Michael Hanscom

• ♿️ Another busy week with the start of the quarter, but not at all a bad week. A particular moment of personal triumph: As part of our Opening Week committee, I’d pushed for a hybrid (both in-person and online) approach, rather than just requiring everyone to show up on campus in person (and therefore excluding those who live and work remotely, have disabilities that make coming to campus and/or participating in big, crowded, group things more difficult, etc.), and we ended up going that way. In our post-event discussion meeting, two people said the they weren’t on board with the hybrid approach but went with the group decision, but after seeing how the week went and reading the positive feedback from participants, are now on board with the hybrid approach. I’m quite pleased about this! Which isn’t to say it was perfect, we definitely picked up on areas that need to be adjusted as we go forward, but overall, we did a good job.

• ♿️🚊 Also at work this week, a small group of us went up to see a piece of artwork that Sound Transit has recently installed at the Kent-Des Moines light rail station. The art is designed to be tactile, and was created in consultation with several visually disabled Highline students. While I wasn’t directly involved with the project, I’d known about it and had been enjoying hearing about it as the project proceeded, and it was really neat to see the final installation.

• 🎭 This afternoon we went out to see the Renton Civic Theatre’s production of Noises Off. Noises Off has been a long-time favorite of ours (really, how can it not be?), and RCT did a good job with it. I was particularly amused by Rachael Spencer’s Brooke Ashton; her bits of business when she wasn’t directly part of the dialogue or action were consistently entertaining. Also, this was the first production of Noises Off I’ve been to where the stage reset between acts was done with the curtains open, and it was a lot of fun to watch the tech crew strike, rotate, and reset the set. It was also a blast listening to the audience, and identifying both people who were laughing because they were familiar with the show, and those who were laughing because it was their first time seeing it. Well worth seeing, and if you’re local, is running through October 18th.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Finished two books this week: John and Maria Jose Tenuto’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film, which I enjoyed, and Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned, which I did not.

📺 Watching

We finally started watching season four of Star Trek: Strange News Worlds. Since our summer vacation was right during its broadcast, we’d decided to wait until we got home to start watching it. (Plus, since I cancelled our Paramount+ subscription last year when it was taken over by the Ellison’s, I had to find…other methods to watch it. Oh, wait, is it not talk like a pirate day anymore?) So far we’ve watched the first three episodes, and while they’re certainly leaning into the “wild swings” and genre games rather than thoughtful sci-fi, we’ve been entertained. Time travel and dinosaurs, creepy horror, and “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft”. Apparently, this is the “what if we did a full season of TOS glowing green hands and Abe Lincoln in space episodes?” season.

🔗 Linking

• This is a modern motherfucking website.: “View source. Seriously, right‐click, do it. Everything I just described is sitting right there in plain text, readable top to bottom by a human being, the way the web was meant to be.”

• Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They’re Horrified (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.”

• Sancho Panza: When did Google get so f-ing weird?: “Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.”

• Bastardica: “A foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and / or squish them.”

• Mat​hias S​chäfer: The death of web development education: “The web is a radical democratic medium. Right now, tech oligarchs and fascist movements are trying to dismantle its radical potential. We must ensure that everyone can shape the web. ¶ Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building a shared and inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment and emancipation.”

• Ilan Kelman and Matthew Blackett at Phys.org: End of humanity? Blow‑by‑blow account of what would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now: “We already know that a super-eruption on this scale would threaten civilization as we know it. So what exactly would we experience if Yellowstone erupted? We are experts in disasters and volcanoes, and what follows is a thought experiment into what might happen in the worst-case scenario. We’ve based our hypothesis on research and an examination of how countries have dealt with disasters in recent years.”

• Lighthouses of the World: “Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle.”

• Magda Patynska at Discover Wildlife: Amazing new penguin discovered for first time in over 100 years: “Until recently, the gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) was thought to be a single, wide-spread species, but researchers now have evidence that it consists of four separate species, one of them previously unknown to science.”

• ♿️ 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!)

• 🎭 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:

• 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.

• 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

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

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.

• ♿️ 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.

• 🚀 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.

• 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”

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• 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.”

• Terence Eden: Put an AV test at the start of your slides: Good advice that I need to remember.

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.”