- Lots of meetings at work this week, including a quarterly exempt staff meeting, a leadership group meeting, and I lead this quarter’s accessibility liaisons group meeting. Definitely kept the week busy. And on top of that…
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Possibly the biggest thing this week was that Tuesday night was the public debut of Highline’s exempt staff unionizing efforts. There has been a lot of organizing quietly going on for close to a year now, I found out a few months ago, and we’d hit the point where we had a strong majority of verbal support, so we had a dinner gathering and officially started signing authorization cards. Within 24 hours we had “yes” votes from 65% of the exempt staff, and by Friday, we had broken 70% in favor. This coming week we’ll be turning in the cards and submitting the formal paperwork to Washington’s Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) for recognition. It’s all pretty exciting!
📸 Photos
📺 Watching
The Family Plan 2 (2025): Nothing groundbreaking, a little predictable, and as with many sequels, not quite as good as the first, but a perfectly enjoyable afternoon diversion.
🔗 Linking
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Victor Tangermann at Futurism: Town’s Huge Christmas Mural Was Generated Using AI, Resulting in Ghastly Chthonic Horrors: “‘It looks like a refugee camp/Christmas market mashup. I guess the prompt was “Reform Christmas nightmare,”‘ one user wrote. ‘They didn’t stop the boats… or the mutant dogs and two-headed snowmen.'”
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Sagar Naresh at Slashgear: 5 Reasons You Might Want To Stop Using HDMI Cables: This one’s mostly just for me, as I’ve never really known the reasons to go with DisplayPort over HDMI.
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Lionsgate: Dogma 4K Steelbook®: If you’re a Kevin Smith fan, you may appreciate knowing that Dogma, long out of print, is finally getting a new pressing on 4K/Blu-ray, and is now available to pre-order.
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Anthony Moser: I Am An AI Hater: “I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.”
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Justin Chang at The New Yorker (archive.is link): “Wicked: For Good” Is Very, Very Bad: “In the second of two movies adapted from the Broadway musical, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo battle fascism, bigotry, and some fairly dreadful filmmaking.”
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Aisha Down at The Guardian: ‘We could have asked ChatGPT’: students fight back over course taught by AI: “Students at the University of Staffordshire have said they feel ‘robbed of knowledge and enjoyment’ after a course they hoped would launch their digital careers turned out to be taught in large part by AI.”
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At Phys.org (byline of Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan): The Batman effect: The mere sight of the ‘superhero’ can make us more altruistic: “‘In the first part of our test (control condition), an experimenter, apparently pregnant, boarded the train with an observer.’ The experts assessed the passengers’ tendency to give up their seats for the pregnant woman. ¶ In the experimental condition, another experimenter dressed as Batman entered the scene from another door of the train. Faced with this unexpected encounter, passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seats: 67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.”
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Tom Forsyth on Mastodon: “Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called ‘Half Life 2’. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.”