Today marks five years since I tried out mental health counseling for the first time, and I’m grateful for the good it’s done me since then.

I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.

Bilan du vélotaf ce matin : un peu mouillé (la pluie est arrivée au bureau juste avant moi), et les chevilles nues sous mon pantalon (je porte toujours des chaussettes courtes, ayant oublié les autres à la maison).

I’ve passed this up a couple of times at the library, but an article at BoingBoing got me to give it a try. It’s a fun, meta take on the comics industry through comics themselves, even if it feels melodramatic at times.

Concerned about the fragile masculinity of the driver whose response to my pulling up in the bike lane is to progressively inch forward into the intersection so that I don’t beat him across when the light turns green. My dude, so long as you don’t run me over, I’m good.

Trying jasmine tea for the first time. I can see why Le Carré characters keep ragging on Control for drinking it, but it’s not bad, actually.

With Mozilla exiting the fediverse, I guess it’s time to really think about either hosting a personal server or seeing if I can make my Hugo site play nice with ActivityPub…

I had never heard of the tram driver Olympics before, and I love it. [gift link]

I’ve read this at least twice before, but it’s a fast read and a delightful one. I know it’s my favorite of the series based on my fuzzy recollections of the sequels, but reading this one again makes me feel like I should give the sequels another shot.

Les frites ne sont pas un vrai repas en soi, mais la poutine, si, et j’en serai toujours reconnaissant aux Canadiens.

I am currently on a train, and I so rarely have the chance to do this (there is no passenger rail where I live, in Kentucky) that it feels extra fun.

introduction and history I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

Bike commuting golf: See how few times you have to put your foot to the ground while on your way to work. It’s more a game of chance than skill (lots depends on the red light gods), but I still enjoy playing.

This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts. I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development.

A funeral home across the country has included me on an email to all staff. I have never worked at a funeral home, much less there. What’s more confusing is that a family member in that state recently passed away, and so I keep having to check that that has nothing to do with it.

Il y a deux ans, j’ai avoué que malgré mon amour pour la musique francophone, il faut parfois beaucoup de temps avant que pouvoir vraiment suivre les paroles. Ce n’est pas forcément une question de compétence en français—un peu, quand-même, mais j’ai souvent le même problème en anglais, où j’écoute une chanson sans vraiment la comprendre. Tout ça pour dire que malgré avoir entendu la chanson « Secret » de Louane plusieurs fois grâce à la radio digitale DKL, ce n’est que ce matin que j’ai vraiment saisi le sens de la chanson.

Got a good chuckle from this.

Sometimes the internet is good.

First things first: I am not familiar with the source material or with the Michael Caine adaptation, so I can’t make any comparisons there. I enjoyed the beginning of the series more than the end: The fast pace usually worked for me but felt rushed in the last episode, and I preferred the more grounded elements to the semi-fantastical stuff that was eventually introduced. That said, I thought it was well shot, well acted, and interesting spy fiction!

One of those mornings where I feel like I’m rolling with disadvantage on all ability checks.

It’s not the best of Astro City (and it feels awkward when trying to work with race and gender), but it’s not the worst either. I enjoyed reading some stories I hadn’t read before, and some of them were really well done.

I’ve been reading up on (and aspiring to) non-violence recently. As I noted in a series of posts almost a year ago (here’s the one that wrapped up the series, and it links to the two earlier ones), I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for playing games and consuming media. I don’t necessarily believe that a commitment to non-violence means that you can’t play through an epic battle in D&D, but I think the question is worth thinking about.

This was good! Not perfect: there were some rough edges, it’s hard to take some scenes seriously if you’ve watched The Good Place, and there’s a bad case of the Force working as the plot needs it to. Despite all that, though, I love the franchise leaning into a “actually, the Jedi kind of suck” story, and there were some interesting fight scenes and compelling story elements. Happy to see Star Wars experimenting like this… though, of course, it should be moving into the public domain so that everyone (not just Disney) can do that experimentation.

Moi dans un parking ce matin: “Why is that bus marked ‘Autocar Chartrand’? That sounds too French for Kentucky. Ah, tiens, il vient du Québec, celui-là. Je devrais leur dire que j’écoutais Les cowboys fringants en voiture ?”

Well, I did it! This is my second readthrough of Dumbing of Age (up through Book 13 at least) in 2024. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I’m done so I can read some other PDFs I’ve been waiting on. I like where this series is going (mostly), and I’m sure I have a lot to learn from it still.

I think this collection has some of my favorite Joyce moments in them. The way Willis treats religion is something I really respect. Past me might not have loved it so much, but he gets a lot of things right about faith transition, including the way some people immediately take up new dogmas that are just as inflexible and judgmental as the ones they left behind. Can’t believe I’m almost caught up!

Comic continues to be good post timeskip! I am glad to almost be done with this reread, since I’d like to turn my attention to other books, but the reread is totally worth it for additional Willis insight and bonus strips.

You know, I’d kind of been dreading getting to this book because I remembered the climax, and I remembered not liking it. After reading it, though, I’m starting to think that it’s better done than I remembered but just that it stresses me out. At any rate, this comic continues to be good, and I also feel like we’re getting more Carla, which I appreciate. She’s the best.

This actually has an absurdly long(er) title that I refuse to include in its entirety. I appreciate the effort, but I think it might break something somewhere on my web workflow. It’s interesting to read this volume with knowledge of what’s coming up in the series! I can see plots being set up that I might not notice otherwise. Not all of those plots are my favorite, but I still really like this comic, so I’m looking forward to them anyway.

This is clever, spot on, and sometimes hilarious.

In some ways, I can’t at all relate to Dumbing of Age because my college experience was so wildly different. Yet, it’s funny how I can relate so much to parts of it now, well after my college years. I don’t know that I would have wanted to have this freshman year (especially not the melodramatic bits or superhero fights), but I do wish I could have learned some of the lessons in the story earlier in life.

This continues to be good, the bonus material keeps getting better, and even though I can’t be bothered to write thorough reviews for these volumes (still 6 to go!), I’m really glad I own them.

The lines between books continue to blur, and as much as I like Becky’s growing importance, I’m not always a huge fan of Amazi-Girl scenes. This continues to be a good comic, though, and I’m enjoying the reread.

Lots of plot developments that will go on to define the comic here, and I enjoyed revisiting them. The bonus material is also really starting to pick up here with the inclusion of Patreon strips, so that’s fun, too.

To be honest, the collections are starting to blur together some, so I don’t exactly remember where the dividing line is between this one and the last. The series continues to be good and fun, though, so it gets this rating nonetheless! I think one reason I like DoA so much is because it’s so different than my own college freshman experience. Some of that is clearly because it’s a work of fiction, but it’s also because BYU is a very different place than other universities, so it’s still interesting to consider different experiences.

DoA can get kind of melodramatic sometimes, and there’s plenty of that in this book. Sometimes it strains credulity, but it doesn’t get in the way of a fantastic webcomic.