Hey, look, it’s an actual weekly update! Exciting stuff, this. (For certain values of “exciting”.)
🇺🇸 So…we’re apparently at war again; illegally, again. I continue to be flabbergasted at how comprehensively the Republican party is just letting our mad king dictator do whatever he wants, no matter how destructive to the country or the world. If only we had an opposition party….
🚗 After last week’s unexpected car adventures, which ended well, but were not exactly un-stressful, we’ve been taking it easy this weekend.
📸 Photos
The nearly full moon Sunday night was gorgeous.I saw this on the shelves at Marshall’s (but did not buy it) and had a few moments of wondering why anyone would name their brand “horse roots”.
📚 Reading
Finished William Alexander’s Sunward, another of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. Just two to go and I’ll have them all read!
📺 Watching
We watched the first two episodes of the Scrubs revival, and so far, they’re off to a good start, feeling much more like the first few seasons of the original run than the last few.
This afternoon we watched the recent I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot/sequel. It was a mildly entertaining bit of nostalgia for ’90s teen horror, but with several plot holes. In the end, while it doesn’t need to be actively avoided, neither does it need to be intentionally sought out.
Friday Nine Inch Nails released a remix album version of the TRON: Ares soundtrack, TRON Ares: Divergence, which found its way into my library when I got home that day.
🔗 Linking
Culture
Colin Gorrie at Dead Language Society: How far back in time can you understand English? (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post. ¶ Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger).” I was fine through 1300, started struggling at 1200, and was lost at 1100.
David Smith at The Guardian: ‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback: “For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.¶ But the era of the ‘pocket book’ is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.”
Ryan Moulton: The Hunt for Dark Breakfast: “Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.”
Tom BH: The Longest Line Of Sight: “The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.”
Design
Paul Lukas at Inconspicuous Consumption: H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “Had Frank Lloyd Wright himself ever been responsible for an upside-down “H”? Wright died in 1959, so he had nothing to do with the most recent iterations of the lettering, but what about the earlier time periods?”
Film
Chloe Veltman at NPR: Found: The 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack: “The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès. […] The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely.”
Photography
Alan Taylor at The Atlantic: Different Views of the Winter Olympics (gift link; Archive.is version in case the gift link dies): “A collection of creative photographs from this year’s games featuring infrared imaging, vintage cameras, optical filters, digital composites, unusual angles, unexpected subjects, and more”
Software
Adam Grossman: Introducing Acme Weather: “Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.”
Maybe eventually I’ll get back to a weekly cadence? Maybe. We’ll see.
👩🏼🏫 The biggest thing of the last two weeks at work was that my wife was awarded tenure! She’s been working towards that for a long time, and it’s great to see it finally happen. Of course, she was teaching when the Board of Trustees cast the vote, but I made sure to attend and text her as soon as the vote went through.
🚀 Last weekend was the penultimate planning meeting for this year’s Norwescon. Just one more in March, and then the convention in April. This is crunch time, but it’s always an exciting crunch time.
🚗 Here at home, our big adventure this weekend was going through with something we’d been considering for quite some time, and trading in our 2016 Chevy Sonic for a fancy new 2026 Honda Civic Sport Touring Hybrid sedan! We’d been looking forward to finally moving to a hybrid car for a while, we’d had a Civic before that we really liked, and the current model is one of the top-rated cars out right now, so we decided the time was right. It’s only been a day so far, but we’re definitely enjoying the upgrade. This is our second time buying a brand-new car, and it’s always fun driving a car off the lot when its odometer is still in the low two digits.
📸 Photos
Us and our new car. So shiny!Our local Winco grocery store has this robotic floor cleaner (basically an overgrown Roomba) that wanders around the store. It’s both a little amusing and a little unsettling. I gave it several suspicious looks.
🏂 We’ve been watching a bit of Winter Olympics every evening. We’re not huge sports people, and tend to prefer the summer to the winter Olympic games, but it’s still fun to tune in, pick a random sport, and watch a bit here and there.
We finished a rewatch of 30 Rock, which though not without the occasional stumble and cringe moment, is still really funny and overall still holds up remarkably well.
🎧 Listening
I’m getting started getting some practice time in before DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon, and as usual, am recording my practice sessions and uploading them. My first of this stretch got posted: Difficult Listening Hour 2026.02.16. More to come!
🔗 Linking
Accessibility
Fable: How early accessibility solutions evolved into core UX design principles: “In this article, you’ll discover ten historical product innovations born from the desire to make everyday experiences accessible to people with disabilities: The typewriter, audiobooks, the teletypewriter (TTY), autocorrect, text-to-speech, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the Clapper, GPS, online shopping, [and] the touch screen.”
Culture
Amanda Sakuma with Jan Diehm at The Pudding: Fit 4 A Teen: “I remember once being that teen girl shopping in the women’s section for the first time. I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I’m stuck with the countless ways that women’s apparel is not made for the average person, like me.”
Fandom
Trae Dorn: Fandom Spaces are Adult Spaces: “I’m not sure why I have to say this sometimes, but fandom spaces are adult spaces. What we consider organized fandom was built by adults, for adults. But there are people who forget this. Like I’ve seen people admonish adults for being involved with fandom, saying “adults should be doing adult things” (whatever the hell those “adult things” are), and I’ve seen kids lament growing up saying they’ll have to stop liking anime or comics or whatever property they’re passionate about. ¶ And I’m just like… no kid, that’s not how it works. That’s the opposite of how it works.”
Film
Todd Vaziri: The Myth of the “Jaws” Shooting Star: “…contrary to what the mythology might be, there is no way those two shooting stars you see in ‘Jaws’ were real-life shooting stars photographed in-camera during filming. Those shots contain animated effects work to simulate shooting stars.”
Local
Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Transit riders will be able to pay fares with credit, debit cards: “This new feature, which starts Feb. 23, comes as Seattle and the Puget Sound region prepare to host several large events in 2026, including the World Cup. With many international visitors expected to travel across the region, Tap to Pay simplifies transit and aligns with global expectations for convenient payment options.”
Politics
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: NBC Hid The Boos For JD Vance. Where’s Trump’s ‘Unfair Editing’ Lawsuit?: “This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn’t ‘be accurate’ or ‘be fair.’ The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.”
Jon Schuppe and Natasha Korecki at NBC News: Broken bones, burning eyes: How Trump’s DHS deploys ‘less lethal’ weapons on protesters: “NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents since the spring and found that Department of Homeland Security officers have repeatedly deployed ‘less lethal’ weapons in ways that appear to violate their own policies or general policing guidelines, unless they believed their lives were in danger. The review was based on interviews with lawyers, experts and protesters who were injured as well as witness statements, documents from criminal and civil cases and videos taken at protests.”
Jay Kuo: Censoring Colbert and Talarico (archive.is copy of a Substack post): “Last night, Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico, currently running for the U.S. Senate, appeared on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ to spread his message of hope and unity in the face of MAGA Trumpism. ¶ But millions who tuned in would not see that interview. That’s because the FCC blocked CBS, which owns ‘The Late Show,’ from airing it.”
Karl Bode at TechDirt: Department Of Education Forced To Back Off Illegal Plan To Be Racist, Sexist Assholes: “One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it. ¶ It happened again this week, when the Department of Education (DOE) was forced to back off of their illegal effort to permanently enshrine intolerance and ignorance across U.S. education standards.”
Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian: ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks: “She didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of an ordeal that would see Karen handcuffed, shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell, before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre. Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa.”
Jordan Golson: What They Copied (Wayback Machine archive of a Substack post): “Then carmakers looked at a product that sold billions of units [(the iPhone)] and said, we should put one of those in the dashboard. But they took the wrong lesson. Your car isn’t supposed to do everything. It’s supposed to be a car. You need to adjust the temperature, change the volume, turn on the heated seats and keep your eyes on the road. These are not problems that require a general-purpose interface. They are problems that have been solved for more than a century — by knobs and buttons and switches — and the industry unresolved them in a decade.” I will never be in the market for a Ferrari, but this is a fascinating look at how Jonny Ive, famed for his design work at Apple, is working with them.
Angela Haupt at Time: The Internet’s New Favorite Insult: ‘Did AI Write That?’: “Across the internet, as tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini become part of everyday life, people are increasingly informing others that their words come across as AI output. You can practically feel the disdain through the screen: ‘Did AI write that?’ It’s not really a question—it’s a way of ending a conversation by casting doubt on whether someone deserves to be taken seriously.”
Richard MacManus at Cybercultural: 1994: Publishing comes to the Web — and design matters: “1994 marks the Web’s shift into a publishing medium. As site authors seek control over formatting and design, the WWW-Talk mailing list hosts an early debate over style sheets and presentation.” While I just slightly miss the 1994 cutoff of this article, my first website went up in 1995, and I have a 1996 archive still online.
Trae Dorn: Discord Just Showed Why We Need to Bring Back Forums: “Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share. ¶ Use the internet like it’s 2006.”
Thomas Germain at the BBC: I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes: “It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.”
Marcin Wichary: Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs Scheme: “The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks. Or, if where you’re going is up in hierarchy, well-designed URL will allow you to drag to select and then backspace a few things from the end. ¶ Flickr allowed to do all that, and all without a touch of a Shift key, too.”
tante: Acting ethically in an imperfect world: “I appreciate a lot of work Cory Doctorow has done in the last decades. But the arguments he presents here to defend his usage of LLMs for this rather trivial task (which TBH could probably be done reasonably well with traditional means) are part of why the Internet – and therefore the world – looks like it does right now. It’s a set of arguments that wants to delegitimize political and moral actions based on libertarian and utilitarian thinking.”
Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links: “The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. ¶ In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.” Ugh. I’ll need to figure out another source for linking to archived copies of paywalled/Substack-ed articles.
Once again, I missed a week. These things happen! So here we are.
The biggest bits of the last two weeks at work were two afternoons on Zoom for the winter DSSC conference, connecting with disability services workers across the state’s college system, and finishing my annual performance review. Both went well, and for the latter, everyone still likes me, and I have a good set of goals for the next year.
On the home front, our big adventure last weekend was heading into Seattle on Saturday for an(other) anti-ICE protest. This one was primarily organized by Seattle-area higher education unions, and was then joined by health care and tech unions. Ended up being larger than we expected at first, with a rally at Seattle Central College and then a march down to the Federal Building. No clashes, no issues, and a good gathering of like-minded educators (including a co-worker who came along with us), healers, techies, and whomever else wanted to join in. Photos are in this Flickr album.
I’d already had plans to head out to the Mercury to get some goth clubbing in that night, so rather than having me drive back and forth from home to protest to home to club to home, we just got a hotel room nearby. After the protest we got set up in our hotel room, had dinner at a local favorite restaurant (the Annapurna Café), and then my wife got a nice quiet night in a hotel room while I went out bouncing around in a dark goth-y club for a few hours. Sunday we had a lazy, slow morning, came back home, and that was that.
This weekend was a slow Saturday of chores and dozing in front of the Olympics. We’d watched the opening ceremony on Friday evening and, well, were more underwhelmed than overwhelmed.
Today we went out to see Cirque du Soleil’s Echo, which just opened here. Really, really neat show — this was our first time seeing a CDS show, and it was totally worth it.
📸 Photos
It felt really good to be at an educator-driven rally. And I have to say, teachers seem to make better public speakers than many of the other people we’ve seen speak at these things. Nothing against energy and enthusiasm, but it’s nice when those are paired with oratory and writing skills as well.Part of the crowd at the Federal Building at the end of the march.Jimi joined the protest, even getting an anti-ICE whistle.The urine anti-splash mats in the urinal at the Mercury make me snicker.Yes, this performer (and the other one still on the stage in this shot) is being suspended by her hair.Another nice touch; the music is performed live, instead of being pre-recorded, and the musicians are often integrated into the show.
📝 Writing
In addition to the little mini-review of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony already linked above, I also had a bit of a bit of a rant on Mastodon about modern Star Trek designing things that look neat rather than feel real. (I actually originally posted it on Bluesky, but it was on Mastodon where I actually got responses and engagement.)
We watched the one-off Muppet Show revival, and really enjoyed it. I’ve seen a lot of other people also saying how much they enjoyed it, so hopefully it does get picked up for a full revival.
🎧 Listening
I found a 2023 article where Consequence posted a list of their picks for the 50 Best Industrial Songs of All Time, and while like any such list, not every choice is one I’d make, it’s not bad. While reading it, I realized that I had most of the tracks on the list already, so I went on a small binge and picked up those I didn’t. So I now have a playlist to match the article, and have been enjoying it and the new additions to my collection.
Plus, these were released recently:
🔗 Linking
Accessibility
Accessible Social: “Accessible best practices for social media content: Learn how to create a more inclusive online experience one post at a time.”
Laura Kalgan: Accessibility for Everyone: A free edition of this 2017 book on accessibility. Some details might have changed, but accessibility best practices remain the same.
Culture
Dan Barry and Sonia A. Rao at The New York Times: The ‘R-Word’ Returns, Dismaying Those Who Fought to Oust It (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “For decades now, the ‘R-word’ has been regarded as a slur against people with intellectual disabilities — a word to be avoided. Yet it has had a striking resurgence, in part because people in high-profile positions of power and influence have chosen to resurrect it, often with an air of defiance.”
Local
Chris Megargee at the Shoreline Area News: ICE agents detain a Shoreline father: “A difficult day. Today I was present as ICE agents detained a father a mile from my house–while his two-year-old son sat scared in the backseat.” I heard about this from a friend on Facebook, who was one of the local community members who were observing.
Photography
Mitchell Clark at DPReview: “Throwing my camera was the right thing to do”: The photographers behind the viral protest photos: “By now, you’ve probably seen the viral photo of John Abernathy, an independent photographer, throwing his Leica M10-R to another photographer after being pinned to the ground by officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. It’s from a striking sequence of images taken by freelance photographer Pierre Lavie, which show Abernathy being tackled, locking eyes with Lavie – then a stranger – and tossing his camera and phone to him in an attempt to keep them from being confiscated. ¶ We caught up with both photographers to get the story behind the photos they took that day, see how they’ve dealt with suddenly having their work presented on a global stage, and talk about how this incident, and others like it, have affected how they cover protests and other similar events.”
Politics
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. …what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.”
Daphne Carr at Pitchfork: Understanding the LRAD, the “Sound Cannon” Police Are Using at Protests, and How to Protect Yourself From It: “Short-term exposure to loud noise like the LRAD’s deterrent tone may cause a sensation of stuffed or ringing ears, known as tinnitus, which can cease minutes after the exposure or last for days. Other sound injury symptoms include headaches, nausea, sweating, vertigo, and loss of balance. Signs of more serious injury include vomiting and mucus or blood from the ears. Exposure to acute loud sounds can tear eardrums and destroy hair cells in the cochlea, which causes permanent hearing loss.”
Robert F. Worth at The Atlantic: Welcome to the American Winter (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as ‘engineered chaos’ produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.”
Cheyanne M. Daniels at Politico: Third ‘No Kings’ nationwide protest planned for March: “The group behind the nationwide ‘No Kings’ protests are planning their fourth demonstration of President Donald Trump’s second term — and are anticipating even greater turnout than their earlier rallies.”
Sarah Jeong at The Verge: Best gas masks: “There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.”
Mia Sato at The Verge: The rise of the slopagandist (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “We mostly talk about it in the context of AI-generated material, but slop does not need to be synthetic — AI slop is just a subgenre of a larger type of content that is made quickly and cheaply and poorly. The same lukewarm financial advice peddled by thousands of literal talking heads on Instagram Reels is slop. Falsehoods and oversimplifications about breaking news or contentious celebrity drama that snowball to millions of views is slop. Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it. Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization.”
Christian Paz at Vox: Minneapolis is showing a new kind of anti-Trump resistance (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “In the Twin Cities area, meanwhile, this activism is well-organized; but it’s not a traditional, anti-government protest movement of the likes we saw during President Donald Trump’s first term. Some have called this new model ‘dissidence’ or ‘neighborism’ — or, more traditionally, ‘direct action.’ As one organizer described what’s happening in the city, ‘it’s kind of unorganized-organized.'”
Technology
Just the Browser: “Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you ‘just the browser’ and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations.” For Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox.
Minifigure Scanner: Use this website on your phone to check which figure is in that blind bag before you buy it.
Two weeks ago, I caught a particularly nasty cold. It was bad enough that we went by urgent care to get tested for flu or Covid. Thankfully, neither of those popped positive, so it really was just a cold, but it meant that I missed a couple days of work. If you can avoid getting the crud this winter (or ever, really), I recommend it; it sounds like everything that’s going around right now is knocking people on their butts.
Over the weekend, we went to the Cougar Mountain Zoo, which we hadn’t explored before. It’s a smaller zoo, but very cute, with a neat collection of bronze statues of animals scattered throughout the grounds. Photos are in a Flickr album as usual.
This past week at work went pretty well, wrapping up with an event where we collaborated with the neurodiversity in education support group Roots2Wings. Highline’s Accessibility Resources department was there in several areas; my area was tabling as part of an accessible technology immersive lab, along with representatives from several other schools and organizations. Not a bad way to wrap up the week.
Out in the wider world, of course, things continue to be an ongoing nuclear dumpster fire. Unsurprisingly, the link roundup at the end of this post will not just be longer than usual (given that this is a two-week catchup), but pretty focused on the wider political shitshow. Maybe eventually things will improve, but for now…oof. Take care of yourselves.
📸 Photos
I’m really appreciating this book display in the college library.Another side of the table. Librarians don’t mess around.The zoo’s warning signs kept making me snicker. Though, really, it’s not bad advice.
📚 Reading
Finished Diane Carey’s Challenger, which wrapped up the “New Earth” six-book Star Trek TOS series I started at the end of 2025
I’m thinking I might start to try categorizing these, particularly when they get this long…
Art
Colin Warren at The Nation: Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit: “CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists? ¶ GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.”
Software
Unstream: Find your favorite music on alternative platforms, directly support the artists you love, and move off streaming.
Iceout.org: Tracking ICE sightings, interactions, and abductions across the country. “Our objective is to collect community-submitted information about possible ICE activity to help inform the public and raise awareness. All reports are reviewed by our moderator team before appearing on the map.”
Tech
Danielle Chelosky at Stereogum: Bandcamp Bans AI Music: “Bandcamp is banning AI music. ¶ The platform made the announcement today via Reddit….”
Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over The World: “If markup is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markdown. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.” I’ve been using Markdown regularly for, well, decades now, since shortly after it was released, thanks to word spreading among the MovableType community. Nearly every post on this blog is Markdown (or a mix of Markdown and HTML).
Politics
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: We’re all just content for ICE: “…ICE agents make no effort to hide what ‘side’ they’re on. I’ve seen up close how intertwined the twin engines of the Trump regime are. Brutal state violence and hysterical right-wing internet content work together in lockstep. According to The Washington Post, the agency is under pressure from The White House to create as much content as possible. Which is why ICE agents have a phone in one hand and a gun in the other. But it goes beyond that.”
Miles Klee at Rolling Stone: Professor Forbidden To Teach Plato Assigns Article About University Censorship Instead: “Rather than teach a different course, Peterson elected to revise his syllabus, replacing the Plato readings with an article in The New York Times about the university’s censorship of the original material. Administrators have approved the change, he says, and he’s looking forward to teaching it in the context of free speech and academic freedom issues. ‘It’s going to be very, very fun,’ he says. Students who received the amended syllabus also found it annotated to highlight exactly what the school had forbidden Peterson from assigning and which alternative material had been added as a result.”
Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court is about to confront its most embarrassing decision (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “It appears, in other words, that Americans around the time of the nation’s founding and the ratification of the Second Amendment were quite comfortable with laws banning gun possession on private land without the land owner’s permission. That should be enough to uphold Hawaii’s law under Bruen’s ‘historical tradition of firearm regulation’ standard. But it’s not that simple.”
Madison McVan at the Minnesota Reformer: In the car with the Minneapolis community patrols working to disrupt ICE operations: “Neubauer and O’Keefe started patrolling their south Minneapolis neighborhood recently as the Trump administration has ramped up its mass deportation campaign in Minnesota, sending in thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents, with more on the way. They are some of the many thousands of Twin Cities residents who have come together over the past year to protest ICE and divert the agents from their mission, often resulting in tense confrontations.”
Sarah Raza at the AP: Minneapolis duo details their ICE detention, including pressure to rat on protest organizers: “According to organizers and an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, immigration officers have also been surveilling activists who have been observing their activities in the Twin Cities, violating their First Amendment rights. And Sigüenza, who like his friend O’Keefe is a U.S. citizen, said an immigration officer who questioned him Sunday even offered him money or legal protection if he gave up the names of organizers or neighbors who are in the country illegally.”
Solarbird: What’s Permuting Itself Around In My Head, Part Two: The Election: “Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. ‘Couchfucker’ Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question. ¶ So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is… ¶ …we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time.”
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Everyone Knows Our Mad King’s Greenland Obsession Is Insane. Why Won’t Congress Stop It?: “A President who openly admits his foreign policy is driven by personal grievances over awards he didn’t receive is not fit for office. A President who threatens to invade NATO allies and won’t rule out military force against them is a danger to global stability. A President who doesn’t understand (or doesn’t care) that the Nobel Committee is independent from the Norwegian government has no business conducting diplomacy. ¶ These aren’t controversial statements. They’re obvious. Everyone knows it. ¶ But none of the political elite want to act.”
Sam Levin at The Guardian: ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials: “Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.”
Meg Anderson at NPR: The ICE surge is fueling fear and anxiety among Twin Cities children: “Parents, teachers, counselors and health care workers across the Twin Cities say many Minnesota children are living in fear or seeing those fears realized. They worry loved ones will be taken away, that they’ll witness violence, or get hurt themselves.”
Sofia Barnett at The Minnesota Star Tribune: Two women, detained by ICE, say they helped agent having seizure: “By the time emergency medical responders arrived, the women had been holding the agent steady for several minutes. They were detained but acting as first responders to the man who had detained them. ¶ Once the agent was transferred to medical care, Amundson and Zemien were placed into another vehicle and driven to Whipple anyway. ¶ ‘I asked if we could just go home,’ Amundson said. ‘I said, ‘We just saved his life. Is that cool with you?’ And they said no.'”
Derek Guy at Politico: There’s More to Greg Bovino’s Coat Than You Think: “Like field shirts, trenchcoats and combat boots, the greatcoat belongs to a shared military vocabulary that predates fascism and has been used by military forces around the world. […] Bovino’s coat may not be a Hitlerian symbol, but it is a symbol for something else: the increasing militarization of immigration enforcement.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with part of the article’s premise, that Bovino isn’t referencing the Nazi’s uniforms — from here, there’s no way to be sure, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was — but the history and fashion shift over the years is interesting.
Dan Sinker: We Are All We Have: “We are all we have and the more you do, today, to reach out in your neighbors, your town, your community, the better off everyone is. ¶ Right now feels impossible, and unfortunately there’s a lot of impossible still to come. There’s no fast fix, no one easy trick to defeating fascism. ¶ But. ¶ But honestly I’ve never felt more hopeful that we actually have what it takes. That we can do the impossible, even when it seems insurmountable. ¶ Because what it takes is us.”
Work was rather uneventful this week, being the week between the end of the quarter and the week of the holiday break. Quiet, with time to putter around on the list of things that have been in the “lower priority” pile for a bit. Not bad at all.
Outside of work, much of the week was just watching the world around us slowly start to emerge from the flood waters. There’s still a lot of water around, and the rivers are still running high, but things are improving and most roads have reopened. Soggy progress is still progress.
Today we went down to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s The Nutcracker down in Federal Way. We enjoy the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s performances — they’re a Ukrainian troupe that’s now based out of Bellevue, with a blend of Ukrainian professionals and local students, so the individual dancers range from very good to very enthusiastic — and it’s always good to support local artists.
📚 Reading
Finished Catherynne Valente’s Space Oddity, the just-as-fun sequel to Space Opera. My only disappointment (and it’s not with the book) is that I was busy enough at last spring’s Norwescon where she was a guest of honor that I barely crossed paths with her and didn’t get to say how much I enjoy her work.
📺 Watching
Rewatched Better Off Dead for the first time in a few years, thanks to Royce pointing out that it’s a Christmas movie. Still one of my all-time favorites.
🎧 Listening
Bootie Mashup’s annual Best of Bootie Mashup album is out; so far I’ve downloaded it and added it to my library, but haven’t started listening through it yet. Looking forward to seeing if there are any gems to be inflicted on my unsuspecting audience at the Norwescon Thursday night dance this spring….
🔗 Linking
Jim Milliot with Sophia Stewart at Publishers Weekly: Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks: “The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks.” This is disappointing; I generally prefer the mass-market paperback size to the trade paperback size (same content, less money, and smaller, so more fit on my shelves).
Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek at Inside Higher Ed: No, Colleges Do Not “Over-Accommodate” (archive.is link): “…a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces…speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education. ¶ As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific ‘type’ of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the ‘Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?’ piece.”
Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal: We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars. (archive.is link): “Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for ‘marketing purposes.’ It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear. ¶ Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.”
Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn at The Guardian: It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced: “In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off.”
About a week and a half again, as I try to get back on a regular schedule after wrapping up Worldcon. And even this is getting posted a day late and backdated, because I had some Worldcon work come up yesterday evening that I had to pay attention to. Even when Worldcon is done, Worldcon isn’t done….
The past week really was about just getting back into the regular routine after vacation. Work was busy but uneventful, and at home, we were just relaxing and trying to stay as cool as we could during a late summer heat wave.
We did spend a day at the Point Defiance Zoo this past Sunday, which is always a fun thing to do, especially when they have a lot of new youngsters to see!
📸 Photos
The baby tapir isn’t a tiny tapir anymore, but it’s still quite cute, and one of my wife’s favorites.Pedro the penguin chick is almost the same size as the rest, but is still more of a silvery tone without the traditional black and white coloring.I got these anemone just as clouds of food was pumped into the tank; I love the otherworldly, alien look that I got by chance.Playing with long exposures and water, and like the way the running water almost looks like frozen ice.
I don’t know exactly when this happened, but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!
📚 Reading
Got through a few books, making up for the lack of reading during Worldcon.
This week’s link list includes some that I found during Worldcon week, but as I didn’t include a link list there, they get rolled into this week’s post.
Matt Wedel at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition: “The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke.”
How to Leave Substack: “You Should Probably Leave Substack. Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation.”
Mike Montiero: How to not build the Torment Nexus: “You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole. It will leave a mark. A memory. A scar.”
John Scalzi: Poking the Discourse Bear Re: “Classic” Science Fiction: “I’m 56 now, and if you’re recommending the same science fiction books to a ten-year-old today that would have been recommended to me when I was a ten-year-old — and were old and kinda dated even then — I think you should seriously reconsider recommending science fiction books to young readers.”
Tactile Maps Automated Production (TMAP): “TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Map files can be visually previewed, downloaded or emailed, then are ready to emboss.”
Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk at the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog: Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction: “The impact of technological changes on the consumption of speculative fiction should not be understated. We think its impacts have brought a broader public under the wing of fandom, prompting inevitable and uncomfortable splits within the subculture. Much as technological advances in the early 20th Century inspired a reactionary movement among painters and labour writ large, similar technological advances in the past 30 years have been at play in the formation of a reactionary movement amongst some groups of speculative fiction creators.”
Joshua Barnes at the Sydney Review of Books: Just a Little Longer: “Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.”
Contrast Grid: Creates a color grid with contrast ratios based on colors you input.
🚗 …we spent most of this past week traveling to visit family. We drove down to Portland and visited our respective families in the area, my wife with her mom and sister and niblings, and me, joined by my brother who flew out from the east coast, visiting with our mom. Had some good and necessary discussions with mom, and it was nice to be able to have both of us there visiting her at the same time. And since we drove back home today, it didn’t really make sense to back-date this post by a day just to keep it as a Sunday evening thing.
📸 Photos
My wife’s mom lives near a cemetery, and it’s a nice place to go for walks. This gravestone makes me laugh every time. I took a few more shots to play with.
My wife and her mother walking through the cemetery.
There are a couple local coyotes that regularly run along a path behind my mom’s apartment; this one decided to take an afternoon nap not far outside mom’s window.
My wife, me, and my brother with mom after dinner on the last night of our visit.
John Voorhees at MacStories: Hands-On: How Apple’s New Speech APIs Outpace Whisper for Lightning-Fast Transcription: “By harnessing SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber on-device, the command line tool tore through the 7GB video file a full 2.2× faster than MacWhisper’s Large V3 Turbo model, with no noticeable difference in transcription quality.”
Tim Chambers: The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix): “So, confession time: I was recently helping a new client get set up on the Fediverse—guiding them through their first steps into our glorious decentralized galaxy. And seeing it all again through fresh eyes? ¶ Reader, it was brutal.”
Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz at Adobe’s research group: Project Indigo – a computational photography camera app: “As Adobe explores ways to evolve mobile photography…we have developed a camera app we call Project Indigo. Today, we are releasing this for iPhone as a free mobile app from Adobe Labs, available in the Apple App Store – to share our progress and get feedback from the community. The app offers full manual controls, a more natural (“SLR-like”) look, and the highest image quality that computational photography can provide – in both JPEG and raw formats. It also introduces some new photographic experiences not available in other camera apps.”
Phoenix Tso and Elizabeth Chou at Los Angeles Public Press: Federal agents thought they could stay at LA-area hotels. Communities are trying to make sure they can’t: “People now frequently turn out in the evenings at hotels where ICE agents are believed to be staying, to bang on pots and pans and play sounds on bullhorns to prevent the agents from having a good night’s sleep. They also hope that the disruption will put pressure on hotel management to turn immigration officials away.”
🎓 This week was commencement week for Highline College! This year, for the first time, we held commencement at the Emerald Downs horse racing facility, and while there were the occasional minor hiccups you might expect with any first-time venue experience, overall, I think it went really well. Hopefully the post-commencement feedback we get is generally in agreement, because I liked this much better than using the local stadium. (Still not as nice as on-campus, but that presents its own set of logistical headaches.)
🇺🇸 Saturday was the No Kings protest, and from my perspective and all the reports I’ve seen since, it went really well, both locally and nationally. Upwards of 70,000 participants in the Seattle Capitol Hill rally and march to the Seattle Center that we went to, with no agitators, no property damage, and virtually nonexistent police presence (I didn’t see any until just before the march reached the Seattle Center, when there were four in regular day wear casually chatting with people walking by, and just as we were leaving, we did see a group of 10 or so bike cops staged in a side street). It felt good. And we need to keep doing this.
📸 Photos
People relaxing at the Seattle Center at the conclusion of the march.It always amuses me when people only decorate one side of their cardboard, because it looks like they’re somewhat confused about their messaging.This one, seen at the start of the march, made me laugh.Students, staff, and faculty, lining up for the commencement processional.Since I’m part of the behind-the-scenes tech team (specifically for me, making sure captioning works properly), this was my view of the ceremony. Not a bad way to do it at all!Unfortunately, since all of this equipment was actually in use, I couldn’t actually pretend I was firing the Death Star. (The shot of the Death Star weapon control lever being moved used a [Grass Valley 1600 video switcher](https://vizreef.tumblr.com/post/684661437770186752/grass-valley-1600-4p1l-broadcast-video-control), specifically, one from [KCET, Los Angeles’s PBS station](https://www.pbssocal.org/tv-talk/how-kcet-helped-destroy-alderaan).)
Sheena Goodyear at CBC Radio: Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened: “Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins’ house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener.”
Jack Tamisiea at Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia: “Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.”
RSSRSSRSSRSS: Combine multiple RSS feeds into one unified feed.
Nikki Mccann Ramirez, Naomi Lachance, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez, and Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Birthday Parade Was A Gross Failure: “An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.”
Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes at Cornell University: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task: “While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.”
🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.
📸 Photos
From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.
Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”
Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”
Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”
Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”
Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”
Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”
🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)
🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!
🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?
📸 Photos
The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.
Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.
🎧 Listening
A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.
Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.
Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.
A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.
But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.
Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.
Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.
Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.
Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.
A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:
FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.
linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.
Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).
And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?
