Good joke here—and one I may share with the students in my games and learning class next semester.

How have I missed this??? A French-language podcast here in Kentucky sounds right up my alley. Bonus, the latest episode is an homage to Karl Tremblay.

I picked up this comic about a post-pandemic-apocalypse from the library on a whim. I have mixed feelings about this genre—especially since it’s hard to believe that it was begun before COVID-19. The story is somewhat interesting but choppy, and the characters are compelling but flat. The translation is rouuuugh, and I wonder how much better it might be in the original German. What saves this for me, though, is how clearly Swiss it is.

There’s some interesting stuff here, including Bendis’s riffs on power and responsibility and how that relates to secret identities. However, there’s too much welding to the broader Ultimate universe, including introducing characters I just don’t care about. I also still feel like Peter’s attitude toward MJ is more low-level misogyny than anything justified.

Definitely not my favorite of the series. Lots of crossover nonsense with characters I don’t really care about. Way too much casual misogyny (Peter toward MJ and creators toward the women they put in impractical fanservice costumes). Starting to question my commitment to this series binge.

Le vélotaf, j’aime bien. Arriver au bureau trempé et froid, après avoir survécu à qqs conducteurs inattentifs, ça, j’aime moins.

So excited to watch this!

J’écoute Les Cowboys Fringants depuis 2011, et Tremblay va me manquer beaucoup.

This volume was excellent. Much more of the Sandbaggers vibes and less saving the world spy fiction. I ordered the third volume today!

It’s finally happened: I’ve seen a comic book panel that has the same style as the Take On Me music video.

I’ve been wanting to read this since binging all three series of The Sandbaggers, since I’ve seen it repeatedly referred to as a spiritual sequel. They weren’t kidding—the first story arc feels like a remix of the show! The third story arc was the least interesting to me (and probably the reason this didn’t get full marks). The first two deal with the cynicism of espionage and the brokenness of spies in the way I expected the series would, whereas the third arc felt more like a traditional spy story with maybe some furniture moving for future arcs.

Peter and MJ’s relationship is one of my favorite things to follow in this series, and that makes this volume a real disappointment. It seems like so much of the story is built around forcing drama and idiot balls into these two characters for the sake of adding twists and turns to the plot. Plus, it really comes through in this volume how often MJ is treated as an extension of Peter instead of a character with her own depth and agency.

This is mostly crossover nonsense, but it’s actually kind of good? The Doctor Strange issues feel overly dramatic at points, but Peter’s nightmare is classic Spider-Man responsibility angst, so I’ll give it a pass.

Gwen Stacy is wasted in the Ultimate continuity, and I have even less interest in Carnage than I do Venom. What saves this volume for me, though, is the throughline of the classic Spider-Man theme of power and responsibility.

Used bookstores for the win! Found the first two volumes of an out-of-print comics series I’ve been wanting to try for months because it’s inspired by a TV series I really liked. Went ahead and bought both because I doubt I’ll ever have luck this good again.

This is a shameless attempt to profit off of whatever Spider-Man movie was coming out at the time, but it’s still a pretty fun story. It continues to strain credulity that this kid could keep up superhero hijinks without Aunt May finding out, but it’s enough of the mythos that I can deal with it (mostly).

This story is interesting, but it suffers from too much of superhero continuity bloat. I also miss Mark Bagley’s illustration—this artist’s faces all look alike, whereas Bagley’s characters are distinct and familiar to me. It’s just meh.

The first few issues of this are just about peak Spider-Man, and I came very close to giving this full marks. By the end, though, there was too much treating female characters as fanservice—and I have never liked temptation to infidelity as a plot device. So, some ups, some downs.

I finally got access to my spouse’s hoopla password so that I can continue my binge of this series without waiting for my loans to refresh in December. There was a lot that I don’t like about this volume: 2000s language that doesn’t age well, oversexualization of costumes and characters, and crossover nonsense. I like the characters, though, and the issue with Aunt May in therapy was good enough on its own to bump my rating up a heart.

I like herbal tea, but there’s only so much interest I can show in a cookbook on the topic. The only reason I read this was because reading a cookbook is one of the squares on my local library’s 2023 reading challenge. It could be interesting to grow my own herbs and make my own blends, but I just don’t see myself doing it.

I respect web forms that don’t let me paste content into the “confirm email” field, but I still resent them.

Oh no!

Watched The Great Mouse Detective with kiddo earlier today and am now reading Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. These are… two very different takes on Holmes.

Quelle tristesse ! Je ne savais même pas qu’il combattait le cancer. Les Cowboys Fringants, c’est un de mes groupes préférés, et je suis donc bouleversé par cette nouvelle.

I know I should probably exercise the MST3K Mantra here, but I don’t understand how you can carry a weapon as inherently dangerous as a lightsaber and describe yourself as a “guardian of peace and justice.”

Back in July, I shared that I’d figured out how to use the Habitica API to create a Siri Shortcut for updating Habitica from my Apple Watch. A few weeks ago, Hypothesis user cormacauty left a comment on that post asking for more information about how I’d done that. This post is a (belated) response to that, in the form of sharing the Siri Shortcuts that I wrote. Part of the reason that it took so long for me to get to this is because I needed to duplicate and edit the Shortcuts to strip out my API key—I’m happy to share my work but don’t want other people to be able to make changes to my account for me.

J’ai souvent l’impression que Johnny Hallyday savait plus sur Tennessee Williams que moi, un Américain, et même si j’apprécie cette chanson-là, je ressens donc toujours un peu de culpabilité en l’écoutant.

I wanted this coconut tea to taste like coconut cream pie, but it’s going in the direction of piña colada instead, and I’m always disappointed when I make myself a cup.

Je suis un Américain qui travaille pour une université américaine, mais je viens de recevoir un courriel (à mon compte professionnel) prétendant venir de l’EDF et annonçant que j’ai une facture à payer. Même si c’est évidemment du spam, je suis flatté qu’on essaie de m’arnaquer en français.

I keep going back and forth on whether I’m going to rag on these comics for having silly comicbook logic, and now’s the time I’m really going to do it. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really cared about Venom, but this reinvention of the character feels especially silly. There’s a great conversation between Peter and Nick Fury that feels like it really gets at teasing apart superhero stories in fascinating ways, but as a whole, this was just not my favorite story in the run.

This is an interesting review of a game that I hadn’t heard of but am now intrigued by. I wouldn’t mind playing an overly optimistic game right now, but I also appreciate the central critique of the game in the review. I think there’s value in recognizing the tensions that prevent us from defeating these obstacles as (relatively) easily as we can in a game.

J’aime bien la plupart des personnages dans cette série, et c’est cool de voir un plan se dérouler. Pourtant, la logique narrative ne tenait pas hyper bien, et on avait parfois l’impression que les personnages faisaient des choses juste pour avancer une certaine histoire (et, d’ailleurs, qu’on inventait de nouveaux personnages pour la même raison).

Superhero stories continue to be kind of silly, but this one continues to be fun, so I’m going to keep reading. I’m starting to realize just how little of this series I’ve read, and it’s fun to catch up with things I’d heard about but never actually seen myself.

This volume emphasized some of the parts of the series that don’t hold up, like casual schoolyard homophobia and damseling Mary Jane. Without dismissing those problems, though, there’s still a lot to like here. I have no recollection of this volume, and it’s interesting to get into new territory for the series.

I’ve decided I don’t need to critically analyze these books anymore. They’re fun, I like Bagley’s art, and I think I’m starting to get into issues I haven’t read before. Hooray for hoopla and easy access to this whole run.

There are a lot of reminders in this volume of how dumb superhero comics can be (how is a 15-year old going toe to toe with a crime boss?), but it’s also fun in a lot of ways, and I know I loved reading this when I was a teenager myself. It continues to be a fun series.