⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Descendants of Khan and his compatriots face off against the Federation. I found this one to be above average, with much of it being something of an early take on the same issues explored by Strange New Worlds with Number One’s status as an Illyrian in hiding, expanded to explore how a society of genetically engineered humans might deal with how they’d be perceived by the Federation. As often happens with any eugenics storyline, it would be improved if the Federation was more honest and introspective about how initial fear and caution has developed into long-standing systemic bigotry, but as Star Trek has yet to really tackle that aspect of the universe, I wouldn’t really have expected it from a thirty-year-old novel.
🎓 This week was Highline’s graduation week, with the commencement ceremony on Thursday. We had a record number of graduates this year (almost 900 signed up to walk in the ceremony), and still managed to wrap up the ceremony in just slightly under two and a half hours. Not bad!
🍾 Happy anniversary to us! Friday was our thirteenth anniversary. Rather than doing anything big, as we just made it through graduation week and have plans coming up next weekend and beyond, we celebrated by having a quiet weekend of naps, reading, and movies here at home.
🌞 Happy solstice! Summer is officially here.
📸 Photos
Improvements made this year that I was involved with included adding the on-stage video screen (in the past, the video was only sent to the arena jumbotron, which is directly above all the graduates, so they couldn’t see anything presented on screen) and moving the live captions from small displays on the sides of the stage to being included on the main video feed. A few glitches here and there, but we know what to work on for next year.All fancied up for the commencement ceremony! I wasn’t graduating, just participating as part of the faculty and staff. The hood recognizes my master’s degree, the rainbow honors cord is the one Highline uses for disability support.Thanks to some birthday funds, I added a Nikkor 26mm f/2.8 lens to my kit. Will be a great walk-around travel lens when we get around to traveling next.
Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.
📺 Watching
Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.
TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.
🔗 Linking
Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”
James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”
Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”
Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Conservative techbros clone America’s founding fathers and raise them in isolation as if it were the 18th century, training them to bring America back to its former glory…until one of them finds a stray iPhone. A very funny and incisive sci-fi political satire; highly recommended.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Hard-boiled noir detective fiction set in an alternate present where Sitka, Alaska is home to resettled Jews after Israel failed to become its own nation after WWII. In addition to being a fun and incredibly well-written noir, the Alaskan setting is great. I grew up in Alaska, and though I pretty much stayed in Anchorage and have only been to Sitka once on a cruise long after I’d moved south, Chabon’s descriptions of Alaskan locales, weather, and people feel oh so familiar. At least the secular bits; as a lapsed Episcopalian, I can’t speak to the Jewishness of it all. Excellent book.
♿️ With the last two weeks being the final two weeks of spring quarter (the last week of classes and finals week), there’s been a lot going on that I’ve been either directly or tangentially involved with. There’s been the launch party for this year’s Arcturus, Highline’s annual student literary journal, the Achieve students’ capstone presentations, a short student-written and produced play, and a discussion panel by four graduating journalists from the Thunderword, our student paper. Plus, of course, all the usual work stuff. I’m looking forward to getting through graduation this coming week and (hopefully) having things slow down a bit over the summer.
✨ Interestingly, and often amusingly, AI has been an ongoing theme this week.
🎓 During the capstone presentations for Achieve, where students from our program for intellectually disabled students present what they’ve done and accomplished over their time at Highline, several of them made it clear that they’d done all the work on their presentations themselves, without using AI.
🎭 The play, written and improvised by the four actors, had an ongoing plot line about whether or not to use AI, with one character convincing another to stop using it. In the after-play conversation, the actors and students in the audience had more to say along these lines.
📰 During the Thunderbird panel, the journalists got a question about AI use, and all vehemently decried the use of AI for their writing. “We’re humans, and we want real human writing, feelings, and reactions in our stories.”
💼 This week was a “listening session” with a representative of a headhunting firm as Highline starts the process of looking for a new college president. AI came up here as well, with people recognizing that we can’t ignore AI’s effects, but also stressing that we don’t want someone who would attempt to push AI over actually educating our students.
👍🏻 Overall, it was heartening that throughout the weeks, from our students to our staff and faculty, there is a lot of healthy skepticism (at best) about genAI.
🎨 Also work-related, this week we had a presentation to Highline’s Board of Trustees telling them about a project we’ve had in progress with Sound Transit’s art program (STart) over the course of the year. We’ve had three visually disabled students working with artists on a piece of tactile artwork for the Kent-DesMoines light rail station, giving their input on materials, colors, and other aspects to make the artwork effective for Blind and low-vision people. The piece is still being finished, but should be installed sometime in August. I’m really looking forward to seeing it!
🚀 Outside of work, last Sunday was Norwescon’s summer picnic…or, well, summer-ish picnic, as for some reason it was much earlier in the year than usual. It was a nice day of hanging out with Norwescon people, chatting and tossing ideas around. Plus, on a personal note, I formally turned over administration duties for our Google Suite to someone else, taking one more thing off of my plate! I’m getting closer to having an actually reasonable amount of duties, instead of my usual “you do how much?” lineup.
📸 Photos
I finished the Lego Enterprise-D this week, and it now sits on display in my home office, next to my complete collection of Star Trek DVDs and Blu-rays, plus a few other Trek bits and bobs. While not visible, these bookshelves also hold my Trek book collection.At the Norwescon picnic.
📚 Reading
Three books finished over these two weeks, one of which was even non-fiction!
This afternoon we watched Send Help (2026), Sam Raimi’s latest horror comedy, and really enjoyed it. Dark, twisted, funny, and with a very satisfying end.
🔗 Linking
Sarah Mizes-Tan at KNKX/NPR: Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students: Just in case you thought WA was too blue for this sort of bigotry: “Student athletes in Washington state who want to compete in girls’ sports would likely have to obtain genital exams to participate if a controversial ballot initiative passes in November.”
Heidi Groover at the Seattle Times: Downtown Seattle may house new data center: “A Texas real estate firm filed permit applications with the city last week proposing a six-story building including a data center, office and retail space at Third Avenue and Virginia Street. The location once housed a Bed Bath & Beyond store and since last year has been home to the contemporary arts center Cannonball Arts.”
Ex Astris Scientia: The Evolution of Screen Ratios in Star Trek: “This article looks at the technical standards that shaped television and cinema, the artistic choices that influenced how Trek moved between these formats and how the franchise entered the era of modern widescreen TV with its new possibilities. It also highlights some odd and inconsequential decisions along the way, including humorous uses of inconsistent aspect ratios in crossovers. Finally, it examines the pros and cons of ‘cinematic’ screen ratios for television series.”
Hunter Ingram at Variety: How ‘For All Mankind’ Works With Apple to Revive and Upgrade the Forgotten Newton as Its Alt-History iPhone: “Apple products and their use in film and TV have long been a source of conversation. Who can carry an iPhone on screen? Are bad guys forced to use nondescript phones and computers so as not to sow chaos with a device bearing Apple’s famous logo? Well, ‘For All Mankind’ asks a different question altogether: Can its characters use a completely forgotten Apple product canceled two decades ago?”
Better Images of AI: “We aim to create a new repository of better images of AI that anyone can use, starting with a collection of inspirational images. We will continue to gather images for this repository and commission original work. We welcome image submissions and funding to commission and brief more artists.”
John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications: “Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a ‘basic competence’ issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me?”
Catherynne M. Valente: The Democratic Urge to Lose (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!”
Chris Person at Aftermath: Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes: “But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about.”
BBSG: Bash Static Site Generator: “BSSG processes Markdown files and builds a minimal, accessible website suitable for personal journals, daily writing, or introspective personal newspapers.” Thinking this might be my first step into moving to a static site generator.
Book 24 of 2026: Possession by J.M. Dillard and Kathleen O’Malley.
⭐️⭐️⭐️: A horror-ish entry, as malevolent alien entities possess the crew. A little slow to start, but not bad, with some nice moments focusing on Worf’s home life with Alexander.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Okay, yes — it could be argued that this book is simply reinforcing my existing biases. But it does a damn good job of that! For anyone less than enthusiastic about the AI invasion, and for some who are too enthusiastic but could perhaps be convinced to question their stance, this is an excellent and accessible takedown of the overhyped and existentially problematic push for “AI”.
I only had two issues:
One, that the this area is simply moving so fast that even though the book was just published within the past year (and so written probably mostly in 2024, so even the most current research available while writing would have been from 2023 or 2024), parts of it already feel out of date. Of particular note to me as someone working in education was the “Listen Up, Class” section (in chapter 4, starting on page 93), which begins with a couple paragraphs citing 2023 research claiming that ChatGPT hadn’t made many inroads into student cheating. In 2026 — anecdotally, at least, from what I see and hear about at the college where I work — that is definitely not the current state of things. Students submitting content created by ChatGPT and other genAI systems is a constant battle that teachers are trying to fight and causing serious problems in nearly, if not entirely, every academic department.
Two, that for some reason (apparently a publisher’s requirement, according to a LinkedIn post from Ms. Bender I found), none of the copious endnote references are numbered in the text. The endnotes include notes so that they can be connected back to the main text, but it’s a very odd choice for the publisher to have made. If, as suspected, this was done to make the book more accessible to a mass audience, I kind of wish there was a second edition available for readers not turned off by footnote/endnote notations.
⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently I’d read this one 15 years ago and entirely forgotten. A sequel to the somewhat notorious Bimbos of the Death Sun, it’s a bit more reserved, swapping snarking on ‘80s SF fandom to looking back on ‘50s Golden Age fandom. It has much of the same obvious mix of affection for and exasperation with the SF scene, but also has many of the same drawbacks as Bimbos, particularly where women characters are concerned. As with Bimbos, it’s an enjoyable but definitely flawed bit of fluff that would be better if it spent more time laughing with its subjects (as Galaxy Quest does for Star Trek) instead of at them.
Monday was Memorial Day, which we spent here at home, relaxing after our Portland jaunt of the prior few days.
♿️ Work continues to be busy with end-of-the quarter business. The big thing for us this week was Wednesday evening, when Highline’s Legacy Awards recognized student leaders on campus, including some students from Access Services and some whom my wife had nominated. It’s always nice to see the students have their accomplishments celebrated.
🌏 Saturday morning we went to Kent’s International Festival. We try to stop by every year, and it’s fun to see the various communities in our city highlight their cultures through music, dance, and other performances. Plus, the food truck selection is always really good.
🦇 Saturday night I headed out to the Mercury for some gothclubbing with friends. This weekend was the club’s 27th birthday celebration, plus a friend’s birthday kicked in at midnight, and it was a really good night all around. Lots of good music, dancing, and socializing. I’m always tired the next day, but it’s always worth it.
📸 Photos
I just got this shirt, and it got a lot of laughs and compliments during the evening, both at the Mercury and from people I passed while wandering around Capitol Hill before the club opened. Amusing side note: I now have six or seven (I think) shirts parodying or playing off of the classic Joy Division shirt…but don’t have the actual Joy Division shirt. Maybe I should pick that up one of these days….One of the table centerpieces from Norwescon got brought along and used for our table.
Olivia Rosane at Common Dreams: ‘The Creep State Is Watching’: Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech’s Power Grab: “The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.” Some background info on some posters I spotted around Seattle at the last No Kings protests (one poster, another one).
David Smith at The Guardian: How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’: “‘If you want to understand Victorian England, reading a handful of Dickens novels can get you there,’ said Joshua Kendall, author of the first major biography of Trudeau. ‘In the same way about the late 20th and early 21st century, Trudeau has got all these different characters and they’re growing and changing. If you want to see how America evolved from 1970 to 2026 you could do worse than just go through a few Doonesbury collections.'”
Ed Zitron: Revenge of The Business Idiot: “We will win, long term. What they are doing is not working. The future will not be without pain, nor will it be easy, or pleasant, or something I relish in. But in the long term I think this is a moment where the greater Business Idiot incursion faces a reckoning with a reality it believed it could change through sheer force of will.”
Iris: “Iris is the native Mac photo library that helps you find, explore, and rediscover the people, places, and moments you love — privately, on your own computer, with the smarts of a cloud service and none of the cost.”
Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions, with more to come, including AI plans: “Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users.”
Science Daily: Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery: “Researchers are developing a futuristic alternative to LASIK that reshapes the eye without lasers or incisions. Using mild electrical pulses and platinum contact lenses, they temporarily soften the cornea so it can be molded into a new shape. Early tests on rabbit eyes successfully corrected nearsightedness in about a minute while preserving the eye’s structure.”
Hanna at Tuta: Discord planned to introduce age verification worldwide – and it’s about to go live.: “According to Discord, starting in June users wanting to switch their account to adult status will have to choose between a facial scan for age estimation or uploading an ID document. In addition, an AI model will automatically assess in the background whether the user is an adult; based on existing account age, device, and activity data.”
Jason Kottke: The Backward Index: “How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.”
Brian Phillips at The Ringer: The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech: “I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.”
Max Rego at The Hill: ‘No Kings’ movement planning nationwide event on Trump 80th birthday: “A 90-minute concert in New York City has been planned to headline the event. The “Rise Up, Sing Out” concert is set to take place at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan and is scheduled to feature performances and appearances by singers Sasha Allen, Bette Midler, Patti Smith and Rufus Wainwright, along with actor Jane Fonda and liberal commentator Joy Reid.”
Jody Amable at KQED: A Preteen Punk Band From Mill Valley Takes on AI: “Knights of Molino are a new punk band composed of middle schoolers Erik and Tommy Birmingham, 11 and 13, and Rowan Campbell, 12. They recently reached moderate viral fame for another track in which they didn’t shy away from speaking their minds. In October, their scathing takedown of generative AI, ‘Take Back Control,’ went spinning across Bay Area and punk-rock TikTok. It’s currently at 240,000 views and 2,500 comments: definitely not Mr. Beast numbers, but pretty impressive when you consider none of them even are allowed on TikTok yet.”
John Gruber at Daring Fireball: What Is a Dickover?: “dickovern. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.”
Rebecca Watson at Skepchick: Is Your Phone Spying on Your Conversations? No.: “Because I do so much work debunking conspiracy theories, people often ask me if there are any unproven conspiracy theories that I truly believe. It’s a tough question for me because there are some things, like Bigfoot, that I absolutely LOVE but do not sincerely believe. And there are others that I don’t believe per se but I find them plausible, in that I can’t dismiss them out of hand and I wouldn’t be very surprised if they turned out to be true. One of those is the extremely common belief that companies are using our cell phones to listen to us and serve us advertising or otherwise benefitting from our data.”
Book 21 of 2026: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo Best Novel)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Reading this for the first time in 2026, twenty years after it was published, when it’s set in 2025, it’s fascinating to see where we’re heading towards what Vinge envisioned and where we’re not. Similarities to Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the ubiquitous virtual worlds, but using augmented reality rather than full VR. Privacy and security are greater considerations as well. Overall, a pretty fascinating take on what’s now an alternate present day.
