I wish I had read this before Gharib’s second comic memoir, because there’s a progression there (in terms of both the quality of art and adding detail to story) that makes it unfair to judge this one after reading it second. I think “It Won’t Always Be Like This” is better, but this comic is so good, too. Great story, distinctive art, great overall product.

I really enjoyed this show! It veers from realism but into the fun thriller, and while its dedication to drama is obvious, it’s not always a bad thing. I enjoy a show that rewards the viewer for knowing the difference between the FSB and the GRU, and I’m really looking forward to the second season.

This is a fun glimpse at the humble beginnings of one of my favorite TTRPGs. I’m trying to get a new solo Starforged campaign off the ground right now, and it seems like this is an appropriate time to do so.

Now that I think of it, that seems to sum up how I increasingly feel about productivity books. I find useful ideas in them, but I also feel like the worldview they promote is broken.

I’m reading a productivity book that has some useful advice in it, but I’m bothered by the running encouragement to find a project I’m willing to get up early or stay up late for. I’ve learned in recent months that getting enough sleep is really important for me—more important than any project.

Everything about this is good: The writing, the art, the mix of the external story and the personal elements that Yang puts in. I wasn’t sure about a basketball comic, but I knew I could trust Yang to pull it off, and I was right.

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change.

switching to Habitica

In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers. I really like Streaks, but there are a couple of things that don’t sit quite right. Besides, to be honest, sometimes just changing things up feels like a breath of fresh air and lets me double down on picking up new habits. After looking into a few different options, I decided to give Habitica another try. I’ve used this gamified habit tracker a couple of times in the past, and besides the gamification gimmick, there are some things about it that I really like.

Update: I’ve figured out the basics of the Habitica API, and now every feature that isn’t native to the service is a challenge to up my programming/Siri Shortcuts game.

I’ve spent a few days considering switching habit trackers, and now that I think I’ve found one, I’m wondering if I know enough to mess around with the API.

In the spirit of ultra obscure references, I really want to name something “Waughmp Rat,” combining a Homestar Runner onomatopoeia and an unseen Star Wars creature.

During my two years living in France and Switzerland, I fell deeply in love with travel by rail. But alas, I live in a particularly rail-unfriendly region of a rather rail-unfriendly country. One of my guilty internet pleasures is consuming rail-related media so that I can feel like I’m having train experiences anyway.

Geoff Marshall’s YouTube channel is a favorite of mine. Le Ferrovipathe and Urban Traveler are a couple of Francophone channels that I like much more, but that produce less content. That said, I’d gladly rewatch Urban Traveler’s #TourDeFranceEnTER or Tour de Suisse en train series, which make me ache for the experience of taking European rail.

I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book, and I’ve also enjoyed its BBC television and radio adaptations a lot. The first time I read it, I didn’t get it, the second time I loved it, and this time I see why it’s such a classic. It was fun to read the original after watching and listening to the adaptations pretty regularly over the past several years. Le Carré does well with detail, and I’d forgotten the subplots and side comments that get left out—but that add so much to the characters, the plot, and the overall feel of the book. That said, there were times when some of those details felt extraneous (i.e., the compressed adaptations don’t suffer for their absence), and fifty years on, Jerry Westerby’s running joke with Smiley about Indigenous Americans is cringeworthy. It’s amazing sometimes how Europeans sometimes feel more racist toward American Indians than we in the U.S. are.

I find memoir (and other non-fiction) comics to be hit or miss; I’ve even passed up Gharib’s earlier memoir a number of times because I just wasn’t sure. I don’t know what stood out to me about this one, but I went for it and I loved it. I love getting a taste of meaningful events in someone else’s life, and Gharib does such a great job telling her story. It even made me wish I’d taken more Arabic classes in college so I could follow some parts better.

I read these books ages ago, but I can hardly remember any of the details, so it’s been fun to revisit this world with flashes of familiarity but mostly just waiting episode to episode to figure things out. The set design is great, the acting is good, and the music is compelling. I don’t know exactly why I’m not giving it full marks (it feels a bit strained and overcomplicated sometimes, but I think that captures the source material from what I remember), but I’m looking forward to future seasons!

I’m continuing my journey theough Le Carré, and I thought I’d give his last, posthumous book a listen while waiting for my hold on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to cone through. It’s so interesting to compare this last book of his to his earlier works: There are more women (though I still don’t think it passes the Bechdel Test), more cell phones, and more swears than his early stuff, but the sense of inevitable plodding toward a disappointing end (for the protagonists at least) is just as strong as ever. I found that this ending wasn’t quite as strong as the buildup, but it was a fine last novel from an excellent author.

Parfois, quand un.e Dijonnais.e s’en fiche, on peut entendre un bof bourguignon.

I guess this is interesting enough to keep reading, but my verdict is still the same. Great art, interesting premise, but I don’t know if it goes further than that.

I stumbled upon this series on TVTropes and was happy to see it’s available through Hoopla. I get why it gets the praise that it does, but it just didn’t land with me. The art is gorgeous and the premise (a noir detective in a 1950s America populated by anthropomorphic animals) is bold and compelling. I don’t know that noir is my genre, though—it feels more like tropes strung together than an actual plot, and it sometimes goes out of its way to be lurid. I also get frustrated reading BD in translation: Sometimes the language feels like French struggling to be liberated from an English straightjacket. There’s also something off when Europeans write American history; we heartily deserve to be criticized for our racism, but sometimes the critiques perpetuate prejudice in trying to confront it (this happens in XIII, too).

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

Ce matin, je prends un petit voyage ferroviare entre Bâle et Strasbourg grâce à YouTube.

I read through this with kiddo this morning, inspired by our recent discovery of Shiga’s new Adventuregame Comics. I was surprised by how little I loved it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s an amazing concept, an interesting story, and it deserves the praise it gets from folks like Gene Luen Yang,Scott McCloud, and others. However, revisiting it after his newer work in this subgenre, I think he does better with Adventuretime Comics! Still happy to have this on my shelf, though.

Il y a quelques années, dans les premiers mois de la pandémie du COVID-19, j’ai décidé de mettre mes ordinateurs (y compris mon smartphone) en français pour m’entrainer un peu. C’était une belle expérience, mais il y a quelques mois, pour une raison dont je ne me souviens plus, j’ai décidé de tout remettre en anglais. L’anglais, c’est ma langue maternelle, mais entre quelques années d’expérience de tout faire en français et ma passion pour cette langue, je trouve qu’il est parfois difficile de m’habituer à ce changement.

In early May, I decided to give tea a try. I’ve enjoyed herbal teas over the years, but I grew up never drinking actual tea (or coffee, which I still have never tried), so this has been a new(ish) experience for me. Over the past two months, I’ve acquired a couple of tea infusers as well as a variety of different teas that I’ve been trying, and tonight I felt like writing about some of the teas I’ve tried so far:

Aujourd’hui, j’ai appris que James Bond avait une mère vaudoise.

There are Aquabats songs that I like because I know they’re dumb, but there is zero irony in my love for “Pizza Day.”