Like the first volume, this was familiar (since I’d just read these comics a few months ago) but worth rereading—both because the comic is good and because the bonus materials are interesting.

It was just earlier this year that I archive binged this comic, but I recently bought PDFs of the collections through a Kickstarter and decided to reread it with the commentary and bonus material. I can see the rough spots that have been improved in over a decade of webcomic history (in art and choice of language, for example), but this still makes for an excellent introduction to the universe, and I feel such a connection with Joyce that it’s interesting to meet her again in her original characterization.

This is a helpful EFF overview that I’m posting to bookmark for later.

Ça faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas de jeu sur mon portable, puis on m’a rappelé Mini Metro, et maintenant je crains perdre pas mal de temps avec ça.

En anglais, un assassin, c’est un tueur à gages, un agent secret, ou parfois quelqu’un qui a tué une personne bien connue. Je sais que ça signifie qqch de plus général en français, mais quand la RTS parle des « assassins mineurs », je suis quand-même un peu choqué avant de me corriger.

Lexington has lots of room to improve, but I’m glad they’re getting credit for the good work they’ve done.

Quelle honte !

I’ve been feeling for a while like I need to move away from Apple eventually, but I’m so entangled in the ecosystem that I’m dragging my feet on it. Seeing the company drink the AI Kool-Aid is definitely accelerating my plans—and will even more so if there’s no easy way to turn these featutes off.

This season isn’t as strong as the first; I’m glad I watched it (for the first time!), but I feel like it got too tangled in storied and then trying to wrap things up for the end.

The book has a fun premise for science fiction: An alien craft lands in medieval England, a series of forced worldbuilding details makes the English knights stronger than the aliens, and before you know it, they’ve gone to space and conquered themselves an empire. The book also has the benefit of being written in a way that anything that hasn’t aged well can be attributed to the fictional characters narrating the story.

Half-serious question as I belatedly remember my library’s summer reading program for adults started last Monday: Does a radio adaptation of a book count as an audiobook?

I suspect the return of Feathers McGraw will ultimately be a disappointment, but I love the character enough to be very excited in the meantime.

Manga is one comics tradition I’ve never really gotten into, but I was impressed by someone else’s description of this series on Micro.blog and decided to give it a try. There are some manga conventions I’m still getting used to, and I don’t know that I fully “get it” yet, but it’s fun! The “cozy apocalypse” vibe it gives off is nice, and I’m looking forward to reading the next volume.

My current RSS reader (feeeed for iOS) boasts Fediverse integration. I always figured it was just through grabbing accounts’ RSS feeds, and you can do that, but it turns out if you subscribe to it as a Fediverse account, it works as a quasi-client, with additional data pulled in. Neat!

I’m glad that so many French comics are now available in American libraries, and it’s a pleasure to read something that came from the influential Métal Hurlant. This is one of those reads, though, where I understand why the work is important, but it just didn’t land with me.

What a great ode to the bike.

My brother misheard “fediverse” as “feta-verse” on a podcast, and I’m now soliciting your best cheese puns for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.

My spouse has been trying to get me to read the book for years, so we had to watch the show! It’s an interesting premise with compelling characters (who are well cast and well acted), and I enjoyed the whole thing. My biggest irritation with it is how the main character’s nobility is seemingly celebrated. I’m no Soviet apologist—it was a repressive country that committed unjustifiable wrongs—but I would have preferred to see the Count reflect on the unmerited wealth and power he held as a member of the Russian nobility rather than be a simple victim of Marxist zeal.

I have really mixed feelings about this book! I’ve read it at least twice before, and after looking at the series on TVTropes, I decided to give it another go. I understand that the series is done now, so I thought I might try reading the whole thing. It’s an interesting premise, with detailed worldbuilding, a compelling narrative, and characters that are fun to follow. I enjoyed reading the book, and I can see myself enjoying the rest of the series, too.

Any recommendations out there for CBD teas? I’ve found CBD chews invaluable on particularly anxious days, but since I’m already a tea-drinker, I’m interested in trying the intersection of the two.

Joost versus the Romulans: A Star Trek/Eurovision crossover with lots of shoulder pads.

This is a fun article.

Hier soir, je me suis dit qu’il ne ferait pas de mal de ne pas me coucher à l’heure. Ce matin, je ne veux que me recoucher.

There’s an interesting premise behind this spy thriller adaptation, and some of the radio work is pretty good, but I felt like there wasn’t enough connective tissue to keep it together. I don’t know how much of the weakness was in the original novel versus introduced in the adaptation—the rushed pacing makes me suspect the latter—but while I don’t regret finishing it, I can’t say I was impressed.

Some time after I moved out of the house for college (etc.), my younger siblings pooled some money to buy a used PlayStation 2 and a few games, including Guitar Hero 2. When I was home for summers and breaks, I got some exposure to new-to-me music through playing that game with them. As a huge fan of Homestar Runner, I naturally appreciated the appreciation of Trogdor, but one of the songs that stuck out most to me was Freezepop’s less talk more rokk:

I love this article precisely because I hate the word “utilize.”

The costume of Latvia’s Eurovision contestant reminds me of The Tick, and I can’t take him seriously.

Love to see Eurovision coverage from US news outlets.

Some better, broader coverage of complaints I made in a blog post earlier this week.

I have zero personal interest in joining Bluesky, but I’m happy that you can follow accounts via RSS and even happier that whatever bug was stopping my RSS reader from pulling posts has been resolved. Glad to be following some people I haven’t seen since Twitter.

This show is the very definition of weird-but-delightful. I watched (some of) it with my now-spouse right around when we first started dating, and it’s fun to revisit. The aesthetic is very specific, the vibe is dark-but-cute, and the dialogue is snappy if strange. Looking forward to Season 2!

This series wasn’t bad—it’s just that maybe I shouldn’t be binging them series after series, because despite some clever moments, I just felt like there wasn’t much new about this material.

Je ne suis plus étudiant en français ni prof de FLE, mais ça continue à me plaire quand je fais de petites améliorations de ma connaissance de la langue de Moliére. J’aurais aimé me rendre compte de certaines choses quand elles m’auraient aidé professionellement, mais bof.

I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).

Today, Stack Overflow announced that it was entering into a partnership with OpenAI to provide data from the former to the latter for the purposes of training ChatGPT, etc. I’ve used Stack Overflow a fair amount over the years, and there have also been times where I tried to get into some of the other Stack Exchange sites, contributing both questions and answers. I haven’t really been active on any of these sites in recent times, but I still decided to take a couple of minutes this afternoon and follow the advice of one outraged Mastodon post: delete my contributions and shut down my accounts.

I didn’t listen to the finale all in one chunk, so I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have, but the excellent use of callbacks and flashbacks in that episode was enough to bump up my rating. I think this is also the first series I hadn’t heard before, so it was nice to hear some new content.