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.
Moi, j'aime le français, les BD, les livres, les podcasts, les jeux (de plateau et de rôle), le cyclisme, et les trains. Je fais de mon mieux de rester organisé et en forme (physiquement et mentalement).
You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account.
- kudos:
Après un vélotaf sous la pluie, une tisane à la réglisse fait beaucoup de bien.
- kudos:
Le vélotaf exige de l’effort—surtout quand l’ascenseur est en panne au bureau et on doit monter son vélo électrique au 2ème étage par l’escalier.
- kudos:
I know that the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie isn’t actually good, but there are bits of it I like, not least the “Zaphod Beeblebrox for President” track on the soundtrack.
- kudos:
TNG episode where Picard realizes that all voice interactions with the Enterprise’s computer are being sent to servers in Cupertino to be processed there; and that Future!Apple employees listen in on some for quality control.
- kudos:
I have unexpectedly hit a point in my life where I associate the voice of Alec Guinness with George Smiley instead of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
- kudos:
Normalement, je me débrouille assez bien en français, mais quand il s’agit d’une conversation au téléphone, j’ai vraiment du mal !
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Slow Horses (Season 3)
- kudos:What an excellent series this is. The finale was more violent than I’m comfortable with, but I appreciated that it never glorified the violence; rather, it fit in nicely with the series’s habit of showing that as screwed up as the Slow Horses are, it’s the dignified leadership of this fictional MI5 who are the real monsters. Power corrupts, and all that. I’m wondering how next series will go—I have only vague recollections of the book, and what I do remember is that it’s one of the weirder ones.
- kudos:
It’s been a feature for ages, so I feel silly that I’m only now beginning to appreciate the ability to take Markdown notes in Things 3 tasks and projects.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Standing By the Wall: The Collected Slough House Novellas, by Mick Herron
- kudos:I’d been meaning to read these for a while and was happy to find them collected in a single (Libby) volume. Herron is great at adding a lot to his universe full of terrible people, and I wish I recognized all the cameos and continuity nods from the main series. I did appreciate Herron’s lampshading of his characters’ not aging despite a decade of publication history—it was clever without feeling out of place.
media I consumed in 2023
- kudos:My dad has been logging the books he reads since he was a teenager, and I’ve always wanted to try something like that out. I gave it a go in 2022 with a notebook, but I quickly realized I wanted to journal that information, too. Since I journal in Day One, that meant logging reading digitally, so at the end of 2022, I started building some Siri Shortcuts for blogging about books.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian Mackintosh: The Inside Story of The Sandbaggers and Television's Top Spy, by Robert G. Folsom
- kudos:I’ve been hungering to read this book for months! I watched all three series of The Sandbaggers early in 2023 and have been trying to read and watch everything I can on the series. This includes a couple of YouTube video essays, most of Greg Rucka’s Queen & Country, and whatever else I could find. A relative gifted me this book for Christmas, and I was very excited! I’d known about it for a while but couldn’t find it through public or academic libraries.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
- kudos:I enjoyed this semi-prequel to the Slow Horses series. I’d forgotten some series details along the way and wish there were a series wiki out there to help me catch up. Nonetheless, I remembered enough to enjoy the connections and figure most bits out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree
- kudos:I don’t think this prequel is quite as good as the original Legends & Lattes, but it is clearly cut from the same cloth. It’s a fun mix of D&D tropes and general coziness and made for a nice way to spend some of my winter break.
🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- kudos:Kicked off the family holiday gathering by watching this with my dad last night. This was a good Indiana Jones movie, I (mostly) had fun watching it, and I’m probably being a little harsh in my rating of it. However, for all we live in an era where punching Nazis is shorthand for some very necessary resistance to some very dangerous far-right action, I’ve been reading about non-violence lately, and that makes it hard to enjoy media like this.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Nancy: A Comic Collection, by Olivia Jaimes
- kudos:I don’t really like gag-a-day strips (or many comic strips at all), but Jaimes’s run on Nancy speaks to me in a way I can’t explain. I checked this out from the library for kiddo but ended up reading it myself.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Loki (Season 2)
- kudos:I enjoyed watching this show, and I really like the aesthetic it’s been rocking for its two seasons. I was inclined to give it a higher rating than this because of those factors and because I don’t really have anything bad to say about it—however, I’m hard pressed to come up with any praise more substantive than “I had a fun time,” so I’m going to knock off a heart for that.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga Volume 11, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
- kudos:I had to refresh myself on the last few volumes before tackling this latest one, and there are still lots of details I can’t remember. This series is gory, crude, and profane in ways that ought to turn me away from it, but it’s just so compelling. Great art, powerful characters, and good story. Maybe I should actually subscribe to issues as they come out? I’ve never read comics in a monthly format before, but I don’t know if I want to wait as long as I had to for this next TPB.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 4, Death of Spider-Man, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I’ve complained a lot about superhero comics nonsense throughout this series, but it’s still depressing to finally show that a 16-year-old wouldn’t survive all of these fights. It’s an interesting wrap up for this character, and I ought to find and read the Miles Morales series, but after 26 TPBs in a couple of months, I think I need a break from Spider-Man. There are other books I ought to read, and on the comics landscape, I hear there’s a new Saga TPB to get caught up on.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 3, Death of Spider-Man Prelude, by Brian Michael Bendis
- kudos:I miss the earlier art, and there’s still plenty of comic book nonsense, but this series has found a good groove. I don’t know a whole ton about main Marvel continuity, but I do feel like Bendis has the freedom to do his own thing here, and I gather that was the point of the Ultimate universe. Kind of wild to have the next volume’s big event spoiled in this volume’s title, but I guess it’s been long enough for it not to matter.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 2, Chameleons, by Brian Michael Bendis and David Lafuente
- kudos:Fun arc! I like the whole range of characters at Bendis’s disposal, and even though it strains credulity sometimes, it is fun to have Peter and friends as teenagers. Lafuente’s art isn’t bad, but I’m not used to it, so I have trouble recognizing Peter as Peter sometimes (especially in this arc!). Nearing the end of this journey, though I ought to read the Miles Morales volumes after that.
- kudos:
I may run a one-shot for my siblings over the holidays and need to decide on system. I like the simplicity of Lasers and Feelings but also the improvisational collaboration of Ironsworn: Starforged. Wondering if I could hack them together…
- kudos:
A while ago, a mental health counselor suggested I leave headphones behind while running and treat it as a mindfulness exercise, too. That’s been genuinely helpful, but it’s so darn cold this morning that if I don’t motivate myself with an actual play podcast, I won’t make it past the front door.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Taskmaster (Series 7)
- kudos:We got really into this show during the height of the pandemic and then left it alone for a while. This was a great season to come back to and provided a lot of laughs. Probably won’t come back to the show for a while (we have a few other series we’re behind on now), but this was exactly what I needed.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 1, The World According to Peter Parker, by Brian Michael Bendis and David Lafuente
- kudos:I don’t know how to deal with the renaming and renumbering going on in this series, and trying to read up on it on Wikipedia is just making me more confused. This is very clearly a “reset the status quo” effort, but it’s not entirely bad? Bendis continues to mistreat Mary Jane, and I feel like it’s actually getting worse, so that’s not great. I do like the dynamic of Aunt May taking in more and more superheroes, though, so we’ll see how that turns out.
🔗 linkblog: mes pensées sur 'Moins de chats, plus de crustacés... des scientifiques veulent davantage de biodiversité dans les emoji - rts.ch - Environnement'
- kudos:Trop de vertébrés dans les emojis ? Ça fait rire un peu, mais je comprends aussi la motivation. C’est vrai que ces petits symboles représentent notre compréhension du monde—pourquoi ne pas donc élargir la collection ? lien pour “Moins de chats, plus de crustacés… des scientifiques veulent davantage de biodiversité dans les emoji - rts.ch - Environnement”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times'
- kudos:Joli article ! I mostly learned Parisian French from my school classes, and I’ve always been interested in the alternatives out there, though I’ll admit I’ve never fully appreciated African French. Time for that to change. link to gift article link to “How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 22, Ultimatum, by Brian Michael Bendis
- kudos:I’d heard a lot about Ultimatum before, but this was my first time actually reading the arc. There are things I don’t like in these issues—including some of the low-level misogyny I pointed out in previous volumes—but for a major crossover event filled with comic book nonsense, it was actually pretty good.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol 21, War of the Symbiotes, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:I really shouldn’t like this volume. I don’t care that much about Venom or Carnage, and I think their Ultimate origin stories are dumb. Gwen Stacy got treated terribly earlier in the series, and this comic book resurrection is as silly as her death was stupid. Yet, I thought the framing story was interesting, Venom is compelling as an eldritch villain, and I… enjoyed myself? Dunno what to make of all that, but four hearts it is.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition, Volume 03, by Greg Rucka
- kudos:I think this might be my least favorite of the three volumes I now own (need to track down the fourth to complete the collection). The first arc was good enough (and felt straight out of The Sandbaggers—Rucka borrows HEAVILY from a couple of episodes), but the second seemed like supplementary material to Rucka’s novels. I like this series when it’s riffing off of The Sandbaggers, but when it feels like its own thing with lots of continuity, it’s harder to enjoy.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 20, And His Amazing Friends, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:This volume also feels like a step in the right direction! It seems like Bendis is willing to stretch with and fill out the universe some: What he did with Liz Allan and recurring villain/joke The Shocker are especially interesting. I’m having fun with this series again!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 19, Death of a Goblin, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:I feel like this series found its groove again! I miss Bagley’s pencilling, but Immonen makes a fine replacement. A lot of the stuff that bothered me in recent volumes has been redeemed here: Kitty Pryde is interesting instead of just a drama device, Norman Osborn gets some depth, S.H.I.E.L.D. is engaged with as the creepy organization they are, and it turns out that comic book nonsense can actually be fun sometimes.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 18, Ultimate Knights, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I’ve complained a lot about comic book nonsense in recent volumes, and there’s plenty of it here, too, but this pulled a lot together in a way that just plain works. Interesting crossover action, classic Spider-Man morality of superheroes, good art, interesting stakes. I guess this is why I keep reading this series.
- kudos:
Cher.ère.s francophones, je n’ai rien contre vos emprunts de nos mots anglais (nous-mêmes, on a souvent emprunté des mots français). Pourtant, je ne comprendrai jamais pourquoi vous avez transformé notre “walkie talkie” en « talkie-walkie ».
- kudos:
Merci à YouTube de me permettre un petit voyage en tramway grenoblois ce matin.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 17, Clone Saga, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I almost gave this four hearts because I kind of like how it turned out, and it did touch on some good Spider-Man themes. However, I then remembered all the comic book nonsense that happens here—and the way that so many of these issues demonstrate how terrible it would be to live in the (Ultimate) Marvel universe.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 16, Deadpool, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:As has been the case for the past few volumes, this has some genuinely interesting stuff in it (the X-Men crossover was more engaging than I’d like to admit), but for the most part, this feels like advancing a broader Marvel landscape than doing actual Spider-Man stuff.