Book Club 2025: Chain of Fools by Richard Stevenson

I think perhaps this is the final book I’ll be reading in this series.

Not that it’s bad or anything — it’s got some fun characters and scenes, but it’s mostly just kinda plodding. It’s a seemingly interminable series of conversations, and while we constantly learn new stuff about the mystery, it’s just not very exciting.

And while some of the earlier books were pleasantly absurd, this is more like “er, that doesn’t make sense, does it?” Which is very different.

But I don’t know. Spending this evening with this book has been pleasant and not annoying in any way, so perhaps I’ll give the next one a go, too. Finding mysteries that aren’t annoying isn’t easy.

Chain of Fools (2023) by Richard Stevenson (buy new, buy used, 3.85 on Goodreads)

Remove category/author/attachment/etc pages from WordPress

Here’s how: Put this in a WordPress PHP file:

function my_disable_some_pages() {
  if ( is_author() || is_category() ||
       is_tag() || is_tax() ||
       is_attachment() || is_date() ) {
    // Redirect permanently to homepage. 
    wp_redirect(get_option('home'), 301); 
    exit; 
  }
}
add_action('template_redirect', 'my_disable_some_pages');

Remove whatever is_ you want from the if above there — perhaps you want to disable author pages, for instance, but not the category pages? It’s easy to edit.

Why would you want to disable (some of) these pages?

Because WordPress, by default, helpfully adds a whole bunch of index-like pages for authors, categories, taxonomies and the like. These can be useful, but if you just have a simple single author blog without categories, these are a bit annoying. They’ll pop up in search results, often ahead of the real posts (since they may have more relevant search terms), so people will be led to https://my.awesome.blog.example/category/uncategorized/page/27/ where they’ll find nothing relevant — because that’s now on page/28 as you’ve posted more stuff.

In addition, AI scrapers will be slamming your site, so you want to reduce the number of pages to a bare minimum — they’ll still slam your site, but less. The sheer number of different URLs WordPress offers up by default means that if you do one post, there’ll be about a dozen different URLs that give you that post (or excerpts from that post). And these scrapers are not very discerning.

And since no real users will ever access these pages, whatever cache you’re using won’t have them, so it means actually generating the pages.

The WordPress console should have checkboxes to disable these pages, but it doesn’t, so…

Note the mealy mouthed way I started this blog post: “Put this in a file”… The most insane thing about WordPress is that there is no good place to put snippets like this. All recipes say something like “put it in the theme’s functions.php” or “alter your category.php” or some crazy shit like that. The next time you update WordPress/the theme, those changes will be gone.

Why on Earth doesn’t WordPress have a my_functions.php file somewhere where you can put stuff like this?

Presently, unfortunately the only sane way to do stuff like this is to make a plugin (!) and put the stuff there. Fortunately, that’s not difficult:

  1. Find the plugin directory. It will typically be /var/www/wp-content/plugins/.
  2. mkdir my-plugin
  3. Put the following in my-plugin/my-plugin.php:
    <?php
/*
Plugin Name: My Plugin
Description: My Plugin For Stuff
*/
  4. Go to the WordPress dashboard and enable the plugin.

Then you can put whatever PHP you want into that file. Fun note: If you have any syntax errors in that file, your entire site will go down.

Fun times!

I felt the need to write this post not because any of this is very difficult, but because he info to do this seems to be oddly obscure these days:

But WordPress knowledge is pretty SEO poisoned, so it’s not all that strange that a straightforward recipe like this isn’t on the Google front page:

Book Club 2025: The Burglar in Short Order by Lawrence Block

I’m ambivalent towards Block’s book. That is, I found the books the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels to be really entertaining (they’re comedic mysteries), so I tried the Scudder books and found them to be pretty dull, but read more than a handful, and finally tried the Evan Tanner books, and found them to be barely readable.

And, man, he’s written a lot of books, but I guess this short story collection (which I bought a couple years ago, before the Tanner debacle) will be the last one. Probably.

As a short story collection, it’s a bit odd. That is, Block just doesn’t have enough short stories to publish a collection, really. So what we get are three chapters from two different novels (the excuse for this is that these had been published separately (after the novels had been published) either as chapbooks or in magazines), a long introduction, an essay that repeats the information from the introduction (cut and paste, mostly), some “interviews” with the main character…

And three actual short stories. Two of them are pretty entertaining.

So I guess you could say that this collection is Block’s writing career in microcosm.

The Burglar in Short Order (2020) by Lawrence Block (buy new, buy used, 3.84 on Goodreads)

August Music

Music I’ve bought in August.

I don’t recall buying this many things last month! It’s over 30 albums or something! Huh. So let’s see what we have…

I bought an older Richard Dawson album, and it’s very nice.

Exventory - Pinhead Leaks (FULL ALBUM)

Get in on the ground floor with a brand new band! I like the way it mixes crunchy sounds with pretty melodies. It’s kinda new and nostalgic at the same time — it reminds me of that brief time around 2005 when people were mixing pop and glitch (Cold House by Hood, Martin Finke’s final album and so on).

jasmine.4.t - Elephant (Official Video)

I saw jasmine.4.t at a music festival this month and then went home and bought the album. I like it!

CAUGHT STEALING - IDLES "Run Rabbit" Lyric Video

Idles released a sountrack album, and I’ve only listened to it twice (it’s brand new), but I think it’s good.

UNIVERSITY - Curwen (Official Video)

I think the University album is good, but I’m not sure.

I like the new Matmos.

And I went to a free jazz festival and bought an album by Stina Stjern, which was this embroidered pouch with a Bandcamp download code. I’m all for innovative packaging. And it’s shaped like a cassette, because she does these interesting cassette things:

Stina Stjern | Live at Kristiansund Kunsthall | 02.09.2023

And speaking of packaging, this 10″ came with very hand-made sleeves. This one seems to have a pouch of some powder taped to it? Hopefully it won’t burst.

Let’s see… what else of note… I’ve bought so much stuff that I’ve hardly had time to listen to it all.

Crayola Lectern :: Disasternoon :: (New single)

Oh yeah. I like the new Crayola Lectern album.

Random Comics

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

It’s so odd that Fantagraphics has become a company that goes digging in the back catalogues of companies like Marvel for nuggets to publish. But I guess there’s precedent — they did publish guide to X-Men back in 1981…

But now there’s even a series? “Lost Marvels”?

Tower of Shadows is presented as if was Marvel’s attempt at doing EC horror comics, but isn’t a more likely precedent DC’s House of Horrors? It was pretty popular — it certainly ran long enough. And the stories are a lo more like those than EC’s stories.

Fantagraphics also stresses that these comics have never been reprinted before in the US, which is true (for the most part), but being Scandinavian, I’ve read a few of these as a child — in Scandinavian horror anthologies.

The stories are OK, I guess, except the ones Wally Wood wrote, which are pretty nonsensical. (But do feature all his obsessions.)

The reproduction is fine — I like that it’s on matte paper. I guess most of it was shot from published copies? Or at least some of it, which makes me wonder why they printed it larger than original, because that just makes the blotches stand out even more.

I bought a mid-80s Legion collection, and I continued to read the snarky recaps here. This isn’t a period I was previously very familiar with, but this is apparently after the big event — “The Big Darkness War” or something — and before the next major sort-of redo.

It’s pretty entertaining? I read the entire thing, which I wasn’t sure I was going to do. They prop the issues so full of plot — there’s an A, B, C and sometimes D plot in every issue for the first half of this volume. It’s fun!

And towards the end, Giffen starts on his journey from being a totally unremarkable super-hero artist to becoming Jose Muñoz reborn, and that’s fun to watch. (It’s not so much fun watching him ditch Cockrum’s fun 70s costumes for much duller, plainer (but probably easier to draw?) ones.)

It’s fun. I think I’m going to be buying more of these… perhaps that Darkness thing?

Another Franka. Has Franka ever been translated to English?

It’s Dutch, and it’s been running since the mid 80s, I think — so it’s not exactly one of those classic French(ey) adventure series, but it’s fun, for the most part. This one is very wordy, and the mystery doesn’t really take off.

But it certainly looks good.

Yeah, I’ve never read Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run. I’d stopped reading super-hero comics at the time, and when I started again a decade later, it didn’t really occur to me. I mean, I like Veitch’s other comics, but I thought the likelihood that a DC Vertigo book by him would appeal to me was small. I mean, his “mystic” stuff isn’t my thing, and Vertigo books usually go hard on that.

Like most DC collections, I don’t quite understand the thought process behind what they include. This starts with two issues of Hellblazer — and they’re not written by Veitch, either. John Constantine features in Swamp Thing, of course, but what happens in the two included issues seems to have absolutely no bearing on anything, so…

And, yes, there’s pages and pages of mystical gobbledygook, like I was afraid of.

Towards the end of the volume, it starts to pick up — it’s not just Swamp Thing having mystical talks with mystical beings, while Abby is in the swamp, staring at nothing (didn’t she bring a book or something to read?) — and we get a plot. A plot that’s not very interesting, but still: A plot.

And do we get the conclusion to that storyline in this volume? Do we fuck. It’s a DC collection, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but *sigh*.

“What? You’ve brought Den? The new restored edition? Surely you had the Catalan Communications version that was published when you were a teenager?” Yes! I do! But I can’t find it!

I was wondering whether to buy the later volumes in this series, but I wanted to read the first two (Neverwhere and Den II) first, and I just can’t find them. I can’t find any of the Catalan books I have — like Squeak the Mouse, Anarcoma, etc. WHERE ARE THEY!??! It’s driving me nuts.

So I just bought this new version.

And the restoration looks really good. I saw some progress rapport from Villaruba in Twitter while he was restoring it, and it seemed like he had a good grasp of what’s important in a Corben book. In addition to rescanning everything, he’s also relettered it — because Corben’s lettering was awful. But… I’m not sure the computer lettering was a good choice.

I remember from when I was a teenager that I thought that these comics were really stupid, but I didn’t remember how … little there is in them. One thing happens after another, but you can’t really call it a plot.

Fun facial expressions on Den, though.

I do remember reading them quite a few times, but the lack of an actual plot means that I didn’t remember anything in specific (except the art). So it was a bit weird reading them now, because I was expecting myself to go “oh, I remember this part”, but — zilch.

I’d also forgotten how hairless everybody in this book is — like Segrelles, really. If you’re going for this rounded, bulbous look, hair gets in the way.

So… I think I’m going to pass on the rest of the volumes in the series.

This is the final batch of Det grymma svärdet that I have.

But it’s a good batch.

Lots of interesting stuff.

And Caroline Sury does Mark Beyer’s Amy & Jordan! Heh heh.

Ballpoint comics rule.

It’s mostly Swedish comics, but here’s Roberta Scomparsa with a strong piece.

The most annoying thing about the anthology is that they don’t really say who did most of the comics. Just based on head size, I’m wondering on this is Moa Romanova, but I have no idea. It’s good, though.

And that’s it.