Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

macOS Tahoe Music (app) breaks shuffle

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Sigh. Shuffle by Album seems to be broken in Apple Music (the app, not the service; what is it with companies giving their apps and services identical generic names?) under macOS 26 Tahoe.

After starting Music, if I go to my library’s Album view (that is, songs that are downloaded and stored locally), the shuffle icon in the new control bar appears to be glowing (with a bad effectThe left side of the audio control bar in Apple's Music player under Tahoe, with the shuffle icon highlighted in red with a very harsh, hard-edged glow with no fade. It looks really ugly.), but if you check options, through the menu bar, Controls > Shuffle shows “Off” and by “Albums”. If I switch that to “On”, I get about a two-second SPoD (Spinning Pizza of Death) — which seems really odd for an audio player on an M4 Mac Mini — before it responds again.

Pre-Tahoe, I could either hit “play” or double-click the “Albums” item in the Music app sidebar, and Music would randomly choose an album, play it through, then randomly play another album.

Now, If I hit the “play” control, Music starts playing the first album in however the album list is sorted; I usually keep my Album display sorted by year, so it always starts playing the oldest item in my collection (Victrola 88049, Enrico Caruso performing “Ideale (My Ideal!)”). If I double-click the “Albums” item in the sidebar, Music starts playing the first song of the first album sorted alphabetically by artist (for me, that’s “Take on Me” off of A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low). Either way, though the shuffle icon is still glowing, checking the menu bar’s Controls > Shuffle shows that that’s now set back to “Off”.

If I let it play as-is, it just plays through the album. If I set Shuffle back to “on”, then it start shuffling by song, not by album. Well…sometimes. Right now, I can’t get it to shuffle at all, even though Shuffle is turned on, both in the menu bar and with the glowing shuffle icon in the control bar.

Revised original line: Shuffle is either partially broken (only shuffling by song, not by album) or entirely (not shuffling at all), possibly randomly choosing (…shuffling?…) between the two options.

I know Apple’s gone all-in on their streaming Music service, but I really wish they still had a few people assigned to making sure they had a decent basic audio player. Music just gets worse and worse for those of us who have extensive non-streaming collections.

Environment:

  • M4 mini (2024, 16 GB)
  • macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Music 1.6.0.151
  • 41,596 tracks on 4,044 albums (136.4 days, 317.43 GB)

Related question:

Are there any third-party audio players for macOS that write back metadata to the macOS Music library?

The biggest reason that I’ve stuck with Music is that I use its smart playlists to regularly update the playlists that live on my iPhone, so they’re regularly updated and the songs on them rotate around. (My regularly used playlists all have some variation of “exclude if listened to in the last two months” as one of their rules.)

As far as I know from past digging, no third-party audio players write metadata (esp. when last played) back to the Music library, so the smart playlists wouldn’t work anymore.

If there’s a good, functional audio player, especially if aimed at people who actually value listening to owned music rather than streamed, that plays nicely with the Music library metadata, I’d dearly love to know about it.

Weekly Notes: September 22–28, 2025

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  • ♿️ We made it through the first week of fall quarter! It was a busy week, with a fair amount of tech troubleshooting for faculty, staff, and students, but on the whole, it went pretty well.

  • 🚀 The week was extra busy with a couple nights of evening Zoom calls, but the end result of one is that after fourteen years, I have finally turned over the social media manager position for Norwescon to someone else! I’m still on the team as an assistant/consultant/graphics person, but I’m not in charge anymore, which is a welcome step. (I didn’t mind doing it, but almost a decade and a half is a long time to be the primary online “voice” of the con, and I’m happy to let someone else with other ideas take over.)

  • 🎻 Today we went into Seattle to see Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton with the Seattle Symphony. Music from 13 of the 17 films that Burton and Elfman have collaborated on, with a full symphony plus choir, and with a screen showing clips from the films interspersed with images of Burton’s character design sketches. Really well done, and the music was great. I was particularly pleasantly surprised with the section from Big Fish — I’ve seen it, but not anytime recently, and didn’t have any memory of the score, and it’s very different than Elfman’s other scores. I didn’t realize Elfman knew that there were that many major chords! ;)

📸 Photos

The Seattle Symphony on stage, with blue and purple lights on the walls, and a screen displaying a Tim Burton sketch of two bare trees on a checkerboard landscape and the text, 'Danny Elfman's music from the films of Tim Burton'.
The show about to start.
Looking south down the Seattle waterfront from the roof of the new aquarium with the skyline on the left and the Seattle ferris wheel on the right, with people strolling along the sidewalk by the old aquarium building.
Before going to the symphony, we went down to look at the newly remodeled Seattle waterfront. It’s really nice!
Panoramic shot of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, half-shrouded in clouds, under a mostly cloudly sky, with a ferry on the water on the far left of the image.
The Olympic mountains were really pretty this morning.
A section of brick wall and utility pipe barely visible behind hundreds of pieces of used, chewed gum, some stuck to the wall in blobs, some stretched to hang off of the pipes. It's actually more gross than it sounds.
It had been a while since we’d gone by the gum wall. It’s as appealing as ever! (My wife glanced up as I was working on this photo, and commented, “That’s disgusting. I looked up just in time to see my husband looking at dirty pictures on his computer…”.)

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s, with the perennial classic: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers: “When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”

  • Varsha Bansal at The Guardian: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: “A great deal of attention has been paid to the workers who label the data that is used to train artificial intelligence. There is, however, another corps of workers, including Sawyer, working day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses. ¶ ‘AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,’ said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. ‘These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.'”

Seattle Worldcon 2025 Wednesday Night Dance

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As described on the Seattle Worldcon 2025 schedule:

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!

Me standing at a table in front of a MacBook on a stand, in front of a large screen with fancy graphics including cover art and audio waveforms of the songs being played.
I may not have the most attended dances, but I have fun trying to make them look good.

The opening night’s dance at Seattle Worldcon 2025, recorded live at the Sheraton Grand hotel in downtown Seattle where the Worldcon After Dark programming was held, just a few blocks away from the Convention Center Summit building that was home to the daytime programming. Because this is an unedited live recording, there are a few flubs (some subtle, but some notable train wrecks right off the bat)…but hey, that’s just proof that I’m a real human and not genAI. ;) Pop it on in the background and enjoy four hours of the Seattle Worldcon nightlife!

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Worldcon Schedule Update

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

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

Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi

Events; Dance/Movement
Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, –<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

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

  • ♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

  • 🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.

  • 🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.

  • 🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.

  • 🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.
Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.
Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.
Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…
A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.
This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is _no way_ I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!
People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.
Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.

  • Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.

  • Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

  • Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.

  • I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.

  • Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.

  • Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.

  • This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”

  • Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”

  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….

  • Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”

  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!

  • Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”

  • James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”

  • Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”

  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.

  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.

  • Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?

  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”

  • Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”

  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Weekly Notes: May 5–11, 2025

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Really, this is one of those weeks that just boils down to being another week, without any noteworthy points.

  • ♿️ As we’re approaching the end of spring quarter and commencement gets closer, I’m pretty constantly feeling like I’m just slightly behind where I should be with everything, Not enough to be in panic mode, just enough to never feel quite satisfied with the situation. Definitely looking forward to the summer quarter and hoping things slow down a touch.

  • 🚀 Norwescon has just about wound down, with just this coming weekend’s post-con meeting to wrap things up until we spin up in the fall for next year. Of course, that means a little less for me, as the website needs to be archived and reworked; hopefully I’ll be able to arrange time with my team to start that work soon. The Worldcon situation has dropped down to a light simmer rather than a full boil, which is progress. Mostly, I keep watching what people write and constantly have to fight the temptation to jump in and correct mistaken assumptions or assertions. As satisfying as it might be in the moment, it wouldn’t actually help. Sometimes knowing that I’m better off keeping my mouth shut really sucks, though.

  • 🏡 We spent part of the weekend cleaning up our little back yard for the summer and refreshing the herb and flower planters. (By which I mean, my wife did the planting, and I did the manual labor of moving planters around and hauling the old stuff out to the trash.) Hoping we have more chances to relax back there than we have for the past couple summers.

📸 Photos

Rows of purple and white, yellow, and orange pansies.
Pansies at the garden center.
My knees visible in the foreground as I sit in a small, gravel-surfaced pocket back yard, with tall trees visible behind the fence, and my wife's hand just visible to one side as she plants flowers.
Sitting for a moment between moving things around.
Potted herbs in front of a decorative glass ball, a metal peacock sculpure, and a small ornament of a fanged frog wearing a spiked collar sitting under a sign that says 'Beware of Frog'.
One corner of our yard.
Planters with herbs and flowers, several with small decorative gnomes sitting in them, next to a metal birdbath.
Another corner of the yard.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Lately it’s been a fair amount of old Hell’s Kitchen, because it can be entertaining to watch Gordon Ramsey yell at people.

🎧 Listening

VNV Nation’s “Construct” came out this week, and new VNV Nation is always good. I did see one friend describe it as “the new VNV Music Factory”, which is funny, but also not wrong, but y’know, I’m good with that. It’s like a review I once saw comparing KMFDM to a Big Mac: You always know that what you get is going to be maybe not not great, but big, cheezy, and acceptably satisfying when that’s what you’re in the mood for. VNV Nation isn’t the same sound, of course, but it’s kind of the same idea: You know what you’re getting, and it’s good comfort food (and occasionally really, really good, though I haven’t identified any tracks off this album that are particular standouts yet).

🔗 Linking

  • Joe Kissell at Take Control Books: Introducing MailMaven, a Better Mac Email App: “MailMaven is an email client for people who love email but want total control over every aspect of it. If there’s something you always wished your email app could do, Maven probably does it (or will before long). But it also does lots of things you never realized you absolutely need in an email app, and soon won’t be able to live without.” Mostly I’m fine with Apple Mail, but sometimes I wonder if something else might work better for me, and this one looks promising.

  • Niléane at MacStories: Are Pride Wallpapers and a Watch Band Enough in 2025?: “At a time when some trans people are actively seeking to flee the U.S. to preserve their fundamental right to a healthy, safe, and decent life free from the threat of President Trump’s actions, Apple doesn’t seem to be stepping up to its professed values to the extent that the situation requires.”

  • Erin Underwood at File 770: Op-Ed: About Choosing Convention Program Participants: “I understand the frustration and anger toward LLMs, but I think that we need to grant a little grace and understanding … and even kindness … to the people who are donating their time and putting their hearts, blood, sweat, and tears into trying to create these events that bring our community together.” Whatever your stance on generative AI and the Seattle Worldcon, this is well worth reading.

  • Eli Wizevich at Smithsonian Magazine: Who Created This Peculiar Painting of a Drooling Dragon? Nobody Knows—but a Museum Just Bought It for $20 Million: “The Virgin and Child With Saints Louis and Margaret is truly one-of-a-kind. Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as ‘wildly inventive’ and ‘full of iconographical oddities,’ per the Art Newspaper.”

  • Adrian Roselli: Do Not Publish Your Designs on the Web with Figma Sites…: “…Unless you want to fail all the WCAGs, create litigation risk, close off opportunities in Europe, engage in reputational harm, and oh yeah, throw up barriers to your customers and users.”

  • Liv Lyons in The Thunderword, Highline’s student paper: Student panel leads from the front on IPSE Day: “Building 7 was the beating heart of campus one week ago, as the students and faculty who make up Highline’s Achieve Program embodied the tenets of accessibility, diversity, and self-acceptance, further highlighting the importance of Inclusive Post-Secondary Education (IPSE) Day at collegiate institutions nationwide.” Our students put on a great panel for IPSE Day!

  • Mac Themes Garden: “Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.” I miss Kaleidoscope, and really wish there was this sort of customization available for the modern macOS.

  • I Don’t Have Spotify: Paste in a link to a music track on one service, get links to it on other services. Handy for those of us who refuse to give Spotify money.

Norwescon 47 Thursday Night Star Trek vs Star Wars Dance

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From Norwescon 47: Are you Team Enterprise or Team Skywalker? Do you dream of the final frontier, or a galaxy far, far away? Lightsaber or phaser? The Force or the Prime Directive? Let your attire display your affiliation as we dance the night away with DJ Wüdi!

One note: Due to technical issues that plagued the start of the dance, the first 20-some minutes of this has been reconstructed at home. Everything from 27 minutes on was recorded live at Norwescon. This also means there’s one duplicated track…have fun finding it!

Costumed people, inculding Ursula from the Little Mermaid, a Starfleet science officer, and a Vulcan, dance in a circle to The Firm&#39;s &quot;Star Trekkin&#39;&quot; as I stand on stage with my DJ gear in front of a video backdrop showing a Super Star Destroyer maneuvering through an asteroid field.

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

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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 24–30, 2025

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  • 😎 Best part of this week was a nice little mid-week mini-break for the spring break lull. We drove up and spent a couple nights at the Tulalip Resort Casino. We’re not casino or gambling people, but very much enjoyed some time away in a nice hotel room!

  • 🚀 Very busy on both the Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 front, with the first just a couple weeks away, and the other further out but with behind-the-scenes stuff helping with digital accessibility matters. Feeling a little behind on everything, but I don’t think i’m actually as behind as it feels.

  • 🔄 Once again, this is being posted on Monday but backdated to Sunday. Starting to wonder if I should just admit that Sunday evenings aren’t the best time for me to try to post these, but we’ll see….

📸 Photos

Life-size sculptures of an orca pod, with three showing fins and one leaping, in the fountain in front the Tulalip resort hotel, visible through light fog in the background.
A foggy morning walk to explore the grounds of the resort was really nice.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Just the usual mindless evening stuff: NCIS: Origins, Drag Race All Stars, and Scrubs. Scrubs “My Musical” is still an excellent episode.

🎧 Listening

  • Mostly just continuing to listen through the new stuff picked up over the past few weeks for Norwescon.

  • Was happy to see that VNV Nation’s new album Construct is coming out soon, and they just released the first song. Have to admit, I’m not a big fan of the cover art, but the song is good!

🔗 Linking

No links this week; too much of what I’ve read has been about the political idiocy, and, well, you can find those stories absolutely everywhere.

Weekly Notes: March 17–23, 2025

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  • ♿️ 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.”