On This Day: Jan 9

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 9…

There are 37 posts previously published on January 9th

  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2021
    • 📚1/2021: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1969 Hugo Best Novel This was excellent, and rather remarkably topical for being 50+ years old. Addressing gender and politics personal and national, and though many points are quite dark, with definite hope. ➡
    • Historians Contextualizing the Capitol Insurrection: A Roundup: A list of their publications is below, in alphabetical order by author’s last name. This is a dynamic document, and will change as historians publish more pieces. ➡
  • 2020
    • I don’t really keep up with automotive news, but…um…Subaru? Everything okay over there? Bonus: As long as this model exists, any contest/competition that awards a car as a prize, but doesn’t offer this model, obviously gives no FUCKS. ➡
    • Short Treks E10: “Children of Mars”: A curious and moody prequel that sets up a bit of backstory, but mostly won’t really fall into place until Picard starts. Guessing that “synths” might be androids based on Romulan experiments with Borg technology? 🖖 ➡
    • We now know that cuttlefish have stereoscopic vision…: because scientists tested the theory by having the cuttlefish wear 3D glasses and showing them 3D movies of shrimp and watching where the cuttlefish tried to strike to eat the shrimp. Not only is it cool, but CUTTLEFISH WEARING 3D GLASSES! ➡
    • Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse: “Hopepunk stories are not specifically climate-focused and, more importantly, do not necessitate hopeful worlds. In the age of Trump, this basic act of extending to another person kindness, rather than disdain or vitriol, becomes a political narrative….” ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 9 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 9 ➡
  • 2019
    • Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep And doesn’t know where to find them She has one ring to bring them in And in the darkness bind them — @IceBergMama on Twitter ➡
    • TIL: Titivillus was the “patron demon of scribes”, blamed for causing typos. I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus … I muste eche day … brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes. ➡
  • 2017
    • Book four of 2017: Hexomancy, by Michael R. Underwood. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • A relaxing day at home. Helping Prairie make dinner (homemade pizza and buffalo chicken) by staying out of the way. This is often my best method of helping in the kitchen (until cleanup, which is usually my responsibility). (9/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • Somebody has to pay for ‘free’ I think Obama's general idea is a good one, and I support it and the thinking behind it. I just wish I could be more optimistic that students in Washington would actually have a chance to take advantage of it. ➡
  • 2014
    • Almost forgot to take a picture today (dunno if this is formally a shot-a-day project, but this’ll be nine in a row, and that’s a good trend), so you get me kicked back in my chair while watching TV. ➡
  • 2013
    • Just Can’t Get Flexible in 1999 Now that I've run through all the long-form mixes I had laying around, here's the first of two mashups I've put together: Depeche Mode vs. Prince. ➡
  • 2009
    • Link Journalism Even though I'm 'just' a consumer, not a journalist in any sense, and not involved with or affiliated with any of these organizations, I'm fascinated by the effects of the evolving connections that technology is making possible between the media and the public, and within and among the various media organizations themselves. ➡
  • 2007
    • 4,000 Lattes…to go? From this morning's introduction of the iPhone, as Steve Jobs was demonstrating various features of the gadget (as reported by [MacRumors)... ➡
  • 2006
    • 35.30572% Geek At least, according to the Original Geek Test, that's my final score. ➡
    • It’s Illegal to be Annoying No, I'm not kidding. Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime. ➡
    • Andy Rosen: Early punk photos I came across an article in today's Seattle Times about Andy Rosen, who'd taken a lot of photographs of the early punk scene in London -- and is just now starting to showcase a lot of never before seen photos on Flickr. ➡
    • Ego up, ego down Perfect scores can go two ways: perfectly good...or perfectly bad. ➡
  • 2005
    • Hey…what’s all that white stuff? Well, it finally happened — after nearly a week of wild rumors and near-panic (I had no less than three of my customers at work plan 'snow days' last Thursday based on the weather reports), it's finally actually snowing in Seattle this morning. ➡
  • 2004
    • blockquotes in TypePad and MovableType Over the past few days, a few people have been posting in a thread on the TypePad User Group, trying to figure out why every so often, using the blockquote tag would suddenly cause display issues in a finished post. ➡
    • Jobs/Mayer collaboration online The composition created by Steve Jobs and John Mayer during the Macworld keynote while demoing GarageBand has been posted online. ➡
    • Curls? I'm starting to wonder just how long I can go before I get sick of the curls and shave my head again. It could be just a few days — or it could be months. ➡
    • More on the iHPod Additionally, one (and only one) report — that at the moment, doesn't seem to be taken terribly seriously by most people — claims that HP 'will be working with Apple to add support for Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year.' ➡
    • Kodak moments …the bottom line is simply anybody but Bush. And by 'anybody', I mean anybody who can realistically have a chance of defeating Bush — and by that, I mean the Democratic nominee. ➡
    • ecto beta available The creator of blogging client Kung-Log has rewritten, updated, and renamed it, and has just relased the first public beta of ecto, which I'm playing with now. ➡
  • 2003
    • Why does [Pres. Bush] want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up. My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? ➡
    • Lots of categories Categories are now listed in each individual post, and there's a lot more to choose from. Am I too anal yet? I've gotta be getting there. ➡
    • Ain't goin' down… Someday, I would dearly love to hear Garth Brooks' 'Ain't Goin' Down 'til the Sun Comes Up' as covered by Ministry. Possibly with Les Claypool doing the vocals. I can hear it in my head — I just wish I could hear it with my ears. ➡
    • Browser Daydreaming Respoding more seriously to Phil Ulrich's question of what I'd like to see in a web browser, I daydream for a while about perfect UIs and plug-in based rendering engines. ➡
  • 2001
    • Words of Wisdom I normally nuke just about every piece of random e-mail I get, but I got one today that I actually thought was worth sharing: Things I wish I'd known before I went out in the real world. ➡
  • 1996
    • [From the archives: 1.9.96 0314] Created a page to shamelessly promote myself, with the various (okay, two) clubs I'm dj'ing at currently. (grin) Hey, somebody's gotta do it, right? ➡
  • 1995
    • [From Usenet 1.9.95 0231] I've seen it on two discs...the import version of the HLAH single (pink and blue cover, no halo number listed, only three tracks to it. ➡
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A Brief History of Convention Ribbons: “If you’ve gone to conventions like CONvergence, you may have seen the ribbons imprinted with catchphrases and clip art people stick to the bottom of the their badges—in some cases, collecting large trails of them. CONvergence does a great job of explaining how you can get your own ribbons on its site, including a variety of different vendors that print them. But what is the real purpose of badge ribbons, and how did the tradition get started?” (There’s a fair amount of ribbon collection/trading at Norwescon as well.)

Our Idols are Fallible

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Isaac Asimov has long been, and still is, one of my favorite authors. He was also a person who regularly sexually harassed women. Both statements can be (and are) true, without me having to give up the former or condone the latter.

His history with women is no secret, and is the subject of the article Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall:

Over the course of many decades, Asimov groped or engaged in other forms of unwanted touching with countless women, often at conventions, but also privately and in the workplace. Within the science fiction community, this is common knowledge, and whenever I bring it up in a room of older fans, the response is usually a series of nods. The number of such incidents is unknown, but it can be plausibly estimated in the hundreds, and thus may match or exceed the long list of books that Asimov wrote.

…I regularly hear the argument that Asimov was simply a product of his era. You certainly don’t need to look far to find parallel offenders, including Asimov’s friend Randall Garrett, of whom Frank Herbert recalled, “You could follow his movements … by the squeals of the women whose bottoms he had just pinched.”

But excusing Asimov by saying that some of his contemporaries were guilty of similar transgressions is like downplaying his productivity by pointing out that other authors were prolific.

I find it important to recognize and consider the flaws in the people and the media that we enjoy, rather than shrugging them off or brushing them under the proverbial carpet. It doesn’t mean we have to “cancel” things, banishing entire swaths of previously-enjoyed content when we discover the creator said or did something we find problematic (though in some instances, we may decide to; each person has to determine that for themselves depending on their values and the situation in question). But learning how to hold ourselves and others to higher standards means not ignoring the failures when they appear.

Domain Switch

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In a project that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, I’ve just moved my personal site from its former home of www.michaelhanscom.com to its new home here at michaelhans.com.

The reason for the move is simple: The “…com.com” repetition at the end of the old URL formed by the end of my last name and the .com top-level domain suffix has always bugged me a little bit, and so the new URL is simpler and more clever.

It has been pointed out to me that this new setup is likely somewhat less optimal in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as “the SEO power of [thing].com is probably less than that of [first-part-of-thing].[second-part-of-thing]”. However, 1) I’ve had my time at the top of the search results, and I’m okay with continuing to drop down in the rankings a bit, and 2) I’ve stopped running ads or paying any real attention to my statistics/site visits/rankings, so SEO just isn’t at the top of my concerns right now. I’m not going to ignore that entirely, but it’s simply not a major concern.

At this point, the move should be complete: All content has been transferred over to the new domain (and I’d like to take a moment to plug the WordPress plugin Duplicator, which made moving my blog much easier than I thought it would be; it wrapped everything up in an archive, I moved the archive to the new location, ran the installer, and that was it–it even scanned the database to replace any links to www.michaelhanscom.com inside blog posts with links to michaelhans.com, which was one of the tasks I was dreading), the .htaccess redirects are in place and working properly, and I’ve adjusted all external connections so that they all point to the right place.

All in all, a rather surprisingly uneventful move.

On This Day: Jan 8

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 8…

There are 41 posts previously published on January 8th

  • 2024
  • 2023
    • 🎥 Ticket to Paradise Unimaginative and entirely predictable, but harmless, and more or less saved by Clooney and Roberts' undeniable easygoing chemistry. ➡
  • 2022
  • 2021
    • Twitter permanently suspends President Donald Trump: citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” ➡
    • Suspended Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules ➡
    • 2019-2020 Tech company donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the election: Google Docs spreadsheet, found via Kottke. ➡
    • The 432-year-old manual on social distancing: “In this spookily prescient booklet, people are advised to keep six feet apart, avoid shaking hands and only send one person per household out to do the shopping.” ➡
    • 🖖 Discovery S03E12 and E13: Well, it ended well, at least for the last five minutes of wrap-up. And there were some good bits scattered through the rest of these final two episodes. But on the whole, this season started strong, lost its way midway, and kind of fizzled out. ➡
  • 2020
    • The opening notes of the closing credits music for Enterprise are so similar to the Non Nobis, Domine from Henry V that I always get the latter running through my head after finishing an episode of Enterprise. 🖖 ➡
    • A Brief History of Convention Ribbons: “If you’ve gone to conventions like CONvergence, you may have seen the ribbons imprinted with catchphrases and clip art people stick to the bottom of the their badges—in some cases, collecting large trails of them. CONvergence does a great job of explaining how you can get your own ribbons ... Read more ➡
    • Best Star Trek Captain: How Captain Picard beat Captain Kirk: “For The Next Generation era, Picard somehow had the swaggering captain thing going for him, but, because he was a little bit stoic and detached, he also had the Spock thing going for him, too. He was the best of both worlds (those worlds being ... Read more ➡
    • Our Idols are Fallible …excusing Asimov by saying that some of his contemporaries were guilty of similar transgressions is like downplaying his productivity by pointing out that other authors were prolific. ➡
    • Domain Switch I've moved to michaelhans.com ➡
    • ‘Star Trek: Picard”: Patrick Stewart on Why He’s Returning: “The new show is different from its predecessor in nearly every respect — texture, tone, format, production value, even the likelihood of characters dropping an f-bomb. That’s all by design. Stewart’s design.” ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 8 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 8 ➡
  • 2019
    • As the following conditions are true: There is yet another high wind warning for tomorrow, and, I have ordered a UPS for my computer, but it does not arrive until Friday, I would like to apologize in advance to the residents of Renton for tomorrow’s inevitable power outage. ➡
    • Book four of 2019: FTL, Y’all! Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive, edited by C. Spike Trotman and Amanda LaFrenais. ⭐️⭐️⭐️  📚 ➡
    • I’ve had about 24 hours without power over three separate outages over the past two days. Yay for winter storms! Ordering a UPS for my office electronics, which means the power outages will stop now, right? ➡
    • Book three of 2019: The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 #hugowinner 📚 ➡
    • National Geographic: “Before we explored outer space, we tried to paint it: In 1939, artist Charles Bittinger imagined worlds we hadn’t traveled to yet—sometimes with impressive accuracy.” Gorgeous artwork, from a time when we knew far less than we do now. ➡
  • 2018
    • Linkdump for December 27th through January 8th An automatically generated list of links that caught my eye between December 27th and January 8th. • Why So Many Men Hate the Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why • My Hero, Luke Skywalker • Stop reading what Facebook tells you to read • List: Alternatives to Platonic Love • This is not going to go the way you think: The Last Jedi and the necessary disappointment of epilogues ➡
  • 2016
    • The plows came through our circle yesterday, and the resulting snow pile is huge! (8/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • Trust There is a better than 50% chance that I'll be ordering an Apple Watch on the day they're added to the Apple Store. ➡
  • 2014
    • I’m about to eat twenty-seven peanut butter cups! ➡
  • 2013
    • Unhappily Ever After Seven short tales, all based off of Disney tales, but far darker than what you're used to. ➡
    • Eclecticism The eight and last of my old mixes to go up. Hopefully I'll eventually start putting _new_ mixes up! ➡
  • 2009
    • Links for December 28th through January 8th Sometime between December 28th and January 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • freezebubbles • xkcd: Converting to Metric • Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Seattle: Green River near Auburn • UiRemote: The Universal Infrared Remote for iPhone • 25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek • 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now • NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack • Weak cellphone law puts drivers off the hook • Whose Streets? • Chart Porn: The Unofficial Theory Of Sci-Fi Connectivity ➡
    • Stormpocalypse! First off, the good news: we're not being affected by the current weather craziness hitting the northwest. That said, this is nuts! This stormpocalypse hit us in two stages: first the snowpocalypse, and now the floodpocalypse. I've been watching #waflood on Twitter, and it's been fascinating watching all the updates appear. ➡
  • 2008
    • Good Action is Geography If you build a fast engine, you don’t need fast cutting, because the story’s being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. ➡
  • 2006
    • Whoops…something slipped. And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work 'til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight's Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you! ➡
  • 2005
    • Progress: Related Entries The keyword index will work, but I've got a lot of work to do on my keywords before I can bring it live. In the meantime, I've re-implemented Adam Kalsey's 'related entries' code, listing five similar entries in the sidebar of each individual entry page. ➡
    • This is Ponderous This is ponderous, man. Really ponderous. ➡
    • 12 Sentences From ctakahara: Take the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year and make a paragraph from it. ➡
  • 2004
    • About that iPod mini So, contrary to my initial opinion, count me fully in the camp of the iPod mini supporters. If my current iPod ever dies — which hopefully won't happen for quite a while yet — the iPod mini will do quite well for me. ➡
    • U.S. Treasury: Anonymous until we change our mind The U.S. Treasury Department plans to publish nearly 10,000 e-mail addresses on the Web, violating its privacy promise to Americans who used e-mail to comment on a government proceeding. ➡
    • Announcing the…iHPod? In an unexpected partnership, Apple and HP announced today that HP will be re-branding and selling Apple iPods and including iTunes pre-installed on HP branded desktop computers. ➡
    • Photoshop CS won’t do money Adobe Photoshop CS apparently has special image-recognition code built in that will detect someone attempting to work with scanned currency, and then refuse to work with the image. ➡
    • I’m going to be an uncle! My brother and his fiance just found out that Emily is pregnant! ➡
    • Your handwriting as a font Fontifier can make your handwriting into a font ➡
  • 2003
    • Abuse my taste in music Take a peek at the last ten tracks that I've listened to on my computer, then leave a comment to tell me how much my taste in music rocks. Or sucks. Whichever. ➡
  • 1996
    • [From the archives: 1.8.96 0212] Just a couple of quick changes at the moment. I've got a few more planned, but they'll have to wait, as I've just been invited out to coffee at VI (Village Inn), and we must have our priorities, mustn't we? ➡
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It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It: “Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.”