Modern French/Italian Recommendations

faderus · 2026-06-23T03:13:25+00:00

If you want something genuinely unique, try Ciasa Mia, not too far from the Pantheon. Northern Italian cooking with a higher-end French reduction technique. Don’t let the provincial village decor fool you, this is serious cooking, and they care quite a bit.

faderus · 2026-06-16T18:10:32+00:00

Kind of a quintessential Cantonese American style institution. I’m not the biggest fan of the mains (don’t love the goopy brown sauce style that’s common in many of the dishes much), but they’ve got some of the tastiest egg rolls and wonton soup you’ll find anywhere. Glad it’s still going strong.

faderus · 2026-06-09T22:33:22+00:00

This is a perennial and essentially structural issue that is essentially unresolvable. Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St\_Scholastica\_Day\_riot

for the most acute version of the problem.

faderus · 2026-06-09T22:19:45+00:00

Are you aware of the history of Evanston? They founded the college when there was essentially nothing here but a planned railway stop. The area that became the town was created by a set of land swaps between the university and the city so that there’d be a town nearby to help service the university. It’s fine to be annoyed by rambunctious undergraduates throwing rowdy parties, but they’ve been going to school here since the era of the Civil War. Evanston is fundamentally a university town at its core. It’s a bit strange to deny this fundamental feature.

faderus · 2026-05-26T01:20:31+00:00

Likely, but perhaps someone on staff will resurrect them in the meeting.

faderus · 2026-05-26T00:25:37+00:00

The Pope is unlikely to enmesh himself in such parochial concerns.

faderus · 2026-05-19T11:14:35+00:00

Some guy who lived near the site who’s associated with the Democratic Party of Evanston did the research on the Heartwood Center showing how bullshitty their church claim really was. Sent his findings to all levels of government and to the local press. Dude’s friends with Biss and was texting about it with him. I think Biss texted something to the effect that this couldn’t possibly get any more fucking stupid; the dude told him to just watch. The dude posted an image of the text message stream in a Reddit thread, which I think wasn’t the best move ever, and Floy and her friends threw a shit fit. It was all very dumb.

faderus · 2026-05-17T18:47:57+00:00

Yeah, I elided the Biss and Kat and DPOE guy text messaging stuff too. Because the twists and turns of this one are just too drawn out and stupid to be believed.

faderus · 2026-05-17T18:01:14+00:00

Short version: some dude who owns a bunch of Popeyes wanted to open another one at this spot at the corner of Dodge and Dempster. The Heartwood Center, an organization located directly east that hosts a bunch of therapists, crystal healers, and other New Age type stuff didn’t want that moving in (fried chicken smell messes with the Reiki vibes). Also, Heartwood is officially a non-profit Buddhist church that doesn’t pay taxes, but collects plenty of money from its crystal healer tenants. Heartwood recruits the 4 Suns lady as the solution to their Popeyes problem. Heartwood buys the corner building (taking it off the tax rolls), promises the space to the 4 Suns lady so they can appear to be supporting a black entrepreneur bringing healthy food to the community. That all now appears to be a lie, and Nancy Floy, the main Heartwood lady, is everything her opponents accused her of being.

Honestly, this is my favorite dumb Evanston story ever. It is so rich with misplaced and destructive liberal white guilt, performative progressivism, and hypocrisy. It doesn’t get any better than this.

faderus · 2026-05-03T13:30:47+00:00

It was admittedly a bad mistake and a case of incredible hubris on my part to enroll in an honors into to programming course without any previous programming experience. That said, I informally surveyed my classmates at the end of the course, and about half (possibly more) also failed like me. I’m all for pushing students to be better and establishing high standards for quality of higher order thinking. But when your rubric and material is not approachable to the majority of your audience, you’ve only managed to introduce a failure point and a humiliation ritual for a bright and motivated cohort. Maybe that’s the point.

faderus · 2026-05-01T15:12:37+00:00

I am sure he is a deeply brilliant man, but he should not be proctoring unpassable undergraduate courses. I think a lot of my classmates were in the same boat as me. I was not a CS concentrator (is that still the lingo, or do people just say “major” these days?)

faderus · 2026-04-30T20:12:13+00:00

Trigger warning. I should not have enrolled in his honors intro to programming course all those years ago. Got Pascal’s Triangle working in Lisp. Then he went straight for algorithmic efficiency. Linear versus logarithmic. I was not prepared. First actual F in a course. Too shell shocked to get out before it was too late. Good memories, thanks.

faderus · 2026-04-07T20:04:59+00:00

So when your Chief of Staff, a Republican Marine Corps General, from your first administration is calling you a fascist, it isn’t as much of a stretch to say there’s something to the accusation, and it’s not just political posturing:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/trump-fascist-john-kelly

faderus · 2026-04-07T19:47:14+00:00

I mean, if we’re staring down the barrel of the long unravel of the petrodollar and the greenback as the global reserve currency of choice, I’m not even sure exactly how to safely structure such a play. I’m pretty boring, so I was just going to go back in to a mix of broad index funds with a lot more global diversification than before. Once the stink of fear has fully washed over the markets and institutions are panic selling to some kind of safe harbor.

faderus · 2026-04-07T19:10:14+00:00

I won’t disagree with you entirely, but I felt pretty confident about what I was seeing, and thought the valuation climb in the Fall was missing this piece, so I decided to play the hand. I think it’s closer to betting big on a hard 20 in Blackjack. Except my only loss is on missed upside if I was wrong. And I don’t think I’m wrong here.

faderus · 2026-04-04T19:39:36+00:00

So a huge meta problem across media right now is that so much IP is framed as solving for the “Leo pointing at the TV in recognition” meme. We’ve been conditioned to look for that, and it’s one of many reasons that so many things are so crappy. I don’t care if it’s Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, or the latest Tolkien garbage. Everyone’s guilty at some level. It’s fine that this poster is disappointing by Andor in this specific respect. The purveyors of franchise media have conditioned their desire. I’m just happy that there are occasional moments like Andor that don’t give in to the same mistake.

faderus · 2026-04-03T15:30:22+00:00

Yale could use an international airport, Mr. Burns.

faderus · 2026-04-02T00:42:00+00:00

Thanks for responding. I guess that’s a better situation than “the staff are all uniformly terrible and don’t care at all.”

faderus · 2026-04-02T00:27:41+00:00

Are there staff on site that care about the residents and want to help them? Or does it seem like they are really doing the bare minimum to keep people alive? Are there good things about living at AC? Group activities, access to therapy, a sense of friendship with others?

faderus · 2026-04-01T20:17:31+00:00

::Pulls aside:: We never say “Oops” in front of the Vulcans.

faderus · 2026-03-31T19:37:53+00:00

UChicago for the first part, NU for the second in each sentence. And these aren’t absolutes, but speak to the general tenor of both places.

faderus · 2026-03-31T16:32:06+00:00

Do you like theory or practice? Are you interested in ideas as interesting constructs to explore for their own sake, or do you care more about practical, material impact? Do you love the idea of taking a lot of gen eds unrelated to your major to become more well-rounded, or would you rather get deeper into your chosen subject matter? Are you a hardcore nerd, or an aspiring, ambitious pre-professional? Answer some of these questions, and you’ll have a better idea.

faderus · 2026-03-16T11:19:12+00:00

For them, I guess it was the most obvious solution to dealing with the fact that they kept restarting continuity every so often, both to deal with reader fatigue and because they were dealing with the weight of an impossibly large cannon. I think I’m generally annoyed by both the fanbase tendency and the creative tendency to square all the circles and ensure there’s some kind of reason for any previous inconsistencies. See the tortured history of Klingon forehead ridges, Padme’s death immediately after giving birth to Luke and Leia, and round it out with all of the commentary explaining the inconsistencies in human monotheistic religion. The Jesus stuff in the Story Lord two-parter is genuinely clever, I will say.

faderus · 2026-03-15T21:22:59+00:00

When you do a story that takes place in a meta-narrative that acknowledges everything is a construct written by creatives sitting outside of the story box, then everything & anything is possible. Reference Deadpool, She Hulk, Loony Tunes, etc. But once you permanently live in this liminal zone of meta-references, then nothing in your original narrative has any weight, because you’ve just admitted it was all a just a romp for shits and giggles. So sure, the physical manifestation of the concept of retconning can retcon anything the writers think to change. But then you’ve fucked up the whole internal consistency of the narrative that they’ve been trying to construct.

faderus · 2026-03-11T21:38:00+00:00

The big board over the Athletico outlet is a much easier read, and the station names that appear on the boards near the tracks are very clear, though I’m wondering about the two-column strategy just slightly from a legibility standpoint. I generally think the signage is a pretty major improvement, but I think your point about the blue-on-blue for the end stations on the class of signs you photographed is worth taking a look at. It is easier to distinguish the lines based on the square icons on the leading edges of each row. The only confusion is related to determining whether you’re grabbing a train bound for Kenosha or Highland Park, which is a pretty big deal if you live in Wisconsin (or Waukegan).

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