- kudos:

Seven years ago, I was applying for grad school, wrestling with the idea of leaving French teaching behind. The longer I spend in this career, though, the more I believe my experience learning and teaching language and culture affects my work.

- kudos:

Libraries are beautiful places: I just left one with four volumes of Star Wars/Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics and a copy of Dr. Wil Gafney’s “Womanist Midrash.”

- kudos:

I had my information literacy and critical thinking students annotate the Wendy’s roleplaying game with comments about how it functions as a persuasive document, and the results are delightful.

- kudos:

The hardest manuscripts to review are the ones that promise something that’s legitimately needed in the literature but then fail to follow through with that promise.

- kudos:

Attention thinkpiece writers: My young kid is now requesting avocado toast for dinner. I am now taking bids for the right to interview us and complain about millennials and their kids in your column.

- kudos:

Today, my kid grabbed a TPB of Ms. Marvel I had checked out from the library, hugged it tight, and announced that she loved it, so I’m feeling pretty good in the parenting department right now.

- kudos:

Yet another Grammarly ad has me thinking… I think my skepticism about AI is not so much the mistakes it makes so much as it is the assumption that human experiences are so well-structured that they can be reduced to an algorithm.

- kudos:

Starting to wonder if Solomon’s “wise” suggestion to cut the baby in half was actually his editorial summary of the advice provided by three conflicting reviewers.

- kudos:

Just learned that there’s a French cover of “Raindrops Falling on My Head,” and now I want to know if they use it in the French dub of Spider-Man 2.

- kudos:

I feel subversive (but absolutely justified) whenever I argue for interpreting “quantitative” data through an interpretivist lens.

- kudos:

Completed a flat-tire-halfway-to-campus bike commuter’s biathlon today.

- kudos:

Gonna start spelling GIF as /dʒɪf/ to make my feelings about the pronunciation clear.

- kudos:

I keep getting automated emails from work that I shouldn’t be getting, but I’m an edge case of what the inclusion criteria are. It’s frustrating, but also a good reminder of need to reflect on variable definitions in computational research. 😂

- kudos:

Just had the surprising experience of seeing the term “NPC” defined and explained in a responsible conduct of research training.

- kudos:

I know some people have strong feelings about split infinitives, but if it’s good enough for Kirk and Picard, it’s good enough for me.

- kudos:

I set up a private Slack group for one of my classes today, and within 15 minutes, they had turned my face into a custom emoji. 😂

- kudos:

When it comes to macaroni and cheese, the spoonfuls I snitch from the pot while serving my kid lunch taste better than any of my own childhood memories of it.

- kudos:

I hope the Disney+ Ms. Marvel show will have an episode set in France where Kamala fights a local super who believes her burkini-based costume to be « une atteinte à la laïcité »

- kudos:

In the years since its release, I have begrudgingly accepted that the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is not that great. The hardest part of that acceptance, though, is how amazing some of its constituent parts are.

- kudos:

I just misread an email from my professional organization of choice as announcing the creation of a number of “research submarines.” Turns out they’re just working on “summaries.”

- kudos:

Beginning of semester dreams: I have written a not-great paper with my wife and the interim dean. We got feedback from Lyon-based bloggers (who like my Olympique de Marseille reference), and the dean wants to submit it to a top chemistry journal.

- kudos:

For the first time in our relationship, we both felt like we needed to ask “So, what would we do if there were an active shooter at this event?” while making Saturday plans. Didn’t feel great.

- kudos:

I am generally a fan of responsive design, but it’s frustrating when a website’s menu goes into mobile mode if I have my browser open on “only” half of my not-small monitor.

- kudos:

Flipping through an old notebook in my office, I found my notes for my campus interview here at UK (nearly two years ago now), including lists of now-colleagues’ publications and phonetic alphabet spellings of names so I wouldn’t mess them up.

- kudos:

Responding to reviewer who has a specific picture in their head of what “good” edtech research “should” look like. Thus, they’re confused by things in my paper that I’m sure aren’t problems—but don’t fit that picture.

- kudos:

I cannot read the word “poignant” without remembering that it is etymologically related to the French word for “fist” and, by extension, to the French expressions for “punch” and “brass knuckles” (literally, “an American punch”).

- kudos:

When I taught keyboarding, students complained about HTML lessons, asking what it had to do with typing. I explained that if you mistype things, you break things… I’m sure they laugh now every time I bork my website w/ a misplaced line break.

- kudos:

What I love about having ~15 years of personal journals hanging around is that if I ever run out of anxiety rooted in the present, I can go back and remember all the anxiety I felt in the past.

- kudos:

I am pleased to report that in the ~4 weeks since moving into my new office, I have only tried to enter the old one once.

- kudos:

Old favorite thing: Finding BBC Radio 4 shows on Audible; new favorite thing: Finding BBC Radio 4 shows on the Internet Archive.

- kudos:

I want to live in a world where I can travel by train from Cincinnati to Chicago without it being a 9-hour trip that leaves at 1am.

- kudos:

The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack just came up in iTunes; it’s good to occasionally remind oneself that Star Wars owes as much (if not more) to Williams, Burtt, and McQuarrie as it does to Lucas.

- kudos:

Toggl has an amazing API and disappointing native apps. If it weren’t for the first, the second could be a dealbreaker.

- kudos:

Unexpected topics in research meetings: The difficulty of choosing English translations for French swearing in your data.

- kudos:

I have now successfully migrated all of my “following” to Feedbin’s Twitter-to-RSS service. Weird way to keep up with tweets (and costs me a monthly fee), but I’m really enjoying it so far.

- kudos:

Totally blanked on bringing work clothes into the office today, so I’ll be working in the t-shirt and shorts I wore biking in. The t-shirt has an anti-imposter syndrome message, though, so that’s helping.