Weekly(-ish) Notes: August 11–August 19, 2025: Worldcon Edition

Deviating from the format this time, because this was Worldcon week! Which means this post will actually cover a bit over a week, and that it makes more sense to go day-by-day than the usually subject summary blocks. So! What did I do this past week?

Me in front of a big screen showing the Seattle Worldcon logo.
Worldcon!

So, so much….

(This one is going to be long and photo-heavy.)

Monday was packing and putting the final touches on prepping to be away for a week, making sure the house was clean and ready for our eventual return. Necessary, but not the most exciting part.

Time to go! Normally we’d light rail our way to downtown Seattle, but this time we had enough luggage that we decided to use Lyft instead.

Selfie of my wife and I standing in front of three suitcases and a couple smaller bags in our caport as we wait for our Lyft.
Our traditional kicking-off-vacation selfie.

We got to the hotel about noon, expecting to have to drop our luggage off until check-in time at 4 p.m., but they were able to check us in right away, which was great! We ended up on the 11th floor, with a nice view of downtown Seattle (though on the wrong side of the building to see the convention center).

A wide-angle shot of downtown Seattle as seen from our hotel room.
The view from our room. Fun fact: I used to work in the basement of the building visible on the far left, when I was running a FedEx Kinko’s print shop there (before FedEx finally dropped the Kinko’s name…and I used to work for Kinko’s up in Anchorage, before FedEx bought them out).

We started with some food shopping at Whole Foods to make sure we had some reasonably healthy options in our hotel room, then headed over to the convention center to get our badges. Once we had those, it was up to the exhibit hall, so I could set up the display I was responsible for (about the Philip K. Dick award ceremony held at Norwescon each year) and drop off some material for another display that I have been assisting with (about the 1961 Seacon, the last Worldcon held in Seattle).

Me setting up an aluminum tripod easel in a huge convention center room; next to me is a wheeled pushcart stacked about three feet high with cardboard wrapped bundles.
I hadn’t really realized just how many posters we had until I saw them all stacked up on that push cart. Thanks to my wife for this and the other photos of me doing things throughout this post!
Me in the midst of setup, with a pile of posters at my feet, and a couple visible easels with posters at the top and leaning against the legs.
The only way to have any hope of displaying the posters was to put them both on the easels and on the floor leaning against the legs of the easels.
A display of book cover art posters displayed on easels and on the floor leaned against the easels, arranged so that people can walk through to view everything on display.
Even doubling up, we had the posters stacked three and four deep, so I came through every day of the con and rotated the stacks so that all the posters were shown at least once.

Once my setup was done, it was back to the hotel with us. We had some dinner from the food we’d picked up earlier, and then my wife settled in for an evening on her own, and I walked from our hotel down to the Seattle Center’s Climate Pledge Arena to meet up with some friends and see Nine Inch Nails.

Me in front of Climate Pledge Area, with a growing crowd of goths behind me waiting outside the doors. I'm wearing an old, faded shirt with a worn but still mostly visible photo collage of Reznor industrial heaters.
I’m wearing a shirt which I haven’t actually worn in 15 or 20 years, as it was getting too worn out to wear regularly. It dates from the mid-’90s; here’s what I wrote about it sometime before 1996: “A shirt created by Robin the Mad Photographer, one of alt.music.nin‘s regular denizens. The front is a collage of Reznor industrial heaters, with “hey, trent…is it me, or is it hot in here?” below. The back says, “alt.music.nin burning this whole world down.” Very cool, only available through Robin on the ‘net. According to a note I got from Robin along with the shirt, this is only one of two reznor heater shirts in Anchorage…and the other belongs to her sister! Woo…”

Now, friends and long-time readers may know that I’ve been a nin fan since shortly after pretty hate machine came out. However, this was the first chance I’d had to see them…and it was absolutely worth the thirty-something (oof) year wait.

The arena filled with people, with the stage at the left of the image, as the band plays behind fabric screens with live images of the band being projected onto them.
We were way up in the stands, but still had an excellent view.

I’m not quite the rabid fan I used to be, having drifted away a bit over the years, and the set list was great for my tastes — lighter on more recent stuff (The Fragile and on), and heavy on the Broken/The Downward Spiral era, while still including really recent stuff like “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” from the upcoming TRON sequel, and of course, pretty hate machine classics.

The arena with the stage on the left, this time with everything bathed in magenda and purple light.
More of the show.

I’m really hoping that there’s an official recording of the show released at some point, or that one of the many audience-shot recordings showing up on YouTube have good audio. While the whole show was good, they did a heavily reworked and modernized version of “Sin” that was incredible and that I’d love to add to my collection.

The arena dark at the end of the show, save for the NIN logo projected on the screens around a black stage.
This wasn’t meant to last. This was for right now.

The show ended, I walked my friends to their car, and then walked back up the hill to our hotel, had some late night cake with my wife, and it was time for bed. (Did I mention that this was on one of Seattle’s occasional 90º+ days? Well, I know I hadn’t mentioned that, but now I have. Oof!)

Wednesday was day one of Worldcon, and it set the trend for the rest of the con, where I spent the morning tucked away in the Publications office making sure that the website schedule was up to date with the latest changes and that the daily ‘zine was uploaded. Once that was done…well, it was time for lunch, so back to the hotel we went for food and an afternoon nap.

The Seacon exhibit, with a display case filled with memorabilia, a wall with printed reproductions of paper ephemera, and a table with more memorabilia and prints.
The Seacon 1961 display.

After the nap, we went back to the convention center for a bit, and I found time to stop by the Seacon 1961 exhibit. This was a lot of fun to see completely put together. The whole thing started after I was asked to write a short article about the 1961 Seacon for our program book. After I turned in my copy along with a list of sources that I’d used, one of our editors realized that we were already in contact with Dr. Mary Cummins, who works at U. C. Riverside, home of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy. We reached out to her, and she spent much of the next few weeks curating an incredible collection of Seacon memorabilia for this display. From reproductions of attendee badges from F.M. and Elinor Busby, the Seacon program book, recollections of the convention, and much more, to original items like a surviving copy of Hugo award-winning fanzine Who Killed Science Fiction, an Analog magazine with the Poul Anderson’s Hugo-winning short story “The Longest Voyage”, and even Anderson’s Hugo award for that story (his first Hugo) loaned to us by his daughter, Astrid Anderson Bear, Mary did an incredible job finding all of this and curating the exhibit. Many thanks to Mary and Seattle Worldcon editor Ella Kliger for their work on this and allowing me to help inspire and participate!

A display case with a photo of Poul Anderson receving his first Hugo for 'The Longest Voyage', the issue of Amazing Stories with that story, his Hugo award trophy, and a copy of A Canticle for Liebowitz, the Best Novle Hugo winner for that year.
The Amazing Stories magazine and the Hugo are the actual items; the copy of A Canticle for Liebowitz is a reproduction cover jacket.

Soon it was time for dinner, and then we headed over to the Sheraton Grand, home of Worldcon’s After Dark evening and nighttime programming, so I could set up for the opening night dance. I’ve been doing Norwescon’s Thursday night dances for a few years, so it seemed pretty natural for me to do Worldcon’s Wednesday night dance — I get another chance to relive my DJing days, I have the rest of my evenings free to attend other things, and my ego is fine with taking on one of the less attended dances. Setup was smooth (props to the team from Encore that handled our staging, lights, and event A/V needs), and about ten minutes after walking in, I was ready to go, with speakers making the right thumpy noises and the video screen behind me showing my graphic setup. I may not have the busiest dances, but I do have fun doing what I can to make sure I’ve got a good looking custom setup!

Me standing at a table behind an Apple MacBook on a stand and an iPad, and in front of a large video screen with fancy-looking graphics being displayed.
I’m really happy with my video backdrop. The main video in the background is a collection of sci-fi looking video loops I found. Layered over that at the bottom left is my DJ Wüdi logo, the Seattle Worldcon 2025 logo, and the QR code to allow people to send in requests. On the bottom right (partially obscured in this photo) is a cute “chibi” drawing of me in my kilt, standing with one leg up on a box, next to a penguin. Lil’ me is wearing a black t-shirt, with images that randomly change every 15 seconds. The graphics overlaid at the top are all pulled from the djay Pro software that I use, allowing me to display the cover art (which rotates as if on a turntable) and live audio waveforms for whatever songs are active, and the title and artist for the currently playing track displayed just under that.

People showed up right when the music started (sure, it was three to start with, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, and they went right to the dance floor), and I was able to keep a reasonably decent night going until just after midnight, when I decided I was tired enough to make my apologies to the five people left and call things done for the night. I had fun, and I got a number of nice comments that night and then off and on through the rest of the weekend from others, so I’d certainly call it a successful night.

A small crowd of about 20 people on the dance floor, lit in blues and magentas.
Dance! Dance for me!

I did make some changes to my setup for this dance, and after reviewing how things went, have some ideas to adjust them for next year’s Norwescon (assuming I get asked back to DJ again, of course). I’m in the habit of creating some way of letting people send in requests before the dance, so I can be sure to have the right music on hand for the night. For this dance, I used the Lime DJ service, which on the whole, worked great — it’s entirely web-based, allowed people to send in all sorts of requests beforehand, and then on the night I locked it down so people could only request songs that I had with me, which they could do from a QR code I had printed on flyers scattered around the room. However, I found that I ended up with a 250+ song, 14-hour list of requests for a scheduled six-hour dance that only ended up going for four hours, and I had no real way of knowing if any of the people that sent requests in beforehand were actually there. It also made it difficult to see when new requests were added in the moment, since the list was so long. Next time, I’ll split the event into two forms: one for before the dance to collect “I’d like to be able to request this” suggestions, and one for at the dance, so I can more easily keep track of what’s actually being requested in the moment.

Additionally, Lime DJ allows people to vote up or down on other people’s requests. Up I’m fine with (“more people want to hear this, I should play it soon”); but voting someone else’s request down just seems like a dick move. I’m going to send in a feature request asking that it be possible to allow up-voting but disallow down-voting.

As always, I recorded my set so you can listen to all four hours of it if you’d like! It’s not perfect (they never are), it’s a bit poppier and less EMB/goth/angst-y than many of the sets I record for myself, and hopefully people enjoy popping it on in the background from time to time.

The first part of Thursday was much the same as the first part of Wednesday: Most of my time was spent in the publications office, making sure the schedule was up to date and getting the daily ‘zine remediated and uploaded, with breaks for food and afternoon nap time.

The evening presented two things that we were interested in seeing: The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE! and the masquerade ball and late-night dance.

The stage for The Head That Woudln't Die, mostly an empty stage lit in green with a video wall in the background, and more video walls to either side of the stage.
Before the show started and during intermission, they played trailers for cheesy B-movies.

The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE! was a lot of very silly fun. It’s a musical send-up of the early ’60s sci-fi/horror B-movie The Brain (or Head) That Wouldn’t Die, and was a blast. A minimal stage enhanced by a video screen to provide virtual sets and a hilariously effective car crash scene, and lots of clever lines and laughs throughout. I don’t know if it will be playing anywhere locally or otherwise anytime soon, but if you happen to get a chance to see it, go forth and enjoy!

My wife and I at the dance, me in a long black frock coat over white shirt and bow tie, her in a green flapper dress, both of us wearing lacy masks.
We may have missed the masquerade ball, but we were dressed for it and looked great!

The one minor downside was that the play ran longer than we expected, so by the time we got over to the Sheraton ballroom, the masquerade ball had wrapped up. But it was only a few minutes of changeover before DJ #CSharp got the late-night dance going, and we stuck around there until a bit after midnight. Besides, we were all dressed up for the evening’s festivities, so we had to spend some time out and socializing before going to bed!

The first part of Friday was much the same as the first part of Wednesday and Thursday: Most of my time was spent in the publications office, making sure the schedule was up to date and getting the daily ‘zine remediated and uploaded, with breaks for food and afternoon nap time.

Best part of Friday morning: Taking a moment to sit out on the main staircase by the windows, when I heard, “…Woody?!?” Months ago my old friend Cyan had mentioned that they’d be at Worldcon, but in all the run-up, I’d totally forgotten, so this was an incredibly fun reunion moment. We’ve known each other for 30-some years, since we were both running around in the ’90s alternative scene up in Anchorage, and it had been probably at least 15 years since we’d crossed paths in the real world. We each had Things What Needed To Get Done, so it was a brief hello, but we figured we’d have more chances to catch up later on in the convention.

Selfie of me and Cyan, both with big grins.
So glad I’m still in touch with this wonderful person.

Friday night was the Masqeurade and John Scalzi’s dance. Though we’d originally planned to go to both, my wife had hit a bit of convention overload (lots of people, and we’re normally in bed at 8 p.m. and asleep by 9, so pushing past midnight for several nights in a row was taking its toll), so she took an evening enjoying a quiet hotel room on her own and I went off to the Sheraton on my own. I spent about an hour up at one of the room parties for the release of a ‘zine (Billions vs. Billionaires) and anthology (120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era) that Cyan had pieces in, and got to spend about an hour chatting and catching up with them more thoroughly than our earlier drive-by encounters had allowed, which was wonderful. Hopefully it won’t be another 15 years before we get to do that again! Eventually, I wandered down to Scalzi’s dance, found some friends, hung out, danced, and then made it back to my hotel to fall asleep just a bit before midnight.

Layered silhouettes of two people talking, in dark pink and green against a light pink lit wall.
Thanks to Michelle for this great shot of me and Crystal chatting during the dance!

The first part of Saturday was much the same as the first part of…well, you get the idea by now. :)

The big thing for me on Saturday afternoon was my presentation: Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions.

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 websites 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. Handout: Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions (407 KB .pdf) or Digital Accessibility Basics Google Drive folder with more material.

Me sitting at a table behind my computer, in front of a large screen displaying a slide with the title 'Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions' and live captions at the bottom of the screen showing me testing the captioning.
Even though every room had its own captioning display (not visible in this shot), I made sure that I provided my own on-screen captions as well.

Since digital accessibility is my day job, I’ve been working on improving the accessibility of electronic materials for both Norwescon and the Seattle Worldcon, and this presentation was part of that outreach project. I go over the basics of why digital accessibility is important, give a brief demonstration of the NVDA screen reader, and then go over some of the basics of creating accessible documents. I think the presentation went well; only a few people were there, but those that were there that were interested and engaged, with good questions and comments. While it would have been nice if more conrunners had joined, this is only the second time I’ve done this presentation in the con environment (the first being last winter’s SMOFcon), and I know that more outreach along these lines is needed — and hey, it wasn’t an empty room, so I’ll still count it as a success!

Me standing behind the table, with my final 'thank you' slide visible on the screen, chatting with four of the attendees.
I even had a good few minutes of post-presentation questions from the attendees afterwards.

Saturday evening, of course, was the Hugo awards ceremony and another chance to play dress-up! We found a group of friends to wait in line with and sit with (though we did get split across a couple rows), and had a good time at the ceremony.

My wife and I in line; she's in a nice long black dress with frilly hem, I'm in a black formal kilt, white shirt, black tux jacket, and bow tie.
We looked great!
Six people in fancy dress, lined up and smiling.
Thanks to Jon for this photo of my wife, me, Crystal, Eric, Teya, and Zerelina as we waited in line.

The ballroom looked great, and on the whole, as an audience member there in the moment, felt like it went pretty well. That said, there were a few hiccups, most egregious being that though most nominees with a large list of team members had their full team read out, the team for khōréō, which had a lot of non-Western names, was just clumsily read as “the khōréō team”…and apparently, this was the second time this happened to them. In an otherwise good ceremony, this stood out to me in the moment as an unfortunate choice. Should the khōréō team be nominated again in the future, I hope they get the full recognition they deserve, just as the rest of the group nominees did.

Wide shot of the Hugo award ceremony stage, lit in blues and with blue and orange curtains to the sides, with large video screens to the far left and right showing a slide that says Welcome to the Hugo Awards.
The stage shortly before the ceremony began.

The highlight for me, of course, was seeing Star Trek get its first Hugo award in 30-some years, for the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “The New Next Generation”…and then just a little later, its second of the night, for the Star Trek: Lower Decks choose-your-own-adventure style graphic novel, Warp Your Own Way! Star Trek has often been nominated for awards but rarely wins, and to have it win twice in one night, and for its half-hour animated comedy incarnation (which really is both excellent comedy and excellent Star Trek) was a real treat.

Six people in various forms of fancy dress on stage, some holding booklets as they sing.
Hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, Seanan McGuire, Catherine McManamon, Cecilia Eng, and musical guest of honor Alexander James Adams opened the ceremony with a performance of “Down the Hugo Road”, a filk parody of “Down the Witches Road” from Agatha All Along.

After the Hugo awards, it was back over to the Sheraton for the Saturday night dance with DJ Dancin’ Dan, who used to be one of Norwescon’s regular DJs. It was good to see him doing his thing again, and as with the other dance nights, much fun was had bouncing around on the dance floor. My most amusing moment was having Taylor come get me when the Rasputin came on, suggest we go out into the center of the circle, and then say, “Okay, you lead!” “I lead? You asked me!” was my response, but we managed to pull it off for a few moments. :)

Me and Taylor, who is dressed in black boots, white suit, and red vest, on the dance floor.
Taylor was dressed as Lucifer from Hazbin Hotel, which I know nothing about, but she looked great!

And then, back to the hotel so we could crash.

The first part of Saturday was…you know the drill.

Me with three other people at a table covered with computers, paper, sticky notes, and various other evidence of a busy workspace.
Caitlin, Shelley, someone who I didn’t catch the name of, and myself; this year’s “’zine team”!

At least by this point, there were far fewer updates to make to the schedule, since we were down to the last day of the con, so we were able to find some time to wander through the exhibit hall (first my wife on her own as I worked, and then the two of us together) and do a little bit of geeky shopping, picking up t-shirts for both of us, some stickers and bookmarks, and some nice jewelry for my wife (including some great Star Trek delta logo earrings). I also stopped by the Seacon exhibit as Mary was disassembling it and was quite tickled to have her ask me to autograph my Seacon article in the program book.

Me laughing as I sign my article as Mary looks on.
This means I’m a famous author now, right?

After that, we went off so I could be a panelist on the Norwescon: Local but Not Little panel.

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

Four people sitting behind a grey table, all lined up for our panel.
Tim, Taylor, Me, and Salt, ready to talk about Norwescon.

For the next hour, Salt, Taylor, Tim and I (along with help from other Norwescon people in the audience, including Don, Doug, Pat, Rob, Peggy, Sarah, and I may be forgetting some) talked about Norwescon’s history, where we’ve been, where we are now, and extrapolated a bit into where we hope Norwescon goes as we approach our 50th year and beyond. It was fun to do, and the audience seemed to be a nice mix of people who were familiar with Norwescon and people who didn’t know much about us.

Wide shot of the panel, with the panelists on the left and a large video screen showing the Norwescon history website on the right.
This gave me a great opportunity to introduce the Norwescon online archives to more people.

I think I had two favorite moments from this panel. One was hearing from Sarah, who is relatively new to Norwescon, as she talked about how she found us and appreciated how we welcomed her in and how much that meant to her. The other was from a younger person in the audience who, after hearing stories from Tim (who attended several of Norwescon’s earliest years) about how as a teen he’d skipped out on his job at Jack in the Box to attend Norwescon with no budget, room, or parental knowledge, crashing with friends and figuring things out on a fly, responded with a heartfelt but very amusing, “I’m seventeen, and I just want to know how you got away with doing all that!” The ’80s were a very different time…. (It was also very nice to see Sarah immediately head over to them to talk to them and, I assume, extend a personal invitation on ways to attend and maybe get involved.)

The four of us at the table on the left, as the screen on the right displays art of a troll under a bridge.
The image on the screen is the cover of the very first Norwescon program book from 1978.

One thing that I didn’t think to mention during the panel that in retrospect that I wish I had: One of the things I’ve found I really value about Norwescon over the years has been how many of our guests of honor have become regular (or semi-regular) attendees and panelists in following years. While we are able to provide travel and lodging for our invited headlining guests of honor, we can’t do that for all of our attending pros and panelists, and I think it’s wonderful how many have such a good time as guests that they then volunteer to spend their own time and money attending and participating afterwards. I think it says a lot about how well run and welcoming the convention is.

A line of seventeen people on the Worldcon main stage.
Seattle Worldcon Chair Kathy behind the podium in the middle, with the department heads lined up behind her.

And not long after that wrapped up, we were off to closing ceremonies. I got to see a lot of friends up on stage, the convention wrapped up, and the gavel was passed off to next year’s LAcon V. We don’t know yet whether that will work into our travel plans, but whether we’re there or not, if you’re at all into the SFF fan world and have been to a Worldcon before or have yet to give it a shot, I recommend going if you’re able.

Me leaning over next to a table with foam-core mouned posters stacked around and on top of it, some covered with cardboard sheets.
Happily, we’d been clever enough to save the protective cardboard sheets after unpacking all of these, so we could easily pack them all up again.

Of course, when you’re part of the organizing committee, the con doesn’t end when the con ends! Once closing ceremonies wrapped up, we headed down to the exhibition hall and packed up all of the Philip K. Dick award posters so they could go back into Norwescon storage. It just wouldn’t have been right to leave that for someone else (but I do have to thank Jeanine for getting started on that before we showed up).

More stacks of posters around the table as I straighten one stack before taping it together.
So many posters! But really, it didn’t take terribly long to get them all packed back up.

After closing ceremonies, my wife went back to the hotel to relax, and I headed off to the dead dog party to have a couple hours of collective “oh my god, we actually did this thing” decompression with many of the on-site staff before heading back to the hotel and getting to bed.

And finally, it was time to pack up our stuff and head back home, with a very successful Worldcon behind us.

Oh, and I definitely got my steps in….

Screenshot of the Apple Health app's trends screen, showing my daily averages jumping from about 6,500 steps and 3 miles a day to almost 20,000 steps and 8.5 miles a day over the prior six days.

Friday was peak time: 25,664 steps, 12.11 miles, 24 flights climbed!

Other Thoughts, Memories, and Neat Things

So many people put so much work into this, and I really think that while there were some stumbles here and there along the way, in the end, we put on a damn good show.

Though I wasn’t directly involved, I was thrilled with the captioning solution our team came up with. We had live, real-time captioning available in every panel room for the full convention. While we used CART (human) captioning for big events, most of the rooms used self-contained auto captioning systems that used Google software running on a Raspberry Pi, all on-device with no network access required. While not perfect (as with any automated captioning system), it worked well enough, and its very prevalence got a lot of compliments throughout the weekend.

My staff badge, with art by Donato Giancola of a craftsman carving a fancy wooden panel.
My staff badge for the weekend.

Sometime on Friday or Saturday (at this point I’ve forgotten exactly when), Kathy found me and presented me with a “Hero of Worldcon” pin in thanks for the work I’ve done on the website and in various other ways over the past couple years. Apparently my name was put forward by a few people, too! Thanks to Kathy and to whomever suggested me for this — it means a lot to have gotten this.

An enamel pin with the Seattle Worldcon logo and the legend 'hero of the convention' at the bottom.
On the one hand, I just do what I think needs to be done. On the other, it is really nice to get this kind of recognition.

There are so many people and friends to thank and recognize (and this won’t be nearly everyone; I’m just concentrating on those I worked most closely with over the past couple years, and may have forgotten some): Kathy for chairing this and herding all the cats, SunnyJim for handling programming and herding all the other cats, Michelle for her incredible work in heading up exhibits, Keith for the tech work and coming up with a great in-room captioning solution, Gail for handling the virtual side and being willing to work with me on making sure that her side of things tied into the main website and keeping accessibility in mind during all of it, Kathryn (and her predecessor) and Jesi for working with me on the accessibility of WSFS materials, and — last, but definitely not least (which always seems like a weird phrase to me, because it begs the question of who is least, but whatever…) — the Publications team: Kevin at the head, Caitlin and Shelley with the ‘zine, BE heading up editing the blog and all of our excellent contributors, Cheryl handling the newsletter, Tabby’s signs, Dawn taking on social media, and Cee for providing very appreciated help with the website. All of you are wonderful and contributed to a great experience.

My badge with a long string of 24 badge ribbons attached to it.
Not a bad collection of ribbons, especially given how much time I spent locked away in the publications office!

Fortnightly Notes: June 30–July 13, 2025

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

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, –<time 2025-08-14T02:00-07:00″>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,

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,

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

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 )!

My (Draft) Worldcon Schedule

The Seattle Worldcon 2025 logo and a group of cartoon characters in retrofuturistic clothing against a blue and gold background.

I have my (draft) paneling schedule for Worldcon! While there’s always the possibility that things may shift a bit between now and August, at the moment, I’m giving one solo presentation and will be a panelist on two panels.

Here’s the lineup:

The future of education technology

to

Adaptive online learning, AI assisted classrooms, virtual reality schools … Things that used to be just science fiction are now science fact. How is education changing and what does it mean for the students?

Corey Frazier (M), Frank Catalano, Lia Holland, Mason A. Porter, Michael Hanscom

Well, as it turns out, I had a conflict come up, so I’ve had to drop this panel. This was a draft schedule, after all!

Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions

to

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 disabled membership 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

to

Founded in 1978, Norwescon draws thousands of PNW SF/F creators and fans each Spring. But did you know… 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

Weekly Notes: April 28–May 4, 2025

  • ♿️ Another busy week at work, including a trip out to Emerald Downs planning for graduation, hosting an IPSE Day event supporting our students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and ending with a full-day all-employee training focusing on equity. This year included a session on disability justice, which was led by a colleague from another school who I know through my work with WAPED, DSSC, and through watching the AHEAD listserv. Happily, this session was quite well attended by people across the college, and not just by people who are part of our Access Services department!

  • 🚀 Unfortunately, Seattle Worldcon is in the midst of our first (and hopefully only) big controversy. While it’s not my area, I’m close enough to have some of the not-yet-public information, and it’s been quite the experience watching the wider commentary based on incomplete information while not saying anything. Hopefully as more information comes out, this will calm down and fade into just being an unfortunate bump on the road.

  • 🥳 And, of course, yesterday was my 52nd birthday. We kept it a fairly low-key day, wrapping up with dinner out and seeing the play version of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” at the Renton Civic Theater. It was a fun show, and we do enjoy supporting local theater.

📸 Photos

One end of a dirt racetrack circle, with green grass and a pond in the center, with the snow-covered peak of Mt. Rainier rising in the distance in a clear blue sky on a sunny spring day.
Mt. Rainier in the distance over the Emerald Downs racetrack.
Four students sit at a table at the front of a lecture hall with a presentation screen behind them, in front of an audience of staff, faculty, and fellow students.
Four of our students were part of a panel discussion for IPSE Day, talking about their experiences at Highline College.
Me, a white man with a short trimmed greying red beard, wearing a black cap, black half-rim glasses, and black shirt and hoodie, standing outside in front of green trees, with a slight smile.
Me at 52. Feeling pretty good about aging well.

📚 Reading

Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance.

🔗 Linking

Weekly Notes: April 21-27, 2025

While not a bad week, this was a long week. Having just finished the four days of Norwescon, I had Monday off to rest, and then went right into three days of two combined work conferences for DSSC and WAPED. They were good, and it’s always good to connect with work colleagues from across the state, but oof. Even in different contexts, that was about a week and a half of being on.

This weekend we did as little as possible.

📸 Photos

A desktop with eight piles of papers and booklets stacked around and on top of the keyboards and other computer peripherals.
One of my roles for Norwescon is as assistant historian (a side effect of running the convention’s online archives, and this year, I was given three and a half boxes with several decades of old convention ephemera. Lots was from Norwescon, but there was also a lot of stuff from other cons, including OryCon, CascadiaCon (the 2005 Nasfic), Westercon, the World Fantasy Convention, Worldcon, and bits and pieces from a few others. I’ve sorted through it all, and most of it I’ll try to pass off to more appropriate interested parties, but the Norwescon stuff will be slowly scanned and added to our archives. Lots of fun to see this old stuff!
The coner of my work desk, with a desk lamp with a colorful space vista printed on the shade, and the TOS Enterprise dangling from the chain. Around the base are seven model Star Trek ships. To the right is a green glowing schematic of the TOS Enterprise.
The Star Trek corner of my desk at work got a fun upgrade with the addition of a desk lamp with the TOS Enterprise dangling from the pull chain. A friend was decluttering, so I…well, I cluttered, but that’s okay.

📝 Writing

I inadvertently took a ride in a new Tesla Model Y, and wasn’t impressed.

📚 Reading

Started Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. I’m almost done with the Vorkosigan Saga books, and the next book on my Hugo reading project is the second in Bujold’s World of the Five Gods series, so my current plan is to go ahead and finish off the Vorkosigan saga before moving on to her fantasy work.

🎧 Listening

I posted the recording of my set DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon. Three and a half hours of listening pleasure for you to enjoy!

🔗 Linking

  • Chrysalis Magazine: “Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults).”

  • Anne Minahan: “Martha’s Rules”: An Alternative to Robert’s Rules of Order (PDF link): “…Martha’s Rules…were developed by Martha’s Housing Co-op for families in Madison, Wisconsin. Martha’s Rules are not only an alternative to Robert’s Rules, but provide ideas for people in organizations who are committed to consensus decision-making and who want to make it work well.”

  • Catherine Zhu at CBC Radio: 45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved: “In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining, the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers. ¶ But the photo wasn’t taken on set with extras. It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone. But whose face was it?”

  • Tim Stevens at The Verge: The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen: “Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be….” I’m not at all a pickup person, so am not really in the market, but I’m rather fascinated by Slate‘s approach. Kinda wish there was a car version of this.

  • Lia Woodward and Leah Folta at McSweeney’s: This Five-Hundred-Word Bumper Sticker On My Tesla Explains Why I’m Not A Bad Person: “Before the last few months, Musk was only mean toward some people, and I hope you can understand that I and most people in my social circles were not among them. So when that suddenly changed for me this year, I was just as outraged as any of you, as evidenced by this five-hundred-word bumper sticker prominently placed on my Tesla.”

Weekly Notes: April 14–20, 2025 (Norwescon 47 wrap-up edition)

This week was all about Norwescon! Well, Monday and Tuesday were normal workdays, but from then on, it was all con, all the time.

Cat Valente, Wayne Barlowe, Tracy Drain, Jenny Jarzabski, Mike Kimmel, Isis Asare, and Lydia K. Valentine on the main stage in front of the Norwescon logo on the video wall.
The Opening Ceremonies, with the guests of honor being introduced and briefly interviewed.
  • Wednesday: Day zero of con is load-in, setup, and generally getting things ready. I spent the morning at home packing up all my stuff, and at noon drove to pick up my wife from work, then she dropped me off at the hotel and headed home for a quiet weekend on her own. From there, it was a lot of wandering around and helping where I could help until I could check into my room, then more of the same.

  • Thursday: Day one of con starts with more helping with setup, plus a lot of general wandering around, saying hi to people, socializing with friends, and so on. I had two official duties for Thursday:

    • 8 p.m.: Introduction to Fandom Dancing was my first time paneling at a convention…though rather than the usual “sit at a table and talk”, this was “play music and help teach people how to do dance”. We concentrated on the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Macarena, and Thriller, plus encouraging people to just have fun and get out and move and not worry about what you look like.

    • 9 p.m.: Immediately following that was the Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Unfortunately, I had some technical issues that made the first 20-30 minutes really dodgy, with a lot of starting and stopping and apologizing as I tried to figure out why my headphones weren’t working, making it impossible for me to pre-cue and mix upcoming tracks. Everyone there understood that these things happen, and once I figured out a solution (though I still need to go back and experiment to really nail down what was going on so it doesn’t happen again), I got a good three-hour set in, going until 12:30 a.m., which is pretty good for Thursday night. I was a little frazzled from the clumsy start, so many of my ideas for what I was going to do disappeared from my brain and I know I didn’t play a lot of the tracks I had planned, but people danced and had fun, which was the important part. I recorded the set, and will have it processed and uploaded to my MixCloud page as soon as I can get around to it.

  • Friday: Friday morning I had free to wander and socialize, but the afternoon and evening of day two of the con was all about the Philip K. Dick Award.

    • 3 p.m.: All About the Philip K. Dick Award is held on Fridays to give people a bit of a history of the award and introduce the attending PKD nominees and let them talk about their work for a bit. This year we had three attending nominees, Bora Chung, Tara Campbell, and Subodhana Wijeyeratne. Normally this panel is moderated by award administrator Gordon Van Gelder, but travel difficulties had him delayed, so I stepped up to moderate instead. I was a bit nervous, having only done one panel before (the prior night’s dance panel, where I mostly played DJ) and never having moderated, but I’d sat in on the panel enough to have a pretty good idea of what Gordon usually said. Between myself and a little assistance from audience members asking questions, we had a very nice conversation with the nominees.

    • 4 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award social is a private event for the nominees to spend some time meeting and chatting with each other. I got them set up in the room, hung around and chatted for about half an hour, and then left them on their own as I headed down to my room to change.

    • 5 p.m.: The Lifetime Member dinner is another private event for Norwescon’s lifetime members (a group I was inaugurated into two years ago) along with our guests of honor, PKD nominees, and charitable partner representatives. I had a table with all of the PKD nominees and their plus-ones, so we were able to continue the conversations from the prior couple hours as we ate. I left about 6:15 to head to the next room over to do some final setup, and then it was time for…

    • 7 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony! This was my third year as ceremony coordinator, and after first-year jitters and second-year “we’re switching the room the ceremony is held in three hours before the ceremony” scrambling, this year went off smoothly and without a hitch. Our three attending nominees read selections from their nominated works, readers read for those nominees who were unable to attend, and it all went well. This year’s winners were Brenda Peynado for Time’s Agent and Adrian Tchaikovsky getting the special citation for Alien Clay, and though neither winner was in attendance, a good time was had by all.

    • At that point, I was done for the day, and spent the rest of the evening bouncing back and forth among the dance, room parties, and general socializing as I came across people.

  • Saturday: Day three of the con is normally a free day for me that I can spend doing whatever seems right in the moment. However, this year I was giving a presentation panel in the evening, and though I’d had “finish the presentation materials” on my to-do list for months…well, yeah. Sometimes procrastination bites us in the butt, and I ended up spending nearly my entire Saturday holed up in my room getting everything finished and ready to go. And so, finally, I emerged, got some socializing in, and then it was time for…

    • 7 p.m.: Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites. This is essentially an adaptation of the kind of thing I do for my day job all the time, and a variation on a panel I gave at last winter’s SMOFcon and will be giving at Seattle Worldcon 2025 in August. For SMOFcon and Worldcon I aim it more at “why/how your convention can make your materials more accessible”; for Norwescon, I tweaked it a bit to be aimed more at authors, especially if self-publishing or marketing, and publishers. While I only had five attendees, all of them were interested and engaged with good comments and questions, and as this was the first time trying this out, with a somewhat niche interest, and programmed at 7 p.m. on Saturday against the masquerade, I’m counting it as a success, and hopefully will be bringing it back next year as well.

    • After the panel, it was another evening of floating among the dance, parties, and chatting with whomever I came across as the evening rolled on.

  • Sunday: And finally, it was Sunday, day four and the final day, with nothing on my schedule except packing up and loading out. I took the day slow, got packed up, and headed home just after the closing ceremonies. With that, another con was done!

📸 Photos

Me outside the hotel, standing next to a hotel luggage cart with all my stuff on it, smiling and wearing a black kilt and black t-shirt.
The now-traditional photo my wife takes as she drops me off for “nerd summer camp”.
Me wearing a black kilt and black shirt with the vulcan salute on it, standing next to a trio of women in Star Trek: The Next Generation themed 50s style poodle skirts.
Star Trek poodle skirts!
Me standing next to a woman in Vulcan ceremonial robes, both of us giving the Vulcan salute.
With T’Resik, who was stoically bemused by the shenanigans of the humans around her.
Me wearing a t-shirt with that says Star Trek but is written in the style of the Star Wars logo, in front of a video wall showing my DJ graphics, including turntables and waveforms for the currently playing tracks, the Norwescon logo, a cartoon version of me, and a video loop of Star Trek and Star Wars spaceship shots, here showing the Enterprise in drydock from The Motion Picture.
I may have the smallest dance, since it’s on Thursday night, but in my not-at-all humble opinion, I have the best looking dance graphics!
The three attending PKD award nominees and myself at the About the PKD Award panel.
Philip K. Dick Award nominees Bora Chung, Tara Campbell, and Subodhana Widjeyeratne and myself at the All About the Philip K. Dick Award panel.
Me on stage wearing a black kilt and black suit jacket, holding a microphone and gesturing as I speak.
Opening and welcoming the audience to the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony.

A few more photos are available in this Flickr album.

🔗 Linking

  • Radek Sienkiewicz: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?: “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making a logo that resembles an anus.”

  • Jeremy Reimer at Ars Technica: An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1: “In our new 3-part series, we remember the people and ideas that made the Internet.” I actually haven’t read this one yet, but want to remember to do so and continue on through the series.

Weekly Notes: March 17–23, 2025

  • ♿️ Busy week at work. The biggest success there was launching an “Accessibility Liaisons” initiative, looking for volunteers across campus to learn more about digital accessibility to assist others in their area. Sent out a campus-wide email about it, and got the first four volunteers within an hour, and were up to twelve by the end of the day. Promising start!

  • 🚀 This weekend was the all-staff meeting weekend for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Friday afternoon I joined in person and got to put a few faces to names I’d only seen online until now; Saturday I stayed home and Zoomed in, since there was less that day that I needed to be present for, and then Sunday I joined the group for a tour of the Seattle Convention Center Summit building where the majority of the convention will be happening. The new convention center building is huge, and really nice. Going to be a great location for Worldcon!

  • 🎻 After the tour, my wife and I went to the Seattle Symphony’s performance of selections from the Fantasia movies, played live as the film clips were projected on a screen. Really enjoyed the performance, and it was fun to see how they synced the performance to the video.

  • 🚀♿️ Had a nice bit of success in crossing the streams between my paid and volunteer work. One of the pages we’d just set up for the Seattle Worldcon site (page not linked, because it’s not fully public) included a drop-down menu that revealed more information on the page, changing depending on which item in the menu was chosen. While working my way through the Trusted Tester training materials, I realized that the current implementation would fail the testing process because those page changes weren’t being announced to assistive technology. A bit of digging, experimentation, and testing, and I figured out how to properly implement an ARIA live region so that the page passes testing.

📸 Photos

A red Chevy Sonic being strapped onto a flatbed tow truck.
Not the best start to Tuesday morning. And it didn’t get much better from there; a failed water pump had led to the car dumping its coolant and cracking the radiator and coolant reservoir. A lot of money and a few days wait for repairs, that turned into a few more days when the wrong part got shipped to the service shop. Hoping we’ll have it back on Monday.
A wide-angle shot of a huge convention center ballroom, with maroonish side walls and a high ceilig with a pattern that's formed by hanging planks of wood.
The main ballroom of the convention center Summit building is _huge_. I mean, I know these spaces are big, but standing in it while it’s completely empty was impressive. I spent a couple moments trying to estimate how many times I could fit my entire house in there (stacked vertically as well as arranged horizontally) before just going with “lots” and giving up.
A concert hall filled with people; on the stage are seats for an orchestra below a large screen showing the logo for Disney's Fantasia.
It was good to be back in Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Symphony. The last time we were here was one of the last Messiah performances before the pandemic kicked in and shut everything down.

📚 Reading

  • Read Requiem by Kevin Ryan and Michael Jan Friedman.

  • Started Polostan by Neal Stephenson.

📺 Watching

Started NCIS: Origins. It’s pretty standard NCIS, but the ’90s setting makes for some entertaining music choices, and we’re being pretty impressed by the casting for younger versions of known characters. Also been doing a lot of Antiques Roadshow, because it’s soothing.

🎧 Listening

A few months ago I’d pre-ordered Ministry’s latest album, The Squirrely Years Revisited, where they update a bunch of those early synth pop tracks that Jourgensen has practically disowned for decades. So far, first impressions are good. While a lot of recent Ministry hasn’t done much for me, as they’ve moved more towards straightforward metal over industrial, they’ve done a really good job of blending the original synth pop tracks with their modern sound, landing in a place that works well for me. Glad Al decided to admit that these tracks are part of his history!

🔗 Linking

  • Assuming the old plugin (last updated in 2008) I found still works, this site will be participating in CSS Naked Day on April 9.

  • Robert Alexander, RSS blogrolls are a federated social network: Something for me to dig more into when I have time.

  • Chris Dalla Riva, The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders: “But if one hit is a miracle, then two hits is a near impossibility. Two-hit artists sit in a weird space, though. Pop stars a remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite.”

  • Anand Giridharadas, The opposite of fascism: “The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.”

Weekly Notes: Mar 3–9, 2025

  • 🏚️ Ah, the joys of owning a 30-some year old house. We finally got around to having the bathroom fan replaced. We’d said to each other that we didn’t really think the fan that was there actually did much of anything (other than make noise), and the contractor had the same opinion, describing it as a “toy”. Now we have a new fan that’s larger, quieter, actually moves air, and vents into an insulated vent hose instead of the uninsulated one that was dripping condensation back into the bathroom during last month’s cold snap. Improvements have been made!

  • 🕺🏻 Made it out to The Mercury on Saturday night for some stompyboot üntz-üntz gothclubbing time. A slow night, with some faces I recognized but not really anyone I knew, but the music was good and I got some good floor time in, so it was worthwhile.

  • ⌚️🥱 Insert my biannual (semiannual? twice a year) rant on the evil that is daylight saving time, how much I hate the time change, and how frustrating it is that Washington voted to get rid of the time change years ago, but did it the wrong damn way, so it did no good. If we could just ditch DST and stay on standard time, this would all be done with.

📸 Photos

Me sitting in our living room holding my iPhone in my right hand and my iPad with my left hand, and with my MacBook on my lap, as I take a selfie with the latest book I read to blog about it.
From my wife, amused by my lap full of Apples as I took the selfie to go with the blog post about the book I’d just finished.
A skeletal ribcage, head, and arms, with tattered bat-like wings, lit all in red, against blue- and amber-toned bits of ceiling in the background.
Decor at the Mercury.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • 🇺🇸 We did not watch Trump’s State of the Union. Masochism just isn’t my thing.

  • We started Alone: Australia, where people with far more outdoor skills than we have get dropped in the middle of the Tasmanian wilderness to survive as long as they can. Because, yes, this is totally something normal people do.

  • We’ve also come back to season three of Evil. I kinda want the pop-up books (and love the way what’s essentially an opening sequence gag keeps getting worked into the action of the show).

🎧 Listening

We’re starting to get requests in for the Norwescon dances, which is always a fun way to be introduced to music I don’t know. So far, I’ve added the following to my collection:

🔗 Linking

  • April 9 is CSS Naked Day, which I should get in on: “The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. In the words of 2006, it’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is.”

  • Mozi: An interesting looking, privacy focused app to coordinate with friends for real-world encounters. An “I’m going to be in [place] at [time]” sort of thing. Currently iOS only, Android maybe in the future.

  • Well, bummer: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has ended after a 42-year run.

  • Priscilla Page, Mad Max: Fury Road: Excellent essay on the best of the Mad Max films. There was so much good analysis and commentary on this film in the months after it came out; diving back into that from a more recent perspective was a pleasure.