This one is fruity and floral, and maybe I steeped it wrong, because there’s the potential of something interesting in here, but it’s just not flavors I want in my tea this morning.

The secret to a good s’mores-flavored thing is to get the graham cracker part right—this is why BYU’s Graham Canyon reigns supreme in the world of ice cream.

Anyway, I’ve been drinking this herbal tea for years, and it tastes so much like graham cracker that it feels like wizardry. It may be my favorite herbal tea of all time.

Même quand il fait -3, ça fait du bien, un vélotaf après une semaine et demie de pause.

I don’t like floral flavors in my tea. This tea was better than I worried, but not as good as it smelled, and… I just don’t like floral flavors in my tea.

I was pretty excited for this one, and it wasn’t bad, but there wasn’t enough chai flavor and there definitely wasn’t enough vanilla. Maybe I steeped it wrong? Maybe I’m too tired this morning to appreciate it? I don’t know, but I’m tired of giving out “good but not great” ratings and was hoping this would really impress me.

Worms Whamageddon

Current mood: Going through Cory Doctorow’s year-end book review summary and reserving more titles from my local library than I have time to read.

I take my tea without milk or anything else—one of the big reasons I got into tea and not coffee was so I could just steep the tea and be done with things. That has an effect on my tea preferences, though, since I won’t ever have other flavors in the cup.

All of this to say that this is right at the edge of “too strong” for me. Breakfast teas are growing on me: They’re one of the reasons I’m excited about this advent calendar. I do like the malty taste, and alternating sips with spoonfuls of muesli was a good experience. It’s also a flavor I’m growing into, though, and I wonder if I would have liked it more if I’d steeped it differently (or had a single cup/bag instead of my usual two).

Still appreciate what this series is aiming for, and there are some good bits in here, but the plot still takes leaps I can’t follow, and my nagging concerns still nag.

December 1st means it’s time to add all the SomaFM Christmas stations to my internet radio client and try once again to broaden my listening beyond a handful of Alsatian stations (même si DKL a une webradio Noël que je devrais aussi ajouter).

So, this still doesn’t sit totally right with me. The sleaze as art choice is still not my style, and I’m not sure which side of the “artistic vs. objectifying” it falls on, though the former is clearly the goal. I also think that plot and character “development” sometimes move too quickly to really land.

If I’m more generous toward this volume, though, it’s because it’s more clear what the creators are trying to do here. The characters are more compelling, with backstories and relationships that make them interesting. The plot twists add genuine drama. It feels like they are trying to prove that comics can be a serious, “adult” (in not just one sense of the term) medium, and I think they mostly succeed? It feels like a comics equivalent of all those blockbuster TV shows I don’t watch, and I can give it credit for that even if there are reasons I tend not to watch those shows.

Okay, I’ve been thinking about setting up a “teablog” for a while, but this Advent, my sister-in-law are working our way through the same Whittard Tea Advent Calendar, so it’s time to actually set this up. My hope is that taking notes like this will get me to think harder about what I like (and don’t) in teas.

This puts me in the weird position of suddenly reviewing teas I’ve been drinking for months (even years), but what are you going to do? There are also going to be a flood of posts in December as I work on that “backlog” and also make my way through this Advent Calendar, and things might get less exciting in January, but I believe firmly in blogging for myself first, and this is what makes sense for me.

I keep expecting to like Matt Fraction stuff to be better than I do because I’ve heard so much good stuff about him. There’s something interesting in here, but it also seems sleazy and grimy as an intentional style decision, and I don’t know if that’s my kind of fiction. I’ll probably keep reading this, and it was helpful to read the cast pages at the end so I could remember who everyone was, but I don’t know if I’ll like it any more.

Look, now more than ever, I’m sympathetic toward a story of Canadian resistance to American bullying, and you’d think that giant mech combat would only make that more appealing.

There are just too many strikes against this to be better than “meh,” though. I don’t like blood and gore in my comics, the characters are kind of flat, and the French dialogue needs another edit.

This was dumb. It’s the kind of comic that’s intentionally offensive, but that doesn’t stop it from being dumb and offensive.

The only thing keeping me from rating it lower is that there’s the spark of something interesting in there. Compelling art! Is Jay Leno POTUS, with Dick Cheney as his VP?! It’s Alan Moore’s Comedian turned up to 12! None of that is enough to make it good, but it’s worth some recognition, I guess.

This comic has the raw ingredients (including solid art) to make a compelling story about mortality, existential dread, privilege, and so many other topics. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be able to organize them into something coherent and compelling.

Still trying to figure out a replacement bike after my main commuter was declared unsafe by the U.S. government. Juggling price, geometry, maintenance, practicality, and everything else.

This series ended as a disappointment. The grace I was willing to give it with the last volume is gone after it finishing in a pile of anticlimaxes and overused science fiction tropes. Meh.

Okay, once I got over the ways that generative AI have ruined the premise, it’s not a terrible story. It’s not deep or particularly original, but I enjoyed it enough to be more generous this time around.

I read this series ages ago; when I got it through an Image Humble Bundle, I decided it was worth a reread.

The art isn’t bad, and the basic ideas of the series are interesting, but it’s remarkable how much generative AI has kind of ruined what the series could be.

So much of this reads differently now: the premise of people seeking companionship in sycophantic robots, the secondary premise of people being convinced that there’s true intelligence behind the scenes just waiting to be unlocked, the idea of “robots rights” in a society that’s skeptical of artificial intelligence. What would have been pretty standard scifi 4 years ago now hits differently, feeling like an allegory for the most delusional parts of pro-AI advocacy.

Il m’arrive de devoir chercher un nouveau vélo, mais il paraît qu’on oublie que les grands aussi ont envie d’être vélotaffeur. Si je faisais quelques centimètres de moins, tout serait bien plus facile.

Over the weekend, I decided to plunge back into following a bunch of social accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky that I had previously removed from Reeder to avoid information overwhelm. Sensitive to the possibility that information overwhelm would come back with all of these new follows, I tried using Reeder’s filter feature to do something I’d never thought about before: organizing feeds by genre instead of by content.

That is, I’ve previously used folders in Reeder (and plenty of other RSS apps) to organize feeds into the different subjects that I’m interested in and then catching up on feeds one subject at a time. However, this time, I used Reeder’s filters to organize by feed type—or genre. That is, I have all true RSS feeds accessible through one filter and all social feeds accessible through another. The idea here is that I’m more interested in at least reviewing all of the true RSS feeds (blogs, news sites, etc.), but with social, I’ll be more willing to hit Reeder’s “go to top” button and skip over a bunch of posts that I missed overnight or during a busy day.

Chaque année, ça brise le cœur d’entendre « Black Friday » sur la radio francophone.

Dammit, now is not a great time to be looking for a replacement ebike. And it looks like Rad is going under, too? Ugh.

Cette carte de vœux MBudget que j’ai acheté en 2009 restera toujours l’un des meilleurs souvenirs que je garderai du temps que j’ai passé en Suisse.