Spencer Greenhalgh likes RSS and thinks you're great for using it

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:18:39 -0400

Nan, mais c’est qui le type qui a traduit “se tenir au drone de secours” comme “stand with the relief drone” en Heave Ho 2 ? Parce que c’est bien différent, ça.

🍿 movieblog: Hundreds of Beavers (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:45:25 -0400

I hate a dumb movie, but I love a movie that is so intentionally dumb that it loops right around to genius. There are excellent jokes of all kinds in here—from riffs on video games to subtle musical jokes—and even if I could have done without an “Indian fur trader” character, I’m hard pressed to find anything (else) that gave me pause in this movie. I wish I hadn’t watched it on my phone while doing chores, because I’m sure I would have gotten even more out of it on a full screen.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:53:16 -0400

J’ai déjà écrit sur combien j’aime le faux français dans Heave Ho 2, mais j’avais oublié mon exemple préféré : quand le chef de cuisine prononce « burger » comme un verbe du premier groupe.

🍿 movieblog: Airplane! (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:37:37 -0400

A deserved masterpiece that I enjoyed watching despite much that’s aged—some things were just out of date while others were more problematic.

☕ teablog: Teavana, Classic Chai (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:36:20 -0400

☕ teablog: Teavana, Classic Chai (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-08-02-serviceable-chai/

☕ teablog: Living Water Tea House, High Mountain Rougui (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:35:25 -0400

I usually feel guilty about preferring corporate dessert-y teas to fancy blends, but this blend has dispelled some of that. It wasn’t bad at first, and I was glad to give a fancy tea a try, but the taste wound up being so strong that the next thing I steeped in my tea tumbler tasted of this rather than what I’d been hoping for. Meh.

🔗 linkblog: D&D is getting World of Warcraft and Star Wars crossovers

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:59:23 -0400

I first encountered TTRPGs through the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars game, which was a heavily reskinned version of 3.5. I would be very tempted to pick up a Star Wars sourcebook for 5e.

☕ teablog: Rare Bird Coffee Roasters, Hojicha Latte (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:39:27 -0400

☕ teablog: Rare Bird Coffee Roasters, Hojicha Latte (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-26-hojicha-is/

📺 tvblog: Severance Season 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:17:29 -0400

I avoided this series for a while because I was afraid that it would provoke some existential angst, but wow is it ever good. Despite what I just said, existential horror is my favorite horror, and this series delivers; it also has analog horror vibes that I find delightful.

I would say that I regret not having watched this earlier except it’s nice not having to wait for the second season in real time.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:10:26 -0400

Uh, tandoori paneer tikka is amazing. I did not know you could prepare cheese like this, and I love it.

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 7 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:37:35 -0400

Cette dernière saison est un peu bizarre, car on voit bien qu’elle est divisée en deux parties, dont la deuxième n’est pas vraiment nécessaire pour conclure l’histoire de la série. Pourtant, j’aime bien ces personnages, et j’ai donc été content de leur dire au revoir comme ça.

C’est une jolie série à laquelle je m’intéressais depuis plusieurs années. Même si c’est bête de le dire, je suis fier de moi d’avoir enfin tout regardé !

🔗 linkblog: DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:05:34 -0400

🔗 linkblog: DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-23-what-a/

📚 bookblog: The Way of the House Husband, Volume 4 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:52:16 -0400

Would I read more of this? Absolutely. But I’m also glad to have exhausted the volumes available at my library, because as fun and cute as the premise is, there’s only so much I can read in a short time without getting tired of it.

📚 bookblog: The Way of the House Husband, Volume 3 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:52:59 -0400

Part of me feels like there’s only so long you can drag along the premise of “retired yakuza becomes stay-at-home spouse,” and a lot of the humor here builds on, rather than outright challenges, traditional gender roles. Yet, it remains a fun read!

📚 bookblog: The Way of the House Husband, Volume 2 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:34:08 -0400

This series is clearly formulaic and episodic, but it’s still fun (and since I struggled to follow the ongoing plot of My Hero Academia, maybe it’s an easier entry point for me).

📚 bookblog: The Way of the House Husband, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:32:25 -0400

📚 bookblog: The Way of the House Husband, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-19-cozy-yakuza/

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:00:05 -0400

Last night, I decided to return a bunch of unread volumes of My Hero Academia to the library, and I am feeling uncultured.

les petites victoires d'un francophone aspirant

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:58:21 -0400

Je viens de passer trois jours à un colloque sur Jacques Ellul, un penseur français qui m’intéresse beaucoup en ce moment (et depuis déjà un peu de temps). J’avoue sans honte qu’une des choses qui m’a attiré chez Ellul, c’était sa francophonie, car le français m’est très cher et je suis toujours à la recherche des moyens d’entraîner mes propres capacités francophones.

C’était donc un grand plaisir de rencontre d’autres francophones à ce colloque (même si la plupart des gens qui y assistaient étaient des anglophones qui lisaient Ellul uniquement en traduction—je ne critique pas, je constate). J’ai pu bavarder avec deux Bordelais.e.s sans trop dire des bêtises, je crois que j’ai bien réussi à savoir quand je pouvais tutoyer (alors que la plupart du temps, j’ai du mal à comprendre ces nuances), et j’ai même fait la bise pour la première fois depuis bien des années (en disant au revoir à une nouvelle amie).

Même si j’avais des raisons surtout professionnelles pour assister à ce colloque, ça m’a fait vraiment—mais VRAIMENT—du bien au niveau personnel et « francophone aspirant » d’avoir eu ces petites victoires au cours de trois jours.

☕ teablog: Druids Garden Tea Company, Vanilla Cherry Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:13:51 -0400

Kiddo brought this back from a Ren Faire for me, and it is great. You can taste cherry (a lot of it), and there are clear hints of vanilla and an aftertaste of peppercorn in the chai. It’s better sipped over the course of a morning than finished in a rush, but I’m looking forward to going through this whole bag.

☕ teablog: Teavana, Jasmine Citrus (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:08:48 -0400

☕ teablog: Teavana, Jasmine Citrus (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-16-not-bad/

☕ teablog: Teavana, English Breakfast (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:02:07 -0400

☕ teablog: Teavana, English Breakfast (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-16-this-tea/

📚 bookblog: Dungeon Crawler Carl (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:54:56 -0400

I honestly didn’t know what I would think of this book. I’d heard some complaints and caveats about it, but some folks also highly recommended it, including one of the people who made a caveat (and who is outspoken on problematic social attitudes), so I thought it was worth a try.

My verdict is that this feels like fanfiction, which isn’t supposed to be an insult but also captures some of my own caveats. Why compare it with fanfiction? Some parts feel unwieldy and overly explanatory of the worldbuilding. It does take a certain pleasure in being transgressive, and sometimes that does cross a line. Yet, I meant what I said about comparng to fiction not being an insult, because it is creative and interesting in the way that sometimes only self-published stuff can be.

I have the second book on hold, so I’m interested to see where the series goes, but I’m also not totally upset that it will be weeks before my hold comes in.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:28:42 -0400

I don’t mind a genuinely difficult escape room (or at-home escape room game), but one advertised as difficult that just feels arbitrary is just frustrating.

🍿 movieblog: This is Spinal Tap (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:56:32 -0400

🍿 movieblog: This is Spinal Tap (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-07-09-i-get/

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:50:32 -0400

J’ai commencé à écouter Stromae ce matin, sans trop me demander si ça représentait de la trahison après la défaite de mes compatriotes aux mains (aux pieds ?) des Belges hier. Mais bon, j’aime bien Stromae, je m’en fiche un peu du foot, et en tout cas, les USA méritent du châtiment en ce moment.

📚 bookblog: I'm a Trash Goblin Who Craves Mess (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:17:12 -0400

This storyline is a bit tough for me, but reading it in a collection reminds me of how much better Dumbing of Age is when you can read a storyline all at once. Really enjoyed the read even if it’s not my favorite arc.

📚 bookblog: Medallion Status (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:18:56 -0400

I don’t regret reading this book, but it’s not as good as Hodgman’s other memoir. I don’t feel like it holds together as well, it feels anchored in 2019 in a way that doesn’t work for me, and I always get bugged when someone picks on “reckless cyclists” when so much of our world and infrastructure are stacked against cycling (though I’m confident that some cyclists are the entitled white dudes that Hodgman is taking aim at in that particular story—I just think there are better ways to skewer white dudes than targeting those who travel by bike).

📚 bookblog: Rebirth (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:45:48 -0400

The finale of this series (or at least this arc) focused more on the parts I liked less, so meh. I still enjoyed the series though and would be interested to read more Andolfo.

📺 tvblog: Sugar Season 1 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:06:43 -0400

I was ready to rate this higher when I watched the season finale last night, but after sleeping on it, I’m actually grumpier about the series than I realized. I loved the first few episodes, but I’m not sure the twist pays off, and the final episode felt stuffed too full. There’s a bit too much going on in the series, and while I’d gladly watch the second season, I won’t mind if we don’t get to it.

📚 bookblog: The Hunt (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:04:57 -0400

Gotta say that I don’t like the fantasy elements of this story as much at the digs at totalitarian policing of gender and sexuality, but this second volume is still a good read.

📚 bookblog: Awakening (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:03:33 -0400

This comic is very weird, but the art is good, the translation is excellent (or at least I don’t think of it being translated), and the social commentary is very well done.

📚 bookblog: The Boy Born with Everything (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:12:34 -0400

I waited a couple of days before writing my review, and I had trouble remembering what I had read. I really want to like this series, and I don’t actively dislike it, but that is just not a great sign.

☕ teablog: Trader Joe's, English Breakfast (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:42:13 -0400

This is good! I thought I might have oversteeped my first cup, but it was a delicious contribution to my breakfast, and I’m looking forward to trying more of it.

📚 bookblog: All Might (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:14:30 -0400

I enjoyed this volume more, likely because I read it in a shorter timespan. I still feel hesitant about the series, perhaps because I have read so dang much superhero fiction that it’s hard to feel like there’s anything new here. I still have a bunch of volumes checked out, though, and I do want to keep going.

📚 bookblog: The Areas of My Expertise (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:10:09 -0400

I can’t remember how long it’s been since I listened to this the first time. It is artfully done, and the Jonathan Coulton addition is tremendous. Some jokes feel like they haven’t aged well (either because they’re simply not timeless or because I don’t think Hodgman would make the same joke today), but the low-key absurdity of the project really appeals to me.

📚 bookblog: Rage, You Damned Nerd (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:27:16 -0500

I read this in scattered chunks before and during a busy week of family camp, so this might not be the measured assessment this deserves. There are things to like here, and I want to continue trying the series, but I confess to having trouble following this particular volume. I’m still learning to tell many of the characters from each other (and a LOT get introduced here), and manga conventions remain unfamiliar to me, so I’m still trying to get used to the medium.

📚 bookblog: Reagan Youth (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:52:28 -0500

This series just does not work for me, I think. I passed it up countless times at various libraries before coming into PDFs of it through a Humble Bundle. That was also not a done deal until I read Remender’s Black Science, which I mostly appreciated and figured that maybe I should try this one, too.

It was shortly into the second volume that I ruled it out for good, so I guess this is a partial review of that, too. I get that the series is supposed to be an allegory or whatever, but the violence and grossness just does not work for me, whatever it is supposed to mean more broadly.

📺 tvblog: For All Mankind Season 5 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:32:41 -0400

I still recognize the bones of why I’ve liked this show for 5+ years, but this season feels like a stretch. The Titan mission seems like the worst planned space mission of all time, Dev makes a lot of dumb decisions so that he can have a change of heart later, and many of the characters feel like dominoes to be set up in specific ways so that the writers can set off a particular chain reaction. It was fine, but not as good as past seasons.

☕ teablog: Coffee Crossing, Almond Cookie (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:04:31 -0400

☕ teablog: Coffee Crossing, Almond Cookie (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-06-08-late-night/

📚 bookblog: Other Confections (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:00:41 -0400

See, here’s a volume that is also reallll dark but has enough anti-nihilism in it to make it shine. This is apparently the last of the volumes I own, and I don’t mind not having any more to read… this series isn’t quite as much fun the second time through.

📚 bookblog: Tiny Lives (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:58:25 -0400

Ice Cream Man rides a fine line between nihilism and anti-nihilism, and this volume was too far on the side of the former for me to really enjoy a reread.

📚 bookblog: Hopscotch Mélange (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:56:19 -0400

Don’t remember how much I liked these stories the first time around, but the worldbuilding of Ice Cream Man is my least favorite part, and without the novelty of a first read, it was just meh.

📚 bookblog: As Good As New (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:54:06 -0400

It didn’t change my life, but this mix of genie magic, techbro survival bunker, and passion for the theater was a fun combination.

📚 bookblog: All the Birds in the Sky (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:51:28 -0400

This book was exploding with creativity: I loved the idea of a two-second time machine as something that just kind of exists but hasn’t caught the public eye, to the extent that it’s forgotten about quickly in the narrative. I also appreciate any story that takes shots at tech bros, and the magic in the book was really interesting.

That said, there were seams in the book that stopped me from giving it full marks. I didn’t follow all of the plot developments (especially the end), it sometimes felt like it was trying to be too cute, and I didn’t always get what Anders was going for with the overarching themes. Still really good, though!

📚 bookblog: Izuku Midoriya: Origin (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:46:31 -0400

I picked this up on a whim while visiting a Japanese bookstore with family. I’ve long felt that of the great comics traditions, manga is one I know less well than I should. I’d heard this name enough to trust buying it without knowing much about it, and I enjoyed reading it on the plane back from Los Angeles. I’ve checked out several of the subsequent volumes from local libraries, and we’ll see how this goes!

📚 bookblog: The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:14:20 -0700

There’s an interesting idea here, but I don’t know if it’s enough to build a short story around.

☕ teablog: Bigelow, English Teatime (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:32:08 -0700

This was one of the better parts of a mediocre hotel breakfast, but that’s not high praise. I’d try it again, though.

📚 bookblog: Strange Neapolitan (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 31 May 2026 16:40:49 -0500

Caleb is my favorite in this series, and so this volume gets full marks for introducing his anti-nihilism.

📚 bookblog: Rainbow Sprinkles (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 31 May 2026 10:56:38 -0400

The first several volumes in this series came in an Image Humble Bundle I’m trying to complete so that I justify the money I spent on it, so I guess it’s time for a reread!

While I still semi-regret starting the series on hoopla last time, I’m glad I read the first few volumes together that time, because these first few issues are not my thing. I don’t mind the bleakness of Ice Cream Man (well, most of the time), but gore and ick are NOT my thing, and they are present here. My favorite parts are yet to come, but what I like in this series (almost despite myself) is definitely here already.

rediscovering Jonathan Coulton this morning

Fri, 29 May 2026 07:45:29 -0400

Ever since importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app back in March, I’ve been able to revisit things I tweeted over the years as part of my almost-daily scroll through Day One’s “on this day” feature. (In fact, it’s an almost-daily scroll because I’m having to purge the tweets that actually don’t work well as journal entries). That’s how I learned this morning that twelve years ago today, I reached out to Jonathan Coulton on Twitter to ask if the line “je suis celui qui suis” in his “barely remembered French” track Je suis Rick Springfield was an intentional reference to a similar line in the Bible or just a “crazy coincidence.”

I don’t remember if Coulton responded to my tweet, and my Twitter archive doesn’t seem to include replies (which is part of the reason why I’m purging so many of them from Day One after all), but reading the post this morning got me thinking about Coulton. He’s one of those artists that I really like when I remember he exists, but I don’t always remember that he does. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Les Cowboys Fringants, a new-to-me They Might Be Giants album (which is actually a decade old, because I also forget about how much I like TMBG), and the Train Valley 2 soundtrack. In fact, nearly four years ago, I wrote a shorter, similar post about rediscovering his music, but that obviously didn’t stick.

This is all somewhat surprising given the amount of my mental real estate Coulton has occupied over the past 15+ years. In a Facebook post from 2010 (which also appears in Day One thanks to an earlier import), I bragged about weirding out my roommates by listening to him. Around that same time, I bought a stuffed monkey toy and a hobby horse so that I could create a mashup stuffed animal for my then-fiancée as a reference to Coulton’s Skullcrusher Mountain. Back when I was teaching French 102, I would actually use a line from Je suis Rick Springfield (« je suis un chic type / qui joue de la guitare ») as an example of the e caduc in French (for all the clumsiness of his French, Coulton correctly pronounces « joue de la » in a way that resembles “Jude Law”; I didn’t really know who Jude Law was, because I was a guy who listened to Jonathan Coulton a lot, but I figured a pop culture reference would help my students). I also spent a lot of time fretting about the proper way to listen to Code Monkey without hearing the word “goddamn,” because that’s something that was really important to me at that time.

All of this led to me singing Je suis Rick Springfield in the kitchen while getting kiddo out the door for school this morning. Kiddo and I share a lot of interests, but she’s at an age where she’s (healthily) setting boundaries by insisting that she doesn’t have to like everything that daddy likes, and she decided that this weird French language song daddy was playing for her on his phone was one of those things she was going to reject. Fair enough, but I knew something that she didn’t, and I told her that we were going to listen to just one more song by Coulton as we got out the door and that she was going to like it.

In a true “crazy coincidence,” Day One tells me that today is also the one-year anniversary of my downloading Portal to kiddo’s Switch to see if she would like it. She did—a lot—and so I blew her mind by explaining that Coulton also wrote the excellent credits song Still Alive. We spent the whole trip to school talking about Portal and wondering if we’d ever completed the co-op campaign, and I felt vindicated… and happy to be remembering all of the time I’ve spent listening to Coulton.

It’s hard to say how long this re-memory is going to stick with me, but at least for this morning, I’m going to revisit some of my favorite Coulton songs and take some pleasure in it.

📚 bookblog: No Authority But Yourself (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:46:49 -0400

I wish I had read this finale more slowly. I like it, but I’m not sure I follow exactly what Remender is going for at each step. This series is worth rereading in the future.

📚 bookblog: Later Than You Think (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:45:03 -0400

I don’t love the wild shift in premise at the end of this volume, but I do enjoy seeing Grant and Sara work through stuff in a way that feels earned, so it gets credit for that.

📚 bookblog: Exctinction is the Rule (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:42:38 -0400

Same as the last volume, there are bits of this that I like (including the framing device), but the ramping up of stakes and driving forward of plot are more “meh.”

📚 bookblog: Forbidden Realms and Hidden Truths (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:39:26 -0400

As promised, I’m starting to blur the lines between volumes—I think some of the things I’m penalizing this review for were actually in the last volume. Oops.

Anyway, I love the art and the premise of this series too much to ever rate it below a four out of five, and there are bits of this volume that I really enjoy, but I like the premise and exploration of this series more than I like its main plot arc, and its efforts to move that plot forward in this story (especially by ramping up the stakes) aren’t super interesting to me.

📚 bookblog: True Atonement (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:33:46 -0400

This series takes more turns in this volume, introducing a major villain who will continue longer than expected and further shifting the premise and main ideas of the series.

I think it works! Grant and Pia get some time to explore their identities and relationship, and playing with bonkers ideas usually works for me.

📚 bookblog: Godworld (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:30:54 -0400

Okay, so let’s get one thing out of the way up front: After a long break from this series, I spedread the remaining five volumes in the course of a few days. My ability to distinguish the volumes is being pushed to its limits, so these reviews may not be super helpful.

I do remember liking this one, though. I’m a bit annoyed at the timeskip, but this volume signals a real shift in the series where Remender introduces some exploration of his characters alongside the bonkers sci-fi premise. That’s cool, and I appreciated getting to know Grant better here.

l'anglais américain dans les séries télévisées françaises

Fri, 22 May 2026 12:03:26 -0400

Une de mes blagues préférés dans la série télévisée Au service de la France, c’est l’accent horrible de tout personnage américain qui paraît dans la série. J’aurais aimé trouver sur YouTube la scène où deux agents de la CIA sont incapables de prononcer « communiste » à la française, employant toujours la prononciation américaine d’une manière qui souligne bien l’attitude américaine paranoïaque envers le communisme pendant la guerre froide. Ne la trouvant pas, je présente donc cette autre scène, où un autre agent CIA parle de combien le président Kennedy « aime les femmes » avec un accent vraiment horrible:

On voit la même chose dans la deuxième film OSS 117 (ce n’est pas étonnant, vu que Jean-François Halin est impliqué dans les deux œuvres), avec Bill Trumendous, un agent américain avec un accent en français qui est tellement mal que j’ai plus de mal à le comprendre que Jean Dujardin.

Bref, je trouve cette blague amusante. Si on se moque de mon pays un peu, j’avoue qu’on le mérite—surtout nos services secrets du 20ème siècle. En plus, c’est difficile d’être offensé, vu que dans les deux scènes, on se moque gentiment des Français aussi.

Mais il y a une chose qui cloche un peu: C’est le décalage entre le vocabulaire des Américains dans ces scènes et leurs accents. J’ai un meilleur accent en français que tous ces personnages, mais ils prononcent quand-même des mots et des phrases que me font courir au dictionnaire. En fin de compte, ce sont des personnes qui parlent mal—mais assez couramment quand-même.

Je viens de remarquer la même chose dans la sixième saison d’Un village française. Vu que cette saison se déroule en 1944, il est normal qu’il y a des personnages américains dans des scènes. Mais, cette série, c’est un drame et non une comédie, et les mauvais accents de ces personnages clochent encore plus. Pourquoi un officier français est capable d’avoir une conversation courante avec une cheffe des FFI mais doit terminer la conversation en anglais, comme s’il a oublié la phrase « au revoir » après avoir parlé des détails minutieux d’une opération militaire ? Comment ça se fait qu’on soldat a appris plus de vocabulaire français que moi dans mes vingt années d’apprentissage mais sans améliorer sa prononciation ?

C’est en réfléchissant sur cela que je me suis rendu compte que c’est ça aussi que nous les Américains font avec nos personnages étrangers dans nos médias. Un Français doit toujours avoir un accent, un Allemand doit sortir des petits mots et phrases allemands, etc. Tout ça pour rappeler que le personnage est bien étranger, malgré sa capacité de participer dans la vie anglophone sans obstacle. Donc, même si je supporte tout cela beaucoup moins dans un drame que dans une comédie (où les accents mauvais sont une blague que j’apprécie beaucoup, en fait), ça reste difficile d’être offensé, vu que nous imposons cette injustice aussi à nos personnages étrangers.

☕ teablog: Elmwood Inn, Hojicha (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 22 May 2026 12:00:22 -0400

This purchase felt like a real gamble. I’m not sure I actually like green tea, and while I have had one yummy hojicha latte, that’s not a lot to base a long-lasting purchase on.

Anyway, I like it! It feels like I shouldn’t, because it’s a very unique taste that reminds me of being in a Japanese restaurant more than the teas I usually like, but it’s good and I’m looking forward to drinking more.

📺 tvblog: Samuel Saison 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:01:25 -0400

Je ne sais plus comment j’ai découvert cette série, mais je suis bien content de l’avoir regardée (merci M. Le VPN pour m’avoir aidé à convaincre Arte que j’étais en France). Si elle est minimaliste, elle est plus forte pour ça.

J’ai écrit quelque chose il y a deux ans sur comment la chanson « Coup de vieux » de Bigflo & Oli m’a beaucoup marqué, car même si je n’ai jamais eu l’expérience d’être jeune en France, je reconaissais quand-même l’expérience d’être jeune. J’ai eu une expérience semblable avec cette série. Si certains éléments m’étaient étranger (je connais pas du tout Diddl, par exemple), les souvenirs de MSN Messenger me sont fort revenus, et même sans cela, l’expérience de jeunesse a quelques éléments universels.

🔗 linkblog: The Mandalorian and Grogu should have been a season of TV

Tue, 19 May 2026 09:11:37 -0400

Sigh. The first paragraph here sums up my own feelings about the show, so I expect I’ll agree with the whole review about the movie:

When The Mandalorian first debuted on Disney Plus, it was a refreshing reminder of how fascinating Star Wars stories can be when they aren’t focused on the same handful of well-established characters. Especially in its first season, the series felt like a sign that Disney was shifting gears after disappointing fans with its last trilogy of big budget features. But as The Mandalorian went on, it became overstuffed with supporting characters and haphazardly-introduced lore that did little to make the show feel like must-see TV.

☕ teablog: Elmwood Inn, Caramel Kettle Corn (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:21:24 -0400

I’m not ready to give this full marks (maybe because I don’t actually like caramel corn all that much, so who knows why I felt like I had to have this tea). That said, it’s good and interesting, Elmwood Inn somehow managed to make it taste like its description, and I don’t think I’ll get bored of it.

☕ teablog: Good & Gather, Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 15 May 2026 07:44:23 -0400

☕ teablog: Good & Gather, Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-05-15-not-the/

📺 tvblog: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 14 May 2026 09:06:59 -0400

“Intentionally bad” is a vibe that really works for me, and this is a masterclass of that vibe. I have some complaints: Some parts are grosser than they need to be, and even though I can forgive most of that as part of the “intentionally bad schtick,” there’s a rape reference in one episode that feels unnecessary even if it’s meant to be a bad call by the characters. Despite even that, I really appreciate this show for the specific thing it’s trying to do, and it made a good break from more serious media this week.

I still love the new Reeder, but Current is the RSS app I need right now

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:07:28 -0400

I feel like the common wisdom is that if seasonal changes are going to affect your mental health, it’s going to be the winter, when temperatures get colder and days get shorter. My experience has often been the opposite, though: It’s not that I don’t sometimes struggle during the winter, but it’s spring and summer that really do a number on my mental health. It’s been helpful to recognize that over the last year or two, not because it changes the pattern but rather because being aware of the pattern is a first step toward developing healthier responses to it.

One thing I know that I can do in response to changes in my mental health is to change the way that I consume information from the internet. For the past year and a half, I’ve really enjoyed the new iteration of the Reeder app, which has added Mastodon and Bluesky client functionality to its core RSS offerings, letting me consume a bunch of different kinds of content all in the same app. However, when my mental health is in a not-ideal place, one of the things I know I need to do is to reduce feed consumption, setting aside the need I feel to stay in the loop about everything and paring down to a core set of sources that actually matter.

So, this year, when I started to feel the added stress that I experience in spring and summer, I pivoted to the Current RSS reader. I’d bought it on a whim earlier this year, when it was first announced, because I really like the aesthetic and feel that it’s going for: no unread counts, items automatically drop out of the feed after a certain amount of time has elapsed, information without obligation. When I first bought it, I decided against using it, because I was really enjoying following Mastodon and Bluesky accounts alongside a bunch of RSS feeds, and Current isn’t as good at that. Now, though, I need to be following less. I’ve almost entirely cut out Mastodon and Bluesky consumption, and I’ve pared down my RSS feeds to the ones that I really care about.

Current fits what I need from an RSS app right now. It will support following Mastodon or Bluesky accounts if I really want to, because both of those platforms have native support for RSS and don’t strictly need client functionality. I’m only following one so far, but I could add more if I feel like I’m missing anything. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t—I know I’m missing posts from people and accounts I like to hear from, but stepping back from online discourse is sometimes the best move even if I miss a few gems here and there.) It’s also got great support for in-app, full-text reading, so I can prioritize really reading fewer things over scrolling past a bunch of headlines and short posts. That feels right in this moment. Finally, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, I know that articles in the feed will just disappear on their own, and I don’t feel the need to stay caught up with everything.

🎙️ radioblog: The Elite (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 11 May 2026 17:25:51 -0400

There’s a fun meta-premise to this story (adapt Doctor Who stories never made for TV as radio dramas), and I enjoyed some parts of this, but I can’t say that Peter Davison is engaging enough (for me personally! I’m sure he’s wonderful for other fans!) for me to be a huge fan here.

Fri, 08 May 2026 19:30:22 -0400

Ça fera bientôt vingt-cinq ans depuis le début de mes études du français, mais dans une scène de fiction, les nuances du tutoiement et du vouvoiement m’échappent toujours. Je comprends ce qui est dit mais trop souvent sans reconnaître les implications pour la relation entre deux personnages.

des blagues qui se cachent derrière les sous-titres

Thu, 07 May 2026 07:42:54 -0400

Mon français est assez fort, mais pas hyper, hyper fort quand-même. Il y a certaines expériences, comme les appels téléphoniques et les films, qui me rappellent surtout mes lacunes linguistiques. Je suis maintenant en train de regarder la cinquième saison d’Un village français, et comme je la regarde grâce à un service américain de vidéo à la demande, la seule version de cette série qui m’est disponible est celle qui a des sous-titres en anglais imposés sur la vidéo—on n’a même pas la possibilité de regarder sans sous-titres. Même si j’aurais préféré des sous-titres en français, il est vrai que ça m’aide beaucoup, avoir les sous-titres pour surmonter les faiblesses qui restent dans mon français.

Pourtant, tout le monde sait qu’il y a beaucoup qui se perd dans la traduction, et si j’ai parfois besoin des sous-titres pour mieux comprendre le sens d’une conversation entre deux personnages, je suis assez fort pour souvent constater quand quelque chose cloche dans les choix des traducteurs. Les choix de traduction pour les gros mots font souvent réfléchir, car il est vrai que ce n’est pas forcément le sens exact d’un gros mot qui compte, mais plutôt sa force dans le contexte, et il faut donc beaucoup de nuance et de compréhension pour bien les traduire. Si ces choix là ne sont pas forcément des fautes de traduction, il existent quand-même d’autres choix qui sont peut-être nécessaire mais quand-même décevants pour ce qui est caché derrière les sous-titres.

Hier soir, je regardais la sixième épisode de la cinquième saison d’Un village français, qui a une scène vraiment drôle, où quatre prisonniers font un procès pour un cafard dans leur cellule. La voici :

J’ai vite vu qu’il y avait des choses qui ne se traduisaient pas bien. Déjà, il y avait plusieurs jeux de mot du genre « avoir le cafard », « cafarder », etc., et là, j’avoue que ce ne sont pas des expressions que je connaissais, et j’étais donc bien reconnaissant pour les sous-titres, même si j’ai du consulter un dictionnaire après pour vraiment apprécier la scène. Ce qui m’a vraiment marqué, pourtant, c’était quand Anselme, un des prisonniers, demande pour le cafard « la mort par écrasement manuel spontané, monsieur le juge ». Cette ligne est traduite en anglais par “death by crushing” qui saisit plus ou moins le sens de la phrase en français mais qui est beaucoup moins drôle. Justement, ce petit procès se déroulait lieu parce qu’on avait demandé à Anselme pourquoi il écrasait les cafards dans leur cellule à la main et spontanément, et c’est là d’où vient la force de la blague. La réduire à “death by crushing” en sous-titres n’est pas forcément faux, mais ça fait pas rire comme j’ai ri quand j’ai entendu la phrase originale.

Bon, je ne dis rien de nouveau ici, car il est bien connu combien on perd dans la traduction, mais la phrase « écrasement manuel spontané » me semble si drôle que je n’ai pas pu m’empêcher de dire combien il est triste que les traducteurs ne l’ont pas gardée—et combien je suis content d’avoir pu surmonter ces fautes de traduction pour pouvoir rire comme la blague le méritait.

☕ teablog: Twinings, English Breakfast (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:47:42 -0400

Okay, so I just reviewed this, but I already think it’s better than I gave it credit for. I just oversteeped a cup because I got caught in conversation on my way back from the break room and it was still just the right taste, and I think that deserves full marks.

☕ teablog: Twinings, English Breakfast (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:31:34 -0400

I know it’s a breakfast tea, but this hit the spot yesterday when I was dragging right before an afternoon meeting. Not too strong, just the exact kind of malty flavor I’m trying to experience more of.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:10:31 -0400

Briefly forgot my work password and then tricked myself into remembering it by first typing out my work username and letting muscle memory take over.

☕ teablog: Harney & Sons, Cookies & Cream (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:58:50 -0400

This blend felt like a bit of a gamble, but if the flavors are subtle, they are more or less what I would have expected from the branding. A welcome addition to my current lineup.

🎙️ radioblog: La guerre des ondes, 1939-1945 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:50:36 -0400

Même si je trouve que l’application Radio France est assez pourrie (difficile à organiser, de grosses pubs qui paraîssent en début de journée), elle a été utile pour trouver d’autres émissions sur Radio Londres et ses concurrents. Hyper fascinante, cette série !

🎙️ radioblog: La liberté au bout des ondes, Radio Londres, 1940-1944 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:42:26 -0400

J’ai enfin repris « Un village français », mais la deuxième épisode que j’ai regardée m’a fait me poser plein de questions sur Radio Londres. Tout ce qui est radio m’intéresse, et je trouve l’idée de Radio Londres particulièrement intéressante. J’ai donc recherché quelque chose qui pourrait m’en apprendre plus, et j’ai découvert ce documentaire, qui m’ai bien plu.

📚 bookblog: Penric's Demon (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:34:04 -0400

The Incomparable has once again clued me in to a fun series, and I was delighted to listen to this over a couple of days. It’s a fun premise, and if the podcast I listened to was any indication, it will only get more fun with time.

📚 bookblog: Vanishing Pattern (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:12:10 -0400

Still good! Interesting themes, great art, fascinating take on a familiar premise, and compelling characters. You can see more of the seams on this volume, but I plan to keep reading, reading, reading.

📚 bookblog: Welcome, Nowhere (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:06:45 -0400

This series isn’t perfect—the shaman character has enough vague stereotype surrounding him to raise a concerned eyebrow—but it’s good. What’s more, I’m so happy to be returning to it after a month-long semi-accidental break that I’m giving this volume full marks.

It’s very weird, with beautiful art to back it up. It’s fast-paced in a way that could be annoying but is justified by the story in a way that works. The characters aren’t always sympathetic, but that usually works to the advantage of the story being told.

📺 tvblog: Smiley's People (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:33:39 -0400

Loved this. I don’t know why I liked it better than Tinker Tailor—is it a better adaptation, or do I actually like the underlying story better?

That got to thinking about how much of Smiley’s People is a clear riff on Tinker Tailor (George tackles a problem from the outside, brings in Guillam, chats with Connie, recruits Toby…). You can’t have Smiley’s People without Tinker Tailor, but I wonder if Smiley’s People is actually the better version of that story.

Anyway, it was good, but now I really need to get back to Un village français.

📚 bookblog: selfcare (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:12:42 -0400

I like blending the mundane and the fantastical (Jedi should absolutely be sent to negotiate trade disputes), so I ought to like this story about the fae and influencers (especially since it has some pro-co-op vibes), but it just didn’t land as well as I’d have liked.

📚 bookblog: Old Media (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:09:30 -0400

Eh, it felt like this was a continuation of some of my least favorite parts of Autonomous. I am also struggling to enjoy “robots’ rights” stories in our LLM era, which is dumb, but that’s how it is.

🍿 movieblog: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:07:18 -0400

I’ve now reviewed the original (audio)book as well as radio, tv, and film adaptations! Wondering if there are more adaptations worth looking at.

This movie isn’t bad, but I found myself disappointed with it. I don’t know if you can trim the story down to two hours (though now I’m wondering what the radio play comes out to), and while I try not to grump about adaptations, I’ve got a list of decisions I didn’t agree with here.

Some are dumb: It turns out I have preferences for how Oliver Lacon should be cast, and I didn’t like this one. The tv miniseries’s Lacon is smarmy and posh in a way that makes sense to me, and thay’s not what I got here.

Others are more substantive: I really think Ricki Tarr’s flashback has to come at the beginning to get George into the game. Tarr calling Lacon from a payphone to mutter something about a mole doesn’t seem like enough to me to set the plot in motion.

I dunno, I’m glad I watched it, but I think the radio adaptation is my favorite at this point.

🎙️ radioblog: The Sontarans (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:53:30 -0400

I enjoyed listening to the “making of” track, and I wish that didn’t sound so dismissive of the actual story as it does. I’m not a huge First Doctor fan, I guess? I also felt like this story had abrupt developments that I either missed or weren’t described well. Dan Starkey was a delight, and there were bits I liked, but overall? Meh.

🔗 linkblog: Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:15:04 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-04-17-i-dont/

🔗 linkblog: The Cybertruck of e-bikes is here to replace your car

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:08:11 -0400

Look, I’m all for getting more cars off the road, but I’ve always been annoyed by people who use ebikes as motorcycles and not as bikes. This passage gets me thinking that I probably wouldn’t like the Olto sharing my local bike infrastructure:

I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.

hallucination in the LLM-based Kagi Translate

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:35:04 -0400

You don’t have to spend long on my blog to figure out that I default to being grumpy about generative AI, but if I’ve made one exception to that rule, it’s for Kagi Translate, which I’ve found to be a genuinely helpful machine translation tool—and to have some neat features that I haven’t found in its Google or DeepL equivalents.

It took me back a little bit tonight, then, when Kagi Translate straight up hallucinated something on me, in a way that I imagine wouldn’t be out of place for a more mainstream LLM (which I’ve never really used). Earlier today, while working on a paper for an upcoming conference, I was consulting a Jacques Ellul book I was about to cite, and I wanted to make sure that “genetic engineering” would be an accurate translation for his phrase « intervention génétique » (which could obviously also be rendered “genetic intervention,” but I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, so I’d prefer to go with a more well-known phrase if it’s accurate).

Anyway, “genetic engineering” was the first thing that Kagi Translate offered (along with a handful of other suggestions), so I felt vindicated in writing that in my paper and moving on. I left the tab open in my browser and went on to other things, forgetting about the exchange. However, while sitting back down at my computer tonight, I had one of those complex fat finger experiences where I started typing something into one interface (my application launcher) but somehow closed it partway through, causing the rest of what I was typing (the letters “ul”) to be appended to whatever was frontmost in the system, which happened to be Kagi Translate. This led to the scene below, where I appear to have asked Kagi to tell me what the English translation of the (nonexistent) French phrase « l’intervention génétiqueul » is.

It is perhaps to Kagi’s credit that the tool figured out what the underlying query was and still gave some valid translations for the correct French phrase that served as the basis of my frankenphrase, but it is not at all to the tools credit for what it read into the translation. Here’s some “helpful” context that Kagi provides for the phrase “l’intervention génétiqueul”:

Wordplay - In French, the speaker creates a portmanteau by blending ‘génétique" (genetic) with ‘cul’ (slang for bottom/ass), implying a crude or sexual nature to the intervention.

Not only is this very clearly not what I’m doing, but if I remember what I learned in my French phonetics course from college (though I’m happy to be corrected here), this isn’t even good wordplay off of « cul ». Rather, « queuel » ought to rhyme with (or rather be in assonance with) « queue », which could lend itself to other ribald wordplay (when the latter word is used as slang for “penis”), but is not pronounced the same way as « cul », as I once learned the hard way (when trying to use it in its more standard definition of “line” as in “standing in line”). In fact, as I keep trying to wrestle with this fake word (which is ridiculous—again, it’s the result of fatfingering something), the best wordplay I can think of is that some Francophone person started using « génétiqueul » as an equivalent to the English word “genetical” (which is so uncommon that I wasn’t sure it was actually a word until I just looked it up).

As I alluded to in the quick post I wrote after first discovering Kagi Translate, it’s primarily the question of digital labor that bothers me about generative AI, so I could potentially forgive one hallucinated (and, admittedly, amusing) “explanation” of non-existent wordplay. However, seeing such a brazen error has forced me to again confront that this tool that I like is built on technologies that I am very much wary of. What’s more, a single error is one thing, but one of the things to keep in mind about generative AI is the scale at which it is being deployed. To riff off of a recent Ars Technica article, 90% accuracy might sound good until you realize that the scale of Google’s AI Overviews means “hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.”

This is more thought than I meant to give this episode (if the screenshot weren’t so unwieldly, I’d have done a 200ish-character photoblog with it instead, since I went through all the effort to make that a thing), but I did want to share it, if only to force myself to think through all of this some more.

📚 bookblog: Automatic Noodle (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:34:56 -0400

Finally getting back to the Newitz and Anders Humble Bundle collection I recently came into! This was a fun, cozy, quick read, and its throwaway reference to a David Graeber book and last-minute praise of platform independence to avoid Apple-style skimming off the top made me smile.

📺 tvblog: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:32:25 -0400

I remembered liking this more than I actually did! It was a fun watch, especially as something to put on in the background while doing something else, so I can’t say for sure why it didn’t land as well as I feel like it has in the past.

🎙️ radioblog: The Havoc of Empires (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:30:18 -0400

I’m rating this a bit higher than I expected. Like the last radio play I reviewed, I just don’t know if the Third Doctor is my thing, but with some hindsight, there were some fun bits of this that will stick with me.

🔗 linkblog: Here's what to expect from the fiery, 14-minute return of Artemis II

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:53:59 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Here's what to expect from the fiery, 14-minute return of Artemis II https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-04-10-i-found/

📚 bookblog: Reminding Myself That Despite What that Sign on the Highway Says, Hell Isn't Real (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:59:54 -0400

I’m still struggling a bit more with these story arcs than I did with earlier ones, but I can’t put my finger on why, and I don’t think it’s because they’re any less good.

It is also very interesting to be reading these books at a time where I’m digitizing journals from my college years, worrying a lot about grades and relationships.

🍿 movieblog: Project Hail Mary (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:17:21 -0400

Excellent adaptation of a book I remember enjoying. My “book is better” brain wanted to quibble with some choices, but I think those choices made sense when considering the change of medium. I also really, really appreciated the almost-throwaway joke about the Phantom Zone.

📚 bookblog: My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart is Basically Now an Ouroboros (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:12:24 -0400

📚 bookblog: My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart is Basically Now an Ouroboros (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-04-09-still-good/

la joie d'acheter (mais vraiment acheter) de la musique

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:05:24 -0400

Ça fait maintenant plusieurs mois que j’ai l’habitude d’écouter en boucle un concert des Cowboys fringants aux Plaines d’Abraham à Québec lors de la fête nationale québécoise en 2013. Vu combien de temps j’ai passé avec cet enregistrement peut-être piraté, quand j’ai découvert que les Cowboys vendaient un enregistrement d’un concert film enregistré une décennie plus tard, quelques mois avant le décès de Karl Tremblay, je me suis dit que j’avais une certaine obligation de l’acheter.

Je l’ai bien acheté, et j’en suis content, mais je suis aussi content de l’effort que j’ai mis cette semaine à télécharger l’enregistrement (car mon achat me le donne le droit), à transformer la vidéo en audio, et puis diviser un seul enregistrement en vingt pistes séparés pour mieux l’organiser dans ma collection de musique. Je suis bien content de pouvoir soutenir un de mes groupes préférés par un achat, mais je suis également content d’avoir le droit de faire avec cet achat ce que je veux. Oui, c’est bien un concert film, et ça fait du plaisir de le regarder, mais il m’arrivera un jour de vouloir écouter la musique en conduisant, et pour cela, il faudra des pistes téléchargées dans une appli pour de la musique.

On vit dans un monde numérique où nos capacités de modifier et adapter nos achats est souvent limité—en fait, il devient de plus en plus rare de pouvoir vraiment acheter un média quelconque (au lieu de louer, selon un contrat complex et flou). Il faut pas dire à mon travail combien de temps j’ai passé ce matin à préparer cette petite conversion de vidéo en album, mais je suis hyper content d’avoir pu le faire.

📚 bookblog: Her Hugs Are Traps (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:55:19 -0400

This review is slightly more negative, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m ready to move on to something else to read, because I don’t like all of the subplots in this part of the story, or something else. It’s still good, though!

🔗 linkblog: Finally, Artemis delivers some exceptional, high-quality photos of the Moon

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:56:18 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Finally, Artemis delivers some exceptional, high-quality photos of the Moon https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-04-07-amazing-picturesmight/

🎙️ radioblog: Prisoners of the Lake (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:38:51 -0400

It’s recognizable as a Doctor Who story, and there are some parts that are fun and interesting, but it just didn’t land with me.

📚 bookblog: I Excised All My Anxieties into Cartoon Characters Who Definitely Don't Have Feelings for Each Other (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:36:09 -0400

📚 bookblog: I Excised All My Anxieties into Cartoon Characters Who Definitely Don't Have Feelings for Each Other (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-04-06-posttimeskip-dumbing/

📚 bookblog: Renounce Magical Thinking and Embrace Empirical Evidence (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:30:13 -0400

Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy this particularly dramatic, action-packed sequence, but Willis does an excellent job of it—and of making it fit within the broader world and story he’s built.

🎙️ radioblog: In Memory Alone (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:26:32 -0400

This last story in the series wasn’t quite as good as the others, but I’m just happy that they made interesting use of the Silents.

🎙️ radioblog: Silent Majority (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:24:01 -0400

This series continues to be fun. It’s making use of a scary villain in compelling ways, and even the “let’s treat UK parliamentary elections like a US presidential race” doesn’t bug me too much.

🔗 linkblog: Artemis II astronauts break a record, name a crater

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:02:33 -0400

I barely got the livestream up on time for this, but I’m glad I did, because it left me teary eyed.

📚 bookblog: Now Let's Go Commit Something Mildly Subversive (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:15:38 -0400

Still enjoying this! I really appreciate Willis’s charitable, nuanced take on non-fundamentalist religion that comes out here while Joyce is wrestling with her faith.

📚 bookblog: Up Here We Can Be Garbage (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:12:01 -0400

I really ought to scan back through each volume as I read it so that I can give it a more thorough review, but these go fast, blend together, and just make a generally good impression. I’d like to wrap up the reread so that I can turn my attention to other stuff, but sometimes you also just need a quick, easy rebinge of a high quality webcomic.

📺 tvblog: The Night Manager Season 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:07:07 -0400

Took me a while to watch this. It’s not bad, and I liked it more than my spouse did, but I really want to read the source material now to see how it holds up.

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:52:11 -0400

Neat that I live at a time where I can set this kind of alarm on my phone.

things to listen to instead of Artemis II live audio

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:19:42 -0400

I really enjoyed watching Artemis II lift off yesterday and immediately realized that I would also enjoy tuning into the live broadcast over the course of the mission. The YouTube feed is pretty good, but what I’d really love (and haven’t been able to find) is to find an audio-only feed that I could plug into my internet radio client and just listen to. I’m mostly interested in tuning in to the mission while working, and while the audio will make for good white noise, I don’t really need (or even want) the visuals in there.

In the absence of any live audio feed (though please let me know if you know of where to find one!), I expect I’ll spend some time today listening to other stuff that scratches a similar itch. SomaFM has the Mission Control internet radio station, which offers “mix of ambient and experimental music mixed with the historical sounds of the space program.” I’m just now learning (because I only started listening in the mid-to-late 2010s) that the station only started mixing in the sounds of the Apollo program after the Space Shuttle missions came to an end, and it surprises me that they aren’t doing Artemis II broadcasts, which would be exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m also a big fan of Public Service Broadcasting’s 2015 album The Race for Space, which samples a lot of Apollo-era recordings (among other relevant audio) into what is an excellent concept album. Listening to the “go” sequence during last night’s launch reminded me of PSB’s song “Go!”, which draws from the equivalent sequence for the Apollo 11 landing. It’s very catchy and fun to listen to.

I’m still hoping to find an audio feed for Artemis II that I can put on in the background while working over the next more-than-a-week, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to. At any rate, as I’m listening to the YouTube feed now, the crew is about to get four hours of sleep (after a conversation about how to correctly hold their microphones, which is fun to listen in to), and I expect I won’t have much to listen to during that time. Between SomaFM and Public Service Broadcasting, though, I think I’ll have enough to keep the space nerd part of my brain busy.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:18:40 -0400

Artemis II has not captured a lot of my attention because it’s hard to get excited about anything my country is doing right now, but I made a last minute decision to put the launch on, and even just listening to mission control is super neat.

🎙️ radioblog: Square One (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:42:44 -0400

It came as something of a surprise that this next part of the story felt even better. It takes some liberties with the British political system, but since it came out in November 2016, it is clearly doing so to criticize Donald Trump, and I can live with that. The story continues to play with the basic concept of the Silents as a supernatural villain, and I’m enjoying seeing where it goes.

🎙️ radioblog: House of Silents (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:39:23 -0400

I’ve made a few comments alluding to how interesting it is to explore expanded universe material in another franchise after a near-lifetime of exploring Star Wars auxiliary fiction. This is a good demonstration of how EUs can be good: The Silents are an interesting villain, and this story makes good use of them while fitting it nicely into the broader Doctor Who canon. I enjoyed the listen.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:04:56 -0400

My vision is bad enough that I can see better wearing my prescription sunglasses indoors than wearing nothing, and since I brought an empty glasses case to work today, I guess that’s what I’ll be doing.

📚 bookblog: Just Put Down the Ukulele Only Then Can the Healing Begin (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:44:13 -0400

DoA is funny because its plot takes place over a few months, but the story has been told over years and years. That makes it hard to remember what happened when. I feel like this volume has some of the changes that most lead to contemporary characters and storylines, and yet that all happens earlier than I expected.

📚 bookblog: The Machinations of My Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift, and Utterly Ridiculous (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:41:45 -0400

📚 bookblog: The Machinations of My Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift, and Utterly Ridiculous (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-03-31-still-blurring/

🔗 linkblog: British Man Desperately Trying To Get Out Of Panel Show Duty

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:59:24 -0400

🔗 linkblog: British Man Desperately Trying To Get Out Of Panel Show Duty https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-03-31-what-a/

📚 bookblog: Hey, Guess What, I'm a Lesbian! (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:57:21 -0400

I wrote about this on my first read through (I think), but it’s very interesting to read this take on the college experience when mine was so very different. It’s interesting to see Joyce, for example, grow in ways I didn’t until a decade or so later in life.

📚 bookblog: Amazi-Girl is Always Prepared for Anything (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:55:02 -0400

These are such fast reads (and I’m waiting so long to review them) that I can’t say I remember the specifics of this volume, but I’m continuing to enjoy this reread, and that’s what counts, I guess.

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:42:11 -0400

Bike update: My dad, a much more experienced cyclist, came to town for something else today, and I got his help. He managed in two minutes what I had spent two hours failing to do. (But my new tube was a dud, and the shop is closed for the day, so the adventure continues…)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:00:31 -0400

I’m a committed commuter but miserable mechanic, so when I bought a new bike in December, I paid extra for something lower maintenance. Got my first flat yesterday, though, and it turns out these tires are tighter than I’m used to. So far, I’ve damaged my hands more than I’ve fixed the bike.

🎙️ radioblog: Expiry Dating (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:29:21 -0400

My favorite thing in these audioplays is getting the tv actors to come back for their parts, and this is especially fun when it brings back Peter Davison and Colin Baker, too. It’s a good story that makes the most of these characters, and I enjoyed it.

📚 bookblog: Your Stupid Overconfidence is Nostalgic (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:20:41 -0400

I’ve noticed this throughout the reread, but this collection really got me thinking about the connections between Willis’s previous work and this reboot/remix. It’s also amazing to me just how long this series has been going on! I’m reading material that came out when I was just starting grad school.

🔗 linkblog: Webtoon is adding AI localization tools to its comics platform

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:29:00 -0400

I read a fair amount of comics in translation, and even when the translation is done with a skilled human, I can always tell that there’s something off about it. Not sure I trust an LLM to fix that problem.

Also, I wish that Webtoon weren’t platformizing webcomics and that we could go back to the models we had in the 2000s and 2010s.

📚 bookblog: I Beg You, Don't Cast Your Body Into the Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:38:50 -0400

📚 bookblog: I Beg You, Don't Cast Your Body Into the Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-03-26-still-enjoying/

🎙️ radioblog: The Black Hole (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:36:46 -0400

🎙️ radioblog: The Black Hole (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-03-26-it-wasnt/

☕ teablog: Pinky Up, Mochi Ice Cream Boba (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:15:21 -0400

This tea has been an afternoon treat for me for a couple of weeks now, but I only just realized that I hadn’t blogged it yet. It’s much better than my last experience with Pinky Up, and it delivers on its promise to be boba-ish without all the trappings (or cost).

📚 bookblog: This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:09:26 -0400

I had been trying to read some of Willis’s other work, making it through the whole Shortpacked! archive and trying to go through Roomies!, etc., but ultimately I realized that what I really wanted was a Dumbing of Age reread, and so here I am. I enjoy this series much more in collected form than I do one strip at a time, and it was fun to start again at the beginning.

☕ teablog: Central Purrk Cat Café, London Fog (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:07:49 -0400

I keep thinking that I should like Earl Grey, but I think it’s time to acknowledge that I just don’t. I’d like to try some more Lady Grey sometime, but even lattefication didn’t help me enjoy Earl Grey.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:13:29 -0400

Ah, mais c’est vrai que “Projet je vous salue Marie” n’aurait pas le même sens. Parfois, il faut voir une traduction en français pour me rendre compte des bizarretés de l’anglais américain.

📚 bookblog: How to Fall Forever (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:52:43 -0400

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this series, but I like it so far! Interesting playing with hubris, imaginative story and art, and compelling characters (even if I have trouble remembering who’s who, but that’s my fault).

My one annoyance is that there are a lot of two-page splashes that do not work well for reading PDFs on my phone. I get that that’s on me, but it’s still a pain.

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:45:53 -0400

Brb, nearly doubling the number of my entries in the Day One journaling app by importing a partial archive of all my tweets.

🎙️ radioblog: False Coronets (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:38:33 -0400

This has everything that annoyed me about the rest of the series but also some weird pro-monarchist vibes to it? Glad to be done with this series, and I hope the next one is better.

🔗 linkblog: Pionnier du fastfood, McDonald's célèbre 50 ans de présence en Suisse | RTS

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:12:18 -0400

Moi, j’ai toujours préféré manger un kebab, mais il m’est arrivé de manger chez McDo une fois ou deux lors de mon séjour en Suisse. Le prix m’a choqué, même en sachant que le coût de la vie était beaucoup plus élévé en Suisse. J’avais honte d’être là avec un ami américain qui parlait français mais qui faisait sa commande en anglais parce que c’était une chaîne américaine et qu’il avait donc le droit.

🎙️ radioblog: The Light Keepers (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:27:38 -0400

Meh. I really don’t like the narration in this series, and even though I was a bit distracted while listening to this one, I’m not convinced I would have liked it much more if I had been giving it my full attention.

updates I've made to my Hugo site over the past year

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:43:09 -0400

Early 2025 was a difficult time for my focus and mental health given all of the nonsense happening in my country at the time. I channeled a lot of my anxiety and distraction into messing around with my Hugo site, which is both something I find genuinely fun and something that is professionally useful, since I teach a course on content management systems where I’ve doubled down on Hugo as a teaching tool. Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of my observation that it was “[t]ime to write up a summary post,” and I’m finally getting around to that today. Waiting so long to write that post means that some of my memories are a little fuzzy now, but I made some further updates to my site over the summer and then again last December, so a “the last year in Hugo adventures” post allows me to capture some of that stuff, too.

new taxonomies

Besides trying to ward off nihilism, I couldn’t tell you for sure what was the genesis of all of the tweaks I started making to my site. Taxonomies seems like a strong candidate, though. I rely a fair amount on my tags to get a sense for what I’m writing about and to find something that I wrote in the past on a particular subject. Tags are great, but having all of my terms in a single taxonomy was starting to get a little clunky, and doing bingereads of a bunch of comic series got me thinking about other ways that I could be sorting posts in terms of their similarities (actually, it seems like this had occurred to me before I’d started some of the binges). So, I learned how to set up new taxonomies in Hugo and set up the following ones that allow for navigating through my media reviews in more fine-grained ways:

the media taxonomy gives me a sense of what I’m consuming and allows me to filter posts by specific medium; I’ve made some non-mutually exclusive categories so that I can affirm that bandes dessinées are also comics (which are also books) while also treating them as a media genre unto themselves.
the title taxonomy is mostly useless, except that it lets me see what media I’ve consumed multiple times (like Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues—or if I’ve consumed multiple media adaptations of the same story (like When the Wind Blows
the series taxonomy lets me filter posts by a specific series; by extension, it lets me see what I’ve been consuming the most of (though these numbers are a bit imprecise—it takes a lot more work to read a Brief Theological Introduction to the Book of Mormon than to listen to a brief Doctor Who Short Trip)
the franchise taxonomy gives me a way of grouping together reviews of media that span multiple series—or that are connected to each other despite not technically being part of the same series; Doctor Who has recently rocketed to the top of this list thanks to all the audio plays I’ve been listening to
the creator taxonomy (I don’t love that name, but “author” doesn’t fit when I also include comic book artists and audiobook narrators) lets me see whose work I’ve been consuming the most… and has helped me realize that I need to take steps to reduce the concentration of white dudes at the top
the rating taxonomy is perhaps even dumber than the title one, but it does let me confirm my hunch that I’m pretty easy-going (and not usually very critical) when reviewing media

While mediablogging was the original inspiration for expanding the taxonomy offerings of my site, it wasn’t hard to figure out that this could be useful for other parts of my site as well. With the power of regex, I also built a sources taxonomy for my linkblogging that gives me some sense of who I’m reading (or lets me find articles I’ve bookmarked from, say, 404 Media).

I also spent some of the summer (finally!) uploading and sorting through a bunch of my research. While I was doing that, I figured I ought to add some taxonomies there, too. It’s now possible to sort my publications and presentations by:

research projects: collections of publications united by ongoing interest in a specific phenomenon or dataset
research topics: more fine-grained, cross-cutting topics that recur in my research
research methods: specific methodological approaches I’ve brought to projects
co-authors: folks I’ve worked with
outlets: journals or conferences where my work has appeared

Finally, in December, I figured I ought to start logging the teas I drink so that I can remember what I thought of a particular kind months after the fact. I was making my way through a tea advent calendar, and that seemed like as good an excuse as any. Teablog posts can be sorted by:

brand of tea
blend of tea
type of tea (i.e., black, herbal, green…)
rating of tea (which, like its media counterpart, might not be super useful as a taxonomy per se)

I also use a semi-meta types taxonomy to distinguish between different kinds of posts to the site.

new post templates

While I started this post by discussing taxonomies, it was pretty clear from the beginning that building new taxonomies would be most useful if I also messed around with how different post types showed up on the site. Messing around with templates was quite a bit of fun! I had done some minor tweaks to post templates in the past but mostly messing around with default templates. This involved creating a bunch of new templates, tweaking them to work the way I wanted, and then updating my posting workflows to explicitly define a particular template for most posts as they get published.

I’m quite pleased with how it’s worked out. I honestly don’t remember how my linkblog posts looked before, but I’m proud of working the links to articles into the post headers in the current layout. I also like how a publication post is actually all driven from post metadata, which is organized into a specific template; if you pull up the .md file, you’ll see that there’s actually no “content” in the post. The different mediablog post types (book, radio, etc.) have individual tweaks to make them work the way I want (I don’t track “creator” for tv or film, for example), and I learned enough Go to get some conditional formatting worked into the template. Some media has a title but no series, some has a series but no title (for volumes within the series), and some have both, and the template now handles all of that beautifully based on the metadata.

posting workflows

Supporting new taxonomies and templates involved reworking most of how I post to Hugo. I’m currently dependent on iOS’s Siri Shortcuts (and a GitHub client) to make the magic happen, and a lot of this work was actually not directly with Hugo but rather rebuilding my Shortcuts so that they’d prompt me in the right way for all of the information needed to support the new site setup. I also spent some time messing with how EchoFeed forwards my posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, and that in turn led me to modifying the RSS template for Hugo.

This last part (RSS and EchoFeed) is something I’d theoretically like to spend more time with. I could make my post forwarding more social friendly by forwarding previews of or excerpts from my media reviews rather than posting what’s obviously just a title and a link to a blog post (though I also don’t really care about unapologetically putting my blog first). At the very least, I’d like for the post summary that goes to social to include some of the series information (when relevant) and not just the title of the work I’m reviewing. Doctor Who audio dramas don’t tend to have evocative titles, and even I, the poster, am more interested in them for how they fit into a series than what their individual names are (see also: a lot of comics).

bilingual mode!

One of the reasons why the research part of my site got some attention over the summer is because I applied for a job in Francophone Switzerland. The application didn’t really go anywhere (which is fine—I’d love to live and work in Switzerland, but I like Lexington and I like my job), but at least I got some more support for my occasionally bilingual posting.

As with taxonomies and templates, I was very impressed by how easy Hugo made it to create two different language modes on my site. There is now a French-language homepage on my site, and if you go to the French-language version of any of my subblogs (say, “Moi”), you get a French-language introduction and the site filters down to only the French-language posts. However, I also have French-language posts show up in the English version of the site, which fits my approach and also makes POSSE forwarding a lot easier. This could use some additional work (my posting workflow is a bit clunky when it comes to affirming that I want to post content to the French version of the site), but I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far.

conclusion

I’ve been using Hugo for a POSSE style since 2019 and I’ve been constantly tinkering with it since then. The last year saw far more tinkering than usual, though, and I’m very pleased with the results. I still have a wishlist of things that I’d like to keep messing with (not least, I’d really, really like to see if I can make the site itself ActivityPub compatible), and I’m sure I’ll get to them at some point, but I’m not in a big rush. I’m proud of what I’ve learned over the past year, and even if these changes benefit me more than anyone else, I think it was worth the time.

🎙️ radioblog: The Top of the Tree (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:22:53 -0400

This story was more interesting, with some additional voice acting to make it feel more like a play than an audiobook. It was also bonkers science fiction in a very Doctor Who way that worked for me.

🎙️ radioblog: The Calendar Man (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:20:40 -0400

I gripe a lot about audio plays being dumb sometimes, but this “narrated story” approach is a lot less interesting than an audio play, and that annoyed me. Jacob Dudman does an excellent Eleventh Doctor, though, so it wasn’t terrible.

📚 bookblog: The Martian (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:16:45 -0400

For about the first half of this book, I was convinced that it was better than the movie and that I had gravely sinned by not rereading it in the past decade.

I am glad that I reread it, but after finishing it, I’m a bit more reserved in my judgment. I can see the seams in the book, there are some comments that feel stuck in the early 2010s, and the scenes that the movie skipped aren’t as interesting as the beginning and end of the book.

Still a delightful read, though!

☕ teablog: Benner Tea Company, Pumpkin Spice (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:13:38 -0400

As a side note, I just want to say how glad I am that I now write these posts because over the weekend, I was trying to remember whether I liked a particular blend, but it was from before I started teablogging, so I had nothing to rely on!

Anyway, this was another good midmorning work tea. I’d gladly drink it again, even if I can’t say I’d notice if I never had it again.

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:30:44 -0400

Just like the first time around, rereading The Martian just makes me want to play some Kerbal Space Program.

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:03:54 -0400

I’ve spent the last decade believing that The Martian was the exception to the “book is always better” rule, but rereading the book is challenging that notion.

📚 bookblog: Woodland Creatures (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:38:49 -0400

This volume seemed to depart so drastically from the first that I had to make sure I hasn’t skipped something by accident. The stories are mostly recognizable as part of a shared universe, but the worldbuilding feels overly ambitious and underserved by the actual plot. The topless Galatea robots are unnecessary, and the lampshading of their luridness by attributing it to an in-universe pervert doesn’t help. I was willing to give the first volume in this series the benefit of the doubt, but I’m glad I don’t have any more of this to read.

🎙️ radioblog: Day of the Vashta Nerada (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:34:05 -0400

See, this one I should have loved: I really want to like Paul McGann’s Doctor, and I do like the Vashta Nerada. This felt like excessive EU riffing, though, and I just couldn’t get excited about it.

🎙️ radioblog: The Carrionite Curse (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:41:54 -0400

I shouldn’t like this! It took a trip to YouTube to remember who the Carrionites even were, and there are so many Doctor-Who-dumb, audio-play-dumb, and just generally dumb elements to this play. Yet, it somehow came together into something that I enjoyed listening to during a stressful week.

☕ teablog: Tazo, Organic Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:36:45 -0400

☕ teablog: Tazo, Organic Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-03-12-doesnt-knock/

☕ teablog: The Republic of Tea, Vanilla Almond (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:35:51 -0400

I hesitated to give this full marks because I know it gets less interesting with time, but that’s also true of my chocolate mint tea that I love, and it’s been a while since I’ve had any of this, so my taste buds are very happy.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:08:09 -0400

Since I’ve been posting about Doctor Who and Tinker Tailor: I had heard of the Valeyard before (my Classic Who knowledge is limited 😬), but I only recently learned that he was portrayed by the actor who played Peter Guillam, and this is really messing with my head.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:22:04 -0400

I would never claim that Käärijä and Baby Lasagna’s #eurodab is a good song, but having it stuck in my head the morning after poor sleep is doing more help than harm.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:04:18 -0400

I like the actor who plays Jim Prideaux in the Tinker Tailor miniseries, but even though I don’t speak a word of Czech, it’s very clear that he doesn’t either.

🎙️ radioblog: Empire of the Racnoss (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:43:21 -0400

The Racnoss struck me as dumb in their first appearance, and this play hasn’t done much to disabuse me of that impression. That said, this played enough with interesting Doctor Who themes of peace and conflict that it won me over anyway.

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:39:07 -0400

Look, I’ve heard some good orchestral versions of the Doctor Who theme, but that song was meant to be as electronic as possible.

📚 bookblog: Tooth and Claw (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:36:04 -0400

Interesting art, and some interesting ideas (like a foulmouthed human being transported to a land of animal wizards). I think there’s something here, even if I’m not totally hooked.

📚 bookblog: Chrononauts, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:45:20 -0400

The art is good, and there are elements of a rollicking time travel romp hidden in here, but the story ultimately comes down to tech bros doing what they want because they have the power to, and we’re lucky that they decided to have a conscience at the end. That is not the kind of story I want to read in 2026.

📚 bookblog: Superman: Red Son (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:42:50 -0400

I’ve read this too many times in the past two decades for it to feel as innovative and interesting as it once did, but it remains good!

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:04:55 -0500

La bd que je lis en ce moment avec ma fille fait un petit clin d’œil aux fameux pirates d’Astérix. Je l’ai donc envoyée chercher un album pour lui expliquer la blague—sauf que j’avais oublié combien l’un des pirates est un caricature raciste, et tout a fini dans la malaise 😬

🎙️ radioblog: Night of the Vashta Nerada (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:44:08 -0500

“Classic Doctors, new monsters” is such a fun concept for an audio play series, and hearing Tom Baker face off against the Vashta Nerada was a delight. Don’t know if I’ll enjoy the upcoming stories as much, but this was fun.

🔗 linkblog: Les premiers trams prêts à circuler dès mardi à Lausanne pour des tests | RTS

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:54:53 -0500

Si je comprends bien, la ligne du tramway est tout près de l’appartement à Renens où j’ai vécu pendant quelques mois, et cette nouvelle fait donc plaisir même si je n’ai pas mis pied à Lausanne depuis 2010.

🎙️ radioblog: Theatre of War (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:47:20 -0500

Sylvester McCoy is delightful, and I’m glad I got to experience a story with his Doctor and Sophie Aldred’s Ace. It’s goofy in the way that most expanded universe material is, but there’s enough there to be interesting, and I enjoyed the listen.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:19:30 -0500

When did YouTube start autodubbing videos into the language it assumes you want? No, thank you!

🎙️ radioblog: Sweet Salvation (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:46:28 -0500

It’s real neat that the Eighth Doctor has had such a presence in Big Finish and other ancillary media, but this is another story that entirely dissuades me from trying to get into any of that, because I cannot follow what’s going on. Hard to say whether it’s continuity lockout, poor writing, or both.

🎙️ radioblog: World of Damnation (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:53:38 -0500

This story is the hardest to follow radio drama I’ve ever experienced. It did turn out that I’d accidentally skipped over the first few tracks, but even going back to listen to them didn’t help much. I couldn’t tell characters apart, I wasn’t sure what was a flashback and what was the main story, there was some serious continuity lockout, and I found the whole thing confusing. There were some fun ideas in there, but they were buried under a persistent feeling of being lost.

📺 tvblog: Au service de la France Saison 2 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:49:52 -0500

Je me souvenais de ne pas aimer cette saison aussi bien que la première. Si ça reste vrai (je n’aime pas trop ce qu’on fait avec André, ce qui me semble trop compliqué), il y a des moments marrants qui ont lieu dans cette saison, et je suis triste de savoir que même la plus compliquée des histoires ne trouveront pas de résolution dans une troisième saison.

🎙️ radioblog: How to Make a Killing in Time Travel (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:44:59 -0500

There was some passing around of the idiot ball in this story, and it felt surprisingly dark for a Doctor Who story, but I appreciated the layers of disaster piling up, and the villain was compelling in a pathetic way (in multiple senses of the word). I don’t know the Eighth Doctor well, so it’s interesting to get to know him here.

🎙️ radioblog: Their Finest Hour (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:41:05 -0500

Battle of Britain Doctor Who would really have appealed to me at some point, but it’s the sort of thing now where I find myself wondering if the story is uncritically pedestalizing an important moment of history that is actually much more complicated.

📺 tvblog: The Diplomat Season 3 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:10:09 -0500

Enjoying this series less and less the more that it goes on. I think I’d still watch a Season 4, but what began as a smart series with interesting drama has felt with each season that it’s leaning more into the drama and willing to set aside the smarts. Some fun moments in this series but also some headscratchers.

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:06:05 -0500

Worms: The Board Game is exactly what I was hoping for. No, it isn’t an elegant work of high strategy, but it captures the feel of the source material even in abstracting it to board game format. Really enjoyed my first play and looking forward to more.

🎙️ radioblog: The Neverwhen (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:43:04 -0500

Some silly stuff in here, but enough of a compelling story (and enough John Hurt and core Doctor Who vibes) that I’m willing to forgive it.

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:58:01 -0500

WAIT. Read the letter more carefully, and my “health plan” gave this third party printing/mailing service my SSN and address. This is even dumber.

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:55:16 -0500

Just got word from a “third-party printing/mailroom services” provider whose name I don’t recognize that they had a data breach involving my SSN and address. Literally no idea how they got those data. Did I sign up with them? Does my employer work with them? What a stupid world we live in.

🎙️ radioblog: A Thing of Guile (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:22:48 -0500

🎙️ radioblog: A Thing of Guile (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤) https://spencergreenhalgh.com/myself/2026-02-17-more-fun/

🎙️ radioblog: Legion of the Lost (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:59:17 -0500

Expanded universe material can get very dumb very quickly, but sometimes, it’s a great way to explore stuff that the main canon didn’t have time for. Just like it was a delight to have Christopher Eccleston back as the Ninth Doctor, getting more from John Hurt as the War Doctor is a treat. The story is interesting enough, but it’s really just fun to play with these action figures for a bit,

☕ teablog: Chaotic Good gaming café, Chai Latte (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:12:41 -0500

When one is at a gaming café, one pays one’s dues to help keep the place open, but the chai latte was a bad choice. It tasted like warm milk with some cinnamon mixed in, and maybe that works for some people, but it’s not what I’m looking for. I might just go for some “regular” tea the next time I’m there—or support the café in some other way.

🎙️ radioblog: The Auntie Matter (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:11:33 -0500

Clever genre blending is one of my favorite things, so setting a Doctor Who story in what I presume is the style of a P. G. Wodehouse story is delightful (even if I clearly don’t know the genre it’s being blended into!).

🎙️ radioblog: The Ravagers (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:02:54 -0500

Doctor Who is not often high art, and neither are radio plays, but this was good enough. Besides, I didn’t realize how damn much I missed Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, and I would have struggled through a much worse story just to hear his “lots of planets have a north” voice.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:45:13 -0500

Torn between enjoying Kagi’s machine translation tool and grumpiness about using something LLM-based. Still can’t get over digital labor, but I might(?) be less hostile to generative AI if it were more often deployed in these targeted, careful ways instead of as get-rich-quick chatbots.

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:50:43 -0500

Leveling up from Doctor Who Short Trips to full-length Doctor Who radio plays, and they’re only affirming my belief that a well-done radio play might as well be television.

🎙️ radioblog: Quantum Heresy (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:08 -0500

Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to this while trying to find parking on campus at a very inconvenient time, but even though there’s an interesting time travel bit at the center of the story, it just didn’t pay off for me.

🎙️ radioblog: The Shadow Trader (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:07 -0500

This was a fun example of a lot of worldbuilding crammed into the background of a short Doctor Who story, and it gets a lot of points for that.

🎙️ radioblog: To Cut a Blade of Grass (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:06 -0500

This story is maybe the most heartwarming and beautiful that I’ve heard in the entire collection! The Sixth Doctor visits a stroke patient in the hospital and takes him into his own future to see a few important events that he’ll miss because he never recovers from the stroke. It really emphasizes that you don’t have to be important to matter and encourages the listener to be kind in small ways. I really liked it.

🎙️ radioblog: The Lions of Trafalgar (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:05 -0500

This particular story is just so very British that it didn’t really connect with me. I normally appreciate Doctor Who’s very Britishness, but this one just didn’t work for this American.

🎙️ radioblog: The Old Rogue (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:04 -0500

Loved this one. It tells the story of The Fourth Doctor and Romana visiting a café owner who is actually a galactic tyrant who got body swapped with a café owner forty years ago and now lives out a much more meager existence on earth. The Doctor checks in on him every decade or so, and even though he resents the whole thing, it’s kind of working for the villain’s rehabilitation. It was clever, funny, and made me want to watch Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, so full marks.

🎙️ radioblog: Lost in the Wakefield Triangle (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:03 -0500

There have been a couple of these audio stories that felt like someone read a Wikipedia article about something they found interesting and decided to build a Doctor Who story around it. I… have not really enjoyed them.

🎙️ radioblog: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:33:02 -0500

There’s an interesting, even Ellulian, moral to this story about falling in love with the means and not thinking about the ends, but I think the story surrounding that moral could have been better done.

🎙️ radioblog: A Star is Born (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:32:58 -0500

It took me three times to start and follow through on this one. The science was too wibbly wobbly, and I’m not invested enough in the First Doctor to care about it on those terms.

☕ teablog: Tazo, Green Ginger (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:02:32 -0500

A friend offered me a cup of this when I dropped by to visit briefly. It was good! I’d drink more green tea if it tasted like this!

🎙️ radioblog: Seven to One (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:20:04 -0500

It took me a while to cotton on to some of the premise of this story—again, not being a Classic Who fan means mixing up characters means missing important details—and I’m still not sure I get all of it, but it was fun enough to give it some benefit of the doubt.

🎙️ radioblog: All the Fun of the Fair (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:17:51 -0500

Silly and fun, this story wasn’t life changing (and I have a lot of questions about the fictional logic of things), but I enjoyed listening to it.

🎙️ radioblog: The Riparian Ripper (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:15:29 -0500

At first, I thought this was going to be gruesome and dumb, but it ended up turning into that special Doctor Who genre of the wildly misunderstood monster, and I really enjoyed listening to it while shoveling ice out of our cul-de-sac.

☕ teablog: The Republic of Tea, Coconut Cocoa (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:26:56 -0500

While I’m in a “reevaluating tea” mood today, I want to confess that this tea is not as mind-blowing as it was when I first discovered it years ago. It’s good, but it’s not Smores or Dubai Chocolate-tier good.

☕ teablog: Elmwood Inn, Indian Chai (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:58:07 -0500

I badmouthed this in my first review, but I’ve since remembered what I like about it even if it isn’t what I expected from a chai, so it deserves a review update.

🎙️ radioblog: Murmurs of Earth (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:53:40 -0500

The Voyager record as inspiration for a Doctor Who story really ought to work for me, but it didn’t land. Maybe I’m tired of this series, or maybe I should have paid more attention instead of listening while cleaning.

🎙️ radioblog: Wet Walls (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:50:41 -0500

I can’t say this one worked for me. I can kind of see the vibe that the author was going for, but I wasn’t a fan.

🎙️ radioblog: The Wondrous Box (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:45:35 -0500

TARDIS dematerializing is responsible for famous elephant death (which I didn’t know about before listening) is not the fun Doctor Who story the author thinks it is. This felt like it was an extended excuse to riff on a historical anecdote, and it didn’t land at all for me.

🎙️ radioblog: Pop Up (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:42:28 -0500

The idea behind this one is fun—not least a BASIC interface on the TARDIS—but it doesn’t really deliver.

🎙️ radioblog: The Five Dimensional Man (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:40:17 -0500

Fun homage to 50s sci-fi and old-timey radio shows. The performance and the conceit got me more than any of the plot did.

🎙️ radioblog: Letting Go (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:37:48 -0500

It can be surprising how dark and melancholy Doctor Who is sometimes, but this story does an excellent job of capturing that vibe in audio. Really enjoyed this one.

🎙️ radioblog: Critical Mass (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:57:36 -0500

Yet another story that doesn’t really land with me because I don’t know Classic Who that well.

🎙️ radioblog: The Doctor's Coat (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:49:55 -0500

Good mix of a clever idea that holds the story together, alien world-building (including an alien comics shop, which earns full marks on its own), and some semi-meta reflection on the importance of wardrobe in this franchise.

🎙️ radioblog: Sock Pig (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:47:27 -0500

I like parts of this, but there’s also some nonchalantness about grief that doesn’t work for me—and maybe a vibrator joke?

🎙️ radioblog: Chain Reaction (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:44:40 -0500

Even by Doctor Who’s famously wibbly wobbly standards, the rules of time travel make zero sense in this story, but it’s so fun that I don’t care.

🎙️ radioblog: Walls of Confinement (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:43:04 -0500

Some fun gags, but this is another case where I think not knowing the classic series prevents me from appreciating this. Or maybe it’s just not that interesting?

🎙️ radioblog: The Way Forward (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:51:46 -0500

Sometimes silly is good, and this story features a gorilla quoting Monty Python within a goofy but interesting premise, so I’m here for it.

🎙️ radioblog: 1963 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:50:09 -0500

This didn’t wind up being as meta as I’d hoped when I first realized where it was going, but it was fun and interesting.

🎙️ radioblog: Running Out of Time (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:28:24 -0500

Wondering if I should be reviewing these a volume at a time instead of a story at a time, but it’s too late now. This one felt like a Doctor Who story—if a bit darker than what we might see on TV—but that’s not entirely complimentary. Not bad, but nothing impressive in my book.