Just checked the Wayback Machine to see if my old, long-deleted LiveJournal ever got archived. It wasn’t, but I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a disappointment or a relief.

It’s been a long day at the end of a long week, but it ended with an “are you working on anything interesting so I can write about it?” message from a reporter and a kind compliment from a grad school friend, so all in all, not too bad.

Hier soir, j’ai été sage en me couchant à l’heure. J’ai même réussi à vite m’endormir ! Logique, donc, que j’ai été réveillé bien avant l’heure prévue.

Remembering the time some trollish critics of research I’m doing with a colleague grabbed the audio from a YouTube video of our conference presentation and remixed it into a song they posted to SoundCloud. It’s supposed to be mocking, but I find it funny.

I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.

There’s a lot I love about using Hugo for my website, but one of the best bits is that since posts are stored as text files, it’s remarkably straightforward to write a script to do bulk edits.

Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.

Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.

The pure joy kiddo showed when getting her first library card was exactly what I needed just now.

Nothing says unwarranted optimism quite like the big pile of books I brought home from campus in case I had time to work on “that manuscript” over the break. Lugging them back to campus tomorrow morning.

Dreamt this morning that I was applying for PhD programs. It wasn’t until dream-me began reviewing my research record that I remembered that I already have a PhD and am actually applying for tenure right now.

It’s been so long since I stayed up to welcome in the new year that there was a brief moment last night where I honestly couldn’t remember if you’re supposed to do that on December 31st or January 1st.

I have never needed to write a recursive function in any of my (admittedly quite limited) professional programming, but when messing with kiddo’s robot today, I remembered the concept from a Java class in college and pulled it off in block programming. Pretty happy with that.

Today, kiddo is rediscovering her set of Story Cubes. I had forgotten her insistence that the comedy and tragedy masks on one cube face are actually Grey-style aliens.

Even on my second read-through, it’s hard to believe how good the 2016 Flintstones comic actually is.

Steven Peck’s “A Short Stay in Hell” gets better each time I read it.

Kiddo’s uncle is teaching her the Pokémon TCG, which is pretty delightful.

I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.

Doing some Christmas Eve Geoguessr, and I think I ought to make this a tradition.

I’ve been trying to put words to an idea in my head for a few weeks, and I think I finally have it: A secular Christmas is still definitely Christian in the same way that Homer Simpson is still definitely a white dude.

My reputation as an uncle is increasingly becoming associated with tabletop RPGs, and I’m not upset about that at all.

I’m normally a big “break is break” advocate, but family illness meant being behind on work, which meant taking over my father-in-law’s WFH setup today to finish a syllabus and course shell I needed to prep so other instructors could work off them.

Skipping my congregation’s candelight service today. Can’t go in person because of family sickness, and they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to make huge efforts to make it Zoom accessible. Bummed to miss it, but playing Mario Party with kiddo instead is pretty fun.

I was really hoping to make something special of Advent this year, but the past three weeks have just kind of sucked, and I don’t know if the next one will be any better. I don’t know that I have a takeaway from this, except that maybe it’s okay to have a sucky Advent.

I think it would be dumb to name my next TTRPG character “John Mastodon,” but I’m not sure that will stop me.