⭐️⭐️⭐️: Look – by just about any realistic objective measure (script, plot, science, fidelity to nearly any aspect of Star Trek, printing quality, etc.), these are bad; two stars would be generous. But as artifacts of 1970s Trek comics medium, they’re certainly entertaining, if in a very cringey sort of way. Not really worth looking for unless you’re a Trek and/or comics collector, but if you run across them and are curious, you’ll likely get some chuckles.
Book 30 of 2026: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: This was excellent. Funny (many bits had me quite literally laughing out loud), but with an increasingly serious undertone as it goes. A valet robot kills his employer for reasons he does t understand, and embarks on a quest to figure out why, and then joins with a partner out to determine why society collapsed. From reliance on AI to what actually constitutes consciousness and personhood, there’s a lot of good stuff here, wrapped up in a mismatched buddy adventure. My favorite of Tchaikovsky’s books that I’ve read so far. Highly recommended.
♿️ Work has moved to our summer schedule of four ten-hour days. The days can be a little long, but it’s worth it for the three-day weekends! It’s also been a little noisy this week, as a large section of our floor of the building is being converted from an old meeting room to offices, and the work crew has been in all week doing the work. Hopefully the noisy part of the work doesn’t last too much longer.
🚗 This weekend we headed back down to Portland for some family visits. A few unexpected bumps here and there, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with, and it was good to get one more visit in, this time without it being an add-on to a work conference in the area.
🇺🇸 I was not at all disappointed to wake up to the news that Lindsey Graham had died. I was rather disappointed to later see that there is apparently confirmation that someone cracked the seal on Mitch McConnell’s Schrödinger’s box and he’s still around. (As a rule, I don’t wish for someone’s death, but there are certainly people who I am will not be at all sorry to be reading their obituaries. McConnell is very high on that list.)
📸 Photos
Prairie’s sister’s family has a new and very adorable puppy, Obi, who really enjoys running in circles around the back yard.Found tucked into a hollow in an old tree in a Portland cemetery.
📚 Reading
Just one book this week: A Fury Scorned by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski, a Star Trek TNG novel, a bit better than the norm.
Marina Hyde at The Guardian: So it’s Trump 1, Belgium 4 – and the world rejoices. Nothing like failed chicanery to bring us together, is there?: “You’ve heard a lot about shithousery during this tournament. We have even, excruciatingly, seen a few American commentators attempt to use the word in conversation. Guys, please, just – no. It’s not for you. You have ’erbs, ‘a couple things’, and ‘a ways to go’. But let’s call the events of the past few days by the name they deserve in all the languages of the world: Whitehousery. ¶ Some absolute Whitehousery has been on display and the world certainly has a way (singular) to go before we all forget it.”
Casey Parks at The Washington Post: Trans people are fleeing red states for Seattle. The city can’t keep up. (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Seattle has long been known as one of the country’s most trans-friendly cities. It banned discrimination on the basis of gender 40 years ago. Its hospitals were among the first to offer gender transition care to young people. And Washington state was the first in the nation to allow trans athletes to compete. ¶ Those protections have always drawn trans people from elsewhere, but in the years before Trump won reelection, nonprofit leaders say, the numbers were small enough, and the newcomers so prepared, that organizations could easily help people settle in. Most arrived with jobs and rental agreements. But after Trump took office and further emboldened conservative lawmakers to strip trans people of rights, Seattle leaders say they began to hear from people with no plan, only a desperate need to move immediately.”
Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie: How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization: “Some of these rephrasings may feel a little clunky, and they can end up longer than the anthropomorphizing shorthand. This means it takes a little more dedication to use them, but also isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We should stop and think about the tech we are using, or even discussing, and what it actually does.”
DeFlock: “An open-source project mapping license plate readers.” Find out where Flock and other automated license plate readers are installed in your area.
Michael Kan at PC Mag: FCC Approves Reflect Orbital’s Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate: “Despite a flood of objections, the FCC has approved a startup’s plan to launch a controversial satellite that’ll use a giant mirror to reflect sunlight to Earth after dark. ¶ On Thursday, the FCC granted California-based Reflect Orbital permission to launch and operate the satellite in low-Earth orbit using the requested radio spectrum. The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground.” This is such a bad idea, for so many reasons.
Dr. Drang: Old icons: “…Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then.”
Chris Heath at National Geographic: Inside the secret operation to move the world’s most famous tapestry (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “After more than 900 years in France, the Bayeux Tapestry—one of medieval Europe’s most fragile, priceless treasures—slipped back into England in a controversial overnight operation. Here’s what transporting a 225-foot-long masterwork actually takes.”
Odette Yousef at NPR: With the white nationalist group Patriot Front, what you see is not what you get: “…those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see. ¶ ‘That is not who they are in private,’ said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. ‘Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.'”
Chloe Laws at Marie Claire: Madonna’s Confessions II Deserves to Be the Album of the Summer, But the Response Proves We Still Punish Women for Ageing: “At every point in her career, Madonna has challenged the standards that treat women unfairly—sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply through existing. The ageism she has faced for almost two decades falls into the latter category. From the backlash to ‘Like a Prayer’, to Pepsi dropping her, to the banning of ‘Justify My Love’, to the outrage surrounding Erotica, Madonna has repeatedly found herself at the centre of cultural panic whenever she has challenged expectations around religion, sexuality and womanhood. The criticism she receives today follows the same pattern.”
Frank Landymore at Futurism: The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop: “Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.”
Book 29 of 2026: A Fury Scorned by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski.
⭐️⭐️⭐️: The Enterprise is called to assist a planet about to be destroyed, and is unable to rescue the entire population. A subplot of seeing if they can pull off a miracle (guess what…), but most interesting as the crew actually attempts to grapple with their inability to save everyone. More introspective than most Trek novels.
It’s another two-week edition of my weekly roundup! (And even then, posted a couple days late and backdated….)
🎻 Last Saturday we went out to see Raiders of the Lost Ark with live soundtrack performed by the Seattle Symphony. It was a great concert — the combination of an all-time great film and hearing the soundtrack performed live was great.
🏳️🌈 Last Sunday was Seattle’s Pride parade, and we went for the first time in eight years. We got there about an hour and a half early, found a great spot to sit…and then, unfortunately, ended up with a bunch of inconsiderate people who showed up late and decided that standing directly in front of us was the place to be. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves, and it was definitely good to be back at the parade again, but some aspects could have been better. Maybe next year?
🇺🇸 This past weekend, of course, was the 4th of July holiday weekend. Not exactly a holiday we felt like celebrating, for fairly obvious reasons, so we just spent it at home, reading books, watching movies, and rolling our eyes at the various neighbors who don’t care that fireworks are illegal in our city. (With a special, targeted grumble at whoever fired off mortars at 5 a.m. on the 6th, and 2 a.m. on the 7th.)
📸 Photos
It’s important to remember that Pride isn’t just a party. It was, and still is, also a protest. Especially these days. 🏳️⚧️🧱 (I have a few more photos from the parade on Flickr.)They had to switch the day of the performance (to avoid conflicting with the Pride parade), so our seats got upgraded. Fourth row back is really close to the stage!My choice of red, white, and blue on July 4th.
📚 Reading
Two books this week — one of which was even non-fiction! Still pretty solidly in my wheelhouse, though.
Three movies of varying quality. In order, worst to best:
Enola Holmes 3 (2026): ⭐️⭐️: By far the least interesting of the series. The first was the best, the second was a decent sequel, this one barely held our interest.
Uncharted (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently sourced from a video game I don’t know anything about, this was mostly a perfectly acceptable afternoon action adventure film (Wahlberg has definitely found his niche as a B-movie action star), the final action set piece is over the top and ridiculous in a way that we really enjoyed.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026): A rare sequel that lives up to the original. Just as fun and funny (and violent and bloody), it picked up right where the first ended and goes bigger, but in ways that make sense and are internally consistent while expanding the world.
We also celebrated the holiday weekend by watching the latest Lucy Worsley Investigates on PBS, where she looks at the American Revolution from a British point of view. Highly recommended.
🎧 Listening
Three new albums in rotation these two weeks:
Doublespeak’s self-titled debut: covers of mostly little-known tracks, by a collaboration between Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yazoo), Neil Arthur (Blancmange), and producer Benge.
Front 242’s Blackout: their final live album, recorded on their recent farewell tour before formally retiring the band.
Ali Jasemi at The Conversation: Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologis: “…news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.”
Dana Goldstein at The New York Times: Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.”
Listen to Wikipedia: Wikipedia edits turned into ambient background music. “Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.”
Rani Molla at The Verge: I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism: “For decades, compact pickups such as the Toyota Pickup, Ford Ranger, and Nissan Hardbody served as inexpensive, utilitarian vehicles for young buyers, tradespeople, and anyone who simply needed a truck. But as automakers chased higher margins, pickups grew larger, more luxurious, and substantially more expensive. Today, even many entry-level trucks come loaded with luxuries. Slate is betting there is still demand for a truck that prioritizes affordability over amenities.”
I’m not in the market for a new car, and I’ve never had any interest in a pickup truck, but I’m fascinated by what Slate is trying and I really hope they succeed.
Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros at The New York Times: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (gift link that may eventually expire; this article is too interactive to be successfully mirrored by archive.is): “Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths. ¶ There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.”
lcamtuf’s thing: AI children’s books, body horror edition (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “…I’m told that frontier models have surpassed PhD-level intelligence in the summer of 2025. Most of the books in question were published mid-2026 and the artwork points to a flagship model from a major US-based lab. So, in all likelihood, there’s nothing to worry a— Oh… Oh.”
Lauren Sherrard: 10 Ways to Make Your Emails More Accessible: “Almost every marketing email has accessibility problems. In fact, the Email Markup Consortium found that 99.89% of HTML emails tested contained serious or critical accessibility issues. Out of more than 443,000 emails analysed, only 21 passed all automated accessibility checks.”
Basic Apple Guy: MacOS California Camino: “…I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.”
Vita Nouva: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: “The reply [to an IT support ticket] and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him).”
Fascinating deep dive into web design, middle-eastern history, Arabic typography, only one of which I know much of anything about (and nowhere near this extent).
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: A neat exploration of quantum physics and the nature of the universe through lenses of Black perspectives, queer theory, and pop culture. Mostly really good, but for me, with one significant flaw. While I will happily accept the author’s expertise in physics, there is one specific sentence that is simply, surprisingly, and significantly wrong.
Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books are referenced multiple times, and on page 232, the poem “Jabberwocky” is mentioned: “It’s a poem that doesn’t make any sense, composed primarily with words that Lewis Carroll made up.” I’m baffled by the claim that “Jabberwocky” “doesn’t make sense” — yes, many of the words are invented nonsense words, but that’s precisely the beauty and brilliance of the poem, because it absolutely makes sense! The reader knows what is going on; the words may be unfamiliar, but where and how they are used, along with the fun-to-read onomatopoeic nature of them, conveys a very clear story. Honestly, it’s good that this claim showed up a little over two-thirds of the way into the book, due to how severely it threw me out of the book and shook my trust in the author. Any earlier and I might have struggled to keep going.
Still, all in all, a very good book — except for that one sentence.
This “AI Compass” test was interesting. As with most such tests, it’s not perfect, and I have some quibbles with some of the questions and answers, particularly some where I think it falls into the usual trap of using “AI” for everything, and not adequately distinguishing between genAI and machine learning (ML), but still, not bad.
My result:
I’m the glowy orange dot. Looks like I’m right on the border, almost ending up classified as “The Skeptic” (full description below). (Side note: Pity about the poor and very inaccessible color design.)
YOU ARE… The Union Organizer
patron saint: Cory Doctorow.
AI is a real tool being used to extract real labor value from real people without paying them. You don’t care about the singularity — you care about the artists, writers, and workers getting strip-mined by capital. You’re not anti-technology. You’re anti-theft.
Looking at the full list of possible outcomes, I’d self-identify as one of the following. I think it’s my hedging slightly on some of the answers because of the genAI/ML confusion that pushed me into the result I got. They’re all in the same general “don’t like it, don’t trust it, don’t want it” quadrant, though.
The Luddite (Affectionate)
patron saint: Emily Bender
It doesn’t work the way they claim, it’s making everything worse, and you’d like your internet back, please. You can explain in precise technical detail why it’s a stochastic parrot, and you will, whether or not anyone asked. You’re funnier about this than people give you credit for.
The Digital Hermit
patron saint: Jaron Lanier
You’ve been saying the framing is wrong since before most people had heard of any of this. AI is less a technology than a story Silicon Valley tells to consolidate power, and the story is bad. You read physical books and you don’t need a language model to tell you what they mean.
The Skeptic
patron saint: Ed Zitron
It’s oversold, it’s losing staggering amounts of money, and the harms are arriving faster than the value. You’ve done the math on the unit economics and it doesn’t close. You are loud about this, prolific about this, and you suspect history will vindicate you.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Descendants of Khan and his compatriots face off against the Federation. I found this one to be above average, with much of it being something of an early take on the same issues explored by Strange New Worlds with Number One’s status as an Illyrian in hiding, expanded to explore how a society of genetically engineered humans might deal with how they’d be perceived by the Federation. As often happens with any eugenics storyline, it would be improved if the Federation was more honest and introspective about how initial fear and caution has developed into long-standing systemic bigotry, but as Star Trek has yet to really tackle that aspect of the universe, I wouldn’t really have expected it from a thirty-year-old novel.
🎓 This week was Highline’s graduation week, with the commencement ceremony on Thursday. We had a record number of graduates this year (almost 900 signed up to walk in the ceremony), and still managed to wrap up the ceremony in just slightly under two and a half hours. Not bad!
🍾 Happy anniversary to us! Friday was our thirteenth anniversary. Rather than doing anything big, as we just made it through graduation week and have plans coming up next weekend and beyond, we celebrated by having a quiet weekend of naps, reading, and movies here at home.
🌞 Happy solstice! Summer is officially here.
📸 Photos
Improvements made this year that I was involved with included adding the on-stage video screen (in the past, the video was only sent to the arena jumbotron, which is directly above all the graduates, so they couldn’t see anything presented on screen) and moving the live captions from small displays on the sides of the stage to being included on the main video feed. A few glitches here and there, but we know what to work on for next year.All fancied up for the commencement ceremony! I wasn’t graduating, just participating as part of the faculty and staff. The hood recognizes my master’s degree, the rainbow honors cord is the one Highline uses for disability support.Thanks to some birthday funds, I added a Nikkor 26mm f/2.8 lens to my kit. Will be a great walk-around travel lens when we get around to traveling next.
Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.
📺 Watching
Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.
TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.
🔗 Linking
Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”
James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”
Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”
Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Conservative techbros clone America’s founding fathers and raise them in isolation as if it were the 18th century, training them to bring America back to its former glory…until one of them finds a stray iPhone. A very funny and incisive sci-fi political satire; highly recommended.
