I’ve wanted to read this book before—I believe I read the whole thing once in high school, and we read a portion of it in a French Civ class before discussing the Bayeux Tapestry. I recently saw it at the library and decided to give it another go. Because I took a while to get started, the due date snuck up on me, and I had to rush through most of it rather than give it the critical read it deserves.

I jumped right into this sequel for Slow Horses right after finishing the first volume. The core of what attracted me to the first book was largely present, hence my giving it the same rating. However, at the end of the day, I didn’t like it quite as much. I couldn’t say exactly why that is—the characters I enjoyed were just as enjoyable, the story was interesting, and there were great shout-outs to Le Carré and funny recurring jokes in the story.

Great news for a tough Monday! This is one of my favorite comics, I love podcasts, and North is writing scripts. Perfect combination.

Admire what Josh is doing here. I’ve been rethinking my own social media presence recently and want to take some cues here.

Local farmers market has garlic chocolate chip cookies, which I love and no one else in my family likes. Suits me just fine.

I think I like to listen to the Interstellar soundtrack when I’m feeling anxious, but the truth is that listening to the Interstellar soundtrack makes me more anxious, so I gotta stop doing that.

À propos of nothing in particular, I’m looking into how to set up a Mastodon instance, and it’s not as hard or expensive as I thought.

Just recognized a song playing on (Swiss) radio as being from Eurovision 2021, and that makes me happy.

Hard to think of a worse use of the OGL than this. I’m already grumpy about NFTs, but this is making me mad.

Recently got a six-month free trial of Apple Music, so I figured I’d try out music streaming for the first time in years. As great as the music selection is, though, my bias toward owning music and listening to internet radio is being strengthened.

Comme il n’y a même pas de métro chez moi, je suis limité à « vélo, boulot, dodo »

Ça fait 10 ans que j’écoute Les Cowboys Fringants, mais je les apprécie davantage avec chaque année qui passe.

I found this translation of Delisle’s latest graphic novel at the Jessamine County Public Library and decided to give it a try. I don’t remember how I discovered Delisle, but I love his book Pyongyang, I’ve read a couple of his other books, and I loved this one. Delisle’s art is great—his style is consistent, simple, and appealing. I like the way that he did color in this book, which is mostly monochrome but with bursts of yellow here and there.

I’ve owned this comic for a while and have been meaning to read it the whole time—especially since reading All of the Marvels and the first volume of Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther. Anyway, I finally got to it and I mostly liked it, but it wasn’t as mind-blowing as I hoped it would be. Coates does some really interesting things challenging the idea of Black Panther as an ideal monarch by questioning if such a thing even exists.

Very relieved to learn that the singer on French radio that I can’t tell apart from Johnny Hallyday started his career as a Hallyday impressionist.

This volume went back to blah. On one hand, it’s interesting for the way it gives a backstory to a relatively minor character. On the other, it falls into the same trap of wanting to give series villains gruesome backstories as some sort of Freudian excuse. Truth be told, I preferred the minor character as just that. I don’t know that this backstory was consistent with his original portrayal, and it didn’t help me appreciate him any more.

I think this might be the best of the series so far, even if it’s not quite good enough to bump it up to four hearts. First, this is probably the most serious consideration of the far right conspiracy in the series as a violent, racist conspiracy and not just a plot point. Second, while it’s as chock-full of references to other characters and events in the series as previous volumes, I feel like this volume does a better job than any of the others of trying to weave them together into a coherent whole rather than simply stuff references into a volume.

This volume was better than the last two, probably because it had a more interesting plot than just a series of cameos and because it was less egregious than the others in terms of trying to do social justice but falling short. At the same time, this continues the series’s predilection for making sure that all of the characters are related to each other in some way, and that gets tiring after awhile.

Like the last volume, this one seems to exaggerate the things I like least about the XIII series while ditching the things I like most (the art and the French, though that’s a function of my reading a translation. Jones is an interesting character and the authors contextualize her childhood in interesting ways, but there’s something off-putting about (presumably) white French people trying to tell the story of the U.S. black civil rights movement and throwing racial slurs in there for good measure.

This series continues to be interesting, but kind of dumb. I feel like I’m a kid again, reading all the Star Wars books I could find at the library, filling in all the details between the main parts of the story, not always in a quality package. This volume in particular exaggerates the problems that already exist in the XIII series related to women. In a sort of half-hearted feminism, Irina is portrayed (like other women, including Jones) as capable, action-oriented and violent, but ultimately an objectified sex symbol.

I love the XIII BD even though it’s dumb, but reading the translations gets on my nerves for some reason. I think a lot of the appeal of the series for me is practicing my French, and a slightly stilted translation obviously doesn’t provide that appeal. I still enjoy the universe for all its dumbness, though, and I started reading this spinoff series on Hoopla several months ago before turning to something else.

Pleased to see Stromae reviewed in the NYT—by someone who liveblogged Eurovision no less. Will be listening all afternoon, I’m sure.

Long week ahead, but there’s a new Stromae album coming out Friday, so I already have some self-care plans in place for the end of it.

Shut up and take my money! This is why itch is one of my favorite game-related places on the internet.

The last panel is the real gem here.

Rewatched the Pixar movie Soul while going through old letters and mementos, and that’s quite the combination.

I don’t think I’ve ever read any Black Panther before, but I loved the movie from a few years ago, and Christopher Priest’s run was recommended in All of the Marvels, so I decided to give this a try. I see why this run was recommended, and there was a lot in there to like, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure it worked for me. I enjoy comics a lot, but it felt really continuity-heavy, and maybe I prefer graphic novels and self-contained short runs to issues that try to sit in the middle of everything Marvel’s ever published.

Grumpy about DRM today. So much content I’ve purchased but am forever beholden to Amazon to access.

This was… a bizarre book. I’ve read plenty of David Weber’s writing before and the premise of the book seemed pretty close to Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, so I thought I might enjoy it. Te premise of the book is that Earth has been invaded by a species that is clearly superior in the grand scheme of things but comparable to human technology other than space travel, giving humanity somewhat of a fighting chance.

Wolk read 27,000+ Marvel comics to write this book, an attempt to trace the most important part of the Marvel universe over the past ~60 years. I love the book for a few reasons. First, it takes comics—and Marvel Comics in particular—seriously, examining their sense-making and stories. Second, there’s a deep love of comics that’s evident in the book. Not a stilted, defensive love, but a mature one that knows what’s wrong with them but champions what they get right.

Jim Hacker is in The Prisoner???

Came across this while explaining Puerto Rico to my games and learning class. I love board games, but we have to critically evaluate them just like any other medium.

I think concerns about being dependent on technology are valuable, but I also note that no one is ever talking about technologies like, say, language or agriculture.

Is NaNoTwiMo a thing? Every time I assign Twine to my students, I want to spend some time doing something big and beautiful with it.

One of my favorite differences between European and Canadian French is the subtly different way they each pronounce words and names in English.

I probably would not have read this book on my own but it was selected as the 2022 Kentucky Reads selection by Kentucky Humanities. I noticed that in a headline somewhere (probably the Herald-Leader) and decided it was worth giving it a shot. I ended up enjoying the book a lot! It plays with themes of nostalgia and wondering if the past could have or should have been different. I’ve been thinking about both of those things a lot recently, including in the context of my faith transition.