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.
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📚 bookblog: Warp Your Own Way (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I can’t claim to have read all of the “choose your own adventure” comics in the world, but I’ve read a few in my time, and this is a good one! (Though I really need to figure out how to finish Jason Shiga’s latest…)
The art and the dialogue capture Lower Decks perfectly—I could hear the characters’ voices in my head as I read. I loved the puzzle-y bits, too, where you have to explore multiple paths (and also “cheat” at certain times) to get to a true ending. It also does what Lower Decks does best, which is to pay homage (and make fun of) what makes Star Trek fun. So glad I read this.
📺 tvblog: Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This felt more consistent than the second season. The in-jokes and continuity nods continued to be great, especially the Deep Space Nine episode and its riffs on that series’s opening credits.
I love so much that this is a Star Trek show about loving Star Trek (even its dumb bits).
📚 bookblog: Queen & Country, Definitive Edition Volume 02 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
As I wrote in my last review of this volume, this really steps things up. It better captures the ugliness and senseless brutality that The Sandbaggers also did—it also liberally cribs from Sandbaggers plot points, but I see it more as loving homage than plagiarism. I still don’t think it’s as good as The Sandbaggers, and the changing art style sometimes bugs me, but I think this might be the peak of the series.
🎙️ radioblog: Wyrd Sisters (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
I don’t know if I didn’t like the adaptation or if I wouldn’t have liked the source material, but this just felt like a slog to get through, and I didn’t really enjoy it.
🎙️ radioblog: Mort (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This bounced off of me at first, which surprised me, because I remembered liking it when listening to it years ago. I think it might have been a case of the Mondays, though, because by the last episode, I was totally on board. It’s funny, adapted well to radio, and worth the listen.
📚 bookblog: Queen & Country, Definitive Edition Volume 01 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
🔗 linkblog: Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data'
Posting this in the interest of fairness, but I’m still not happy with Mozilla right now.
📚 bookblog: Trois montres d'argent (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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 ?
📚 bookblog: El Cascador (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 2)
The finale was a perfect summary of everything I love about this show, but I had some trouble getting into the earlier episodes.
📚 bookblog: Chroniques birmanes (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Yiddish Policemen's Union
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.
in criticism of Microsoft Outlook Reactions
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.
🔗 linkblog: [Article] Zuckerberg donations – Alex'
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.