I was not optimistic coming into this year’s midterms. Hopeful, yes: I was feeling like there was actually a chance of getting a small majority in the House, and while it was nice to think about getting 50 seats in the Senate, I wasn’t actually expecting that to happen.
When even the NYT has to admit that this actually happened….
There’s enough being written by so many other people that I don’t need to go over it all, but the blue shift across the entire country is incredible. Texas went blue. Mississippi is too close to call. Alaska is still in the running. And so many more notable firsts and landmark victories. (Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan! Susan Collins out of Maine! Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia!)
Locally things are looking pretty good as well, with four of the five Supreme Court seats going to left-leaning justices, the millionaire’s tax being upheld, and Democrats possibly getting a supermajority in the WA House.
The one major disappointment, unfortunately, is Washington’s transphobic I-638 looking to pass (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original). This is especially painful in a pretty solidly blue state, which is generally seen as a “safe haven” for transgender people, and which has seen a recent influx of transgender people because it’s a safer state to live in than most others, and in the midst of election where transgender and other LGBTQIA+ candidates posted significant wins in other parts of the country. Votes are still being counted, of course, and even assuming it does pass, there will surely be legal challenges, so the story definitely isn’t over. It’s just sad to have that one notable stain among otherwise better-than-expected results.
Still — even with that, there are lots of good things to celebrate today.
Now for the next part: Pressure on the incoming Democratic-led US House and Senate to take an aggressive stance and actually do something to make positive change, to investigate and prosecute the corruption, and to hold the executive branch in check until (and so that) we can do this again in two years.
We didn’t elect you to “reach across the aisle” unless it’s to hand out subpoenas and indictments.
When I started, the state was at just under a 20% return rate, and as of today’s ballot drop, we’re at almost (but not quite) a 33% return rate.
Not enough green. Too much yellow.
I’m so frustrated by how few people vote in midterms. I mean, in general — even the major presidential elections have a far lower turnout rate than they should — but particularly the midterms.
It’s four days before election day, and not quite one third of the state’s electorate’s ballots have been received.
King County, Washington’s most populous county (solidly blue), is still lagging behind the overall return rate.
Jefferson County (solidly blue) has the best return rate.
Adams County (solidly red) has the worst return rate.
The optimist in me wants to see the Jefferson and Adams County return rates as indicative of how things are going to go, with Democrats coming out strong and Republicans not showing up. However, this could just be that Democrats have been voting earlier, and Republicans will have their ballots coming in at the end. (Obviously, even my optimism is struggling right now.)
The pessimist in me looks at the overall return rate, King County’s return rate, and that the strongest age group is the 65+ group, and worries that right-leaning rural boomers are going to dominate the results.
I try to be hopeful (I’m better at hopeful than optimistic), but…its tough right now. So many people say they want things to change, but when 2/3 of them don’t even bother to vote, it’s hard to see any avenue for things actually improving.
I hope that those who are voting are numerous enough and left-leaning enough that we have a chance of pushing things back towards a saner position. I really do. We’ll know (to one degree or another) sometime next week.
If you haven’t voted yet, please do.
If you know people younger than you, encourage them to vote.
Sure, backdating a day, but let’s see if I can get at least one weekly cadence post up before Norwescon throws me off again. :)
So, this past week…not a lot to tell, actually, for most of it
This was spring break week for the college, so things around the office were a little slower and we all got to spend some time catching up on some of the little things that had been pushed into the “in a bit” piles. Not a bad thing at all! Since my wife is a teacher, she got a week at home to rest between quarters.
Politically, everything is still a dumpster fire, of course. Saturday was the third No Kings rally and march, which we once again went up to Seattle to participate in. I don’t know how big it actually was (I know they were hoping for 100,000 in Seattle, though I don’t know if an official count has been announced yet), but it definitely felt big. During the march from Capitol Hill to the Seattle Center, we were somewhere in the middle of the pack, and whenever I had a raised view and looked ahead or behind, I couldn’t see either end of the crowd. I took a bunch of pictures, but don’t have them posted yet. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow so I have those up before Norwescon.
📸 Photos
I finally got to add the Klingon K’tinga class battlecruiser to my little fleet of Star Trek model ships on my desktop at work. This is one of my favorite ships from the Trek universe, certainly my favorite non-Federation ship, and was one of the final two models that I’ve been hoping would get re-released. Now down to the last one I’m hoping for, the motion picture Enterprise refit (though I’d settle for the 1701-A, as they’re physically the same, just an updated paint job and new registry number).Since the No Kings rally was on the same day that Sound Transit opened the next bit of Line 2, going across Lake Washington, I made my sign appropriate for both celebrations. We haven’t taken the new Line 2 yet, but we’ll do that eventually.Us at the Cal Anderson park playfield as people gathered for the No Kings rally.
And now, a few week’s worth of collected links. Some may be slightly “old new” by now, but so it goes.
Accessibility
Adrian Roselli: Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page: “Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some other vendor pitching you on some kind of thing that reads your web pages aloud to users? ¶ You don’t need it. ¶ Or, rather, your users may not need it. Their browser already offers it. At no cost to you. Nor them.”
Amanda Shekarchi at the CBC: When Comicon and other fan conventions focus on accessibility, everyone wins: “Many fan conventions implement accommodations like American Sign Language interpreters, accessible seating at panels and quiet rooms to break from sensory overload. Still, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of making the convention experience fully accessible.”
Entertainment
Eoin Glackin at the Dublin InQuirer: Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating strange new worlds : “Diane Duane’s early days writing fan fiction have led to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer.” (Good article, but why is every sentence its own paragraph?)
Charlie Jane Anders: Let Firefly Stay Dead!: “But also, if there is going to be a new show based on one of Joss Whedon’s creations, I think Buffy is a much better choice. Both Buffy and Firefly are chock full of Whedon’s preoccupations and stock characters, but Buffy has more potential to go in a different direction and become properly feminist this time around. Also, I really think it’s time to stop trying to make space westerns a thing.”
History
Jocelyn Timperley at the BBC: The ancient reason there are 60 minutes in an hour: “To understand how we started counting, and still count today, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, though, we need to wind the clock back to an era before the dawn of timekeeping. Because it’s the story of one of the earliest number systems that started us off on this track – and explains why this awkward system has long outlived the civilisations who invented it.”
Local
Paul Constant at the Seattle Times: Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill offers used books with a side of cats: “The interior of Twice Sold Tales has remained the same, with winding bookcases packed with noteworthy bargains of all kinds — from super-rare art books to paperbacks that will set you back a couple bucks — and all sorts of handwritten signs and other ephemera affixed to the walls. In many ways, wandering the shop feels like exploring a well-thumbed paperback. The shop is staffed with seven cats (who live in the stacks 24/7) and five booksellers (who go home at the end of their shifts).”
Photography
Peter Dench at Amateur Photographer: I took Steve Jobs’ favourite ever portrait – it was all about the preparation: “The resulting portrait shot on film is stark, frontal, almost confrontational in its simplicity. It has become one of the most recognisable images of Jobs ever made. It was used on the cover of Jobs’ biography and Apple’s tribute, with Jobs later calling it his favourite photo. It looks effortless but was all in the preparation.”
Politics
Erin Reed at Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (archive.is snapshot of a Substack original): “As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a “Do Not Travel” warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.”
Kelly Jensen at Book Riot: A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives: “H.R. 7661 is an anti-trans bill, and tucked within its provisions are those that ban books for those under 18 that “include sexually oriented material.” This is the same vague language used in numerous states across the U.S. to ban books from public schools and public libraries. This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes. No such books for young readers exist, but facts don’t matter to a regime seeking total and complete control.”
“Staff” at the Kent Reporter: King County blocks construction of ICE detention centers: “Mosqueda said the ordinance is consistent with legislation that has been adopted, or is under consideration by, Tukwila, SeaTac, Port of Seattle, City of Seattle, Baltimore County, Kansas City, Missouri, and other jurisdictions around the country, and ensures that King County’s land use regulations can continue to focus on strengthening public health and community resilience.”
Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Kent City Council passes moratorium on detention centers: “The Kent City Council joined a growing list of King County jurisdictions to adopt a measure to prohibit any new or expansion of jail, corrections or detention facilities in town with expectations that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might be looking to add another center to go with its Tacoma site.”
Karl Bode at TechDirt: 37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich: “Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state. ¶ Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich.”
Aaron Glantz in The Guardian: US veteran charged with ‘conspiracy’ over ICE protest refuses to plead guilty: “The right to protest is ‘supposed to be fundamentally American’, said Bajun Mavalwalla, who walked foot patrols as US army sergeant in the Horn of Panjwai, the birthplace of the Taliban and one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. ¶ ‘It’s among the rights that when I joined the military, I thought I was joining to protect,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it violently. You can’t do it in a way that harms other people, but you have a right to stand up for what you believe in.'”
Bret Devereaux: Miscellanea: The War in Iran : “This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.”
Technology
Maarten Paulusse at the Eindhoven University of Technology: Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?: “When dealing with large amounts of text, the process of reading, evaluating, and summarizing can feel daunting. It is understandable to want to outsource this cognitive heavy lifting to a GenAI tool. However, the quality of AI-generated summaries is insufficient for academic use, and they will not provide the coherent, reliable overview you are looking for. Furthermore, by generating a summary instead of writing your own, you miss an essential step in processing, memorizing, and applying information effectively.”
Jon Hicks: My perfect Music app doesn’t exist: I don’t have exactly the same ideal requirements as Jon does, but he captures a lot of the frustration with today’s music options. I’m still (somewhat reluctantly) using Apple’s Music player (for owned, locally stored music most of the time, rather than the Apple Music service), and am making most of my music purchases through Qobuz, as it has the best artist payout.
AJ Dellinger at Gizmodo: Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You’re Being Watched, Too : “According to a joint investigation published by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, sensitive and personal footage captured by the devices—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is being reviewed by contractors who see all of it uncensored.”
Steve Bonifield at The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission (archive.is snapshot of a paywalled original: “In a statement to The Verge, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Grammarly parent company Superhuman, commented: ‘The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.'” The feature has since been pulled (and a class action lawsuit filed), but it’s just such egregiously shitty behavior that I didn’t want to drop the link off this roundup.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI: “The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.”
Rogi: I Verified My Linkedin Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.: “Understanding what I actually agreed to took me an entire weekend reading 34 pages of legal documents. ¶ I handed a US company my passport, my face, and the mathematical geometry of my skull. They cross-referenced me against credit agencies and government databases. They’ll use my documents to train their AI. And if the US government comes knocking, they’ll hand it all over — even if it’s stored in Europe, even if I’m European, and possibly without ever telling me. ¶ All for a small blue checkmark on a professional networking site.”
Jeff Johnson: If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate?: “The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI appears to be that you’ll never have to learn anything. Don’t know something? Just ask AI for the answer. Can’t do something? Just ask AI to do it. Ignorance is bliss. Laziness is encouraged in the name of efficiency. The prospect that one may have to work and struggle to achieve one’s goals is considered abhorrent. The very notion of self-improvement becomes obsolete. Life under AI is a video game, pure joy… as long as you continue inserting tokens into the machine. Hopefully my video arcade metaphor hasn’t become obsolete too.”
Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You”: “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.”
Shubham: The 49MB Web Page: “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.”
Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels: Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Tric: “I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. ¶ Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them.”
Hana Lee Goldin at Card Catalog: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.: “The search bar you already have is more capable than that arrangement requires you to know. With the right syntax, it becomes a precision instrument: narrow by domain, by date, by file type, by exact phrase. We can pull up archived pages, surface open file directories, and even find what people said in forums instead of what brands want us to find. None of it requires a new tool or a paid account. The capability has been there the whole time.”
Hey, look, it’s an actual weekly update! Exciting stuff, this. (For certain values of “exciting”.)
🇺🇸 So…we’re apparently at war again; illegally, again. I continue to be flabbergasted at how comprehensively the Republican party is just letting our mad king dictator do whatever he wants, no matter how destructive to the country or the world. If only we had an opposition party….
🚗 After last week’s unexpected car adventures, which ended well, but were not exactly un-stressful, we’ve been taking it easy this weekend.
📸 Photos
The nearly full moon Sunday night was gorgeous.I saw this on the shelves at Marshall’s (but did not buy it) and had a few moments of wondering why anyone would name their brand “horse roots”.
📚 Reading
Finished William Alexander’s Sunward, another of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. Just two to go and I’ll have them all read!
📺 Watching
We watched the first two episodes of the Scrubs revival, and so far, they’re off to a good start, feeling much more like the first few seasons of the original run than the last few.
This afternoon we watched the recent I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot/sequel. It was a mildly entertaining bit of nostalgia for ’90s teen horror, but with several plot holes. In the end, while it doesn’t need to be actively avoided, neither does it need to be intentionally sought out.
Friday Nine Inch Nails released a remix album version of the TRON: Ares soundtrack, TRON Ares: Divergence, which found its way into my library when I got home that day.
🔗 Linking
Culture
Colin Gorrie at Dead Language Society: How far back in time can you understand English? (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post. ¶ Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger).” I was fine through 1300, started struggling at 1200, and was lost at 1100.
David Smith at The Guardian: ‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback: “For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.¶ But the era of the ‘pocket book’ is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.”
Ryan Moulton: The Hunt for Dark Breakfast: “Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.”
Tom BH: The Longest Line Of Sight: “The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.”
Design
Paul Lukas at Inconspicuous Consumption: H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “Had Frank Lloyd Wright himself ever been responsible for an upside-down “H”? Wright died in 1959, so he had nothing to do with the most recent iterations of the lettering, but what about the earlier time periods?”
Film
Chloe Veltman at NPR: Found: The 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack: “The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès. […] The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely.”
Photography
Alan Taylor at The Atlantic: Different Views of the Winter Olympics (gift link; Archive.is version in case the gift link dies): “A collection of creative photographs from this year’s games featuring infrared imaging, vintage cameras, optical filters, digital composites, unusual angles, unexpected subjects, and more”
Software
Adam Grossman: Introducing Acme Weather: “Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.”
Once again, I missed a week. These things happen! So here we are.
The biggest bits of the last two weeks at work were two afternoons on Zoom for the winter DSSC conference, connecting with disability services workers across the state’s college system, and finishing my annual performance review. Both went well, and for the latter, everyone still likes me, and I have a good set of goals for the next year.
On the home front, our big adventure last weekend was heading into Seattle on Saturday for an(other) anti-ICE protest. This one was primarily organized by Seattle-area higher education unions, and was then joined by health care and tech unions. Ended up being larger than we expected at first, with a rally at Seattle Central College and then a march down to the Federal Building. No clashes, no issues, and a good gathering of like-minded educators (including a co-worker who came along with us), healers, techies, and whomever else wanted to join in. Photos are in this Flickr album.
I’d already had plans to head out to the Mercury to get some goth clubbing in that night, so rather than having me drive back and forth from home to protest to home to club to home, we just got a hotel room nearby. After the protest we got set up in our hotel room, had dinner at a local favorite restaurant (the Annapurna Café), and then my wife got a nice quiet night in a hotel room while I went out bouncing around in a dark goth-y club for a few hours. Sunday we had a lazy, slow morning, came back home, and that was that.
This weekend was a slow Saturday of chores and dozing in front of the Olympics. We’d watched the opening ceremony on Friday evening and, well, were more underwhelmed than overwhelmed.
Today we went out to see Cirque du Soleil’s Echo, which just opened here. Really, really neat show — this was our first time seeing a CDS show, and it was totally worth it.
📸 Photos
It felt really good to be at an educator-driven rally. And I have to say, teachers seem to make better public speakers than many of the other people we’ve seen speak at these things. Nothing against energy and enthusiasm, but it’s nice when those are paired with oratory and writing skills as well.Part of the crowd at the Federal Building at the end of the march.Jimi joined the protest, even getting an anti-ICE whistle.The urine anti-splash mats in the urinal at the Mercury make me snicker.Yes, this performer (and the other one still on the stage in this shot) is being suspended by her hair.Another nice touch; the music is performed live, instead of being pre-recorded, and the musicians are often integrated into the show.
📝 Writing
In addition to the little mini-review of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony already linked above, I also had a bit of a bit of a rant on Mastodon about modern Star Trek designing things that look neat rather than feel real. (I actually originally posted it on Bluesky, but it was on Mastodon where I actually got responses and engagement.)
We watched the one-off Muppet Show revival, and really enjoyed it. I’ve seen a lot of other people also saying how much they enjoyed it, so hopefully it does get picked up for a full revival.
🎧 Listening
I found a 2023 article where Consequence posted a list of their picks for the 50 Best Industrial Songs of All Time, and while like any such list, not every choice is one I’d make, it’s not bad. While reading it, I realized that I had most of the tracks on the list already, so I went on a small binge and picked up those I didn’t. So I now have a playlist to match the article, and have been enjoying it and the new additions to my collection.
Plus, these were released recently:
🔗 Linking
Accessibility
Accessible Social: “Accessible best practices for social media content: Learn how to create a more inclusive online experience one post at a time.”
Laura Kalgan: Accessibility for Everyone: A free edition of this 2017 book on accessibility. Some details might have changed, but accessibility best practices remain the same.
Culture
Dan Barry and Sonia A. Rao at The New York Times: The ‘R-Word’ Returns, Dismaying Those Who Fought to Oust It (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “For decades now, the ‘R-word’ has been regarded as a slur against people with intellectual disabilities — a word to be avoided. Yet it has had a striking resurgence, in part because people in high-profile positions of power and influence have chosen to resurrect it, often with an air of defiance.”
Local
Chris Megargee at the Shoreline Area News: ICE agents detain a Shoreline father: “A difficult day. Today I was present as ICE agents detained a father a mile from my house–while his two-year-old son sat scared in the backseat.” I heard about this from a friend on Facebook, who was one of the local community members who were observing.
Photography
Mitchell Clark at DPReview: “Throwing my camera was the right thing to do”: The photographers behind the viral protest photos: “By now, you’ve probably seen the viral photo of John Abernathy, an independent photographer, throwing his Leica M10-R to another photographer after being pinned to the ground by officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. It’s from a striking sequence of images taken by freelance photographer Pierre Lavie, which show Abernathy being tackled, locking eyes with Lavie – then a stranger – and tossing his camera and phone to him in an attempt to keep them from being confiscated. ¶ We caught up with both photographers to get the story behind the photos they took that day, see how they’ve dealt with suddenly having their work presented on a global stage, and talk about how this incident, and others like it, have affected how they cover protests and other similar events.”
Politics
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. …what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.”
Daphne Carr at Pitchfork: Understanding the LRAD, the “Sound Cannon” Police Are Using at Protests, and How to Protect Yourself From It: “Short-term exposure to loud noise like the LRAD’s deterrent tone may cause a sensation of stuffed or ringing ears, known as tinnitus, which can cease minutes after the exposure or last for days. Other sound injury symptoms include headaches, nausea, sweating, vertigo, and loss of balance. Signs of more serious injury include vomiting and mucus or blood from the ears. Exposure to acute loud sounds can tear eardrums and destroy hair cells in the cochlea, which causes permanent hearing loss.”
Robert F. Worth at The Atlantic: Welcome to the American Winter (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as ‘engineered chaos’ produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.”
Cheyanne M. Daniels at Politico: Third ‘No Kings’ nationwide protest planned for March: “The group behind the nationwide ‘No Kings’ protests are planning their fourth demonstration of President Donald Trump’s second term — and are anticipating even greater turnout than their earlier rallies.”
Sarah Jeong at The Verge: Best gas masks: “There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.”
Mia Sato at The Verge: The rise of the slopagandist (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “We mostly talk about it in the context of AI-generated material, but slop does not need to be synthetic — AI slop is just a subgenre of a larger type of content that is made quickly and cheaply and poorly. The same lukewarm financial advice peddled by thousands of literal talking heads on Instagram Reels is slop. Falsehoods and oversimplifications about breaking news or contentious celebrity drama that snowball to millions of views is slop. Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it. Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization.”
Christian Paz at Vox: Minneapolis is showing a new kind of anti-Trump resistance (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “In the Twin Cities area, meanwhile, this activism is well-organized; but it’s not a traditional, anti-government protest movement of the likes we saw during President Donald Trump’s first term. Some have called this new model ‘dissidence’ or ‘neighborism’ — or, more traditionally, ‘direct action.’ As one organizer described what’s happening in the city, ‘it’s kind of unorganized-organized.'”
Technology
Just the Browser: “Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you ‘just the browser’ and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations.” For Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox.
Minifigure Scanner: Use this website on your phone to check which figure is in that blind bag before you buy it.
Two weeks ago, I caught a particularly nasty cold. It was bad enough that we went by urgent care to get tested for flu or Covid. Thankfully, neither of those popped positive, so it really was just a cold, but it meant that I missed a couple days of work. If you can avoid getting the crud this winter (or ever, really), I recommend it; it sounds like everything that’s going around right now is knocking people on their butts.
Over the weekend, we went to the Cougar Mountain Zoo, which we hadn’t explored before. It’s a smaller zoo, but very cute, with a neat collection of bronze statues of animals scattered throughout the grounds. Photos are in a Flickr album as usual.
This past week at work went pretty well, wrapping up with an event where we collaborated with the neurodiversity in education support group Roots2Wings. Highline’s Accessibility Resources department was there in several areas; my area was tabling as part of an accessible technology immersive lab, along with representatives from several other schools and organizations. Not a bad way to wrap up the week.
Out in the wider world, of course, things continue to be an ongoing nuclear dumpster fire. Unsurprisingly, the link roundup at the end of this post will not just be longer than usual (given that this is a two-week catchup), but pretty focused on the wider political shitshow. Maybe eventually things will improve, but for now…oof. Take care of yourselves.
📸 Photos
I’m really appreciating this book display in the college library.Another side of the table. Librarians don’t mess around.The zoo’s warning signs kept making me snicker. Though, really, it’s not bad advice.
📚 Reading
Finished Diane Carey’s Challenger, which wrapped up the “New Earth” six-book Star Trek TOS series I started at the end of 2025
I’m thinking I might start to try categorizing these, particularly when they get this long…
Art
Colin Warren at The Nation: Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit: “CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists? ¶ GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.”
Software
Unstream: Find your favorite music on alternative platforms, directly support the artists you love, and move off streaming.
Iceout.org: Tracking ICE sightings, interactions, and abductions across the country. “Our objective is to collect community-submitted information about possible ICE activity to help inform the public and raise awareness. All reports are reviewed by our moderator team before appearing on the map.”
Tech
Danielle Chelosky at Stereogum: Bandcamp Bans AI Music: “Bandcamp is banning AI music. ¶ The platform made the announcement today via Reddit….”
Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over The World: “If markup is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markdown. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.” I’ve been using Markdown regularly for, well, decades now, since shortly after it was released, thanks to word spreading among the MovableType community. Nearly every post on this blog is Markdown (or a mix of Markdown and HTML).
Politics
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: We’re all just content for ICE: “…ICE agents make no effort to hide what ‘side’ they’re on. I’ve seen up close how intertwined the twin engines of the Trump regime are. Brutal state violence and hysterical right-wing internet content work together in lockstep. According to The Washington Post, the agency is under pressure from The White House to create as much content as possible. Which is why ICE agents have a phone in one hand and a gun in the other. But it goes beyond that.”
Miles Klee at Rolling Stone: Professor Forbidden To Teach Plato Assigns Article About University Censorship Instead: “Rather than teach a different course, Peterson elected to revise his syllabus, replacing the Plato readings with an article in The New York Times about the university’s censorship of the original material. Administrators have approved the change, he says, and he’s looking forward to teaching it in the context of free speech and academic freedom issues. ‘It’s going to be very, very fun,’ he says. Students who received the amended syllabus also found it annotated to highlight exactly what the school had forbidden Peterson from assigning and which alternative material had been added as a result.”
Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court is about to confront its most embarrassing decision (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “It appears, in other words, that Americans around the time of the nation’s founding and the ratification of the Second Amendment were quite comfortable with laws banning gun possession on private land without the land owner’s permission. That should be enough to uphold Hawaii’s law under Bruen’s ‘historical tradition of firearm regulation’ standard. But it’s not that simple.”
Madison McVan at the Minnesota Reformer: In the car with the Minneapolis community patrols working to disrupt ICE operations: “Neubauer and O’Keefe started patrolling their south Minneapolis neighborhood recently as the Trump administration has ramped up its mass deportation campaign in Minnesota, sending in thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents, with more on the way. They are some of the many thousands of Twin Cities residents who have come together over the past year to protest ICE and divert the agents from their mission, often resulting in tense confrontations.”
Sarah Raza at the AP: Minneapolis duo details their ICE detention, including pressure to rat on protest organizers: “According to organizers and an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, immigration officers have also been surveilling activists who have been observing their activities in the Twin Cities, violating their First Amendment rights. And Sigüenza, who like his friend O’Keefe is a U.S. citizen, said an immigration officer who questioned him Sunday even offered him money or legal protection if he gave up the names of organizers or neighbors who are in the country illegally.”
Solarbird: What’s Permuting Itself Around In My Head, Part Two: The Election: “Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. ‘Couchfucker’ Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question. ¶ So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is… ¶ …we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time.”
Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Everyone Knows Our Mad King’s Greenland Obsession Is Insane. Why Won’t Congress Stop It?: “A President who openly admits his foreign policy is driven by personal grievances over awards he didn’t receive is not fit for office. A President who threatens to invade NATO allies and won’t rule out military force against them is a danger to global stability. A President who doesn’t understand (or doesn’t care) that the Nobel Committee is independent from the Norwegian government has no business conducting diplomacy. ¶ These aren’t controversial statements. They’re obvious. Everyone knows it. ¶ But none of the political elite want to act.”
Sam Levin at The Guardian: ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials: “Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.”
Meg Anderson at NPR: The ICE surge is fueling fear and anxiety among Twin Cities children: “Parents, teachers, counselors and health care workers across the Twin Cities say many Minnesota children are living in fear or seeing those fears realized. They worry loved ones will be taken away, that they’ll witness violence, or get hurt themselves.”
Sofia Barnett at The Minnesota Star Tribune: Two women, detained by ICE, say they helped agent having seizure: “By the time emergency medical responders arrived, the women had been holding the agent steady for several minutes. They were detained but acting as first responders to the man who had detained them. ¶ Once the agent was transferred to medical care, Amundson and Zemien were placed into another vehicle and driven to Whipple anyway. ¶ ‘I asked if we could just go home,’ Amundson said. ‘I said, ‘We just saved his life. Is that cool with you?’ And they said no.'”
Derek Guy at Politico: There’s More to Greg Bovino’s Coat Than You Think: “Like field shirts, trenchcoats and combat boots, the greatcoat belongs to a shared military vocabulary that predates fascism and has been used by military forces around the world. […] Bovino’s coat may not be a Hitlerian symbol, but it is a symbol for something else: the increasing militarization of immigration enforcement.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with part of the article’s premise, that Bovino isn’t referencing the Nazi’s uniforms — from here, there’s no way to be sure, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was — but the history and fashion shift over the years is interesting.
Dan Sinker: We Are All We Have: “We are all we have and the more you do, today, to reach out in your neighbors, your town, your community, the better off everyone is. ¶ Right now feels impossible, and unfortunately there’s a lot of impossible still to come. There’s no fast fix, no one easy trick to defeating fascism. ¶ But. ¶ But honestly I’ve never felt more hopeful that we actually have what it takes. That we can do the impossible, even when it seems insurmountable. ¶ Because what it takes is us.”
Made it through the first week of the quarter! It was definitely a busy week, but nothing major exploded, so I’ll count that as a success.
Saturday night we went out to see one of the 40th anniversary theatrical showings of Labyrith. I don’t remember seeing it in the theater when it came out — I would have been 12, so right in the target range, but I have no memory of doing so — and it was a real treat to be able to do this. It holds up well!
Sunday we headed up to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park for one of this weekend’s “ICE Out for Good” rallies. I’ve uploaded my full photo set to Flickr, as usual.
📸 Photos
From today’s protest rally.Another good one.
📺 Watching
Labyrinth (1986), as noted above.
🔗 Linking
Niki Tonsky: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons: “The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. ¶ Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.”
Casey Newton at Platformer: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit: “For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge? ¶ Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds.”
Stefano Marinelli: The Virtue of Finished Things: “I received an email yesterday morning. It was a thank-you note for one of the open-source tools I created and maintain. The sender explained how useful the software was for their specific needs, and as always, this brought me an immense sense of satisfaction. ¶ But at one point in the email, a question appeared – one that has become a recurring theme in the modern software world: ‘I notice there haven’t been any new releases for about ten months. Should I consider the project abandoned?'”
Teresa Duryea Wong at Quiltfolk: One Year After an Uncomfortable Choice for Best in Show: “This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher. ¶ What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.”
Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero at the South Seattle Emerald: A Fistful of Loud: Seattle Neighbors Build Whistle Kits to Protect Immigrants From ICE: “‘By making noise, you bring visibility to what is happening on the street,’ said Kate Macfarlane, who started the WA Whistles project. ‘ICE relies on shock tactics and moving in very quickly … it turns [an] otherwise pretty silent abduction into a loud, highly visible opportunity for neighbors to rally.'”
WA Whistles: “Our purpose is to spread whistles throughout WA to help communities protect themselves against ICE.”
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: DHS Is Lying To You (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.”
Melissa Turniten at Fox9 KMSP: Minneapolis ICE shooting: Eyewitness accounts contradict ICE statement: “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls the claim the shooting was self-defense ‘bullshit’ and is a ‘garbage narrative’ after seeing video of the shooting. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also seen the video, saying ‘Don’t believe the propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.'”
Jennifer Mascia at The Trace: How Many People Have Been Shot in ICE Raids?: “Using Gun Violence Archive data and news clips, The Trace has identified 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire and another 15 incidents in which agents held someone at gunpoint since the crackdown began. At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”
Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.”
Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman at Wired: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance: “Two key elements of digital surveillance should be top of mind for protestors. One is the data that authorities could potentially obtain from your phone if you are detained, arrested, or they confiscate your device. The other is surveillance of all the identifying and revealing information that you produce when you attend a protest, which can include wireless interception of text messages and more, and tracking tools like license plate scanners and face recognition. You should be mindful of both.”
Ari Anderson at The Stranger: What I Learned About the Future at Seattle WorldCon: “Like the standing on threshold of a cosmic portal, Seattle’s convention center buzzed with bards, fae, aliens, monsters, warriors and spaceships, far away planets and misty forests, innumerable stories of heartbreak and triumph, all tantalizingly within reach between the covers of a thousand books.”
Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards: “Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.”
Julia Shumway at the Washington State Standard: Federal judge blocks Trump election order, siding with Oregon, Washington: “A federal judge in Washington state on Friday permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a 2025 executive order that sought to require voters prove citizenship and that all ballots be received by Election Day.”
Well, we wrapped up 2025…and as happy as we were to see 2025 end, 2026 is already looking to keep the dumpster fires burning bright.
At work, the week was fine. Back in the office this week, though as it was still in the holiday break, it was another pretty slow week. Next week classes start, so things will pick back up again. The slowdown is always nice, but it’ll also be good to have things back to normal after the holidays.
Here at home, we had a nice quiet New Year’s Eve. It was even a bit quieter than we expected, as there weren’t as many local unsanctioned fireworks as there have been in years past.
Out in the wider world, though, we all woke up one morning just a few days into the year to discover that the US had invaded Venezuela and abducted its president and his wife. Because…sigh. We are continuing to speed run becoming everything as a country that I was brought up being told that we weren’t. And even though the older I get and the more I learn, the more obvious it is how far we always have been from the ideals we claimed to uphold, it’s still mind-boggling to be where we are now.
As I said on Mastodon: “I’m confused: Is being a brown-skinned person accused of being involved with drugs something that gets you kidnapped and forcibly kicked out of the country or kidnapped and forcibly brought into the country?”
Though really, after what we saw of Trump in his first term and so far in his second, the only thing that’s really surprising me about all of this is how many people are just…going along with it (most notably Congress — especially, but not at all limited to, the Republican party — and the Supreme Court). The system of checks and balances has apparently given up trying to either check or balance, and that’s perhaps the most troubling part of all of this.
📸 Photos
Got this really cute shot of Prairie getting a selfie of us as we were on an evening walk on the last day of 2025.And then this selfie on our first walk of 2026, during which I discovered that my new camera has an automatic selfie mode with a short timer that is activated when you flip the screen out and backwards.
Finished my last book of the year, Rough Trails by L.A. Graf, and my first book of the year, Thin Air by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, both parts of a six-book TOS-era Star Trek series.
📺 Watching
We watched two movies over the weekend:
The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Decent thriller with a very satisfying ending.
NOTE: For regular readers (assuming there are any), a bit of clarification on how I link some items: I use archive.is for pages on sites that are paywalled (including sites that will only show content if adblockers are disabled) and for Substack pages (because Substack is another Nazi bar). Starting with this week’s post, I will also include links to the original pages, as not everyone has the same attitudes as I do about these things and may have subscriptions to the sites in question, not be as annoyed as I am at dealing with paywalls, ads, and the like, or have either accepted Substack as a “necessary evil” or are unaware of their problematic practices.
National Society of Tax Professionals: USPS Announces Changes to the Postmark Date System: “…while a postmark confirms the USPS possessed a mail piece on the date inscribed, that date does not necessarily align with the date the USPS first accepted possession of the item.” Potentially impactful in a number of important scenarios, including voting by mail. Undated informational page, but the rule took effect in November 2025.
Foz Meadows: Against AI (archive.is link of Substack original): “AI is unethical on a scale that SFF authors should be uniquely placed to appreciate, its evils mirroring metaphors that are older than our present civilization. AI is the cursed amulet, the magic mirror, the deal with the devil, the doppelganger that learns our secrets and steals our face; it’s a faerie illusion, leprechaun gold, the fox’s trick that gives rot the look of resplendence, the naked emperor parading with his cock out; it’s the disembodied voice that whispers let me in, the zombie virus that transforms the known into the unrecognizable, the corrupting fungi whose tendrils invade and poison. It’s the literal fucking One Ring, telling us that of course we’d use its power for good, compelling us to pick it up so that through us, it might do great evil.”
Chuck Wendig: My Open Letter to That Open Letter About AI in Writing and Publishing: “AI IS NOT INEVITABLE. ¶ The only strategy here is the sum total pushback against its uncanny horrors and its non-consensual intrusion into every corner of our world — it steals our content, guzzles our water, increases our power bills, is crammed into services we didn’t ask for it to be crammed into while also charging us more money for the “privelege.” There is no strategy here except to find the fields where the AI grows and metaphorically set them aflame. ¶ And shame and anger against corporate overreach is a powerful fire.”
Trekorama!: 3D walkthroughs of locations on various Star Trek ships, including the Enterprise 1701 (main bridge), 1701-D (main bridge, engineering, sick bay, Ten-Forward, transporter room, Picard, Data, Troi, and Worf’s quarters, and a shuttle), 1701-E (bridge), and Kelvinverse version (bridge and corridor), Defiant (deck one), Voyager (deck one, sickbay, transporter room, engineering, mess hall), Discovery (bridge, transporter room, mess hall, and corridor), and Klingon Bird of Prey (bridge), plus the real-world ISS.
David Reamer at the Anchorage Daily News: Termination dust: Its history, evolution in meaning and possible origin (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “…the history and evolution of termination dust as a turn of phrase offers education, enlightenment and entertainment. Over the decades, there have been changes in meaning and connotation. Throughout those years, it remains a significant detail of local history, a widely recognizable bit of slang whose lore maps closely against that of the town itself.”
John Scalo: Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?: “I think our helmet-clad robot friends might have been making a little joke that we’ve apparently all missed. The BPM of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is actually 123.45.” Fun bit of music trivia, plus a bit of a peek at the difficulties of having a computer do something that seems relatively easy for humans; in this case, determining a song’s tempo.
The big thing around here this week, of course, has been the weather. Specifically, a once-in-quite-a-few-decades atmospheric river that hammered Washington for the past week, with the particular area we live in being one of the harder hit. We’re fortunate in that we live and work on high ground, and while we do drive through the Kent valley to get between the two, our usual route hasn’t been directly affected (…yet…?). The rain slacked off this weekend, but there’s a second river due to start impacting us tonight, so we’ll see what happens next.
📸 Photos
Today we went down to gawk at the Green River around the Meeker Street bridge, the Riverbend golf course, and the Old Fishing Hole park. This is definitely not what it normally looks like! In addition to these four, there are more on my Flickr account.Normally, this sign would be pretty far above the heads of anyone boating down the river.Golf courses do usually have water features, but not like this….Normally, the left side of this shot would be a river, the center would be a two-lane road, and the right would be the parking lot for a park, where you then walked down a hill to walk on a path around a small lake (or large pond).
🔗 Linking
stickertop.art: “Discover a unique collection of laptops adorned with creative stickers from around the world. This project celebrates the art and culture of laptop personalization each laptop tells a story through its stickers and gives us a glimpse of the personality of the owners.”
Ben Werdmuller: Why RSS matters: “[Its] invisibility has created a misconception, in some quarters, that RSS is a relic. But the opposite is true: we’ve never relied on it more. And as the social web fractures, as platforms wall off content, and as AI agents begin remixing everything they can ingest, our dependence on neutral, open standards for distributing information is about to become existential.”
Mallory Carra at The Guardian: Gen Zine: DIY publications find new life as a form of resistance against Trump: “Zines have made a resurgence in recent months as communities seek to share information, such as how to protect one another from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or how to resist the Trump administration outside No Kings protests…. ¶ Zine-makers and enthusiasts say that people are likely embracing the pen-and-paper medium again due to social media censorship, surveillance, doxing and the alleged suppression of certain topics on algorithms.”
Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography: “…typography can enhance your writing. Typography can create a better first impression. Typography can reinforce your key points. Typography can extend reader attention. When you ignore typography, you’re ignoring an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of your writing.”
Matt Gurney: ‘We will never fucking trust you again’ (archive.is link): “America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America’s recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally. ¶ The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won’t matter. ¶ Because ‘we will never fucking trust you again.'”
Dax Castro: A New Font, the Same Old Habit: Erasing People to Preserve Appearances: “Today, we do not pass laws banning people from public because of how they look. Instead, we often do something quieter and more subtle. We define professionalism so narrowly that people must adapt themselves, their tools, and sometimes their bodies to fit an aesthetic ideal. ¶ Dress codes that disproportionately punish certain hairstyles. Workplace norms that equate tradition with legitimacy. Design decisions that dismiss accessibility as selfish, optional, or visually inconvenient. ¶ Font decisions live in that same ecosystem.”
James Whitbrook at Gizmodo: The History Behind All the Cuts of the Original ‘Star Wars’: “The movie that made it to theaters was one of a thousand compromises, with things tweaked and cut and given up on as Lucas strove to realize his ambitious ideas on screen. The moment Star Wars hit theaters, the director was not done pushing what he could change, emboldened by its immediate success—establishing a long history of his revisits to the movie that changed his career forever. Here’s a timeline of the changes made, from 1977 to the film’s latest version streaming on Disney+.”
Joanna Slater at The Washington Post: Professors are turning to this old-school method to stop AI use on exams (achive.is link): “Across the country, a small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.”
Alexandra Petri at The Atlantic: Finally!! No More Woke Fonts! (archive.is link): “The Department of Homeland Security is getting rid of Futura and bringing back our medieval gothic blackletter favorites with a switch to Fraktur. “What do you mean, you’re bringing our medieval fonts back? What medieval fonts? What country do you think this is?” Germany, right? 1930s, right? If not, we’re going to be very embarrassed. In general, when selecting a font or making any other kind of design choice, think, Would this look out of place on a Leni Riefenstahl film poster?“
Ellen Scherr: Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore (archived.is link): “Research in neuroscience shows that as we age, the brain undergoes a process called synaptic pruning. Neural pathways that aren’t essential get trimmed away. Your brain is essentially Marie Kondo-ing itself, keeping what serves you and discarding what doesn’t. ¶ And all those neural pathways dedicated to hypervigilant people-pleasing? They’re often first on the chopping block.”
The work week was pretty normal, but felt a little busier than usual because of the Tuesday holiday. Mid-week holidays always throw me off.
Other than that, it’s pretty much just another normal week without much to tell.
📸 Photos
We had a really good fall Seattle fog this morning; I snapped this out of our bedroom window.
📺 Watching
Damsel (2024): Slightly flat dialogue and performances, but great creature design and effects. Not destined to be a classic, but an enjoyable fantasy adventure.
🎧 Listening
I happened to discover that Pop Will Eat Itself just released a new album, Delete Everything. I haven’t really dived in yet, but new PWEI is never a bad thing.
🔗 Linking
Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: Why WA community colleges are about to see their funding change: “Thousands rely on community college as a transition to the rest of their careers: They are the first stop for teenagers on their way to university, or adults who want to switch careers to vital fields like nursing and dentistry. And even in the best of times, they are notorious for running on shoestring budgets.”
Jason Bergman at The Comics Journal: Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d Stay Up All Night Drawing Stuff To Make Each Other Laugh’: “Other than some time off every year for Christmas, Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne have delivered a new Oglaf comic, skewering fantasy tropes with absolutely not safe for work humor, every week since 2008. Which, if you do some quick napkin math, makes it nearly old enough to pass its own age check. That’s quite a remarkable run for a sexually explicit, gag-a-week strip with only a handful of recurring characters and no ongoing storyline.”
Terrence O’Brien at The Verge: The algorithm failed music (archive.is link): “…in a sort of feedback loop, labels started prioritizing artists that sound like what people were already listening to. And what people were listening to is what the algorithm suggested.”
Mike Brock at TechDirt: Chuck Schumer Doesn’t Know What Time It Is: “Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works. ¶ Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.”
Mac Mouse Fix: “Make Your $10 Mouse Better Than an Apple Trackpad!”
Adrian Roselli: Pre-order “Digital Accessibility Ethics”: “Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, and Chancey Fleet gathered 36 authors across 10 countries and a commonwealth to write 32 chapters about ethics in digital accessibility. I am one of those 36 authors. ¶ The book introduces the first (that I’ve heard of) Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework. It’s a three-part tool intended to influence, change, & disrupt patterns of disability exclusion.”
Jacob Beckert at The Atlantic: The Disappearance of Everyday Nudity (archive.is link): “Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves. Without exposure to the normal variety of bodies, we may become less comfortable with our own, more likely to mistake common characteristics for flaws—and more inclined to see every bare body as an inherently sexual object, making nudity even more charged.”
Trae Dorn: You Need to Start a Blog.: “Yes, you — the person who is reading this right now, either on my blog or a syndicated version on one of the websites I distribute this to. You need to go out, find some web space or a blog host, and start writing a blog.”
Tim Bray: Time to Migrate: “Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of “less useful”, “less safe”, or “less fun”. This month marks the third anniversary of my Mastodon migration and I’m convinced that right now, in late 2025, it’s the best place to go. Come join me. Here’s why.”
