This apparently took us two months to watch, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if that hadn’t been the case. I actually didn’t really enjoy the season arc so much—individual episodes were great, though, and the show continues to be fun. Hard to believe there’s only one season left to get through!

Am I tired, am I getting sick, or is it just Monday?

One of my favorite webcomics is a long runner that began when I was just starting high school, so the archive binge I began this week is bringing back memories in multiple ways.

Ayant grandi dans l’Église de Jésus-Christ des saints des derniers jours, c’était normal que je m’engage comme missionnaire mormon à l’âge de 19 ans. Comme j’avais déjà beaucoup étudié le français, on m’a affecté au service missionnaire en France et en Suisse, où j’ai donc habité entre 2007 et 2009.

Mes souvenirs de cette période de ma vie sont un peu compliqués. Comme je n’ai plus les mêmes croyances religieuses, j’ai certains regrets. Comme c’était quand-même très cool de vivre en Europe francophone pendant deux ans, j’éprouve quand-même de la nostalgie pour cette saison de ma vie.

When my post-bike commute helmet hair starts looking like Norman Osborn’s weird comics haircut, it might be time for a trim.

Aw, heck yes, there’s a Eurovision internet radio station.

Ebike adventure of the day: Taking a speed bump so fast it disconnected an important cord, and I spend a couple minutes trying to figure out why I lost power.

Remaking Star Wars would be unpardonable, but once enough hits the public domain, I want alternate sequels and prequels. Riff on the original in new ways. Give me a follow up where Darth Vader was never Anakin Skywalker. Bring back human, Irish Jabba. Go wild.

Since early 2019(!), I’ve been slowly but surely orienting my online presence around my Hugo blog. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on social media platforms, but that those are merely appendages to a website that I have more control over. In fact, I’m really pleased with the POSSE—Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—setup that I’ve developed over the past couple of years. It currently works like this: All of my posts start on this website, and then I use the EchoFeed service to send posts to my Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account (Micro.blog also imports my posts via RSS).

This is a funny show to rate! I believe I learned about it from David Loehr on The Incomparable, who spoke highly of it. I did enjoy watching it, which is why I’m pretty positive about it.

Thinking about it critically, the overarching plot is kind of hard to follow, the individual mysteries don’t have any way of solving them but “trust that brilliant main character is brilliant,” and the show almost knows how contrived its confessions at the end of each episode are.

Very excited to watch this.

Tinker Tailor is a comfort listen for me at this point. This weekend, I also watched the two first episodes of the Alec Guinness miniseries, and I might like the radio adaptation more? It’s really good.

Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well!

I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship. It’s the fun kind of fanservice, and while I hope this doesn’t go all Tom Clancy in its posthumous franchization, I wouldn’t mind another from Harkaway.

I don’t know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but I’ve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that don’t get a lot of results. When it happened again earlier this week, I finally grabbed a screenshot:

So, here I am searching for something related to the (relatively obscure, relatively progressive) religious denomination I belong to, and when DDG (or maybe Bing) couldn’t find anything related to the specific thing I was searching for, the first text result that it gave me was the best result it could find for a subset of my search matched with the town I live in: Lexington, Kentucky.

One of the perks of building some new content taxonomies for my review posts is that I can get a quick view of whose stuff I’m reading (or listening to) most… and realize just how much of my reading is comics.

Am I feeling excited about the Fantastic Four because the new trailer looks good? Or because the idea of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds doesn’t sound so bad right now?

Not only did my e-bike’s battery charger short out but the slow leak in the rear tire also turned into a straight up flat soon thereafter. Thanks to the student-run bike workshop on campus, I still got home in time to pick up kiddo from school, but I remain grumpy.

Not thrilled about the faint burning plastic smell that was coming from the charger for my e-bike’s battery today. (I immediately unplugged it and have reluctantly added replacing it to today’s to-do list).

I made a mistake with this reread—not in the reread itself but in starting it this early. I forgot how much these collections suck me in—and, therefore, how quickly I go through them—so now I’m done and there are still several weeks to go before the next PDF gets delivered to me and I still have to disentangle my brain between what I’m reading daily and the specific context of the new collection. It’s not a huge deal (and I liked this collection!), but food for thought before the next time I try this.

I enjoyed this collection, too, even if Billie and Ruth’s relationship always makes me slightly uncomfortable for how broken it is. Willis is good at this, and I enjoy reading these in collections even better than one strip at a time every morning.

I’m rating this higher than on my last readthrough. I couldn’t tell you why I held back last time, but this time, I was reminded of some excellent strips that have really made an impression on me, so full marks.

Why am I rereading in the first place? I did two full(ish) archive binges of DoA in 2024, so I don’t strictly need to reread this. I did back the Book 14 Kickstarter, though, and I wanted to have some context for when that PDF arrives. I’ve also been doing a lot of comics rereads in 2025, so even though I definitely don’t have the energy for another archive binge, I thought I’d revisit everything post timeskip.

Bon, je regrette pas avoir commandé un livre depuis la Suisse juste avant l’annonce des taxes douanières, mais j’espère quand-même qu’il arrive avant la prochaine folie américaine.

Feeling optimistic!

How about a sequel to “The Measure of a Man” where some future tech bro (Trek bro?) uses the events of the original episode to argue that his LLM is sentient, and so Picard, Riker, and Data team up to respond “wtf, no.”

“Came In From the Cold” may be Le Carré’s best, but I think “Looking Glass” is my favorite. That’s true of the book, but Ian McDiarmid as an incompetent agency director is also a lot of fun.

Le Carré has a particular kind of plot that boils down to “stupid people making stupid decisions,” and I think this is the best of them. It’s a damning story of toxic World War II nostalgia, desperation to be doing something meaningful with one’s life, and manipulation by more competent cynics. It plays out like a train wreck that you know will end in disaster but you can’t help but watch. I love it so much, and I wish it got more references in later Smileyverse stories.