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. It homages that era in a way that acknowledges its silliness, and that self-aware approach is —surprisingly!—better than any attempt to reimagine or grittify the character.

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. I came close when attending a conference in Portland last year; it might have been possible to fly into Seattle and then take the train to Portland, but university policy would have required me to prove that this itinerary was cheaper and faster than flying to Seattle and then flying to Portland. That would have been difficult to do, so I wound up taking a miserable red-eye flight back home after the conference was done.

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. So, it was three days later that I realized that in addition to our Micro.blog conversation, Chris had been kind enough to leave some comments on my site, giving the Hypothesis comment layer a test run. The most helpful comment included a link to a post he’d written describing how to subscribe to a Hypothesis RSS feed that supported wildcards, something that I’d previously thought was impossible (and, at any rate, isn’t listed in the Hypothesis documentation I was checking).Thanks to this, I’ve now got a notification system for website comments, which is going to make life a lot easier; however, I did find that I had to use a variation of the format that Chris posted:

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. Thus, the main secretary of the service begins singing « tamponné, double tamponné » (“stamped, double stamped”) as she signs off on each form passed to her. This leads to some tension, as seen in the scene below:

As I’ve been working on updating this website and revamping my web presence over the course of the summer, one of the items on my to-do list has been to add a commenting feature to the website. I love Hugo, but the absence of any in-built commenting feature is definitely a downside. I’ve looked over various Hugo-compatible commenting systems, but I honestly don’t know how much commenting activity I’ll see, and I’ve been hesitant to pay a third-party platform to do all of this for me.

I remember the first Floppotron, and 3.0 continues to be delightful. I may have to show this in class next year.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks how to best add commenting to my Hugo static site, and it just hit me that I could embed Hypothesis and use that as a social layer. Very excited about this idea.

If I thought the previous book was wrapping up the series for it to be concluded here (which I did), I was absolutely wrong. This book laid further breadcrumbs for future books, left the reader in total suspense about the fate of one of its most prominent characters, and had a delightful story of its own.

The cynicism of the book and the incompetence or irritation of its characters continue in fine form from previous entries in the series. I wonder if the connection to contemporary events will make it harder for this book to age well, but they make it a more interesting read in the present.

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. With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of RSS feeds available for my site at this link. I certainly don’t mind if folks continue to subscribe to all the content coming out of this blog, but I also want to give folks the chance to only subscribe to the content that they’re interested in.

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.