Kerbal Space Program has prepared me to answer kiddo questions about basic orbital mechanics, but she is (rightly!) more concerned with why there hasn’t been a woman on the moon yet.

Artemis II has not captured a lot of my attention because it’s hard to get excited about anything my country is doing right now, but I made a last minute decision to put the launch on, and even just listening to mission control is super neat.

Kiddo, while we’re listening to a “Curse of Strahd” actual play: “Would Castle Ravenloft be as scary if it were called Castle RAISINloft?”

My vision is bad enough that I can see better wearing my prescription sunglasses indoors than wearing nothing, and since I brought an empty glasses case to work today, I guess that’s what I’ll be doing.

Gotta admit that I was tempted to put “Brendan Carr is a dummy” on my protest sign today so I could find the other Vergecast listeners in town.

Bike update: My dad, a much more experienced cyclist, came to town for something else today, and I got his help. He managed in two minutes what I had spent two hours failing to do. (But my new tube was a dud, and the shop is closed for the day, so the adventure continues…)

I’m a committed commuter but miserable mechanic, so when I bought a new bike in December, I paid extra for something lower maintenance. Got my first flat yesterday, though, and it turns out these tires are tighter than I’m used to. So far, I’ve damaged my hands more than I’ve fixed the bike.

Once again, my spring break has consisted of: trying to catch up on work, telling myself that it’s spring break and therefore okay to not catch up on as much work as I expected, and feeling guilty about not catching up on as much as I expected

Brb, nearly doubling the number of my entries in the Day One journaling app by importing a partial archive of all my tweets.

Greenhalgh family dinner conversations: “You know, if you ignore the salmon and the mustard, this dish is practically pecan pie.”

Look, I know I’m always complaining about my university employer’s schedule being out of sync with local schools, but I want to point out the absurdity of it being easier to deal with kiddo’s school suddenly cancelling for snow because I’m on Spring Break.

That Marc Andreessen clip about having zero introspection sounds like it’s straight out of an Ellulian critique: There is no good or bad, there is only technique.

The Martian is a fun reread—except when its casual references to a functioning federal government and US media ecosystem briefly take me out of the narrative.

Just like the first time around, rereading The Martian just makes me want to play some Kerbal Space Program.

I’ve spent the last decade believing that The Martian was the exception to the “book is always better” rule, but rereading the book is challenging that notion.

Just checked up on the results of a web scrape that worked so, so much better than expected only to find that I hadn’t updated the base URL correctly, so all the results were wrong.

Since I’ve been posting about Doctor Who and Tinker Tailor: I had heard of the Valeyard before (my Classic Who knowledge is limited 😬), but I only recently learned that he was portrayed by the actor who played Peter Guillam, and this is really messing with my head.

I would never claim that Käärijä and Baby Lasagna’s #eurodab is a good song, but having it stuck in my head the morning after poor sleep is doing more help than harm.

I like the actor who plays Jim Prideaux in the Tinker Tailor miniseries, but even though I don’t speak a word of Czech, it’s very clear that he doesn’t either.

Look, I’ve heard some good orchestral versions of the Doctor Who theme, but that song was meant to be as electronic as possible.

La bd que je lis en ce moment avec ma fille fait un petit clin d’œil aux fameux pirates d’Astérix. Je l’ai donc envoyée chercher un album pour lui expliquer la blague—sauf que j’avais oublié combien l’un des pirates est un caricature raciste, et tout a fini dans la malaise 😬

When did YouTube start autodubbing videos into the language it assumes you want? No, thank you!

Look, I have complicated feelings about my Latter-day Saint mission experience, but I’d be silly not to take joy from learning that Ardis Parshall served in the same mission as me (and Lavina Fielding Anderson). Wish I’d read Keepapitchinin more regularly.

Worms: The Board Game is exactly what I was hoping for. No, it isn’t an elegant work of high strategy, but it captures the feel of the source material even in abstracting it to board game format. Really enjoyed my first play and looking forward to more.

For the past three weeks, we’ve been doing “daddy translates a French kids’ comics series” at bedtimes. We just finished the last volume, and it did not end the way kiddo wanted, so we had a conversation about fanfic and fixfic.