I like French, comics, books, podcasts, (board and roleplaying) games, biking, and trains. I try to stay organized and in good (physical and mental) shape.
You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account. You can also subscribe to all of the content on this website through this RSS feed, this Bluesky account, or this newsletter.
I sometimes write in French! To only see the French content (which is also available below, alongside English content), please click on [fr] in the site header.
going semi-viral on Bluesky just made me miss blogging
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).
📺 tvblog: Ludwig (Series 1) (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
🔗 linkblog: Star Wars’ ‘Andor’ Season 2 Depicts the Banality of American Fascism
Very excited to watch this.
🎙️ radioblog: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
📚 bookblog: Karla's Choice (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
DuckDuckGo and IP geolocation (with a MapQuest and generative AI tangent)
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.
📚 bookblog: My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart Is Basically Now an Ouroboros (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Her Hugs Are Traps (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: I Excised All My Anxieties into Cartoon Characters Who Definitely Don't Have Feelings for Each Other (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Looking Glass War (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
“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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I know that “Tinker, Tailor” is good, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it for the nth time, but I really think this is the best of the Smileyverse. The most twisty, the most cynical, the most appalled at its own cynicism. It’s no surprise that the most recent additions to the Smileyverse have revisited this story—it’s the best.
📚 bookblog: The Space Between (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
I didn’t like this at all. The art is weird, and I didn’t like the story. It very nearly got more interesting in the final part, when it started pulling together the previous, seemingly standalone stories, but I still feel like it didn’t stick the landing.
📚 bookblog: Star Trek: Boldly Go, Volume 3 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I won’t pretend to be able to distinguish the very fine line that separates boring comic nonsense from amazing comic nonsense, but this is on the right side of things.
Gary Mitchell elevates Kelvinverse Kirk to godhood so that they can play a game of multiversal chess using as pieces infinite Kirks in infinite combinations. The gender-flipped Enterprise comes back! There’s a Kirk raised by Klingons and a Spock (“Simon Grayson”) who’s rejected his Vulcan side! Everything is bonkers (I didn’t even mentioned the gas-based Scotty), but I appreciate a big swing.
📚 bookblog: Star Trek: Boldly Go, Volume 2 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
I dunno, I guess there’s some good stuff in here, and maybe I’d be more patient with it if I weren’t reading a lot of Star Trek comics in a very short period of time. It just feels like I’m reading it to complete my binge, though, and I can’t say this volume impressed me much.
🔗 linkblog: Swiss Indignant to Make the Top 10 of Trump’s Tariffs List
Devinez qui c’est qui a commandé un livre depuis la Suisse la semaine dernière ?