😎 Best part of this week was a nice little mid-week mini-break for the spring break lull. We drove up and spent a couple nights at the Tulalip Resort Casino. We’re not casino or gambling people, but very much enjoyed some time away in a nice hotel room!
🚀 Very busy on both the Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 front, with the first just a couple weeks away, and the other further out but with behind-the-scenes stuff helping with digital accessibility matters. Feeling a little behind on everything, but I don’t think i’m actually as behind as it feels.
🔄 Once again, this is being posted on Monday but backdated to Sunday. Starting to wonder if I should just admit that Sunday evenings aren’t the best time for me to try to post these, but we’ll see….
📸 Photos
A foggy morning walk to explore the grounds of the resort was really nice.
Just the usual mindless evening stuff: NCIS: Origins, Drag Race All Stars, and Scrubs. Scrubs “My Musical” is still an excellent episode.
🎧 Listening
Mostly just continuing to listen through the new stuff picked up over the past few weeks for Norwescon.
Was happy to see that VNV Nation’s new album Construct is coming out soon, and they just released the first song. Have to admit, I’m not a big fan of the cover art, but the song is good!
🔗 Linking
No links this week; too much of what I’ve read has been about the political idiocy, and, well, you can find those stories absolutely everywhere.
Book 18 of 2025: Polostan by Neal Stephenson: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
On the one hand, it’s basically all setup — it very much feels like Stephenson wrote another 1,000-plus page opus and the publisher cut it down into more manageable pieces. On the other, if you’re the type who enjoys Stephenson’s 1,000-page plus opuses, it’s captivating and engrossing setup, as he sets the stage with events in 1930s America and the Soviet Union, with his usual digressions and fixations on whatever minutiae have captured his fancy. Hopefully it won’t be too long between volumes, as it’s a minor pity that I can’t just read the full story in one go.
♿️ Busy week at work. The biggest success there was launching an “Accessibility Liaisons” initiative, looking for volunteers across campus to learn more about digital accessibility to assist others in their area. Sent out a campus-wide email about it, and got the first four volunteers within an hour, and were up to twelve by the end of the day. Promising start!
🚀 This weekend was the all-staff meeting weekend for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Friday afternoon I joined in person and got to put a few faces to names I’d only seen online until now; Saturday I stayed home and Zoomed in, since there was less that day that I needed to be present for, and then Sunday I joined the group for a tour of the Seattle Convention Center Summit building where the majority of the convention will be happening. The new convention center building is huge, and really nice. Going to be a great location for Worldcon!
🎻 After the tour, my wife and I went to the Seattle Symphony’s performance of selections from the Fantasia movies, played live as the film clips were projected on a screen. Really enjoyed the performance, and it was fun to see how they synced the performance to the video.
🚀♿️ Had a nice bit of success in crossing the streams between my paid and volunteer work. One of the pages we’d just set up for the Seattle Worldcon site (page not linked, because it’s not fully public) included a drop-down menu that revealed more information on the page, changing depending on which item in the menu was chosen. While working my way through the Trusted Tester training materials, I realized that the current implementation would fail the testing process because those page changes weren’t being announced to assistive technology. A bit of digging, experimentation, and testing, and I figured out how to properly implement an ARIA live region so that the page passes testing.
📸 Photos
Not the best start to Tuesday morning. And it didn’t get much better from there; a failed water pump had led to the car dumping its coolant and cracking the radiator and coolant reservoir. A lot of money and a few days wait for repairs, that turned into a few more days when the wrong part got shipped to the service shop. Hoping we’ll have it back on Monday.The main ballroom of the convention center Summit building is _huge_. I mean, I know these spaces are big, but standing in it while it’s completely empty was impressive. I spent a couple moments trying to estimate how many times I could fit my entire house in there (stacked vertically as well as arranged horizontally) before just going with “lots” and giving up.It was good to be back in Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Symphony. The last time we were here was one of the last Messiah performances before the pandemic kicked in and shut everything down.
📚 Reading
Read Requiem by Kevin Ryan and Michael Jan Friedman.
Started NCIS: Origins. It’s pretty standard NCIS, but the ’90s setting makes for some entertaining music choices, and we’re being pretty impressed by the casting for younger versions of known characters. Also been doing a lot of Antiques Roadshow, because it’s soothing.
🎧 Listening
A few months ago I’d pre-ordered Ministry’s latest album, The Squirrely Years Revisited, where they update a bunch of those early synth pop tracks that Jourgensen has practically disowned for decades. So far, first impressions are good. While a lot of recent Ministry hasn’t done much for me, as they’ve moved more towards straightforward metal over industrial, they’ve done a really good job of blending the original synth pop tracks with their modern sound, landing in a place that works well for me. Glad Al decided to admit that these tracks are part of his history!
🔗 Linking
Assuming the old plugin (last updated in 2008) I found still works, this site will be participating in CSS Naked Day on April 9.
Chris Dalla Riva, The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders: “But if one hit is a miracle, then two hits is a near impossibility. Two-hit artists sit in a weird space, though. Pop stars a remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite.”
Anand Giridharadas, The opposite of fascism: “The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.”
Book 17 of 2025: Requiem by Kevin Ryan and Michael Jan Friedman: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Picard gets thrown back in time to Cestus III – just days before the Federation’s disastrous first contact with the Gorn (well, first contact before Strange New Worlds started up…I’m still unclear how they’re reconciling that whole thing, but that’s not for here…). Fleshes out the story of the Cestus III colony in really good ways, with a standard but perfectly acceptable framing story as the Enterprise tries to get Picard back.
Book 16 of 2025: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A hilarious Eurovision-in-space with humanity’s very existence at stake. I love Valente’s near stream-of-consciousness style and descriptions that draw very well deserved comparisons to Douglas Adams. Great, and I’m both looking forward to reading the recently released sequel and seeing Valente at Norwescon in a month.
My favorites this month were “Pollen” by Anna Burdenko, translated by Alex Shvartsman, and “The Sound of the Star” by Ren Zeyu, translated by Jay Zhang.
Book 14 of 2025: Uncanny Magazine Issue 63 edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
My favorites this issue were “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills, “Butterfly Pavilion” by G. Willow Wilson, and “Infinite Halves by J.L. Akagi.
Historian Lucy Worsley looks at the growth of murder (fictional and real) as entertainment in British media. Fascinating and a lot of fun to read; if you’ve ever enjoyed one if Worsley’s TV historical documentaries (we’ve become big fans), this has the same humor, and it’s decidedly her voice.
🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.
🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).
📸 Photos
Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.
And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.
📺 Watching
Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.
After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.
🎧 Listening
I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.
I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.
Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch: “‘The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.’ Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
Airlines Challenge Biden-Era Wheelchair Accessibility Rule: “Some of the biggest US airlines are seeking to overturn a sweeping Biden administration rule that would impose higher standards for accommodating passengers with disabilities, particularly wheelchair users.”
It’s disappointing to learn that the horrible video of deportees in chains that the official White House X account posted was filmed here in Seattle at Boeing Field. I mean, I knew the flights had to go out from somewhere, but I guess I just assumed it would be someplace a little less blue. How depressingly naïve of me.
My favorites this month were “King of the Castle” by Fiona Moore and “The Hanging Tower of Babel” by Wang Zhenzhen, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan.
Also, this is the fourth consecutive story by Fiona Moore, all in the same world and with the same central characters (particularly Morag and her repurposed security robot Seamus), that has ended up as one of my favorites when they appear in Clarkesworld. She’s writing the kind of post-apocalyptic stores that really resonate for me, where the immediate post-apocalyptic part and all associated Bad Things That Happen have already happened, and society has moved on to finding ways to reconnect and rebuild. Post-post-apocalyptic, I suppose. Much more my style of story than the standard post-apocalyptic tale of people trapped in bad situations and having to cope with horrible things happening to them.
The stories I’ve read (I haven’t yet dug to see if there are more in this world) are:
