TV And Films

• ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.

• 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.

• 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Finished James Swallow’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds book Toward the Night.

• Started Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the last of the Vorkosikan saga books.

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

• Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…

• Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”

• David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.

• Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.

• Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”

• Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.

• Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”

• Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”

• Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”

• Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”

• Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”