Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

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Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.

iPhone security: Hard locking and lockdown mode

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An iPhone showing the Lockdown Mode pre-activation warning screen.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PROTESTING or in any sort of situation where there’s a higher-than-average chance of having potentially adversarial encounters with the police, and if you have an iPhone, please remember these two tips:

  1. Memorize how to quickly “hard lock” your phone. It’s easy to do, even as you’re pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag: hold the power button and either volume button for about two seconds. Your screen will flip to show the “slide to power off” toggle, along with the Medical ID and emergency call toggles. Once you’ve done this, Face ID/Touch ID is disabled, and you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. (If you keep holding the buttons for five or more seconds, your phone will automatically call emergency services.)

    While there are some legal disputes over this, currently the police cannot force you to surrender your phone passcode, but they might be allowed to force you to use Touch ID/Face ID to unlock it. By hard locking your phone, you’re locking them out until/unless they get a warrant. If the police ever ask you to surrender your phone, hard lock it as you hand it to them.

    I also recommend switching from a standard 4- or 6-digit passcode to a longer, alphanumeric password. To set this up, go to Settings > Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, tap Turn Passcode On, and tap Passcode Options and set your passcode. This is much more secure than a short numerical passcode, and if your phone ever gets confiscated, will make it much more difficult for authorities to gain access to your phone.

  2. Either before you join the protest, or if you see the police presence start to ramp up, TURN ON LOCKDOWN MODE.

    Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > On

    Note: This is not a setting that most people need to have enabled full-time. It’s designed, in Apple’s words, “for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.” Turning it on will severely restrict how your phone works in a number of ways (see Apple’s Lockdown Mode support document for details). However, it also makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you, intercept your communications, or otherwise gain access to your phone.

Make your voices heard! But keep yourself safe as you do.

Android users will have to do their own research for these or similar techniques. Or get better phones. ;) (Yes, I’m kidding. Use what works for you.)

(Image yoinked from AppleInsider’s Lockdown Mode post until I can make my own.)

Don’t want to support Nazis? Don’t support Substack.

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Substack vocally and proudly supports and platforms writers of Nazi viewpoints.

If you don’t want to support writers of Nazi viewpoints, don’t give Substack money through paid subscriptions to anyone who publishes there, and certainly don’t publish through them yourself.

If you use Substack to publish your writing, go somewhere else. There are options.

If you read someone who publishes via Substack, encourage them to publish somewhere else and stop your subscription until they do. If you really want to keep reading what they publish without a subscription (if they offer that option), learn how to subscribe via an RSS reader so that you’re not visiting the website and creating impressions that way.

Here’s what Substack said earlier today about their ongoing commitment to freedom of the press:

Elon Musk has been a vocal supporter of free speech. It’s no secret that we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but he deserves a lot of credit for advancing freedom of speech on X, before it was popular and in the face of fierce criticism and opposition….

We will continue to support editorial freedom and the hands-off approach to content moderation that we have had in place since the company was founded in 2017….

As a platform, we are committed to supporting the speech rights of creators and their audiences, so we avoid political or business commitments that conflict with this mission. We buy into the old idea that we can strongly disagree with what someone has to say and still defend their right to say it.

In other words: Paradox of tolerance? Never heard about it, don’t really care.

Other resources on Substack’s ongoing Nazi platforming (with thanks to Imani Gandy for collecting these):

  • March 17, 2021, Annalee Newitz in The Hypothesis): “Here’s why Substack’s scam worked so well“:

    Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers. Among them is Graham Linehan, who was already booted from Twitter for hate speech against trans people, and whose Substack is entirely devoted to the idea that trans women are a danger to cis women and should be stopped.

  • November 28, 2023, Jonathan M. Katz in The Atlantic: “Substack Has a Nazi Problem“:

    Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year.

  • November 19, 2024, Anil Dash: “Don’t call it a Substack.“:

    Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

  • December 18, 2024, Marisa Kabas in The Handbasket: “Substack is at it again“:

    Nearly 250 Substacks posted an open letter to the founders on their respective sites in mid-December of last year after journalist Jonathan Katz’s piece for The Atlantic revealed an ugly truth: the platform was monetizing Nazis. The open letter campaign resulted in coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, The Verge, Tech Dirt, and others. It was a roar the founders couldn’t ignore, and they responded with a truly baffling post explaining their decision to stay the course.

There are other options than Substack (and more beyond those, I’m sure). Stop supporting businesses that make their money by platforming the worst of humanity.

Answering the blog questions challenge

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While I wasn’t specifically tagged (I’m not that well known), I saw Matthew Haughey do this (via his Mastodon post), and figured I’d jump in. Nothing like a little narcissistic navel gazing to distract from <waves hands around expressively>, right?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Trick question (kind of, unplanned): I didn’t even know I was blogging in the first place, because the “blog”/”blogging” terms hadn’t been coined yet! I created my first personal site probably sometime in 1995 (that archive is from February of 1996), and that site had an “announcements” page that was essentially an early blog, with short little updates mostly detailing what changes I’d most recently made, but also with occasional bits about my life. All hand-coded, of course, as this was well before any sort of website builder apps existed, let alone CMS software. It wasn’t until February of 2001 when I discovered the words and realized that I was “blogging”.

Screenshot of my 1996 website, titled 'Woody's World of Wonders'. It has a repeating gif background of my signature, and a 'Netscape 2.0 enhanced' warning at the top.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I’m using WordPress (self hosted), and have been since November 16, 2006. At the time, I had been using Movable Type, which was the Big Thing for self-hosted blogging in the early 2000s. However, they’d been moving towards a more corporate model, and I figured I’d check out this new up-and-comer. Almost 20 years later, I guess it worked out.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yup! Between WordPress and the previously mentioned Movable Type, I was also on TypePad (a hosted blogging platform originally by the Movable Type people, though I have no idea if there’s any relationship anymore); before Movable Type I used a system called NewsPro (which no longer has a web presence). I’ve also at times dabbled with Blogger, LiveJournal (no link because that account got purged), Tumblr, and others; I currently mirror this blog to a DreamWidth blog (like LiveJournal before the Russians bought it).

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most of the time, as long as I’m on my desktop or laptop, I use MarsEdit. If I’m mobile on my phone or iPad, I just use the WordPress web interface, because I haven’t found a good mobile app. (Yes, I know WordPress has an app; it just annoyed me when I tried to use it.)

The MarsEdit post editing window showing this post being written in Markdown format.

Sometimes I’ll start writing elsewhere as I get thoughts together; if I do that, it’s likely to either be in Apple’s Notes app or BBEdit.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m really excited about something or really ticked off about something. Other than that, it’s kind of random. And it’s been more random than I like for a long time (honestly, and unfortunately, my blogging frequency has existed in somewhat inverse relation to the rise of Facebook/Twitter and other non-blog forms of social media), but I’m in the midst of (yet another) attempt at making a real push to blogging here more regularly instead of pushing it all to Facebook. Facebook and its associated Meta products becoming an ever more overt dumpster fire and prompting an exodus is certainly helping with that.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Usually I write, publish, and go. If it’s something I’m really invested in (due to the aforementioned excitement or rage), then I might take a little more time to work and polish it before pushing it live. But my general approach is to just dump it out of my brain and onto the pixels.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Whatever catches my interest. This is definitely not a single-topic blog; hence the “Eclecticism” name.

Who are you writing for?

My first audience is me — in large part, because I so rarely know if anyone else is reading (few people comment, and I long ago turned off any sort of site statistic tracking). My secondary audience is friends and family or anyone who might be interested enough in my ramblings to read regularly, whether by stopping by my site, following the links I put on social media, or who have me in their RSS feeds. The tertiary audience is whomever else happens to stumble by for whatever reason.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

With 29 years of archives (34 if you include the earliest entries in my “beyond the blog” category that collects email list and usenet posts I made before I had my own website; the oldest one dates from October 17, 1991), that’s a difficult question to answer. However, I do keep a “Worth Reading” page that I’ll occasionally update with posts that I think are among the most…well, worth reading…and of those, I’d say my current favorite is the most recent addition: Change is good, where I advocate growth and learning and my own journey ever leftward, as occasionally evidenced by older posts here.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Nothing solid. I do occasionally look at options for moving away from WordPress (most recently due to what I consider highly questionable choices by the primary face of WordPress), but so far, between having limited time and energy to devote to diving into my computer (my wife does appreciate actually interacting with me from time to time, after all) and not having found quite the right solution to move to, things are probably stable for the time being.

I do have a wishlist of what I’d like to have in a blogging tool (summarized as “early-2000s MovableType, only with some modern updates”) that, if I could find a solution that supported all of these, would get me off of WordPress in a heartbeat. But until someone builds my dream blogging tool, inertia is probably going to keep me with something that works, even if I’m not entirely happy with it.

Who else do you want to tag?

I haven’t got a clue! Especially since “tagging” as a way to notify someone is more difficult over multiple services. Of course, if anyone finds this and wants to jump in without being specifically tagged (like I did), feel free! Harken back to the pre-Facebook/Twitter days when blogs like this were how we kept up with each other and these were memes instead of silly text on an image!

The End of Section 31

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The more I think about the Section 31 movie, the more I think that there’s a possibility that it might have one good outcome: Solidifying Section 31 as being nothing more than a run-of-the-mill black ops/special forces/Delta Force/Seal Team Six/Mission Impossible/whatever department, and therefore 1) not the Big Scary Thing it was originally presented as, 2) not something we really need to be terribly concerned about or excited by, and 3) not something we really need to spend any more time on.

As Edgar Anderson (@pithyphrase.net) noted on Bluesky:

In Deep Space Nine, it was never 100% to me whether Section 31 actually existed or Sloane was just a very capable but insane person acting on his own. I wish that ambiguity had been maintained.

As far as I’m concerned, this — or perhaps something that’s a little bit of both — is the best way to look at Section 31. While the “sooper sekret ‘good bad guys’ doing the dirty work so you fragile little snowflakes can have your Federation utopia” idea fit with DS9’s take on the Trek universe, for me, Sloane’s ambiguous nature is part of what made DS9’s Section 31 bearable. For a concept that was so very antithetical to the established Star Trek universe, having it be presented as a “…wait…really? Or is he…no. But…maybe?” thing worked, and worked well. Maybe it was a thing. Maybe he was a very talented psychopath.

William Sadler as Agent Luther Sloan in Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

But then, over the years, particularly with Discovery diving down the Section 31 rabbit hole in ways that made no sense with the concept (the super-secret covert ops branch of the Federation that almost nobody knows about, exists only in the shadows, and will be denied at every opportunity if mentioned, has its own all-black comm badges and fancy ships, for V’ger’s sake), and now this particularly “meh” attempt at merging Mission Impossible with Star Trek, it’s time to give up on the concept.

Just write it off as a special forces unit that, both on the individual member level and the institutional level, let its ego get far too out of control, and while it has occasionally been useful, it has also occasionally been dangerously embarrassing and embarrassingly dangerous, and it needs to be disbanded. Both in-universe and out here in the real world.

Let it go.