It is September 13th. I am already buying myself a tea advent calendar and hating myself for it. I am thinking about how much more offensive capitalist Christmas should be to Christians than secular Christmas.

Dad tip: Always build in a buffer between the walk home from school and your next meeting so that there’s plenty of time in case you need to clean up a scraped elbow and serve medicinal ice cream.

If there’s one cause I truly aspire to be more radical about, it’s non-violence.

I’ve studied enough educational psychology to know I don’t believe in a “general intelligence factor,” but not enough I’m confident I could talk kiddo’s school out of testing students for it.

Today was really, truly going to be a much-needed writing day, and then I didn’t even clear my inbox until 2:30. Yayyyyyy.

Spaced on an evening meeting that I’d actually been looking forward to and 😫😫😫

DuckDuckGo (or Bing?) really loves to feed me local results when I’m deliberately looking for results in another city/state/country. It’s driving me crazy.

After years of putting this off, I have finally figured out how to network my computer to the department printer, and I no longer have to worry that my position as a tenured professor of information communication technology will be revoked for being intimidated by basic office setups.

Today, I attended my first kids’ soccer game since rereading James Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” and since reading about Jacques Ellul’s ethic of non-power, and it turns out that makes a difference?

The surreal horror comic “Ice Cream Man” is very different than the Australian Eurovision entry “Milkshake Man,” so it’s weird to have the latter stuck in my head while reading the former.

Ce matin, j’ai été poursuivi par un chien aboyant pour la première fois en sept ans de vélotaf. Vive le vélo électrique ! 😅

For the second year in a row, kiddo’s school is launching a fundraiser at the same time the district announces a decrease in local school taxes, and the juxtaposition is driving me crazy.

Kiddo is strong enough of a reader to do her own bedtime stories, but we’ve recently built up a small collection of French kids’ comics. Since she doesn’t read French, we’ve gone back to me (and mom) reading to her, and that’s kind of fun.

Mais comme ça fait pleurer, la chandon « Secret » de Louane.

Kiddo’s school district has gotten rid of ClassDojo (hooray!) and replaced it with what looks like a homebrew platform (tentative hooray?) that still datafies student behavior (boo!) and frames the whole thing in terms of employability and workforce development (super boo!).

In the name of practicing a growth mindset, I am choosing to pat myself on the back for addressing an issue in the kitchen that I likely created through previous inattention.

Spent some time exploring Tapestry last night (and stayed up too late doing so, boo). Really appreciate what it’s going for, but it’s not quite what I want, so going to stick with Reeder.

I’m very much on team “alternate voting systems in the U.S., please,” but it’s also wild how much of what’s happening in Gaza right now can arguably be traced back to proportional representation with low thresholds.

Je viens d’entendre à la RTS une définition des « digital natives » comme la génération Z. On a commencé à employer cette phrase aux années 2000 pour décrire ma génération, et son usage continu pour signifier « les jeunes d’aujourd’hui » révèle combien elle est inutile.

Love that moment in academic writing where you can find five rejected versions of a paragraph below the version I’m currently working on.

From its earliest paragraphs, All Systems Red is helping clarify my feelings about the Murderbot TV show. I don’t know that it’s a bad adaptation so much as I think that some of my favorite parts of the book just can’t be adapted to screen.

I’m glad I have my files organized enough to retrieve preprints of about a decade’s worth of research, but I really wish I’d been doing this as I went.

Current levels of home maintenance confidence: Feeling like a god for taking a pocket door off its track and feeling utterly intimidated by needing to eventually put it back on.

I don’t think copyright is the best argument against generative AI (strengthening copyright law will benefit big companies more than small creators), but “can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few copyrighted eggs 🤷🤷🤷” is still a depressingly cynical national policy.

Went to claim kiddo’s prizes for doing library summer reading and walked away with four free admissions to the roller rink, an EXIT-brand puzzle gamebook, and a bunch of other stuff. Libraries are great.