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.

I was worried this was going to be a gritty take on Astro City, but now I’m just mad they took the name of my favorite superhero for a different story.

Grâce à une épisode de Culture BD sur France Culture, j’ai décidé de lire (enfin) Corto Maltese. Content de trouver des traductions chez ma bibliothèque locale, mais il faut que je trouve plus de moyens pour lire la BD en français, quoi.

Wild article. We once knew how to do trains, so why can’t we figure it out better now?

Like the previous entry in this series, I wouldn’t say that this is a classic of science fiction, but it was a fun read. The worldbuilding continues to be interesting, the characters have potential, the plot was fun, and I enjoyed reading it. It did make me want to play some space opera/space military RPGs, but I also felt conflicted about that. As I think about Community of Christ’ focus on becoming a peace church, I wonder how much I should enjoy reading books that make violence and warfare interesting (or consuming other media that does the same).

I read this book for the first time a few years ago. Dan is a regular panelist on The Incomparable and a regular player on their D+D spinoff, so I figured I owed it a read. When reading it then, it bounced off of me—I wasn’t all that impressed with the story or the writing, and I barely remembered any of it when revisiting it. I recently listened to Dan talk about this book—and the sequels he’s since written—on an episode of The Incomparable, so I decided to give the series another try.

One of my favorite podcasts, The Incomparable, recently covered this book, describing it as a crazy mix of genres and ideas that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. That convinced me to give the book a try, and that description holds up. There’s a woman who’s sold her soul to a demon; a family of extraterrestrial refugees running a donut shop; a trans girl escaping from abuse; love for video game music; a deep respect for food, classical music, and violin construction; and so much that doesn’t seem to all fit in the same story but does anyway.

Ce n’est pas souvent que j’ai le plaisir de commander un kebab-frites aux États-Unis. C’est donc un déjeuner réussi aujourd’hui !

Je sais que nous, les Américains, nous avone une longue tradition de massacrer les mots empruntés du français, mais je ne comprendrai jamais pourquoi on dit « crêpe » comme « crépe ». C’est insupportable.

I feel like I should love Catch-22, but even though I got a lot more out of it this time than the first time I read it over a decade ago, I just don’t think it’s as funny as it’s famed to be. 📚

J’ai déjà écrit cette semaine sur mon amour pour Dijon, et c’est peut-être pour ça qu’un souvenir précis me vient à l’esprit ce matin. Quand je vivais à Dijon, je n’avais pas d’ordinateur et ce n’était pas encore l’âge de l’ordiphone. J’allais donc chez un cybercafé toutes les semaines pour écrire des courriels à ma famille et à des amis. Le cybercafé que je fréquentais s’appellait Cyberbisey, justement parce que c’était un cybercafé sur la rue Berbisey (ce n’était qu’après plusieurs semaines que j’ai compris la blague).

Cet après-midi, je prépare mes cours d’automne en écoutant Indochine.

I have done more blogging this summer than in the two preceding years, and I love it. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up this rate once the school year starts, but I want to keep up consistency.

Ça fait quelques années que mon frère regarde la chaîne YouTube Not Just Bikes, qui parle des vélos, des transports publics, et de l’infrastructure qui les soutient (où pas). Il m’en parle assez souvent, mais ce n’est que récemment que j’ai enfin décidé de regarder quelques vidéos. Vu mon amour pour les sujets abordés dans les vidéos (les vélos, les transports publics, l’Europe), ça m’étonne que je n’ai pas découvert cette chaîne avant.

I broke my site a few days ago without realizing it, so kept remote posting to it. Fixed site this morning, and now thinking about how nice it is that Micro.blog weaves the new posts into the timeline by the original timestamp instead of mass posting them.

Content de voir le retour de Culture BD sur France Culture !

When I was in college, I ran into a friend on my way to a professor’s office hours. He saw that I had a copy of Superman for All Seasons with me and gave me a hard time about it—he was much more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan (these were the days when this was primarily a reference to comics, not sprawling cinematic universes) and just didn’t get the appeal of Superman—how could you do anything interesting with a character that powerful?

Pour un album censé être féministe, il y a bien trop d’essentialisme dans Mesdames de Grand Corps Malade.

This morning’s RSS issues seem to be a problem with NetNewsWire’s standalone functionality, so as much as I love the app, it’s time to find a new one. Now taking RSS recommendations for iOS/macOS.

In happier morning news, I am now restocked on my favorite Coconut Cocoa herbal tea thanks to a recent visit to Cincinnati’s best international/odds and ends market.

Belatedly realized this morning that I haven’t been getting RSS updates from local paper for… a while. Don’t know if issue is on my end or theirs, but I’m a faithful subscriber, so I’d like to get this fixed.

I often read two books at a time, but reading Thomas Merton on contemplation and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather simultaneously is… quite the combination.

I am not entirely sure why I decided to finally read this book. I say “finally,” but the truth is that it’s never been on my list of books to read. I certainly never had plans to watch the movie, but maybe that was what pushed me to read the book. After hearing os much about a classic movie that I didn’t think I’d ever watch, I figured I ought to at least read the book.

I never would have picked this comic up on my own, but I discovered it through TVTropes, read it over two days, and really enjoyed i! Fraction’s take on writing it is similar to Ryan North’s take on Squirrel Girl, with a lot of humor, very little taking oneself seriously, and plenty of story to keep the whole thing together. The comic leans into the silliness of Olsen as a character and embraces a lot of the Silver Age approach to comics.

I always tell my students that you can learn best by just diving in and tinkering, but it blows my mind that I was just able to make some SVG icons do what I wanted by making educated guesses about how their code worked.

I always found the Inhumans stuff the least interesting part of Ms. Marvel comics, so I’m digging the reimagined parts of the TV show.

Comme je reprends la course à pied, j’augmente aussi le nombre de podcasts que j’écoute; il y a des podcasts francophones à ne pas rater ?

Après presque deux ans de pause, je reprends la course à pied. Mon dos va mieux, j’ai de nouvelles chaussures, et je suis bien impatient de recommencer cette habitude.

Whenever I book travel for work, I pull up the Amtrak website to see if it would be in any way practical to add a rail component to the trip to replace flying (or driving, but it’s rare that I drive for work travel). Given the state of American rail, this is most often an exercise in disappointment. My only success story in four years at this job was when I attended a conference in Bordeaux; I flew into Paris and then took a low-cost OuiGo TGV for my trips between Paris and Bordeaux.

Shortly after last week’s mostly-successful experiment with Hypothesis, I noticed Chris Aldrich posting to Micro.blog about the software and started up a conversation. I’d followed Chris a few weeks before in trying to get more into Micro.blog (perhaps my favorite indie social media platform out there, though I’m also enjoying getting into Mastodon) by following academia and academia-adjacent folks, and was pleased to see an area of common interest. It wasn’t until a separate conversation on Mastodon this morning that I remembered that my Hypothesis setup was dependent on my manually checking annotations on my website.

Francophones, quelle est votre traduction préférée du mot « tag » dans un contexte technologique ? J’ai des applis qui disent « étiquette » et d’autres qui disent « mot-clé ».

The more I work with WordPress site builders, the more they annoy me.

A few months ago, during a weekend where my family was out of town, I binge watched both seasons of « Au service de la France », a hilarious spy comedy available on Netflix. One of the running gags of the series is the (fictional) French secret service’s obsession with bureaucracy. So, for example, when the service suspects a mole in its midst, one of the responses is to make sure that every piece of paperwork is signed multiple times before being stamped twice.