Fortnightly Notes: September 29–October 12, 2025

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  • ⌚️ “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.” — Ford Prefect, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I meant to do this last week, but somehow it just didn’t happen. So here we are!

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the October planning meeting for Norwescon; this time held virtually over Zoom. I have a new person on the website team, and we were able to make some good progress on getting them up and running, and they’ve already started jumping in and making some page updates, so things are looking good there.

  • 🕺🏻 I also got to go out to the Mercury for Caturday (or, well, since this was October’s, it was Baturday). Saw a few people, got some dancing in, and had a good night out.

  • 🚨 This week, we had our first run-in with a jury duty scam call. Nothing came of it other than some stress and wasted time, but it wasn’t a fun thing to deal with. If someone calls or leaves you a voice mail saying that you’ve missed jury duty and must immediately pay a fine or be arrested, just hang up and report the call to the police.

📸 Photos

White clouds mostly cover a blue sky above a grid of black horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines made by the girders of an electrical tower.
Standing directly under an electrical line tower during last weekend’s morning walk.
A wide shot of a walking path strewn with fall leaves, with a stone wall on the right side and green trees on either side.
Another shot from last week’s walk; a scenic spot at the top of a hill.
A hawk sits on a branch of a tree under green leaves and a blue sky.
During a walk around the pond on the Highline campus during lunch, I caught the movement of a bird landing in a tree. At first I figured it was one of the many crows, but then saw that it was a hawk. Just managed to get a picture before it flew off again.
Wide shot of three mushrooms on the forest floor, with rounded orange caps with raised white spots.
This weekend’s walk was a good one for mushroom spotting; apparently the recent rains brought them out. These were all over the place.
Pale mushrooms kind of resembling flattened cauliflower grow out of a moss-covered tree stump on a forest floor.
Another kind of mushroom we spotted.

📝 Writing

I was a little more talkative this week, with a rant about Apple’s Music app breaking under Tahoe and posting my current ranking of the Star Trek films.

📚 Reading

Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, the second book of her World of the Five Gods series. This was also my 64th Hugo Best Novel award winner, putting me 78% of the way through reading them all.

🎧 Listening

After hearing Blackbook’s “I Dance Alone” at the Mercury last Saturday and realizing I had another couple songs by them already in my collection that I’d picked up on samplers and enjoyed (“Love is a Crime” and “You Are Strange”), I went ahead and picked up their albums Confessions of the Innocent and Radio Strange. Really enjoying them both, and lots of these will be ending up in my regular rotation.

🔗 Linking

  • Stephanie Booth: Rebooting the Blogosphere, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: “What this is all about is figuring out how blogging can learn from what made “The Socials” (which became the big capitalist social networks we all know) so successful, to the point that many die-hard bloggers (myself included) got sucked up in the socials and either completely abandoned their blog, or left it on life-support. I believe that understanding this can help us draft a vision for how things in the “open social web” (I’ll keep calling it that for the time being) can work, now or in the near future, to give us the best of both blogging and the socials, without requiring that we sell our souls or leave our content hostage to big corporations.”

  • Andrew Villeneuve at The Cascadia Advocate: Are you a PNW voter who usually returns your ballot via U.S. Mail? Switch to a drop box to ensure it counts this year!: “Do not return your ballot through the United States Postal Service — there’s a real risk it won’t receive a timely postmark.”

  • Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: UW students chase disrupter out of class: “A young man barged into a 400-person human sexuality lecture at the University of Washington on Wednesday, making what appeared to be Nazi salutes and hurling insults at the class. ¶ But it wasn’t security personnel who escorted him out of the Kane Hall classroom. It was the students and their professor.”

  • Seattle Indivisible: Seattle No Kings- Oct 18: The main page for next weekend’s No Kings protest rally at the Seattle Center.

  • Glenn Fleishman at Six Colors: Navigate your Mac without a mouse: “Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?”

  • Mike Masnick at TechDirt: The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment: “The problem isn’t just burying important quotes—it’s the widespread adoption of “view from nowhere” reporting that treats even the most basic facts as matters of debate.”

  • Alice Strangman & Liza Groen Trombi at Locus: Seattle Worldcon 2025: Locus‘s writeup of the Seattle Worldcon. After putting about a year and a half into this (and with friends who have been working on it for a decade), it’s nice to see this writeup.

  • Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing: “This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” Written for Wikipedia, but is a good list of things to look for.

  • Rachel Saslow at Willamette Week: An Interview With the Portland Chicken: “When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [Secretary] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”

  • Decca Muldowney and Alex Hanna: Sora 2 Serves up More Slop: “The potential for misinformation and the ability to “flood the zone” with videos that throw doubt onto the authenticity of online content is evident. Moreover, shitty video-generation apps like Sora 2 don’t “democratize” art, they degrade human creativity itself.”

  • Christian Kriticos at the BBC: A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks: “At first, the durable plastic of floppy disks, popular from the 1970s to the 1990s, may seem more secure than fragile manuscripts. Paper rots, ink fades and runs. Synthetic materials can last much longer – that is, after all, why plastic pollution is such a concern. But the digital information saved inside these rigid cassettes is more vulnerable than you might think.”

Ranking the Star Trek Films (Again)

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An update to my last attempt at doing this back in 2009. I originally posted this to Mastodon back in April after watching Star Trek: Section 31, and after realizing I hadn’t cross-posted it here, am doing that now. Also somewhat prompted by a friend sending me this ranking from Den of Geek, which is close, but not identical, to mine; I do broadly agree with their summaries of the various films.

I gave it some thought, and while the exact placement of any of these might vary slightly depending on time/mood/etc., I think this is a pretty good stab at my personal Star Trek film ranking, best/favorite to worst/least favorite:

  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  • Star Trek: First Contact
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  • Galaxy Quest
  • Star Trek (2009)
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  • Star Trek: Generations
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  • Star Trek: Section 31
  • Star Trek: Insurrection
  • Star Trek: Nemesis
  • Star Trek Into Darkness

A few more details:

The first three (TWoK, TVH, TUC) are essentially a three-way tie for first. At any given point, the order could be shuffled around and would probably be acceptable.

TMP remains in that place whether it’s the theatrical, TV extended, or directors cut, but of the three, the director’s cut is definitively the best.

Some purists might be surprised at the two Kelvinverse films ranking that high, but for all the faults, the casting was so good at embodying the characters without slavishly copying or parodying (intentionally or not) the original actors, and I think both films are a lot of fun.

Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge almost pushes TSfS higher, but…not quite. But it does mark the dividing line between “films I can put on at just about any time and enjoy” and “films I’ll watch when there’s a reason to” (chronological rewatch, someone else wants to watch one, etc.).

S31 is barely Star Trek. It’s a generic sci-fi spy film that someone spritzed with synthehol and Starfleet emblems; it ranks as high as it does because it’s an acceptable generic sci-fi spy film, entirely suitable for having on in the background and occasionally paying attention to. Michelle Yeoh (and Georgeau) deserved better.

Into Darkness…I just have so many issues with it. I will be quite unpleasantly surprised if they ever make a Trek film that knocks it out of the bottom spot on this list.

macOS Tahoe Music (app) breaks shuffle

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Sigh. Shuffle by Album seems to be broken in Apple Music (the app, not the service; what is it with companies giving their apps and services identical generic names?) under macOS 26 Tahoe.

After starting Music, if I go to my library’s Album view (that is, songs that are downloaded and stored locally), the shuffle icon in the new control bar appears to be glowing (with a bad effectThe left side of the audio control bar in Apple's Music player under Tahoe, with the shuffle icon highlighted in red with a very harsh, hard-edged glow with no fade. It looks really ugly.), but if you check options, through the menu bar, Controls > Shuffle shows “Off” and by “Albums”. If I switch that to “On”, I get about a two-second SPoD (Spinning Pizza of Death) — which seems really odd for an audio player on an M4 Mac Mini — before it responds again.

Pre-Tahoe, I could either hit “play” or double-click the “Albums” item in the Music app sidebar, and Music would randomly choose an album, play it through, then randomly play another album.

Now, If I hit the “play” control, Music starts playing the first album in however the album list is sorted; I usually keep my Album display sorted by year, so it always starts playing the oldest item in my collection (Victrola 88049, Enrico Caruso performing “Ideale (My Ideal!)”). If I double-click the “Albums” item in the sidebar, Music starts playing the first song of the first album sorted alphabetically by artist (for me, that’s “Take on Me” off of A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low). Either way, though the shuffle icon is still glowing, checking the menu bar’s Controls > Shuffle shows that that’s now set back to “Off”.

If I let it play as-is, it just plays through the album. If I set Shuffle back to “on”, then it start shuffling by song, not by album. Well…sometimes. Right now, I can’t get it to shuffle at all, even though Shuffle is turned on, both in the menu bar and with the glowing shuffle icon in the control bar.

Revised original line: Shuffle is either partially broken (only shuffling by song, not by album) or entirely (not shuffling at all), possibly randomly choosing (…shuffling?…) between the two options.

I know Apple’s gone all-in on their streaming Music service, but I really wish they still had a few people assigned to making sure they had a decent basic audio player. Music just gets worse and worse for those of us who have extensive non-streaming collections.

Environment:

  • M4 mini (2024, 16 GB)
  • macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Music 1.6.0.151
  • 41,596 tracks on 4,044 albums (136.4 days, 317.43 GB)

Related question:

Are there any third-party audio players for macOS that write back metadata to the macOS Music library?

The biggest reason that I’ve stuck with Music is that I use its smart playlists to regularly update the playlists that live on my iPhone, so they’re regularly updated and the songs on them rotate around. (My regularly used playlists all have some variation of “exclude if listened to in the last two months” as one of their rules.)

As far as I know from past digging, no third-party audio players write metadata (esp. when last played) back to the Music library, so the smart playlists wouldn’t work anymore.

If there’s a good, functional audio player, especially if aimed at people who actually value listening to owned music rather than streamed, that plays nicely with the Music library metadata, I’d dearly love to know about it.

Weekly Notes: September 22–28, 2025

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  • ♿️ We made it through the first week of fall quarter! It was a busy week, with a fair amount of tech troubleshooting for faculty, staff, and students, but on the whole, it went pretty well.

  • 🚀 The week was extra busy with a couple nights of evening Zoom calls, but the end result of one is that after fourteen years, I have finally turned over the social media manager position for Norwescon to someone else! I’m still on the team as an assistant/consultant/graphics person, but I’m not in charge anymore, which is a welcome step. (I didn’t mind doing it, but almost a decade and a half is a long time to be the primary online “voice” of the con, and I’m happy to let someone else with other ideas take over.)

  • 🎻 Today we went into Seattle to see Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton with the Seattle Symphony. Music from 13 of the 17 films that Burton and Elfman have collaborated on, with a full symphony plus choir, and with a screen showing clips from the films interspersed with images of Burton’s character design sketches. Really well done, and the music was great. I was particularly pleasantly surprised with the section from Big Fish — I’ve seen it, but not anytime recently, and didn’t have any memory of the score, and it’s very different than Elfman’s other scores. I didn’t realize Elfman knew that there were that many major chords! ;)

📸 Photos

The Seattle Symphony on stage, with blue and purple lights on the walls, and a screen displaying a Tim Burton sketch of two bare trees on a checkerboard landscape and the text, 'Danny Elfman's music from the films of Tim Burton'.
The show about to start.
Looking south down the Seattle waterfront from the roof of the new aquarium with the skyline on the left and the Seattle ferris wheel on the right, with people strolling along the sidewalk by the old aquarium building.
Before going to the symphony, we went down to look at the newly remodeled Seattle waterfront. It’s really nice!
Panoramic shot of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, half-shrouded in clouds, under a mostly cloudly sky, with a ferry on the water on the far left of the image.
The Olympic mountains were really pretty this morning.
A section of brick wall and utility pipe barely visible behind hundreds of pieces of used, chewed gum, some stuck to the wall in blobs, some stretched to hang off of the pipes. It's actually more gross than it sounds.
It had been a while since we’d gone by the gum wall. It’s as appealing as ever! (My wife glanced up as I was working on this photo, and commented, “That’s disgusting. I looked up just in time to see my husband looking at dirty pictures on his computer…”.)

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s, with the perennial classic: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers: “When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”

  • Varsha Bansal at The Guardian: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: “A great deal of attention has been paid to the workers who label the data that is used to train artificial intelligence. There is, however, another corps of workers, including Sawyer, working day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses. ¶ ‘AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,’ said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. ‘These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.'”

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 53 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Has all the great characterization, worldbuilding, humor, and heart of the Vorkosigan saga, only this time in a fantasy setting. This was an interesting experiment, reading fantasy from an author I became a fan of through her sci-fi work. Somewhat amusingly, and definitely interestingly, I just couldn’t quite get as much into this as I did the Vorkosigan books – which is not a fault of the book, I’ve just always been more into SF than F.

Me holding The Curse of Chalion

Weekly Notes: September 15–21, 2025

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  • ♿️ Made it through opening week at work! (This is the week before classes start, filled with staff and faculty info and training.) Day two got a little crazy for me running around making sure that captions were up and running properly, but everything worked out in the end. Tomorrow, students are back and classes start!

  • 💻 A particularly exciting part of the week was getting issued my new work laptop. My old one was a Dell something-or-other, my new one is an Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, and 1 TB drive. A very nice upgrade, prompted because I need to be able to work cross-platform for accessibility testing and document remediation, and this allows me to run Windows in a virtual environment inside the macOS. Haven’t gotten very far setting it up yet, but it’ll be very nice when it’s all set up.

📸 Photos

Spooky season decorations outside our house, incouding a skeleton, jack-o-lanterns, and several Halloween themed gnomes.
It’s spooky season! Our seasonal gnome garden gets some extra friends for the next month or so…plus, we got some fun new additions this year.
An outdoor decorative figure of three very creepy mushrooms with wide eyes, droopy noses, and wide evil sharp-toothed smiles, with tombstones and bones at their bases.
This great bunch of evil mushrooms has been creeping out my wife for the past few weeks since we found it and tossed it on a shelf inside until it was time to set it out front.
An outdoor figurine of a snail with a green head, blue foot, and purple shell, all stitched up and with metal plugs like Frankenstein's monster.
We definitely couldn’t resist this frankensnail (Frankensnail’s monster?) when we saw it.
Me holding a paper model of a Seattle Link light rail train car, while wearing a black cap, rainbow shirt, and black face mask.
We’re less than three months away from the new Link light rail station across the street opening up, so we got paper craft train cars to assemble during our first day of all-staff events.

🎧 Listening

  • Nine Inch Nails’ Tron: Ares soundtrack just landed. I’ve only given it a quick run-through so far, but my first impressions are that it works really well as a follow up to Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, and has some really strong new NIN tracks, but I’m not yet entirely sure what I think of it as a NIN album.

🔗 Linking

There’s a bit of a theme to this week’s links that will be quite obvious….

Weekly Notes: September 8–14, 2025

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  • 💉 Last weekend we tried to get our Covid boosters at our local Walgreens and were turned down, even though Washington’s governor had put out a directive a few days before stating that everyone in Washington over six months old was eligible. So on Monday, we tried again at our local Safeway, which had no problems at all with giving us a Flu/Covid vaccine cocktail, so we’ve now switched pharmacies from Walgreens to Safeway.

  • Work was pretty uneventful, though this was the last week of the summer break; this coming week is our “opening week” with lots of staff and faculty welcomes and training workshops, and the week after that, students are back on campus. Back into the school year!

📸 Photos

Me with the left sleeve of my t-shirt rolled up to reveal two band-aids that have been written on with black permanent marker; the top says "F U" and the bottom says "R F K".
I decorated my bandaids after getting my vaccines, just because I could.
Three decorative 'skeleton' creatures on my office desk. One is an elephant (complete with solid bone ears and trunk bones), one an octopus (with large skull and tentacle bones), and one a snail (with skull shell, solid antennae, and a bony ribcage-like structure for the foot that makes it look almost centipedal).
It’s spooky season, so it’s time for my small collection of ridiculously anatomically improbable skeletons to come back out onto my desk at work. The elephant is the newest addition.
A flock of about 40 ducks standing across a bike path.
The ducks on our weekend walking trail were out in force on Saturday morning.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

I finished two books this week; one was even non-fiction! Though as it was a behind-the-scenes look at Star Trek III, it was still solidly within my usual wheelhouse.

And I’ve just started Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, as a precursor to moving forward on my Hugo best novel reading project; this one isn’t a Hugo winner, but its immediate sequel is. With how much I enjoyed Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, which though sci-fi, combined two genres that aren’t my usual thing (military SF and romance), I’m curious what I’ll think of her in the fantasy realm, which is also secondary to SF in my interests.

📺 Watching

Two movies this week:

  • The Phoenician Scheme (⭐️⭐️⭐️): I am absolutely a sucker for Anderson’s quirky hyper-stylized films.

  • The Thursday Murder Club (⭐️⭐️⭐️): Take some of today’s most known British actors and let ‘em run around having fun in a murder mystery. Quite enjoyable.

🔗 Linking

  • Erin Reed: We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk’s Hateful Life: “Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. […] His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.”

  • Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'”

  • Identity 4: Racintosh Plus: Really impressive work putting a Mac Plus into a one-unit rack mount casing.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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Book 52 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was fun, and I can totally see it as a mid-pandemic “just need to have fun writing something” lark of a book. Having recently watched the first season of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series (set in one of the recent Godzilla timelines), it was amusingly easy to see this as an extension of that…or vice versa, for that matter. It did skimp a bit on actually describing any of the creatures (the kaiju are big, some have wings, claws, and/or teeth, they have parasites that are also dangerous, use your imagination for anything else), but while a little odd, I can cope.

Me holding The Kaiju Preservation Society