I missed my target of Sunday for my weekly roundup, and for reasons which will become clear, don’t expect to be making this coming Sunday’s post either, so here we are, with an off-cycle Thursday catchup.
- ♿️ Work has been pretty standard day-by-day, save for last Thursday when I went up to Shoreline College for the day for a planning retreat for the Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight (CATO), one of the SBCTC groups I’m part of. We got a lot done in planning for the next year, and as this is a group of college representatives from across the state that generally meets only on Zoom, it was nice to get most of us together in person.
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🎭 Sunday we went out to meet some friends and see Wooden O’s Macbeth Shakespeare in the Park production. It was very well done, though rather surprisingly straightforward after having recently seen the same company do some incredible work incorporating fun tweaks to both The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
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🗺️ Other than that, most everything has been getting everything ready for our summer vacation — which we’ll be setting off on tomorrow! We’re all packed and ready to go, the house is clean and set, and now it’s just a matter of waiting until it’s time to head off and get things started. This is also a big reason why this post went up today instead of waiting until Sunday as I’d normally do. It’s possible — likely, even — that I may not be posting much until we’re back from this trip. Imagine that!
📸 Photos
📚 Reading
Two books finished recently:
- Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall, which was a fun “zombie apocalypse at a Star Trek convention” romp. This was very kindly sent to me a while ago by Elena/theresmiling, and I’ll be passing it along to someone else in turn.
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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I did not like at all, and wouldn’t have finished if it wasn’t part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.
📺 Watching
Forgot to mention last time that while coming back from our Providence/New York trip, I watched The Gorge, and it was…alright, but not great. The first half of the film, where it’s all setup, teasing the mystery of what’s in the gorge, and developing the relationship between the two characters is a solid three-star film. There was promise here. The second half, where it’s all watching someone play a Playstation zombie-hunting game, is a solid single star.
🔗 Linking
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Michael Bolton at Carnegie: Breaking the PDF Habit in Higher Ed: Why Website Bloat is a Governance Problem, Not a Tech One: Yes, this is basically an ad for Carnegie’s services, but the problem of “PDF bloat” in higher education is real.
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Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” (Google has since removed this “feature”, but…for how long? And seriously, what the fuck?)
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Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Google has rolled back the image generation feature it launched in Google Earth on 30 July. The tool let anyone zoom to any coordinates, type a sentence, and get back a photorealistic image built on Google’s own satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that spot. It went live worldwide, on the web, with no waitlist. It was withdrawn on 31 July.”
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Gerrad Hall at Entertainment Weekly: Inside CODA director’s follow-up Being Heumann, about Judy Heumann and her fight for disability rights: “Being Heumann, which opens the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, centers on Judy Heumann, who, after contracting polio as a toddler, used a wheelchair the rest of her life for mobility. […] While Heumann became known as “the mother” of the Disability Rights Movement, she is not widely known outside of the disability community.”
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FlockHopper: See where Flock cameras are in your area, and use the map or iOS app (Android under development) to plan routes that avoid them.
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Reading Maps: Plotting maps from notable books and films to see where the characters went.
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Russell Samora, Florina Sutanto, Arjun Kakkar, and Sushant Karki at The Pudding: Why some people mow a lawn better than others: “You’ve probably done something like mow a lawn or vacuum a rug hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Some part of your brain works out a route that’s usually good enough to get the job done. People are actually pretty good at this, and better than you’d guess for a problem that is hard for computers. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we built a lawn and asked people to mow it.”
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Danny Westneat at The Seattle Times: WA Democrats face no backlash for ‘millionaires tax’ (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “…after ruling Democrats finally pushed through their own version of a personal income tax this spring, the big question has been: Will they face backlash from voters? ¶ The answer seems to be a resounding ‘No.'” Now we just need to make sure the push to repeal the “millionaire’s tax” fails at the ballot in November.
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Shaun Smucker: Please use AI (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.” -
Sharon Yoo at King5: UW: ICE used Washington driver’s license database in at least 90 immigration arrests over the past year: “Researchers say federal agents continue accessing WA DOL records despite a state law limiting the information from being used for immigration enforcement.”
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Drew Dotson at the Kent Reporter: Renton City Council votes to cover Flock cameras: “‘We’ve been hearing a lot of concerns around transparency and trust, and I think it’s in the best direction to help foster that by listening to the public,’ Councilmember Carmen Rivera said. ‘The camera’s already paused. They’re not collecting anything. If it’s safe and if it’s within the purview of our staff to be able to do it, I think it’s something that is just some easy simple fix that tells the residents one that we’re listening and that we’re trying to foster that trust and that transparency.'” Now if only we could get Kent to back away from their love affair with Flock….
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Amogh Dimri at The Atlantic: The Color Recession May Be Permanent (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. ‘Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,’ Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, ‘gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.’ Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features ‘Ice Cube’ and ‘Crushed Ice’ (both white), and ‘Agreeable Gray’ and ‘Passive’ (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re ‘warmer whites.’ The company’s color of 2026 is ‘Universal Khaki’—otherwise known, unfortunately, as ‘greige.'”
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Luke Plunkett at Aftermath: Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer’s AI Mandates: “‘I work for a company that produces luxury items’, one worker tells me. ‘Any time I get prompted that my ‘token spend’ is too low (0), I go in and ask ChatGPT random gardening questions. So far it has failed to adequately build a rain garden, but I’ve gotten it to describe a sweet potato once.'”
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Brett C.: I’m done using AI: “Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience.”