Michael Hanscom

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

Weekly Notes: July 14–20, 2025

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(Posting this one a couple days late and backdating it….)

  • ♿️ My wife’s healing has been going well, so this week I went back to heading into the office to work. Well…in theory. The Seattle area was having a bit of a heat wave (high 80s to mid 90s), which threw things off. Mondays I work from home, Tuesday I went in and the building was really warm, Wednesday I went in but we got sent home at noon because the A/C was out, Thursday we were told to work from home while they worked on the A/C, and we work on a 4-10s schedule during the summer, so I didn’t work on Friday. So my first week back in the office was a day and a half! My wife didn’t mind, though. :)

  • 🕺🏻 Saturday night a friend of my wife’s came over to spend the night so that I could have a night off from caretaking, so I got to head out to the Mercury for the first time in a couple months. It was a rather slow night (competing with the Capitol Hill Block Party and a Stabbing Westward concert), but picked up a bit towards midnight. No worries, though, as the music was good, and I got to hang out with a friend and chat about convention drama.

📸 Photos

A brown dragonfly with clear wings striped with brown, sitting on a fence post with blurry green leaves in the background.
This dragonfly was hunting gnats in our backyard as I was watering our flowers.
A heron sitting on a dead tree branch behind some wetlands grass with trees in the background.
We spotted a heron to the side of the trail as we were off taking my wife on her first walk outside of our neighborhood in several weeks.
Whoah-oh, Black Betty…
A grocery bin sign that says 'rambutan'.
A sticker that says 'trans witches for Palestine' stuck to a building on a Seattle street.
Seattle sticker graffiti doesn’t get much more Seattle than this.
A small collectible card storage box that looks like a classic Star Trek Gorn, sitting next to a small gnome holding a sign that says 'welcome' and standing near a small red door.
When we got home from our walk on Sunday morning, we discovered that the “Welcome gnome” outside our front door was being menaced by a Gorn! Sort of. A nice surprise gift from a friend!

📚 Reading

With Worldcon coming up in just a few weeks, I’m binging my way through the Murderbot series by our guest of honor Martha Wells. This week, I read The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 1 (collecting All Systems Red and Artificial Condition), Compulsory, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 2 (collecting Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy), and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory.

📺 Watching

🖖🏻 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back with the first two episodes of season three! I enjoyed both episodes…but with reservations (which I posted behind a content warning on Mastodon to protect against spoilers).

🎧 Listening

Two new albums this week:

🔗 Linking

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory by Martha Wells

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Book 40 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Another very short glimpse into the world around Murderbot. Brief as it is, I really liked the look at how Mensah is dealing with the trauma and PTSD of her experiences, and how Murderbot is integrating into its new situation. They way these two are relying on each other is really nice.

Me holding Home on my iPad

The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2 by Martha Wells

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Book 39 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

(Collects Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy.)

Brings the overall arc of the first four Murderbot novellas to a close, as Murderbot continues to investigate the circumstances behind the events of All Systems Red, and learns ever more about itself in the process. Really satisfying, and even as a neurotypical person (as far as I know, at least), it’s all too easy to identify with Murderbot’s confusion and irritation with human behavior.

Me holding The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1 by Martha Wells

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Book 36 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

(Collects All Systems Red and Artificial Condition.)

I’d read the first half of this back in 2018, when All Systems Red was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, but until now, hadn’t gone any further into the series. Having Martha Wells as a Guest of Honor for this year’s Worldcon was a great reason to pick these up and read them all.

Definitely enjoyed All Systems Red as much as I remembered from the first time around, and Artificial Condition is just as fun, picking up almost exactly where ASR ends and exploring more of Murderbot’s past. Murderbot is such a great character.

Me holding The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1

Fortnightly Notes: June 30–July 13, 2025

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As there have been Things Going On lately, I missed last Sunday’s “Weekly Notes” post, so this becomes a “Fortnightly Notes” post instead, partly because “biweekly” is vague, and “fortnight” is a term should be used more often (outside of a gaming context).

  • 🏥 The major part of the Things Going On has been that two weeks ago, my wife had a (planned and necessary) hysterectomy, and I’ve been on caretaker duty. She had two nights in the hospital following the surgery, and then came home and has been recuperating here. She’s healing well, and had a good post-op checkup a few days ago, so things are going well! This does mean that our summer is going to be mostly uneventful, but that’s obviously quite okay under the circumstances.

  • ♿️ Due to the aforementioned Things Going On, I’ve spent the past two weeks working remotely. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job that lets me do that when it’s necessary, and I wish more people had the ability to do this.

  • 🚀 On the convention front, the Seattle Worldcon schedule was released this past week. Since I’m our website admin, I’m quite happy with the technical side of things, as I was able to present the full 5-day schedule on a single page, filterable by day, track, or both, and with clean (for WordPress), semantic, and accessible (to the best of my ability to verify) code.

    A bit of geekery:

    The Javascript code that does the filtering could quite probably be improved and optimized, as it’s just a result of me digging through the web and hacking things together until it did what I wanted, and my JavaScript knowledge is just barely at the level that allowed me to figure this out. But hey, it works, and that was the most important part.

    Each panel is wrapped in an article tag, each panel title is a heading, and start and end times are wrapped in proper time tags. Panel titles are linked self-anchors so that it’s easy to link directly to individual panels, which is discoverable either by tabbing to the title or by mousing over them. Here’s a sample of the code for one (totally randomly chosen) panel:

    <article class="track dan eve">
    <h4 id="EVE03"><a href="#EVE03">Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi</a></h4>
    <div class="sched">Events; Dance/Movement<br>Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, <time datetime="2025-08-13T20:00-07:00">Wed. 8 p.m.</time>–<time datetime="2025-08-14T02:00-07:00">2 a.m.</time></div>
    <p class="desc">From dance clubs in Alaska in the '90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes! Already know there's something that'll get you out on the floor? <a href="https://app.limedj.com/shows/djwudi/9NWMHW">Send in your requests ahead of time!</a></p>
    <p class="pros">DJ Wüdi</p>
</article>

    Keyboard navigation for the page works fine, checking it with WAVE comes up with zero errors (and 400-some “alerts”, but that’s because WAVE incorrectly thinks the panelist listings should be headers), checking with ANDI also looks good, and I was able to navigate and interact (at least as well as a non-regular screen reader user can) with VoiceOver and NVDA. This certainly doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved, but I’m pretty happy with where I got things to be.

📸 Photos

Me stretched out in a grey recliner in our living room.
Our old recliner broke, so we got a new one. Of course, once assembled, I had to give it a good test. It works! Which is good, since this is my wife’s primary recuperation spot.
Me sitting at a small table in a hospital room, wearing a face mask while working on my computer.
Working from a hospital room isn’t quite as comfortable as from home or at the office, but at least I could do it!

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Read Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids and issue 65 of Uncanny Magazine.

📺 Watching

I found time for four movies, mostly in the first few post-surgery days when my wife was doing a lot of sleeping:

  • The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother: ⭐️⭐️ — Not as amusing as I hoped, given the cast.
  • Bugsy Malone: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ – I’d had vague memories of kids shooting marshmallows out of tommy guns in a ’20s gangster film, and finally tracked down that memory. Odd, but entertaining!
  • Johnny Dangerously: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Another ’20s gangster parody I vaguely remembered watching as a kid; this one is still really funny, and I realized while watching it that some old jokes I’ve had in my head for years came from this film. “You shouldn’t grab me, Johnny. My mother grabbed me once. Once.“
  • KPop Demon Hunters: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Somehow this one popped into conversations around me, I gave it a shot, and was entertained…and suspect that it would be a good idea to make sure the soundtrack ends up in my convention DJing playlist.

🔗 Linking

  • Patrick Clark in Businessweek: American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination: I’ve occasionally wondered about how the mid-range hotel breakfast buffet got started; this was a surprisingly interesting look at how strategically aiming for the middle of the road made Hampton Inn the US’s largest hotel chain (which I wouldn’t have guessed).

  • Lynda V. Mapes in The Seattle Times: These orcas have been trying to feed people, new research shows: “So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people? ¶ Researchers ruled out play, because the incidents were short, lasting only about 30 seconds. And it’s mostly young orcas that play, and orcas of every age offered food. So it seems what is going on is exploration, the scientists surmised: The orcas are curious to see what happens if they offer us food.”

  • Gaurav Sood at Yanko Design: World’s Narrowest Fiat Panda is One Anorexic 19-Inch-Wide EV Destined for the Record Books: “Italian mechanic Andrea Marazzi has transformed a 1993 Fiat Panda into what is now being described as the world’s narrowest functioning car. At just 19.6 inches wide, the one-seater electric vehicle looks more like a cartoon sketch brought to life than a road-ready hatchback. Yet it can move, steer, stop, and drive like any other car.”

  • Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared: “Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. […] To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an “ongoing basis”….

  • Sitara at Sitara’s Garden: How Fantasy Fuelled 60s Counterculture: “That pirated Tolkien paperbacks hit like a bomb in 60s campuses. The bootleg copy was printed due to a loophole in copyright law and quickly became a cult phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in 1965 alone. The biggest fans of the book seemed to be hippies, protesters and rockstars. It makes sense when you look at the context.”

  • Laura Michet: Touching the back wall of the Apple store: “When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”

  • Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong at The Verge: The American system of democracy has crashed: “The declaration pronounces these rights to be so important that it’s worth overthrowing a government over them. But one should not undertake revolution against a tyrannical government lightly, the declaration says, going on to provide a massive litany of complaints as justification. In modern times, the full list was considered to be the boring part of this document, lacking the vim and vigor of ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ and other such bars from the preamble. But this year, it’s become a… bracing read.”

  • Jason Kottke: There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy: “America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.”

  • Sarah Taber on Mastodon (as a nice chaser to Kottke’s link above): “Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don’t feel like there’s much to celebrate this July 4th. It’s been a rough several years. ¶ So I want to talk about how we’re making history right now.”

  • Marcus Medford-Kerr at CBC Radio: These sea spiders use the bacteria on their bodies to turn methane into food: “Most sea spiders are hunters. They tend to eat anemones, worms, sponges and soft corals, getting their nutrients by piercing their prey and sucking up their internal fluids. ¶ The Sericosura spiders, on the other hand, are more like intergenerational farmers.”

  • Catherynne M. Valente in Uncanny Magazine Issue 65: When He Calls Your Name: So good, and a wonderful homage to…well, that would just be giving it away, wouldn’t it?

  • Dr David Musgrove at History Extra: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery: “It’s not too often that medieval historians grab national headlines, but when you get an Oxford academic counting penises in a world-famous embroidery, you’re sure to arouse media attention.”

  • Randee Dawn: 7.07.25 Why most SFF cons need fixing, and how CONvergence can show the way: I’m actually pleased to see that Norwescon is already doing or working on several of the suggestions in this post. That said, there’s more we can do to ensure that we’re around for our 50th year (not too far away!) and beyond.

  • Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQNation: GOP erases all mentions of bisexuals from Stonewall Monument webpages: “Transgender journalist Erin Reed noted that the Stonewall National Monument page once said, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.’ The newly revised version says, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal.'”

  • Marcin Wichary: Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004: “Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.”

Worldcon Schedule Update

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Me, a white man with short-cropped greying red beard and glasses, with the Seattle Worldcon logo.

I’ve had to drop one of the panels I was on, but am still a panelist on one, presenting on my own for another, and have added DJing the Wednesday night dance! Here are the current details (now with links, since we’ve posted the full schedule):

Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi

Events; Dance/Movement
Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, Wed. 8 p.m.–2 a.m.

From dance clubs in Alaska in the ’90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes! Already know there’s something that’ll get you out on the floor? Send in your requests ahead of time!

DJ Wüdi

Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions

Conrunning/Fandom
Room 327, Sat. 4:30–5:30 p.m.

Conventions are getting more used to considering the physical accessibility of their hotels and convention centers, but how are we doing with digital accessibility? Ensuring that website and web applications, email marketing, and distributed documents are set up to be compatible with assistive technology keeps our members with disabilities included throughout the year. Learn about the basics of document accessibility and get a grounding of what your publications and marketing volunteers should be aware of in order to make sure your convention’s materials are accessible to everyone.

Michael Hanscom (M)

Norwescon: Local but Not Little

Conrunning/Fandom; Local Flavor
Room 343-344, Sun. 1:30–2:30 p.m.

Founded in 1978, Norwescon (NWC) draws thousands of Pacific Northwest SFF creators and fans each spring. But did you know that NWC grew out of a desire to bring Worldcon back to Seattle? Well, we’ve finally done it, so come hear how we got here… and what’s next!

Wm Salt Hale (M), Michael Hanscom, Taylor Tomblin, Tim Bennett

An Alt Text Experiment

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I’m the website administrator for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and I decided to run a bit of an experiment with the site, playing with an idea I’d been toying with for next year’s Norwescon website.

As I’ve been learning more about accessibility over the past few years, I’ve been working on transferring what I learn over to both the Norwescon and Worldcon websites as I’ve been working on them. Since alt text on images is one of the baseline requirements for good accessibility, I’ve been making sure that we have decent alt text for any images added to either site.

Of course, when working with other people’s art and images, there’s always a little question of whether the alt text I come up with would be satisfactory for the artist creating the image. So, I figured, why not see if I could more directly involve them?

When we were collecting signups for the fan tables, art show, and dealers’ room, as I was building the registration forms, whenever we asked for a logo or image to be uploaded, I added an optional field to allow the user to include alt text for the image they were uploading. I didn’t expect everyone using the form would take advantage of this — not everyone is familiar with alt text, some might not entirely understand what the field was for, and some might just find the extra field confusing — but I figured it would be worth a shot to see what happened.

Screenshot of a section of a website form. On the left is an option to upload a logo image, on the right is a text box asking for alt text. The prompt reads, 'A brief description of the image to support our Blind and low vision members. If no alt text is provided, '[display name] logo' will be used.' The field is limited to 1000 characters.
The logo upload field and associated alt text entry field for the art show application. The fan table and dealers’ room applications used very similar language.

Without showing how many of each type of application Worldcon received (because I don’t know if our Exhibits department would want that publicized beyond the “more than we have spots for” for each category that they’ve already said), here’s a breakdown of the percentages of each application type that included a logo image, and how many of those included alt text.

Area Submitted Logo Submitted Alt Text for Logo
Fan Tables 77.55% 63.16%
Dealers’ Room 99.60% 72.98%
Art Show 79.89% 87.05%
“Submitted Logo” is the percentage of applications that included a logo image. “Submitted Alt Text” is the percentage of submitted logos that included alt text.

As far as this goes, I’d say it was a pretty successful experiment, with between 63% and 87% of submitted images including alt text that we could then copy and paste into the website backend and code as we built the pages that used them, both saving us time and effort and ensuring that the alt text was what the people filling out the form would want it to be. Not bad at all!

Of course, simply having alt text is only part of the equation. The next question is how good is the submitted alt text?

Not surprisingly, it’s a bit all over the place. Some were very simple and straightforward, with just a business name, or the name with “logo” appended. Some described the logo in varying levels of detail. And some went far beyond just describing the logo, occasionally including information better suited other fields on the form that asked for a promotional description of the business, organization, or artist. That said, there were very few instances where I considered the submitted text to be unusable for its intended purpose.

Later on when I have more time, I might dive a bit more into the submissions to do a more detailed analysis of the quality of the submitted alt text. But for now, I’m quite satisfied with how this worked out. I fully intend on doing this for Norwescon’s website next year and onward, and would recommend that other conventions (and other organizations or businesses) that accept user image uploads to also allow users to provide their own alt text.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the final results of this experiment on Worldcon’s Art Show, Dealers’ Room, and Fan Table pages…and if any of this inspires you to come to Worldcon (if you’re not already planning to), stop by my presentation on digital accessibility for conventions (currently scheduled for )!