Weekly Notes: September 8–14, 2025

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  • 💉 Last weekend we tried to get our Covid boosters at our local Walgreens and were turned down, even though Washington’s governor had put out a directive a few days before stating that everyone in Washington over six months old was eligible. So on Monday, we tried again at our local Safeway, which had no problems at all with giving us a Flu/Covid vaccine cocktail, so we’ve now switched pharmacies from Walgreens to Safeway.

  • Work was pretty uneventful, though this was the last week of the summer break; this coming week is our “opening week” with lots of staff and faculty welcomes and training workshops, and the week after that, students are back on campus. Back into the school year!

📸 Photos

Me with the left sleeve of my t-shirt rolled up to reveal two band-aids that have been written on with black permanent marker; the top says "F U" and the bottom says "R F K".
I decorated my bandaids after getting my vaccines, just because I could.
Three decorative 'skeleton' creatures on my office desk. One is an elephant (complete with solid bone ears and trunk bones), one an octopus (with large skull and tentacle bones), and one a snail (with skull shell, solid antennae, and a bony ribcage-like structure for the foot that makes it look almost centipedal).
It’s spooky season, so it’s time for my small collection of ridiculously anatomically improbable skeletons to come back out onto my desk at work. The elephant is the newest addition.
A flock of about 40 ducks standing across a bike path.
The ducks on our weekend walking trail were out in force on Saturday morning.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

I finished two books this week; one was even non-fiction! Though as it was a behind-the-scenes look at Star Trek III, it was still solidly within my usual wheelhouse.

And I’ve just started Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, as a precursor to moving forward on my Hugo best novel reading project; this one isn’t a Hugo winner, but its immediate sequel is. With how much I enjoyed Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, which though sci-fi, combined two genres that aren’t my usual thing (military SF and romance), I’m curious what I’ll think of her in the fantasy realm, which is also secondary to SF in my interests.

📺 Watching

Two movies this week:

  • The Phoenician Scheme (⭐️⭐️⭐️): I am absolutely a sucker for Anderson’s quirky hyper-stylized films.

  • The Thursday Murder Club (⭐️⭐️⭐️): Take some of today’s most known British actors and let ‘em run around having fun in a murder mystery. Quite enjoyable.

🔗 Linking

  • Erin Reed: We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk’s Hateful Life: “Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. […] His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.”

  • Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'”

  • Identity 4: Racintosh Plus: Really impressive work putting a Mac Plus into a one-unit rack mount casing.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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Book 52 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was fun, and I can totally see it as a mid-pandemic “just need to have fun writing something” lark of a book. Having recently watched the first season of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series (set in one of the recent Godzilla timelines), it was amusingly easy to see this as an extension of that…or vice versa, for that matter. It did skimp a bit on actually describing any of the creatures (the kaiju are big, some have wings, claws, and/or teeth, they have parasites that are also dangerous, use your imagination for anything else), but while a little odd, I can cope.

Me holding The Kaiju Preservation Society

Two Thoughts on Charlie Kirk and Gavin Newsom

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I’m not celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder.

I’m also not mourning the death of someone who spent his adult life explicitly calling for the very kind of political violence that he fell victim to, who regularly called for violence against essentially everyone not him, and who made millions of dollars in the process.

I’d have preferred that he had been silenced by other means, but I’m not disappointed that he will no longer be spewing his hate into the world.

Gavin Newsom (or, at least, his social media team) has absolutely been doing an impressive job of trolling Trump by mirroring his rambling, grandiose style of social media posting back at him. I’ve been amused by many of the posts.

I’m also steadfast in my belief that Newsom is an opportunistic chucklefuck who will say anything to amass more power. We should not ignore that when he’s not trolling Trump, he has been tacking so far to the middle that he’s often swinging well to the political right, attacking trans people, participating in the destruction of homeless camps, and actively courting the right-wing.

When Newsom started his podcast, Charlie Kirk was his first guest. In the course of their conversation, Newsome “shared his opposition to the term Latinx, suggested his opposition to gender transition surgeries for inmates and said that it was ‘deeply unfair’ for transgender women to participate in women’s sports” (from Wikipedia).

And now he says this: “the best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work”.

Social media post by Governor Gavin Newsom: 'The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate -- never through violence.'
From the look of it, posted on X, of course.

To be clear, Charlie’s “work” included calling transgender people a “throbbing middle finger to God”, telling his followers to take care of transgender people like they did “in the 50s and 60s”, speaking out against empathy, calling stoning gay people “God’s perfect law”, using Turning Point USA to promote anti-LGBTQIA+ hate in the public and on college campuses, to bring Christian nationalism to the United States, and more (adapted from Erin Reed’s Bluesky thread).

Kirk didn’t “engage with [others] across ideology through spirited discourse”. Kirk attacked everyone he could, and took advantage of the “both sides”-ism of today’s media and figures like Newsom, who are so desperate to gain new followers across the spectrum that they’ll agree — or at least not openly disagree — with horrible things, to further promote and spew his hate.

It’s pretty clear that Newsom is angling for a Presidential bid. It’s also pretty clear that he should not get anywhere close.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto

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Book 51 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The third in Titan Books’s series of Star Trek films “behind the scenes” coffee-table art books, and the second from the team of John and Maria Jose Tenuto. It’s always fun to see all the production art, photos of models and setups, and all the skill that goes into the films. As with the prior books, much of the information I knew, but there are always some gems and stories that I hadn’t come across yet.

Me holding Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Making of the Classic Film.

Weekly Notes: September 1–7, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)

  • 📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.

  • The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.

📸 Photos

A metal firefighting hose pipe fitting on a brick wall, with sticker graffiti that says, 'destroy monotony write on walls'.
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.
A curved grey brick wall with graffiti that reads, 'those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won't teach them to love society', surrounded by more graffiti of cat heads and text that says, 'bigots beware' and 'trans hearts run this park'.
I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.
A woman sitting on a brick wall and smiling, holding a sign that says, 'Palantir is how Númenor fell'.
The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.
A crowd of people, many hoding protest signs and some holding U.S. flags, gathered in a brick plaza and watching people speak.
Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?

📚 Reading

Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.

📺 Watching

  • We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.

  • We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.

🔗 Linking

  • Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  • Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.

Weekly-ish Notes: August 20–31, 2025

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About a week and a half again, as I try to get back on a regular schedule after wrapping up Worldcon. And even this is getting posted a day late and backdated, because I had some Worldcon work come up yesterday evening that I had to pay attention to. Even when Worldcon is done, Worldcon isn’t done….

The past week really was about just getting back into the regular routine after vacation. Work was busy but uneventful, and at home, we were just relaxing and trying to stay as cool as we could during a late summer heat wave.

We did spend a day at the Point Defiance Zoo this past Sunday, which is always a fun thing to do, especially when they have a lot of new youngsters to see!

📸 Photos

A parent and juvenile tapir stand next to a fence as a zookeper feeds them.
The baby tapir isn’t a tiny tapir anymore, but it’s still quite cute, and one of my wife’s favorites.
Six penguins swim in a pool, one is more silvery and hasn't yet gained its black and white plumage.
Pedro the penguin chick is almost the same size as the rest, but is still more of a silvery tone without the traditional black and white coloring.
A wide-angle shot of dark red aenemones in a tank, surrounded by clouds of bubbles as the water circulates. It looks otherworldly, almost like a photo of nebulae in space.
I got these anemone just as clouds of food was pumped into the tank; I love the otherworldly, alien look that I got by chance.
A small stream runs down a cleft in rocks; the water is motion blurred and smooth.
Playing with long exposures and water, and like the way the running water almost looks like frozen ice.

📝 Writing

An actual blog post this week: Google Docs Adds PDF Accessibility Tagging.

I don’t know exactly when this happened, but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!

📚 Reading

Got through a few books, making up for the lack of reading during Worldcon.

🔗 Linking

This week’s link list includes some that I found during Worldcon week, but as I didn’t include a link list there, they get rolled into this week’s post.

  • Matt Wedel at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition: “The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke.”

  • Open Culture: Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”

  • How to Leave Substack: “You Should Probably Leave Substack. Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation.”

  • Mike Glyer at File 770: Ben Jason and the Early History of the Hugo Rocket

  • Mike Montiero: How to not build the Torment Nexus: “You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole. It will leave a mark. A memory. A scar.”

  • John Scalzi: Poking the Discourse Bear Re: “Classic” Science Fiction: “I’m 56 now, and if you’re recommending the same science fiction books to a ten-year-old today that would have been recommended to me when I was a ten-year-old — and were old and kinda dated even then — I think you should seriously reconsider recommending science fiction books to young readers.”

  • Tactile Maps Automated Production (TMAP): “TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Map files can be visually previewed, downloaded or emailed, then are ready to emboss.”

  • Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk at the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog: Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction: “The impact of technological changes on the consumption of speculative fiction should not be understated. We think its impacts have brought a broader public under the wing of fandom, prompting inevitable and uncomfortable splits within the subculture. Much as technological advances in the early 20th Century inspired a reactionary movement among painters and labour writ large, similar technological advances in the past 30 years have been at play in the formation of a reactionary movement amongst some groups of speculative fiction creators.”

  • Joshua Barnes at the Sydney Review of Books: Just a Little Longer: “Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.”

  • Contrast Grid: Creates a color grid with contrast ratios based on colors you input.

120 Murders edited by Nick Mamatas

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Book 49 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Anthology of dark, noir-ish fiction inspired by the music (and memories) of the ’90s alternative scene. My favorites were Veronica Schanoes’s “Wendy, Growing Up”, Alex Jennings’s “We’ve Been Had”, Brian Francis Slattery’s “Never Let Me Down”, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Superstition”, and Cyan Katz’s “The Show Must Go On”.

Two additional notes: This is the debut publication for Cyan, whom I’ve known since we were both running around in the 90’s alternative scene in Anchorage, Alaska, and I’m thrilled for them; and I’m sorely tempted to make a playlist/”mixtape” of the inspirational tracks for all the stories in this anthology.

Me holding 120 Murders.

Google Docs Adds PDF Accessibility Tagging

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I don’t know exactly when this happened (my best guess is maybe sometime in April, based on this YouTube video; if you watch it, be aware that the output seems to have improved since it was made), but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!

update: Looks like this started rolling out in December 2024, earlier than I realized. Thanks to Curtis Wilcox for pointing out the announcement link.

Quick Background

For PDFs to be compatible with assistive technology and readable by people with various disabilities, including but not at all limited to visually disabled people who use screen readers like VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA, and ORCA, PDFs must include accessibility tags. These are not visible to most users, but are embedded in the “behind the scenes” document information, and define the various parts of the document. Assistive technology, rather than having to try to interpret the visual presentation of a PDF, is able to read the accessibility tags and use those to voice the document, assist with navigation, and other features.

However, until recently, Google Docs has not included this information when exporting a PDF using the File > Download > PDF Document (.pdf) option. PDFs downloaded from Google Docs, even if designed with accessibility features such as headings, alt text on images, and so on, were exported in an inaccessible format (as if they had been created with a “print to PDF” function). The only way around this was to either use other software to tag the PDF or to export the document as a Microsoft Word .docx file and export to PDF from Word.

But that’s no longer the case! I first realized this a couple months ago when I was sent a PDF generated from Google Docs and was surprised to see tags already there. I’ve recently had the chance to dig into this a little bit more, and I’m rather pleasantly surprised by what I’m seeing. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t suck.

Important note

I’m not a PDF expert! I’ve been working in the digital accessibility space for a bit over three years now, but I’m learning more stuff all the time, and I’m sure there’s still a lot I don’t know. There are likely other people in this space who could dig into this a lot more comprehensively than I can, and I invite them to do so (heck, that’s part of why I’m making this post). But I’m also not a total neophyte, and given how little information on this change I could find out there, I figured I’d put what knowledge I do have to some use.

Testing process

Very simple, quick-and-dirty: I created a test Google Doc from scratch, making sure to include the basics (headings, descriptive links, images with alt text) and some more advanced bits (horizontal rules, a table, a multi-column section, an equation, a drawing, and a chart). I then downloaded that document as a PDF and dug into the accessibility tags to see what I found. As I reviewed the tags, I updated the document with my findings, and downloaded a new version of the PDF with my findings included (338 KB .pdf).

Acrobat Pro displaying a document titled 'this is an accessibility test document' with the tags pane open to the right and the first line of the document selected and highlighted with a purple box.

Findings

More details are in the PDF, but in brief:

  • Paragraphs are tagged correctly as <P>.
  • Heading are tagged correctly as <H1> (or whatever level is appropriate).
  • Links are tagged correctly as a <Link> with a <Link - OBJR> tag. Link text is wrapped in a <Span>, and the link underline ends up as a non-artifacted <Path>.
  • Images are tagged correctly as a <Figure> with alt text included. However, images on their own lines end up wrapped inside a <P> tag and are followed by a <Span> containing an empty object (likely the carriage return).
  • Lists are pretty good. If a <LI> list item includes a subsidiary list, that list is outside of the <LBody> tag, and I’m not sure if that’s correct, incorrect, or indifferent. Additionally, list markers such as bullets or ordinals are not wrapped in <LBL> tags but are included as part of the <LBody> text object. However, this isn’t unusual (I believe Microsoft Word also does this), and doesn’t seem to cause difficulties.
  • Tables are mostly correct, including tagging the header row cells with <TH> if the header row is pinned (which is the only way I could find to define a header row within Google Docs). However, the column scope is not defined (row scope is moot, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to define row header cells within Google Docs; the table options are fairly limited).
  • Horizontal lines are properly artifacted, but do produce a <P> containing an empty object (presumably the carriage return, just as with images).
  • Using columns didn’t affect the proper paragraph tagging; columned content will be read in the proper order.
  • Inserted drawings and charts are output as images, including any defined alt text.
  • Equations are just output as plain text, without using MathML, and may drop characters or have some symbols rendered as “Path” within the text string. STEM documents will continue to have issues.

Conclusion

So, not perfect…but an impressive change from just a few months ago, and really, the output doesn’t suck! For your basic, everyday document, if you need to distribute it as a PDF instead of some other more accessible native format, PDFs downloaded from Google Does now seem to be a not-horrible option. (My base recommendation is still to distribute native documents whenever possible, as they give the user agency over the presentation, such as being able to adjust font face, size, and color based on their needs. However, since PDFs are so ubiquitous, it’s heartening to see Google improving things.)