Maybe eventually I’ll get back to a weekly cadence? Maybe. We’ll see.
- 👩🏼🏫 The biggest thing of the last two weeks at work was that my wife was awarded tenure! She’s been working towards that for a long time, and it’s great to see it finally happen. Of course, she was teaching when the Board of Trustees cast the vote, but I made sure to attend and text her as soon as the vote went through.
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🚀 Last weekend was the penultimate planning meeting for this year’s Norwescon. Just one more in March, and then the convention in April. This is crunch time, but it’s always an exciting crunch time.
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🚗 Here at home, our big adventure this weekend was going through with something we’d been considering for quite some time, and trading in our 2016 Chevy Sonic for a fancy new 2026 Honda Civic Sport Touring Hybrid sedan! We’d been looking forward to finally moving to a hybrid car for a while, we’d had a Civic before that we really liked, and the current model is one of the top-rated cars out right now, so we decided the time was right. It’s only been a day so far, but we’re definitely enjoying the upgrade. This is our second time buying a brand-new car, and it’s always fun driving a car off the lot when its odometer is still in the low two digits.
📸 Photos
📚 Reading
I’ve finished two more of this year’s Philip K. Dick nominees: M. R. Carey’s Outlaw Planet and Christopher Hinz’s Scales.
📺 Watching
- 🏂 We’ve been watching a bit of Winter Olympics every evening. We’re not huge sports people, and tend to prefer the summer to the winter Olympic games, but it’s still fun to tune in, pick a random sport, and watch a bit here and there.
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We finished a rewatch of 30 Rock, which though not without the occasional stumble and cringe moment, is still really funny and overall still holds up remarkably well.
🎧 Listening
I’m getting started getting some practice time in before DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon, and as usual, am recording my practice sessions and uploading them. My first of this stretch got posted: Difficult Listening Hour 2026.02.16. More to come!
🔗 Linking
Accessibility
- Fable: How early accessibility solutions evolved into core UX design principles: “In this article, you’ll discover ten historical product innovations born from the desire to make everyday experiences accessible to people with disabilities: The typewriter, audiobooks, the teletypewriter (TTY), autocorrect, text-to-speech, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the Clapper, GPS, online shopping, [and] the touch screen.”
Culture
- Amanda Sakuma with Jan Diehm at The Pudding: Fit 4 A Teen: “I remember once being that teen girl shopping in the women’s section for the first time. I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I’m stuck with the countless ways that women’s apparel is not made for the average person, like me.”
Fandom
- Trae Dorn: Fandom Spaces are Adult Spaces: “I’m not sure why I have to say this sometimes, but fandom spaces are adult spaces. What we consider organized fandom was built by adults, for adults. But there are people who forget this. Like I’ve seen people admonish adults for being involved with fandom, saying “adults should be doing adult things” (whatever the hell those “adult things” are), and I’ve seen kids lament growing up saying they’ll have to stop liking anime or comics or whatever property they’re passionate about. ¶ And I’m just like… no kid, that’s not how it works. That’s the opposite of how it works.”
Film
- Todd Vaziri: The Myth of the “Jaws” Shooting Star: “…contrary to what the mythology might be, there is no way those two shooting stars you see in ‘Jaws’ were real-life shooting stars photographed in-camera during filming. Those shots contain animated effects work to simulate shooting stars.”
Local
- Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Transit riders will be able to pay fares with credit, debit cards: “This new feature, which starts Feb. 23, comes as Seattle and the Puget Sound region prepare to host several large events in 2026, including the World Cup. With many international visitors expected to travel across the region, Tap to Pay simplifies transit and aligns with global expectations for convenient payment options.”
Politics
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Mike Masnick at TechDirt: NBC Hid The Boos For JD Vance. Where’s Trump’s ‘Unfair Editing’ Lawsuit?: “This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn’t ‘be accurate’ or ‘be fair.’ The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.”
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Jon Schuppe and Natasha Korecki at NBC News: Broken bones, burning eyes: How Trump’s DHS deploys ‘less lethal’ weapons on protesters: “NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents since the spring and found that Department of Homeland Security officers have repeatedly deployed ‘less lethal’ weapons in ways that appear to violate their own policies or general policing guidelines, unless they believed their lives were in danger. The review was based on interviews with lawyers, experts and protesters who were injured as well as witness statements, documents from criminal and civil cases and videos taken at protests.”
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Jay Kuo: Censoring Colbert and Talarico (archive.is copy of a Substack post): “Last night, Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico, currently running for the U.S. Senate, appeared on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ to spread his message of hope and unity in the face of MAGA Trumpism. ¶ But millions who tuned in would not see that interview. That’s because the FCC blocked CBS, which owns ‘The Late Show,’ from airing it.”
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Karl Bode at TechDirt: Department Of Education Forced To Back Off Illegal Plan To Be Racist, Sexist Assholes: “One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it. ¶ It happened again this week, when the Department of Education (DOE) was forced to back off of their illegal effort to permanently enshrine intolerance and ignorance across U.S. education standards.”
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Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian: ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks: “She didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of an ordeal that would see Karen handcuffed, shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell, before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre. Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa.”
Software
- Current: A new RSS reader that looks interesting.
Tech
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Jordan Golson: What They Copied (Wayback Machine archive of a Substack post): “Then carmakers looked at a product that sold billions of units [(the iPhone)] and said, we should put one of those in the dashboard. But they took the wrong lesson. Your car isn’t supposed to do everything. It’s supposed to be a car. You need to adjust the temperature, change the volume, turn on the heated seats and keep your eyes on the road. These are not problems that require a general-purpose interface. They are problems that have been solved for more than a century — by knobs and buttons and switches — and the industry unresolved them in a decade.” I will never be in the market for a Ferrari, but this is a fascinating look at how Jonny Ive, famed for his design work at Apple, is working with them.
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Angela Haupt at Time: The Internet’s New Favorite Insult: ‘Did AI Write That?’: “Across the internet, as tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini become part of everyday life, people are increasingly informing others that their words come across as AI output. You can practically feel the disdain through the screen: ‘Did AI write that?’ It’s not really a question—it’s a way of ending a conversation by casting doubt on whether someone deserves to be taken seriously.”
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Richard MacManus at Cybercultural: 1994: Publishing comes to the Web — and design matters: “1994 marks the Web’s shift into a publishing medium. As site authors seek control over formatting and design, the WWW-Talk mailing list hosts an early debate over style sheets and presentation.” While I just slightly miss the 1994 cutoff of this article, my first website went up in 1995, and I have a 1996 archive still online.
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Trae Dorn: Discord Just Showed Why We Need to Bring Back Forums: “Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share. ¶ Use the internet like it’s 2006.”
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Thomas Germain at the BBC: I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes: “It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.”
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Marcin Wichary: Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs Scheme: “The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks. Or, if where you’re going is up in hierarchy, well-designed URL will allow you to drag to select and then backspace a few things from the end. ¶ Flickr allowed to do all that, and all without a touch of a Shift key, too.”
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tante: Acting ethically in an imperfect world: “I appreciate a lot of work Cory Doctorow has done in the last decades. But the arguments he presents here to defend his usage of LLMs for this rather trivial task (which TBH could probably be done reasonably well with traditional means) are part of why the Internet – and therefore the world – looks like it does right now. It’s a set of arguments that wants to delegitimize political and moral actions based on libertarian and utilitarian thinking.”
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Victor Tangermann at Futurism: Realtor Uses AI, Accidentally Posts Listing for Rental Property With Demonic Figure Emerging From Mirror: “Renters seeking a new home in the capital made a horrifying discovery while browsing listings: what can only be described as an Eldritch horror poking her disfigured head out — from somehow both inside and outside — of a bathroom mirror.”
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Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links: “The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. ¶ In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.” Ugh. I’ll need to figure out another source for linking to archived copies of paywalled/Substack-ed articles.