Artificial Blog Pingbacks

WordpRess has this concept called “pingbacks”. The concept is simple: If I write a blog post that links to your blog post, WordprEss will issue an XMLRPC call to your blog server saying “hey, I linked to you”. You can then choose to display that as a comment on your blog.

Of course, this can be used for spamming or other nefarious purposes.

It’s so nefarious that if you try to search for technical details of how the pingback mechanism works, the search results are mostly about various exploits, and how to disable pingbacks.

Anyway, your WordpreSs will check whether it’s a real pingback by looking at my blog to see whether there really is a link there, and if not, issue an error message. Which is nice.

As you can see from the screenshot at the top here, that error message (faultString) is “”, and the error code (faultCode) is 0, which means success. Programmers, eh? Eh?

As you can also see from that same screenshot, if I then try to do it again, I’m blocked, because that WOrdpress instance runs fail2ban, and that looks for XMLRPC errors and just blocks the sender’s IP totally.

Which is, again, nice, but the problem here is that WoRdpress’s link checker isn’t very reliable (and besides — these days half the web will block access from anything but real browsers running from real laptops or mobile phones). So it doesn’t really work very well these days.

But here’s why I started looking at this today: I thought it would be nice to be able to (manually) add backlinks to this blog. That is, if I see somebody linking to an article, it would be kinda cool to just add that to the “pingback” section below the article. And pingbacks are stored as normal comments in WorDPrEss anyway (but with type “pingback” instead of “comment”), so I thought I could just use the wp.newComment XMLRPC API call and say what the type is. But nope — it doesn’t allow that. I can only add normal comments using that mechanism:

IT”S SO ULGEEE

Which is why I started looking at the pingback.ping mechanism I whine about at the start of this post. Which I can’t use.

But then I thought: CSS is a thing that exists. If I add a class="pingback" to the pseudo-pingback links, has CSS finally grown a “parent selector”? And it has! As of 2023, apparently all the major browser have it, so I can say:

article:has(a.pingback) footer {
  display: none;
}

And then get:

Good enough!

I then added this as a command to ewp, the WordpresS package for Emacs so that it can do the formatting automatically.

So there you go. Or not.

Book Club 2025: Fer-de-Lance/The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout

I read an article about Rex Stout’s sister a couple of weeks ago. Ruth Stout is allegedly a Tick Tock phenomenon these days on account of her “no-work method” of gardening, and the writer of the article was saying how ironic it was that all her books are currently in print while none of Rex Stout’s books are (because Rex was a phenomenon when they were alive, and Ruth wasn’t).

I think the article writer exaggerated for effect (or was just, you know, making things up), because you can buy a gazillion brand new Rex Stout books from bookshop.org, so it has to be “in print” (at least in some meanings of the word).

I bought an omnibus of the first two Nero Wolfe novels, and it was published in 2008, and does not seem to be a print on demand edition. But! It has not been re-typeset — it’s obviously been shot from either the negatives for a previous edition, or they’ve scanned an old paperback and used that to print this.

And that’s led to the two novels here having strikingly different typography. But it’s a pretty nice edition, anyway.

I’ve never read Rex Stout before, and I was surprised to find that the first book was published in 1934 — I assumed that Nero Wolfe was a 50s thing. So what’s it like? Typical sentence (totally at random): “Horstmann didn’t think any more of those plants than I do of my right eye.” Yes, indeed, the narrator character (Archie Goodwin) speaks in Thirties Wise Guy. It’s not that it’s unintelligible (at least not to me, but I’ve got a doctorate in 30s screwball comedy from the University Of Mycouch), but it certainly trips me up. The meaning of “it was easy to see that they hadn’t gone over it more than a thousand times” is clear, but it requires me to stop and think it over for a second.

What I’m saying is that sometimes when reading this I didn’t find the action to sometimes not being more obscure than a trip to a dark cellar — I’ve been reading a page and then I realise that I didn’t understand anything of what’s been happening.

It’s certainly amusing, but I can see why this wouldn’t go over with the kids these days no more than a zeppelin on fire. Or is that “would”? See, I confused myself.

I’m curious to see whether Stout kept up this style — the last one was written i 1975, and there’s one or two published per year, so I’m guessing not. Seems like a lot of work. I kinda want to sample a couple more of his later books, but while I liked these two novels just fine, I’m not chomping at the bit to read all of them.

Besides the wise-ass writing style, the pacing isn’t impressive — Stout’s main thing seems to be seemingly interminable interviews with suspects and witnesses. A single one can go on for 50 pages, and are dominated by Goodwin trying to make the bird sing, and it’s just not that interesting. And the plots are preposterous, but whatevs.

I found it interesting that Stout seemingly went to such lengths to convince the readers that the first novel wasn’t the first — there’s so many references to previous cases in the first book, and Stout doesn’t tell us anything about how the setup came to be. It’s like an anti-origin story, and I like that. (Because origin stories are dull.) Stout sets up the status quo from the first page, and then just runs with it. It’s smart.

Heh heh.

Oh! OK, spoilers ahead!

This is the most wilful misreading I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Literally! I mean, it’s true as it goes for that scene… but Wolfe arranges to have the guy described killed (yes, killed) for what he did. (And Goodwin was overjoyed by that.) Isn’t that a kind of mild “expression of disapproval”?

Anyway. Opinions differ.

Fer-de-Lance/The League of Frightened Men (1934/1935) by Rex Stout (buy new, buy used, 4.22 on Goodreads)

Random Comics

I read some comics this week, but first: Comics drama!

The social mediases (that’s a word) have been doing an impressive pile-up on a comic book artist today. It started when Alex Graham (full disclosure: I disliked Dog Biscuits and I like The Devil’s Grin) posed a subtweet-ey criticism of Comics These Days, and it’s really just perfection… if you wanted to have the entire Comics Internet come down on you. Let me count the ways:

  1. She dares to imply that not all comics are fantastic. That’s just rude!
  2. She names a style she finds particularly annoying, and it’s “Cal-Arts”. This offends comics people on several levels: You’re not allowed to say that people work in a particular style, because we’re all individuals, and also there’s so many people using that style, so you just offended all those people. I had no idea what that style was, but it’s this thing:

    The horror!

  3. The strip doesn’t name anybody, which means that all the Internet Sleuths are raring to go to discover who Graham is mad at:

    Which makes no sense, because if there’s anything that looks less Cal-Arts it’s Lee Lai:

  4. When I read the panel below, I assumed Graham was just saying “white men suck”, which is, you know, fair:

    Everybody else interpreted it as having to mean that the comics Graham was dissing had to be created by a Black person, which is, you know, also fair, so she should have dropped that one. But:

  5. Mainstream comics fans have never heard of Alex Graham, and if somebody who is not famous dares to have an opinion on something popular, that’s just an outrage:

    (There are about three hundred people posting basically the same thing — bragging about never having heard of Graham, which is just a weird flex: She’s been nominated to all the awards, and her previous major book was on a lot of the “best of” lists that year.)

  6. And people thought that Alex Graham was a man:

So: Perfect storm. You couldn’t have created a more perfect way to get all of Comics Internet to gang up on you. I’ve seen only one person try to defend Graham.

I wonder which anthology she was dissing?

[Edit five minutes later: More defense

]

And there’s also this:

Which is… bizarre. And:

Anyway, to recap: Perfect recipe for an Internet Pile-On: Criticising comics (while not being a famous comics artist) and a popular comics art style (while using a non-traditional style herself) to get people really riled up, and then mentioning race gives people a convenient cudgel. (Granted, the cudgel is there, so…)

It’s what the Internet was made for.

Onto the comics:

I’ve never heard of Jean-Claude Denis, but I picked this up at a used bookstore in Montreal last year.

And… it’s from 1979, and it looks 97% like an American underground comic book.

It’s pretty good? It’s about a guy who wants to liberate some animals from a zoo (and a circus), and there’s twists and turns. I really like the artwork — the animals look totally natural…

I’m learning French, and one of the problems is that I have no idea when I encounter something new whether it’s something I don’t know, or whether it’s just wrong. The artist has several words that start with “rr”, like “rrenais” up there… so I had to google that. But I think it’s just misspelled “prenais”? I mean, that makes sense — “to think that I I took her for a friend” or something along those lines.

But it’s just bizarre to letter a “P” as an “R”.

This is from 1948/49, and is one of Bob de Moor’s earliest long-form stories.

As you can probably tell, de Moor was Hergé’s assistant…

This is kind of a dry-run for one of the most famous Tintin stories, On a marché sur la Lune that started serialisation in 1950. Well, at least I think it must have been — there’s no editorial text. But it’s about going to the moon, and it was published a year before Tintin went to the moon, so they must have been getting designs ready by the point this was published.

But while the Tintin story was a pretty peaceful adventure, this is all war and stuff.

It’s not actually, er, what’s the word… “good”… Which may explain why it wasn’t collected in a colour album until a couple years ago.

I finally got around to buying this… I mean, it got a lot of attention a few years back, but I just completely forgot.

If I understand correctly, it was serialised on Instagram, and started off as a goof.

But then got quite serious after a while.

And the end is quite gripping.

But… uhm… I liked it overall, I guess? But I have to say I got quite impatient with it all after reading (let’s say) one quarter, and I didn’t really get into it again until the final quarter.

I got this from here.

This issue is a hefty one. It’s heavier (in all senses) than World War 3 Illustrated usually is, and it’s usually pretty heavy.

It’s about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, mostly — WW3I is usually grounded in smaller issues…

So we get explainers and stuff. It’s all correct, so I’m not complaining — I’m just saying that it’s less gripping than issues usually are.

The most successful pieces are the ones that focus more on personal experience, like the above.

But misunderstand me right — it’s still a really strong issue. Get a copy.

Well, this is a strange one. Colwell has done some amazing comics over the years — his longer piece in Bizarre Sex #10 is awesome. But I guess he’s mostly known for the Doll series these days? It’s been a few decades since he published a major work, and it’s about Bosch?

I know nothing about Bosch (I mean, more than what everybody knows), but I’m guessing that the story Colwell tells here is complete fiction? I mean, it’s about how Bosch painted The Garden of Earthly Delights, but it seems unlikely that somebody wrote down how that painting came to be created, at least in this much detail? (I know, I could do research, but where’s the fun in that.)

I like Colwell’s artwork — it’s stiff and posed, but in a good way. And this is, of course, about people posing, stiffly, so it’s perfect.

The book’s thesis is that Bosch suffered through great pangs while making The Garden of Etc, and I dunno. Perhaps? He’s depicted as a totally naive guy, though, and that just seems… unlikely?

Well, I dunno. It’s an enjoyable book, anyway.

And that’s it for this week.