Thus ends my first month of rest and recuperation. It’s been hot, very hot, but I’ve been lucky enough to be able to cat sit for a couple of friends who have a nice fresh house outside of the city and a swimming pool, which makes all the difference. Since coming back to my apartment, I’ve been struggling a bit, even though we’re back to normal summer temperatures!
These ten days away doing absolutely nothing have given me exactly what I needed and you might have noticed that I started writing some small things on my blog again in the past month as I’m slowly starting to feel my brain regain its capabilities.
July and August will be months without work but they will also be months with quite a bit of travelling, which I’m very excited for, including Wikimania in Paris in July and a few days in Torino in August!
What I’ve read / Texte
📚 Books / Livres
In English
- Fiction
- Heatwaves and holidays imply romance reading: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry and Violet Thistlewaite is not a villain anymore by Emily Krempholtz are two very good ones.
- Slightly less romancey, House of Frank by Kay Synclaire.
- 99 Erics: a Kat Cataclysm faux novel, by Julia Serano, had me laughing out loud countless times.
- Non-fiction
- I started reading The cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American exercise phenomenon by Katie Rose Hejtmanek because I was curious about CrossFit and ended up highlighting mostly things about the American approach to religion.
En français
- Fiction
- Les Pizzlys de Jérémie Moreau est un superbe roman graphique, qui a tendance à idéaliser les « nobles sauvages » d’Alaska mais nous sort agréablement de nos téléphones
- Lupano et Léonard Chemineau ont fait le roman graphique La bibliomule de Cordoue, drôle et instructif
- Non-fiction
- Tant pis pour l’amour. Ou comment j’ai survécu à un manipulateur de Sophie Lambda m’a brisé le cœur et fasciné à la fois.
📰 Web links / Liens web
In English
- A blog post from 2003 that’s still amazing, on Poynter by Greg Toppo. « Generations of reporters have been raised on the journalistic bromide “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and for good reason. »
- An introduction to the Great Stork Derby by Jordan Friedman in the Smithsonian magazine.
- « Humility is expensive. Humility doesn’t move books, and unsold books don’t pay the rent. If you believe in what you wrote, and I very much hope you do, completing your book should fill you with joy. » by Mike Monteiro
- « I think anxiety becomes sharper when your mind never fully gets to unpack. Mine has been living out of a suitcase for a long time now. » My friend Rishabh, who works at Meta, remembers the night before the most recent layoffs.
- User interfaces have gotten bland, says Jordan Moore.
- Daniel Lavery classifies the different types of fun. « Type VII Fun. Something that was not pleasurable to you in the moment, but was pleasurable to someone else after the fact, and that a third party took additional pleasure in denouncing the second party for experiencing. »
- Tracy Durnell thinks about how we could evolve towards human-oriented blog publishing. « Human-oriented could mean using techniques to limit bot access and encourage human access, or writing in a way that is only legible to humans, or interactive posts that emphasize the human connection between writer and reader. »
- Joan Westenberg calls it the Costco theory of the Internet: « Nobody walks into Costco believing every item is elite. They walk in trusting that the floor is higher than the open market, and they’ll pay for that trust. »
En français
- J’adore les publications de L’arme à gauche, nouvelle newsletter sur la communication politique à gauche en vue des présidentielles 2027. Tenez, par exemple : et si le moment était venu pour la gauche de se (ré)approprier le concept de la majorité silencieuse ?
- Ou alors, on peut parler de vivre (presque) sans smartphone sur le blog Stella Polaris.
What I’ve watched / Vidéo
🎞 Movies / Films
The 1949 movie Noblesse Oblige has very British humour and gave me a good laugh.
📺 TV Shows / Séries
Tried rewatching Crazy Ex-girlfriend, which reminded me that 1. I’m not interested in watching TV shows on my own anymore 2. the beginning of this (excellent) show was really not that good.
Started watching Margo’s got money problems with M and promptly got sidetracked by a new season of Jet Lag, so we’re making very slow progress.
What I’ve played / Jeux
Some Stardew Valley and a bit of You must build a boat, nothing remarkable.
Where I’ve been / Lieux
At the beginning of the month, I went on a semi-work trip: first, two days in Paris for a Wikimedia France board of administrators meeting, then Dublin for three more days, where I talked about bias in GenAI, especially in multilingual contexts, at a panel with two wonderful people. This was at the LocWorld conference. It was my first LocWorld and I hope it won’t be the last, as being in a room with a bunch of localization professionals means being in a room with a bunch of potential new friends!
And finally, at my friends’ place! And it was great! (Also, it required driving, which I do remarkably regularly, as in, for exactly 10 days every two years.)