Links

• ♿️ A more normal work week, though with three mornings dedicated to the WAPED fall conference. As always, good conversation and connections with people in the field across the state.

• 🥱 Since it’s been a pretty busy month, and we had nothing planned this weekend, we enjoyed having nothing planned, and spent our weekend at home, with a lot of napping and TV binging (sometimes at the same time).

📝 Writing

Actually posted twice this week! One was a wish for better semantic text markup tools, and the other was noting that after almost 20 years on WordPress, this blog is now running on ClassicPress.

📚 Reading

• Travis Bagwell’s Catharsis, the first book in a LitRPG series. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more from this series in used bookstores.

• Diane Duane’s Intellivore, an interesting but somewhat slow Next Gen novel.

📺 Watching

We finished season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Overall, I get why a lot of fans weren’t thrilled with the season, but I’ll admit to (for the most part) enjoying it. While it’s a little weird to have a full season of what in the past would have been mid-season one-off filler episodes, they at least went whole-hog and had fun with what they were doing. I’d rank this season better than season three, and hopefully that trend continues and they are able to wrap things up well with the final short season.

🔗 Linking

• Rae Morey at The Repository: Matt Mullenweg Orders Accessibility Revert, Tells Core Committer to “Contribute Your Talents to Another Project”: “Andrea Fercia has spent more than a decade making WordPress more accessible. But on Tuesday, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg told the long-time core committer to take his talents elsewhere.”

• Lex Friedman: I can’t believe we’re still arguing over whether X is for jerks: “John [Gruber]’s taking the most extreme reactions he can find and presenting them as representative of everyone who objects to X. It’s an easy argument to win when you get to pick the stupidest possible version of the opposing position.”

• Matthew Belter at The Vinyl District: Praga Khan of Lords of Acid, The TVD Interview: “I started making records myself in 1987, when Atari came out with its sequencing software. Before that I’d been working with a Commodore sequencing system. I’ve always been in love with technology and in love with music, so combining the two was the perfect thing for me. The very first record I made was a song called ‘Blow Job,’ and I honestly didn’t know what the word meant. I thought a blow job was a bad job, when somebody does something wrong. Only later did I find out what it really was.”

• Owen Lacey at The Pudding: The Real Kevin Bacon: “The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Bacon is the all-encompassing center of Hollywood, so prolific that the game is a lot easier than if it were called the ‘Six Degrees of John Doe’. ¶ However, Kevin Bacon is not the center of Hollywood. In fact, he never has been, and almost certainly never will be.”

• Local Wikipedia: “Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you. (If there are fewer than 25 things close to you, it takes the closest 25 things within about 6 miles. If there are more than 500 things only the closest 500 will be included.)”

Another two-week update!

• ♿️ Work has been really busy for a few weeks now, but I think that going forward, it will be just normal levels of busy. Three weeks ago was our “opening week”, the week before classes start when there’s a lot of faculty- and staff-centric training and professional development; the next two weeks were the first two weeks of classes for the year, which is always a busy time; this Friday was an “in-service” Professional Development Day. There’s one committee that organizes both Opening Week and PDD, and I was on that committee, so that was a lot of work, and for PDD I did a two-and-a-half-hour session on digital accessibility. And on top of all that, I’m kicking off a “Strive for 85” campaign to encourage staff to raise the accessibility of their courses, and I had to scramble to get it ready to announce just before and at PDD day. It’s been a lot! But now all that’s done, so — fingers crossed — things will be a bit more manageable now.

• 🕺🏻 Last weekend I went out to the Mercury for their annual open membership night and welcomed a co-worker and their spouse in as new members. The music was really good, but the open membership nights are (unsurprisingly) very crowded, and it was a mix of enjoying seeing the club that full and wishing there were a few less people on the dance floor. Not a bad thing, of course! Just most of my dancing was more towards the beginning of the evening as people were still filtering in.

• 🚀 Yesterday was the October Norwescon planning meeting. Lots of good conversations and planning, from helping to film a bit for our social media that will get posted sometime later on, to discussing our historical archives and getting another bag full of things to scan and upload, to talking about the Philip K. Dick award with one of the award administrators, and a whole host of side conversations, as usual. Five months to go!

• 🇺🇸 Because of the Norwescon meeting, we didn’t go to Saturday’s No Kings events, but we did fill out our ballots and drop them off out our local ballot drop box, wearing No Kings shirts. We participated as we could!

📸 Photos

More vacation trip photos are up, covering Amsterdam and Brussels.

📝 Writing

• Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber posted a ridiculous and disappointing (but not surprising) “actually, X/Twitter’s a great place that you all should come back to” bit of drivel that finally got me to drop him from my reading list.

📚 Reading

Three books finished over the past two weeks:

• David Mack’s More Beautiful Than Death, a Trek novel set in the Kelvinverse alternate reality.

• Nandita Gupta and Rachel Grossman-Kahn’s Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide, an excellent entry-level guide to digital accessibility.

• Joan Winston’s The Making of the Trek Conventions, a non-fiction memoir covering the early days of Star Trek fan conventions in the mid- to late-1970s.

📺 Watching

We’re still working our way through season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and are still enjoying it. It’s definitely a full season of what would be off-kilter filler episodes back when we got 22+ episode seasons, so I can absolutely understand why a lot of people are dissatisfied with this season. Still, we’re having fun with it.

🔗 Linking

• Anil Dash: We are going to kill “unalive”: “Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say.

• Scharon Harding at Ars Technica: Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27: “Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.”

  • RemoveMacAI: “Debloat macOS: turn off Apple Intelligence, analytics, ads and pop-ups. A native app and CLI, and every change can be undone.”
• Lex Friedman: Claude writes code; I author the apps: “The question, to me, isn’t how much code was written by a human. It’s how much the app was authored by a human, which I think is a more nuanced question. How much care, thought, and humanity went into the app matters far more than tabs vs. spaces or a manually-vs.-machine-built HStack.”
  • Overall, this is as close as I’ve seen to a defense of AI-assisted programming that comes close to being reasonable. But it still avoids the ethical questions about how the AI tools were trained, and still seems to me to create output that the human “author” has an imperfect understanding of and may not ever be able to really understand or troubleshoot. I’m not convinced, but this was worth reading.
• Al Jazeera: Can the KKK find a new foothold in the US?: “What Lavelle found was a group seemingly eager to rebrand. The group had shortened its title to The Knights Party, and members told Lavelle they were trying to re-centre their message around family and faith. ¶ But when Lavelle asked if a Black person would be welcome at the group’s church, Robb’s answer was simple. ¶ ‘No,’ Robb responded. ‘Because this is a white nationalist church.'”

• Janine Liberty at MIT News: Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90: “A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Kent Reporter: ELECTION 2026: State Supreme Court candidates make their case: “Two new justices will join the nine-member high court, and two new justices appointed by Gov. Bob Ferguson with no prior judicial experience face their first tests at the ballot box. The chief justice is also seeking another term.”

• Jason Pohl at UC Berkeley News: Study explores how AI use affects performance on math and reasoning tasks: “…a landmark study…found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs our ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks. […] The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient. And relying on AI also removes what the team called ‘productive struggle,’ which can lead people to find their research strengths and passions.”

• Lindsey Galloway at the BBC: The world’s top cities for 2026 – and why they stand out: “Looking across the leaders and standout performers, four qualities stand out – and they help explain why some cities remain so compelling to live and visit.”

  • Of the top five cities, we live in one (Seattle, number four) and have visited the other four within the past few months (New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco). Not bad!
• Tyler Gooch at McSweeneys: Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves Into a Jam Letter-Wise: “What 14-Across and 28-Down might sound like if you tried to say both of them at the same time”

• Jason Barlow at BBC TopGear: The deux chevaux is back! Welcome to the new Citroen 2CV… yours for £12k+: “Although the 2CV concept is clearly inspired by the original, it doesn’t replicate the car so much as the spirit that infused it. The silhouette is familiar and cuddly, the execution fastidiously detail-focused.”

  • This thing is adorable. I do wish they’d used more actual buttons and knobs for the controls, though.
• The Associated Press via NPR: DNA and vehicle-tracking help French investigators recover stolen Renoirs: “One painting, ‘Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano,’ suffered a tear. The other, ‘Young Woman at the Well,’ had slight damage to its frame, Bessone said. He estimated their combined value at 4.2 million euros ($4.7 million).”

• sheets.works (the only credit I could find): The people holding up the internet: “Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. ¶ They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time.”

• Jacob Aron at NewScientist: Self-replicating AIs are a great digital horror story – here’s the reality: “As I said at the top of this article, a self-replicating AI that takes over your smart oven is a great story, and I can see why it has spread so rapidly. But stories like this are a cognitive worm, hacking your critical thinking abilities by going straight for your fear response. Could this someday be a concern? Perhaps, although this article has hopefully poked holes in some of the storytelling logic behind the idea. Is it something we need to worry about in the next few months? Absolutely not.”

• ClassicPress: “A lightweight, stable, instantly familiar free open-source content management system. Forked from WordPress without the block editor (Gutenberg).”

  • Maybe this will finally get me off of WordPress.
• Staff at the Kent Reporter: Kent Reporter joins regional print edition, expanding coverage for readers and advertisers: “Beginning Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, the Kent Reporter will join the Renton Reporter, Auburn Reporter and Federal Way Mirror in a unified regional print publication called the South King Reporter. ¶ The change brings the four publications together in one print product while preserving their individual websites and continued focus on the communities they serve.”

• Jason Snell at Six Colors: A $299 Apple TV: Is that all there is?: “When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.”

• Subvert.fm AI Policy: “This policy was shaped by an extended, participatory deliberation among Subvert’s membership. Between May 2025 and March 2026, 68 members contributed 352 posts to the forum thread “Help Craft Subvert’s AI Policy,” making it one of the most engaged governance discussions our forum. At its core, this policy aims to be a reflection of our members’ sentiment on how our platform should define an AI policy. Our Artist representatives on the board of directors (Iz and Hannah Lee Benson) have distilled this large wide-ranging discussion into a workable policy. This document is the result.”

  • This is really, really good. As expected with the platform it comes from, focuses primarily on audio and music production, but is an excellent example of what a site’s modern AI policy should be. The recognition that “AI” is becoming a meaningless marketing term, the separation between genAI and machine learning aspects of tools, and the emphasis on honesty between the artist and the audience…it’s a great model policy.

  • Via John Scalzi: What a Good “AI” Policy Looks Like: “…it firmly makes the case for human creation while acknowledging the reality of modern creative processes — in this case music production, where so many of the tools have ‘AI’ baked in but are doing things of a technical nature: ‘mastering, mixing, equalization, pitch correction, beat detection, noise reduction, and loudness optimization’ are examples the policy gives of such tools. These tools handle backend processes but not creative processes, which are the ones Subvert is primarily concerned about. One can argue whether the lines they draw are the right lines, but in these cases the lines come with the knowledge of, and familiarity with, both the field of ‘AI’ and of music composition and production.”

• ♿️ Another busy week with the start of the quarter, but not at all a bad week. A particular moment of personal triumph: As part of our Opening Week committee, I’d pushed for a hybrid (both in-person and online) approach, rather than just requiring everyone to show up on campus in person (and therefore excluding those who live and work remotely, have disabilities that make coming to campus and/or participating in big, crowded, group things more difficult, etc.), and we ended up going that way. In our post-event discussion meeting, two people said the they weren’t on board with the hybrid approach but went with the group decision, but after seeing how the week went and reading the positive feedback from participants, are now on board with the hybrid approach. I’m quite pleased about this! Which isn’t to say it was perfect, we definitely picked up on areas that need to be adjusted as we go forward, but overall, we did a good job.

• ♿️🚊 Also at work this week, a small group of us went up to see a piece of artwork that Sound Transit has recently installed at the Kent-Des Moines light rail station. The art is designed to be tactile, and was created in consultation with several visually disabled Highline students. While I wasn’t directly involved with the project, I’d known about it and had been enjoying hearing about it as the project proceeded, and it was really neat to see the final installation.

• 🎭 This afternoon we went out to see the Renton Civic Theatre’s production of Noises Off. Noises Off has been a long-time favorite of ours (really, how can it not be?), and RCT did a good job with it. I was particularly amused by Rachael Spencer’s Brooke Ashton; her bits of business when she wasn’t directly part of the dialogue or action were consistently entertaining. Also, this was the first production of Noises Off I’ve been to where the stage reset between acts was done with the curtains open, and it was a lot of fun to watch the tech crew strike, rotate, and reset the set. It was also a blast listening to the audience, and identifying both people who were laughing because they were familiar with the show, and those who were laughing because it was their first time seeing it. Well worth seeing, and if you’re local, is running through October 18th.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Finished two books this week: John and Maria Jose Tenuto’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film, which I enjoyed, and Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned, which I did not.

📺 Watching

We finally started watching season four of Star Trek: Strange News Worlds. Since our summer vacation was right during its broadcast, we’d decided to wait until we got home to start watching it. (Plus, since I cancelled our Paramount+ subscription last year when it was taken over by the Ellison’s, I had to find…other methods to watch it. Oh, wait, is it not talk like a pirate day anymore?) So far we’ve watched the first three episodes, and while they’re certainly leaning into the “wild swings” and genre games rather than thoughtful sci-fi, we’ve been entertained. Time travel and dinosaurs, creepy horror, and “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft”. Apparently, this is the “what if we did a full season of TOS glowing green hands and Abe Lincoln in space episodes?” season.

🔗 Linking

• This is a modern motherfucking website.: “View source. Seriously, right‐click, do it. Everything I just described is sitting right there in plain text, readable top to bottom by a human being, the way the web was meant to be.”

• Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They’re Horrified (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.”

• Sancho Panza: When did Google get so f-ing weird?: “Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.”

• Bastardica: “A foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and / or squish them.”

• Mat​hias S​chäfer: The death of web development education: “The web is a radical democratic medium. Right now, tech oligarchs and fascist movements are trying to dismantle its radical potential. We must ensure that everyone can shape the web. ¶ Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building a shared and inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment and emancipation.”

• Ilan Kelman and Matthew Blackett at Phys.org: End of humanity? Blow‑by‑blow account of what would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now: “We already know that a super-eruption on this scale would threaten civilization as we know it. So what exactly would we experience if Yellowstone erupted? We are experts in disasters and volcanoes, and what follows is a thought experiment into what might happen in the worst-case scenario. We’ve based our hypothesis on research and an examination of how countries have dealt with disasters in recent years.”

• Lighthouses of the World: “Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle.”

• Magda Patynska at Discover Wildlife: Amazing new penguin discovered for first time in over 100 years: “Until recently, the gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) was thought to be a single, wide-spread species, but researchers now have evidence that it consists of four separate species, one of them previously unknown to science.”

• ♿️ Been a very busy couple weeks of work as we’ve been approaching the start of classes for the fall quarter. In addition to the usual preparations and appointments with students, I’ve been part of our Opening Week planning committee. Part of that was helping to make sure that accessibility was kept in mind as we were planning the week’s activities, and part was serving on a subcommittee to come up with a “community engagement” activity.

  We tried to come up with a pub quiz-inspired trivia activity (created by people who’d never done pub trivia) that would work both for people there in person and those who were attending via Zoom, with questions drawn from the college’s history. While there were definitely still some bumps, overall I think we did okay; we’ll see what people say as evaluations of the week come in. (A few have come in already, and so far…well, responses are definitely mixed. So it goes!)

• 🎭 Last Sunday we went to the Union Arts Center’s production of Hamlet with a friend from work, and really enjoyed it. Done in a nice small theater in the round, with a minimalist set, and some very strong performances. If you’re local to Seattle, it runs through Oct. 11.

📸 Photos

Vacation photos continue to be worked on, and my photos from Frankfurt and from Berlin are now up.

📚 Reading

I finished China Miéville’s The City and The City, which I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

Two films this weekend:

• Project Hail Mary (2026): Good, but didn’t “wow” me as much as it did many, I think. I’m not sure that it needed to be two and a half hours long, and while it’s possible it suffered in translation from page to film, but a lot of the science felt more like magic to me. I did really appreciate Rocky being a practical effect, though.

• Stop! That! Train! (2026): Honestly, better and funnier than I expected. Absolutely a ridiculous, low-brow, Drag Race-meets-Airplane disaster movie spoof with virtually non-stop rapid-fire jokes, not all of which land. But there were a lot of jokes that really made me laugh out loud.

🔗 Linking

• Alan Siegel at The Ringer: Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: “These days, battles between art and commerce don’t tend to end well for the artists. But every so often, the little guy manages to avoid the anvil—and win.”

• Ernie Smith at Tedium: alt.time-capsule.reopened: “I think what stands out to me about Usenet-Rewind is that it more or less captures all of it, warts and all. I did a search for my late ’90s email address, and found numerous entries under my name. I then did a search at my email addresses for the two colleges I went to and found a bunch more posts. And I’m not going to lie, most of those posts were not written with the assumption that they would be a part of the permanent record 25 years later.”

• Frederic J. Frommer at The Contrarian: Congress Moved Quickly to Name Kennedy Center in Wake of JFK Assassination (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Given Kennedy’s muscular support for the cultural center, many thought it a natural tribute to name it for him after his death.”

• Catalina Gaitán at The Seattle Times: Seattle bans discrimination against polyamorous, nonmonogamous people (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass a law barring discrimination in employment, housing, business licensure, park usage, policing and public accommodation against adults in consensual relationships with more than one partner. ¶ The bill also expands such protections to nonbinary people in general by removing “male or female” from the city’s definition of sexual orientation, and broadens the protected category’s definition to include pansexuality — attraction to people regardless of gender identity — and asexuality — not experiencing sexual attraction while sometimes experiencing romantic or significant connection to other people.”

• Corinne Purtill at The L.A. Times: New evidence shows that you are only slightly hotter than a T. rex: Fun science, and a rather hilarious (rude!) headline.

• Mike Masnick and Dave Willner at TechDirt: The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy: “For all the talk of “AI Safety” risk these days, the most present real risks remain variations on the theme of “humans doing stupid shit”. Sometimes really smart humans. But stupid actions by humans are a lot less headline grabbing than the shiny sexy apocalypse. A human accidentally causing a radioactive chain reaction by carelessly using a screwdriver to separate things is stupid. Skynet turning everyone into paperclips… is kind of cool and fun. ¶ But, as anyone who works in risk mitigation (including one of the authors of this piece) can tell you, the overwhelming majority of actual disasters aren’t cool and fun. Instead, they’re usually more like the Demon Core: stupid, disappointing, and easily prevented if only a few common sense steps had been taken.”

• David Gutman and Jim Brunner at The Seattle Times: Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit seeking WA voter records (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “It was the 25th loss in a row for the Trump Justice Department in its demands for similar voter data from states.”

• Ryan Epps at Polygon: Fahrenheit 451’s opening line still burns, 73 years later: “All he needed was six words. That’s all Bradbury required to introduce one of the most famous dystopian novels ever written. The sentence is almost comically straightforward, which makes its meaning all the more horrifying. Bradbury doesn’t begin by explaining why books are forbidden or by introducing the society that outlawed them. Instead, he puts us directly inside the head of the story’s protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman whose very job is to burn said books. The pleasure isn’t metaphorical. Montag genuinely enjoys watching books of all kinds erupt into flames.”

Home from vacation!

• 🥱 The big theme for this week was jet lag. 10 hours of time change is a lot to adjust to, and it was only at the end of the week that we really started feeling like we were about back to a regular sleep schedule.

• ♿️ Since I figured jet lag would be a thing, I took a couple recovery days, and so only came back to work on Thursday. Those two days of work were, unsurprisingly, pretty much dedicated to getting caught up and triaging through the hundreds of emails that were waiting for me after a month away.

• 🚀 Saturday was the first ConCom planning meeting for Norwescon 49, and it was good to start getting back into the swing of things there. Plus, I came home with a box full of more goodies to scan for the historical archives, which was fun as well.

📸 Photos

I’ve started the process of uploading my photos from the trip. It’ll take a while to get through everything, but San Francisco is up.

📚 Reading

While traveling, I read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels Reaper Man and Witches Abroad, and finished the next one, Small Gods, and a Star Trek novel I’d started just before we left, John Peel’s The Death of Princes, over the course of the week.

📺 Watching

I didn’t get through all of it, but I watched all of the first season and a couple episodes of the second season of the classic ’80s cyberpunk series Max Headroom while on the flights to and from Europe, and it’s a lot of fun. Dated in many ways, sure, but a lot of the themes that are in the storylines actually hold up pretty well today. Definitely need to find time to finish the rest of the second season.

🎧 Listening

I’ve been enjoying listening to the CDs I picked up while traveling:

• Hooverphonic, Blue Wonder Power Milk
• Holy Ghost!, Dynamics
• Blood and Computers
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics Volume 2
• Dependence – Next Level Electronics 2015

Plus, a few purchases from Bandcamp:

• Pop Will Eat Itself, Ruff Justice (PWEI.40 Rework)
• Orbital, Lush (2025)
• Synthetic. Facts. Nine.

🔗 Linking

Some of these links got saved while I was traveling, so they may not all be super current.

• Sophie McBain at The Guardian: Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’: “More than four decades after his Holocaust story Maus transformed the graphic novel genre, Art Spiegelman discusses Trump, the shadow of 9/11 and the rise of fascism in America”

• Jessamyn West at Librarian.net: How to disable or avoid intrusive AI: “One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides “what is taking up all my cloud storage?”) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don’t want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment.”

• Stephannie Stokes at The Seattle Times: A one-of-a-kind partnership gets community college students housed (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “Since 2020, Highline College has paired students facing homelessness with housing vouchers provided by the King County Housing Authority, covering their rent for up to four and a half years or until six months after they graduate.” Neat article about a very cool program at Highline College.

• Rui Carmo at The Tao of Mac: Apple Papercuts: “This isn’t about Liquid Glass or grand design failures–those are well documented elsewhere. This is about the small stuff. The papercuts that, individually, you learn to live with, and collectively make you wonder whether anyone at Apple actually uses their software.”

• Angela Lim at The Seattle Times: Old 7-Eleven in downtown Seattle becomes ‘Inconvenience Store’ exhibit (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The shop, stationed in a building that formerly housed a downtown 7-Eleven, includes a hot bar, checkout counter and refrigerator. But rather than offering quick grab-and-go options, this one sells beeswax egg votive candles, shoulder bags made out of Cheetos and Lays wrappers, Nerds Gummy Clusters keychains and a pretangled USB cord.”

• Ian Sample at The Guardian: Rich people more likely to steal children’s sweets, finds Ig Nobel prize-winning study: “Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.”

• Jewel Bright at NPR: The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size: “The ‘Correct the Map’ resolution, introduced by the West African country of Togo on behalf of the African Group (the 54 African member states at the U.N.) and supported by the African Union, was adopted on Friday by a vote of 164 to one, with six countries abstaining. ¶ The United States was the only country to vote against it.”

• Angelina Chapin at The Guardian (in 2016, but I just came across it): WD-40 and microwaved tampons: secrets of food photography revealed: “Behind most professional food photos is a stylist who tricks the viewer. These deceits range from a touch of lipstick to redden a strawberry, to ‘milkshakes’ made from mashed potatoes. It’s not that food stylists are liars and cheats. They’re simply in the business of improvisation.”

• Robert Hart at The Verge: Why AI food looks like that (archive.today mirror of a paywalled original): “There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There’s also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don’t even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There are lumps. And holes. So many holes.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Coming in November: A big election for WA’s Supreme Court: “The five elections are, in a way, statewide proxy battles between conservatives and liberals, with four challengers endorsed by the state Republican Party against candidates favored by Democratic leaders, including two new appointees of Gov. Bob Ferguson.”

• Eddy Frankel at The Guardian: A constipated baby and a kid that looks like Boris Johnson: why would anyone bother stealing a Renoir?: “Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of impressionism’s head honchos, a leading figure in one of 19th-century art’s most important movements. But time hasn’t been too kind to poor old Pierre. Where his contemporaries like Monet, Cézanne and Degas have been heralded as modernist revolutionaries, artists who shaped the future of western painting and helped set the path that all of their successors would soon follow, in recent years Renoir has been denigrated, mocked, protested and hashtagged.”

• Judd Legum at Popular Information: The hidden dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org: “The slick voter registration website, currently being promoted to millions of people, is a digital surveillance machine.”

• Terence Eden: Put an AV test at the start of your slides: Good advice that I need to remember.

• Melissa Santos at Axios Seattle: Seattle’s civil rights laws could soon cover polyamory: “The measure would make people who engage in consensual nonmonogamy, including polyamory, a protected class that can’t be discriminated against in areas such as housing or employment.” This would be a boon to a lot of people I know.

• Meredith Blake at The Contrarian: The Rise of the Infinite Cable News Ticker (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “The news ticker was not exactly an unknown concept in 2001. The iconic Motograph News Bulletin in Times Square — a.k.a. “The Zipper” — had been flashing headlines from around the world for more than 70 years. But before September 11, the feature was used sparingly on TV, usually to display stock prices during financial news programs or share storm warnings in specific regions. ¶ By December 2001, however, constantly scrolling headlines became a permanent fixture on TV.”

• Michael Cragg at The Guardian: ‘You start to worry you’ll never listen to anything else’: 25 years of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the song that saw the future of pop: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head wasn’t just ‘good, for a pop song’, as joyless people were wont to say, keen to use the caveat in case their muso credentials be tarnished. As pop began to absorb the outre production styles of R&B experimentalists such as the Neptunes and Timbaland – Britney’s career-restructuring I’m a Slave 4 U, produced by the former, would arrive in the same month as Can’t Get You Out of My Head – audiences were becoming more attuned to pop that was looking to push the boundaries. This felt like dance-pop beamed in from the future, where the first time you hear it you’re like, ‘Huh?’ then the second you’re like, ‘Wait!’ and then the 35th time you start to worry you may never listen to anything else.”

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).