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The thing about getting in the habit of reading privacy policies is that it sometimes changes your behavior, but it ALWAYS ups your anxiety about the impossibility of ever changing your behavior sufficiently.

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Just figured out a regex solution to something in under ten minutes. Watch out Friday, nothing can stop me now.

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This afternoon, a career in academia looks like working from the kitchen table, playing a French 80s radio station, and fuming at Reviewer B’s complaints about my using the journal’s template like I was asked to.

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I just finished rereading Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.” It is really good—in ways I didn’t appreciate when I first read it in high school and that I couldn’t begin to articulate now.

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One of the greatest joys I experience as a veteran of a decade of French classes is whenever I discover that a song we used to listen to in high school is an actual song, not just something made up for class.

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Hearing a lot of things today that are reminding me why I find utilitarianism totally unsatisfying as a moral philosophy.

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Not sure what I expected less today: To explain the concept of death to my kid or for my kid to grasp the concept well enough to burst into tears.

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Listening to public Swiss radio (as I do) and got chills when I heard a new, prerecorded gov’t COVID-19 safety message played before the hourly news update. Felt like I was in disaster fiction.

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Perk of having ed tech degree/experience in the era of COVID-19: I’m currently walking my mom through Zoom to allow for possibility of her offering distance piano lessons.

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Was there a moral panic about radio? My kid is enjoying podcasts, and while parent-me feels like that’s somehow better than TV, tech researcher me is wondering about history.

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TIL that if you don’t keep an e-bike adequately charged, all of that fancy-but-heavy pedal assist equipment is as much of a liability for your commute as it usually is an asset.

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Trying to collect tweets from a very-new account, but advanced search with “from:” doesn’t seem to work. Has anyone ever had this happen before?

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Is there a word for “the uncanny valley” but for British actors doing American accents (and, presumably, vice versa)?

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35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

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If Charles Xavier is looking for a copy editor, I’m pretty sure my mutant power is noticing unnecessary spaces between words in a manuscript.

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I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍

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Despite a really intense week (important work meetings, closing on a house), the 30 minutes where we thought we’d lost the kid’s beloved stuffed animal easily takes 1st place for stress level.

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Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.

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The only bad thing about having volunteered to maintain the Global Mormon Studies website is that every time I update the program for the 2020 conference, I am increasingly disappointed that I didn’t have anything to submit myself.

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Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.

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My experience with my office’s snack cache is suggesting the uncomfortable possibility that protein bars are their own state of matter.

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I can appreciate Le Carré’s shocking twists over and over—because he is also good at the inevitable-but-gripping and because he uses them both to create compelling tragedy.

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Highlight of the morning: Hearing a translator for the interviewee on a France Culture show about comics struggle to remember the French neologism for “spoiler.”

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Quick thought post-Mando and pre-TRoS: What Star Wars has given me a world in which to tell stories—not just movies. I played RPG campaigns that made the prequel trilogy look good, because the world held up even when the movies didn’t.

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It must be called two-factor authentication because the app never works the first time.

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I have just learned that there is an Etsy shop dedicated ENTIRELY to producing and selling magnets in the shape of trains and subway cars, and it’s restoring some faith in the internet.

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A personal philosophy that I need reminding of today: To make fun of others’ typos or grammatical errors (whatever criticism they otherwise deserve) is nearly always a flaunting of privilege and therefore unnecessary.

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Maybe the Cylons were a prescient metaphor for all that is terrible about the Internet of Things, and we ought to be adopting the Colonies’ aversion to networked technologies.

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Currently completing my annual review, which has me thinking how much of my career I owe to more senior academics who have been kind and generous to me when they didn’t have to be. Hope I can follow that example myself.

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If only I had known as a middle schooler who was uncool for not knowing who Eminem was that one day I would be explaining a “Real Slim Shady” joke in an academic research paper about how Mormons use Twitter 😂🤷🏼‍♂️

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My dual monitor setup relies on my using my standing desk. Since I’m under the weather today, I’m working from a chair instead and trying out the new Sidecar functionality for my iPad. Pleased with it so far!

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.