Personal

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

Weekly Notes: October 27–November 2, 2025

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  • Our big thing this week was taking a weekend mini-break to celebrate my wife’s birthday (coming up tomorrow). As soon as work was done on Friday we headed into Seattle and checked in to the Olive 8. We’d stayed here over the summer during Worldcon and enjoyed it, so we decided to come back. Once we’d checked in and had dinner, our first thing for the weekend was…
    • Shrew, a great version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Really funny, but not at all shying away from the play’s more controversial and problematic elements, even to giving Katherine’s final monologue a wonderfully creepy, horror-movie-esque staging that worked wonderfully well.

    • Saturday we had a nice lazy morning before braving a Seattle windstorm to walk down to the Pike Place Market to get breakfast and pick up fixings for lunch. Back to the hotel for lunch and lounging, and then we heading back down toward the Market for dinner and a show at the Seattle Can Can’s Hitchcock Hotel. Humor, dance, songs, nudity, and a great time; we even ended up with seats right by the stage (any closer and we’d have been part of the show…thankfully, that honor went to another member of the audience).

    • After the show and a quick stop back at the hotel room, we headed up the hill to the Mercury for this month’s Saturday. This wasn’t on the original plan, but we had energy and it seemed like a good addition to the weekend’s plans. Amusingly, since this wasn’t in the original plan, I’d packed for walking around a rainy and windy Seattle, and I do believe that this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Mercury wearing pants!

📸 Photos

My hand placing a Washington ballot envelope into a blue-and-white King County ballot drop box.
It’s time to vote! If you’re local to Washington and haven’t done so already, get your ballot filled out and to a drop box!
A Washington state ferry pulls in with the Seattle waterfront ferris wheel in the foreground on a grey fall day.
This was just such a Seattle scene.
The Can Can room all in red and gold, with a stage on the left with a closed red velvet curtain, red fabric stretched aross the ceiling over strings of lights.
The view from our seats at the Can Can.

📝 Writing

I took a look at this week’s updates to the Affinity design suite, and came out cautiously hopeful, which was a better place than I was afraid of ending up.

📺 Watching

  • I finished the first (currently only) season of Alien: Earth early this week. That was very enjoyably and often disturbingly creepy, and does a better job of working with the perennial “what if xenomorphs made it to Earth” question than I was afraid it might, especially given that this is set before the original movie. I was particularly impressed with the work they did in blending the original very ’70s aesthetic with modern tech and techniques; it’s as good or better as the work done with both Rogue One and Andor in the Star Wars world.

  • Sunday afternoon we watched Jurassic World: Rebirth. Mostly it was fine (I mean, it’s hard to go wrong with dinosaurs chasing people), but it kind of fell apart at the end with the “D-Rex” (dubbed the “Disappointment Rex” by my wife). Studios really need to remember that it’s entirely possible to write a good, enjoyable, fun adventure/horror sequel without constantly having to one-up the last one with something bigger (figuratively and literally). Still, sometimes you’re just in the mood to watch people make bad decision around dangerous animals, and the series continues to entertain on that front.

🔗 Linking

  • Tom Ellison at McSweeney’s: Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, And I Am Ready For Your Apology: “In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, ‘What a lazy cheater.’ ¶ Now you’d think, ‘At least he’s not asking Gemini.’ ¶ In a few years, you’ll say, ‘Wow, look, a human being who can read.'”

  • Jesus Diaz at Fast Company: Canva’s new free Affinity app wants to sink the Adobe flagships: “Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.”

Weekly Notes: October 20–26, 2025

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  • ♿️ Another quite busy week at work. Tuesday through Thursday mornings were the WAPED fall meeting; on various days this afternoon there were meetings with artists who are working with some of our visually disabled students on some tactile public art for the soon-to-open light rail station near the college, two training sessions on creating screen-reader accessible math equations in documents, and two public information sessions with a representative from the Secretary of State about Washington State’s accessible voting options.

  • Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.

Reading

Finished two books this week: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and a Star Trek manga.

Listening

I indulged myself with a silly idea I had a few weeks ago, and created a 40-minute mix of mashups based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Definitely a mix that will either really work for someone or drive them absolutely up the wall.

I also picked up two new albums on Saturday that I’ll start listening to into this coming week:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Eight, the latest in a compilation series from Infacted Recordings.

  • Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.

Linking

  • Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”

  • Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”

  • Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”

  • Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”

  • Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”

  • Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”

  • Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian Magazine: See This Year’s Hilarious Finalists From the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, From Gossiping Leopards to Breakdancing Foxes: “Founded in 2015 by two professional photographers, the awards merge skillful wildlife photography with the “positive power” of humor to promote wildlife and habitat conservation, per a statement. The competition is free and open to novices, amateurs and professionals.”

  • Ella Glover at The Guardian: ‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone: “Some research suggests that the average age of festivalgoers is increasing, and older people are still going out frequently, which may account for the increased number of people attending solo….”

Star Trek: The Manga Volume 1: Shinsei/Shinsei edited by Luis Reyes

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Book 57 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An anthology of six short pieces; five manga-style comics and one short story. Seeing TOS-era Trek through the eyes of manga artists is amusing, and all the stories were fine for Trek in this medium (though the “twist ending” of the first story was pretty clearly visible quite early on). I think this came from the Norwescon Little Free Library table a couple years back, as I’d had no idea this kind of thing existed. My favorite stories were Chris Dows’ “Side Effects” (even with the predictable ending) and Rob Tokar’s “Orphans” (the Enterprise vs. giant mecha!).

Me holding Star Trek: The Manga Vol. 1

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

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Book 56 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I backed the special Kickstarter re-release edition of this on a bit of a whim, figuring that it was worth supporting a local author whom I’d met at Norwescon. I also knew that it was a bit of a risk for me: I never got into role-playing games, and the last time I read a book that I described as “like watching someone else play a game“, I didn’t say that in a complimentary way (Dafydd Ab Hugh’s Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead). Thankfully, Dinniman is much better at this sort of thing than Ab Hugh was, and I was entertained throughout. Carl isn’t too much of an asshole, Donut is just enough of an asshole (she is a cat, after all), and the adventure is a good balance of dungeon crawl and slowly exploring the wider world. Honestly, I kind of expected that this would be a one-off thing, but I was amused enough that I’ll continue backing the Kickstarter editions to collect a full set.

Me holding Dungeon Cralwer Carl.

Weekly Notes: October 13–19, 2025

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  • ♿️ The big thing at work this week was Friday’s annual professional development day; I was serving on the PDD committee, and presented for one of the sessions. The first time I did a PDD accessibility presentation I had two attendees; this year I had over 60, so I’d say that’s a success! If you’d like, you can head on over to YouTube to see me ramble on for a bit over an hour with an introduction to viewing, checking, and editing accessibility tags in PDFs.

  • 🇺🇸 Saturday we took the light rail into Seattle to be part of No Kings 2.0 protest. Reports say that Seattle had around 90,000 participants and that there were as many as 8 million countrywide, making this the second-largest protest in U.S. history (after the 1970 Earth Day protest, which drew 20 million). I brought my camera; my photos from the protest are on Flickr.

  • 🎭 Sunday we went back into the city to see the Seattle Opera’s The Pirates of Penzance. The production was great, and we both really enjoyed getting to see it; I hadn’t seen a performance of Penzance in decades, and it was my wife’s first time seeing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on stage. Great way to wrap up a weekend.

📸 Photos

A low-angle shot of a shallow pond on a sunny fall day.
I wrapped up professional development day on Friday with a walk around the pond in the wooded area on campus.
The program for The Pirates of Penzance, held up with the audience and stage in the background.
It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!

📚 Reading

I read the latest Star Trek: Strange New Worlds novel, David Mack’s Ring of Fire.

🎧 Listening

For some time now I’ve been collecting the “Matrix Downloaded” compilations from the Alfa Matrix label. This week I got notification that issue twelve was out, which I realized meant I’d missed the release of issue eleven, so both of those have just been added to my collection. Between professional development day and the weekend’s activities, I haven’t really dug into them yet, but they’re generally pretty solid compilations.

🔗 Linking

Fortnightly Notes: September 29–October 12, 2025

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  • ⌚️ “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.” — Ford Prefect, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I meant to do this last week, but somehow it just didn’t happen. So here we are!

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the October planning meeting for Norwescon; this time held virtually over Zoom. I have a new person on the website team, and we were able to make some good progress on getting them up and running, and they’ve already started jumping in and making some page updates, so things are looking good there.

  • 🕺🏻 I also got to go out to the Mercury for Caturday (or, well, since this was October’s, it was Baturday). Saw a few people, got some dancing in, and had a good night out.

  • 🚨 This week, we had our first run-in with a jury duty scam call. Nothing came of it other than some stress and wasted time, but it wasn’t a fun thing to deal with. If someone calls or leaves you a voice mail saying that you’ve missed jury duty and must immediately pay a fine or be arrested, just hang up and report the call to the police.

📸 Photos

White clouds mostly cover a blue sky above a grid of black horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines made by the girders of an electrical tower.
Standing directly under an electrical line tower during last weekend’s morning walk.
A wide shot of a walking path strewn with fall leaves, with a stone wall on the right side and green trees on either side.
Another shot from last week’s walk; a scenic spot at the top of a hill.
A hawk sits on a branch of a tree under green leaves and a blue sky.
During a walk around the pond on the Highline campus during lunch, I caught the movement of a bird landing in a tree. At first I figured it was one of the many crows, but then saw that it was a hawk. Just managed to get a picture before it flew off again.
Wide shot of three mushrooms on the forest floor, with rounded orange caps with raised white spots.
This weekend’s walk was a good one for mushroom spotting; apparently the recent rains brought them out. These were all over the place.
Pale mushrooms kind of resembling flattened cauliflower grow out of a moss-covered tree stump on a forest floor.
Another kind of mushroom we spotted.

📝 Writing

I was a little more talkative this week, with a rant about Apple’s Music app breaking under Tahoe and posting my current ranking of the Star Trek films.

📚 Reading

Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, the second book of her World of the Five Gods series. This was also my 64th Hugo Best Novel award winner, putting me 78% of the way through reading them all.

🎧 Listening

After hearing Blackbook’s “I Dance Alone” at the Mercury last Saturday and realizing I had another couple songs by them already in my collection that I’d picked up on samplers and enjoyed (“Love is a Crime” and “You Are Strange”), I went ahead and picked up their albums Confessions of the Innocent and Radio Strange. Really enjoying them both, and lots of these will be ending up in my regular rotation.

🔗 Linking

  • Stephanie Booth: Rebooting the Blogosphere, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: “What this is all about is figuring out how blogging can learn from what made “The Socials” (which became the big capitalist social networks we all know) so successful, to the point that many die-hard bloggers (myself included) got sucked up in the socials and either completely abandoned their blog, or left it on life-support. I believe that understanding this can help us draft a vision for how things in the “open social web” (I’ll keep calling it that for the time being) can work, now or in the near future, to give us the best of both blogging and the socials, without requiring that we sell our souls or leave our content hostage to big corporations.”

  • Andrew Villeneuve at The Cascadia Advocate: Are you a PNW voter who usually returns your ballot via U.S. Mail? Switch to a drop box to ensure it counts this year!: “Do not return your ballot through the United States Postal Service — there’s a real risk it won’t receive a timely postmark.”

  • Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: UW students chase disrupter out of class: “A young man barged into a 400-person human sexuality lecture at the University of Washington on Wednesday, making what appeared to be Nazi salutes and hurling insults at the class. ¶ But it wasn’t security personnel who escorted him out of the Kane Hall classroom. It was the students and their professor.”

  • Seattle Indivisible: Seattle No Kings- Oct 18: The main page for next weekend’s No Kings protest rally at the Seattle Center.

  • Glenn Fleishman at Six Colors: Navigate your Mac without a mouse: “Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?”

  • Mike Masnick at TechDirt: The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment: “The problem isn’t just burying important quotes—it’s the widespread adoption of “view from nowhere” reporting that treats even the most basic facts as matters of debate.”

  • Alice Strangman & Liza Groen Trombi at Locus: Seattle Worldcon 2025: Locus‘s writeup of the Seattle Worldcon. After putting about a year and a half into this (and with friends who have been working on it for a decade), it’s nice to see this writeup.

  • Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing: “This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” Written for Wikipedia, but is a good list of things to look for.

  • Rachel Saslow at Willamette Week: An Interview With the Portland Chicken: “When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [Secretary] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”

  • Decca Muldowney and Alex Hanna: Sora 2 Serves up More Slop: “The potential for misinformation and the ability to “flood the zone” with videos that throw doubt onto the authenticity of online content is evident. Moreover, shitty video-generation apps like Sora 2 don’t “democratize” art, they degrade human creativity itself.”

  • Christian Kriticos at the BBC: A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks: “At first, the durable plastic of floppy disks, popular from the 1970s to the 1990s, may seem more secure than fragile manuscripts. Paper rots, ink fades and runs. Synthetic materials can last much longer – that is, after all, why plastic pollution is such a concern. But the digital information saved inside these rigid cassettes is more vulnerable than you might think.”

Weekly Notes: September 22–28, 2025

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  • ♿️ We made it through the first week of fall quarter! It was a busy week, with a fair amount of tech troubleshooting for faculty, staff, and students, but on the whole, it went pretty well.

  • 🚀 The week was extra busy with a couple nights of evening Zoom calls, but the end result of one is that after fourteen years, I have finally turned over the social media manager position for Norwescon to someone else! I’m still on the team as an assistant/consultant/graphics person, but I’m not in charge anymore, which is a welcome step. (I didn’t mind doing it, but almost a decade and a half is a long time to be the primary online “voice” of the con, and I’m happy to let someone else with other ideas take over.)

  • 🎻 Today we went into Seattle to see Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton with the Seattle Symphony. Music from 13 of the 17 films that Burton and Elfman have collaborated on, with a full symphony plus choir, and with a screen showing clips from the films interspersed with images of Burton’s character design sketches. Really well done, and the music was great. I was particularly pleasantly surprised with the section from Big Fish — I’ve seen it, but not anytime recently, and didn’t have any memory of the score, and it’s very different than Elfman’s other scores. I didn’t realize Elfman knew that there were that many major chords! ;)

📸 Photos

The Seattle Symphony on stage, with blue and purple lights on the walls, and a screen displaying a Tim Burton sketch of two bare trees on a checkerboard landscape and the text, 'Danny Elfman's music from the films of Tim Burton'.
The show about to start.
Looking south down the Seattle waterfront from the roof of the new aquarium with the skyline on the left and the Seattle ferris wheel on the right, with people strolling along the sidewalk by the old aquarium building.
Before going to the symphony, we went down to look at the newly remodeled Seattle waterfront. It’s really nice!
Panoramic shot of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, half-shrouded in clouds, under a mostly cloudly sky, with a ferry on the water on the far left of the image.
The Olympic mountains were really pretty this morning.
A section of brick wall and utility pipe barely visible behind hundreds of pieces of used, chewed gum, some stuck to the wall in blobs, some stretched to hang off of the pipes. It's actually more gross than it sounds.
It had been a while since we’d gone by the gum wall. It’s as appealing as ever! (My wife glanced up as I was working on this photo, and commented, “That’s disgusting. I looked up just in time to see my husband looking at dirty pictures on his computer…”.)

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s, with the perennial classic: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers: “When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”

  • Varsha Bansal at The Guardian: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: “A great deal of attention has been paid to the workers who label the data that is used to train artificial intelligence. There is, however, another corps of workers, including Sawyer, working day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses. ¶ ‘AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,’ said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. ‘These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.'”

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 53 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Has all the great characterization, worldbuilding, humor, and heart of the Vorkosigan saga, only this time in a fantasy setting. This was an interesting experiment, reading fantasy from an author I became a fan of through her sci-fi work. Somewhat amusingly, and definitely interestingly, I just couldn’t quite get as much into this as I did the Vorkosigan books – which is not a fault of the book, I’ve just always been more into SF than F.

Me holding The Curse of Chalion