Links

I missed my target of Sunday for my weekly roundup, and for reasons which will become clear, don’t expect to be making this coming Sunday’s post either, so here we are, with an off-cycle Thursday catchup.

• ♿️ Work has been pretty standard day-by-day, save for last Thursday when I went up to Shoreline College for the day for a planning retreat for the Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight (CATO), one of the SBCTC groups I’m part of. We got a lot done in planning for the next year, and as this is a group of college representatives from across the state that generally meets only on Zoom, it was nice to get most of us together in person.

• 🎭 Sunday we went out to meet some friends and see Wooden O’s Macbeth Shakespeare in the Park production. It was very well done, though rather surprisingly straightforward after having recently seen the same company do some incredible work incorporating fun tweaks to both The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

• 🗺️ Other than that, most everything has been getting everything ready for our summer vacation — which we’ll be setting off on tomorrow! We’re all packed and ready to go, the house is clean and set, and now it’s just a matter of waiting until it’s time to head off and get things started. This is also a big reason why this post went up today instead of waiting until Sunday as I’d normally do. It’s possible — likely, even — that I may not be posting much until we’re back from this trip. Imagine that!

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books finished recently:

• Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall, which was a fun “zombie apocalypse at a Star Trek convention” romp. This was very kindly sent to me a while ago by Elena/theresmiling, and I’ll be passing it along to someone else in turn.

• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I did not like at all, and wouldn’t have finished if it wasn’t part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.

📺 Watching

Forgot to mention last time that while coming back from our Providence/New York trip, I watched The Gorge, and it was…alright, but not great. The first half of the film, where it’s all setup, teasing the mystery of what’s in the gorge, and developing the relationship between the two characters is a solid three-star film. There was promise here. The second half, where it’s all watching someone play a Playstation zombie-hunting game, is a solid single star.

🔗 Linking

• Michael Bolton at Carnegie: Breaking the PDF Habit in Higher Ed: Why Website Bloat is a Governance Problem, Not a Tech One: Yes, this is basically an ad for Carnegie’s services, but the problem of “PDF bloat” in higher education is real.

• Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” (Google has since removed this “feature”, but…for how long? And seriously, what the fuck?)

• Henk Van Ess at Digital Digging: Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth (archive.is mirror of a paywalled Substack original): “Google has rolled back the image generation feature it launched in Google Earth on 30 July. The tool let anyone zoom to any coordinates, type a sentence, and get back a photorealistic image built on Google’s own satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that spot. It went live worldwide, on the web, with no waitlist. It was withdrawn on 31 July.”

• Gerrad Hall at Entertainment Weekly: Inside CODA director’s follow-up Being Heumann, about Judy Heumann and her fight for disability rights: “Being Heumann, which opens the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, centers on Judy Heumann, who, after contracting polio as a toddler, used a wheelchair the rest of her life for mobility. […] While Heumann became known as “the mother” of the Disability Rights Movement, she is not widely known outside of the disability community.”

• FlockHopper: See where Flock cameras are in your area, and use the map or iOS app (Android under development) to plan routes that avoid them.

• Reading Maps: Plotting maps from notable books and films to see where the characters went.

• Russell Samora, Florina Sutanto, Arjun Kakkar, and Sushant Karki at The Pudding: Why some people mow a lawn better than others: “You’ve probably done something like mow a lawn or vacuum a rug hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Some part of your brain works out a route that’s usually good enough to get the job done. People are actually pretty good at this, and better than you’d guess for a problem that is hard for computers. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we built a lawn and asked people to mow it.”

• Danny Westneat at The Seattle Times: WA Democrats face no backlash for ‘millionaires tax’ (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “…after ruling Democrats finally pushed through their own version of a personal income tax this spring, the big question has been: Will they face backlash from voters? ¶ The answer seems to be a resounding ‘No.'” Now we just need to make sure the push to repeal the “millionaire’s tax” fails at the ballot in November.

• Shaun Smucker: Please use AI (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Be sure to use AI when making
  your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
  for example. Definitely do not call
  your friend who loves to cook and ask her
  for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
  to save time making meals,
  because you will end
  up talking for longer than you had hoped,
  hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
  diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
  what she’s planted in her spring
  garden and then lost with the early frost.”

• Sharon Yoo at King5: UW: ICE used Washington driver’s license database in at least 90 immigration arrests over the past year: “Researchers say federal agents continue accessing WA DOL records despite a state law limiting the information from being used for immigration enforcement.”

• Drew Dotson at the Kent Reporter: Renton City Council votes to cover Flock cameras: “‘We’ve been hearing a lot of concerns around transparency and trust, and I think it’s in the best direction to help foster that by listening to the public,’ Councilmember Carmen Rivera said. ‘The camera’s already paused. They’re not collecting anything. If it’s safe and if it’s within the purview of our staff to be able to do it, I think it’s something that is just some easy simple fix that tells the residents one that we’re listening and that we’re trying to foster that trust and that transparency.'” Now if only we could get Kent to back away from their love affair with Flock….

• Amogh Dimri at The Atlantic: The Color Recession May Be Permanent (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. ‘Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,’ Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, ‘gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.’ Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features ‘Ice Cube’ and ‘Crushed Ice’ (both white), and ‘Agreeable Gray’ and ‘Passive’ (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re ‘warmer whites.’ The company’s color of 2026 is ‘Universal Khaki’—otherwise known, unfortunately, as ‘greige.'”

• Luke Plunkett at Aftermath: Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer’s AI Mandates: “‘I work for a company that produces luxury items’, one worker tells me. ‘Any time I get prompted that my ‘token spend’ is too low (0), I go in and ask ChatGPT random gardening questions. So far it has failed to adequately build a rain garden, but I’ve gotten it to describe a sweet potato once.'”

• Brett C.: I’m done using AI: “Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience.”

• 🏡 Back at home this week! We had a good week of conference and travel, but it’s always nice to get back into the familiar comfort of our own home.

• ♿️ Work was fairly uneventful, which is always nice after being away for a while (even if I was technically working last week). No explosions or catastrophes to worry about, at least.

• 🚀 Yesterday I was able to head down to dig into the physical Norwescon archives, and grab a selection of stuff to bring back home so that I can scan it and get it added to our online archives. Some I’ll be able to keep in my part of the archives (what I’m now calling the “annex”), some will go back down to be re-filed in the primary archives.

📸 Photos

I got my photos from Providence and New York uploaded to Flickr. Here are a few favorites; there are many more in the Flickr album.

📚 Reading

After getting home, I finished one book I’d started before we left (Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs Volume 2) and one I’d started towards the end of the trip (Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett).

📺 Watching

While working our way through the flights home on Sunday and Monday, I watched the two most recent live-action Predator movies, Prey and Predator: Badlands. I’m definitely enjoying how Dan Trachtenberg is expanding the Predator mythos, without feeling restricted by following a particular storyline or set of characters, but playing with different stories within the broader universe.

🎧 Listening

This week’s main listening has been a new two-part post-punk/EBM/goth/industrial compilation from Sideline Magazine, United 1 – The Freya Files and United 2 – The Odin Files. Both are free to download, but if you chip in a little money, all proceeds go to support humanitarian and frontline aid efforts in Ukraine (I did).

🔗 Linking

• Emily Wilson at the London Review of Books: An Uncomplicated Man: “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

• Bettina Makalintal at Eater: In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical: “The backlash to AI imagery is growing across a certain part of the culture. Sentiment along the lines of ‘I’d rather see a poster made with Sharpie on a scrap of paper than an AI event flyer,’ or ‘I’m not going to your restaurant if the ad is the AI’ is proliferating. ‘Frictionmaxxing,’ a term that writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined to refer to a rejection of technologies of convenience in favor of slower and more analog processes, has escaped containment, coming to mean the general choice to choose pre-internet ways of creation and problem-solving. In this sense, it can refer to the choice of the handcrafted over the AI-generated.”

• Julian Fong on Mastodon: “I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. […] Code is art. I work at a studio full of ungodly talented artists, but I will still die on this hill. Code is often messy and dirty and it’s a pain to create and get right but the results reflect the personality of the creator and the pain of the creation. Just like the rest of art. Sometimes you have to look at the source code to see that, but it’s there if you look for it, hidden beneath the surface. ¶ AI generated code is not art.”

• Catherine Rampell: Inside Trump’s Stealth Trick to Rig the Census—and Congress (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “A vaguely ominous but little-noticed regulatory filing issued in late June could have a profound impact on business, immigrants, and the balance of power in our country. […] The actual specifics of those new rules remain scant. But from conversations I’ve been having with people close to the process, it is widely expected that the administration will try to recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States.”

• Danny Katch at Revolution for Cowards: We used to be able to buy things in this country (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.”

• Stephanie Rohler at Star Trek.com: Accommodations On Board: A Celebration of Disability in Star Trek: “None of Star Trek‘s disability portrayals and accommodations have been perfect — but that’s alright. Star Trek still exists as a rare piece of fiction that openly begins discussions about what life with disability looks like, and the adaptations necessary for disabled people to find a comfortable home in society. It’s the fact that Star Trek has and keeps including disabled characters that makes the difference, especially in a modern world that argues so often about the rights of disabled people.”

• Nikshep Myle at MSN: AI companies are still buying up old books by the pallet – then shredding them: “Every out-of-print volume that disappears into a scanner may be the last copy accessible to anyone outside an AI lab’s servers. Rare, foreign-language, and low-circulation titles – many never digitized elsewhere – vanish from physical existence after a single scan. Who controls humanity’s textual heritage is no longer a question anyone can afford to leave unanswered, especially as the push to build AI Data Centers accelerates the industry’s resource acquisition at every level.”

• Newsmax: Newsmax and Meta Enter AI Content Partnership (archive.is mirror; I’m not linking directly to Newsmax): Meta is partnering with Newsmax to feed their right-wing claptrap into Meta’s AI chatbots as training material. Don’t be surprised by any Meta chatbot (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) becoming even more right-wing loony than they already are.

• Jasmine Nackash at The Pudding: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us: “While these [“essential vocabulary” lists] were practical tools, built to capture which words people need most, the answer also doubles as a snapshot of ordinary life, 70 years apart: what people were expected to engage with, and had to deal with, in their daily lives. ¶ Treating the lists as an indirect record of day-to-day life, I went through the differences between them from a few angles: what the words were about, how tangible were they, and to which parts of speech they belonged.”

• Cory Turner at NPR: Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out: “Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable. ¶ The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass ‘legislation’ to help the nation’s K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.”

• ♿️ Work has moved to our summer schedule of four ten-hour days. The days can be a little long, but it’s worth it for the three-day weekends! It’s also been a little noisy this week, as a large section of our floor of the building is being converted from an old meeting room to offices, and the work crew has been in all week doing the work. Hopefully the noisy part of the work doesn’t last too much longer.

• 🚗 This weekend we headed back down to Portland for some family visits. A few unexpected bumps here and there, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with, and it was good to get one more visit in, this time without it being an add-on to a work conference in the area.

• 🇺🇸 I was not at all disappointed to wake up to the news that Lindsey Graham had died. I was rather disappointed to later see that there is apparently confirmation that someone cracked the seal on Mitch McConnell’s Schrödinger’s box and he’s still around. (As a rule, I don’t wish for someone’s death, but there are certainly people who I am will not be at all sorry to be reading their obituaries. McConnell is very high on that list.)

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Just one book this week: A Fury Scorned by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski, a Star Trek TNG novel, a bit better than the norm.

🎧 Listening

• Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor and Confessions II have been in heavy rotation this week. Definitely enjoying the new album.

• Also picked up Artoffact Record’s The State of Canada sampler.

🔗 Linking

• Marina Hyde at The Guardian: So it’s Trump 1, Belgium 4 – and the world rejoices. Nothing like failed chicanery to bring us together, is there?: “You’ve heard a lot about shithousery during this tournament. We have even, excruciatingly, seen a few American commentators attempt to use the word in conversation. Guys, please, just – no. It’s not for you. You have ’erbs, ‘a couple things’, and ‘a ways to go’. But let’s call the events of the past few days by the name they deserve in all the languages of the world: Whitehousery. ¶ Some absolute Whitehousery has been on display and the world certainly has a way (singular) to go before we all forget it.”

• Casey Parks at The Washington Post: Trans people are fleeing red states for Seattle. The city can’t keep up. (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Seattle has long been known as one of the country’s most trans-friendly cities. It banned discrimination on the basis of gender 40 years ago. Its hospitals were among the first to offer gender transition care to young people. And Washington state was the first in the nation to allow trans athletes to compete. ¶ Those protections have always drawn trans people from elsewhere, but in the years before Trump won reelection, nonprofit leaders say, the numbers were small enough, and the newcomers so prepared, that organizations could easily help people settle in. Most arrived with jobs and rental agreements. But after Trump took office and further emboldened conservative lawmakers to strip trans people of rights, Seattle leaders say they began to hear from people with no plan, only a desperate need to move immediately.”

• Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie: How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization: “Some of these rephrasings may feel a little clunky, and they can end up longer than the anthropomorphizing shorthand. This means it takes a little more dedication to use them, but also isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We should stop and think about the tech we are using, or even discussing, and what it actually does.”

• DeFlock: “An open-source project mapping license plate readers.” Find out where Flock and other automated license plate readers are installed in your area.

• Michael Kan at PC Mag: FCC Approves Reflect Orbital’s Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate: “Despite a flood of objections, the FCC has approved a startup’s plan to launch a controversial satellite that’ll use a giant mirror to reflect sunlight to Earth after dark. ¶ On Thursday, the FCC granted California-based Reflect Orbital permission to launch and operate the satellite in low-Earth orbit using the requested radio spectrum. The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground.” This is such a bad idea, for so many reasons.

• Dr. Drang: Old icons: “…Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then.”

• Chris Heath at National Geographic: Inside the secret operation to move the world’s most famous tapestry (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “After more than 900 years in France, the Bayeux Tapestry—one of medieval Europe’s most fragile, priceless treasures—slipped back into England in a controversial overnight operation. Here’s what transporting a 225-foot-long masterwork actually takes.”

• Odette Yousef at NPR: With the white nationalist group Patriot Front, what you see is not what you get: “…those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see. ¶ ‘That is not who they are in private,’ said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. ‘Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.'”

• Chloe Laws at Marie Claire: Madonna’s Confessions II Deserves to Be the Album of the Summer, But the Response Proves We Still Punish Women for Ageing: “At every point in her career, Madonna has challenged the standards that treat women unfairly—sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply through existing. The ageism she has faced for almost two decades falls into the latter category. From the backlash to ‘Like a Prayer’, to Pepsi dropping her, to the banning of ‘Justify My Love’, to the outrage surrounding Erotica, Madonna has repeatedly found herself at the centre of cultural panic whenever she has challenged expectations around religion, sexuality and womanhood. The criticism she receives today follows the same pattern.”

• Frank Landymore at Futurism: The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop: “Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.”

It’s another two-week edition of my weekly roundup! (And even then, posted a couple days late and backdated….)

• 🎻 Last Saturday we went out to see Raiders of the Lost Ark with live soundtrack performed by the Seattle Symphony. It was a great concert — the combination of an all-time great film and hearing the soundtrack performed live was great.

• 🏳️‍🌈 Last Sunday was Seattle’s Pride parade, and we went for the first time in eight years. We got there about an hour and a half early, found a great spot to sit…and then, unfortunately, ended up with a bunch of inconsiderate people who showed up late and decided that standing directly in front of us was the place to be. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves, and it was definitely good to be back at the parade again, but some aspects could have been better. Maybe next year?

• 🇺🇸 This past weekend, of course, was the 4th of July holiday weekend. Not exactly a holiday we felt like celebrating, for fairly obvious reasons, so we just spent it at home, reading books, watching movies, and rolling our eyes at the various neighbors who don’t care that fireworks are illegal in our city. (With a special, targeted grumble at whoever fired off mortars at 5 a.m. on the 6th, and 2 a.m. on the 7th.)

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books this week — one of which was even non-fiction! Still pretty solidly in my wheelhouse, though.

• Infiltrator by W.R. Thompson, an above-average TNG-era Trek novel.

• The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A neat exploration of quantum physics and the nature of the universe through lenses of Black perspectives, queer theory, and pop culture, with one incredibly incorrect sentence that threw me for a loop.

📺 Watching

Three movies of varying quality. In order, worst to best:

• Enola Holmes 3 (2026): ⭐️⭐️: By far the least interesting of the series. The first was the best, the second was a decent sequel, this one barely held our interest.

• Uncharted (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently sourced from a video game I don’t know anything about, this was mostly a perfectly acceptable afternoon action adventure film (Wahlberg has definitely found his niche as a B-movie action star), the final action set piece is over the top and ridiculous in a way that we really enjoyed.

• Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026): A rare sequel that lives up to the original. Just as fun and funny (and violent and bloody), it picked up right where the first ended and goes bigger, but in ways that make sense and are internally consistent while expanding the world.

We also celebrated the holiday weekend by watching the latest Lucy Worsley Investigates on PBS, where she looks at the American Revolution from a British point of view. Highly recommended.

🎧 Listening

Three new albums in rotation these two weeks:

• Doublespeak’s self-titled debut: covers of mostly little-known tracks, by a collaboration between Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yazoo), Neil Arthur (Blancmange), and producer Benge.

• Front 242’s Blackout: their final live album, recorded on their recent farewell tour before formally retiring the band.

• Recovery 2 For You: a Front 242 tribute album and sequel to 2016’s Recovery For You.

🔗 Linking

• Ali Jasemi at The Conversation: Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologis: “…news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.”

• Dana Goldstein at The New York Times: Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.”

• Listen to Wikipedia: Wikipedia edits turned into ambient background music. “Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.”

• Rani Molla at The Verge: I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism: “For decades, compact pickups such as the Toyota Pickup, Ford Ranger, and Nissan Hardbody served as inexpensive, utilitarian vehicles for young buyers, tradespeople, and anyone who simply needed a truck. But as automakers chased higher margins, pickups grew larger, more luxurious, and substantially more expensive. Today, even many entry-level trucks come loaded with luxuries. Slate is betting there is still demand for a truck that prioritizes affordability over amenities.”

  I’m not in the market for a new car, and I’ve never had any interest in a pickup truck, but I’m fascinated by what Slate is trying and I really hope they succeed.

• Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros at The New York Times: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (gift link that may eventually expire; this article is too interactive to be successfully mirrored by archive.is): “Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths. ¶ There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.”

• lcamtuf’s thing: AI children’s books, body horror edition (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “…I’m told that frontier models have surpassed PhD-level intelligence in the summer of 2025. Most of the books in question were published mid-2026 and the artwork points to a flagship model from a major US-based lab. So, in all likelihood, there’s nothing to worry a— Oh… Oh.”

• Lauren Sherrard: 10 Ways to Make Your Emails More Accessible: “Almost every marketing email has accessibility problems. In fact, the Email Markup Consortium found that 99.89% of HTML emails tested contained serious or critical accessibility issues. Out of more than 443,000 emails analysed, only 21 passed all automated accessibility checks.”

• Basic Apple Guy: MacOS California Camino: “…I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.”

• Joe Coughlan at the BBC: Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives: “A rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered at The National Archives in Kew, the only known example of its kind outside the US.”

• Vita Nouva: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt: “The reply [to an IT support ticket] and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him).”

  Fascinating deep dive into web design, middle-eastern history, Arabic typography, only one of which I know much of anything about (and nowhere near this extent).

• 🎓 This week was Highline’s graduation week, with the commencement ceremony on Thursday. We had a record number of graduates this year (almost 900 signed up to walk in the ceremony), and still managed to wrap up the ceremony in just slightly under two and a half hours. Not bad!

• 🍾 Happy anniversary to us! Friday was our thirteenth anniversary. Rather than doing anything big, as we just made it through graduation week and have plans coming up next weekend and beyond, we celebrated by having a quiet weekend of naps, reading, and movies here at home.

• 🌞 Happy solstice! Summer is officially here.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a noir detective mystery in an alternate-present Sitka, Alaska.

• Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

• Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.

• TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.

🔗 Linking

• Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”

• Catalina Gaitán at the Seattle Times: Judge to decide fate of Seattle’s unofficial nude beach (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): I’ve never been to this beach, but I know people who have and who would be disappointed if the NIMBYs got their way.

• James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Battle ramps up over WA ballot measure to bar transgender students from girls’ sports: In case you thought Washington was too blue to have to deal with this transphobic crap.

• Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”

• Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”

• ♿️ With the last two weeks being the final two weeks of spring quarter (the last week of classes and finals week), there’s been a lot going on that I’ve been either directly or tangentially involved with. There’s been the launch party for this year’s Arcturus, Highline’s annual student literary journal, the Achieve students’ capstone presentations, a short student-written and produced play, and a discussion panel by four graduating journalists from the Thunderword, our student paper. Plus, of course, all the usual work stuff. I’m looking forward to getting through graduation this coming week and (hopefully) having things slow down a bit over the summer.

• ✨ Interestingly, and often amusingly, AI has been an ongoing theme this week.

  • 🎓 During the capstone presentations for Achieve, where students from our program for intellectually disabled students present what they’ve done and accomplished over their time at Highline, several of them made it clear that they’d done all the work on their presentations themselves, without using AI.

  • 🎭 The play, written and improvised by the four actors, had an ongoing plot line about whether or not to use AI, with one character convincing another to stop using it. In the after-play conversation, the actors and students in the audience had more to say along these lines.

  • 📰 During the Thunderbird panel, the journalists got a question about AI use, and all vehemently decried the use of AI for their writing. “We’re humans, and we want real human writing, feelings, and reactions in our stories.”

  • 💼 This week was a “listening session” with a representative of a headhunting firm as Highline starts the process of looking for a new college president. AI came up here as well, with people recognizing that we can’t ignore AI’s effects, but also stressing that we don’t want someone who would attempt to push AI over actually educating our students.

  • 👍🏻 Overall, it was heartening that throughout the weeks, from our students to our staff and faculty, there is a lot of healthy skepticism (at best) about genAI.

• 🎨 Also work-related, this week we had a presentation to Highline’s Board of Trustees telling them about a project we’ve had in progress with Sound Transit’s art program (STart) over the course of the year. We’ve had three visually disabled students working with artists on a piece of tactile artwork for the Kent-DesMoines light rail station, giving their input on materials, colors, and other aspects to make the artwork effective for Blind and low-vision people. The piece is still being finished, but should be installed sometime in August. I’m really looking forward to seeing it!

• 🚀 Outside of work, last Sunday was Norwescon’s summer picnic…or, well, summer-ish picnic, as for some reason it was much earlier in the year than usual. It was a nice day of hanging out with Norwescon people, chatting and tossing ideas around. Plus, on a personal note, I formally turned over administration duties for our Google Suite to someone else, taking one more thing off of my plate! I’m getting closer to having an actually reasonable amount of duties, instead of my usual “you do how much?” lineup.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Three books finished over these two weeks, one of which was even non-fiction!

• Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb, a mystery and sequel to the somewhat notorious (in SF circles) Bimbos of the Death Sun.

• The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, which did a wonderful job of reinforcing my anti-AI biases.

• Possession by J.M. Dillard and Kathleen O’Malley, a TNG-era Star Trek novel.

📺 Watching

• This afternoon we watched Send Help (2026), Sam Raimi’s latest horror comedy, and really enjoyed it. Dark, twisted, funny, and with a very satisfying end.

🔗 Linking

• Sarah Mizes-Tan at KNKX/NPR: Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students: Just in case you thought WA was too blue for this sort of bigotry: “Student athletes in Washington state who want to compete in girls’ sports would likely have to obtain genital exams to participate if a controversial ballot initiative passes in November.”

• Heidi Groover at the Seattle Times: Downtown Seattle may house new data center: “A Texas real estate firm filed permit applications with the city last week proposing a six-story building including a data center, office and retail space at Third Avenue and Virginia Street. The location once housed a Bed Bath & Beyond store and since last year has been home to the contemporary arts center Cannonball Arts.”

• Ex Astris Scientia: The Evolution of Screen Ratios in Star Trek: “This article looks at the technical standards that shaped television and cinema, the artistic choices that influenced how Trek moved between these formats and how the franchise entered the era of modern widescreen TV with its new possibilities. It also highlights some odd and inconsequential decisions along the way, including humorous uses of inconsistent aspect ratios in crossovers. Finally, it examines the pros and cons of ‘cinematic’ screen ratios for television series.”

• Hunter Ingram at Variety: How ‘For All Mankind’ Works With Apple to Revive and Upgrade the Forgotten Newton as Its Alt-History iPhone: “Apple products and their use in film and TV have long been a source of conversation. Who can carry an iPhone on screen? Are bad guys forced to use nondescript phones and computers so as not to sow chaos with a device bearing Apple’s famous logo? Well, ‘For All Mankind’ asks a different question altogether: Can its characters use a completely forgotten Apple product canceled two decades ago?”

• Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb, and Gabe Cohen at CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive: “The March 2026 executive order is one of several moves Trump has made recently to seek federal control over elections and restrict mail-in voting, which he has repeatedly cast as a tool used by his opponents for election cheating despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

• Better Images of AI: “We aim to create a new repository of better images of AI that anyone can use, starting with a collection of inspirational images. We will continue to gather images for this repository and commission original work. We welcome image submissions and funding to commission and brief more artists.”

• John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications: “Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a ‘basic competence’ issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me?”

• Catherynne M. Valente: The Democratic Urge to Lose (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!”

• Chris Person at Aftermath: Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes: “But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about.”

• BBSG: Bash Static Site Generator: “BSSG processes Markdown files and builds a minimal, accessible website suitable for personal journals, daily writing, or introspective personal newspapers.” Thinking this might be my first step into moving to a static site generator.

• Monday was Memorial Day, which we spent here at home, relaxing after our Portland jaunt of the prior few days.

• ♿️ Work continues to be busy with end-of-the quarter business. The big thing for us this week was Wednesday evening, when Highline’s Legacy Awards recognized student leaders on campus, including some students from Access Services and some whom my wife had nominated. It’s always nice to see the students have their accomplishments celebrated.

• 🌏 Saturday morning we went to Kent’s International Festival. We try to stop by every year, and it’s fun to see the various communities in our city highlight their cultures through music, dance, and other performances. Plus, the food truck selection is always really good.

• 🦇 Saturday night I headed out to the Mercury for some gothclubbing with friends. This weekend was the club’s 27th birthday celebration, plus a friend’s birthday kicked in at midnight, and it was a really good night all around. Lots of good music, dancing, and socializing. I’m always tired the next day, but it’s always worth it.

📸 Photos

One of the table centerpieces from Norwescon got brought along and used for our table.

📚 Reading

One more book on my Hugo Best Novel reading progress completed, with Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

📺 Watching

We had a bit of a movie binge this weekend:

• The Inheritance (2024): ⭐️⭐️
• A Haunting in Venice (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

🔗 Linking

• Olivia Rosane at Common Dreams: ‘The Creep State Is Watching’: Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech’s Power Grab​: “The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.” Some background info on some posters I spotted around Seattle at the last No Kings protests (one poster, another one).

• David Smith at The Guardian: How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’: “‘If you want to understand Victorian England, reading a handful of Dickens novels can get you there,’ said Joshua Kendall, author of the first major biography of Trudeau. ‘In the same way about the late 20th and early 21st century, Trudeau has got all these different characters and they’re growing and changing. If you want to see how America evolved from 1970 to 2026 you could do worse than just go through a few Doonesbury collections.'”

• Ed Zitron: Revenge of The Business Idiot: “We will win, long term. What they are doing is not working. The future will not be without pain, nor will it be easy, or pleasant, or something I relish in. But in the long term I think this is a moment where the greater Business Idiot incursion faces a reckoning with a reality it believed it could change through sheer force of will.”

• Iris: “Iris is the native Mac photo library that helps you find, explore, and rediscover the people, places, and moments you love — privately, on your own computer, with the smarts of a cloud service and none of the cost.”

• Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions, with more to come, including AI plans: “Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users.”

• Is AI Profitable Yet?: No.

• Science Daily: Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery: “Researchers are developing a futuristic alternative to LASIK that reshapes the eye without lasers or incisions. Using mild electrical pulses and platinum contact lenses, they temporarily soften the cornea so it can be molded into a new shape. Early tests on rabbit eyes successfully corrected nearsightedness in about a minute while preserving the eye’s structure.”

• Hanna at Tuta: Discord planned to introduce age verification worldwide – and it’s about to go live.: “According to Discord, starting in June users wanting to switch their account to adult status will have to choose between a facial scan for age estimation or uploading an ID document. In addition, an AI model will automatically assess in the background whether the user is an adult; based on existing account age, device, and activity data.”

• Jason Kottke: The Backward Index: “How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.”

• Brian Phillips at The Ringer: The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech: “I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.”

• Max Rego at The Hill: ‘No Kings’ movement planning nationwide event on Trump 80th birthday: “A 90-minute concert in New York City has been planned to headline the event. The “Rise Up, Sing Out” concert is set to take place at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan and is scheduled to feature performances and appearances by singers Sasha Allen, Bette Midler, Patti Smith and Rufus Wainwright, along with actor Jane Fonda and liberal commentator Joy Reid.”

• Jody Amable at KQED: A Preteen Punk Band From Mill Valley Takes on AI: “Knights of Molino are a new punk band composed of middle schoolers Erik and Tommy Birmingham, 11 and 13, and Rowan Campbell, 12. They recently reached moderate viral fame for another track in which they didn’t shy away from speaking their minds. In October, their scathing takedown of generative AI, ‘Take Back Control,’ went spinning across Bay Area and punk-rock TikTok. It’s currently at 240,000 views and 2,500 comments: definitely not Mr. Beast numbers, but pretty impressive when you consider none of them even are allowed on TikTok yet.”

• John Gruber at Daring Fireball: What Is a Dickover?: “dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.”

• Rebecca Watson at Skepchick: Is Your Phone Spying on Your Conversations? No.: “Because I do so much work debunking conspiracy theories, people often ask me if there are any unproven conspiracy theories that I truly believe. It’s a tough question for me because there are some things, like Bigfoot, that I absolutely LOVE but do not sincerely believe. And there are others that I don’t believe per se but I find them plausible, in that I can’t dismiss them out of hand and I wouldn’t be very surprised if they turned out to be true. One of those is the extremely common belief that companies are using our cell phones to listen to us and serve us advertising or otherwise benefitting from our data.”

Honestly, I don’t even remember why I didn’t get around to this last week. But here we are!

• ♿️ Work has been busy, but pretty much just the “regular busy” sort of thing. Which is good, because as we approach the end of spring quarter, we’ll have all of the various end-of-quarter celebrations going on for the next few weeks. The busy time is coming!

• ♿️ Thursday this week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). As part of that, I uploaded a video walkthrough of Canva’s new accessibility features — I’ve generally not been a big fan of Canva, but they have been making some notable improvements to their products, and that’s worth recognizing.

• 🚶🏼‍➡️ This weekend my wife had a work conference in Portland, so I went along as her chauffeur. We drove down Thursday afternoon, and then while she was conferencing, I got to spend Friday and Saturday wandering around Portland with my camera. Friday was around the downtown area (including a stop by Powell’s, of course), and Saturday I took the Max up to Washington Park and spent a few hours wandering around the Hoyt Arboretum. “Real camera” photos will go up eventually, but some of my iPhone shots are below.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Dayton Ward’s To Defy Fate, in the Star Trek: Picard line, but with enough timestream bouncing around that it almost feels like a stealth 60th anniversary release.
• David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years, indulging one of my other fandoms. I can obsess over something other than Star Trek!
• And then, of course, another Star Trek novel; John Vornholt’s TNG-series Rogue Saucer.

🔗 Linking

• Jeremy Hsu at ars technica: Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags: “Since its publication, the study has been cited 262 times in other papers published by Springer Nature’s peer-reviewed journals and received a total of 504 citations from both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. It also attracted nearly half a million readers and received enough online attention to rank in the 99th percentile for journal articles in terms of attention score.”

• Subvert: A co-op music publishing marketplace, similar to Bandcamp but with a different backend structure.

• Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic: How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition (archive.is version of a paywalled original): “[Princeton’s honor] code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again.”

• Manda Factor at MyNorthwest: Five WA Supreme Court seats are on the ballot this fall, and the stakes have never been higher: “Under normal circumstances, three justices face voters every two years as part of their staggered six-year terms. But recent resignations led then-Governor Jay Inslee to appoint replacements to fill the vacancies, and those appointees must now stand for election. Additionally, two of the three justices whose terms are expiring could not seek reelection due to age.”

• Gracchus at Build a Better Donkey: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive.is version of a Substack original): “The question is whether this country holds or comes apart, and coming apart doesn’t mean a stern editorial in The Atlantic. It means what it has always meant, every time a society told a critical mass of its members that their participation was decoration. It means blood. It means whole regions of this country deciding that the social contract is a piece of paper the other side already burned, and they’re under no obligation to honor a corpse.”

• Scott Schaefer at I Love Kent: REPORT: Gun violence homicides drop to single digits for first time in 9 years: “Both Seattle and South King County have experienced a continuous decline of shots fired in the last few years, with South King County experiencing a 61% decrease and the Seattle area experiencing a 47% decrease since their peak Q1 numbers in 2024, respectively.”

• Hannah Seibold at the Portland Tribune: Every Portland easter egg we’ve spotted in Laika’s new ‘Wildwood’ teaser trailer: “Directed by Travis Knight, the film blends Laika’s signature stop-motion style with real-world Portland geography, transforming familiar neighborhoods, bridges and forested spaces into a layered fantasy setting. The trailer cuts between everyday city life and an increasingly surreal journey into Wildwood, a mythical extension of Forest Park.”