One of my favorite things that Lexington does is to hold a bike light awareness “Glow Ride” the night before the fall time change. It’s been a family tradition for us and a lot of fun.

I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out.

Pretty sure I just saw a student dressed up for Halloween as a Skrull, and it occurs to me that anyone could claim to be in costume as a Skrull.

A lot of my Hugo hacks are ugly, but I’m happy that I’ve figured it out well enough to be able to do the hacks in the first place.

Hier, je me demandais combien de temps encore cette période de bonne santé mentale (qui existait depuis quelques mois) durerait encore. Ce matin, j’ai malheurusement la réponse.

I had some driving to do this weekend, so I tore through the audiobook of this at 2x speed. I may be a but harsh on it with my rating, but I just didn’t really love it? It’s well written and interesting but didn’t cohere enough for me.

I wonder if reading it 20 years ago when it first came out might have changed my views. Some of it might have seemed more prescient, and some of its attitudes less problematic.

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

After the brilliant first season of The Mandalorian, I put some related art up in my office. As the show has gone on, though, I’ve gotten less and less impressed with it, to the point that I wonder why I keep the art up.

My favorite detail from Homestar Runner production is how the off-brand voices in the low-quality animation segments are just the best efforts of the non-voice-actor guy to imitate the voices his brother does.

I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.

I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much.

I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).

The RSS feeds for my local newspaper don’t seem to be compatible with my current feed reader, and I’m torn between building myself a web-scrape-to-RSS workaround for the fun of it or just pivoting to another local news source.

The Mastodon bot that posts random Homestar Runner screenshots is back, and I’m so happy. Refusing to unfollow it despite it not having posted since July was a wise choice.

Today, after a brief appearance on campus to teach one class, I begin a convoluted trip to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. As this trip has gotten closer, I’ve looked at the details of my trip and slowly realized that I messed this up good in terms of deciding how to get to Pittsburgh and back. This post is a confession of my sins!

I’m fairly transport conscious—at least for an American. I checked Amtrak to see if there was a reasonable way to get there by train, and I’m pretty sure I also checked Greyhound to see what travel by bus would be like. I do this for any conference I attend, but I usually get the same result: American trains and buses just aren’t well developed enough to support this kind of trip. At some point, I must have also done the math on driving versus flying… or at least I hope I did—maybe that’s another sin to confess. At any rate, at some point I gave in to the inevitability of flying and worked with my employer’s travel office to get some tickets booked.

RSS forever! I love RSS, I love Cory Doctorow, and I love this post.

I am 100% on team POSSE, but it can approach Rube Goldberg levels of complexity, and I don’t always know right away how to fix things that break.

Over the weekend, I bought a print of a Biggs Darklighter portrait from a local artist, and every time I walk past it, I feel better about the purchase.

Between a work conversation a few days ago and a podcast I’m listening to this morning, I’ve spent a lot of time this week wishing I were a regular comic book shop customer.

I’m surprised to be rating this higher than previous seasons, because it’s based off of one of my least favorite books in the series. I like the series more when it leans into the petty and mundane, and this book feels almost like a blockbuster spy movie with its unstoppable bad guys and conspiratorial plots.

That turns out to make for good television, though, and I thought the season finale was particularly good, in a way that raises my opinion of the whole season. I am feeling excited about this franchise and might do a reread while I wait for the fifth season to come out (not least because I’m struggling to remember the plot of the fifth book).

Look, I like Steam, but it’s still a sucky business model, like so many others today,

I tried the first episode of Agatha All Along with my spouse, and we both agreed we needed a refresher on this series.

I think this is one of the best entries in the MCU—certainly for TV. The premise is weird and is committed to it; it’s comic book-y but mostly in a fun way; it explores deep questions alongside action and humor; and it’s willing to show how scary superpowers are. I’m glad we came back to it.

RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped updating nearly 3 weeks ago. Not sure if it’s the website or my app, but it’s making me grumpy.

I am by nature pretty prudish, and even though I’ve been successfully dialing that down recently, I still feel weird about having read this and even weirder about acknowledging that on a public website. That said, I’ve always felt like I should give this a try since it’s well regarded in comics, and after a few failed attempts in earlier, more prudish years, I powered my way through this complete edition over the past few days.

I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game. After spending a ton of money on the First Edition and realizing that I still wasn’t great at the game because I couldn’t be bothered to follow “the meta,” I got disillusioned when the Second Edition came out and made all my purchases semi-obsolete and the little skill I’d built up totally obsolete.

Today marks five years since I tried out mental health counseling for the first time, and I’m grateful for the good it’s done me since then.