Does anyone out there have experience with Tannus tire armor on an ebike? My local shop is recommending it, but I don’t know if it’s good advice or if I’m being upsold.

Kiddo accidentally emotionally traumatized a giant shrimp in her first D&D session this afternoon, and I honestly think that’s a great introduction to the game.

I’ve had many good church experiences in my life, but today’s listening over Zoom to a former pastor give her sermon calling out billionaires by name while filling in the last few details on kiddo’s D&D character sheet ranks hiiiiigh.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen two different CFPs that apply perfectly to a paper I wrote and then abandoned after a rejection and a paper I’ve wanted to write but had no good reason to. This may be what gets me back into a research groove this semester.

The guy who runs Kentucky high school speech and debate found my name somewhere, remembered me from when I was a student at those competitions, and invited me to help judge a state championship next month. I am dangerously close to Nerd!Uncle Rico territory right now.

Dentist’s office tried to get me to sign away my health data for AI training, but at least I got to talk Astérix with the German dentist and hygienist.

One day, I will develop some more normal hobbies. In the meantime, I’m quite pleased with the custom Hugo templates and taxonomies I’ve built to make my book reviews be a bit more like what I imagine Goodreads would be like.

Verdict on new lobster claw bike gloves: Much better than my older winter gloves (I don’t have to warm my hands under water after getting to office), but the tips of my fingers still feel the cold. I must just have really bad circulation.

My office neighbor is starting a “department and friends” campaign, I asked if there was an age limit, and that’s how kiddo is joining her first D&D game later this month.

I feel like half of ClassDojo’s business model is “let’s prey on parental anxiety.”

I’ll say this much: A snow day is a heck of a lot easier when the university (i.e., mom and dad’s employer) also cancels for the day.

Been waiting for this email all day: the University of Kentucky estimates that the NIH limits on indirect funding, if maintained, would cost us $40 million over the next year.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, what an uncaring dad I have!”

Me, all of December: “Next semester, I have a course release and a once-a-week evening class. I’m going to get so much research done during the day!” Me, on February 7th: “Wow, it’s great to finally be getting to research this semester.”

(Now that I think about it, scanning for digits in a wall of tea tin text is like the brain’s natural regex, and I think that’s beautiful.)

Tea steeping times should always be printed in digits (“4 minutes” not “four minutes”) so that I can scan for digits on the tin instead of having to read through words.

Today is “getting siblings and parents on Signal” day.

Love to be living in a world where a blog I read for tech commentary—and that is more reserved than I would be on a lot of that commentary—is running articles describing current goings-on as “a coup in progress.”

It’s obviously not the most worrying thing about it, but a very specific tragedy about Musk’s DOGE nonsense is that it may end up being the largest (indirect) influence Homestar Runner has had on the world.

Some Bluesky posts are reminding me of what I wrote about how my LDS mission sometimes played fast and loose with immigration documents: https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/the-missionary-with-the-expired-visa/

If current events continue to echo the Twitter takeover, we’re about a year out from Elon Musk telling a gathering of world leaders to go fuck themselves for not supporting his agenda.

“Someday My [Chance To Sleep Deeply for An Indefinitely Long Time] Will Come”

Testing a new post-forwarding service for my POSSE setup. Wish me luck!

I like bookshop.org and I’m glad they’re selling ebooks—it’s a much better option than Amazon or Apple. Yet, so long as DRM is still the default, there’s still a problem, and you still don’t own what you buy from them.

Kiddo just told me to “make an Insight check” after fibbing to me about something, so it sounds like that D&D actual play podcast we’ve been listening to is making an impression.

Mormon Studies professional organizations are funny because when you ask for someone’s affiliation on a survey, there’s a distinctive minority of people who list their religious status instead of (or alongside) what university they belong to.

I have always thought the TikTok ban was dumb, and it just seems to get dumber with every new development. It’s not that there aren’t salient arguments in there, it’s that they’re all buried under vibes and nonsense.

I keep saying that I blog for myself before any other audience, but there’s a lot I haven’t been posting because I knew my POSSE setup was borked these past couple of weeks. I think it’s fixed now, so time to get those posts finished and published.

I intentionally keep receiving ClassDojo marketing emails because I keep thinking I ought to archive them all to write an autoethnography of my (negative) experience with it as a parent with an ed tech PhD, but I keep not doing that and just being angry at the emails.

I’m proud of the research I’ve done on online communities taking cues from dark corners of the internet, and I’m glad that some reporters find it interesting. It’s still uncomfortable to read certain excerpts from my data out loud to people over the phone.

I want to be clear that I am not upset at my kid for checking out this soulless Grinch platformer—I am upset at whatever executives and IP holders thought a Grinch platformer was a good idea in the first place.

School district has explicitly said it’s not going to make a decision about tomorrow until between 2:30am and 5:00am, so we have to get everything ready tonight knowing full well that it might prove to be vain by the time we get up. Yayyyyy.

A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.

No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.

After a few years of demanding more sleep, it looks like my body is following up with becoming a lighter sleeper, too.

When I went through an Esperanto phase years and years ago, my dad once asked why I was so interested in studying a language with no practical applications, but joke’s on him because I can follow dialogue in Saga way easier now.