Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Weekly Notes: June 9–15, 2025

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  • 🎓 This week was commencement week for Highline College! This year, for the first time, we held commencement at the Emerald Downs horse racing facility, and while there were the occasional minor hiccups you might expect with any first-time venue experience, overall, I think it went really well. Hopefully the post-commencement feedback we get is generally in agreement, because I liked this much better than using the local stadium. (Still not as nice as on-campus, but that presents its own set of logistical headaches.)
  • 🇺🇸 Saturday was the No Kings protest, and from my perspective and all the reports I’ve seen since, it went really well, both locally and nationally. Upwards of 70,000 participants in the Seattle Capitol Hill rally and march to the Seattle Center that we went to, with no agitators, no property damage, and virtually nonexistent police presence (I didn’t see any until just before the march reached the Seattle Center, when there were four in regular day wear casually chatting with people walking by, and just as we were leaving, we did see a group of 10 or so bike cops staged in a side street). It felt good. And we need to keep doing this.

📸 Photos

Wide panoramic shot of the Seattle Center's International Fountain crowded with post-march protesters, with the Space Needle in the background under a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.
People relaxing at the Seattle Center at the conclusion of the march.

Seen from behind, a marcher holds up a large piece of cardboard with the IKEA logo.
It always amuses me when people only decorate one side of their cardboard, because it looks like they’re somewhat confused about their messaging.

A marcher in a crowd holding up a sign that says, "hot girls hate fascists".
This one, seen at the start of the march, made me laugh.

Wide shot of a lot of people wearing graduation robes and caps standing on paths between green hedges.
Students, staff, and faculty, lining up for the commencement processional.

An AV control room with three people watching lots of banks of monitors, most of which are showing an image of a graduation speaker at a podium with captions at the bottom of the image.
Since I’m part of the behind-the-scenes tech team (specifically for me, making sure captioning works properly), this was my view of the ceremony. Not a bad way to do it at all!

An AV control board with lots of banks of brightly colored and lit buttons, with a silver t-shaped control lever that looks suspiciously like the one used during the Death Star's firing sequence….
Unfortunately, since all of this equipment was actually in use, I couldn’t actually pretend I was firing the Death Star. (The shot of the Death Star weapon control lever being moved used a Grass Valley 1600 video switcher, specifically, one from KCET, Los Angeles’s PBS station.)

📚 Reading

Read Clarkesworld Issue 225 and the first issue of Heavy Metal magazine’s relaunch.

🔗 Linking

  • Sheena Goodyear at CBC Radio: Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened: “Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins’ house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener.”
  • Jack Tamisiea at Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia: “Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.”
  • RSSRSSRSSRSS: Combine multiple RSS feeds into one unified feed.
  • Nikki Mccann Ramirez, Naomi Lachance, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez, and Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Birthday Parade Was A Gross Failure: “An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.”
  • Doug Landry on X (but this is a ThreadReader link): I just got back from the Trump parade and I have to say it was legitimately the worst executed mass attendance event I’ve ever seen. The full thread is worth reading for some seriously good schadenfreude.
  • Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes at Cornell University: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task: “While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.”

Heavy Metal 001

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Book 32 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you know much of anything about Heavy Metal, you know what to expect with this relaunch of the long-running comic anthology series. Sci-fi/fantasy/horror comics and art (often of the “muscle bound men and women wearing a whole lot of not very much no matter how impractical that might be” variety, of course). As the relaunch issue, this also has several short essays about the history of the magazine and some of the artists who have been involved, particularly Greg Hildebrandt, who died between painting the cover (of the edition I have) and when it was published. Though I was never a subscriber, I’d found the occasional issue, and certainly saw the movie (and have had it in my collection for years, even if it’s not a regular watch), and it’s good to know that the magazine is still going, and that it’s still exactly what your inner ’80s adolescent has been looking for.

Me holding Heavy Metal relaunch issue 1

Weekly Notes: June 2–8, 2025

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  • ♿️🇺🇸 Work this week was something of a study in contrasts, whipsawing between celebrating our students at end-of-the-year celebrations and preparing for commencement, and getting news of two major attacks on disability rights and accessibility:
    • The American Council on Education has sent a letter (PDF link) to the Office of Management and Budget asking that implementation of last year’s Title II updates be delayed. The reasoning is the usual “but it’s too hard/expensive” whining from people who don’t want to do even the bare minimum of work to support disabled communities; the surprise is who the letter is coming from and being signed by. This has prompted a lot of uproar in the higher education accessibility communities, and we’re just getting started.
    • The Department of Energy is trying to fast-track rolling back the regulations that require new construction to be made accessible. This would be a huge blow to accessibility, and because of how they’re doing this, comments can only be submitted until June 16 (next Monday).
  • 🤓 On Saturday, we went down to the Kent Nerd Party, something of a local mini-convention in the historic downtown area. We were only there for a little over an hour (it being the first day of a two-day spring heatwave, with temperatures in the mid- to high-80s), but it was fun to see costumes, geek-centric street booths, a small Lego museum with some really impressive creations, and a few friends that we happened to run into.

📸 Photos

24 small Lego dioramas featuring well-known artists and their work, with cards below explaining which artist each diorama represents.
Seen at the Lego display at the Kent Nerd Party. My wife and I could identify most of these little artist dioramas without needing to reference the clue cards beneath.

A large size Lego person sitting in a lawn chair next to a plant with another figure emerging from it, both next to a poster for the classic sci-fi horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I really appreciated this nod to classic sci-fi horror. Figured it out before I noticed the poster to the side!

Small inclusive, bi, and trans pride flags displayed in the grass by a paved walkway.
Nice to see Pride flags set out across campus.

A metal tray with nine snacks made up of stacked lettuce, meat patty, tomato slice, and pickle…and nothing else.
There’s an old Bloom County comic where Milo goes into a Burger King and orders a Whopper, “hold the bun”. So I was very amused to see a tray of burgers, sans bun, among the food options at a catered event on campus this week. For somewhere around four decades, I’d only ever known this as a comic strip gag, but apparently it’s a real thing?

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • S. Baum at Erin in the Morning: Defying DeSantis, Florida Pride Marchers Light Up Jacksonville Bridge with Rainbow Colors. It’s good to remember that as horrible as Florida the state is being right now, there are still a lot of people there that don’t agree with what their local government is doing, and are willing to make that known.
  • John Scalzi: Well, CAN You Prove You’re a US Citizen?: “How many US citizens could, in fact, prove that they are US citizens at the drop of the hat? Leave aside for the moment the absolutely correct argument that it should not be incumbent on any of us to do so, and focus on this particular question. Can you, directly and/or indirectly, show that you have citizenship here in the US?”
  • Amanda Guinzburg: Diabolus Ex Machina: “Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent. ¶ What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.”
  • Nathalie Graham at Seattle Met: A Midsummer Nightmare: “According to performers and volunteers interviewed for this story, something is rotten in the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire: Poor labor conditions, bad actors, and business-over-people decisions by the board of directors are sapping the Renaissance faire of its magic.” Content warning: Contains reports of sexual and domestic abuse. Ammie, the first person interviewed in the article, is an acquaintance/friend from the Norwescon and SeaGoth communities, so I’d heard bits and pieces of her story over time; the other stories are new to me.
  • Sen. Patty Murray in the Seattle Times: Shut up and be quiet? No thanks: “Make yourself heard however you can. Maybe that’s a social media post or maybe it’s organizing thousands of parents to speak up for funding you care about. Big or small, it all makes a difference and it all adds up.”

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 30 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In a fitting bookend for a series that began with a sci-fi romance between a military officer and a planetary surveyor, it ends with something essentially the same, even to one of the same characters. Much less adventuresome or military than others, this is more of a pleasant, comfortable wrap up for the series, bringing it back to where it started while checking in with many of the remaining characters. While the stories certainly good go on if Bujold chose to write more, this is also a very worthy ending to the series itself.

Me holding Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

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  • ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.
  • 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.
  • 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

A rock group of seven teens and pre-teens performing on an outdoor stage as people watch.
The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.

Social media post by Claire Willett saying, "for pride month this year can straight people focus less on 'love is love' and more on 'queer and trans people are in danger'".

A rainbow-colored unicorn with a skull face striding through a black and grey landsdape with flames at its hooves, trailing a banner that says, "we called off pride, now it's gay wrath month".

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

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

🔗 Linking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward the Night by James Swallow

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Book 29 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We haven’t gotten an Ortegas-centric episode of the show yet, so it’s fun to get a bit more of a peek into her and her background through this adventure. A mysterious alien artifact, a dangerous planet, ornery Klingons…all in all, quite the fun Trek adventure.

(Very mild spoilers: The only flaw for me wasn’t actually a flaw with the book, but a happenstance of my reading: I’d just read the TOS ebook novella Miasma, so this made for two Trek stories in a row with a landing party trapped on a rainy, muddy planet being chased by swarms of hungry giant bugs while cut off from all communication with the Enterprise. I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t quite as derivative as it seemed.)

Me holding Toward the Night

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

  • ♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.
  • 🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

  • 🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
  • 🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.
  • 🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.
  • 🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.

Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.

Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.

Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…

A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.

This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is no way I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!

People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.

Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.
  • Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.
  • Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

  • Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.
  • I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.
  • Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.
  • Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.
  • This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”
  • Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”
  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….
  • Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”
  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!
  • Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”
  • James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”
  • Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”
  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.
  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.
  • Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?
  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”
  • Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”
  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 28 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

More good Vorkosigan adventure as Miles heads off to investigate cryogenic companies and ends up in more trouble than he expected. Toss in some cute kids, a menagerie, questionably competent criminals, and diplomats getting their first taste of Miles’s approach to problem solving, and it’s a lot of fun. Though the end took a turn I definitely wasn’t expecting….

Me holding Cryoburn