As promised, I’m reading this in honor of Bill Willingham’s badass public domain antics earlier this week. I think the concept of his series is fun, but I’m not sure if I think it’s as great as its reputation. The idea of fairy tale characters living in the real world is full of potential, but the story seems pretty superficial. Will probably keep reading, though.

Appreciate Doctorow’s detailed (and expert) perspectve here.

I often gripe that Markdown doesn’t have as much functionality as HTML, but I just had to hand-convert a short .md document to .html, and it emphasized just how much easier it is to write Markdown on the fly.

So neat! Gotta figure this out for my Hugo site.

Such a cool thing to do. I haven’t read Fables in ages, but may revisit it out of respect for Willingham.

This is an interesting interview. I don’t think I’m sold on the defense—if anyone can afford to pay artists, the team behind Terraforming Mars can—but I do see how there’s more nuance here than my gut reaction to the headline. Still not pleased, though.

I was already enjoying the actual play podcast Worlds Beyond Number, but once the phrase “pro bono rules lawyer” was uttered, I knew I was totally in.

I inherited from my mom a heart rate that just trends low—even lower if I’m exercising regularly. The doctors I’ve talked to aren’t concerned about it, but every morning, my Apple Watch freaks out, convinced that I almost died in my sleep.

Quelle belle idée !

Je dis pas que c’est un chef d’oeuvre, mais ça faisait plusieurs années depuis la dernière fois que j’ai regardé ce film, et on s’est bien amusé, ma fille et moi. Ça donne envie de lire les livres.

Faudra que je visite la petite ceinture un jour !

Il y a beaucoup de sagesse dans la chanson « Octobre » des Cowboys fringants. Faut que je l’écoute plus souvent.

I didn’t love this when I first read it after its publication, but it has grown on me since! It’s fanservice, franchise-oriented writing at its best, and even if some of its details strain plausibility (just how old is Smiley?), it’s fun to see behind the scenes of Leamas’s narrative in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and to weld that narrative to characters we know from the Karla trilogy.

Neat! This could make a good reading for my class on games and meaning.

After several years of having it vaguely on my wish list (ever since Cory Doctorow’s post about it on Boing Boing), I finally picked up a copy of Lotus Dimension, a tabletop roleplaying game with an intentional emphasis on resolving problems through non-violence. I’ve been reading a lot on non-violence lately, and even though I still have a lot to learn, I’ve been asking recently whether a commitment to non-violence in real life would be incompatible with enjoying games where violence is one of the key ways to achieve victory.

I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.

Je trouve que Paris est surreprésenté dans les mondes francophones et francophiles, mais je me lasse pas quand-même des vidéos sur son métro.

I really enjoyed the original adaptation of the book (which I’m trying to read now), and the characters and many of the jokes were just as delightful in the second series. As a whole, though, the series felt like it didn’t have much of a plot—or, when it did, that it was moving furniture for a third series.

Je regrette ne pas avoir réussi (pour le moment) à enseigner le français à ma fille, mais ça reste utile pour parler en secret avec mon épouse.

I have loved They Might Be Giants longer than any other artist, and I still feel like I constantly overlook how good they are.

I grew up not drinking tea or coffee because of religious convictions—a habit that ultimately stayed with me longer than those convictions! Over the course of the two years I spent as a Mormon missionary, I taught a number of people that (among other things) they should adopt the same convictions and also give up tea and coffee. One of the most interesting lessons on this subject I had was with Jonathan.

I was excited last weekend to buy two new teas to add to my growing collection, but these might be the first duds I’ve picked out since starting with tea in May. I know rooibos is a red flag for me from years of herbal teas, so I don’t know how I missed it in the one ingredient list.

I skipped The Honourable Schoolboy for this Le Carré adventure because I think it’s the weakest of the Karla trilogy, and because the BBC Radio 4 adaptation made me dread what kind of stereotypical Chinese accents an audiobook reader might adopt. I couldn’t possibly skip Smiley’s People, though; I think I might like it even more than Tinker Tailor, though you can’t appreciate this without having read that. It has the best of Le Carré—copious but not irrelevant detail, moral ambiguity without needless grittiness, and a sense of inevitability that still keeps you hooked on the story.

Ma fille aime bien les crêpes au Nutella, et ça fait un petit moment qu’on n’en a pas fait. Comme elle est malade depuis quelques jours, c’était le bon moment ce soir de reprendre cette petite tradition. En mangeant ma première crêpe, j’ai été rempli d’un tas de souvenirs, comme si c’était la madeleine de Proust. Je n’ai pas envie d’écrire sept tomes sur le sujet, mais pourquoi pas un petit blog ?

I don’t know (or care) much about D&D worldbuilding, and I’m not going to let Hasbro off the hook for their OGL nonsense, but this was a fun movie, and I’m glad I finally got to watch it.

J’aime bien la ville où j’habite, mais c’est fort dommage qu’il n’y ait pas d’Alliance Française ici.

J’ai déjà lu cet album cette année, mais comme j’étais en mode « Guy Delisle », j’ai décidé de le relire. C’est bien différent que ses albums de l’étranger, mais c’est tout aussi émouvant. J’aime beaucoup.

I don’t even remember when this season ended, but it took a while to convince myself to get through it. The first season of this show was near-perfect, but it’s gotten dumber over time, and this season was particularly disappointing. It felt stuffed with fanservice and worldbuilding I didn’t care about, indecisive and self-contradictory, and like everything proceeded on the logic of plot. Makes me miss Andor.

A few weeks ago, I added a tin of tea that tastes like Andes mints to my growing collection, and it’s taken a lot of self control to drink anything else in the morning.

I’ve read this a number of times already, but after reading Delisle’s “Jerusalem,” I had to revisit it. It’s the wild, literally incredible story of the two months he spent in Pyongang supervising a team of North Korean animators who were doing work for the French animation studio Delisle worked for. The art is excellent, the writing is good, the story is bonkers. One of my favorite comics.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working to digitize journals, letters, and other documents from my past. It’s interesting to see how much of present me is different than past me—but also what’s still the same.

C’était le 1er août (où peut-être le jour d’après) la dernière fois que j’ai quitté la Suisse pour rentrer chez moi. La fête nationale marque donc un rappel d’y retourner un jour.

Lire Guy Delisle en traduction, c’est déjà bon, et je suis content que ses albums sont disponible dans les bibliothèques près de chez moi. Pourtant, je viens de reprende Pyongyang en version francophone, et c’est parfait.

Using Siri Shortcuts and an API, I just made a crude-but-functional Apple Watch implementation for Habitica. Very pleased with myself.

I wish I had read this before Gharib’s second comic memoir, because there’s a progression there (in terms of both the quality of art and adding detail to story) that makes it unfair to judge this one after reading it second. I think “It Won’t Always Be Like This” is better, but this comic is so good, too. Great story, distinctive art, great overall product.

I really enjoyed this show! It veers from realism but into the fun thriller, and while its dedication to drama is obvious, it’s not always a bad thing. I enjoy a show that rewards the viewer for knowing the difference between the FSB and the GRU, and I’m really looking forward to the second season.