The End of Gmane?

In 2002, I grew annoyed with not finding the obscure technical information I was looking for, so I started Gmane, the mailing list archive. All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces.

The past few weeks, the Gmane machines (and more importantly, the company I work for, who are graciously hosting the servers) have been the target of a number of distributed denial of service attacks. Our upstream have been good about helping us filter out the DDoS traffic, but it’s meant serious downtime where we’ve been completely off the Internet.

Of course, there are ways to try to mitigate all this: I’m moving the Gmane servers off of my employer’s net, and I’m putting Cloudflare in front of the Gmane web servers.

But I ask myself: Is this fun any more?

Running a mailing list archive means, of course, that people want stuff removed from the archive, so I’ve apparently been sued in India (along with Google and Yahoo) (and I’m never going there: I might be sentenced. I don’t know). And I’m the Internet Help Desk, which is nice, but confusing. And all the threats of “legal action” are, well, something.

And now the DDoS stuff, which I have no idea why is happening, but I can only assume that somebody is angry about something.

Probably me being a wise ass.

So… it’s been 14 years… I’m old now. I almost threw up earlier tonight because I’m so stressed about the situation. I should retire and read comic books and watch films. Oh, and the day job. Work, work, work. Oh, and Gnus.

I’m thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don’t want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess…

The nice thing about a mailing list archive (with NNTP and HTTP interfaces) is that it enables software maintainers to say (whenever somebody suggests using Spiffy Collaboration Tool of the Month instead of yucky mailing lists) is “well, just read the stuff on Gmane, then”. I feel like I’m letting down a generation here. And despite what I rambled about in that paragraph up there, I’ve had many fun interactions with people because of Gmane. And lots and lots and lots of appreciative feedback over the years.

*sigh*

But there’s The Mail Archive. Those guys are doing a good job. If The Mail Archive had been as good in 2002 as it is now, I probably wouldn’t have started Gmane.

I’m open to ideas here. If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool). I’ve written a lot of software for Gmane, but it’s all quite site specific and un-documented. And the web interface was written in, like, 2004, so it’s way way way un-Web 2.0-ey and shiny. You’re probably better off implementing this stuff from scratch.

Oh, and along with the spool you’ll get the gmane.conf file which has the mailing list->NNTP mapping.

I can’t really recommend the job, though. It sucks.

[Update: See this comment.]

FF1991: Big Thing

Big Thing #1-4 by Colin Upton.

This series is probably called Colin Upton’s Other Big Thing (Upton had self-published more that 60 mini-comics by this time, and one larger one, which was called Big Thing, so this name makes sense), and then Colin Upton’s Other Slightly Smaller Big Thing (when it went to a smaller size).

Phew.

Anyway, we’re talking about slice-of-life stories with a particularly late-80s flavour. Even if we’re in the early 90s.

The stories are mostly slice-of-life, but mostly not really in the tradition of Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb. Instead they’re mostly anecdotes of interesting things that have happened to Upton, and you could imagine him telling you these over a cup of tea somewhere.

Not extremely soul-searching or harrowing, and you can see Upton chafing under (imagined?) pressure to be more “raw”, which may explain the quip up there about Graphic Story Monthly.

It’s not all autobio, though. There’s the occasional, er, whimsical? story like this one, with angels and devils:

But it’s mostly anecdotes, and some of them aren’t very exciting:

That’s it.

As for the art, it’s kinda lumpy, isn’t it? It’s clear and understandable, but I just… don’t really enjoy it much.

In perhaps the most exciting tale in these issues, Upton joins The Haters (GX Jupitter-Larsen noise/performance thing) for a performance, and there is So Much Drama. Mostly because Upton is so scared of getting arrested that it starts being annoying in the retelling.

But it’s a good story. And above we see Roberta Gregory, first drawn by Upton and then by Gregory. Always fun to see two autobio depicting the same scene. Compare and contrast.

Upton visits Fantagraphics.

The third issue is mostly about participating in demonstrations against the … er… first Bush gulf war? I’ve lost count at this point. It’s a very angry issue, and it should be.

*sigh*

And then!

Oh, it’s a parody.

Yeah, yeah… 1991 was a sucky year to try to get non-genre earnest work published.

“No apologies to the guy who draws Faust.” Heh heh.

Anyway, that was it. After four issues, Big Thing was cancelled.

I remember reading this at the time and enjoying it quite a bit (especially the political angry bits), but the series has problems. There’s nothing wrong with doing anecdotes, but cumulatively they don’t really seem to be going anywhere.

It’s a nice series, but it’s not all that memorable.

I vaguely remember Upton doing a series after this called Buddha on the Road. (I probably have it in a case here … somewhere…) Let’s see… *google* *bing* *yahoo* Oh, yeah, he (ironically enough) did a porn series called Incubus. I think I have that here, too… But other than that, there doesn’t seem to be that much more published after the mid 90s?

Oh, and he has a comic book store now.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1994: Bad Comics

Bad Comics #1 by JR Williams.

A previous #1 had been published a few years earlier by Cat-Head Comics, and if I remember correctly, it was much like this one: A random collection of funny comics by JR Williams.

Like Sam Henderson, he’s someone who seems to know the mechanics of telling a joke well, and subverting your expectations is what it’s all about.

Like this comic about some yokels hooking up with some city ladies…

… ending like this:

And stories about really bad boys doing bad stuff:

So it’s all quite simple and funny.

A couple of the pieces use a very different rendering style, though, like this Skinboy two-pager.

So what can I say? It’s slightly gross and quite funny. Johnny Ryan would take this style to another level about ten years later…

Williams mainly published minicomix and in the small press, but I think Fantagraphics did a few more one-shots in the mid 90s. In which case I’ll get to them later, I’m sure.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.