Affinity by Canva Accessible PDF Output Test

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The Affinity by Canva splash screen over an Adobe Acrobat window with an open PDF document.

With the release of Affinity by Canva, I was curious how they were doing on supporting creating accessible PDF output. A very quick cursory initial check showed some hopeful signs, but I wanted to take a more detailed look, so I’ve put together a brief test document to check some of the more common document features. This isn’t at all meant to be all-encompassing and comprehensive; it’s just what popped to mind as I was experimenting. My hope is to occasionally update this as I think of more test cases (or have more test cases suggested to me) and as Affinity is updated.

More details are in the document itself, but in brief, I set up several test cases using various Affinity features, exported to tagged PDF, and checked the PDF in Acrobat to see how things looked.

If you’d like to play along at home, you can download the source .af document (5 MB .zip) and the exported .pdf document (721 KB .pdf) to review yourself and otherwise do with as you wish under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license.

The executive summary TL;DR: Canva/Affinity is making improvements, but Affinity in its current state is definitely not ready to be a replacement for Adobe InDesign. If you’re an Affinity die-hard and have the time and resources to do remediation work in Acrobat Pro or using a tool like CommonLook, you could certainly go that route, but don’t expect to be able to export an accessible PDF from Affinity just yet.

I do want to be clear that none of this is to say that Affinity is “bad” or shouldn’t be used; on the contrary, I’m looking forward to using it as much as I can (for experimentation and any print-only work I do). This is all intended to encourage Canva/Affinity to continue working on this aspect of their software.

Test Case 1: Paragraphs

Result: Fail. Any paragraph that is more than one line gets one P tag for every line, rather than one P tag for the entire paragraph. In addition, if there are any deviations from the base style (using character styles, manual formatting, adding hyperlinks, etc.), all of those end up in their own individual P tags instead of being wrapped in Span tags inside the P tag.

Test Case 2: Headings

Result: Pass (with qualifications). When creating styles, PDF (and EPUB) export tagging can be assigned — as long as you only need P or H1 through H6; no other tags (like BlockQuote, for example) can be assigned to styles. Within that, though, text given a heading style does export with the correct tag…but once again, if the heading spans more than one line, it ends up being two H1 (or whatever level) tags rather than one.

Test Case 3: Images

Result: Pass/Fail (yes, both).

Pass: Images can be placed inline or floated; if floated, they can be anchored within text. Alt text can be assigned various ways, either manually or (in theory, I didn’t test this) automatically pulled from the image’s XMP metadata. The alt text pane also supports adding extended description and summary text, though I haven’t played with these fields yet. Alt text is correctly added to the Figure tag in the PDF.

Fail: Though the images were placed inline with the text in the document, the Figure tag was placed at the end of the content for its parent text frame rather than at the proper place within the text.

Test Case 4: Lists

Result: Fail. Lists are tagged as paragraphs, without any L or child LI, LBL, or LBODY tags.

Test Case 5: Languages

Result: Fail. I could not find any way to designate a base language for the document as a whole. Character and paragraph styles can be given a language setting, but (in addition to the character style being tagged as a new P rather than a Span within the paragraph) the language is not set in the tag properties.

Test Case 6: Tables

Result: Fail. Simple tables can be added and their visual presentation can be adjusted, but I found no way to set header rows or columns. Tables also cannot be given alt text (at least, not with the same Tags pane used to add alt text to images).

The table was not tagged with any Table or child TR, TH, or TD tags, just a lot of P tags. In addition, though the table was inline with text later in the document, it was placed as a Sect at nearly the top of the document, the first tags underneath the opening H1 tags.

Test Case 7: Table of Contents

Result: Fail. Affinity can automatically generate a table of contents from the header styles used in a document. However, the exported PDF does not use any TOC or associated child tags; every line of the table of contents is a P tag followed by a Link tag that contains two Link - OBJR tags, one for the text of the item and one for the page number.

Test Case 8: Reading Order

Result: Pass (with qualifications). Affinity has a Reading Order panel which allows you to rearrange items, group items together into articles, and toggle items off and on, and this does properly affect the tags in the exported PDF. In an earlier test document (not publicly distributable), I was easily able to put all of the objects in their correct reading order. However, in this test document, the images (which are placed inline with the text, and therefore within a text frame) don’t appear in the reading order panel, and as noted above, don’t have their Figure tags placed in the correct location.

Test Case 9: Master Pages

Result: Pass. My test document had master pages set up with footer text; this text was properly excluded (artifacted) in the PDF.

Test Case 10: There is no test ten…

…because I ran out of ideas right then. But more can be added! When I have time, I want to add more objects to play with the reading order pane more, explore Affinity’s footnotes/index/reference support (which at this point I don’t expect to be tagged correctly, but maybe someday), and there are probably plenty of other things that more experienced accessibility and/or document creation professionals might think of.

Conclusion

As noted in the TL;DR up top, Affinity is a long way away from being able to replace InDesign when it comes to creating accessible PDFs.

That said — they’re working on it! This is more support than the last version of Affinity had, and there are more signs here and there that more may be in development. For example, while I was looking for a way to specify a base document language, I checked the File > Document Metadata option, and it’s a series of checkboxes and fields for specifying exactly which accessibility features a document supports, its conformance level, a certifier’s name and credentials, and so on. (The actual basic document metadata, including title, author, copyright info, etc., can be set with the Window > References > Fields pane, and does get properly added to the exported PDF.)

While there’s certainly work to be done, I’m encouraged to see the features that have been added so far, and as noted above, want to encourage Affinity to continue working on this aspect of the app. I would love to be able to finally drop InDesign (as I dropped Photoshop and Illustrator years ago) and move entirely over to Affinity (well…entirely aside from Acrobat…).

Addendum: ePub output

Out of curiosity and a question on Mastodon (that I don’t actually think was directed at me, but that’s okay), I exported this test document to ePub format, using both the “fixed layout” and “reflowable” options. I then checked each file in both Thorium Reader and Apple’s Books app, and ran them through the Ace by DAISY ePub accessibility checker.

It should be noted that I did not change anything about the file for this test, and I created the document with PDF in mind, not ePub, so this may affect the results.

I’m not as experienced in checking ePub files, but a few notes:

Ace by DAISY reported errors with both documents. The fixed layout version had eight errors, three serious and five moderate; the reflowable version had 22 errors, one critical, 16 serious, and five moderate. The ePubs and Ace by DAISY reports may be downloaded for you to review. All downloadable files are .zip files that you’ll need to decompress — I know that ePubs are already zipped, but my WordPress configuration wouldn’t allow me to upload the .epub file.

The fixed layout version is much larger than the reflowable. I think that’s because the reflowable version seems to have scaled and compressed the photos in the document, while the fixed layout version left them at their original sizes. This may have been an export setting in Affinity that I didn’t adjust.

Neither document has bookmarks automatically defined.

The fixed layout version in Thorium using Thorium’s built-in reader reads the images outside of their placement in the text, instead speaking them at the beginning of the second page. The table on page three also gets read at the beginning of the third page. This does not happen with the reflowable version; images are read in their correct locations.

There’s an odd black square graphic that appears at the end of the Test 3 section in the reflowable version that is not present in the original Affinity file. I have no idea where this image is coming from.

Using Apple Books’s built-in reader, the reflowable version seemed to read properly, but the fixed layout version was missing large chunks of text.

With the aforementioned caveat that this document wasn’t created with ePub in mind, which may be affecting things, my first impression is that, as with PDF tagging, Affinity has some work to do with creating accessible ePub files. This is definitely an app that currently is much more aimed at visual presentation (whether print or electronic), with accessibility being an afterthought. Once again, I hope this improves over time as future versions are released.

Summer 2024 Vacation Photos (Long-Delayed)

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I’d let this project fall to the side for a while, but I started coming back to it last week, and this morning before work, I finally finished processing and uploading my photos from our summer 2024 vacation up to Victoria, B.C.

If you’d like to scroll through someone else’s vacation photos, I have them split into two albums on Flickr: 2024 Summer Vacation 1: Sequim and Port Angeles and 2024 Summer Vacation 2: Victoria, B.C.. Otherwise, here’s a one-shot-per-day sampler.

My wife and I on a hotel rooftop deck, with green fields under a blue sky filled with fluffy grey clouds.
Day 1, Sequim: At our hotel in Sequim.
A Nikon camera with an old reflex telephoto lens attached.
Day 2, Port Angeles: While wandering through antique stores, we stumbled across this very cool old lens, a Nikkor 500mm f/8 reflex telephoto, still with its original carry case and filter set. If you’re into quirky old photo gear, I have more shots of and by this lens.
Flat stones on a sandy beach, in a nearly monochromatic image.
Day 3, Klaloch Beach: Playing with the new lens while walking along Klaloch Beach. The out-of-focus rocks in the distance show the characteristic “donut” effect caused by the mirror setup of the reflex lens.
A whale's flukes break the surface of the sea as water streams off of them, with forested hills visible in the distance.
Day 4, Whale Watching: A whale watching tour on the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Port Angeles and Victoria.
A snow-covered mountain in the far distance, rising above marshlands and out-of-focus driftwood in the foreground.
Day 5, Dungeness Wildlife Refuge: We took a nice, long, slow wander about a third of the way out along the spit at the wildlife refuge. Lots of birds and gorgeous views of Mt. Baker.
A dimly-lit basement with a gigantic spider sculpture.
Day 6, Port Angeles: On our last day in Port Angeles we went on their “underground” walking tour. Not as much underground as Seattle’s, but historical walking tours are generally fun, and this one was occasional enhanced by Halloween decorations that never got removed after the 2020 pandemic shutdown; apparently when the tours started again, enough people were amused by them that they’re just year-round decorations now.
A man wearing a keffiyah and waving a Palestinian flag stands next to a row of people holding an elongated Palestinian flag on the steps in front of Victoria's Parliament building.
Day 7, Victoria: We ferried over to Victoria, took a carriage ride tour through one of the historical neighborhoods, and then happened to be walking by the Parliament building when a protest against the Palestinian genocide was getting started.
On a hilltop with Camelot visible in the distance, a tiny knight in armor on horseback raises a sword in salute.
Day 8, Victoria: The Miniature World Museum was a fun treat, with lots of intricately detailed miniature dioramas of scenes past and future, real and fantastical. Our day also included high tea at the Empress Hotel and an evening walk along the waterfront.
Water drips from a bamboo pipe into a circular basin with a square indentation in the center. It's visually satisfying in an incredibly generic sort of way.
Day 9, The Butchart Gardens: We bussed up to spend most of the day at the Butchart Gardens, which are beautiful. Lots of pretty landscapes and flowers…and this, what I think is probably the most hilariously “should be sold with the generic artwork in frames at Ross or T.J. Maxx and hung in a mid-tier hotel somewhere” photo I’ve taken yet.
A 1960s stereo on display in a museum. It's made of two wooden cases, one on the right to hold LPs, the other on the left, twice as wide, to hold the turntable and central control panel. Black spherical speakers are on either side. The whole thing is probably about eight feet wide.
Day 10, The Royal BC Museum: The museum had an exhibit with a lot of mid-century-modern items as part. There were several stereos like this one that I’d love to have (if I had the space and budget to ignore practicality, neither of which I do).
A narrow brick alley, strung with lights and round red paper lanterns.
Day 11, Victoria: For our last day in Victoria, we took two walking tours: a food tour in the morning, and a ghost walk tour in the evening. Both were a lot of fun.
A snow-covered mountain in the distance under a clear blue sky and with flat blue ocean in the foreground.
Day 12: Heading Home: And then we hopped back on the ferry, caught a nice view of Mt. Baker on our way back to Washington, and drove back home.

Weekly Notes: October 27–November 2, 2025

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  • Our big thing this week was taking a weekend mini-break to celebrate my wife’s birthday (coming up tomorrow). As soon as work was done on Friday we headed into Seattle and checked in to the Olive 8. We’d stayed here over the summer during Worldcon and enjoyed it, so we decided to come back. Once we’d checked in and had dinner, our first thing for the weekend was…
    • Shrew, a great version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Really funny, but not at all shying away from the play’s more controversial and problematic elements, even to giving Katherine’s final monologue a wonderfully creepy, horror-movie-esque staging that worked wonderfully well.

    • Saturday we had a nice lazy morning before braving a Seattle windstorm to walk down to the Pike Place Market to get breakfast and pick up fixings for lunch. Back to the hotel for lunch and lounging, and then we heading back down toward the Market for dinner and a show at the Seattle Can Can’s Hitchcock Hotel. Humor, dance, songs, nudity, and a great time; we even ended up with seats right by the stage (any closer and we’d have been part of the show…thankfully, that honor went to another member of the audience).

    • After the show and a quick stop back at the hotel room, we headed up the hill to the Mercury for this month’s Saturday. This wasn’t on the original plan, but we had energy and it seemed like a good addition to the weekend’s plans. Amusingly, since this wasn’t in the original plan, I’d packed for walking around a rainy and windy Seattle, and I do believe that this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Mercury wearing pants!

📸 Photos

My hand placing a Washington ballot envelope into a blue-and-white King County ballot drop box.
It’s time to vote! If you’re local to Washington and haven’t done so already, get your ballot filled out and to a drop box!
A Washington state ferry pulls in with the Seattle waterfront ferris wheel in the foreground on a grey fall day.
This was just such a Seattle scene.
The Can Can room all in red and gold, with a stage on the left with a closed red velvet curtain, red fabric stretched aross the ceiling over strings of lights.
The view from our seats at the Can Can.

📝 Writing

I took a look at this week’s updates to the Affinity design suite, and came out cautiously hopeful, which was a better place than I was afraid of ending up.

📺 Watching

  • I finished the first (currently only) season of Alien: Earth early this week. That was very enjoyably and often disturbingly creepy, and does a better job of working with the perennial “what if xenomorphs made it to Earth” question than I was afraid it might, especially given that this is set before the original movie. I was particularly impressed with the work they did in blending the original very ’70s aesthetic with modern tech and techniques; it’s as good or better as the work done with both Rogue One and Andor in the Star Wars world.

  • Sunday afternoon we watched Jurassic World: Rebirth. Mostly it was fine (I mean, it’s hard to go wrong with dinosaurs chasing people), but it kind of fell apart at the end with the “D-Rex” (dubbed the “Disappointment Rex” by my wife). Studios really need to remember that it’s entirely possible to write a good, enjoyable, fun adventure/horror sequel without constantly having to one-up the last one with something bigger (figuratively and literally). Still, sometimes you’re just in the mood to watch people make bad decision around dangerous animals, and the series continues to entertain on that front.

🔗 Linking

  • Tom Ellison at McSweeney’s: Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, And I Am Ready For Your Apology: “In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, ‘What a lazy cheater.’ ¶ Now you’d think, ‘At least he’s not asking Gemini.’ ¶ In a few years, you’ll say, ‘Wow, look, a human being who can read.'”

  • Jesus Diaz at Fast Company: Canva’s new free Affinity app wants to sink the Adobe flagships: “Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.”

Initial Thoughts on Affinity by Canva

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I’ve been an Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher user since sometime before 2019 (the first mention I can find here), and have recommended them to a lot of people as a less expensive but (nearly) equivalent alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign suite of apps. Last year Affinity was acquired by Canva, which did not thrill me (I’m not a fan of Canva, as accessibility has never seemed to be a high priority for them, and remediating PDFs created by Canva users is an ongoing exercise in frustration), but at the time they pledged to uphold Affinity’s pricing and quality. All we could do at that point was wait to see what happened.

A few weeks ago, Affinity closed their forums, opened a Discord server, removed the ability to purchase the current versions of the Affinity suite of apps, and started posting vague “something big is coming” posts to their social media channels and email lists. Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with much of the existing user base, and we’ve had three weeks of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), with a lot of people (including me) expecting that Canva would taking Affinity down the road of enshittification.

Yesterday was the big announcement, and…

The Affinity by Canva startup splash screen.

…as it turns out, it looks to me at first blush that it doesn’t suck. The short version:

  1. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher have been deprecated, all replaced with a single unified application called Affinity by Canva.
    1. The existing versions of the old Affinity suite (version 2.6.5) will continue to work, so existing users can continue to use those if they don’t want to update. In theory, these will work indefinitely; in practice, that depends on how long Canva keeps the registration servers active and when Apple releases a macOS update that breaks the apps in some way. Hopefully, neither of those things happens for quite some time (and if Canva ever does decide to retire the registration servers, I’d really hope that they’d at least be kind enough to issue a final update for the apps that removes the registration check; I don’t expect it, but it would be the best possible way to formally “end of life” support for these apps).
  2. Affinity by Canva is free.
    1. You do need to sign in with a Canva account. But you had to sign in to Affinity with Serif account, and Canva now owns Serif, so this isn’t exactly a big surprise for me.
  3. The upsell is that if you want to use AI features, you have to pony up for a paid Canva Pro account. Assumedly, they figure there are enough people on the AI bandwagon that this, in combination with Canva’s coffers, will be enough to subsidize the app for all the people who don’t want or need the AI features.
    1. “AI features” is a little vague, but it seems to cover both generative AI and machine learning tools.

    2. Affinity’s new “Machine Learning Models” preferences section has four optional installs: Segmentation (“allows Photo to create precise, detailed pixel selections”), Depth Estimation (“allows Photo to build a depth map from pixel layers or placed images”), Colorization (“used to restore realistic colors from a black and white pixel layer”), and Super Resolution (“allows pixel layers to be scaled up in size without loss of quality”). Of these, Segmentation is the only one that currently is installable without a Canva Pro account; the other three options are locked. The preferences dialog does have a note that “all machine learning operations in Affinity Photo are performed ‘on-device’ — so no data leaves your device at any time”.

    3. The Canva AI Integrations page on the new Affinity site indicates that available AI tools also include generative features such as automatically expanding the edges of an image and text-to-image generation (interestingly, this includes both pixel and vector objects).

    4. In the FAQs at the bottom of the integrations promo page, Canva says that Affinity content is not used to train AI. “In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.”

      1. If you, like me, are not a fan of generative AI, I do recommend checking your Canva account settings and disabling everything you can (I’ve done this myself). The relevant settings are under “Personal Privacy” (I disabled everything) and “AI Personalization”.
    5. I actually feel like this is an acceptable approach. Since I’m no fan of generative AI, I can simply not sign up for a Canva Pro account, disable the “Canva AI” button in Affinity’s top button bar, and not worry about it; people who do want to use it can pay the money to do so. I do wish there was a clearer distinction between generative AI and on-device machine learning tools and that more of the on-device machine learning tools were available without being locked behind the paywall; that said, the one paywalled feature I’d be most likely to occasionally want to use is the Super Resolution upscaling, and I can do that in an external app on the occasional instances where I need it.

So at this point, I’m feeling mostly okay with the changes. There are still some reservations, of course.

I’m not entirely sold on the “single app” approach. Generally, a “one stop shop” approach tends to mean that a program is okay at doing a lot of things instead of being really good at doing one thing, and it would be a shame if this change meant reduced functionality. That said, Affinity has said that this was their original vision, and they’ve long had an early version of this in their existing apps, with top-bar buttons in each app that would switch you into an embedded “light” version of the other apps for specific tasks, so it does feel like a pretty natural evolution.

A lot of this does depend on how much trust you put in Canva. Of course, that goes with any customer/app/developer relationship. I have my skepticism, but I’m also going to recognize that at least right now, Canva does seem to be holding to the promises that they made when they acquired Serif/Affinity.

Time will tell how well Canva actually holds to their promises of continuing to provide a free illustration, design, and publishing app that’s powerful enough to compete with three of Adobe’s major apps. Right now, I’m landing…maybe not on “cautiously optimistic”, but at least somewhere in “cautiously hopeful”.

Finally, one very promising thing I’ve already found. While I haven’t done any in-depth experimenting yet, I did take a peek at the new Typography section, and styles can now define PDF export tags! The selection of available tags to choose from is currently somewhat limited (just P and H1 through H6), but the option is there. I created a quick sample document, chose the Export: PDF (digital – high quality) option, and there is a “Tagged” option that is enabled by default for this export setting (it’s also enabled by default for the PDF (digital – small size) and PDF (for export) options; the PDF (for print), PDF (press ready), PDF (flatten), PDF/X-1a:2003, PDF/X-3:2003, and PDF/X-4 options all default to having the “Tagged” option disabled).

When I exported the PDF (38 KB PDF) and checked it in Acrobat, the good news is that the heading and paragraph tags exist! The less-good news is that paragraphs that go over multiple lines are tagged with one P tag per line, instead of one P tag per paragraph.

So accessible output support is a bit of a mixed bag right now (only a few tags available, imperfect tagging on export), but it’s at least a good improvement over the prior versions. Here’s the current help page on creating accessible PDFs, and hopefully this is a promising sign of more to come.

Weekly Notes: October 20–26, 2025

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  • ♿️ Another quite busy week at work. Tuesday through Thursday mornings were the WAPED fall meeting; on various days this afternoon there were meetings with artists who are working with some of our visually disabled students on some tactile public art for the soon-to-open light rail station near the college, two training sessions on creating screen-reader accessible math equations in documents, and two public information sessions with a representative from the Secretary of State about Washington State’s accessible voting options.

  • Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.

Reading

Finished two books this week: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and a Star Trek manga.

Listening

I indulged myself with a silly idea I had a few weeks ago, and created a 40-minute mix of mashups based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Definitely a mix that will either really work for someone or drive them absolutely up the wall.

I also picked up two new albums on Saturday that I’ll start listening to into this coming week:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Eight, the latest in a compilation series from Infacted Recordings.

  • Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.

Linking

  • Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”

  • Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”

  • Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”

  • Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”

  • Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”

  • Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”

  • Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian Magazine: See This Year’s Hilarious Finalists From the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, From Gossiping Leopards to Breakdancing Foxes: “Founded in 2015 by two professional photographers, the awards merge skillful wildlife photography with the “positive power” of humor to promote wildlife and habitat conservation, per a statement. The competition is free and open to novices, amateurs and professionals.”

  • Ella Glover at The Guardian: ‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone: “Some research suggests that the average age of festivalgoers is increasing, and older people are still going out frequently, which may account for the increased number of people attending solo….”

Star Trek: The Manga Volume 1: Shinsei/Shinsei edited by Luis Reyes

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Book 57 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An anthology of six short pieces; five manga-style comics and one short story. Seeing TOS-era Trek through the eyes of manga artists is amusing, and all the stories were fine for Trek in this medium (though the “twist ending” of the first story was pretty clearly visible quite early on). I think this came from the Norwescon Little Free Library table a couple years back, as I’d had no idea this kind of thing existed. My favorite stories were Chris Dows’ “Side Effects” (even with the predictable ending) and Rob Tokar’s “Orphans” (the Enterprise vs. giant mecha!).

Me holding Star Trek: The Manga Vol. 1

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

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Book 56 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I backed the special Kickstarter re-release edition of this on a bit of a whim, figuring that it was worth supporting a local author whom I’d met at Norwescon. I also knew that it was a bit of a risk for me: I never got into role-playing games, and the last time I read a book that I described as “like watching someone else play a game“, I didn’t say that in a complimentary way (Dafydd Ab Hugh’s Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead). Thankfully, Dinniman is much better at this sort of thing than Ab Hugh was, and I was entertained throughout. Carl isn’t too much of an asshole, Donut is just enough of an asshole (she is a cat, after all), and the adventure is a good balance of dungeon crawl and slowly exploring the wider world. Honestly, I kind of expected that this would be a one-off thing, but I was amused enough that I’ll continue backing the Kickstarter editions to collect a full set.

Me holding Dungeon Cralwer Carl.

Difficult Listening Hour 2025.10.20: I Have Absolutely Had Enough

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One of those goofball ideas that most people will either really like or really hate, with very little in-between: Stringing together every mashup in my collection that’s based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. 40 minutes of one Depeche Mode song mashed up with a bunch of others! Enjoy. Or don’t. Either way, I scratched an itch. ;)

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Weekly Notes: October 13–19, 2025

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  • ♿️ The big thing at work this week was Friday’s annual professional development day; I was serving on the PDD committee, and presented for one of the sessions. The first time I did a PDD accessibility presentation I had two attendees; this year I had over 60, so I’d say that’s a success! If you’d like, you can head on over to YouTube to see me ramble on for a bit over an hour with an introduction to viewing, checking, and editing accessibility tags in PDFs.

  • 🇺🇸 Saturday we took the light rail into Seattle to be part of No Kings 2.0 protest. Reports say that Seattle had around 90,000 participants and that there were as many as 8 million countrywide, making this the second-largest protest in U.S. history (after the 1970 Earth Day protest, which drew 20 million). I brought my camera; my photos from the protest are on Flickr.

  • 🎭 Sunday we went back into the city to see the Seattle Opera’s The Pirates of Penzance. The production was great, and we both really enjoyed getting to see it; I hadn’t seen a performance of Penzance in decades, and it was my wife’s first time seeing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on stage. Great way to wrap up a weekend.

📸 Photos

A low-angle shot of a shallow pond on a sunny fall day.
I wrapped up professional development day on Friday with a walk around the pond in the wooded area on campus.
The program for The Pirates of Penzance, held up with the audience and stage in the background.
It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!

📚 Reading

I read the latest Star Trek: Strange New Worlds novel, David Mack’s Ring of Fire.

🎧 Listening

For some time now I’ve been collecting the “Matrix Downloaded” compilations from the Alfa Matrix label. This week I got notification that issue twelve was out, which I realized meant I’d missed the release of issue eleven, so both of those have just been added to my collection. Between professional development day and the weekend’s activities, I haven’t really dug into them yet, but they’re generally pretty solid compilations.

🔗 Linking