I like French, comics, books, podcasts, (board and roleplaying) games, biking, and trains. I try to stay organized and in good (physical and mental) shape.
Moi, j'aime le français, les BD, les livres, les podcasts, les jeux (de plateau et de rôle), le cyclisme, et les trains. Je fais de mon mieux de rester organisé et en forme (physiquement et mentalement).
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- kudos:
Hier soir, je me suis dit qu’il ne ferait pas de mal de ne pas me coucher à l’heure. Ce matin, je ne veux que me recoucher.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for XPD
- kudos:There’s an interesting premise behind this spy thriller adaptation, and some of the radio work is pretty good, but I felt like there wasn’t enough connective tissue to keep it together. I don’t know how much of the weakness was in the original novel versus introduced in the adaptation—the rushed pacing makes me suspect the latter—but while I don’t regret finishing it, I can’t say I was impressed.
Guitar Hero 2, Eurovision, and Wikipedia: rediscovering Freezepop
- kudos:Some time after I moved out of the house for college (etc.), my younger siblings pooled some money to buy a used PlayStation 2 and a few games, including Guitar Hero 2. When I was home for summers and breaks, I got some exposure to new-to-me music through playing that game with them. As a huge fan of Homestar Runner, I naturally appreciated the appreciation of Trogdor, but one of the songs that stuck out most to me was Freezepop’s less talk more rokk:
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I’m the Word “Utilize” and I’m Loving Every Moment of Your Overblown Rhetoric'
- kudos:I love this article precisely because I hate the word “utilize.” link to “I’m the Word “Utilize” and I’m Loving Every Moment of Your Overblown Rhetoric”
- kudos:
The costume of Latvia’s Eurovision contestant reminds me of The Tick, and I can’t take him seriously.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Eurovision 2024: Here are the songs with the best shot at glory'
- kudos:Love to see Eurovision coverage from US news outlets. link to “Eurovision 2024: Here are the songs with the best shot at glory”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal'
- kudos:Some better, broader coverage of complaints I made in a blog post earlier this week. link to “Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal”
- kudos:
I have zero personal interest in joining Bluesky, but I’m happy that you can follow accounts via RSS and even happier that whatever bug was stopping my RSS reader from pulling posts has been resolved. Glad to be following some people I haven’t seen since Twitter.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Pushing Daisies (Season 1)
- kudos:This show is the very definition of weird-but-delightful. I watched (some of) it with my now-spouse right around when we first started dating, and it’s fun to revisit. The aesthetic is very specific, the vibe is dark-but-cute, and the dialogue is snappy if strange. Looking forward to Season 2!
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 8)
- kudos:This series wasn’t bad—it’s just that maybe I shouldn’t be binging them series after series, because despite some clever moments, I just felt like there wasn’t much new about this material.
- kudos:
Je ne suis plus étudiant en français ni prof de FLE, mais ça continue à me plaire quand je fais de petites améliorations de ma connaissance de la langue de Moliére. J’aurais aimé me rendre compte de certaines choses quand elles m’auraient aidé professionellement, mais bof.
setting up POSSE-style microblogging with a Hugo static site and Micro.blog
- kudos:I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).
Stack Exchange and digital labor
- kudos:Today, Stack Overflow announced that it was entering into a partnership with OpenAI to provide data from the former to the latter for the purposes of training ChatGPT, etc. I’ve used Stack Overflow a fair amount over the years, and there have also been times where I tried to get into some of the other Stack Exchange sites, contributing both questions and answers. I haven’t really been active on any of these sites in recent times, but I still decided to take a couple of minutes this afternoon and follow the advice of one outraged Mastodon post: delete my contributions and shut down my accounts.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 7)
- kudos:I didn’t listen to the finale all in one chunk, so I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have, but the excellent use of callbacks and flashbacks in that episode was enough to bump up my rating. I think this is also the first series I hadn’t heard before, so it was nice to hear some new content.
- kudos:
Faut que j’arrête d’écouter le nouvel album des Cowboys fringants en voiture—trop difficile de conduire les larmes aux yeux.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 6)
- kudos:Still fun! Just didn’t stand out as much as some of the other series.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 5)
- kudos:I really enjoy metahumor, and Finnemore’s talent for it is on full display in this series—even to the extent of calling himself out on overreliance on it. Doesn’t bother me, though!
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 4)
- kudos:I’ve been tempering my praise of this series through this relisten, but the time travel sketch in the finale is excellent, and there are other top notch examples of Finnemore’s humor scattered throughout. What’s more, the recordings of this series on the Internet Archive are actual recordings and have bits of continuity announcer on either end of the episodes. I just love that, for reasons I can’t fully articulate, and I wish all the series were like that.
merci Karl, merci Melissa
- kudos:Lundi matin, une amie et une collègue à moi est décédee bien trop jeune suite à un cancer. Ce n’est que quelques jours plus tard que j’ai appris l’existence du nouvel album des Cowboys fringants, un album posthume de Karl Tremblay qui lui aussi est décédée bien trop jeune suite à un cancer. Je suis content de pouvoir entendre Karl chanter sa propre mort pendant que je pense à la disparition de mon amie Melissa.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How do you build without over polluting? That's the challenge of new Catan board game'
- kudos:Really interested in this game. link to “How do you build without over polluting? That’s the challenge of new Catan board game”
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 3)
- kudos:I miss the traditional “storyteller” sketches at the end of every episode, but I know they’ll be back in future series, and there were plenty of laugh out loud moments in this one.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 2)
- kudos:This show continues to be fun, even if it wears off its genius on the third run. Some parts still make me laugh out loud, though!
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme (Series 1)
- kudos:This is the third time I’ve listened to this series in the past five years, and I wonder if I’m rating it a bit low because of that. At any rate, I couldn’t help myself from trying it again after finishing Cabin Pressure. I might like this show even better—Finnemore has more freedom to show off his gift for words and his intricate plotting and callbacks.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Cabin Pressure (Series 4 and Finale)
- kudos:It’s been about a decade since I was introduced to this show, and I’m very glad to finally have experienced the whole thing. The last season was fun, the finale was a nice wrap-up, and I really do think the whole thing is a masterpiece.
- kudos:
My favorite radio episodes to download from the Internet Archive are the ones that are actually recorded from a broadcast, so you get a minute or so of continuity announcer at the beginning and the end.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Cabin Pressure (Series 3)
- kudos:This series feels like Finnemore kicking things up a notch. There are some interesting new character arcs in play, and it’s fun to see Finnemore playing with the fact that one of his actors is now taking on the role of Sherlock Holmes. He’s also clearly having fun subverting some audience expectations with stories and characters. I hadn’t heard this series before, and it was fun to come back to it!
some praise for Dumbing of Age
- kudos:I’ve been a big fan of webcomics since I first discovered they existed in the early-to-mid 2000s. I’ve been following Order of the Stick for about twenty years(!), I’ve read the entire web run of Dr. McNinja, xkcd makes frequent appearance in my lecture slides, and there are other comics that I’ve jumped in and out of over time. It hasn’t been that long since I started following Dork Tower again, but last Fall, it did a crossover with Dumbing of Age, which I mentally noted I should check out sometime.
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Cabin Pressure (Series 2)
- kudos:My journey through Cabin Pressure continues! I can’t remember how much of this series I’ve previously listened to—definitely not the Christmas special, but probably the rest of it. At any rate, it continues to have exceptional writing and lovely acting. Radio is underrated, and John Finnemore is perhaps the best example of that.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Story Behind The XZ Backdoor Is Way More Fascinating Than It Should Be'
- kudos:I’ve been meaning to read more about this story, so I’m grateful for Masnick’s summary here. link to “The Story Behind The XZ Backdoor Is Way More Fascinating Than It Should Be”
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Cabin Pressure (Series 1)
- kudos:It’s been ages since I’ve listened to this, though I’ve listened to some of John Finnemore’s other work in the meantime. It’s such an excellent show: brilliantly written, well acted, and a real joy to listen to. I’m confident I haven’t listened to all four series, though I can’t remember which bits I’ve missed. Looking forward to finding out!
🎙️ radioblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Primary Phase)
- kudos:I first picked this up through an Audible deal several years ago, with the idea that it would help with the move from Michigan to Kentucky (I can’t remember if I wasn’t yet anti-Audible or if it was just a good deal that I couldn’t pass up with the whole family living off my grad school fellowship). Anyway, the U-Haul didn’t have an aux jack or Bluetooth, so my brother-in-law and I cranked my phone as loud as it would go and tried to make out the jokes over the highway noise.
Arthur Dent, the bulldozer, and generative AI
- kudos:This week, I decided to see if it was worth relistening to the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. I’m having trouble committing to things to listen to right now, and I’ve found in recent years that I don’t enjoy H2G2 as much as I once did, so it’s hard to say whether I’ll follow through with this. However, I did get far enough in to the first episode to enjoy Arthur Dent’s confrontation with Mr.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New Catan game has overpopulation, pollution, fossil fuels, and clean energy'
- kudos:Interesting! I haven’t been into Catan for years, but this could bring me back. link to “New Catan game has overpopulation, pollution, fossil fuels, and clean energy”
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Borgen (Season 1)
- kudos:I struggled with what to rate this series. It’s great in a lot of ways, and it’s fun to watch a political show that is based in a country I don’t know very well (plus, explaining parliamentary coalitions and other election systems to my spouse made me feel smart). That said, it’s also not as tight and polished as something like The West Wing, and while it might not be fair to compare the two, it’s inevitable.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'After years of trying, the U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws'
- kudos:I have a scar from a nearly 20-year old table saw injury, and that made this fascinating to read. link to “After years of trying, the U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Nancy Wins at Friendship: A Nancy Comic Collection, by Olivia Jaimes
- kudos:This time, kiddo checked this out on hoopla, and I decided to read it, too. As I’ve said before, gag-a-day comics aren’t really my thing, and as delightful as Nancy is, I still can’t say that it’s my favorite.