J’ai découvert un podcast sur le jeu de rôle en mileu Star Wars (que j’aime beaucoup) qui est en français canadien (dont j’essaie d’améliorer ma compréhension). Ça tombe bien !

Very excited for this show. I hadn’t been all that concerned about the changing of Kamala’s powers, but this article brought up some good points about how that changes some of the messaging behind the character. link to ‘Ms. Marvel review: Kamala Khan’s new series feels like the MCU’s future - The Verge’

Ce weekend, j’ai regardé une émission sur la ligne ferroviaire Lausanne-Échallens-Bercher qui m’a beaucoup plu: Quand j’ai vécu à Renens pendant quelques mois, c’était toujours un plaisir de voir passer une rame du LEB en me promenant sur l’Avenue d’Échallens. Je n’ai jamais eu l’occasion de voyager sur cette ligne, mais j’ai fort envie de retourner dans le Vaud pour l’essayer. Regarder des vidéos comme celle-ci (ou bien des vidéos « en cabine » qui montre les gares différentes ainsi que le paysage vaudois) me donne une nostalgie profonde pour le temps que j’ai passé tout près du LEB.

I hope it will be the last. End it while it’s still good.

Just this weekend, I was trying to figure out if I could do this to improve some video quality. Neat! link to ‘You’ll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam - The Verge’

I don’t know how many folks are subscribed to this blog via RSS, but if you are, chances are that you subscribed out of an interest in my professional writing. I’m making some big changes to the blog in part to give me the freedom to start writing on some other topics as well. You’ve probably seen some of these posts already, but I want to make it clear that it’s going to continue.

This is, in my view, the weakest arc in all of North’s run on Squirrel Girl, and I think it’s because it’s the only time that North’s story gets a significant connecting to an overarching Marvel plot. It’s not bad—the characters and art are still interesting in the ways that previous stories have been—but I just didn’t feel as engaged by any of it as I had been in previous TPBs.

There’s a SomaFM internet radio station that plays NASA recordings of Apollo missions over calm electronic music. I don’t listen to it often, but I love it when I do.

I’m interested in this argument about Star Wars feeling like a TTRPG campaign setting. Throughout much of middle and high school, I played the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars TTRPG, and that made even the prequel movies beloved because they became a setting to explore rather than movies to be unsatisfied with.

Il y a plusieurs années, un ami m’a prévenu qu’il y a tant de jeux de mots dans les albums Astérix qu’un Américain ne les comprendraient jamais pleinement. Les chansons Stromae me donnent maintenant la même impression.

Woke up to a They Might Be Giants song stuck in my head, which I choose to interpret as a good sign.

This, the final arc in the TUSG book, was a delightful way to wrap up the series. It captured all the stories, characters, art, and ideas that made this comic so great and gave them the ending that they deserved. There were a lot of callbacks to previous parts of the series, and it could have been annoying, but I found it to be a nice way of wrapping everything up.

Beginning with this collection, the art changes, which I was sure would be an issue for me (no pun intended). I really like Erica Henderson’s drawing, and I think it fits North’s writing better, so I knew I would miss it. However, this TPB also has one of the best stories of the run in it—one that I’d forgotten all about. North really wrestles with his recurring theme of redemption rather than punishment with a multi-issue story on Kraven the Hunter—but still writes it in a way that affirms hope in the power of redemption.

Not really interested in the new Stranger Things, but it does make me want to get serious about a Tales from the Loop campaign (surtout avec le supplément « La France aux années 80»)

This is another collection that I think I’ve read once but didn’t remember terribly well and was happy to return to it. I don’t know if I’ve read the next collection or not—it will be interesting to see when I begin to venture into the unknown. I think this TPB has one of the most creative and sweetest stories in the whole run—one about the friendship between Doreen and her roommate Nancy.

With this TPB, I continued to get into stories I’m not as familiar with but that make the best of this goofy series. I think my favorite issue in this collection is the “zine,” which presents itself as an in-universe comic put together by the characters in the series. It is a great example of how North and the other have fun with this medium instead of just phoning the comics in.

As with the last collection of TUSG issues, I have read these stories before, but not recently and not often, so it was fun to revisit them. After finishing this collection, I had to go back to the regular TPBs rather than this double TPB format, and that’s made me better appreciate these large formats, which leave out things like the letters page, etc. I have enjoyed reading those before, but when trying to power through the entire series, it’s nice to remove extraneous information and focus on the stuff I’m really there to read.

I’m less familiar with this part of the Squirrel Girl series, so it was even more fun to revisit these issues as I try to make my way through the whole series. North is a great author for this kind of thing—I get a bit grumpy about his computer science lessons because of my complicated feelings toward computer science education (I’m for it but not necessarily in the way it’s being done) , but otherwise, I love his dialogue, characters, plots, and absurdity.

I recently finished the new Squirrel Girl podcast written by North, which made me miss the comics. I’ve also been meaning to finish the series, which ended in 2019 but I never caught up on. So, I checked on the hoopla app connected to my library account and discovered that the whole series is finally available there—hooray! I own all of these issues in trade paperback, but I read them on my phone to give me something productive to do on my phone.

Very happy to learn that the whole run of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is now available through my library. I am several years behind and eager to catch up.

Recently bought a used ABBA greatest hits CD for next to nothing, which has led to a comically difficult effort to get access to an optical drive so that I can actually listen to the music.

Il y a un an, j’ai regardé ma première Eurovision, Je l’ai ratée cette année (conflit avec un anniversaire en famille), mais j’espère y retourner en 2023.

Il y a trop peu de monde qui aime les podcasts et apprécie aussi RSS pour d’autres fins.

This book has been as enjoyable as all of the previous ones in the series. It took me longer to get into—probably because I’ve read so many of them lately—but once I got started, it moved along nicely. The past few entries in the series have seemed more intentional than others in setting up clues for the future rather than being self-contained stories. This book was also shorter and ended on a dramatic cliffhanger, giving the impression that Herron is wrapping up the series in the next book and might even have split this final story into two.

Je suis impressionné par le nombre de BD francophones disponible aux bibliothèques du Kentucky, mais c’est quand-même hyper decevant de lire une BD francophone en traduction.

Since April, I’ve gotten sucked into the Slow Horses British spy series after really enjoying the Apple TV+ adaptation. I’ve been powering through all the full-length novels and am now reading 2021’s Slough House, which features a character who’s survived a bullet wound to the head. Her description stood out to me for one particular detail, though: Her hair was different. Maybe that’s what death does to you. I twas still mostly red but now punkishly short, with a white stripe across her left temple where the bullet had passed…

I’ve been a big fan of audio-only media for a big chunk of my life. I grew up listening to NPR radio shows like Car Talk and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on Saturdays while my dad drove us around to do errands. TV wasn’t allowed in my family on Sundays, but the NPR Sunday Puzzle was—depending on what time church was that year, we’d listen to it on our way to Sunday meetings.

Voyage pour le boulot qui s’approche, et j’essaie donc de proposer un trajet mi-avion, mi-train. C’est vraiment le trajet le plus efficace, mais comme j’habite dans un pays ferroviphobe, il me faudra de la chance…

So excited! This has been a great show, and this season seems topical.

The more I learn about and work with the DNS, the more impressive and frightening it becomes.

Messing around with my Hugo static site between other, draining tasks may be the only thing that got me through today.

I flew through this book and quite enjoyed it. As Herron gets further along in the series, the continued plots strain suspension strain suspension of disbelief more and more, just like Smiley’s repeated resignations and returns make some of Le Carré’s books a bit creaky. Like Le Carré, though, there’s enough that’s good about the series that you can overlook these gaps. Herron feels no need to spare his characters, and he uses that expertly in this book.

This continues to be a fascinating series. While there are real threats and real bad guys in each story, so much of the story is on internal squabbling, and none of the characters can be said to be a “good guy.” In some ways the immediate plot of the book seems to be an excuse for letting the terrible characters bump against each other and make a mess of things. This book in particular really strained my affection for the characters, but I was still hooked by Herron’s writing.

It’s a testament to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses that I am now reading the whole book series and that I can only imagine the characters as the show’s actors.

J’suis pas hyper doué en cuisine, mais comme il reste rien à manger demain matin et comme j’ai une recette pour le muesli fait maison, je suis en mode Farmer Croc, là.

Tentative de publication depuis mon site web.