Over the past few days, I’ve been relistening to the One Shot podcast’s October 2018 Kids on Bikes episodes (which starts here). There’s so much to love about this six-episode series. I remembered enjoying the characters and the players, but it wasn’t until this morning that I remembered the perfect moment where one player describes the biblical Jacob as “history’s best angel fighter” and summons him to help a science teacher fight off a terrifying seraphim (which I promise makes sense in context).

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Lexi Lishinski, a good friend from grad school, to appear on an episode of her podcast The Unlistenable Podcast. To quote the About page for the podcast:

It’s not called that because it has dreadful audio quality, although that may be true. It’s called that because you can’t listen to it, because I’m not going to release the episodes. This solves literally every issue that ever stopped me from recording a podcast.

Je n’ai jamais mangé chez Quick pendant mon séjour en France, mais hier, je me baladais virtuellement à Grenoble, et j’ai vu un resto Quick que j’avais souvent vu et qui avait été transformé en Burger King, et cela m’a donné une tristesse bizarre.

Love the paper tickets, and this makes me sad.

Three years ago today, I visited a mental health therapist for the first time and immediately wished I’d done it a decade earlier. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

Yesterday, my spouse asked why my Apple Watch was named GTS Centaur, and I faced the difficult choice between saying it didn’t really matter and launching into an explanation of the 1999 space sim Descent: Freespace.

Guy de mot-de-passant.

This is a good response to Musk’s complaining about bots.

I think one of the cutest American customs is the little wave drivers give cyclists after almost driving them off the road. Looking at you, UPS truck.

My optimism about internet culture has been waning for several years, but I still appreciate a deep-dive into how rich and complex a given meme can be.

I knew my distrust of spellcheck would be validated one day! Seriously, though, this is bad news.

This isn’t the first article I’ve read comparing Q to an ARG, but I may still send it to my students next semester. I’m also interested in the book this comes from…

I am very much here for Matt Potts criticizing Hogwarts for not embracing the humanities and the importance of the humanities.

Yesterday, two podcasts that I listened to while doing work around the house lined up in such a perfect way that I wanted to write down my memory of the moment. First, because I was recently reminded of the fantastic podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text (which applies sacred reading techniques to the Harry Potter series, treating it as serious and meaningful without letting it—or its author—off the hook for being problematic), I’ve been trying to catch up with its second runthrough of the book series, in the perhaps-vain hope that I can start listening to episodes as they come out. In one episode I listened to yesterday, the hosts spoke on the theme of awe. One of the hosts put it this way:

Grâce à une conversation avec une amie (celle qui m’a donné une pièce de 5 CHF), je me suis souvenu ce matin de l’émission RTS « Gare à vous ». J’en profite pour découvrir Romanshorn en rangeant la maison cet après-midi.

Good article on an important subject. I may have to assign this to my students next semester!

J’ai commencé à écouter la musique francophone il y a onze ans. Avant ça, j’avais quelques albums (Caféine de Christophe Willem et la bande originale de Le Roi Soleil), et je connaissais Serge Gainsbourg, mais selon mes souvenirs, j’ai du attendre janvier 2011 pour me foncer vraiment dans la musique en français.

En ce temps, je commençais un poste comme « instructeur étudiant » du français à l’université où je faisais mes propres études. Pendant une réunion de formation, la représentante de l’entreprise qui publiait notre manuel nous a donné des cartes cadeaux iTunes pour qu’on puisse acheter de la musique francophone et nous inspirer professionnellement. À l’époque, c’était bien plus facile de trouver de la musique franco-canadienne que de la musique francophone européenne, et j’ai donc acheté quelques pistes des groupes comme Mes aïeux et Les Cowboys fringants. Peu après, j’ai découvert Les Trois Accords, et la musique franco-canadienne est ensuite devenu un élément important de ma bibliothèque musicale. Quelques années plus tard, pendant mes études de doctorat, j’ai passé un peu de temps avec Spotify (avant d’abandonner définitivement) et beaucoup de temps avec la radio en ligne, et ces deux ressources m’ont aidé à approfondir ma connaissance de la musique francophone.

I loved the original book and hope to pick up the second. This was a good interview on how surprisingly many important things this kind of weird project overlaps with.

I’ve long written in my journal kind things people say about me. I used to think of that as vanity, but since recognizing my imposter syndrome and other mental health struggles, I think of it as storing up confidence for hard days.

I find myself enjoying this books as quick reads in between—or concurrent with—longer, more demanding reads. It’s interesting to see Moren build up more of his fictional universe and do more work to connect characters and events.

I enjoyed the actions and setting of this book—it would make good inspiration for an RPG setting, which I mean as a compliment. It felt like the cliffhanger in this book was a bit of a gimmick, and I’m not sure I followed all of the plot (or that it was developed in the way I would have hoped), but it was still an enjoyable read.

I picked this book up on a whim at a Nashville bookstore over the summer. It surprised me that I felt drawn to the book—I know who Wheaton is, but I’m not a super fan; the book was an expensive new hardback; and I usually am more hesitant about buying things than grabbing something on a whim.

I did really feel drawn to the book, though. I had recently started reading Wheaton’s blog, I admire his EFF-style thinking, I know he’s been an advocate for mental health, and I was intrigued by the conceit of revisiting a 20-year-old memoir and annotating it with two decades of further growth and hindsight.

I am very near the end of Wil Wheaton’s updated/annotated memoir Still Just a Geek, which I bought over the summer on a short family trip. I have lots of thoughts—most of them positive—about the memoir and may write a bit more about it once I finally finish. For now, though, since I wrote last week complaining about companies like Apple and ClassDojo restricting hardware and software to support their bottom line at the expense of users, I was struck by a short passage Wheaton included making a case for general purpose computing:

It’s been an existentially and emotionally tiring weekend, so the “person man” verse of TMBG’s Particle Man is hitting in a way it hasn’t before.

Je viens de payer une facture assez chère pour faire entretenir et réparer mon vélo, mais la facture annuelle juste pour le droit de garer une voiture chez mon travail coûterait deux fois ça. Je sors donc toujours gagnant.

This is a cute story—hat tip to Boing Boing for recommending it.