This is mostly because I grew up in Northern Kentucky, but my favorite Lower Decks throwaway joke so far is the idea of an adopted Orion growing up in Cincinnati.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of my comics collection in recent months, and after finally finishing XIII, I thought I’d revisit this series. In fact, I’ve been wanting to reread Queen & Country basically since I first read it. This first volume in particular has seen a lot of revisiting, especially the early pages.

That made it hard to appreciate the volume this time around, and it was harder to get through. It’s also a product of its time in a very specific way—20+ years later, it’s much harder to get excited about heroic secret agents facing off against mean old terrorists. What I love about The Sandbaggers (which inspired these comics) is the way the show reveals the moral vacuum at the heart of Cold War espionage (even for the “good guys”), and I’m not sure this series is willing to go there—at least not in its first issues.

Posting this in the interest of fairness, but I’m still not happy with Mozilla right now.

Le sigh.

I’ve been a Mozilla fan for a long time, but this sort of default behavior is why I’m souring on the organization (and why I abandoned Firefox a few months ago).

Does anyone out there have experience with Tannus tire armor on an ebike? My local shop is recommending it, but I don’t know if it’s good advice or if I’m being upsold.

Alors, quelques mois plus tard, j’ai enfin fini de relire les albums XIII dans ma petite collection. J’avais l’intention depuis plusieurs années de grandir cette collection, mais après cette relecture, je ne suis plus sûr. J’aime bien l’art, les histoires sont parfois intéressantes, mais il y a bien trop de choses stupides qui se déroulent dans ces pages.

Cet album-ci montre bien une chose : Vance et Van Hamme sont attirés par les États-Unis (par le bien et le mal américains), et ils essaient d’incorporer tous les genres possibles de la fiction américaine dans leurs histoires : les espions, les militaires, les immigrés, les cowboys, les complotistes… tout ce qu’on pourrait imaginer dans un film hollywoodien doit aussi être intégré chez XIII. On n’arrive plus à croire, et si je ne m’amuse plus à lire, est-ce que cela vaut la peine ?

Bon, ce n’est pas que j’avais fort envie de reprendre cette série, mais il n’y avait que deux tomes qui restent dans ma collection, et j’ai d’autres choses à relire après avoir terminé cette relecture.

Il y a dans ce tome tout ce qui m’attire et tout ce qui m’agace de la série XIII. J’ai pas trop envie de tout répéter. Il suffit de dire que c’est intéressant comme histoire d’aventure tant qu’on arrive à oublier toutes les bêtises y présentes.

The finale was a perfect summary of everything I love about this show, but I had some trouble getting into the earlier episodes.

J’aime bien les « Chroniques » de Guy Delisle, et j’étais content de pouvoir acheter cet album-ci. Pourtant, je l’ai trouvé moins intéressant que les autres que j’ai lus. C’est peut-être que le Myanmar a beaucoup changé depuis—même si je suis loin d’être expert sur le pays, ça fait bizarre d’entendre parler d’Aung San Suu Kyi avant sa libération, et avant le commencement de la tragédie des Rohingya.

En tout cas, je continue à aimer le style de Delisle (en écriture et en dessin), et ça fait que je pardonne beaucoup même si je m’ennuyais plus que prévu.

I’ve read this before, so I knew that I would enjoy it this time, but I had forgotten just how good it is. The premise is bonkers: It’s a noir story featuring a detective from an alternate history where the U.S. made part of Alaska available to Jewish refugees in the 1930s. The story picks up in the mid-2000s, when a strange murder unfolds in the months before the “Federal District of Sitka” is returned to Alaska.

Dentist’s office tried to get me to sign away my health data for AI training, but at least I got to talk Astérix with the German dentist and hygienist.

One day, I will develop some more normal hobbies. In the meantime, I’m quite pleased with the custom Hugo templates and taxonomies I’ve built to make my book reviews be a bit more like what I imagine Goodreads would be like.

Verdict on new lobster claw bike gloves: Much better than my older winter gloves (I don’t have to warm my hands under water after getting to office), but the tips of my fingers still feel the cold. I must just have really bad circulation.

Once or twice a week, I get a “Reaction Daily Digest” in my work email account catching me up on some of the emoji-style reactions I’ve received to recent emails that I’ve recently missed. I hate these emails for enough reasons that I’m taking a break from clearing my morning email to write a post about this.

email shouldn’t have emoji reactions

This isn’t a criticism of emoji or emoji reactions. As I’ve been increasing my use of Signal over the past week or so, I’ve been pleased that it supports emoji reactions and that it allows a wide range of them instead of locking you into a select few. However, one of the (few) great things about email is that it’s pretty much an open, cross-platform means of communication, and adding emoji reactions to Outlook email in a way that isn’t accounted for in the protocols that email is built on just feels dumb. It’s even more annoying than seeing phones trying to account for iOS and Android’s differing approaches to emoji reactions in a mixed group chat. Emoji reactions are great, but they don’t belong in email.

Love this framing of using Meta as “making donations to Mark Zuckerberg.” It nicely describes the idea of digital labor that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now.

I really liked this season. Each of the actors feels perfect for their role, the writers had some good fun with us through twists and turns (I’m sure some of it was original to the source material), and I’m looking forward to the next season.

This is such a fun show. I am not as well-versed in Star Trek as I’d like, so I’m sure I’m missing some of the jokes, but there are still so, so many of them. It’s bizarre, it’s a loving homage, and it’s really good.

(Now that I think about it, scanning for digits in a wall of tea tin text is like the brain’s natural regex, and I think that’s beautiful.)

Tea steeping times should always be printed in digits (“4 minutes” not “four minutes”) so that I can scan for digits on the tin instead of having to read through words.

I get a lot of reading done through hoopla, but this kind of story is starting to sour me on the platform.

John Siracusa recommended the anime adaptation of this on the year-end episode of The Incomparable, and the premise sounded interesting enough to try getting into manga again.

I love stories that explore the mundanity of fantastic worlds—there are lots of things I don’t like about the Star Wars prequels, but Jedi Knights resolving trade disputes is great—and this story delivers on that. It picks up after a D&D-style adventure party has completed their quest and asks what happens next. More particularly, it asks what it means to be a long-lived elf in a world of mortals with lesser lifespans. It leans into low-stakes tasks and semi-useless spells. It has interesting characters and great callbacks and connective tissue.

J’ai commandé un album de Guy Delisle juste pour ajouter à ma petite collection de bd francophone, et j’espère que cette case ne sera pas trop, TROP utile pendant les quatres années à venir aux USA.

“Someday My [Chance To Sleep Deeply for An Indefinitely Long Time] Will Come”

Testing a new post-forwarding service for my POSSE setup. Wish me luck!