Filtering data centres from web stats

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing weird stuff popping up in my WordPress Statistics for Emacs buffer (that I wrote about here). It’s like the above — a bunch of hits for the same page, using the same identical User-Agent, in a short time period, from different IP addresses (if they’d used the same IP address, they’d already be filtered out). The User-Agent doesn’t announce that it’s a bot (bots are filtered out already by wse), but is instead something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.6778.33 Safari/537.36

I finally broke down and investigated… and it turns out that those IP addresses are from Azure. So this is probably some kind of AI-scraping bot? I guess Copilot is going to become more adept at writing smart-ass articles about obscure comics or somethings.

The sensible thing would, of course, be to ignore all this, because who cares. On the other hand, it made me wonder whether it was possible to whip something up to ignore all visits from data centres when doing the stats… and somebody has helpfully made a list of all CIDRs for Azure/AWS/etc.

But I’m unable to find anything to cover all data centres — and that list is IPv4 only, which is weird. Don’t any of these services use IPv6 yet?

Anyway, after doing some typing:

(wse--data-center-ip-p "40.122.184.170")
=> "Azure"

(wse--data-center-ip-p "80.91.231.1")
=> nil

It works!!!

(Hm… I feel I’ve written a CIDR function like this before, but I can’t find it now.)

So how big is the problem really?

Oh, it’s 6% of page views. That’s not so bad. However, this is just AWS/Azure/CGP/Cloudflare — it doesn’t cover the rest. So my question is — does anybody have a complete data centre CIDR list? And howabouts them IPv6es?

Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past few days.

I think the translation of Svetoft’s Spa (from Fantagraphics) got a bit of attention last year?

This is very different — it’s more of a shaggy dog gangster/heist/macduffin thig…

But with the grotesques you’d expect.

It’s good — it’s funny, unsettling, kinda exciting. But I have to say that I was more confused than the author had even intended (and I think a lot of the confusion was intended). But there’s two dozen characters, and they mostly look like random variations. That is, they all have distinctive features, but from a very limited palette, so you have to concentrate on like “right, that’s the one with the stache and the square glasses and the grey hair, not the one with the stache and the round glasses the and black hair”.

This is a very handsome book. For the first couple of years, New York Review Comics books were kinda indifferent physically (while they reprinted excellent stuff), but that’s changed — more care is being taken these days.

The reproduction on this is great.

So, McMillan is somebody I’ve encountered in some 70s underground comics, but haven’t really paid much attention to. His comics are quite interesting, but to me, they lack a sense of direction — sure, they’re pleasantly absurd and way out there, but…

Anyway.

I’ve been slacking off on my French comics reading the past month, but I got three Spirous done the past few days.

The special issue on The Smurfs was smurfin’ hard to smurf, because of all the smurf.

These are three pretty good issues, but as usual, The Fabrices win.

There’s something about the format of these DC collection that make me pick them up, even though I don’t really have much hope that they’re going to be, like, good…

This collection starts with Batgirl #7, because I’m sure that makes lots of sense.

But this was actually not bad. I mean, I couldn’t really tell what all the drama was about, because it seems like there’s a gazillion plot threads from 75 years of continuity being spun here, but that’s fine.

So I read half the book before I realised that I didn’t really care, and then I dropped it, but it’s not bad. It moves fast. I think my main problem ended up being the artwork, which doesn’t do anything for me.

Yes! I got a ton of floppies.

Of them, the Ryan North crossover continues to entertain.

I found the humour in this Lower Decks issue to be pretty strange, and then I realised that it’s because Ryan North has left the book. I mean, it’s not bad or anything, but…

It’s annoying when the creators you follow drop out, but I guess the super-hero books North are writing pays 100x for 100th of the work required (jokes are hard), so I’m not surprised.

Al Ewing/Steve Lieber’s Metamorpho gets even weirder. I know! It shouldn’t be possible, but it is. It’s very good.

I don’t know exactly why I picked this up…

… but I’m totally impressed by the artwork. It’s very now.

It’s very… Moebius via Simon Roy? With more than a dash of James Stokoe? Or something? Whatever the inspiration, it looks totally on point. It’s fun to look at, and it reads so well.

The story, on the other hand… well, it’s not bad? It’s very… uhm… Yeah, it’s basically The Incal, but different. Private dick, love interests, MacGuffins, betrayals, cosmicness… all that stuff. It’s pretty good.

This is a strange one.

It’s slice of life humour from a Swedish comics artist who lives in Japan. So she does these things that are about how strange Japanese customs seem to her (or vice versa).

These were published in Japan first, and there’s half a dozen volumes out, apparently? So it’s a success. However, I just found it kinda… eh… The things she points out are so obvious — there’s nothing really interesting? And the way it’s presented is also just so… OK, there’s four panels per “issue” she’s explaining. And then there’s a single panel “after comic”, and then there’s that speech bubble in the left hand corner where she basically reiterates what she’s just told us.

Like a recap. As if this is going to be on a test.

It’s maddening, so I tried skipping that bit while reading the book, but I still only lasted 50 pages.

OK, that’s it.

Book Club 2025: Irresistible Forces edited by Catherine Asaro

I bought this around 2009 (because of the Bujold short story), but then never got around to reading the book because I have a tendency to put off short story collections in favour of reading novels. But I strangely felt like reading some short stories now, so here we go.

First of all, the feel of the book is just odd. It’s published by Penguin, but the book is printed on totally white paper, and the binding is stiff and awkward — not like a Penguin book at all. It feels like an early print-on-demand book… Oh yeah, it doesn’t mention a printer but just says “Made in the USA, Lexington, KY” on the final page. Yeah, I guess it’s a POD book — I didn’t know that they even had those in 2009. Perhaps I bought this later?

The reason I bought this book is obviously the first story — Winterfair Gifts by Lois Macmaster Bujold. And it’s great! I read the entire thing with a smile plastered on my face. It’s centred on Loic and Taura… and ends with (not much of a spoiler) the Vorkosigan marriage. It’s amazing that Bujold would put something like this in a short story, and one published in a collection like this. My guess is that 99.97% of the people who bought this did it for the same reason as me — the Bujold story.

Because, let me tell you — the rest really isn’t up to snuff. I made a valiant attempt at reading the second story, by Mary Jo Putney, and got halfway through it before realising that I really didn’t care at all. And after losing faith in the editor like that, I dropped each subsequent story earlier and earlier.

So I didn’t much like the rest of the book, but it’s worth it just for the Bujold story. But it’s included in the Miles in Love omnibus, so I guess you don’t have to buy this.

Editor Asaro talks in the introduction about how controversial it was it mix science fiction/fantasy with romance (as all the stories here do), but I guess that’s no longer the case, 20 years later: Apparently romantasy is the major seller in fantasy these days? So she won.

Irresistible Forces (2004) edited by Catherine Asaro (buy new, buy used, 3.52 on Goodreads)

[Edit a couple days later.]

Hey! While doing an “audit” of my bookcase of unread books (I thought I had a lot of books marked as “unread” in my database that I’d read; and it turned out I had about 20, but there were 28 ones that I hadn’t registered at all, so now I have 437 unread books, oh where was I) and I found another copy of this book. And this one was properly printed! I’d probably have liked it more if I’d read this edition instead.