I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

After the brilliant first season of The Mandalorian, I put some related art up in my office. As the show has gone on, though, I’ve gotten less and less impressed with it, to the point that I wonder why I keep the art up.

My favorite detail from Homestar Runner production is how the off-brand voices in the low-quality animation segments are just the best efforts of the non-voice-actor guy to imitate the voices his brother does.

I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.

I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much. I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).

The RSS feeds for my local newspaper don’t seem to be compatible with my current feed reader, and I’m torn between building myself a web-scrape-to-RSS workaround for the fun of it or just pivoting to another local news source.

The Mastodon bot that posts random Homestar Runner screenshots is back, and I’m so happy. Refusing to unfollow it despite it not having posted since July was a wise choice.

Today, after a brief appearance on campus to teach one class, I begin a convoluted trip to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. As this trip has gotten closer, I’ve looked at the details of my trip and slowly realized that I messed this up good in terms of deciding how to get to Pittsburgh and back. This post is a confession of my sins! I’m fairly transport conscious—at least for an American.

RSS forever! I love RSS, I love Cory Doctorow, and I love this post.

I am 100% on team POSSE, but it can approach Rube Goldberg levels of complexity, and I don’t always know right away how to fix things that break.

Over the weekend, I bought a print of a Biggs Darklighter portrait from a local artist, and every time I walk past it, I feel better about the purchase.

Between a work conversation a few days ago and a podcast I’m listening to this morning, I’ve spent a lot of time this week wishing I were a regular comic book shop customer.

I’m surprised to be rating this higher than previous seasons, because it’s based off of one of my least favorite books in the series. I like the series more when it leans into the petty and mundane, and this book feels almost like a blockbuster spy movie with its unstoppable bad guys and conspiratorial plots. That turns out to make for good television, though, and I thought the season finale was particularly good, in a way that raises my opinion of the whole season.

Look, I like Steam, but it’s still a sucky business model, like so many others today,

I tried the first episode of Agatha All Along with my spouse, and we both agreed we needed a refresher on this series. I think this is one of the best entries in the MCU—certainly for TV. The premise is weird and is committed to it; it’s comic book-y but mostly in a fun way; it explores deep questions alongside action and humor; and it’s willing to show how scary superpowers are.

RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped updating nearly 3 weeks ago. Not sure if it’s the website or my app, but it’s making me grumpy.

I am by nature pretty prudish, and even though I’ve been successfully dialing that down recently, I still feel weird about having read this and even weirder about acknowledging that on a public website. That said, I’ve always felt like I should give this a try since it’s well regarded in comics, and after a few failed attempts in earlier, more prudish years, I powered my way through this complete edition over the past few days.

I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game.

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.