From its earliest paragraphs, All Systems Red is helping clarify my feelings about the Murderbot TV show. I don’t know that it’s a bad adaptation so much as I think that some of my favorite parts of the book just can’t be adapted to screen.

I’m glad I have my files organized enough to retrieve preprints of about a decade’s worth of research, but I really wish I’d been doing this as I went.

Current levels of home maintenance confidence: Feeling like a god for taking a pocket door off its track and feeling utterly intimidated by needing to eventually put it back on.

I don’t think copyright is the best argument against generative AI (strengthening copyright law will benefit big companies more than small creators), but “can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few copyrighted eggs 🤷🤷🤷” is still a depressingly cynical national policy.

Went to claim kiddo’s prizes for doing library summer reading and walked away with four free admissions to the roller rink, an EXIT-brand puzzle gamebook, and a bunch of other stuff. Libraries are great.

A dehumidifier that we’ve been putting off taking to an appliance disposal dropoff—for months—decided to magically work for us after a late night fridge leak yesterday. Thanks, little guy. Don’t know what kind of karmic advance we had to call in for that, but I’m grateful.

Bien content que ma fille me fasse confiance pour traduire quelques mots fr français dans une épisode de My Little Pony.

Just sent one of the most stressful emails of my career and got an out of office reply. I’m not mad—good for people taking time away from work—but that’s a heck of an anticlimax.

Talking in the car about Unicode standards for emojis, like all daddy-daughter pairs.

Je compte bientôt préparer un document professionnel en français. Il y a cinq ans, j’aurais demandé à quelqu’un de m’aider à corriger des erreurs. En 2025, par contre, je me demande si mes petites erreurs éventuelles feront preuve que j’ai tout écrit moi-même au lieu de me fier à l’IA.

Every game I bought myself for kiddo’s Switch has really only gotten playtime if kiddo has taken an interest in it.

I hear people are angry about Superman being an immigrant, so I think it’s time to read “Superman Smashes the Klan” again (and maybe even listen to the 1940s radio serial it’s based on).

J’ai été content aujourd’hui de comprendre le mot « rougeole » à la RTS. Puis, je me suis demandé où j’aurai eu besoin d’apprendre ce mot dans le passé. Comme elle fait sa réapparation aux États-Unis maintenant, peut-être que j’en aurai besoin en fin de compte.

Dealing with yet another case of “these reviewer suggestions are good and pretty straightforward, so why don’t I have any motivation to make the revisions?”

Discovered a quirky museum spotlighting local artists and found in their gift shop a zine that a former student of mine contributed to. Double win!

Je suis content de découvrir combien il est facile de changer mon site Hugo en version multilangue, mais il y aura des conséquences pour le POSSE si je ne suis pas attentif…

Playing the Portal series with kiddo is going well, except that she is (understandably, tbh) freaked out by the Valve screen that appears when you first load it.

One of my favorite ways of stretching my Hugo and Siri Shortcuts skills is thinking about features I could build into my website based off of what other services already offer. Thinking about building a game session logging system this summer…

I feel like we need to talk more about epistemology—and especially the social construction of facts—in the era of chatbot LLMs.

What kind of children’s performer has three different “no photos” reminders before the show even starts?

Kiddo’s Father’s Day card has been addressed to “Dr. Spencer Greenhalgh,” which is technically accurate but still feels off.

Woke up with protest music from Andor playing in my head, which seems fitting.

Has anyone ever tried Kagi’s Kid Mode? It sounds like a great idea but also ups the cost significantly, so I’d like to hear about experiences before deciding.

Trader Joe’s chai mints are everything I was hoping they’d be.

Un ami norvégien qui a passé son enfance dans le Vaud m’a dit cette semaine qu’il détectait de l’influence suisse dans mon français, et j’en ai été très fier !

“What am I, made of jokes tonight?” - kiddo, after telling two admittedly good ones

Living my best Mormon(-adjacent) life today by having an article accepted in Dialogue the same day that I’ll be watching two of the people who gave me advice on revisions be ordained apostles in Community of Christ.

One of the fun things (for me) about attending World Conference is remembering how much more useful French is in Community of Christ contexts than LDS contexts.

So, uh, is my kid’s dream about a peanut butter fountain a good or a bad omen for all the hours we’re spending in the car today?

Road trip tomorrow, so downloading Portal to kiddo’s Switch to see if she’s old enough to enjoy it.

Il n’y a pas d’anxiété sans été.

Kiddo just apologized for being the “baron of bad news,” and that’s how we’re all going to say it from now on, okay?

Who schedules an academic conference to overlap with Halloween? And how long ago did they stop having kids at home?

Kiddo: wonders why I am talking about disabling predictive text on the iPad she’s using spouse: “well, Daddy is a monster who doesn’t even use autocorrect” me: “excuse me, I think you mean I’m a ‘mnoster’”

Kiddo is a wild mix of adventurous and picky when it comes to food. She does not want the unobjectionable ravioli the rest of us are eating, but she is powering through the too-spicy-for-her curry leftovers in the fridge.

Trying to figure out whether hate listening to the audiobook of Moneyball has implications for my suitability to teach my department’s Intro to Data Science class.