Below are posts associated with the “parenting” tag.
rediscovering the library as workplace
Kiddo is at a half-day summer camp this week, which is freeing up my mornings for work. However, the camp is across town from where we live, so rather than driving all the way home for a couple of hours of work, I’ve been driving to a nearby branch of the Lexington Public Library to set up my laptop and get some work done there. It has been really nice!
🔗 linkblog: Momfluencers Are Pitching AI as a Better ‘Coparent’ Than Men
Don’t love the idea of AI as coparent, but gendered divisions of labor also suck.
rediscovering Jonathan Coulton this morning
Ever since importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app back in March, I’ve been able to revisit things I tweeted over the years as part of my almost-daily scroll through Day One’s “on this day” feature. (In fact, it’s an almost-daily scroll because I’m having to purge the tweets that actually don’t work well as journal entries). That’s how I learned this morning that twelve years ago today, I reached out to Jonathan Coulton on Twitter to ask if the line “je suis celui qui suis” in his “barely remembered French” track Je suis Rick Springfield was an intentional reference to a similar line in the Bible or just a “crazy coincidence.”
introducing the next generation to Numa Numa
Kiddo and I often play a little bit of Switch together right before or after dinner. Last night, she was humming what my spouse and I both thought was a nonsense melody that she was making up—but that immediately reminded both of us of the Romanian dance song Dragostea Din Tei as featured in the classic internet meme Numa Numa.
It turned out that kiddo was humming Dragostea Din Tei—the adults had both forgotten that a version (or sample? I dunno) of the song features in Mitchells vs. the Machines, but she’d watched it recently on her own, and that’s what she had in her mind when singing during Switch time.
the simple joy of picking out 'bag your own' Pokémon cards with kiddo
There’s a used bookstore near my in-laws that I enjoy stopping by when we’re visiting. One of the best offerings of this store (at least in kiddo’s mind) is the bin full of Pokémon cards up near the comics. The deal is that you can stuff a provided plastic bag (the kind that comes in board games to hold components) as full as you dare, take it up to the register, and they’ll just charge you a flat five bucks, no matter how many cards you fit into the bag. (You can also fill a larger box for a higher fee, or you can stuff a bag full of Magic cards from the next bin over, but our interest has always been in bagging our own Pokémon cards).