Il existe à Grenoble un magasin des jeux nommé « Les contrées du jeu ». Il y a seize ans cette semaine, alors que j’habitais à Grenoble, j’y suis entré m’offrir le jeu « Wings of War ». J’ai toujours une carte de fidélité comme preuve de cette transaction :

Il n’y a rien de profond dans ce souvenir, mais j’ai beaucoup de petits souvenirs du temps que j’ai passé en France et en Suisse qui semble avoir une grande importance malgré cette manque de profondeur. Dans le cas de ce magasin, c’est peut-être que mes deux petites visites là-bas (la première pour trouver un jeu à acheter, la deuxième pour l’acheter) me semblent relier bien d’autres moments dans ma vie. Par exemple, c’était dans ce magasin que j’ai appris le mot « costaud » pour la première fois (pour décrire les avions dans le jeu qui demandaient plus d’effort pour abattre), et même si je ne prononce que rarement ce mot, c’est impossible de le faire sans penser à ce jeu.

I came for the Ms. Marvel, and this delivered! She’s a great character, and it was fun to see her in this movie. There were also lots of weird-but-fun bits that I enjoyed.

There are plenty of things about the movie that didn’t work for me, but it’s no less dumb than most Marvel movies, and I have no interest in feeding what I understand is a bunch of hating on the movie. It’s not the best MCU film out there, but it was plenty fun, and I’d blame the growing unwieldiness of the universe as much as anything about this installment for the clunky bits.

I recently came into some Amazon gift cards, so I bought this volume to complete my collection of Queen & Country. I think this is the first time I’ve owned an entire comics series? At least, one of this length.

I’m glad I own the whole series, but like the show its based on, I feel like it gets less interesting the longer it goes on. It’s fun to get some peeks into the backstories of the characters who come up in the first two volumes, but it’s just not as interesting as the early stories. I’m sure I’ll come back to the whole series at some point anyway.

I got really into Doctor Who for the better part of a decade, I have really fond memories of the many seasons I watched, and there are episodes I would gladly return to. I petered out after Jodie Whitaker’s first season, though, and watching these specials showed me I’m still not ready to come back. I don’t know what has changed, but I feel less patient with the show’s goofiness. If it’s going to keep coming to Disney+, I’ll try to keep an eye on it, but hard to say if I’ll ever really reinvest.

Okay, my new favorite fun fact about myself for ice breaking activities is that Wil Wheaton has read my name aloud as part of his recording of a Cory Doctorow audiobook.

My Apple Watch is generous and congratulates me for a full night’s sleep even if I miss my goal by a few minutes. My body, on the other hand, is more demanding and keeps reminding me I needed more sleep.

Oh, so it’s not just me…

Save the cheese!

Mon beau-frère s’intéresse beaucoup aux langues. Moi aussi, d’une manière générale, mais lui, il se fonce dans une langue quelconque quand l’envie lui prend. C’est donc comme ça qu’il sait lire un peu en français, en espagnol, en turc, en néerlandais, et ainsi de suite. Si je n’ai pas la largeur de ses compétences linguistiques, j’ai quand-même une meilleure connaissance du français que lui, et il lui arrive donc de me poser des questions sur le français.

Love seeing this kind of narrative- and character-focused mechanic,

Sometimes, a run produces a runner’s high and sometimes it just makes me tired the rest of the day. Stayed up too late last night, so there’s a lot riding on this morning’s outcome.

I love this show, and this season was a delight to watch. There were bumps along the way, some characters were done dirty, and I don’t know that I like the characters that the finale wants to be in the right (or that the characters I like weren’t in the wrong), but it was a wonderful piece of television.

I like that there’s a They Might Be Giants lyrics bot to follow on Mastodon, but I’m dealing with a lot more TMBG songs stuck in my head these days.

Hier soir, j’ai rêvé d’une France post-apocalyptique où les Parisiens ne reconnaissaient plus les noms des villes « en province ». Juste avant de me réveiller, je partais à pied explorer un pays oublié et enneigé.

English speakers who insist on pronouncing “coup de grâce” without the final /s/ sound are actually saying “coup de gras,” which evokes pelting someone with a lump of fat.

Après un vélotaf sous la pluie, une tisane à la réglisse fait beaucoup de bien.

Le vélotaf exige de l’effort—surtout quand l’ascenseur est en panne au bureau et on doit monter son vélo électrique au 2ème étage par l’escalier.

I know that the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie isn’t actually good, but there are bits of it I like, not least the “Zaphod Beeblebrox for President” track on the soundtrack.

TNG episode where Picard realizes that all voice interactions with the Enterprise’s computer are being sent to servers in Cupertino to be processed there; and that Future!Apple employees listen in on some for quality control.

I have unexpectedly hit a point in my life where I associate the voice of Alec Guinness with George Smiley instead of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Normalement, je me débrouille assez bien en français, mais quand il s’agit d’une conversation au téléphone, j’ai vraiment du mal !

What an excellent series this is. The finale was more violent than I’m comfortable with, but I appreciated that it never glorified the violence; rather, it fit in nicely with the series’s habit of showing that as screwed up as the Slow Horses are, it’s the dignified leadership of this fictional MI5 who are the real monsters. Power corrupts, and all that. I’m wondering how next series will go—I have only vague recollections of the book, and what I do remember is that it’s one of the weirder ones.

It’s been a feature for ages, so I feel silly that I’m only now beginning to appreciate the ability to take Markdown notes in Things 3 tasks and projects.

I’d been meaning to read these for a while and was happy to find them collected in a single (Libby) volume. Herron is great at adding a lot to his universe full of terrible people, and I wish I recognized all the cameos and continuity nods from the main series. I did appreciate Herron’s lampshading of his characters’ not aging despite a decade of publication history—it was clever without feeling out of place.

My dad has been logging the books he reads since he was a teenager, and I’ve always wanted to try something like that out. I gave it a go in 2022 with a notebook, but I quickly realized I wanted to journal that information, too.

Since I journal in Day One, that meant logging reading digitally, so at the end of 2022, I started building some Siri Shortcuts for blogging about books. Once I did it for books, it was easy enough to expand the system to TV and movies, too.