I read this book for the first time a few years ago. Dan is a regular panelist on The Incomparable and a regular player on their D+D spinoff, so I figured I owed it a read. When reading it then, it bounced off of me—I wasn’t all that impressed with the story or the writing, and I barely remembered any of it when revisiting it.

I recently listened to Dan talk about this book—and the sequels he’s since written—on an episode of The Incomparable, so I decided to give the series another try. It’s not a masterpiece of science fiction, but I liked the setting and the writing wasn’t terrible. I don’t know what made the difference this time, but I’ve already reserved the next one from the library.

One of my favorite podcasts, The Incomparable, recently covered this book, describing it as a crazy mix of genres and ideas that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

That convinced me to give the book a try, and that description holds up. There’s a woman who’s sold her soul to a demon; a family of extraterrestrial refugees running a donut shop; a trans girl escaping from abuse; love for video game music; a deep respect for food, classical music, and violin construction; and so much that doesn’t seem to all fit in the same story but does anyway.

Ce n’est pas souvent que j’ai le plaisir de commander un kebab-frites aux États-Unis. C’est donc un déjeuner réussi aujourd’hui !

Je sais que nous, les Américains, nous avone une longue tradition de massacrer les mots empruntés du français, mais je ne comprendrai jamais pourquoi on dit « crêpe » comme « crépe ». C’est insupportable.

I feel like I should love Catch-22, but even though I got a lot more out of it this time than the first time I read it over a decade ago, I just don’t think it’s as funny as it’s famed to be. 📚

J’ai déjà écrit cette semaine sur mon amour pour Dijon, et c’est peut-être pour ça qu’un souvenir précis me vient à l’esprit ce matin.

Quand je vivais à Dijon, je n’avais pas d’ordinateur et ce n’était pas encore l’âge de l’ordiphone. J’allais donc chez un cybercafé toutes les semaines pour écrire des courriels à ma famille et à des amis. Le cybercafé que je fréquentais s’appellait Cyberbisey, justement parce que c’était un cybercafé sur la rue Berbisey (ce n’était qu’après plusieurs semaines que j’ai compris la blague).

Cet après-midi, je prépare mes cours d’automne en écoutant Indochine.

I have done more blogging this summer than in the two preceding years, and I love it. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up this rate once the school year starts, but I want to keep up consistency.

Ça fait quelques années que mon frère regarde la chaîne YouTube Not Just Bikes, qui parle des vélos, des transports publics, et de l’infrastructure qui les soutient (où pas). Il m’en parle assez souvent, mais ce n’est que récemment que j’ai enfin décidé de regarder quelques vidéos. Vu mon amour pour les sujets abordés dans les vidéos (les vélos, les transports publics, l’Europe), ça m’étonne que je n’ai pas découvert cette chaîne avant. J’ai surtout apprécié ces vidéos sur le vélo en Suisse, les pistes cyclables à Paris, et les trains de grande vitesse en Italie (surtout parce que j’avais déjà regardé cette vidéo sur la service Frecciarossa entre Paris et Lyon).

I broke my site a few days ago without realizing it, so kept remote posting to it. Fixed site this morning, and now thinking about how nice it is that Micro.blog weaves the new posts into the timeline by the original timestamp instead of mass posting them.

Content de voir le retour de Culture BD sur France Culture !

When I was in college, I ran into a friend on my way to a professor’s office hours. He saw that I had a copy of Superman for All Seasons with me and gave me a hard time about it—he was much more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan (these were the days when this was primarily a reference to comics, not sprawling cinematic universes) and just didn’t get the appeal of Superman—how could you do anything interesting with a character that powerful? Fortunately, the reason that I like Superman for All Seasons is my best answer to that question: What makes the Superman character interesting is not the magnitude of his power but the ways that he chooses to exercise it. I don’t find at all interesting any comics that take the format of “Superman must prove himself stronger than increasingly stronger adversaries,” but I find absolutely fascinating the many Superman comics—and other comics clearly playing with homages to the character—the ones that ask themselves why such a powerful character would use that power for good.

Pour un album censé être féministe, il y a bien trop d’essentialisme dans Mesdames de Grand Corps Malade.

This morning’s RSS issues seem to be a problem with NetNewsWire’s standalone functionality, so as much as I love the app, it’s time to find a new one. Now taking RSS recommendations for iOS/macOS.

In happier morning news, I am now restocked on my favorite Coconut Cocoa herbal tea thanks to a recent visit to Cincinnati’s best international/odds and ends market.

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: