Tech – Eclecticism

Goodbye WordPress, hello ClassicPress!

October 24, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

After nearly 20 years (only about three weeks shy) using WordPress, I’ve finally moved this blog over to ClassicPress.

Moving off of WordPress is one of those things that I’d wanted to do for a long time, but figured it would be too much trouble to actually bother with. Two things happened in the past week to convince me otherwise:

Matt Mullenweg continued on his campaign of general dickishness and torpedoed an accessibility update and booted the primary accessibility contributor from access to the project.
This is just the latest in a long string of examples of Mullenweg being an ass, particularly when it comes to WordPress. Mullenweg.wtf is a good resource for keeping an eye on his antics, if you’re into that sort of thing.
A thread by Adrian Roselli on Mastodon about the above led me to a post of his about WordPress accessibility, one of the updates to which mentioned ClassicPress.

Once I took a look at ClassicPress and realized what it was — a fork of an earlier version of WordPress that removes the problematic Gutenberg block editor and is continually updated to optimize, add new features, and stay broadly compatible with the wider WordPress ecosystem, including many themes and plugins — I thought this might be the way to go.

And as it turns out, it was. The switch took all of about five minutes, all told:

Install the ‘Switch to ClassicPress’ plugin.
Deactivate all other plugins.
Click the ‘Switch to ClassicPress’ button.
Reactivate the other plugins.
Done.

I only had one plugin that wasn’t compatible (the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer); everything else is quite happy doing what it was doing before.

If you’ve been considering moving away from WordPress but have been concerned about the time it would take to move to a new platform, having to learn a new system, losing access to the wider WordPress ecosystem, or any combination of the above, I’d recommend taking a look at ClassicPress. While it’s been, admittedly, all of about 15 minutes, and I haven’t even really dug into the settings to explore the differences, it’s been an easy and worry-free 15 minutes. Off to a good start!

Wishlist: Truly Semantic Plain Text Markup

October 20, 2026October 19, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

This is something in between “wishlist” and “proposal”, in that it’s something I really want, but don’t have the skills to create on my own. So I’m tossing this out into the world with the “lazyweb” tag to see if magic happens at some point.

UPDATE: Though written with Markdown as the initial focus, there are many different text markup systems with text-to-HTML (or other format) and vice versa processors, dating at least back to setext, which itself I think at least partially grew out of existing Usenet conventions at the time. So while my long use of Markdown as the underlying format for my text documents led me to focus there, Markdown itself is just one of many tools which all suffer from the same basic issue of confusing semantics and presentation. I’ve updated the title of this post accordingly and added this paragraph. And now back to the original post….

However much its creator currently bothers me, there’s no denying that Markdown is a very useful way of crafting text documents so that they’re easily convertible to HTML (among other formats).

Various people over the years have identified ways in which the original version of Markdown wasn’t quite what they were looking for, so there are a number of Markdown variants to choose from.

However, every version (at least, every version that I’ve looked into, I haven’t done an exhaustive survey) has the same limitation inherited from the original that drives me up the wall: None of them actually create proper semantic HTML.

In every variant, you have the option to create italicized text by wrapping text in single _underscores_ or *asterisks*, or bold text with doubled __underscores__ or **asterisks**.

However, those don’t actually output / or / tags; instead, they output / and / tags.

Now, that is what it says in the original specification, so all downstream implementations are following the lead of the original.

My contention is that this was a bad choice at the time, made worse over the years due to the proliferation of WYSIWYG editors that use buttons marked B and I as shortcuts for adding either Markdown underscores/asterisks or HTML em or strong tags.

Italics are not necessarily emphasis. For example, book titles (which, admittedly, should really be wrapped in <cite>/</cite> tags) are commonly represented with italics, as are the names of ships, such as the U.S.S. Enterprise. And, of course, there may be times when italics are used in a purely presentational manner.

Similarly, bold is not necessarily strong emphasis; it’s often used as a presentational style.

Now, when writing Markdown, since you can incorporate HTML and it just gets passed through to the final rendered HTML, it’s easy enough to create semantic final HTML by writing with a blend of Markdown and HTML markup. (I do this a lot.)

Unfortunately, in HTML to Markdown conversions, both  and  tags become single underscores or asterisks, both  and  tags become doubled underscores or asterisks, and <cite> tags just disappear. There’s no way to retain the original semantics (assuming the original document was properly coded to begin with, of course) in the conversion; if you want clean and correct final output, you’ll have a lot of careful search-and-replace to recreate the semantically appropriate markup.

What I want is a Markdown variant that handles semantics properly in some way.

One possibility (though there may be reasons why these choices wouldn’t work; this is off the top of my head):

_single underscore_: creates / italic tags.
__double underscore__: creates / emphasis tags.
*single asterisk*: creates / bold tags.
**double asterisk**: creates / strong emphasis tags.

There’s probably a lot more that could be done to create a Markdown variant that supports text semantics well — citation tags, for example — but these are the ones that keep bothering me.

(And yes, I know there apparently is at least one project called “semantic markdown”, but it seems to be concerned with JSON and AI-readable text, and doesn’t address the particular semantics that I’m grumbling about.)

Done with Daring Fireball

October 14, 2026October 13, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

I can’t really imagine he’ll care, but after literal decades of reading John Gruber’s Daring Fireball (I even had two different DF t-shirts back from when I thought he was worth supporting monetarily), the time has come to unsubscribe. (By which I mean, I’m dropping him from my RSS reader. He wasn’t getting money from me.)

I’d been on the fence for a while, thanks to his occasional casual ableism (called out here, and then again here). But it was his recent “actually, hanging out in a nazi bar (X) is fine, actually” post and subsequent “but if I had principles, I wouldn’t have any entertainment” whining (“The Ellisons aren’t much better than Musk. Should I stop watching Warner Bros and Paramount movies, HBO, CBS, and CNN?” and “The principled man has nothing to watch.”) that finally pushed me over the edge.

I’m often disappointed that so many high-profile people and businesses, including many of those that Gruber cites as reasons to be on X, are still (or again) posting there. But if someone I liked in the real world decided they wanted to go hang out with a crowd that I found morally, ethically, politically, and in many other ways reprehensible, that’d be their bad decision, and not only would I not join them, but I wouldn’t see much reason to hang out with them, either. It’s easy enough to do that in the virtual world, too.

There are plenty of other people to read and sources of Apple and wider tech commentary and opinion.

Kudos to the many people who have been pushing back against Gruber’s post, including higher profile names more likely to influence Gruber’s thinking (maybe, hopefully, but I’m not optimistic about it) than I am, like Anil Dash over on Bluesky (first thread, second thread, third thread), Lex Friedman on his blog and with a followup, and a few others I saw pass through my reading but can’t remember exactly who and where at this moment.

I’ve been off X/Twitter for almost exactly four years now, since November 20, 2022, and I haven’t missed it. It’s really not difficult to not hang out with racists, nazis, and pedophiles. At least, it isn’t for me. I wish it were that easy for more people.

Updates:

Gavin Anderegg, John Gruber on X: “I’m not angry, John, I’m just so very tired.” (This led me to the following two.)
Ernie Smith, The X is Off-Target: “…X is not a welcoming place anymore and in fact comes with more brand harms than brand goods.”
Dan Sinker, An Open Letter To The People Writing Lengthy Posts About ‘Why I’m Going Back to Twitter’: “What the fuck are you doing?”
Watts Martin, Checking Prior Assumptions: “Prior assumptions checked. You know what? I’m feeling pretty good about them.”
Warner Crocker, John Gruber Thinks I’ve Lost My Mind: “…whether you pay for X or just lurk and scroll, you’re giving Musk money to do what he does.”
Cesare Forelli: “Picking the week in which the owner of Twitter spent 276 millions to help Republicans – just days after the US president abandoned Ukraine to lend a saving hand to Putin – to write some sort of love letter for Twitter is definitely a choice.”
Jeff Johnson: “Gruber’s post, mere weeks before the midterms, with democracy itself under threat from Trump, doesn’t even mention the moral dilemma of supporting the political propaganda machine of the man who paid $250 million to elect Trump, took a chainsaw to our government, and continues to be the biggest right-wing funder in history.”
Karl Bode, Casey Newton And John Gruber Slink Back To Elon Musk’s Right-Wing Propaganda Machine: “Tech journalism mainstays are feebly rationalizing their return to a broken, billionaire-run right-wing propaganda website.”
Tim Bray, I Wasted an Hour on X: “I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out.”

macOS Golden Gate Music app still crap

September 28, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

The latest thing in my “Apple really needs to get their shit together with the macOS Music (iTunes) app” file:

If you have a compilation album where the tracks aren’t numbered (common for things like mashup compilations), the tracks display and play in alphabetical order…but they display alphabetically by track title, and they play alphabetically by artist.

Screenshot of Apple's Music app showing a 'Bootie Mashup Top 10 September 2026' album. The tracks are listed alphabetically by track title, but red arrows show how they play alphabetically by artist. — In a sane world, the tracks would be played in the order they’re displayed. Apple’s Music app hasn’t existed in a sane world for years.

The AI Compass

June 30, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

This “AI Compass” test was interesting. As with most such tests, it’s not perfect, and I have some quibbles with some of the questions and answers, particularly some where I think it falls into the usual trap of using “AI” for everything, and not adequately distinguishing between genAI and machine learning (ML), but still, not bad.

My result:

YOU ARE…
The Union Organizer
patron saint: Cory Doctorow.
AI is a real tool being used to extract real labor value from real people without paying them. You don’t care about the singularity — you care about the artists, writers, and workers getting strip-mined by capital. You’re not anti-technology. You’re anti-theft.

Looking at the full list of possible outcomes, I’d self-identify as one of the following. I think it’s my hedging slightly on some of the answers because of the genAI/ML confusion that pushed me into the result I got. They’re all in the same general “don’t like it, don’t trust it, don’t want it” quadrant, though.

The Luddite (Affectionate)
patron saint: Emily Bender
It doesn’t work the way they claim, it’s making everything worse, and you’d like your internet back, please. You can explain in precise technical detail why it’s a stochastic parrot, and you will, whether or not anyone asked. You’re funnier about this than people give you credit for.

The Digital Hermit
patron saint: Jaron Lanier
You’ve been saying the framing is wrong since before most people had heard of any of this. AI is less a technology than a story Silicon Valley tells to consolidate power, and the story is bad. You read physical books and you don’t need a language model to tell you what they mean.

The Skeptic
patron saint: Ed Zitron
It’s oversold, it’s losing staggering amounts of money, and the harms are arriving faster than the value. You’ve done the math on the unit economics and it doesn’t close. You are loud about this, prolific about this, and you suspect history will vindicate you.

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue

May 25, 2026May 21, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

Book 19 of 2026: Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Excellent history of Apple, from its earliest days to today. Covers the ups and downs, with a ton of neat stories about the genesis of a whole slew of technologies, many of which I hadn’t really realized Apple’s involvement with. Admittedly, something of a niche subject (even if it’s a fairly large niche these days), but if you’re an Apple fan, it’s well worth the read. And as a long-time Apple user who got started with Apple IIs back in elementary school and got my first Mac (a Mac Classic) in 1990, it was a lot of fun to revisit and get more of the background behind the many things I remembered.

Me holding Apple: The First 50 Years

Weekly Notes: March 23–29, 2026

March 30, 2026March 29, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

Sure, backdating a day, but let’s see if I can get at least one weekly cadence post up before Norwescon throws me off again. :)

So, this past week…not a lot to tell, actually, for most of it

This was spring break week for the college, so things around the office were a little slower and we all got to spend some time catching up on some of the little things that had been pushed into the “in a bit” piles. Not a bad thing at all! Since my wife is a teacher, she got a week at home to rest between quarters.
Politically, everything is still a dumpster fire, of course. Saturday was the third No Kings rally and march, which we once again went up to Seattle to participate in. I don’t know how big it actually was (I know they were hoping for 100,000 in Seattle, though I don’t know if an official count has been announced yet), but it definitely felt big. During the march from Capitol Hill to the Seattle Center, we were somewhere in the middle of the pack, and whenever I had a raised view and looked ahead or behind, I couldn’t see either end of the crowd. I took a bunch of pictures, but don’t have them posted yet. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow so I have those up before Norwescon.

📸 Photos

A model of a Klingon K'Tinga class battlecruiser, sitting on a wooden desk. — I finally got to add the Klingon K’tinga class battlecruiser to my little fleet of Star Trek model ships on my desktop at work. This is one of my favorite ships from the Trek universe, certainly my favorite non-Federation ship, and was one of the final two models that I’ve been hoping would get re-released. Now down to the last one I’m hoping for, the motion picture *Enterprise* refit (though I’d settle for the 1701-A, as they’re physically the same, just an updated paint job and new registry number).

My hand holding up a sign that says 'no kings, yes light rail' as a light rail train pulls into the station. — Since the No Kings rally was on the same day that Sound Transit opened the next bit of Line 2, going across Lake Washington, I made my sign appropriate for both celebrations. We haven’t taken the new Line 2 yet, but we’ll do that eventually.

Me and my wife on a sports field with people gathering. — Us at the Cal Anderson park playfield as people gathered for the No Kings rally.

📚 Reading

Read T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Came to Call and enjoyed it. Glad I managed to get one of her books in before seeing her at con this year!

🔗 Linking

And now, a few week’s worth of collected links. Some may be slightly “old new” by now, but so it goes.

Accessibility

Adrian Roselli: Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page: “Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some other vendor pitching you on some kind of thing that reads your web pages aloud to users? ¶ You don’t need it. ¶ Or, rather, your users may not need it. Their browser already offers it. At no cost to you. Nor them.”
Amanda Shekarchi at the CBC: When Comicon and other fan conventions focus on accessibility, everyone wins: “Many fan conventions implement accommodations like American Sign Language interpreters, accessible seating at panels and quiet rooms to break from sensory overload. Still, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of making the convention experience fully accessible.”

Entertainment

Eoin Glackin at the Dublin InQuirer: Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating strange new worlds
: “Diane Duane’s early days writing fan fiction have led to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer.” (Good article, but why is every sentence its own paragraph?)
Charlie Jane Anders: Let Firefly Stay Dead!: “But also, if there is going to be a new show based on one of Joss Whedon’s creations, I think Buffy is a much better choice. Both Buffy and Firefly are chock full of Whedon’s preoccupations and stock characters, but Buffy has more potential to go in a different direction and become properly feminist this time around. Also, I really think it’s time to stop trying to make space westerns a thing.”

History

Jocelyn Timperley at the BBC: The ancient reason there are 60 minutes in an hour: “To understand how we started counting, and still count today, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, though, we need to wind the clock back to an era before the dawn of timekeeping. Because it’s the story of one of the earliest number systems that started us off on this track – and explains why this awkward system has long outlived the civilisations who invented it.”

Local

Paul Constant at the Seattle Times: Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill offers used books with a side of cats: “The interior of Twice Sold Tales has remained the same, with winding bookcases packed with noteworthy bargains of all kinds — from super-rare art books to paperbacks that will set you back a couple bucks — and all sorts of handwritten signs and other ephemera affixed to the walls. In many ways, wandering the shop feels like exploring a well-thumbed paperback. The shop is staffed with seven cats (who live in the stacks 24/7) and five booksellers (who go home at the end of their shifts).”

Photography

Peter Dench at Amateur Photographer: I took Steve Jobs’ favourite ever portrait – it was all about the preparation: “The resulting portrait shot on film is stark, frontal, almost confrontational in its simplicity. It has become one of the most recognisable images of Jobs ever made. It was used on the cover of Jobs’ biography and Apple’s tribute, with Jobs later calling it his favourite photo. It looks effortless but was all in the preparation.”

Politics

Erin Reed at Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (archive.is snapshot of a Substack original): “As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a “Do Not Travel” warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.”
Kelly Jensen at Book Riot: A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives: “H.R. 7661 is an anti-trans bill, and tucked within its provisions are those that ban books for those under 18 that “include sexually oriented material.” This is the same vague language used in numerous states across the U.S. to ban books from public schools and public libraries. This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes. No such books for young readers exist, but facts don’t matter to a regime seeking total and complete control.”
Cedar Attanasio for the AP: Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead: “For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”
“Staff” at the Kent Reporter: King County blocks construction of ICE detention centers: “Mosqueda said the ordinance is consistent with legislation that has been adopted, or is under consideration by, Tukwila, SeaTac, Port of Seattle, City of Seattle, Baltimore County, Kansas City, Missouri, and other jurisdictions around the country, and ensures that King County’s land use regulations can continue to focus on strengthening public health and community resilience.”
Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Kent City Council passes moratorium on detention centers: “The Kent City Council joined a growing list of King County jurisdictions to adopt a measure to prohibit any new or expansion of jail, corrections or detention facilities in town with expectations that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might be looking to add another center to go with its Tacoma site.”
Karl Bode at TechDirt: 37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich: “Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state. ¶ Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich.”
Aaron Glantz in The Guardian: US veteran charged with ‘conspiracy’ over ICE protest refuses to plead guilty: “The right to protest is ‘supposed to be fundamentally American’, said Bajun Mavalwalla, who walked foot patrols as US army sergeant in the Horn of Panjwai, the birthplace of the Taliban and one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. ¶ ‘It’s among the rights that when I joined the military, I thought I was joining to protect,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it violently. You can’t do it in a way that harms other people, but you have a right to stand up for what you believe in.'”
Bret Devereaux: Miscellanea: The War in Iran
: “This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.”

Technology

Maarten Paulusse at the Eindhoven University of Technology: Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?: “When dealing with large amounts of text, the process of reading, evaluating, and summarizing can feel daunting. It is understandable to want to outsource this cognitive heavy lifting to a GenAI tool. However, the quality of AI-generated summaries is insufficient for academic use, and they will not provide the coherent, reliable overview you are looking for. Furthermore, by generating a summary instead of writing your own, you miss an essential step in processing, memorizing, and applying information effectively.”
Jon Hicks: My perfect Music app doesn’t exist: I don’t have exactly the same ideal requirements as Jon does, but he captures a lot of the frustration with today’s music options. I’m still (somewhat reluctantly) using Apple’s Music player (for owned, locally stored music most of the time, rather than the Apple Music service), and am making most of my music purchases through Qobuz, as it has the best artist payout.
AJ Dellinger at Gizmodo: Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You’re Being Watched, Too
: “According to a joint investigation published by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, sensitive and personal footage captured by the devices—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is being reviewed by contractors who see all of it uncensored.”
Steve Bonifield at The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission (archive.is snapshot of a paywalled original: “In a statement to The Verge, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Grammarly parent company Superhuman, commented: ‘The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.'” The feature has since been pulled (and a class action lawsuit filed), but it’s just such egregiously shitty behavior that I didn’t want to drop the link off this roundup.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI: “The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.”
Rogi: I Verified My Linkedin Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.: “Understanding what I actually agreed to took me an entire weekend reading 34 pages of legal documents. ¶ I handed a US company my passport, my face, and the mathematical geometry of my skull. They cross-referenced me against credit agencies and government databases. They’ll use my documents to train their AI. And if the US government comes knocking, they’ll hand it all over — even if it’s stored in Europe, even if I’m European, and possibly without ever telling me. ¶ All for a small blue checkmark on a professional networking site.”
Jeff Johnson: If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate?: “The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI appears to be that you’ll never have to learn anything. Don’t know something? Just ask AI for the answer. Can’t do something? Just ask AI to do it. Ignorance is bliss. Laziness is encouraged in the name of efficiency. The prospect that one may have to work and struggle to achieve one’s goals is considered abhorrent. The very notion of self-improvement becomes obsolete. Life under AI is a video game, pure joy… as long as you continue inserting tokens into the machine. Hopefully my video arcade metaphor hasn’t become obsolete too.”
Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You”: “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.”
Shubham: The 49MB Web Page: “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.”
Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels: Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Tric: “I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. ¶ Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them.”
Hana Lee Goldin at Card Catalog: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.: “The search bar you already have is more capable than that arrangement requires you to know. With the right syntax, it becomes a precision instrument: narrow by domain, by date, by file type, by exact phrase. We can pull up archived pages, surface open file directories, and even find what people said in forums instead of what brands want us to find. None of it requires a new tool or a paid account. The capability has been there the whole time.”

Weekly Notes: January 5–11, 2026

January 11, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

Made it through the first week of the quarter! It was definitely a busy week, but nothing major exploded, so I’ll count that as a success.
Saturday night we went out to see one of the 40th anniversary theatrical showings of Labyrith. I don’t remember seeing it in the theater when it came out — I would have been 12, so right in the target range, but I have no memory of doing so — and it was a real treat to be able to do this. It holds up well!
Sunday we headed up to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park for one of this weekend’s “ICE Out for Good” rallies. I’ve uploaded my full photo set to Flickr, as usual.

📸 Photos

Protest sign that says, ''the officer feared for his life' is so funny to me, because as a woman, if I shot a man in the face every time I've felt afraid, the streets would be lined with bodies'. — From today’s protest rally.

Protest sign that says, 'so much wrong, so little cardboard'. — Another good one.

📺 Watching

Labyrinth (1986), as noted above.

🔗 Linking

Niki Tonsky: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons: “The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. ¶ Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.”
Casey Newton at Platformer: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit: “For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge? ¶ Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds.”
Stefano Marinelli: The Virtue of Finished Things: “I received an email yesterday morning. It was a thank-you note for one of the open-source tools I created and maintain. The sender explained how useful the software was for their specific needs, and as always, this brought me an immense sense of satisfaction. ¶ But at one point in the email, a question appeared – one that has become a recurring theme in the modern software world: ‘I notice there haven’t been any new releases for about ten months. Should I consider the project abandoned?'”
Teresa Duryea Wong at Quiltfolk: One Year After an Uncomfortable Choice for Best in Show: “This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher. ¶ What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.”
Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero at the South Seattle Emerald: A Fistful of Loud: Seattle Neighbors Build Whistle Kits to Protect Immigrants From ICE: “‘By making noise, you bring visibility to what is happening on the street,’ said Kate Macfarlane, who started the WA Whistles project. ‘ICE relies on shock tactics and moving in very quickly … it turns [an] otherwise pretty silent abduction into a loud, highly visible opportunity for neighbors to rally.'”
WA Whistles: “Our purpose is to spread whistles throughout WA to help communities protect themselves against ICE.”
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: DHS Is Lying To You (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.”
Melissa Turniten at Fox9 KMSP: Minneapolis ICE shooting: Eyewitness accounts contradict ICE statement: “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls the claim the shooting was self-defense ‘bullshit’ and is a ‘garbage narrative’ after seeing video of the shooting. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also seen the video, saying ‘Don’t believe the propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.'”
Jennifer Mascia at The Trace: How Many People Have Been Shot in ICE Raids?: “Using Gun Violence Archive data and news clips, The Trace has identified 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire and another 15 incidents in which agents held someone at gunpoint since the crackdown began. At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.”
Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman at Wired: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance: “Two key elements of digital surveillance should be top of mind for protestors. One is the data that authorities could potentially obtain from your phone if you are detained, arrested, or they confiscate your device. The other is surveillance of all the identifying and revealing information that you produce when you attend a protest, which can include wireless interception of text messages and more, and tracking tools like license plate scanners and face recognition. You should be mindful of both.”
Joanna Kavenna at The Guardian: Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present: “From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?”
Ari Anderson at The Stranger: What I Learned About the Future at Seattle WorldCon: “Like the standing on threshold of a cosmic portal, Seattle’s convention center buzzed with bards, fae, aliens, monsters, warriors and spaceships, far away planets and misty forests, innumerable stories of heartbreak and triumph, all tantalizingly within reach between the covers of a thousand books.”
Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards: “Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.”
Julia Shumway at the Washington State Standard: Federal judge blocks Trump election order, siding with Oregon, Washington: “A federal judge in Washington state on Friday permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a 2025 executive order that sought to require voters prove citizenship and that all ballots be received by Election Day.”

Weekly Notes: December 29, 2025–January 4, 2026

January 5, 2026January 4, 2026 by Michael Hanscom

Happy holidays (part two)!

Well, we wrapped up 2025…and as happy as we were to see 2025 end, 2026 is already looking to keep the dumpster fires burning bright.

At work, the week was fine. Back in the office this week, though as it was still in the holiday break, it was another pretty slow week. Next week classes start, so things will pick back up again. The slowdown is always nice, but it’ll also be good to have things back to normal after the holidays.

Here at home, we had a nice quiet New Year’s Eve. It was even a bit quieter than we expected, as there weren’t as many local unsanctioned fireworks as there have been in years past.

Out in the wider world, though, we all woke up one morning just a few days into the year to discover that the US had invaded Venezuela and abducted its president and his wife. Because…sigh. We are continuing to speed run becoming everything as a country that I was brought up being told that we weren’t. And even though the older I get and the more I learn, the more obvious it is how far we always have been from the ideals we claimed to uphold, it’s still mind-boggling to be where we are now.

As I said on Mastodon: “I’m confused: Is being a brown-skinned person accused of being involved with drugs something that gets you kidnapped and forcibly kicked out of the country or kidnapped and forcibly brought into the country?”

Though really, after what we saw of Trump in his first term and so far in his second, the only thing that’s really surprising me about all of this is how many people are just…going along with it (most notably Congress — especially, but not at all limited to, the Republican party — and the Supreme Court). The system of checks and balances has apparently given up trying to either check or balance, and that’s perhaps the most troubling part of all of this.

📸 Photos

My wife's outstretched arms hold an iPhone taking a selfie, with her smiling face and me holding up my camera in front of my face visible on the iPhone's screen. — Got this really cute shot of Prairie getting a selfie of us as we were on an evening walk on the last day of 2025.

Selfie of me, a white man with greying red beard, weraing glasses and a black coat and hoodie with the hood up, and my wife a white woman with wavy blonde hair and glasses, both of us smiling. — And then this selfie on our first walk of 2026, during which I discovered that my new camera has an automatic selfie mode with a short timer that is activated when you flip the screen out and backwards.

📝 Writing

This week I recorded my responses to the current SFWA survey on AI use in the SFF writing/publishing industry, did my annual reading wrap-up for the year, and posted my resolutions for this year.

📚 Reading

Finished my last book of the year, Rough Trails by L.A. Graf, and my first book of the year, Thin Air by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, both parts of a six-book TOS-era Star Trek series.

📺 Watching

We watched two movies over the weekend:

The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Decent thriller with a very satisfying ending.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025): ⭐️⭐️: A particularly disappointing finale to the series.

🔗 Linking

NOTE: For regular readers (assuming there are any), a bit of clarification on how I link some items: I use archive.is for pages on sites that are paywalled (including sites that will only show content if adblockers are disabled) and for Substack pages (because Substack is another Nazi bar). Starting with this week’s post, I will also include links to the original pages, as not everyone has the same attitudes as I do about these things and may have subscriptions to the sites in question, not be as annoyed as I am at dealing with paywalls, ads, and the like, or have either accepted Substack as a “necessary evil” or are unaware of their problematic practices.

National Society of Tax Professionals: USPS Announces Changes to the Postmark Date System: “…while a postmark confirms the USPS possessed a mail piece on the date inscribed, that date does not necessarily align with the date the USPS first accepted possession of the item.” Potentially impactful in a number of important scenarios, including voting by mail. Undated informational page, but the rule took effect in November 2025.
Foz Meadows: Against AI (archive.is link of Substack original): “AI is unethical on a scale that SFF authors should be uniquely placed to appreciate, its evils mirroring metaphors that are older than our present civilization. AI is the cursed amulet, the magic mirror, the deal with the devil, the doppelganger that learns our secrets and steals our face; it’s a faerie illusion, leprechaun gold, the fox’s trick that gives rot the look of resplendence, the naked emperor parading with his cock out; it’s the disembodied voice that whispers let me in, the zombie virus that transforms the known into the unrecognizable, the corrupting fungi whose tendrils invade and poison. It’s the literal fucking One Ring, telling us that of course we’d use its power for good, compelling us to pick it up so that through us, it might do great evil.”
Chuck Wendig: My Open Letter to That Open Letter About AI in Writing and Publishing: “AI IS NOT INEVITABLE. ¶ The only strategy here is the sum total pushback against its uncanny horrors and its non-consensual intrusion into every corner of our world — it steals our content, guzzles our water, increases our power bills, is crammed into services we didn’t ask for it to be crammed into while also charging us more money for the “privelege.” There is no strategy here except to find the fields where the AI grows and metaphorically set them aflame. ¶ And shame and anger against corporate overreach is a powerful fire.”
Trekorama!: 3D walkthroughs of locations on various Star Trek ships, including the Enterprise 1701 (main bridge), 1701-D (main bridge, engineering, sick bay, Ten-Forward, transporter room, Picard, Data, Troi, and Worf’s quarters, and a shuttle), 1701-E (bridge), and Kelvinverse version (bridge and corridor), Defiant (deck one), Voyager (deck one, sickbay, transporter room, engineering, mess hall), Discovery (bridge, transporter room, mess hall, and corridor), and Klingon Bird of Prey (bridge), plus the real-world ISS.
David Reamer at the Anchorage Daily News: Termination dust: Its history, evolution in meaning and possible origin (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “…the history and evolution of termination dust as a turn of phrase offers education, enlightenment and entertainment. Over the decades, there have been changes in meaning and connotation. Throughout those years, it remains a significant detail of local history, a widely recognizable bit of slang whose lore maps closely against that of the town itself.”
Robin Young and Emiko Tamagawa at WBUR: ‘Wake Up Dead Man’: Rian and Nathan Johnson on blending mystery and faith in new ‘Knives Out’ movie: Brief but interesting interview touching on the religious motifs in Wake Up Dead Man.
John Scalo: Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?: “I think our helmet-clad robot friends might have been making a little joke that we’ve apparently all missed. The BPM of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is actually 123.45.” Fun bit of music trivia, plus a bit of a peek at the difficulties of having a computer do something that seems relatively easy for humans; in this case, determining a song’s tempo.