October 2024 in review / Récap d’octobre 2024

I don’t know what happened, but October was a bad health month. It started real nice, with a nice trip to Lisbon for a conference, although I was already pretty tired by then; then coming back to Paris, which was a real morale and health hit as the only thing I wanted by then was to go home.

And go home I did, and I recovered and was doing well even! I also started my language classes (advanced Italian and intermediary German) and really enjoyed those!

I kept going to roller derby and enjoying every minute of it, until I failed a jumping exercise, fell on my head, got three days of neck and head pain, went to the hospital, spent the night there, was told I was fine, went back home, found out I was running a fever, waited a week, and realized the fever was still there.

At least my brain is functional now and that’s nice.

It’s also been a busy month − not that it was extra busy, I mostly just forgot what having a real job was like. Adjusting was hard but now I’m good and that’s really cool!

I hope November will be much, much easier and quieter now!

What I’ve read / Texte

📚 Books / Livres

In English

• Fiction
  • After years and years of no Philip Pullman, I finally read La Belle Sauvage, in part thanks to the Girls gone canon podcast. It was great − although I had never realized how much easier it was to read in French.
  • Rainbow Black is an excellent Satanic Panic thriller that actually debunks the Satanic Panic. Good work.

En français

• Fiction
  • Fantômes de Fatma Aydemir suit une famille turco-allemande se rendant en Turquie pour l’enterrement du patriarche.
• Non-fiction
  • Le management désincarné de Marie-Anne Dujarier parle des planneurs, ces rôles en entreprise qui servent à dire aux autres quoi faire sans jamais aller sur le terrain ; elle y étudie pourquoi c’est naze, mais aussi pourquoi ils ne sont pas très heureux non plus.

📰 News and blog posts / Articles

In English

• Rest of World’s series on digital divinity
• Xandra reminds us to be nice.
• The BBC made its sound effects public and it’s fun.
• Pudding.cool analyzed Archive of our Own to check who gets shipped. It’s amazing.
• Adam enjoyed The Fall of Giants, which is one of my favourite novels.
• Lou talked about the best pharmacist in the world, and had me dreaming of a world where this is all normal.
• My friend Siddharth shared this analysis of the game Universal Paperclips.
• Tomas, a journalist, explained how he uses GenAI in an ethical way. Specific recommendations: « There are specialized models small enough to run on personal devices, and tools like LM Studio, Ollama, and llm make them easy to download, run, and tinker with. »
• Every time there’s a blog post about RSS feeds I feel compelled to share it. This time, it’s by Cory Doctorow.
• Weird Gloop is helping wikis move away from Fandom for all the right reasons.
• In The Guardian, Peter shared what their daughters have been learning in a public Chinese school. I loved it.

En français

• Bonne nouvelle : à Grenoble, la pollution de l’air a été divisée par deux en 15 ans.
• Coop-Médias est une coopérative de médias indépendants. J’ai voulu devenir sociétaire mais j’ai pas compris si j’avais le droit de mettre mon prénom d’usage et du coup ça a pas marché. Mais ça a l’air cool, je réessaierai.
• Des nouvelles règles pour la sécurité des mots de passe, traduites par Nicolas Vivant.
• Subventionner la malbouffe puis en réparer les dégâts, quand l’État paie deux fois, sur Basta!
• Taxe « grands voyageurs », quotas, interdiction des jets privés, les mesures les plus efficaces pour réduire le trafic aérien, sur Vert.eco

What I’ve watched / Vidéo

🎞 Movies / Films

Avec mon copain Ben, on a regardé La Haine. C’était sa première fois, et pour moi ça faisait quelques années. Bah c’est toujours un chef-d’œuvre.

📺 TV Shows / Séries

My partner and I are still watching The Good Place, now jumping into Season 3.

On my own, I’ve stopped watching His Dark Materials (season 3 costumes were painful) and gone back to The Sopranos, starting Season 2 this week.

📷 Online video / Vidéos en ligne

In English

• Is the Besançon light rail transit a good model to follow? by Félix on rails
• The weird world of pronatalist families by Alice Cappelle
• What your favorite Olympic sport says about you by Shannon Fiedler (very US-centric, still great)
• The rise of religious tiktokers and how I escaped the cult, by Salem Tovar
• Why we can’t fix the makeover movie, by VerilyBitchie
• Short & funny
  • Half of British television always starts like this, by Michael Spicer
  • Every « comedy » from the early 2000s, by Wizards with Guns
  • Every BBC series about the universe, by Seán Burke
  • Straight male friend, on SNL

What I’ve listened to / Audio

🎤 Podcasts

In English

• Spirit Halloween on 99% Invisible by SiriusXM

En français

• Castopod et l’environnement du podcast (partie 1) par Projets libres !
• Les guerres d’Antoine Prost, une interview sur Paroles d’histoire
• Le radio show en léger direct : la chute de l’empire Bolloré par ARTE Radio, aucune idée de comment l’équipe légale a pu approuver ça, mais c’est délicieux

🎹 Music

Starmania’s Blues du businessman has been playing on repeat on my computer for the past few weeks. That’s about it.

Where I’ve been / Lieux

I went to Lisbon! It was my first time in Portugal. I didn’t really enjoy it. But I want to try again, with another city / place. This was just not the right time, not the right place, and also, it was a work conference.