Weekly Notes: July 27–August 2, 2026

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  • 🏡 Back at home this week! We had a good week of conference and travel, but it’s always nice to get back into the familiar comfort of our own home.

  • ♿️ Work was fairly uneventful, which is always nice after being away for a while (even if I was technically working last week). No explosions or catastrophes to worry about, at least.

  • 🚀 Yesterday I was able to head down to dig into the physical Norwescon archives, and grab a selection of stuff to bring back home so that I can scan it and get it added to our online archives. Some I’ll be able to keep in my part of the archives (what I’m now calling the “annex”), some will go back down to be re-filed in the primary archives.

📸 Photos

I got my photos from Providence and New York uploaded to Flickr. Here are a few favorites; there are many more in the Flickr album.

A night shot down the Providence river, which runs through downtown Providence. Tall stone buildings lit by streetlights flank a river banked by stone walls, under a deep blue evening sky that fades to a light purple at the horizon behind more city buildings. The sky and buildings are reflected in the surface of the river.
The Providence river in the evening, as we were walking back to our hotel after touring the Lippett House and exploring up around the Brown University campus.
With a slightly blurry dark wooden staircase in the background, a white stone sculpture of a crouching woman with a severe expression looks towards the camera as if angry at the photographer.
I kind of get the feeling she didn’t really want to have her photo taken….
A red brick walkway shaded by tall green oak trees leads to the white marble staircase, edifice, and dome of a large governmental building under a clear light blue sky.
Walking up to the Rhode Island state house building.
A white stone sculpture of a sailor, leaning back slightly on one leg, holding a rope in both hands, wearing a sweater that open and falling off of his shoulders and with the sleeves rolled up to expose a very muscular chest and arms, and with very tight pants rolled up at the cuffs to show off his muscular legs.
There are several 1940’s-era (I think) statues around the Rhosde Island capitol building honoring the various branches of the armed forces. This is the only one I took a picture of. With the style of the time, with that pose, those muscles, and that sweater open to show off that chest…all this sassy sailor boy needs is a leather jacket to be a Tom of Finland model.
A black and white shot of the Empire State Building from street level, symmetrically framed, so that the straight lines of the building rise and converge towards the top center of the photo.
The Empire State Building. We didn’t have time to go up to the top, but it’s pretty impressive from street level, too.

📚 Reading

After getting home, I finished one book I’d started before we left (Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs Volume 2) and one I’d started towards the end of the trip (Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett).

📺 Watching

While working our way through the flights home on Sunday and Monday, I watched the two most recent live-action Predator movies, Prey and Predator: Badlands. I’m definitely enjoying how Dan Trachtenberg is expanding the Predator mythos, without feeling restricted by following a particular storyline or set of characters, but playing with different stories within the broader universe.

🎧 Listening

This week’s main listening has been a new two-part post-punk/EBM/goth/industrial compilation from Sideline Magazine, United 1 – The Freya Files and United 2 – The Odin Files. Both are free to download, but if you chip in a little money, all proceeds go to support humanitarian and frontline aid efforts in Ukraine (I did).

🔗 Linking

  • Emily Wilson at the London Review of Books: An Uncomplicated Man: “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

  • Bettina Makalintal at Eater: In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical: “The backlash to AI imagery is growing across a certain part of the culture. Sentiment along the lines of ‘I’d rather see a poster made with Sharpie on a scrap of paper than an AI event flyer,’ or ‘I’m not going to your restaurant if the ad is the AI’ is proliferating. ‘Frictionmaxxing,’ a term that writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined to refer to a rejection of technologies of convenience in favor of slower and more analog processes, has escaped containment, coming to mean the general choice to choose pre-internet ways of creation and problem-solving. In this sense, it can refer to the choice of the handcrafted over the AI-generated.”

  • Julian Fong on Mastodon: “I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. […] Code is art. I work at a studio full of ungodly talented artists, but I will still die on this hill. Code is often messy and dirty and it’s a pain to create and get right but the results reflect the personality of the creator and the pain of the creation. Just like the rest of art. Sometimes you have to look at the source code to see that, but it’s there if you look for it, hidden beneath the surface. ¶ AI generated code is not art.”

  • Catherine Rampell: Inside Trump’s Stealth Trick to Rig the Census—and Congress (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “A vaguely ominous but little-noticed regulatory filing issued in late June could have a profound impact on business, immigrants, and the balance of power in our country. […] The actual specifics of those new rules remain scant. But from conversations I’ve been having with people close to the process, it is widely expected that the administration will try to recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States.”

  • Danny Katch at Revolution for Cowards: We used to be able to buy things in this country (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.”

  • Stephanie Rohler at Star Trek.com: Accommodations On Board: A Celebration of Disability in Star Trek: “None of Star Trek‘s disability portrayals and accommodations have been perfect — but that’s alright. Star Trek still exists as a rare piece of fiction that openly begins discussions about what life with disability looks like, and the adaptations necessary for disabled people to find a comfortable home in society. It’s the fact that Star Trek has and keeps including disabled characters that makes the difference, especially in a modern world that argues so often about the rights of disabled people.”

  • Nikshep Myle at MSN: AI companies are still buying up old books by the pallet – then shredding them: “Every out-of-print volume that disappears into a scanner may be the last copy accessible to anyone outside an AI lab’s servers. Rare, foreign-language, and low-circulation titles – many never digitized elsewhere – vanish from physical existence after a single scan. Who controls humanity’s textual heritage is no longer a question anyone can afford to leave unanswered, especially as the push to build AI Data Centers accelerates the industry’s resource acquisition at every level.”

  • Newsmax: Newsmax and Meta Enter AI Content Partnership (archive.is mirror; I’m not linking directly to Newsmax): Meta is partnering with Newsmax to feed their right-wing claptrap into Meta’s AI chatbots as training material. Don’t be surprised by any Meta chatbot (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) becoming even more right-wing loony than they already are.

  • Jasmine Nackash at The Pudding: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us: “While these [“essential vocabulary” lists] were practical tools, built to capture which words people need most, the answer also doubles as a snapshot of ordinary life, 70 years apart: what people were expected to engage with, and had to deal with, in their daily lives. ¶ Treating the lists as an indirect record of day-to-day life, I went through the differences between them from a few angles: what the words were about, how tangible were they, and to which parts of speech they belonged.”

  • Cory Turner at NPR: Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out: “Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable. ¶ The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass ‘legislation’ to help the nation’s K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.”

Weekly Notes: July 20–26, 2026

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Our travel adventure week continues! When I last left off, we’d just made it to our hotel in Providence….

  • ♿️ So all of my days this week were taken up with attending the AHEAD 2026 conference. Lots of good information got poured into my head over the past week. Since this is a broader conference than Accessing Higher Ground (AHG), I tried to find sessions either connected to my usual accessible technology focus, to projects I’m currently involved with, or the wider world of disability services in higher education.
    • Here’s a look at the sessions I attended:
      • Introduction to Disability Law for Disability Office Directors and Staff and ADA/504 Coordinators (a two-day pre-conference session, on Monday and Tuesday)
      • OCR Year in Review
      • Faculty as Partners in Access: Building Collaboration Beyond Compliance
      • Strategies for Enhancing UDL and Digital Accessibility in the Classroom: Insights from Faculty Advocates
      • It’s Not My Problem, Right? Liability and Risks Arising from Inaccessible Third-Parties
      • Hot Topics in Disability Law
      • State & Local Involvement: A Strategy to Impact the Lives of Disabled People (included walking up to the Rhode Island State House building for a tour)
      • Crafting Clear Accommodation Wording
      • Policy to Practice: Accessible Events by Design
    • Overall, the conference was really good, and while I wouldn’t mind going again, I probably get more directly relevant information from AHG when I can go there.
    • It was discouraging how often I heard people talking about how much they’re using genAI and what they’re using it for. Even the occasional mention of genAI’s failings and problematic aspects tended to only come up as afterthoughts after a long digression into “I’m feeding every case I review into Claude to pull out the key points” or some such thing. Sigh. It’s sad to see how many people are so eager to offload critical thinking to something that isn’t doing that and can’t do that.
  • 🚶‍♀️ While I was conferencing, my wife was enjoying spending her days walking around and exploring Providence, and acting as entertainment director for our evenings. Among the things she found for us to do:
    • A stop by the Weird Providence bookstore, which was small but very well curated; she picked up an H.P. Lovecraft collection (because of course), while I picked up a Philip K. Dick collection.
    • A tour of the Lippet House Museum, a remarkably well-preserved Victorian mansion.
    • The Providence Ghost Tour. Haunted city tours are always fun, and this was no exception.
    • A gondola ride along Providence’s river through the heart of the city, complete with Italian serenade by the gondolier.
    • And, of course, lots of good food and just enjoying evenings walking around Providence. It’s a really pretty and comfortable city, and we both liked it a lot. If for some reason we decided to move from the west to the east coast, Providence would be high on our list of possible destinations.
  • 🚆 When planning this week, we’d decided that as long as we were on the east coast, we might as well take advantage of it, and so rather than flying right back to Seattle, we took Amtrak from Providence to New York City.
    • 🗽 We got in to NYC a bit before noon, checked in to our hotel, grabbed hot dogs from a Times Square street vendor, and started wandering. We started heading down toward Bryant Park and the library, and realized as we were walking that we were across the street from the MoMA.
    • 🖼️ “Wanna go to the MoMA?” “Let’s go to the MoMA!” So we did, and it was incredible. Knowing that the MoMA has an incredible collection is one thing, actually being able to wander through and see it is a whole different thing entirely. So much neat art that I’d read about and seen images of, but now got to see in person. I particularly enjoyed the Marcel Duchamp and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibitions.
    • 🧛🏻 Then, after getting some great NY-style pizza, we walked up to the Palace Theatre to see The Lost Boys, the new musical that just won several Tony awards. Seeing a Tony award winning musical on Broadway in its initial run with the original cast was a real treat! The show itself was great, too. There were a few notable changes from the original film (as expected when translating a film to the stage), but all the key elements were there, and all the changes worked for me. The music was good (arguably perhaps a bit too heavy on power ballads), but don’t go in expecting the classic soundtrack. This is a new show, not a jukebox musical (though bits of “Cry Little Sister” do get worked in at a few key appropriate moments). We really enjoyed ourselves, and if you get a chance to see this, whether on Broadway or when it goes on tour, I’d recommend it.
    • 🍰 On our way back to our hotel after the show, my wife’s cheesecake sensor was in fine form, and she walked us right up to Junior’s Cheesecake, which absolutely lived up to its promise. We each got slices to go, and enjoyed a late night dessert before heading to bed.
    • 🥯 This morning we got up, got some proper NY bagels for breakfast, and wandered down to eat them on the plaza of NYC’s iconic Schwarzman library. From there we walked a bit of a loop back to our hotel so we could walk by the Empire State Building. We didn’t go up to the top, but just enjoyed the view from street level.
    • 🚕 Finally, we checked out of the hotel, hopped in a taxi (still being rather amused that the “stand on the curb and wave” method of hailing a taxi actually works), and headed to LaGuardia airport to start our trip home.
  • ✈️ Which, true to form, is becoming its own adventure. For whatever reason, rather than getting a direct NYC-SEA flight, we ended up with a three leg flight, with each leg being on a new plane. Our first leg was from NYC to Omaha, Nebraska, which is where we are as I type this.
    • The Omaha airport, by the way, is not one that we’d recommend (especially for a nearly five-hour layover like we have). It’s small, old, poorly marked, and generally unpleasant. Maybe it’ll be better eventually — they are in the process of renovating and expanding — but at the moment, it’s by far the most unpleasant part of this trip.
  • ✈️ The next leg will be from here to Vegas, and then a final jump from Vegas up to Seattle, when we expect to finally land around 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning. So, this post is going up at about 7:30 p.m. Omaha time, still with an hour and a half to go before we leave Nebraska. Not that I’m counting the minutes or anything….

📸 Photos

I brought my “real” camera along for this trip, and have taken a lot of photos, but they won’t be posted until I get through processing them. In the meantime, a few from my phone (not in chronological order).

A wide-angle shot of a woman walking through downtown New York City into Times Square, surrounded by other people, giant flashing billboards, and tall buildings.
Walking into Times Square on our way to the show. So many people, so much noise, so many lights, so much going on. I loved it.
Selfie of my wife and I on a hill overlooking Providence as the sun sets in the distance.
At Providence’s Prospect Terrace park at sunset, before the start of the ghost tour.
A grid of windows of two buildings side-by-side, one a darker brown and one a lighter tan, with a large metal tube running down the darker building.
The view from our hotel window. Wasn’t even remotely disappointed; somehow, this just felt right for New York City.
A white woman with short wavy blonde hair takes a bite from a large piece of pizza, with strings of cheese leading from the pizza to her pursed lips.
My wife, thoroughly enjoying her dinner. As did I.

📚 Reading

While traveling, I’ve finished two more Discworld books by Terry Pratchett (this is my go-to travel reading series at the moment, as I picked the full collection as ebooks some time ago), Guards! Guards! and Eric. Both were fun, and since I still have hours of traveling to go, I’m about to get started on the next one, Moving Pictures.

And that’s it! No links for this week, as most of my brain space was devoted to conferencing and though I was skimming headlines, I didn’t mark anything as particularly noteworthy.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

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Book 33 of 2026: Eric by Terry Pratchett

⭐️⭐️⭐️: A shorter book, this is a relatively quick romp through a mashup of three wishes, Discworld’s version of The Odyssey (rather amusing, as I read this just as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey film was in the theaters), and the joys of mid-level bureaucracy. Not bad, but not a standout.

Me holding Eric

Weekly Notes: July 13–19, 2026

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  • ♿️ The work week was pretty standard, with the most excitement coming either from the continued work on remodeling an old meeting room into office space, which we keep peeking through the windows at, or when an unusual summer storm system came through the Seattle area, when five or six of the people in the office gathered on the balcony outside my office to watch for lightning and listen to the peals of thunder that kept rolling over our heads.

  • ✈️ Most of the week at home was also pretty low-key, but Sunday (“today” if I was actually posting this on Sunday evening, rather than posting on Tuesday morning and backdating it) was a travel day for us, as this next week I’m in Providence, Rhode Island for the 2026 AHEAD conference. This turned into a bit of adventure (originally posted to Facebook, then to this Mastodon thread, so some of you may have seen this already)…

    • Today’s adventures in travel:

      Flight scheduled for 8:20, so we get up at 3:30 and are out the door heading to the airport at 5.

      Flight delayed until 10, which goofs our connecting flight, so everything is rescheduled, and we will now have a 4-hour layover instead of a 1-hour layover, and won’t get to our destination until around midnight. Whee!

      I don’t have the American Airlines app on my phone yet, so we print physical boarding passes and go to the gate (S4). At the gate, I get the AA app installed, get logged in…and the electronic version of the boarding pass shows a different gate (S2). I go check the big reader board on the wall…and it shows a third gate (D26).

      There are no AA employees anywhere in sight. I wander through gate after gate (from the S gates to the D gates, which is a two-shuttle-train journey) until I find a couple employees standing at an AA-marked gate, and go to see if they can confirm what gate we should be at. Only they’re Alaska employees, not AA, and they’re trying to get the monitor updated to show the correct flight info. They point me towards more gates that might have AA employees.

      I head that way, and eventually find some AA people who look up our flight (…on Google…) and say that S2 is the right gate.

      I go back to my wife at S4, and we move over to S2 and settle in. My wife heads off to stand in line at a coffee shop to get us hot chocolates.

      Half an hour later, I get an update on the AA app saying that the gate has been changed…

      …to D26.

      Right.

      I text my wife. She’s just made it to the front of the line, so she bails out just before ordering, thoroughly befuddling everyone behind her. We grab our stuff and make the two-shuttle-train and a lot of walking journey to D26.

      We’re now settled in at D26, which isn’t actually a get-you-on-the-plane gate, but a get-you-on-a-bus-to-get-you-to-the-plane gate.

      It’s an adventure!

    • And our flight just got delayed by another hour. At least that four-hour layover gives us some cushion for things on this end.

    • The sign showing our departure time was showing 11 a.m., but about ten minutes ago it switched to 8:20 a.m. – the original departure time, now an hour and a half in the past. Happily, it just flipped back to 11 a.m. as I started to write this comment. There may be hope of leaving Seattle yet!

      Or we just live at gate D26 now. We’ll send out change of address forms once we’re sure.

    • Announcement: They found the part, it seems to be working, they just need to screw in the eight screws and find the flight crew, who might be over in the other D concourse. Still expecting an 11 a.m. departure.

    • Apparently the part had to be flown in from Dallas.

    • We’re supposed to take off in 30 minutes, and they haven’t yet started bussing us all out to the plane.

      What I’ve learned from this is that American Airlines really needs to get its shit together.

    • It’s the scheduled departure time, and the busses have just started moving people to the plane.

    • (We finally took off at slightly after noon, an hour after the delayed departure time, and three and a half hours after the original departure time.)

    • Landed! Right in line with everything else, there was an announcement shortly after we took off that the in-flight WiFi was down.

      I never bother, so it didn’t affect me, but it did make me laugh.

    • And the adventures continue!

      Landed in Philadelphia at gate C28. Immediately after deboarding, checked the AA app and the airport reader board; both said our next flight was at B15. So we work our way to that gate, pausing at one of the many options to grab Philly cheesesteaks (what else would you get for dinner when in the Philly airport for a layover?).

      We get to B15, sit down, check the app…and while we were going from one gate to the other, they changed our outgoing gate to C21.

      Right.

      We ate our cheesesteaks (which were quite tasty) as we listened to several other travelers make the same realization we just had, and then strolled back to the C concourse and sat at C21. Where we are now waiting for our flight or for the next gate change, whichever comes first.

    • Smaller plane for this leg, with limited overhead bin space, so they asked us to check our carryons. Sure, no problem.

      The bag tag printer broke.

    • Made it (about midnight; hours later than originally scheduled, but we’re here)! We’re in Providence, Rhode Island for the week. I’m here for a work conference, and my wife’s tagging along to enjoy a week poking around Providence. Now for the sleep!

📸 Photos

My hand placing a Washington state vote by mail return envelope into a mailbox.
We sent in our primary ballots this week. If you vote by mail early enough, using the mail should still be okay, but if you wait until closer to the election, especially within a week of the due date, use a drop box instead, as the USPS no longer prioritizes ballots.
An American Airlines plane sitting on the tarmac with a mobile ramp platform letting passengers embark.
My first time (that I can remember, at least) doing the “get bussed to a plane on the tarmac and board there instead of using a gangway” thing.
The classic 'I Want to Believe' poster, only with the UFO replaced with Jimothy.
Tossed together after someone remarked that Mulder would have been all over this Jimothy cryptid.

📚 Reading

I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, which was excellent, my favorite of what I’ve read from him so far, and the first volume of the Star Trek Enterprise Logs, collections of the 1970s Gold Key Star Trek comics, which are not good by any objective measure, but are entertaining, if in a rather cringy way.

📺 Watching

We finished the first (and so far only) season of Widow’s Bay, and I finished the fifth and latest season of For All Mankind, both of which are excellent.

🎧 Listening

I realized this week that Gangstagrass had recently released a new album, The Blackest Thing on the Menu, so their blend of bluegrass and hip-hop has been in high rotation.

🔗 Linking

  • Marcin Wichary at Unsung: “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”: Fun little roundup of answers to a Bluesky thread on favorite and least favorite file types. For me? Favorite: .txt, specifically .md (Markdown formatted text…or even more specifically, a mix of Markdown and HTML tags to ensure proper semantic tagging) for simplicity, portability, compatibility, and convertibility. Least favorite: .pdf, as for someone who works in the accessibility field, PDFs are the bane of my existence, serving both as a regular source of headaches and job security.

  • LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project: “Two decades of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, documented bill by bill. […] In the 2026 session, lawmakers introduced 787 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — 55% of them targeting transgender people.”

  • Jerry Cornfield at the Washington State Standard: It’s official: WA voters will get to weigh in on new income tax: I’d have phrased that headline somewhat differently, but the Standard leans quite a bit more conservative than I do. The initiative is being pushed by Brian Heywood of “Let’s Go Washington”, who, if you can’t tell by the name of his organization, exists somewhere in the general right-wing/libertarian “all taxes and Democrats are bad” political space, and has taken up Tim Eyman’s mantle as the local “exploit populist approaches to tear everything down” ringleader. Vote “no” on Initiative 645 and keep the high-earnings income tax in place.

  • Phil Gyford: Flickr iOS and iPadOS app version 5: “So here’s a list of all the things that are worse about the new version, compiled from my own usage and all the recent bad reviews on the App Store.” This is discouraging. I’ve been using Flickr for over two decades, and still (mostly) like them, but if this is a sign of where they’re heading, it doesn’t bode well.

  • Connor Nash at the South Seattle Emerald: Inside One of 18 Data Centers Operating in Tukwila Industrial Park: “According to the website Data Center Map, there are at least a dozen data centers in Seattle, mainly downtown. But the site’s map also shows 18 data centers in one industrial park in Tukwila, 17 of which publicly report their power capacity. Collectively, those data centers reported that they could draw 80 to 113 megawatts at maximum capacity. If these data centers sustained that demand for a month, they would consume about 57,600 to 81,360 megawatt-hours of electricity — equivalent to the monthly electricity use of 94,000 to 133,000 Seattle-area homes.”

  • Louie Mantia at Parakeet Blog: The Shape of Apps: “Because app icons from the Mac OS X era are so beloved, it’s very understandable—relatable even—how mandating rounded square app icons is downright heartbreaking to long-time Mac OS X users. ¶ What happened? Why did this happen? And what should we do?” While I’m still not a fan of the mandated squircle and really wish Apple would relax things so icons could be more distinctive again, this is an interesting and more measured look at the possible thinking behind the change.

  • Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku: Jimothy Isn’t A Cryptid, But Instead The Internet’s Favorite Racoon: “Earlier this month, some people in the Seattle, Washington area began spotting a strange little creature scuttling about. Was it a new cryptid? A new mysterious creature like Bigfoot or Nessie? Nope. Instead, what people were spotting was a raccoon with a deformed spine that locals have started referring to as Jimothy. And unlike those other cryptids, he’s real and cool.” If you somehow haven’t heard of Jimothy yet, here you go.

  • Abhijith M B at Windows Latest: Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a GDID tracker with no off switch, first documented publicly in an FBI hacker complaint: Windows has a Global Device ID (GDID), “a permanent, unique digital fingerprint that Microsoft automatically assigns to your computer when you install Windows or sign into a Microsoft account.” This allows Microsoft to track what you do and where you are, which information can then be given to law enforcement. The GDID survives Windows updates. A clean reinstall can generate a new one, but when combined with other identifying markers, multiple GDIDs can be tied together as belonging to the same person.

  • Keyana Sapp at Worse on Purpose: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose: “Nowhere is the illusion of choice more potent than in the appliance showroom. Dozens of brands fan out across the price tiers, a wall of brushed steel under the lights, and behind all of it sit five or six companies. The labels compete. The machines mostly don’t.”

Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs

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Book 31 of 2026: Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs

⭐️⭐️⭐️: 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.

Me holding The Enterprise Logs

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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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.

Me holding Service Model

Weekly Notes: July 6–12, 2026

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  • ♿️ 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

An adorable cream and white puppy runs through a yard with its tongue hanging out.
Prairie’s sister’s family has a new and very adorable puppy, Obi, who really enjoys running in circles around the back yard.
A small sculpture of a fairy sitting on a swing made of twigs and leaves hanging from a tree branch, placed in a moss-covered hollow in a tree.
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.

🎧 Listening

🔗 Linking

  • 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.”