Home from vacation!
- 🥱 The big theme for this week was jet lag. 10 hours of time change is a lot to adjust to, and it was only at the end of the week that we really started feeling like we were about back to a regular sleep schedule.
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♿️ Since I figured jet lag would be a thing, I took a couple recovery days, and so only came back to work on Thursday. Those two days of work were, unsurprisingly, pretty much dedicated to getting caught up and triaging through the hundreds of emails that were waiting for me after a month away.
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🚀 Saturday was the first ConCom planning meeting for Norwescon 49, and it was good to start getting back into the swing of things there. Plus, I came home with a box full of more goodies to scan for the historical archives, which was fun as well.
📸 Photos
I’ve started the process of uploading my photos from the trip. It’ll take a while to get through everything, but San Francisco is up.
📚 Reading
While traveling, I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels Reaper Man and Witches Abroad, and finished the next one, Small Gods, and a Star Trek novel I’d started just before we left, John Peel’s The Death of Princes, over the course of the week.
📺 Watching
I didn’t get through all of it, but I watched all of the first season and a couple episodes of the second season of the classic ’80s cyberpunk series Max Headroom while on the flights to and from Europe, and it’s a lot of fun. Dated in many ways, sure, but a lot of the themes that are in the storylines actually hold up pretty well today. Definitely need to find time to finish the rest of the second season.
🎧 Listening
I’ve been enjoying listening to the CDs I picked up while traveling:
- Hooverphonic, Blue Wonder Power Milk
- Holy Ghost!, Dynamics
- Blood and Computers
- Dependence – Next Level Electronics
- Dependence – Next Level Electronics Volume 2
- Dependence – Next Level Electronics 2015
Plus, a few purchases from Bandcamp:
- Pop Will Eat Itself, Ruff Justice (PWEI.40 Rework)
- Orbital, Lush (2025)
- Synthetic. Facts. Nine.
🔗 Linking
Some of these links got saved while I was traveling, so they may not all be super current.
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Sophie McBain at The Guardian: Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’: “More than four decades after his Holocaust story Maus transformed the graphic novel genre, Art Spiegelman discusses Trump, the shadow of 9/11 and the rise of fascism in America”
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Jessamyn West at Librarian.net: How to disable or avoid intrusive AI: “One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides “what is taking up all my cloud storage?”) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don’t want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment.”
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Stephannie Stokes at The Seattle Times: A one-of-a-kind partnership gets community college students housed (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Since 2020, Highline College has paired students facing homelessness with housing vouchers provided by the King County Housing Authority, covering their rent for up to four and a half years or until six months after they graduate.” Neat article about a very cool program at Highline College.
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Rui Carmo at The Tao of Mac: Apple Papercuts: “This isn’t about Liquid Glass or grand design failures–those are well documented elsewhere. This is about the small stuff. The papercuts that, individually, you learn to live with, and collectively make you wonder whether anyone at Apple actually uses their software.”
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Angela Lim at The Seattle Times: Old 7-Eleven in downtown Seattle becomes ‘Inconvenience Store’ exhibit (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The shop, stationed in a building that formerly housed a downtown 7-Eleven, includes a hot bar, checkout counter and refrigerator. But rather than offering quick grab-and-go options, this one sells beeswax egg votive candles, shoulder bags made out of Cheetos and Lays wrappers, Nerds Gummy Clusters keychains and a pretangled USB cord.”
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Ian Sample at The Guardian: Rich people more likely to steal children’s sweets, finds Ig Nobel prize-winning study: “Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.”
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Jewel Bright at NPR: The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size: “The ‘Correct the Map’ resolution, introduced by the West African country of Togo on behalf of the African Group (the 54 African member states at the U.N.) and supported by the African Union, was adopted on Friday by a vote of 164 to one, with six countries abstaining. ¶ The United States was the only country to vote against it.”
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Angelina Chapin at The Guardian (in 2016, but I just came across it): WD-40 and microwaved tampons: secrets of food photography revealed: “Behind most professional food photos is a stylist who tricks the viewer. These deceits range from a touch of lipstick to redden a strawberry, to ‘milkshakes’ made from mashed potatoes. It’s not that food stylists are liars and cheats. They’re simply in the business of improvisation.”
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Robert Hart at The Verge: Why AI food looks like that (archive.today mirror of a paywalled original): “There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There’s also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don’t even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There are lumps. And holes. So many holes.”
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Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Coming in November: A big election for WA’s Supreme Court: “The five elections are, in a way, statewide proxy battles between conservatives and liberals, with four challengers endorsed by the state Republican Party against candidates favored by Democratic leaders, including two new appointees of Gov. Bob Ferguson.”
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Eddy Frankel at The Guardian: A constipated baby and a kid that looks like Boris Johnson: why would anyone bother stealing a Renoir?: “Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of impressionism’s head honchos, a leading figure in one of 19th-century art’s most important movements. But time hasn’t been too kind to poor old Pierre. Where his contemporaries like Monet, Cézanne and Degas have been heralded as modernist revolutionaries, artists who shaped the future of western painting and helped set the path that all of their successors would soon follow, in recent years Renoir has been denigrated, mocked, protested and hashtagged.”
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Judd Legum at Popular Information: The hidden dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org: “The slick voter registration website, currently being promoted to millions of people, is a digital surveillance machine.”
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Terence Eden: Put an AV test at the start of your slides: Good advice that I need to remember.
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Melissa Santos at Axios Seattle: Seattle’s civil rights laws could soon cover polyamory: “The measure would make people who engage in consensual nonmonogamy, including polyamory, a protected class that can’t be discriminated against in areas such as housing or employment.” This would be a boon to a lot of people I know.
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Meredith Blake at The Contrarian: The Rise of the Infinite Cable News Ticker (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “The news ticker was not exactly an unknown concept in 2001. The iconic Motograph News Bulletin in Times Square — a.k.a. “The Zipper” — had been flashing headlines from around the world for more than 70 years. But before September 11, the feature was used sparingly on TV, usually to display stock prices during financial news programs or share storm warnings in specific regions. ¶ By December 2001, however, constantly scrolling headlines became a permanent fixture on TV.”
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Michael Cragg at The Guardian: ‘You start to worry you’ll never listen to anything else’: 25 years of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the song that saw the future of pop: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head wasn’t just ‘good, for a pop song’, as joyless people were wont to say, keen to use the caveat in case their muso credentials be tarnished. As pop began to absorb the outre production styles of R&B experimentalists such as the Neptunes and Timbaland – Britney’s career-restructuring I’m a Slave 4 U, produced by the former, would arrive in the same month as Can’t Get You Out of My Head – audiences were becoming more attuned to pop that was looking to push the boundaries. This felt like dance-pop beamed in from the future, where the first time you hear it you’re like, ‘Huh?’ then the second you’re like, ‘Wait!’ and then the 35th time you start to worry you may never listen to anything else.”