If you are not following the news in France, they are pretty depressing. Students started blocking their high schools to ask for better studying conditions, which is more than fair considering the state of some of the buildings. Of course, the government refused to open the dialogue and sent police forces instead. A completely disproportionate response that costed some of the students an eye or a forearm. Unsurprisingly, the medias are focusing on the vast minority of disturbances - often caused by outsiders and not students - in an attempt to discredit the movement. France keeps slowly slipping into facism and it’s been disheartening to watch from afar. I’m putting a lot hope into the presidential election in April next year. Hopefully it’s not too late to turn things around.

Now, onto less important stuff.

Not a lot is happening on the personal front, besides starting to run again or more specifically, going out on runs and enjoying it again. I went on a run and counted dogs: 17 in my neighbourhood. Not bad for a Saturday morning. I’m also starting to share my runs on Strava again, partly because a friend finally wore me down but also because I left on Saturday without my watch and had to use Strava on my phone instead, like an animal. This means I’m going to dust my dog counting website soon as well, but I want to make some changes first. Currently, adding a new run is a whole annoying process, so I want to improve that slightly.

I’ve been volunteering with our local municipal elections and it’s frustrating to see the same patterns emerge no matter the level of elections. We have the people who think we should improve society somewhat (and who have been, by building more bike paths, affordable housing, etc.) while the opposition is straight up voting against those initiative and lying in the media, unless there is credit to be taken for stuff they had no part in. Maybe that’s how politics are nowaday, but I’ve enjoyed being able to contribute at my level.

In terms of media, we finished Ted Lasso season 4, Silo season 3, Richer season 4 and we’re eagerly waiting each episodes of Slow Horses every week. While I will never be able to apologize enough to my spouse for taking her to see Green Lanterns in 2011, I think the Lanterns TV show helped wash away some of the trauma. Kyle Chander and Aaron Pierre have an amazing chemistry and while I expected more shiny green constructs, I’m actually happy it went deeper than fighting to determine who has the bigger imagination.

I also went to see the new Resident Evil and it was… refreshing? I really enjoyed the movie, even if the last 20 minutes are basically just CGI slop. It made be want to play Resident Evil again so I purchased Resident Evil 6 on my Steamdeck and I immediately disliked it. Lot’s of QTE (which I hate) and a pretty bad experience on the deck made me ask for a refund from Steam after 15 minutes, something I’d never done before. That being said, I have hopes that we can have good movies based on video games, so I’m excited to see Street Fighter next week. In the meantime, I’m mostly playing Death Door in which you play a crow who fights monsters and look for the soul you were supposed to collect as part of your job. It’s very cute and the music is very well done. Also, I’m getting my crow ass kicked.

My wonderful spouse treated me for my (belated) birthday to a trip to The Vancouver Pen Shop (sorry, it’s a facebook link) and it was fun. I asked for help of course because I didn’t know what kind of pen I wanted to go with my Kaweco Sport. After talking with a seller, I ended up buying a Pilot MR1 Classic, which feels like a good day-to-day pen. I know nothing about pen, but they make be feel good when I write with them.

I don’t have a lot of links to share this week since my pile of stuff I wanna read later is out of control, but this blog post truly hit it home for me. I’m also recommending the post from my friend who recently had to move and wrote about the people she couldn’t say goodbye to. If you like it, she’s a researcher, writer and instructor open to work and one of the smartest people I know.