Today’s adventures in helping kiddo with a science fair project include: 1) discovering I can still do long division and 2) complaining that the school worksheet organizes data into rows and columns differently than I would have.

I would appreciate the district’s assurance that “state tests cannot measure important aspects of a children’s learning” a lot more if the examples they listed weren’t also things they were trying to quantify in other ways.

…when did Garfield Without Garfield get mainstream enough that my kid can check out a book of it on Libby?

We have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars at our local indie bookstore, justifying each cent as helping it stay independent. Seeing it get acquired by B&N is devastating, no matter how much independence they claim they will let it keep.

me: “hey, kiddo, can you plug your headphones into your Switch?”

kiddo: “ugh, fine, I guess SOME people don’t want to hear the melodious sound of going through portals”

me: “…”

kiddo: begins humming Portal theme song louder than the sound effects were coming through her Switch

Earlier today, I wrote a review of the second season of Severance where I mentioned how hard it is to follow up on a stellar first take on an idea. I was really nervous about this sequel in the same way, but it really works!

Kiddo somewhat begrudgingly admitted she liked the first movie enough for us to watch this one over the long weekend. It was great! I have been giggling about Ben Reilly jokes for the past 24 hours. I also love how Reilly looks like he’s from a 90s comic book, and the whole movie does a good job of following up with the creative blend of animation styles (the LEGO joke was fine, but the Da Vinci Vulture was fun, as was the “-Ed.” joke, which I’m surprised they didn’t use in the first one.

Look, I’m biased, but it feels like a self-own for a “school picture day” flyer to use an AI-generated approximation of a school picture instead of an actual photograph?

Got an AI-generated flyer from kiddo’s Kentucky school today that put a Texas flag in the artwork, and I have questions.

Looks like it’s another year of wondering why the ParentSquare school communication app’s website will show image previews to logged out visitors. Better than full-size images, I guess, but why can someone who isn’t logged in see anything?

This movie is a pure delight, and I’m glad I talked kiddo into watching it with me. Maybe it’s time to finally watch the sequel after three years of meaning to but never getting around to it.

“‘Gotta scratch ’em all!’ Yeah, it’s from when Ash had a lottery ticket phase.”

Sans le faire exprès, il nous est arrivé (à ma fille et moi) de passer un été du jeu vidéo français. En début d’été, j’ai acheté « Rayman Legends ». On avait beaucoup aimé jouer à « Rayman Origins » sur notre Wii avant de nous offrir une Switch. Comme ça nous manquait un peu, j’ai décidé d’acheter la suite pour retourner à ces souvenirs-là. Rayman me paraît un jeu bien français, même si je ne suis pas sûr de pouvoir défendre cette impression. C’est surtout l’animation du jeu, qui me semble mise en vedette d’une façon qui est digne d’un pays qui valorise la bande dessinée et le dessin animé.

Kiddo and I went to go see this at the library, and in the few minutes before they actually hit play, whoever was running the event played some of the Blu-ray special features to tide us over. One of them was about all of the “easter eggs” we were going to see in the movie. This annoyed me a bit, because if I’d heard one thing about the movie, it’s that it was stuffed full of (perhaps gratuitous) Nintendo references, and I don’t think it’s an “easter egg” if the movie is built around hitting you over the head with reference after reference after reference.

First impression of my new push mower: I get why they aren’t more popular, but I’m also mad that in decades of mowing lawns, I never knew it was a viable modern option and not just a prop for movies set in the 50s or whatever.

I genuinely appreciate that my job is flexible enough that I get to be primary parent over the summer, but I’d be lying if I said that I enjoy every single moment of it. Enough of my self-conception is wrapped up in my professional identity (and enough of my anxiety is wrapped up specifically in parenting) that it has taken some real re-orientation over the past several years to turn this into a more positive experience. This summer has not been without bumps in the road, but it feels like it has gone particularly well.

I have the lowest possible standards for feeling victorious at home improvement tasks, and yet I so rarely meet that standard that I will always take that feeling when it comes.

I have purchased a reel mower because it is less expensive than buying a replacement battery for our electric mower, which was itself a replacement battery for the one we originally had.

Okay, you weird French blobs: It’s time to try out Heave Ho 2.

Am I playing fast and loose with tracking kiddo’s time for summer reading programs? Yes, but she’s also a kid who never gets angrier at me than when I tell her to put down a book to come to dinner, so I think I can get away with it.

Look, there were good parts to this movie, including jokes that made me laugh and scenes that made me tear up. It just seems weird to feel continuity lockout from a Toy Story movie (never having seen the fourth one), and that made me wonder if this movie needed to exist.

What’s more, I have a rule of thumb that good tech criticism in fiction needs to target the companies as much as the computers, and this fails that test. While the movie stops short of moral panic (and intentionally so), it gets close, and critiques that could be good feel a bit shallow and obvious to me.

My mother-in-law just picked up a Snorlax mug and asked “is this a cat or Dracula?”

Had a family discussion over breakfast about not following the example of certain behaviors depicted in music videos (taking the rotoscoped hands of strange men reaching out from comic books).

Like Icarus, we have soared to new heights* only to now find that we have flown to close to the sun**

*gotten away for years with buying knock-off versions of IKEA furniture

**that our new, official IKEA accessories aren’t compatible with them

Spouse lines: “We christened our car—wait, I’m not religious. We ‘heathened’ our car ‘Chester.’”

Spending part of my Father’s Day afternoon exploring a rhyming dictionary with kiddo in an urgent care waiting room, and I actually think that’s kind of perfect.