I like weird fiction, and this anarchist occult book delivers. I like the mundanity of the occult stuff and the persistent but relatively subtle anarchist themes. It could be better, but the vibes alone are enough for a positive review. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series.

Chamomile is not something I generally like in tea, but the overall combination here works, and it’s a nice “warm me up” blend for a cold day.

Reading about Apple’s manufacturing practices and thinking about Fairphones again.

Feel weird giving this full marks because it didn’t knock my socks off exactly, but it wasn’t “slightly too strong” in the way that I penalized yesterday’s Kenya blend for, so I guess if I’m going to have plain black tea one morning, I’d be happy with Darjeeling.

I enjoyed watching some of my favorite characters in this series, but it does not have the coherence or cleverness of the first one.

Still kind of meh at this point, and I’m wondering if there’s only so far that the premise of this series can go. There are some interesting plot developments, though, so we’ll see if things get more exciting in the next volume(s).

Not bad but not my favorite. I liked the recent blend of Kenya and Ceylon tea a lot, and now I’m wondering if what I really liked was the Ceylon. I’m guessing I’ll find out!

Chai sounds good, and coconut sounds good, but this combination doesn’t work for me. The coconut flavor is too strong, too tropical, and too artificial. Pretty disappointing.

Parts of this are good—especially the Batman-analogue/Catwoman-analogue date subplot that bookends this volume—but a lot of it is meh. I’m also not a fan of the “rich dude has to work to make a problem go away for his company” plot, though we’ll see if that changes any.

For over 7 years now, I’ve been using the Day One app on iOS and macOS to keep my journal. Journaling has been important to me since I was a teenager, and being able to do it on a phone or a computer just makes it more likely that it’s going to happen. My dependence on Day One isn’t without issues: I’ve gotten warier of Automattic over the past couple of years, I’d like to one day extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem altogether, and I do think that there’s something I miss by typing rather than handwriting my journal entries. Nonetheless, it’s a good app, and I’m not likely to jump ship until I’ve finished digitizing all of my older journals and memorabilia so that I can have some PDF, Markdown, and JSON exports of all of my journals to convert into something more homebrew and platform-independent.

One of the first non-herbal teas I tried was a Lady Grey, and I think that biased me toward that approach to Grey-like teas. I’ve had mixed experiences with Earl Greys (sorry, Jean-Luc), and I usually find myself wishing it was a Lady Grey instead.

This Earl Grey was pretty good, though! Not enough to get full marks from me (again, I found myself wishing for more citrus), but I was pleased by how it worked out.

This series continues to be compelling, even if I have some complaints about it. Casey’s dialogue for Black characters sometimes feels stereotypical, I don’t love his use (or depiction) of rape as a plot point, and (like some of the other Image series I’ve read) I feel like there’s a fine line between “comics can be a mature medium” and “let’s draw all the boobs and butts we can.”

And yet. This is a more interesting Batman story than so many actual Batman stories I’ve read. For all my baseline prudishness and legitimate concerns, I don’t (usually) think this is just mature content just to be titillating, and I really want to see how things play out.

Just over a year ago, I read and reviewed Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals, which felt weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge having read. I got why it received the acclaim that it did but didn’t really like it.

This Image comics Humble Bundle that I’ve been working my way through included the entire run of Sex Criminals, which I don’t intend to reread, but I am trying to read basically everything else in the bundle, including other series that it feels weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge reading. I’ve been oblique in referencing that so far, but it’s hard to avoid with this review.

I bought this at a Renaissance Faire in September and had the last of it at lunch today, because it’s a “several cups of tea” kind of day. It’s not as exciting as I hoped when I first bought it, but it’s been a reliable weekend tea for the past few months, and I’ve enjoyed it.

I couldn’t articulate specifically why this breakfast blend (which mixes Ceylon and Kenyan leaves) impressed me more than the English Breakfast one, but it did! I could drink this one on a regular basis.

From now on, when I’m feeling insecure about the depths of my technical knowledge, I’m just going to think about this bit of dialogue here.

I was just posting this morning about how great this idea of teablogging is, but I’m going to immediately undercut that my questioning my ability to rate teas in the first place.

This is the most interesting and enjoyable blend I’ve had so far in the advent calendar, and for that, it gets a higher rating than anything I’ve tried so far. Yet, I think I’d also tire of it more quickly than most of the other blends I’ve tried, so in the long term (rather than as a first impression), I think it would rate lower. I could drink the vanilla chai every morning even if it was a bit disappointing, but I think I’d have to space the bergamot and jasmine flavors of this blend out or else I’d quickly get sick of it.

Because I only use Mastodon as an extension of a POSSE setup, I missed the rollout of quote posts, but I’m thrilled that (as I expected) they’re a simple syntax translated by the Masto software into a specific presentation. Means that I can probably build it into a POSSE workflow somehow.

My spouse asked last night what that morning’s advent calendar tea had been. It had been a long day, so I couldn’t remember at first, and that short exchange entirely justified the 45 minutes I’d spent on Monday building a new “teablog” content type onto my Hugo site.

This sucks—and even more so because the Reddit company is willing to play nice with AI to get their pretty penny.

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.