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.

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.