- Made it through the first week of the quarter! It was definitely a busy week, but nothing major exploded, so I’ll count that as a success.
-
Saturday night we went out to see one of the 40th anniversary theatrical showings of Labyrith. I don’t remember seeing it in the theater when it came out — I would have been 12, so right in the target range, but I have no memory of doing so — and it was a real treat to be able to do this. It holds up well!
-
Sunday we headed up to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park for one of this weekend’s “ICE Out for Good” rallies. I’ve uploaded my full photo set to Flickr, as usual.
📸 Photos
📺 Watching
- Labyrinth (1986), as noted above.
🔗 Linking
-
Niki Tonsky: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons: “The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. ¶ Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.”
-
Casey Newton at Platformer: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit: “For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge? ¶ Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds.”
-
Stefano Marinelli: The Virtue of Finished Things: “I received an email yesterday morning. It was a thank-you note for one of the open-source tools I created and maintain. The sender explained how useful the software was for their specific needs, and as always, this brought me an immense sense of satisfaction. ¶ But at one point in the email, a question appeared – one that has become a recurring theme in the modern software world: ‘I notice there haven’t been any new releases for about ten months. Should I consider the project abandoned?'”
-
Teresa Duryea Wong at Quiltfolk: One Year After an Uncomfortable Choice for Best in Show: “This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher. ¶ What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.”
-
Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero at the South Seattle Emerald: A Fistful of Loud: Seattle Neighbors Build Whistle Kits to Protect Immigrants From ICE: “‘By making noise, you bring visibility to what is happening on the street,’ said Kate Macfarlane, who started the WA Whistles project. ‘ICE relies on shock tactics and moving in very quickly … it turns [an] otherwise pretty silent abduction into a loud, highly visible opportunity for neighbors to rally.'”
-
WA Whistles: “Our purpose is to spread whistles throughout WA to help communities protect themselves against ICE.”
-
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: DHS Is Lying To You (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.”
-
Melissa Turniten at Fox9 KMSP: Minneapolis ICE shooting: Eyewitness accounts contradict ICE statement: “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls the claim the shooting was self-defense ‘bullshit’ and is a ‘garbage narrative’ after seeing video of the shooting. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also seen the video, saying ‘Don’t believe the propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.'”
-
Jennifer Mascia at The Trace: How Many People Have Been Shot in ICE Raids?: “Using Gun Violence Archive data and news clips, The Trace has identified 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire and another 15 incidents in which agents held someone at gunpoint since the crackdown began. At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”
-
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.”
-
Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman at Wired: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance: “Two key elements of digital surveillance should be top of mind for protestors. One is the data that authorities could potentially obtain from your phone if you are detained, arrested, or they confiscate your device. The other is surveillance of all the identifying and revealing information that you produce when you attend a protest, which can include wireless interception of text messages and more, and tracking tools like license plate scanners and face recognition. You should be mindful of both.”
-
Joanna Kavenna at The Guardian: Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present: “From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?”
-
Ari Anderson at The Stranger: What I Learned About the Future at Seattle WorldCon: “Like the standing on threshold of a cosmic portal, Seattle’s convention center buzzed with bards, fae, aliens, monsters, warriors and spaceships, far away planets and misty forests, innumerable stories of heartbreak and triumph, all tantalizingly within reach between the covers of a thousand books.”
-
Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards: “Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.”
-
Julia Shumway at the Washington State Standard: Federal judge blocks Trump election order, siding with Oregon, Washington: “A federal judge in Washington state on Friday permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a 2025 executive order that sought to require voters prove citizenship and that all ballots be received by Election Day.”