Abstraction—and especially the abstraction of humans and their lives—has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notes—I have fond memories of the audiobook but can’t recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellul’s writing, which I’ve been consuming a lot of lately.

In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things.

That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality. It acknowledges the reduction of human beings into abstractions without ever really being skeptical of it. As cool as the core idea is, it’s also kind of a horror story, and we can see some of its scarier implications a couple of decades later.

Il n’y a pas d’anxiété sans été.

This is more the kind of thing I’d expect from OOTS “purchase only” content. The additional stories were fun, the author commentary was interesting, and there’s at least one panel I might be able to work into a conference presentation, so that’s nice.

Okay, buying this Order of the Stick collection was worth it for this panel alone.

Webcomics break my reviewing assumptions in interesting ways. I recently spent a lot of time binging the OOTS archives, with over 1,000 pages of material, without writing any reviews, because that wasn’t a “book.” This 75ish-page comic, though, gets a review.

Anyway, that binge reminded me of how much I love this webcomic, which is why I’m kind of surprised not to like this prequel. Maybe it’s because it’s anchored to the beginning, gag-a-strip format, before the story gets really interesting. Maybe it’s because it’s B&W and doesn’t have a lot of depth. I don’t know, but it’s not going to stop me from trying to build up a collection of the PDFs of other volumes in the series.

Okay, so I know that most of my long-form blogging for the past few months has touched on Jacques Ellul in some way, but I’m reading a lot of his work right now, and I wouldn’t keep referencing his work if I didn’t find it relevant in some way. I’m particularly pleased that Ellul’s writing is helping me revisit some ideas (and concerns) that I had over a decade ago, when I was applying to and then first beginning grad school. I thought that I would spend my PhD researching games and learning, and even though I’m happy with my decision to pivot to social media research, I kind of miss some of those ideas I was playing around with at the time, and I’m glad that reading Ellul is helping bring them back.

Cory Doctorow reviewed this book on his Pluralistic blog recently, and since I typically enjoy the books he recommends (well, the ones I try, anyway), I gave it a try. The writing style is not my favorite, and I don’t know that it needed to be one of those books that is written by an in-universe character, but both of those fit really well into the themes of the book, so I shouldn’t complain.

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.