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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Have people ever used Snopes as a verb, à la Google? Or is this just the best throwaway detail in a science fiction short story ever?

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Rather than feel dumb for losing control of my bike taking a turn too fast, I am choosing to focus on the wreck’s superficial similarity to the Akira slide.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The thing about the Kobayashi Maru'

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The Kobayashi Maru scenario is one of the best things to come out of Star Trek, and this is one of the best takes on it I’ve read. link to “The thing about the Kobayashi Maru”

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, by CRC Payne

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Look, I’m still tired of Batman stories, and I don’t think this series really pushes back against the grittiness and violence that finally pushed me over the edge, but this is as close as you get to “wholesome Batman,” and it’s kind of fun.

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Finally trying Bigelow’s “Constant Comment” after several months of meaning to. So far, it ranks pretty high on my list of non-desserty teas.

setting up an iOS image posting POSSE workflow for Hugo

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Several days ago, I posted that: One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it. A couple of days later, I realized I wasn’t alone in this when Alex Sirac picked up the post on their website, and it got another sympathetic comment there, too.

📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Diplomat (Season 2)

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I still enjoyed this season, but I don’t think it’s as good as the first one. The characters and situations remain interesting, but the plot feels more slapdash and less carefully constructed than it did in the first season.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Batman: Failsafe, by Chip Zdarsky

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I picked this up because it had Zdarsky’s name on it, and Jorge Jiménez’s art looked gorgeous. It was a fun read, but there are all the problems with it that I have with most modern Batman: It’s violent, absurd, and bogged down in continuity. I’m glad I tried it, but I don’t miss Batman all that much.

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Love me a creative rickroll, so I’m glad my brother sent me this right after I got my image posting workflow working.

image from

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, by Glenn Fleishman

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I’ve listened to Glenn on The Incomparable for years, and a rule I try to follow is to pay for creative works from creators whose content I’ve often consumed for free. This sounded interesting, I do like comics, and so I bought it on a whim. I don’t think buying a print copy was ever in the cards for me, but I wish I’d at least read it on a bigger screen than my phone: It’s beautifully designed, and there are lots of visual goodies in there.

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It’s been messy, but pretty sure I’ve finally figured out how to post images to my website (and from there to social media) from my phone.

image from

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '[Article] <You have reached the clipping limit for this item> – Alex'

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It never occurred to me that you could use a Kindle in such a “de-Amazoned” way… and it also infuriates me that Amazon still interferes this much. link to “[Article] – Alex”

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media'

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I agree with a lot of this post. link to “Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media”

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I Miss What The Mandalorian Was'

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Excellent article that sums up a lot of my thinking on this show. link to “I Miss What The Mandalorian Was”

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… and as long as I’m posting about fun-but-unnecessary website hacks I don’t have time for, I’d also love to redo the taxonomies and templates on my site to make it easy to navigate media reviews by author, title, series, etc. No one would use it but me, but I’d have a lot of fun with it.

- kudos:

One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it.

some thoughts on joining Bluesky, maintaining platform independence, and tweaking Mastodon

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It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts. I’m on Bluesky now, I guess? First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A classic that really made me laugh this morning: Pachelbel’...'

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Nearly spit out my lunch while watching this! link to “A classic that really made me laugh this morning: Pachelbel’…”

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Il y a beaucoup plus de photos de train sur mes fils Mastodon et Bluesky qu’il y en avait sur mon fil Twitter, et ça donne de la joie.

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Il arrive que je passerai bientôt quelques jours en Alsace, et j’accepterais avec plaisir des conseils pour quoi faire pendant mon séjour.

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“Your browser settings are preventing an optimal experience with Microsoft 365.” Yes, and that’s how I know they’re set up properly.

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Despite all the Bad Stuff happening right now, what my brain has chosen to get anxious about this morning is how I have my RSS + Micro.blog + Mastodon + Bluesky reader set up.

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Happy to report that I won this morning’s game of precipitation chicken—didn’t even need the rain gear I put on out of caution.

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Another fun bike commuting game is precipitation chicken: How much of this rain can I wait out before delaying my ride in makes me late for class?

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I have long felt that “Anne Ominous” would be a good name for a character in a superhero story—and long bemoaned that I’m not creative enough to create that story myself.

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One of my favorite things that Lexington does is to hold a bike light awareness “Glow Ride” the night before the fall time change. It’s been a family tradition for us and a lot of fun.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says'

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I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out. link to “Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says”

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Pretty sure I just saw a student dressed up for Halloween as a Skrull, and it occurs to me that anyone could claim to be in costume as a Skrull.

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A lot of my Hugo hacks are ugly, but I’m happy that I’ve figured it out well enough to be able to do the hacks in the first place.

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Hier, je me demandais combien de temps encore cette période de bonne santé mentale (qui existait depuis quelques mois) durerait encore. Ce matin, j’ai malheurusement la réponse.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow

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I had some driving to do this weekend, so I tore through the audiobook of this at 2x speed. I may be a but harsh on it with my rating, but I just didn’t really love it? It’s well written and interesting but didn’t cohere enough for me. I wonder if reading it 20 years ago when it first came out might have changed my views. Some of it might have seemed more prescient, and some of its attitudes less problematic.

Atomic Robo, the Book of Mormon, and Animal Man

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I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

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After the brilliant first season of The Mandalorian, I put some related art up in my office. As the show has gone on, though, I’ve gotten less and less impressed with it, to the point that I wonder why I keep the art up.

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My favorite detail from Homestar Runner production is how the off-brand voices in the low-quality animation segments are just the best efforts of the non-voice-actor guy to imitate the voices his brother does.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition (Book Two), by Grant Morrison

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I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.

📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition (Book One), by Grant Morrison

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I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much. I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).