It’s another two-week edition of my weekly roundup! (And even then, posted a couple days late and backdated….)
- 🎻 Last Saturday we went out to see Raiders of the Lost Ark with live soundtrack performed by the Seattle Symphony. It was a great concert — the combination of an all-time great film and hearing the soundtrack performed live was great.
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🏳️🌈 Last Sunday was Seattle’s Pride parade, and we went for the first time in eight years. We got there about an hour and a half early, found a great spot to sit…and then, unfortunately, ended up with a bunch of inconsiderate people who showed up late and decided that standing directly in front of us was the place to be. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves, and it was definitely good to be back at the parade again, but some aspects could have been better. Maybe next year?
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🇺🇸 This past weekend, of course, was the 4th of July holiday weekend. Not exactly a holiday we felt like celebrating, for fairly obvious reasons, so we just spent it at home, reading books, watching movies, and rolling our eyes at the various neighbors who don’t care that fireworks are illegal in our city. (With a special, targeted grumble at whoever fired off mortars at 5 a.m. on the 6th, and 2 a.m. on the 7th.)
📸 Photos
📚 Reading
Two books this week — one of which was even non-fiction! Still pretty solidly in my wheelhouse, though.
- Infiltrator by W.R. Thompson, an above-average TNG-era Trek novel.
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The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A neat exploration of quantum physics and the nature of the universe through lenses of Black perspectives, queer theory, and pop culture, with one incredibly incorrect sentence that threw me for a loop.
📺 Watching
Three movies of varying quality. In order, worst to best:
- Enola Holmes 3 (2026): ⭐️⭐️: By far the least interesting of the series. The first was the best, the second was a decent sequel, this one barely held our interest.
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Uncharted (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently sourced from a video game I don’t know anything about, this was mostly a perfectly acceptable afternoon action adventure film (Wahlberg has definitely found his niche as a B-movie action star), the final action set piece is over the top and ridiculous in a way that we really enjoyed.
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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026): A rare sequel that lives up to the original. Just as fun and funny (and violent and bloody), it picked up right where the first ended and goes bigger, but in ways that make sense and are internally consistent while expanding the world.
We also celebrated the holiday weekend by watching the latest Lucy Worsley Investigates on PBS, where she looks at the American Revolution from a British point of view. Highly recommended.
🎧 Listening
Three new albums in rotation these two weeks:
- Doublespeak’s self-titled debut: covers of mostly little-known tracks, by a collaboration between Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yazoo), Neil Arthur (Blancmange), and producer Benge.
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Front 242’s Blackout: their final live album, recorded on their recent farewell tour before formally retiring the band.
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Recovery 2 For You: a Front 242 tribute album and sequel to 2016’s Recovery For You.
🔗 Linking
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Ali Jasemi at The Conversation: Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologis: “…news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.”
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Dana Goldstein at The New York Times: Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.”
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Listen to Wikipedia: Wikipedia edits turned into ambient background music. “Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.”
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Rani Molla at The Verge: I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism: “For decades, compact pickups such as the Toyota Pickup, Ford Ranger, and Nissan Hardbody served as inexpensive, utilitarian vehicles for young buyers, tradespeople, and anyone who simply needed a truck. But as automakers chased higher margins, pickups grew larger, more luxurious, and substantially more expensive. Today, even many entry-level trucks come loaded with luxuries. Slate is betting there is still demand for a truck that prioritizes affordability over amenities.”
I’m not in the market for a new car, and I’ve never had any interest in a pickup truck, but I’m fascinated by what Slate is trying and I really hope they succeed.
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Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros at The New York Times: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (gift link that may eventually expire; this article is too interactive to be successfully mirrored by archive.is): “Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths. ¶ There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.”
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lcamtuf’s thing: AI children’s books, body horror edition (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “…I’m told that frontier models have surpassed PhD-level intelligence in the summer of 2025. Most of the books in question were published mid-2026 and the artwork points to a flagship model from a major US-based lab. So, in all likelihood, there’s nothing to worry a— Oh… Oh.”
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Lauren Sherrard: 10 Ways to Make Your Emails More Accessible: “Almost every marketing email has accessibility problems. In fact, the Email Markup Consortium found that 99.89% of HTML emails tested contained serious or critical accessibility issues. Out of more than 443,000 emails analysed, only 21 passed all automated accessibility checks.”
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Basic Apple Guy: MacOS California Camino: “…I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.”
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Joe Coughlan at the BBC: Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives: “A rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered at The National Archives in Kew, the only known example of its kind outside the US.”
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Vita Nouva: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: “The reply [to an IT support ticket] and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him).”
Fascinating deep dive into web design, middle-eastern history, Arabic typography, only one of which I know much of anything about (and nowhere near this extent).