♿️ I spent all week in Spokane for the annual linked spring conferences for DSSC (Disability Support Services Council) and WAPED (Washington Association on Postsecondary Education and Disability), two disability in higher education groups I’m part of. Both conference were good, with a good mix of networking, support, and information; many of these are people I see regularly via Zoom and on listservs, and it’s always good to get a chance to connect in person.
😷 Unfortunately, it appears that I let my masking game slip at an inopportune point, and came home from the conference with a cold. So our weekend was a lot of rest, fluids, and trying to kick this out of my system.
🎂 Sunday was my birthday – I’ve successfully made it to 53! This was a pretty low-key birthday (in part due to the aforementioned cold, but also planned that way, as we knew I’d be coming off of a week of travel and conference), but it wasn’t a bad one. Lots of naps, some cake, and a few presents…including the Enterprise-D Lego set that’s been sitting in our basement since it arrived in December!
📸 Photos
I spent one of my evenings in Spokane having a very pleasant walk along the river. I took a bunch of photos, but concentrating on taking care of the cold means that they’re not processed and online yet. I’ll get there….Me at 53 with two of my most-anticipated birthday presents.The shirt was another of my presents. Become ungovernable!
📚 Reading
Two books finished this week, the final two books in a TOS Star Trek trilogy that I started last week:
I’ve been on a bit of a Front Line Assembly (and associated projects) kick this week, in part due to the release of the nine-disk Excursions 1992-1998 anthology, focusing on various FLA side projects (Noise Unit, Synæsthesia, Pro>Tech, Equinox, and Delerium).
🔗 Linking
Joshua Solorzano at the Kent Reporter: Federal Way man’s Lego legacy includes model of Space Needle: “Hussey said his acme is the 14-foot-tall Lego Space Needle that now sits in the Space Needle gift shop in Seattle for visitors from around the globe to see.”
Mike Carson: I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It: “…I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life. […] If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online. […] All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.” It’s an interesting idea, but I have more than a few quibbles with the assumption that I don’t have “real friendships” with the many, many people whom I have rarely, if ever, interacted with in person. Or that the friend I’ve had since third grade isn’t a “real” friend because we live 3,000 miles apart and don’t arrange for annual get togethers. It’s a interesting, but for me, somewhat flawed concept.
Anil Dash: Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?: “If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?” I remember so much of this history — I joined Flickr in September 2004 (here’s my first photo), when it was just seven months old (according to Wikipedia), and while never a “big name”, was around for all of that history. 22 years and 22,192 photos later, I’m glad Flickr’s still doing its thing.
Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel: Adobe Has Run Out of Allies: “It is hard to imagine a more widely detested brand among its own users than Adobe. ¶ Adobe is alone, and it has only itself to blame. ¶ Those who once would have thrown themselves in front of oncoming fire to protect the software they loved — loved because of what it allowed them to do — will now do nothing but point and laugh as the company suffers.”
Artemis II Photo Timeline: What it says on the tin. Great way to browse through the Artemis II mission.
Tom Nardi at Hackaday: The GPS III Rollout is Almost Complete, But What Is It?: “Just last week, the tenth GPS III satellite was placed in orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once it’s properly configured and operational, it will join its peers to form the first complete “block” of third-generation GPS satellites. Over the next decade, as many as 22 revised GPS III satellites are slated to take their position over the Earth, eventually replacing all of the aging satellites that billions of people currently rely on.”
Well, it’s been a busy month. I kept meaning to come back to this “Weekly Notes” series and get caught up, and then there were more things to do, and here we are! So let’s just do a quick catch up.
March 30–April 5: Norwescon week! I have a half-written post-con wrap-up in progress, but who knows if it will ever get finished, so I’ll just say that it was a really good year. Had a lot of fun with friends, DJ’d a good dance on Thursday, the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony on Friday went well, and my accessibility presentation on Saturday was lightly attended, but everyone who was there was very engaged and expressed how much they appreciated the information they got.
April 6–12: A quiet week, somewhat intentionally so, as this was between Things Going On.
April 13–19: A busy work week, with a weekend jaunt down to Vancouver, WA for a work conference for my wife, while I took a day to explore the Vancouver area and bounce down into the Portland area to visit my mom.
April 20–26: Another busy work week, a lot of which was concerned with the sudden (if not entirely unexpected) delay of the ADA Title II update implementation deadline from this Friday the 24th to a year from now. It could have been a lot worse than a one-year delay, but there are a lot of us wondering what else is going to happen over the next year….
📸 Photos
Each of the following photos is linked to a larger photo album on Flickr. Click on through for more!
DJing on Thursday night at Norwescon as our security team keeps their eye(stalk)s out. Photo courtesy of Pascale.A favorite shot from when I was exploring Fort Vancouver.
📚 Reading
I’ve finished four books over the past four weeks:
Wet Visions edited by Cyn Mason; an anthology from 1988 of stories by Pacific Northwest authors that I discovered because it was regularly mentioned in old Norwescon program books.
Captain to Captain by Greg Cox; the first of a Star Trek TOS-era trilogy. I’m a bit behind on my book-a-week goal for the year, and diving into Trek books is generally a good way to get caught up.
📺 Watching
We’ve been enjoying History’s Greatest Mysteries from the History channel. It’s about 85% really interesting history, 10% crackpot conspiracy theories, and 5% “ALIENS!!!”
🎧 Listening
As usual, I recorded my set at Norwescon. If you’re looking for some background music to listen to during your day, you could (hopefully) do worse than this! Here’s my First Contact Galactic Gala, three and a half hours of music recorded live at Norwescon 48!
Foz Meadows: Politics in SFF: Arguing With Andy Weir: “…just as baffled, angry transphobes can successfully use a variety of pronouns in everyday life without realizing that’s what they’re called, so too can authors like Andy Weir include politics and social commentary in their works without realizing that’s what they’ve done.”
Catherynne M. Valente: Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement: “They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator. ¶ They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.”
Eric Eggert: Screen readers are not testing tools: “Screen readers show the symptoms of bad code, but not the actual problems. They are an indirect way to test.”
Jonaki Mehta at NPR: These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help: “Digital accessibility is a major concern for students with blindness and other disabilities — an ever-changing landscape that often isn’t designed with disabilities in mind. ¶ Now, that could change: An update to regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), set to take effect at the end of April, will require public institutions to meet new standards that dictate what accessibility should look like.”
Ben Andrews at Digital Camera World: NASA chose an old DSLR as its primary Artemis II camera – here’s why: “There are plenty of premium cameras that could potentially work well for such a special task, but NASA has a long history of trusting Nikon for its photographic requirements, so it’s of little surprise NASA has again picked Nikon for Artemis II. What’s more surprising is the particular Nikon camera bodies you’ll find on board.”
Sophie Hardach at the BBC: Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy: “Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness”. But why did they die out in the first place?”
Clifford Winston at the New York Times: Where Did All the Affordable Cars Go?: “While politicians and economists scratch their heads at voters upset about affordability in a decent economy, they seem to somehow miss the fact that for most Americans, the purchase of a car has become a debt sentence.”
Spencer Mortensen: Email address obfuscation: What works in 2026?: “Here are some of the best techniques for keeping email addresses hidden from spammers—along with the statistics on how likely they are to be broken.”
Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns: “In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with ‘reasoning-intensive’ cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.”
Colleen Gratzer: Can You Create Accessible PDFs in Affinity?: “I hope that Affinity will continue adding the basic and necessary accessibility features that designers need. But, sorry to say… Affinity just isn’t there yet as a full-on replacement to InDesign for accessibility work.”
Oliver Schöndorfer: Dyslexia friendly fonts: Are they any good?: “TL;DR: So-called dyslexia friendly fonts perform worse than other typefaces, while conveying an either broken or playful aesthetic that might not fit to your project. As a rule of thumb, prefer more common typefaces with a looser spacing, open shapes, and distinct letters.”
Emily M. Bender and Decca Muldowney: Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you: “So what’s the big deal with ‘AI’ charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings.”
Shri Khalpada at PerThirtySix: How The Heck Does Shazam Work?: “How audio fingerprinting and a connect-the-dots trick lets Shazam identify a song in seconds.”
Newcastle University: Accessible conferences and events: “These guidelines that we have produced are intended as a checklist for use when planning and running an event. It might feel slightly daunting at first as you are having to rethink aspects of your approach to planning these events but please be reassured that doing something is better than nothing and any attempt to improve accessibility will be welcomed.”
Chris Klimek at NPR: Before sci-fi was everywhere, this pioneering magazine championed ‘scientifiction’: “His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback’s innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves.”
Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR: The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens: “During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like ‘digital casinos.’ That’s an apt comparison, according to Schüll’s research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.”
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
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).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.Us at the Cal Anderson park playfield as people gathered for the No Kings rally.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
