

Hey, that’s a lot of albums (and singles)… However, this month I’ve been listening mostly to old music for some reason or other. That is, I’ve been listening chronologically to albums starting in 1967 and working my way to 1980. So I’ve barely listened to these new albums at all.

Do I even remember any of these albums at all? Let’s see…

I finally bought the Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges album, and it’s very good (duh).

Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo - Radioactive Dreams (Official Music Video)

The Chat Pile/Hayden Pegido album is good? I think?

Tonight I Heard The Dog Star Bark - Gwenifer Raymond

I like the Gwenifer Raymond album.

ganavya & Sam Amidon - Would Be Better (Official Audio)

Oh yeah! The ganavya & Sam Amidon single is great!

2hollis - all 2s (official video)

Er… Can’t remember whether I liked the 2hollis album, but I remember it being very crunchy.

OK, that’s all I can dredge up memories about! Sorry!

Book Club 2025: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

I’ve read this before, of course, and wasn’t there a movie? I had totally forgotten who the murderer was, though. While reading this, I was thinking of a different lots-of-people-dying movie… set in a castle or something? Where the first guy to “die” was the culprit. Hm… Yes! Murder By Death! Must be that one.

Anyway, this is pretty inspired. Christie writes in a brief preface that it took a long time to work out the logistics of this book, and you can see the sheer glee of having made it all work. And she gets to kill off ten miscreants in one book, and she doesn’t have to put in even a single sympathetic character.

And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie (buy used, 4.27 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Death and the Princess by Robert Barnard

After the fairly incompetent mystery I read last, I wanted something more reliable, and Barnard is usually reliable.

But this isn’t quite satisfactory. Barnard is quite varied in scenery and plot, but this is pretty unusual even for him. It’s like his agent told him to write a mystery set in royal circles, and he reluctantly agreed. So he spends quite a bit of the book bemoaning how little interest he has in royals, and this seems to affect the plot as well: It’s one of those books where it’s not even clear whether there’s been a crime… and then the resolution comes out of left field with twenty pages to go.

So even if this is a short novel, Barnard has to pad it with blather about Society These Days, and it all leads to a book that feels like it’s caught in a complete stasis — as if Barnard, usually a master plotter, didn’t really know where to go with it all.

But Barnard has the amusing patter down as always, so it’s not that bad, really.

Death and the Princess (1982) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

Search Ranking Tweaks on kwakk.info

The search engine on kwakk.info (the comics research site) uses a very simple ranking algorithm. For instance, if you want to see if anybody has talked about Batman in conjunction with (Dirty) Harry, you might lazily type batman harry… but then the first four hits don’t really talk about that.

That’s because the search engine first finds all pages that have batman and harry, and then ranks them by how many instances of both these words there are. And that’s it.

But the search engine does allow using operators like ADJ and NEAR to say “just give me results where these words are (respectively) after one another (with some words in between) or just near each other in general”.

No users can be expected to know that, so I wondered whether I could just do three queries and then smush the results together. Tada:

Now the search engine first does ADJ, then NEAR, and finally (as before) AND, and uses that to give a better ranking. The number of results is the same as before — the only thing that’s affected is how the results are ordered.

Now hopefully with more relevant stuff towards the top.

This makes searches a bit slower… and I may have screwed something up, because the rewrite wasn’t altogether trivial, so let me know if you see any oddities.

Oh, and:

So close to 11K!!!

Book Club 2025: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

I was quite impressed with the first book in this series. I mean, it was utterly stupid, but it was extremely entertaining. And so I read the second book.

And… it’s not good. The first book was nice in that it was all investigation all the time, but there’s a whole lot less plot in this book. Instead it feels like we’re in total stasis for large parts of the book, and the author resorts to adding bickering between the characters to pad things out, as well as adding character development (it turns out that the protagonist’s father wasn’t there for him when he grew up) and several scenes of gross grossness.

It was way too easy to guess who the killers were in the first book, so I wondered whether he had honed his mystery-writing skills on that point for this one, but nope: As soon as the character was introduced, he might has well have had neon signs flashing pointing at him: “HE’S THE ONE!!!”

This book felt like it was twice as long as the first, so I was shocked when I saw that they’re the same number of pages.

Of course this book has an even higher Goodreads rating than the first book — but that’s usually the case with series: People who didn’t like the first book aren’t going to be reading the second book, so a book has to be really awful to have the ratings decrease. It is interesting that the second book has half as many reviews, but then again, it’s newer, so…

Amusingly enough, the third book (which will be published in August 2026) already has 43 reviews. Lots of psychics use Goodreads.

Wow.

Well, gotta have a look at the one star reviews…

That’s more like it.

This one is accurate.

Well, it’s all a disappointment after the first book — I thought I had found an entertainingly schlocky author, but the entertainment factor dissipated.

A Drop of Corruption (2025) by Robert Jackson Bennett (buy new, buy used, 4.49 on Goodreads)