WAIT. Read the letter more carefully, and my “health plan” gave this third party printing/mailing service my SSN and address. This is even dumber.

Just got word from a “third-party printing/mailroom services” provider whose name I don’t recognize that they had a data breach involving my SSN and address. Literally no idea how they got those data. Did I sign up with them? Does my employer work with them? What a stupid world we live in.

I’ve been sour on Ring for a long time, but literally everything their CEO is saying to Nilay Patel in these interview clips I’m listening to makes me even angrier at the company.

Grading anxiety (“am I not teaching this right? is my rubric unclear?”) has been a persistent part of my academic career for so long that I’ve had to deliberately embrace that Simpsons Skinner meme and tell myself that sometimes “no, it’s the [students] who are wrong.”

TFW a special issue deadline gets extended by a month after you dropped everything for a week to meet the original deadline. Alas.

“Lent starts tomorrow, I should go ahead and eat that cookie,” I said to myself, unwittingly reinventing Mardi Gras.

All parents should introduce their kids to D&D so that all parents can hear their kids say things like “I don’t think it’s worth it to have the spider fall in love with me.”

You know, I was just thinking of Clark Gilbert earlier today (or maybe yesterday morning?). It was while I was standing “the wrong way” in the elevator, something I do—and have perfectly good reason to do—every day I bike into work.

In a Zoom meeting with the dean, with my X-Wing and Enterprise-D posters clearly visible in the background. Living my most professional life.

Torn between enjoying Kagi’s machine translation tool and grumpiness about using something LLM-based. Still can’t get over digital labor, but I might(?) be less hostile to generative AI if it were more often deployed in these targeted, careful ways instead of as get-rich-quick chatbots.

Leveling up from Doctor Who Short Trips to full-length Doctor Who radio plays, and they’re only affirming my belief that a well-done radio play might as well be television.

Local schools have been out for so long that I occasionally forget that they have had class since winter break.

One of the best things I’ve done recently in terms of feeling good about myself as a parent is draw my attention to how often I “show up” as a parent rather than insist on evaluating “how I do” when I show up. (This reflection brought to you by two weeks of snow days).

A mail truck was abandoned at the bottom of our cul-de-sac after an ice-related accident a couple of hours ago, blocking traffic in and out. The tow truck sent to move it got stuck in the ice, and now a second truck is coming for it. If I were better at social media, this would be a viral thread.

One of our favorite Eurovision 2024 songs was Finland’s “No Rules!” When tomorrow was announced as our tenth snow day in a row, spouse decided to Weird Al it as “No School!”

Kiddo got excited when the number 67 came up in the D&D actual play podcast we’re listening to. I thought at first that it was a “six seven” joke, but it turns out she liked that it sounded like 6d7.

It is very strange to go back and read Shortpacked after a couple of years of reading Dumbing of Age, and now I wonder how people felt doing things in the opposite order.

One consequence of tracking my reading over the past few years is seeing which authors and artists I read most—and realizing that the list is dominated by white dudes. Need to make a deliberate effort to diversify my reading.

A faculty candidate visit for tomorrow just got moved 100% virtual, and while this sucks for all of us in so many ways, it also means I don’t have to clean out my car for fear of being embarrassed by the mess when giving the candidate a ride.

Kiddo has decided that she can get away with ignoring requests so long as it’s because she’s reading something. The most annoying part of it is that she’s right that we’ll grant a lot of latitude for that in particular.

Kiddo was asking me questions about the manuscript I was writing, that got us talking about science fairs, and then she basically reasoned her way into the idea of a meta-analysis.

Thinking about how 90% of what I post to social media is links back to my blog and how that’s probably not great for attracting followers but also it’s exactly what I want.

There are scenes in Superman 2025 that are very, very funny if you have spent time at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

Kiddo objected to my using the word “enshittification” in a family conversation just now—not because it contains a swear, but because it was too complicated a vocabulary word.

Me, a weakling who has just started doing regular 6-12 minute bodyweight workouts: “Ah, yes, now I too understand why people talk about ’leg day.'”