Quick thought post-Mando and pre-TRoS: What Star Wars has given me a world in which to tell stories—not just movies. I played RPG campaigns that made the prequel trilogy look good, because the world held up even when the movies didn’t.

I hear Italian PM Giuseppe Conte’s name fairly often on Francophone radio, but I nearly always hear it first as José Piquanté and then fix it in post.

TIL that Star Trek’s “warp speed” is translated as the vastly inferior “distortion” in French and that at least one French news outlet has therefore adopted the translation “Operation Lightning Speed” for the U.S. vaccine effort.

Just minutes after complaining that Harry Turtledove works so many recaps into each book of the series I’m reading, I discovered that I’d actually skipped a much earlier book. I hadn’t noticed because the recaps were so helpful in catching me up.

I recently ordered a book directly from a French publisher, and thanks to COVID, watching the FedEx tracking updates is the closest thing I’ve had (or will have) to vacation travel for a long time.