I am very much here for Matt Potts criticizing Hogwarts for not embracing the humanities and the importance of the humanities.

Yesterday, two podcasts that I listened to while doing work around the house lined up in such a perfect way that I wanted to write down my memory of the moment. First, because I was recently reminded of the fantastic podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text (which applies sacred reading techniques to the Harry Potter series, treating it as serious and meaningful without letting it—or its author—off the hook for being problematic), I’ve been trying to catch up with its second runthrough of the book series, in the perhaps-vain hope that I can start listening to episodes as they come out.

Grâce à une conversation avec une amie (celle qui m’a donné une pièce de 5 CHF), je me suis souvenu ce matin de l’émission RTS « Gare à vous ». J’en profite pour découvrir Romanshorn en rangeant la maison cet après-midi.

Good article on an important subject. I may have to assign this to my students next semester!

J’ai commencé à écouter la musique francophone il y a onze ans. Avant ça, j’avais quelques albums (Caféine de Christophe Willem et la bande originale de Le Roi Soleil), et je connaissais Serge Gainsbourg, mais selon mes souvenirs, j’ai du attendre janvier 2011 pour me foncer vraiment dans la musique en français. En ce temps, je commençais un poste comme « instructeur étudiant » du français à l’université où je faisais mes propres études.

Ma fille se plaint quand on écoute « La marine marchande » des Cowboys fringants parce qu’elle ne comprend pas le français, mais si elle comprenait le français, je n’oserai jamais écouter cette chanson devant elle !

Je viens de recevoir une pièce de 5 CHF (la meilleure pièce de toutes les monnaies du monde) d’une amie qui a visité la Suisse cet été. Quel beau cadeau et souvenir !

I loved the original book and hope to pick up the second. This was a good interview on how surprisingly many important things this kind of weird project overlaps with.

I’ve long written in my journal kind things people say about me. I used to think of that as vanity, but since recognizing my imposter syndrome and other mental health struggles, I think of it as storing up confidence for hard days.

I find myself enjoying this books as quick reads in between—or concurrent with—longer, more demanding reads. It’s interesting to see Moren build up more of his fictional universe and do more work to connect characters and events. I enjoyed the actions and setting of this book—it would make good inspiration for an RPG setting, which I mean as a compliment. It felt like the cliffhanger in this book was a bit of a gimmick, and I’m not sure I followed all of the plot (or that it was developed in the way I would have hoped), but it was still an enjoyable read.

I picked this book up on a whim at a Nashville bookstore over the summer. It surprised me that I felt drawn to the book—I know who Wheaton is, but I’m not a super fan; the book was an expensive new hardback; and I usually am more hesitant about buying things than grabbing something on a whim. I did really feel drawn to the book, though. I had recently started reading Wheaton’s blog, I admire his EFF-style thinking, I know he’s been an advocate for mental health, and I was intrigued by the conceit of revisiting a 20-year-old memoir and annotating it with two decades of further growth and hindsight.

I am very near the end of Wil Wheaton’s updated/annotated memoir Still Just a Geek, which I bought over the summer on a short family trip. I have lots of thoughts—most of them positive—about the memoir and may write a bit more about it once I finally finish. For now, though, since I wrote last week complaining about companies like Apple and ClassDojo restricting hardware and software to support their bottom line at the expense of users, I was struck by a short passage Wheaton included making a case for general purpose computing:

It’s been an existentially and emotionally tiring weekend, so the “person man” verse of TMBG’s Particle Man is hitting in a way it hasn’t before.

Je viens de payer une facture assez chère pour faire entretenir et réparer mon vélo, mais la facture annuelle juste pour le droit de garer une voiture chez mon travail coûterait deux fois ça. Je sors donc toujours gagnant.

This is a cute story—hat tip to Boing Boing for recommending it.

Hier soir, juste avant de me coucher, quelqu’un a posé une question sur r/French: Pourquoi les non-Francophones choisissent-ils d’apprendre le français ? J’ai vu la question peu après qu’elle a été posée, et j’ai dit la vérité : On m’avait offert le choix entre les cours de français et les cours d’espagnol. Il y avait plus de monde qui voulaient étudier l’espagnol, et j’avais envie de contrarier. J’ai donc choisi le français comme acte de rébellion.

A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

Thanks to a recommendation from Boing Boing, I’ve spent part of this afternoon watching this amazing video cataloging “Every Music Reference & Sample in They Might Be Giants Songs”: Flood was one of the first albums I ever owned (I think it was beat by the deluxe soundtrack for Star Wars: A New Hope, but not by much), and while I don’t listen to TMBG as often as I ought to, videos like these remind me how much I love the band.

Sad news. I had the livestream up and was hoping to watch the launch before going into the office today.

Looks like a fun local gaming pub.

I read Feed in high school and found it interesting, but when I read it again in 2019, it was amazing. This review gets at why the book is so good—and important. Maybe it’s time for me to visit it again.

Like the previous books in this series, I enjoyed this read even if it wasn’t the best book in the world. Moren continues to build an interesting world populated by tropey-but-fun characters.

J’ai mis un autocollant SNCF sur mon cahier pour le nouveau semestre. Je voulais signifier que je suis francophile et ferroviphile, mais comme je suis bien en retard quant aux préparations pour mes cours, j’avoue que l’autocollant peut avoir un sens double.

I saw this book at a bookstore on a recent family vacation and immediately made note of it. I’d read Robb’s The Discovery of France in college and really enjoyed it, so I was sure I’d like this one, too. I checked it out from the library and then had to read it in a rush when I was alerted about someone else’s hold on the book. I ended up turning it in about a week late, but oh well.

I really should have been reading other books that I started earlier, but this one was too much fun not to start. Several weeks ago, I watched the Aardman-animated The Pirates! movie and I came away a bit disappointed. I had liked the books in high school, so I looked them up at the library, only to find this book by the same author. The subject matter was really interesting to me—I’ve been fascinated by the social construction of countries since before I knew the language to put it in those terms.

Listening to the NPR audio adaptation of Star Wars emphasizes just how important John Williams and Ben Burtt are to making that universe work.

The more time I have spent writing web content, the more I have come to loathe WYSIWYG interfaces.

J’aime beaucoup la radio numérique, surtout parce que j’ai la possibilité d’écouter des chaînes radio francophones. Parmi mes chaînes préférées se trouve DKL Dreyeckland, une chaîne alsatienne. J’aime bien la musique, mais ce que j’aime surtout, ce sont les pubs. Normalement, je supporte pas la publicité dans mes médias, mais je fais une exception pour les pubs en français, parce que ça me permet d’apprendre un langage que je n’ai jamais appris dans un cours lycéen ou universitaire.

Twelve years ago, I spent a summer in Geneva completing an internship at the NGO Geneva Call ( « Appel de Genève » ). Being the bookworm that I am, I naturally grabbed a few books to bring with me. I know that I read through Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar that summer—I had just started using Ubuntu and was wildly (over)optimistic about the ideals of open source.

Thanks to Reddit and Wikipedia, I learned this morning that Cincinnati has an abandoned, partially completed subway system. Grew up just south of Cincy but never heard this until now.

Impossible de regarder une vidéo sur les trains des CFF sans fort ressentir l’envie de retourner en Suisse.

Kiddo starts at a new school on Wednesday, and I’ve been putting off signing the Acceptable Use Policy and Chromebook Policy because I want to read them carefully. I don’t know how much I can do about anything that I’m really concerned with, but I’m a tech researcher when I’m not being kiddo’s dad, so I feel an obligation to be informed and raise a fuss when something is fussworthy.

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes spend a weekend setting up Axis and Allies and then playing the better part of a whole game against myself. I got pretty good at opening moves this way, and I kind of wish I had the time to do this again once.

This summer has been a good one for getting back into tabletop roleplaying. I played a lot of the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG in middle and high school and have been spending most of my life since then wishing that I were still that involved with RPGs. I’ve compensated some by listening to actual play podcast: Total Party Kill rotates through several great D&D campaigns, the original Fantasy Flight Star Wars run of Campaign is so good that I’m listening to it a second time, and Penny Arcade’s Tales from the Loop campaign blew my mind when I listened to it a few months ago.

Malgré avoir grandi au Kentucky, je n’ai jamais éprouvé un grand amour pour la musique country. Ça m’étonne donc toujours quand je constate son influence dans la musique francophone.

Happily rediscovering Jonathan Coulton’s discography this morning.