Recently bought a used ABBA greatest hits CD for next to nothing, which has led to a comically difficult effort to get access to an optical drive so that I can actually listen to the music.

Il y a un an, j’ai regardé ma première Eurovision, Je l’ai ratée cette année (conflit avec un anniversaire en famille), mais j’espère y retourner en 2023.

Il y a trop peu de monde qui aime les podcasts et apprécie aussi RSS pour d’autres fins.

This book has been as enjoyable as all of the previous ones in the series. It took me longer to get into—probably because I’ve read so many of them lately—but once I got started, it moved along nicely.

The past few entries in the series have seemed more intentional than others in setting up clues for the future rather than being self-contained stories. This book was also shorter and ended on a dramatic cliffhanger, giving the impression that Herron is wrapping up the series in the next book and might even have split this final story into two.

Je suis impressionné par le nombre de BD francophones disponible aux bibliothèques du Kentucky, mais c’est quand-même hyper decevant de lire une BD francophone en traduction.

Since April, I’ve gotten sucked into the Slow Horses British spy series after really enjoying the Apple TV+ adaptation. I’ve been powering through all the full-length novels and am now reading 2021’s Slough House, which features a character who’s survived a bullet wound to the head. Her description stood out to me for one particular detail, though:

Her hair was different. Maybe that’s what death does to you. I twas still mostly red but now punkishly short, with a white stripe across her left temple where the bullet had passed…

I’ve been a big fan of audio-only media for a big chunk of my life. I grew up listening to NPR radio shows like Car Talk and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on Saturdays while my dad drove us around to do errands. TV wasn’t allowed in my family on Sundays, but the NPR Sunday Puzzle was—depending on what time church was that year, we’d listen to it on our way to Sunday meetings. I discovered podcasts in their infancy, during my final years of high school, and started really getting into them near the end of college.

Voyage pour le boulot qui s’approche, et j’essaie donc de proposer un trajet mi-avion, mi-train. C’est vraiment le trajet le plus efficace, mais comme j’habite dans un pays ferroviphobe, il me faudra de la chance…

So excited! This has been a great show, and this season seems topical.

The more I learn about and work with the DNS, the more impressive and frightening it becomes.

Messing around with my Hugo static site between other, draining tasks may be the only thing that got me through today.

I flew through this book and quite enjoyed it. As Herron gets further along in the series, the continued plots strain suspension strain suspension of disbelief more and more, just like Smiley’s repeated resignations and returns make some of Le Carré’s books a bit creaky.

Like Le Carré, though, there’s enough that’s good about the series that you can overlook these gaps. Herron feels no need to spare his characters, and he uses that expertly in this book. Many of his books include teasing (even trolling) suggestions that something is about to happen to an established character, but this book begins with a flash forward to two characters’ deaths, and the rest of the book is quite tense as you wonder what Herron is going to do to lead to that conclusion.

This continues to be a fascinating series. While there are real threats and real bad guys in each story, so much of the story is on internal squabbling, and none of the characters can be said to be a “good guy.”

In some ways the immediate plot of the book seems to be an excuse for letting the terrible characters bump against each other and make a mess of things. This book in particular really strained my affection for the characters, but I was still hooked by Herron’s writing.

It’s a testament to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses that I am now reading the whole book series and that I can only imagine the characters as the show’s actors.

J’suis pas hyper doué en cuisine, mais comme il reste rien à manger demain matin et comme j’ai une recette pour le muesli fait maison, je suis en mode Farmer Croc, là.

Tentative de publication depuis mon site web.

Now checking that the tagging system works fine.

Testing a new Siri Shortcut for remote posting to Hugo.

We took a family trip to Mammoth Cave this weekend, and I decided to read the fourth entry in this series over the course of the trip. I quite liked it and it was fun to read it so quickly.

Despite being a bit more fantastical and less down to earth than some of the other entries, I thought the story was innovative and made good use of some of the recurring characters of the series so far.

Even though I ought to be finishing up some other books, I’ve enjoyed this series enough to check out the third book and read it over the last few days.

Herron does a good job of making none of his characters likable but some of sympathetic and I enjoyed this book more than the last. Herron does his best, I think, when his nominal heroes and their bosses are the real villains of the piece.

Is this just mastodon.social? Seems like it, but that’s not the only instance getting a bump, and sloppy reporting to ignore how federated instances work—that’s one of the reasons we’re all moving there.

Between Enilda here and Josh Rosenberg’s recent decision to do something similar, I feel that I have a lot to learn from and think about.

My spouse and I recently started watching the Apple TV+ series based on this book and its sequels. I’ve loved the show, so when she and kiddo were at a local library on Thursday, they grabbed the book for me.

I’m a big fan of John Le Carré, and this feels like a worthy modern successor. It’s crafty and smart, but even more than Le Carré, Herron leans into the ugly parts of the profession and the people who embrace those parts rather than try to maintain honor and dignity.

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.