We have some neat family holiday plans this year, so naturally the part of my brain that likes to imagine how things could go wrong is working overtime right now.

Adding “Star Trek: Lower Decks” to my running list of “things I sample on YouTube that I wish I had time to really commit to instead.” (Other entries include the Keyforge unique deck game and solo campaigns of the Starforged TTRPG).

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

I’m stress-eating banana bread to put off grading, how’s your end of semester going?

This is a busy week, so I really don’t want to be spending time updating a shared course that I’m not even teaching next semester… but I am getting to learn more about SSHing into a VM, and that’s legitimately cool.

Reread some feedback from a journal editor after a couple of days, and while I still disagree with it, it’s at least more reasonable than I remembered it being.

All the guilt I felt about cancelling our local news subscription vanished during the corporate slog I had to go through to actually make it happen. Looking forward to redirecting funds to news orgs with a little more respect for their subscribers.

I will never not be angry about the term STEAM, even when it’s being used in good faith by people I respect.

I know I’ve made this exact post before, but it’s relevant again this morning, so: I agree with the advice to leave one’s headphones at home to practice mindfulness while running, but I’m exhausted this morning and don’t think I’ll even get my shoes on without an actual play podcast to motivate me.

Sun. afternoon, after chatting with other parents at birthday party: “Wow, spending time with fellow adults is great.” Sun. evening, after Zoom siblings’ game night: “Why don’t I do this more often?” Mon. morning, barely functional from not enough sleep: “Oh, right.”

Current status: Copying information from one text message into another and reflexively almost adding Markdown blockquote formatting.

For the first time in a few years, I’m sorting feed subscriptions into folders instead of having a “monofeed.” Combined with Reeder’s lack of unread counts, I’m pleasantly surprised how this has encouraged more mindfulness in subscribing and checking feeds.

Next self-imposed challenge for improving my website-first approach to social media: How can I “repost” content from either Mastodon, Bluesky, or Micro.blog in a way that embeds it in the post on my site but then links to (or otherwise shares) it when that post goes out to those platforms?

Scientific inquiry report: Hand warmers work well enough that I feel dumb that I haven’t been using them, but they don’t fix the main problem of numb fingers. My current winter gloves usually do the trick, but it’s time to invest in some “lobster claws” for really cold commutes.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry (and getting my colleagues off my case about the color of my fingers when I get to the office), let’s see how much protection these expired-in-2022 hand warmers provide against this morning’s freezing temperatures.

Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.

Some of my recent posts that I like the best have naturally been to the one part of my site for which my Micro.blog POSSE relay isn’t working. Guess it’s time to teach myself some JSON in hopes of building a more reliable set of feeds.

Kiddo is expressing her distaste for her “read aloud” homework by putting a lot of obviously false enthusiasm into her performance.

Kiddo’s describing defeated Pokémon as “dying” is really forcing me to confront the premise of the series.

Some Sundays, you cancel your church plans so you can Zoom into a relative and her girlfriend’s spur of the moment “let’s at least get legally married now in case things get bad before our September wedding” service.

I (someone who doesn’t really believe in a literal resurrection) have been scheduled to preach in February on Paul’s “if there’s no resurrection, this is all in vain” in 1 Cor. 15. Gonna have to think about this one.

I often wonder if a “sandbox” board game is possible. Played 7 Wonders tonight, and it’s close: I so enjoyed playing that endgame scoring almost didn’t matter. It also made me want to finish Carse’s book on finite and infinite games.

Love that our family makes a point to stop at the Kentucky Artisan Center rest stop instead of the Buc-ee’s just up the road. Further love that my favorite locally-made tea company can always be found there.

Freeing our family from Audible by starting a libro.fm account is a normal thing for a dad to be proud of, right? (Don’t tell me if the answer is no.)

We picked up some of the Exploding Kittens-brand goofy party games for our upcoming big family Thanksgiving, and my inner board game snob is kind of offended at how actually fun they seem.

I think one of my favorite things about following a They Might Be Giants lyrics bot on Mastodon is that I’ll occasionally get a TMBG song I haven’t thought about for a while stuck in my head for a few hours.

Glad I already have tenure or else I’d be a lot more worried about what my colleagues think of me holding my numb fingers under running water in the break room, still dressed in four layers of warm and reflective clothing and before I’ve had a chance to fix my helmet hair.

Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.

Rather than feel dumb for losing control of my bike taking a turn too fast, I am choosing to focus on the wreck’s superficial similarity to the Akira slide.

Finally trying Bigelow’s “Constant Comment” after several months of meaning to. So far, it ranks pretty high on my list of non-desserty teas.

Kiddo, covering up one of the tines on a fork: “Look, now it’s a threek!”

Kiddo, putting away laundry: “My sweater! Come feel its soft wrath!”—

This morning, I’m realizing (and somewhat to my horror) that some of my reflection on whether to change up one of my classes essentially mirrors the ed psych debates about constructivism versus direct instruction that I found so intolerable in grad school.

I expected Naomi Alderman’s The Future to be good, but I didn’t expect an interesting, responsible reading of the destruction of Sodom to be a throughline of the story.

Back in 2020-2021, I made the decision to pivot from Twitter as a research site in case data ever became less available—and so I could focus more on right-wing online spaces. It was a good call but still hilariously mistaken at the same time.

… and as long as I’m posting about fun-but-unnecessary website hacks I don’t have time for, I’d also love to redo the taxonomies and templates on my site to make it easy to navigate media reviews by author, title, series, etc. No one would use it but me, but I’d have a lot of fun with it.