- ♿️ Been a very busy couple weeks of work as we’ve been approaching the start of classes for the fall quarter. In addition to the usual preparations and appointments with students, I’ve been part of our Opening Week planning committee. Part of that was helping to make sure that accessibility was kept in mind as we were planning the week’s activities, and part was serving on a subcommittee to come up with a “community engagement” activity.
We tried to come up with a pub quiz-inspired trivia activity (created by people who’d never done pub trivia) that would work both for people there in person and those who were attending via Zoom, with questions drawn from the college’s history. While there were definitely still some bumps, overall I think we did okay; we’ll see what people say as evaluations of the week come in. (A few have come in already, and so far…well, responses are definitely mixed. So it goes!)
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🎭 Last Sunday we went to the Union Arts Center’s production of Hamlet with a friend from work, and really enjoyed it. Done in a nice small theater in the round, with a minimalist set, and some very strong performances. If you’re local to Seattle, it runs through Oct. 11.
📸 Photos
Vacation photos continue to be worked on, and my photos from Frankfurt and from Berlin are now up.
📚 Reading
I finished China Miéville’s The City and The City, which I really enjoyed.
📺 Watching
Two films this weekend:
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Project Hail Mary (2026): Good, but didn’t “wow” me as much as it did many, I think. I’m not sure that it needed to be two and a half hours long, and while it’s possible it suffered in translation from page to film, but a lot of the science felt more like magic to me. I did really appreciate Rocky being a practical effect, though.
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Stop! That! Train! (2026): Honestly, better and funnier than I expected. Absolutely a ridiculous, low-brow, Drag Race-meets-Airplane disaster movie spoof with virtually non-stop rapid-fire jokes, not all of which land. But there were a lot of jokes that really made me laugh out loud.
🔗 Linking
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Alan Siegel at The Ringer: Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: “These days, battles between art and commerce don’t tend to end well for the artists. But every so often, the little guy manages to avoid the anvil—and win.”
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Ernie Smith at Tedium: alt.time-capsule.reopened: “I think what stands out to me about Usenet-Rewind is that it more or less captures all of it, warts and all. I did a search for my late ’90s email address, and found numerous entries under my name. I then did a search at my email addresses for the two colleges I went to and found a bunch more posts. And I’m not going to lie, most of those posts were not written with the assumption that they would be a part of the permanent record 25 years later.”
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Frederic J. Frommer at The Contrarian: Congress Moved Quickly to Name Kennedy Center in Wake of JFK Assassination (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Given Kennedy’s muscular support for the cultural center, many thought it a natural tribute to name it for him after his death.”
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Catalina Gaitán at The Seattle Times: Seattle bans discrimination against polyamorous, nonmonogamous people (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass a law barring discrimination in employment, housing, business licensure, park usage, policing and public accommodation against adults in consensual relationships with more than one partner. ¶ The bill also expands such protections to nonbinary people in general by removing “male or female” from the city’s definition of sexual orientation, and broadens the protected category’s definition to include pansexuality — attraction to people regardless of gender identity — and asexuality — not experiencing sexual attraction while sometimes experiencing romantic or significant connection to other people.”
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Corinne Purtill at The L.A. Times: New evidence shows that you are only slightly hotter than a T. rex: Fun science, and a rather hilarious (rude!) headline.
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Mike Masnick and Dave Willner at TechDirt: The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy: “For all the talk of “AI Safety” risk these days, the most present real risks remain variations on the theme of “humans doing stupid shit”. Sometimes really smart humans. But stupid actions by humans are a lot less headline grabbing than the shiny sexy apocalypse. A human accidentally causing a radioactive chain reaction by carelessly using a screwdriver to separate things is stupid. Skynet turning everyone into paperclips… is kind of cool and fun. ¶ But, as anyone who works in risk mitigation (including one of the authors of this piece) can tell you, the overwhelming majority of actual disasters aren’t cool and fun. Instead, they’re usually more like the Demon Core: stupid, disappointing, and easily prevented if only a few common sense steps had been taken.”
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David Gutman and Jim Brunner at The Seattle Times: Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit seeking WA voter records (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “It was the 25th loss in a row for the Trump Justice Department in its demands for similar voter data from states.”
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Ryan Epps at Polygon: Fahrenheit 451’s opening line still burns, 73 years later: “All he needed was six words. That’s all Bradbury required to introduce one of the most famous dystopian novels ever written. The sentence is almost comically straightforward, which makes its meaning all the more horrifying. Bradbury doesn’t begin by explaining why books are forbidden or by introducing the society that outlawed them. Instead, he puts us directly inside the head of the story’s protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman whose very job is to burn said books. The pleasure isn’t metaphorical. Montag genuinely enjoys watching books of all kinds erupt into flames.”