It’s been an intense month − again!
The month included a lot of documentation triage, so more papers & blog posts links than usual. This trend should keep going for another ~8 months if I manage to keep this rhythm (which is unlikely).
During the month of June, here’s some stuff that happened:
- I went to Pride in Grenoble and an old man passing by told me that people there were predators, to which I answered « oh no sir I actually am the predator » without thinking.
- My country collapsed.
- I started a 100-day challenge of doing 100 squats per day.
- I got into blockchain? Well, I read and learned a lot about blockchain-related things. It was very instructive.
- I met a bunch of wonderful people!
- I started taking allergy medication and weirdly enough I also started feeling less sick all the time. Probably a coincidence.
- I finished physical therapy for my knee, meaning it still hurts but now we don’t care anymore.
- I carried the Olympic torch with a few absolute legends.
And more, but that’s what I can think of right now.
What I’ve read / Texte
📚 Books / Livres
I’m still catching up on some May 2024 book reviews, but I’m making good progress. As usual, this is a list of the books I recommend. For a full list of what I’ve read, check The Storygraph.
In English
- Fiction
- Every Time You Hear That Song, by Jenna Voris, was a very cute Young Adult romance and music adventure and I liked it.
- Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé wrote another absolute banger of a young adult / dark academia thriller, Where Sleeping Girls Lie
- Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville
- Holly, Stephen King
- Non-fiction
- Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It, by Joshua Dávila
- Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Brian Merchant
- Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, by Patricia Evangelista
En français
- Fiction
- Blanc autour, Wilfrid Lupano et Stéphane Fert, une BD sur une école pour jeunes filles noires avant la guerre de Sécession américaine.
- Non-fiction
- Mangeuses : Histoire de celles qui dévorent, savourent ou se privent à l’excès, Lauren Malka
🔍 Papers / Articles académiques
In English
- Kuznetsov, D., & Ismangil, M. (2020). YouTube as Praxis? On BreadTube and the Digital Propagation of Socialist Thought. In tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society (Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 204–218). Information Society Research. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1128
En français
- Volpe, Valeria, et Ornella Zaza. « Les arrangements de l’innovation numérique dans les territoires ruraux. Une comparaison France-Italie », Espaces et sociétés, vol. 191, no. 1, 2024, pp. 31-47. https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.191.0031
- Froidevaux, Solène, et Claire Nicolas. « Penser les corps sportifs en féministes », Nouvelles Questions Féministes, vol. 43, no. 1, 2024, pp. 12-25. https://doi.org/10.3917/nqf.431.0012
📰 News and blog posts / Articles
In English
- Bruna Alexandre is the third person to compete in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. Inside the Games wrote a profile about her.
- Nadim is shocked by how bad calendars are on computers, and so am I. They also call to create an open-source, high-quality project, and are looking for other interested developers.
- My friend Ben sent me How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers , which I read with horrified fascination. (US-centric)
- James (whose redesigned blog I really love) talks about the next decade of the web. « We are already making change, but to make more we need to reaffirm the foundations of the web: that the web is for people. We need to go out and shout from the rooftops that the web can be different. »
- Chris writes about owning your scroll and going back to RSS feeds, something I’ll never read enough about. « The very best content is not authored directly inside social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions upon millions of new articles created every week. But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it. This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. »
- I loved the Humane Web Manifesto.
- There’s an article on Vox about hyper-virility suddenly being cool in Silicon Valley.
- Sammy wrote about the Wikimedia community, and how we can even listen to it if we can’t define it. Obviously this resonates a lot with my Wikimédia France experience, where most of the nonprofit’s members are contributors, when what we truly need are readers. If you speak French and have some interest in the France-based activities of Wikimedia (Wikipedia & all the others projects), you should join.
- Pitchfork wrote something nice about why we bother to listen to new music instead of just listening to our 3 favourites over and over.
- Simone, who got a dream job and is celebrating his 10 years of marriage (big month!), wrote about how we were all fooled by the idea of turning our online presence into a brand.
- Autostraddle published a wonderful essay about why trans organizers should organize with cis people − and how cis people can help us do that.
- Aeon asked « why does moral progress feel preachy and annoying? »
- There’s this adorable game and visualisation on game theory and the evolution of trust
En français
- Spécial législatives
- Femmes, LGBT : face à l’offensive réactionnaire, la gauche promet de nouveaux droits, Sarah Brethes et Marine Turchi pour Médiapart, 7 juin
- L’extrême dérive d’Emmanuel Macron, Ellen Salvi pour Médiapart, 12 juin
- Face à la fronde de LR, Éric Ciotti joue les forcenés, Pauline Graulle pour Médiapart, 12 juin
- 🔏 Macron et ses idées à la conf, Raphaël Garrigos et Isabelle Roberts pour Les Jours, 12 juin
- Le PS, EELV et LFI croulent sous les propositions d’actions, Lisa Noyal pour Streetpress, 19 juin
- Nouveau Front populaire : comment faire tenir l’union, Alexandre-Reza Kokabi pour Reporterre, 14 juin
- Ce que la gauche peut (raisonnablement) espérer des législatives, Fabien Escalona pour Médiapart, 23 juin
- Résistance au changement et logiciels libres par Nicolas Vivant, qui montre : « Un passage direct de Windows 95 à Windows 11, par exemple, serait vécu comme une catastrophe par la plupart des utilisateurs. Mais les changements introduits dans le fonctionnement, dans l’ergonomie et dans l’expérience utilisateur en général ont été suffisamment progressifs pour que la résistance soit contenue à des niveaux acceptables. » et présente une stratégie complète d’aide pour un collectif qui voudrait passer sous Linux.
What I’ve watched / Vidéo
🎞 Movies / Films
Rewatched Dodgeball with my friend Ben. Watched Bottoms, which made me feel extremely old, and Civil War (2024), which I paused at one point because my FreeCell game was too interesting and I needed to focus.
A few friends and myself have decided to do watch parties of cringe 2000s comedies. I’m very excited for La Tour Montparnasse Infernale and I think we’ll start in August!
📺 TV Shows / Séries
Mehdi and I are watching season 2 of Girls5Eva. It’s brilliant.
I watched Daisy Jones and the Six. The first episode was excellent, but it was a scam and I quickly grew extremely bored. I have one episode to go and I just can’t find the will to watch it.
I made progress on season 4 of Star Trek TNG. I miss lil’ Crusher.
📷 Online video / Vidéos en ligne
In English
- A brief exploration of the « Horse Girl » phenomenon, Tara Mooknee [56:49]
- Leadership Sync, Krazam [2:14]
- When actors become brands, Patrick H Willems [59:25 and a bit less on Nebula]
En français
- Éduc pop’ : les universités populaires (1899 – 1914), Oui d’accord [33:44]
- Ces musiques cachent un secret terrible…, Maskey [15:44]
What I’ve listened to / Audio
🎤 Podcasts
Tous mes bons épisodes de podcast de ce mois-ci sont en français.
- Aux sources du vote FN/RN : prendre le racisme au sérieux, Minuit dans le siècle (Spectre) [38:55]
- L’islamophobie : racisme institutionnel et locomotive du néofascisme, Minuit dans le siècle (Spectre) [1:08:46]
- Joséphine Pencalet, l’élection d’une ouvrière, avec Fanny Bugnon, Paroles d’histoire [56:27]
- Agir face à l’extrême droite, législatives 2024, à l’intersection [38:08]
- Comment en Allemagne en 1932 les divisions de la droite ont facilité l’ascension d’Hitler, Le Biais d’Esther Duflo (France Culture) [3:23]
- Législatives 2024 : Tous·tes aux urnes !, Sabotage (La Clameur) [30:50], vraiment un pur moment de bonheur puisque je me plaignais pas plus tard que ce mois-ci de ne pas avoir assez de leurs épisodes à écouter
🎹 Music
I found the Rest of World playlist really excellent and listened to it a lot, before realizing I could also get the top played songs per country on Spotify (no, I don’t use Spotify) and acquire them.
Here’s one gem from the Vietnamese playlist:
What I’ve played / Jeux
I’m going through the Black Lives Matter & Palestine Relief bundles on itch.io and finally playing a bunch of them, including:
I’ve also played a bunch of tabletop games, because my friends opened up a game bar in Grenoble! If you’re ever nearby, it’s in the Berriat neighbourhood close to La Belle Électrique, they have good alcohol, excellent ginger beer and kombucha, and a bunch of wonderful games. I highly, highly recommend spending time there, at La Tanière au coin du jeu !
Where I’ve been / Lieux
I went to Dublin for a few days and most importantly, to say goodbye to some of my colleagues that I won’t see again. It was really nice, although bittersweet.
I then went directly to Paris, while sick as hell, where I met my future colleagues (they’re wonderful) and attended the office’s Summer Party, another chance to say goodbye to a few absolutely wonderful people.
Then, I finally went back to Grenoble, where I mostly tried to survive for a couple of weeks. It would have been hard after running around like this in any case, but with that heat? Nah, man. At least, La Tanière au coin du jeu has AC, and my ceiling fans are doing an outstanding job.
👍
Martin Constantino-Bodin