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.
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🔗 linkblog: Radio Télévision Suisse Le plan national des pistes cyclables suisses avance à bon rythme
Entre les vélos, les transports publics, et les trains, il me semble qu’il ne serait pas trop difficile de vivre en Suisse sans voiture, et je trouve cela très attirant.
📚 bookblog: Catfight (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
Dumb but fun is how I would describe this. It’s got good art and an interesting premise, but the longer it went on, the more tired I got of twists and the harder time I had following the story. It wasn’t bad—but nothing special either.
📚 bookblog: Brutal Nature Omnibus (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
This one almost won me over. It has good art, and the kind of worldbuilding that goes with an interesting idea rather than explain things. It had a bit more violence than I like and some objectifying art that wasn’t really necessary, but what really lost me was an unnecessary fridging late in the second arc. It could have been something interesting—and frankly still was—but that scene cancelled out a lot of that potential.
📚 bookblog: TRVE KVLT (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I didn’t want to like this. The IDW comics bundle I’ve been working through has been kind of a mixed bag, and this was weird from the get-go. A fast-food employee robs an entire strip mall, which gets him entangled in an effort to summon the devil on earth. It doesn’t sound like my thing at all.
It’s so unashamed of its weirdness, though, that it comes all the way around to amazing.
📚 bookblog: The Kill Lock (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I feel kind of weird rating this above any of the Earthdivers volumes, but hey. The art feels a bit off sometimes, and there were some bits that I didn’t quite follow. The character designs and worldbuilding were great—weird sometimes but stronger for it. The plot was interesting, with some good twists that kept me hooked.
📚 bookblog: Je vais rester (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
En fait, j’ai lu Stay, la traduction anglaise que j’ai trouvée à la bibliothèque chez moi. Je n’aime pas lire les BD en traduction—traduire « kebab » comme « gyro », ça se comprend, mais c’est quand-même insupportable—mais je ne voulais pas rater la possibilité de lire une vraie BD non plus,
L’art est magnifique, et si l’histoire est un peu bizarre, elle est touchante aussi. C’est impressionnant combien cette équipe a pu raconter une histoire tellement émouvante avec si peu de paroles.
📚 bookblog: Star Trek: Lower Decks, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This is a very Ryan Northy comic, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a great adaptation of the Lower Decks vibe (and Fenoglio’s art is a fantastic recreation), but it also has a lot of North’s signature moves. I love his physical comic adaptation of webcomics’ alt text jokes, his voice in those jokes, and his fun with science and public domain characters. I don’t know how much more there is in this series, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for additional volumes.
🍿 movieblog: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Had to watch this after finishing Andor, and I spent the first half of it being disappointed??? I thought I remembered this being one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but after the depth and maturity of its tv prequel, it feels kind of superficial.
The last few sequences won me back, though. Andor is the superior story, but this is a fine action movie and a marvelous piece of fanservice.
📺 tvblog: Andor Season 2 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This was Star Wars at its best, and there is (unfortunately) no better time than now for it to come out.
I’ve wrestled a lot recently with the tension between my love for Star Wars and my aspiration toward non-violence. I don’t know that I agree with this series’s implicit argument that sometimes ugly things are necessary to make a better world, but I appreciate that it deals with that ugliness rather than just letting Luke blow up the Death Star without counting how many people that act of self-defense killed.
📚 bookblog: Reminding Myself That Despite What That Sign on the Highway Says, Hell Isn't Real (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This webcomic is just so good! I really enjoy reading it in collection format, even if it hasn’t been all that long since I read it strip-by-strip. This holds true even if this collection doesn’t have my favorite storylines in it.
Looking forward to next year’s collection!
📚 bookblog: The Hunger and the Dusk, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I picked this up (along with Arca, some titles I’ll be reading and reviewing in the future, and a few that I’m going to skip because they are Not My Thing) in a Humble Bundle for recent IDW titles. I’ve read Wilson’s run on Ms. Marvel (or at least most of it), but I’ve bounced off some of her other stuff, so I wasn’t sure what I’d think of this.
📚 bookblog: Saga, Volume 12 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I forgot for a while there that I was waiting for this to come out on hoopla! I finally remembered yesterday, looked it up, and checked it out.
I think I’ll appreciate this volume more when I can binge read it alongside some of the others. I forgot some of the context for the major plot developments, which got in the way some. It continues to be a weird-but-amazing series, though, and I can’t believe how easily it hooks me, despite forgetting the context and despite the levels of blood and violence being higher than I usually tolerate.
brief, first thoughts on Flipboard's Surf app
I don’t remember exactly when I signed up for the beta of Flipboard’s Surf “social web browser”—probably shortly after blogging about it here—but my invite came in, and I finally installed the beta yesterday to give it a look. This isn’t a proper review so much as a few off-the-cuff thoughts based on a few minutes of fiddling around but those thoughts are mixed.
When I first linkblogged about Surf, I said that I wanted to see more apps like this, and trying out the app only reinforces that impression.
on abstracting human life in games
Abstraction—and especially the abstraction of humans and their lives—has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notes—I have fond memories of the audiobook but can’t recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellul’s writing, which I’ve been consuming a lot of lately.
📚 bookblog: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things.
That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality.
📚 bookblog: Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This is more the kind of thing I’d expect from OOTS “purchase only” content. The additional stories were fun, the author commentary was interesting, and there’s at least one panel I might be able to work into a conference presentation, so that’s nice.
📚 bookblog: On the Origin of PCs (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
Webcomics break my reviewing assumptions in interesting ways. I recently spent a lot of time binging the OOTS archives, with over 1,000 pages of material, without writing any reviews, because that wasn’t a “book.” This 75ish-page comic, though, gets a review.
Anyway, that binge reminded me of how much I love this webcomic, which is why I’m kind of surprised not to like this prequel. Maybe it’s because it’s anchored to the beginning, gag-a-strip format, before the story gets really interesting.
Jacques Ellul and Civilization VI
Okay, so I know that most of my long-form blogging for the past few months has touched on Jacques Ellul in some way, but I’m reading a lot of his work right now, and I wouldn’t keep referencing his work if I didn’t find it relevant in some way. I’m particularly pleased that Ellul’s writing is helping me revisit some ideas (and concerns) that I had over a decade ago, when I was applying to and then first beginning grad school.
📚 bookblog: The Adventures of Mary Darling (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Cory Doctorow reviewed this book on his Pluralistic blog recently, and since I typically enjoy the books he recommends (well, the ones I try, anyway), I gave it a try. The writing style is not my favorite, and I don’t know that it needed to be one of those books that is written by an in-universe character, but both of those fit really well into the themes of the book, so I shouldn’t complain.
📺 tvblog: Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This apparently took us two months to watch, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if that hadn’t been the case. I actually didn’t really enjoy the season arc so much—individual episodes were great, though, and the show continues to be fun. Hard to believe there’s only one season left to get through!
affiches de cinéma dont je me souviens
Ayant grandi dans l’Église de Jésus-Christ des saints des derniers jours, c’était normal que je m’engage comme missionnaire mormon à l’âge de 19 ans. Comme j’avais déjà beaucoup étudié le français, on m’a affecté au service missionnaire en France et en Suisse, où j’ai donc habité entre 2007 et 2009.
Mes souvenirs de cette période de ma vie sont un peu compliqués. Comme je n’ai plus les mêmes croyances religieuses, j’ai certains regrets.