This week's dispatches from the Ministry of Intrigue
Hello, faithful reader.
We published the following fresh dispatches this week:
Weeknotes for 2024-03-08
March 8, 2024, 12:06 p.m.
This week in everything Daniel:
Spent time trying to recover from jacking up my back on a recent work trip to Dallas. Thankfully, my home office chair– a Secret Labs Titan –has great lumbar support.
Prepping for my next work trip to the Netherlands, which I leave for on Saturday.
Made some improvements to my pet project that analyzes podcast feeds. You can learn more about why in this TIL post.
Added a uses page to this site, because I’m a huge nerd.
For Explorers Wanted:
Released a new episode, Difficult Deliveries.
Ilsene and Ezri struggle to evade notice as they move their respective “cargo”.
Watch on YouTube: "Difficult Deliveries (Episode 219 Teaser)"
Filed our company taxes for 5d20 Media.
Spent entirely too much time rearranging my mic and recording settings. Hopefully, this will solve for the extra bass showing up in my track, and make it easier to clear out the higher frequency whistles that sometimes show up over my vowels.
They’re usually a side-effect of the post processing I need to do to clean my vocals. I’m hoping that this ounce of prevention will solve for a pound of production.
Stressed a lot about how our backlog of recordings is almost nothing right now. We’re one scheduling issue away from having to miss a week. Add on the amount of international travel I do, and this gets ugly quick.
Wrote a book review on The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.
Did the usual song and dance with the pharmacy to acquire my ADHD medication refill prior to my trip. This is always a struggle. I hate it here.
Finished watching the Mr. & Mrs. Smith series, which I heartily recommend.
Started a rewatch of Blue Eye Samurai, which, if you have Netflix, should jump to the top of your list.
Started watching Hazbin Hotel on a recommendation from Alex. The first episode was only so-so, but eps two and three have been delightful.
Lots of work projects as always, which I can’t talk about, but I’m excited about them!
And that wraps it up!
Quote: T. Kingfisher on Finns
March 7, 2024, 3:19 p.m.
I’ve spent a lot of time working with Finns, and this quote made me smile.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Finns. Some claim they’re unfriendly, but every one that I’ve ever met has been quite pleasant, if reserved. They have the quiet confidence of a people who know that, at any moment, they could strap on skis, go into the woods, and take out an entire squad of enemy soldiers before anyone knows they’re there.
— T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night
And this follow-up summoned a visceral memory of the terrible black liquor they enjoy.
Also they’re the only country I know whose national liquor is worse than ours. I know, because Dr. Virtanen brought a bottle of salmiakki liqueur with him as a gift. He said it would keep out the chill, and it did. No chill could possibly fight its way through that much black licorice.
— T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night
Intrigue, murder, and infrastructure meet in Bennett's The Tainted Cup
March 6, 2024, 5:57 p.m.
Robert Jackson Bennett has been one of my favorite authors for a while now. His fantasy worlds are realized in stunning detail, with rich characters and intricately woven plots. His latest book, The Tainted Cup, a fantasy murder mystery that kicks off his new Shadow of the Leviathan series, is no exception.
The book follows the exploits of Dinios Kol in his role as an apprentice assistant to Ana Dolabra, a brilliant but eccentric investigator who rarely leaves the walls of her home. The two must solve a series of murders enacted via a weaponized plant that bursts forth from the victims in a deadly bloom. Dolabra cannot abide any overstimulation to her senses, and so Kol, a magically altered human who remembers everything he experiences with perfect clarity, serves as her eyes and ears while she confines herself to her quarters. Their Holmes and Watson relationship is familiar, but Dolabra has a streak of Hannibal Lecter to her that is pleasantly unsettling.
Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.
— Ana Dolabra
The victims are members of the Engineers, those tasked with the upkeep of the empire’s infrastructure. Most notably, these fallen are responsible for the upkeep of the mighty walls that protect the populace from destructive incursions of leviathans that regularly rise from the sea. With the threat of the next leviathan looming, Kol and Dolabra race to connect the clues, and soon find themselves embroiled in the politics of the powerful and uncovering shameful events that many would kill to have forgotten. As they close in on the killer, Kol is amazed by Dolabra’s keen intellect, and must contend with his fear that the very same will reveal his own secrets.
Civilization is often a task that is only barely managed. But harden your heart and slow your blood. The towers of justice are built one brick at a time. We have more to build yet.
— Ana Dolabra
This book is expertly plotted and paced; it was almost impossible for me to put down. The characters are well drawn, and the mystery is delightfully twisty. Bennett’s focus on how infrastructure keeps an empire alive, and what happens when the process of maintenance is corrupted in the name of profit, is yet another example of the cerebral themes Bennett is capable of weaving within a rollicking story.
[…Most] critically, I focus on the theme. All of the worldbuilding and character development needs to refer back to the overarching theme of the story, whether directly or obliquely. For THE DIVINE CITIES, for example, it was about how people use history to excuse their actions in the present. For FOUNDRYSIDE, it’s about how technology empowers and then disempowers people, leading to lulls and booms. (I personally think we are living through a lull now.)
For THE TAINTED CUP, this is a story about an Empire that harnessed biological magic to fend off enormous, catastrophic threats that regularly occur. Its theme is about evolution, metamorphosis, and change; so, in this story, the villains are usually people who do NOT want things to change. They prefer the status quo, and will use the incumbent powers of their wealth and legal apparatus to maintain it.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, Reddit AMA
The Tainted Cup is a must read and I heartily recommend it. I cannot wait until the next book in the series.
Quote: Robert Jackson Bennet
March 6, 2024, 2:46 p.m.
Writing murder mysteries is largely a process of logistics, I think, ensuring that the timelines work and the right evidence gets in the right place at the right time. You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.
— Robert Jackson Bennet, The Tainted Cup, Acknowledgements
TIL - Podcast hosts serve unreliable art mime types
March 5, 2024, 1:41 p.m.
I’ve been toying with a small Django project that can be given a list of podcast feeds, and then regularly checks those feeds to update some interesting metrics. Initially, I wanted to see how many comparable podcasts to my own made use of various RSS namespace elements,1 and also to pull some aggregate statistics around release frequency, episode length, etc.2
Since I was making a simple UI for myself, I decided to add in the ability to fetch and cache cover art of the podcast, updating it if the URL changes in subsequent checks. And here I noticed something odd. I was limiting the mime types that would be accepted in case garbage data was returned,3 but then I noticed that two podcasts in my initial set were never caching the artwork, even though the secondary checks on the file itself appeared showed valid types! When I dug deeper I found that the issue is with their hosts, which will happily return invalid or imprecise mime types in the Content-Type header.
For example, if the cover art uploaded to Spotify/Anchor ends in .jpg, it will deliver the file with mime type image/jpg, which does not exist. It should be sending it back as image/jpeg, and suggests to me they may be serving the designation by concatenating the file extension onto the the end of image/, which strikes me as a really bad idea. Captivate.fm, on the other hand, doesn’t even try to do the right thing, and reports any file type as application/octet-stream. 🤦
Now, I’m off to add some code to add a datapoint on these types of errors so that over time I can identify how many hosts are doing this!
Some examples include:
iTunes feed type
Season data
Person elements for host/guest
Transcript
Funding
Use of CW/TW in descriptions
Explicit tags
Uses RSS chapters for podcast
This is how I know as of when I’m writing this that if you were to listen to our podcast from start to finish without breaks, it would take you 9 days, 9 hours, 38 minutes, and 40 seconds. ↩︎
Smart thinking, Past Me! ↩︎
And that's it!
Grave dust and falling leaves.