(no subject)

Mail.app's Junk filter used to work great, and then it started being retarded so I stopped using it. The 10.2.5 update seems to have repaired it and then some; it catches almost everything, and the very few false positives so far have been mailing list posts. After running it for a month in "training mode" (where it colors the subject line of suspected spam but leaves it in place) I've had it running fully for the last few days, sorting spam into a separate (circular) file. After weeks without filtration, I find it a little surprising how little legitimate mail I get, now that the separation is so visible... and I still end up deleting most of what remains out of hand, since it's discussion I don't care about on lists that I don't quite yet have reason to unsubscribe from.

I still wish Mail.app's filter worked more like SpamAssassin, so I could manually set some weights: leaning heavily on mail that's mostly HTML or non-ASCII characters, for example. "So why don't you just install SpamAssassin on your mail server?" Eh.

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Despite my earlier griping, The Difference Engine has become my T book. The maniacal pacing has calmed down a bit from the opening, perhaps because I'm now well into the double-digit pages, where a proper SF novel would just start the initial development of the main characters, after laying out the whole setting. This one started with the characters, and worked them through changes before you even got a change to start caring about them, or had any solid information about what their world was like. Not the right order, I daresay, but it does seem to eventually find its own right flow. We'll see.

The last alternate-history book I read what PKD's The Man in the High Castle, and before that I read Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker books (until I got tired of them, circa Alvin Journeyman). I dunno if any of these qualify as alt-history since they rely heavily on fantasy, disqualifying them from the realm of what-if-this-happened-instead-of-that, but I'm not into the sub-genre enough to quibble. I was attracted to Engine because it flips a single bit (a lynchpin, if you will) of real-world 19th century history -- the fact that Charles Babbage failed to complete the construction of his computer, much less mass-market it -- and continues in its own way from there.

(no subject)

You know you're in deep when you adapt your favorite books and albums into hacks of obscure 1980s computer games.