Michael Hanscom

• 🎓 This week was Highline’s graduation week, with the commencement ceremony on Thursday. We had a record number of graduates this year (almost 900 signed up to walk in the ceremony), and still managed to wrap up the ceremony in just slightly under two and a half hours. Not bad!

• 🍾 Happy anniversary to us! Friday was our thirteenth anniversary. Rather than doing anything big, as we just made it through graduation week and have plans coming up next weekend and beyond, we celebrated by having a quiet weekend of naps, reading, and movies here at home.

• 🌞 Happy solstice! Summer is officially here.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a noir detective mystery in an alternate-present Sitka, Alaska.

• Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

• Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.

• TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.

🔗 Linking

• Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”

• Catalina Gaitán at the Seattle Times: Judge to decide fate of Seattle’s unofficial nude beach (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): I’ve never been to this beach, but I know people who have and who would be disappointed if the NIMBYs got their way.

• James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Battle ramps up over WA ballot measure to bar transgender students from girls’ sports: In case you thought Washington was too blue to have to deal with this transphobic crap.

• Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”

• Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”

• ♿️ With the last two weeks being the final two weeks of spring quarter (the last week of classes and finals week), there’s been a lot going on that I’ve been either directly or tangentially involved with. There’s been the launch party for this year’s Arcturus, Highline’s annual student literary journal, the Achieve students’ capstone presentations, a short student-written and produced play, and a discussion panel by four graduating journalists from the Thunderword, our student paper. Plus, of course, all the usual work stuff. I’m looking forward to getting through graduation this coming week and (hopefully) having things slow down a bit over the summer.

• ✨ Interestingly, and often amusingly, AI has been an ongoing theme this week.

  • 🎓 During the capstone presentations for Achieve, where students from our program for intellectually disabled students present what they’ve done and accomplished over their time at Highline, several of them made it clear that they’d done all the work on their presentations themselves, without using AI.

  • 🎭 The play, written and improvised by the four actors, had an ongoing plot line about whether or not to use AI, with one character convincing another to stop using it. In the after-play conversation, the actors and students in the audience had more to say along these lines.

  • 📰 During the Thunderbird panel, the journalists got a question about AI use, and all vehemently decried the use of AI for their writing. “We’re humans, and we want real human writing, feelings, and reactions in our stories.”

  • 💼 This week was a “listening session” with a representative of a headhunting firm as Highline starts the process of looking for a new college president. AI came up here as well, with people recognizing that we can’t ignore AI’s effects, but also stressing that we don’t want someone who would attempt to push AI over actually educating our students.

  • 👍🏻 Overall, it was heartening that throughout the weeks, from our students to our staff and faculty, there is a lot of healthy skepticism (at best) about genAI.

• 🎨 Also work-related, this week we had a presentation to Highline’s Board of Trustees telling them about a project we’ve had in progress with Sound Transit’s art program (STart) over the course of the year. We’ve had three visually disabled students working with artists on a piece of tactile artwork for the Kent-DesMoines light rail station, giving their input on materials, colors, and other aspects to make the artwork effective for Blind and low-vision people. The piece is still being finished, but should be installed sometime in August. I’m really looking forward to seeing it!

• 🚀 Outside of work, last Sunday was Norwescon’s summer picnic…or, well, summer-ish picnic, as for some reason it was much earlier in the year than usual. It was a nice day of hanging out with Norwescon people, chatting and tossing ideas around. Plus, on a personal note, I formally turned over administration duties for our Google Suite to someone else, taking one more thing off of my plate! I’m getting closer to having an actually reasonable amount of duties, instead of my usual “you do how much?” lineup.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Three books finished over these two weeks, one of which was even non-fiction!

• Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb, a mystery and sequel to the somewhat notorious (in SF circles) Bimbos of the Death Sun.

• The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, which did a wonderful job of reinforcing my anti-AI biases.

• Possession by J.M. Dillard and Kathleen O’Malley, a TNG-era Star Trek novel.

📺 Watching

• This afternoon we watched Send Help (2026), Sam Raimi’s latest horror comedy, and really enjoyed it. Dark, twisted, funny, and with a very satisfying end.

🔗 Linking

• Sarah Mizes-Tan at KNKX/NPR: Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students: Just in case you thought WA was too blue for this sort of bigotry: “Student athletes in Washington state who want to compete in girls’ sports would likely have to obtain genital exams to participate if a controversial ballot initiative passes in November.”

• Heidi Groover at the Seattle Times: Downtown Seattle may house new data center: “A Texas real estate firm filed permit applications with the city last week proposing a six-story building including a data center, office and retail space at Third Avenue and Virginia Street. The location once housed a Bed Bath & Beyond store and since last year has been home to the contemporary arts center Cannonball Arts.”

• Ex Astris Scientia: The Evolution of Screen Ratios in Star Trek: “This article looks at the technical standards that shaped television and cinema, the artistic choices that influenced how Trek moved between these formats and how the franchise entered the era of modern widescreen TV with its new possibilities. It also highlights some odd and inconsequential decisions along the way, including humorous uses of inconsistent aspect ratios in crossovers. Finally, it examines the pros and cons of ‘cinematic’ screen ratios for television series.”

• Hunter Ingram at Variety: How ‘For All Mankind’ Works With Apple to Revive and Upgrade the Forgotten Newton as Its Alt-History iPhone: “Apple products and their use in film and TV have long been a source of conversation. Who can carry an iPhone on screen? Are bad guys forced to use nondescript phones and computers so as not to sow chaos with a device bearing Apple’s famous logo? Well, ‘For All Mankind’ asks a different question altogether: Can its characters use a completely forgotten Apple product canceled two decades ago?”

• Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb, and Gabe Cohen at CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive: “The March 2026 executive order is one of several moves Trump has made recently to seek federal control over elections and restrict mail-in voting, which he has repeatedly cast as a tool used by his opponents for election cheating despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

• Better Images of AI: “We aim to create a new repository of better images of AI that anyone can use, starting with a collection of inspirational images. We will continue to gather images for this repository and commission original work. We welcome image submissions and funding to commission and brief more artists.”

• John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications: “Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a ‘basic competence’ issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me?”

• Catherynne M. Valente: The Democratic Urge to Lose (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!”

• Chris Person at Aftermath: Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes: “But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about.”

• BBSG: Bash Static Site Generator: “BSSG processes Markdown files and builds a minimal, accessible website suitable for personal journals, daily writing, or introspective personal newspapers.” Thinking this might be my first step into moving to a static site generator.