Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “mbnov2022”

- kudos:

Pretty windy this morning, which will add another dimension to bike commute safety.

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As my tenure application continues to make its way through that process, I’ve thought a lot about how grateful I am that my unit is the right size pond for this fish.

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In a training last week, we discussed the trend of journals’ checking manuscripts with plagiarism software. People shared examples where editors couldn’t accept perfectly good reasons for authors to reuse material unless a certain software score was also reached.

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Boosted kiddo’s motivation to help put away the dishes by convincing her to think of it as a magic trick (making the dishwasher’s contents ‘disappear’). Boosted my own by remembering it’s now legal to play Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music around the house.

- kudos:

One of the highlights of this week’s family gathering was teaching my cousin’s kids to play the all-ages TTRPG Magical Kitties Save the Day. I didn’t make a firm commitment, but I did suggest we might be able to revisit our game sometime over Zoom.

- kudos:

In recent years, my faith has become less literal, my marriage has become mixed-faith, and we’ve both committed to letting kiddo choose her own future as she gets older. This has meant revisiting family ritual and tradition for end of year holidays, but it’s kind of fun!

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Feeling better today, so we’re joining the family Thanksgiving gathering about 20 hours later than planned. Looks like our holiday plans will retain their general shape despite yesterday’s disruption.

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Woke up feeling lousy, so now I get to spend the next few hours figuring out if it’s the sort of thing we need to update (i.e., cancel) our Thanksgiving travel plans for.

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Growing up, I was taught to graze at religious texts, focusing on anecdotes that supported what we already believed. One of the great pleasures of my adulthood has been learning to read them more critically: wrestling with their problems and learning deeper lessons.

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Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ve reached the season where my colleagues (and students) think I’m crazy for continuing to bike commute. Despite sometimes achey fingers, the cold itself is usually easy to deal with. When I get worried is when there’s ice on the roads.

- kudos:

I sometimes wonder how I’d react if I were put through a ‘Peggy Sue loop’: made to repeat an earlier part of my life with all my knowledge of how things turned out. I have major disagreements with my past self, but I also owe him a lot, so there would be difficult decisions.

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I bought a French novel at a used bookstore last week, but I’ve felt burned out on reading lately, so it’s gone to the pile of books I keep meaning to read but keep skipping in favor of Minecraft or something else.

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‘Kiddo, I’m glad you’re a part of our family.’ ‘… the weirdest family?’ I will never tire of her developing sense of humor.

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I’m a teetotaler, so some of my microbrewing grad school friends once declared that I would make a good “beer eunuch”—I could be trusted to hold onto a barrel (or whatever—I don’t know how this stuff works) without abusing that trust.

- kudos:

J’aime quasiment toutes les pistes sur le nouvel album de Stromae, mais j’apprécie surtout « C’est que du bonheur », où il parle en toute franchise des hauts et des bas de l’expérience d’être parent d’un jeune enfant.

- kudos:

Hearing about Kevin Conroy’s death (😭😭😭) has me reading about Batman: The Animated Series, which has me reading about various “ages” (golden, silver, bronze) of comics. Was there ever an aluminium age? If not, what would it have looked like?

- kudos:

Is to adopt a new religious identity necessarily to leave the old one behind? Many—justifiably and understandably—use that language, but it’s never quite fit my own experience. I feel like I’m nitpicking when I try to explain it, though.

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I’m currently on a train where you can’t adjust the seat in any way. As tall as I am, that means the head rest digs into my shoulder blades if I sit up straight. No wonder my posture is lousy.

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Yesterday’s conference presentation went well, but despite a nagging suspicion that I’d prepared too many slides, I didn’t take the time to trim and wound up skipping a chunk of the talk. Alas.

- kudos:

Doing a research presentation at a conference today. The slides are essentially a fancy HTML doc (thanks to remarkjs), and I’m proud that I figured out how to get Font Awesome SVGs to display in-line with text.

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Over a decade ago, when I was discovering British TV, I imagined a ridiculous hypothetical crossover of all my favorite shows. For example, Sir Humphrey from ‘Yes, Minister’ turned out to be the Master from ‘Doctor Who.’

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In 2022, I joined the prescription sunglasses club. It’s great, but it requires making certain I’m packing any glasses I’m not wearing. That failed yesterday, so I’m wearing old, scratched indoor glasses until I can get my good ones from work.

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A mentor in Community of Christ is encouraging me to attend the April 2023 World Conference—and even to register as a voting delegate. The idea of a church conference that asks for bottom-up consensus is very different than my previous, top-down ecclesiastical experience.

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Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?

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I worry about how often events in my country seem to echo the Dreyfus Affair of late 19th/early 20th century France. As one author put it, truth and justice were set aside by those who perceived them as threats to their vision of the country.

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I feel like I am constantly fine-tuning how I do assessments in my classes. I want to trust students and avoid policing them, but I’m frustrated when they respond to this approach by acting like it exempts them from attending class and participating.

microblogvember and the surprising joy of random words

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Recently, I was listening to a podcast episode that was touching on deconstruction. It was chiefly concerned with the term as it’s used in religious contexts, but to do so, it was going back to its intellectual roots, with Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure. As the host, Jared Byas, summarized the ideas of deconstruction: we can’t ever escape language and the meaning of language depends on other parts of that language.

- kudos:

Hier, je voulais identifier une chanson française dont je me souvenais. Je ne savais ni son titre ni son auteur—juste que le mot « admiration » figurait plusieurs fois parmi ses paroles. Grâce à DuckDuckGo et pas mal d’effort mental, je l’ai trouvée ! « Bidon » de Alain Souchon.

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Among my least typical but most cherished souvenirs of the time I lived in Europe are the legal and quasi-legal documents I picked up along the way. In my campus office, I have a French residency permit, a Swiss driver’s license, lots of public transportation passes…

- kudos:

Je suis en train de ranger et numériser de vieux fichiers, lettres, et souvenirs. Après la numérisation, j’en jette la plupart, mais le reste va au travail pour ajouter un peu de nostalgie à mon bureau. Et c’est donc pour ça que j’ai un permis de conduire suisse au travail.

- kudos:

To get my current driver’s license, I was asked to take off my glasses for the photo and told it had something to do with facial recognition. That terrified me, but my hope is that since I ALWAYS wear my glasses, the software is going to struggle matching me to that photo.

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This morning, I am remembering the officially Wendy’s-branded tabletop roleplaying game ‘Feast of Legends,’ which is preposterous but also seems like it could work if you really wanted it to.

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My parents are hosting (almost) everyone from my big family for Thanksgiving this year. Given growing numbers of food preferences and restrictions among us, I wonder whether we’ll have a big inclusive-but-non-traditional Thursday feast or whether dinner gets balkanized.

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The best figure I’ve ever included in a scholarly publication was a screenshot of a joke I made in a tweet and was especially proud of. The screenshot happened to demonstrate a Twitter feature I was trying to explain, which seemed justification enough.