Chaque année, ça brise le cœur d’entendre « Black Friday » sur la radio francophone.

Black Friday is one of the worst things to ever happen to our world, but if I had to suddenly consider finding an expensive replacement for the bike I use to regularly commute to work, I guess I’m glad the choice came up this week?

Thinking about how I don’t know much about the Great Recession because I lived in a Mormon missionary bubble during that time—and about how during that time, I was supervised by a recently retired high-ranking Fannie Mae executive.

Between purging bookshelves and using the filtering feature of my RSS app, today is a big day for overcoming my tendency toward completionism.

I also want to give myself a winter project of adding yet more social functionality to my core Hugo presence (ActivityPub? reposting social stuff?). I shouldn’t be giving myself more winter projects, but this is stuff I’ve wanted to do for ages, soooo

Heading into another phase of following more sources but using Reeder features to keep it manageable. We’ll see how long it lasts before another phase of following fewer sources.

The most I can ever relate to Superman is during a cloudy day when a lack of sun makes me feel tired and weak.

Tonight, I was that parent at the older kids’ science fair, explaining to kiddo that for her poster, we will be generating graphs using high-powered statistical software, which will be overdoing it but make the best ones in her grade.

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.

Just heard a podcast ad where Amazon tries to claim that shopping from them is supporting small businesses, and it made me want to barf.

I know I’m currently inclined to see everything through an Ellulian lens, but I think one lesson of the first episode of Pluribus is that not all science needs to be done, and especially not just because it can be done.

Analog horror is not a genre I would have ever expected to like, but it turns out that I not only enjoy it but also… find it healing in a weird sort of way?

Is there a technical term for the tension a parent feels between disapproving of what U.S. schools emphasize and how they operate but still being proud of their kid for doing well within that system?

I have the first episode of The Sandbaggers on in my office as background noise, and I’m just so impressed at the way it effortlessly introduces the viewer to all the ideas you need to understand the show.

It’s not that I think pumpkin spice tea pairs well with Friday night sushi takeout, it’s that I can’t remember the last week I lost this much sleep over work anxiety, so I need dinner tea to get through the rest of the day.

Thinking this morning about all of the small, human-oriented things I’ve done this semester to try to be good at my job, and how insulting it will be to have them eventually reduced to a number that can be reported to demonstrate “productivity.”

Je ne dirais jamais que j’aime la fumée de cigarette (en fait, je la déteste), mais il est vrai que ça me rappelle la France, et ça, c’est quand-même sympa. (Je croyais ce constat méchant, et puis je suis retourné en France, où on fume vraiment plus dans les espaces publics).

Regular verbs in French commonly end in “-er” so I joked to a friend about « charmander » as a verb. After some conjugations, he asked what it would mean; it turns out that « mander » is already an archaic verb (and we knew « char » was a noun), so we came up with a defensible definition.

Remembering the time that an article in the Daily Caller took a colleague’s research out of context to make it look bad, but because it tripped a Google Alert, it still got included in some “our research in the media!” newsletter.

Trying to figure out if I recognize lines in Star Trek VI because they’re Shakespeare or because they’re lines-quoting-Shakespeare from Star Trek VI.

Wild to teach data visualization so shortly after reading Jacques Ellul rail against it in his “Humiliation of the Word.” As is often the case, Ellul’s complaints feel overstated, but as I talk through specific things with students, I find myself channeling his concerns.

We thought we’d intentionally given kiddo an uncommon name, but the local youth soccer league seems to have recruited all of the other kids with that name, and it’s very confusing for her.

Genuinely good kiddo joke: “What do you call it when people made of jewels steal something? An ametheist!”

A few days into finally subscribing to Kagi, custom “bang” shortcuts are my favorite feature so far.

“AI is as good as any rubric” (an actual statement I overheard at a campus-wide meeting), if true, is more of an indictment of current assessment practice than praise of AI quality.