No Kings

♿️ The big thing at work this week was Friday’s annual professional development day; I was serving on the PDD committee, and presented for one of the sessions. The first time I did a PDD accessibility presentation I had two attendees; this year I had over 60, so I’d say that’s a success! If you’d like, you can head on over to YouTube to see me ramble on for a bit over an hour with an introduction to viewing, checking, and editing accessibility tags in PDFs.
🇺🇸 Saturday we took the light rail into Seattle to be part of No Kings 2.0 protest. Reports say that Seattle had around 90,000 participants and that there were as many as 8 million countrywide, making this the second-largest protest in U.S. history (after the 1970 Earth Day protest, which drew 20 million). I brought my camera; my photos from the protest are on Flickr.
🎭 Sunday we went back into the city to see the Seattle Opera’s The Pirates of Penzance. The production was great, and we both really enjoyed getting to see it; I hadn’t seen a performance of Penzance in decades, and it was my wife’s first time seeing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on stage. Great way to wrap up a weekend.

📸 Photos

A low-angle shot of a shallow pond on a sunny fall day. — I wrapped up professional development day on Friday with a walk around the pond in the wooded area on campus.

The program for The Pirates of Penzance, held up with the audience and stage in the background. — It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!

📚 Reading

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

🎧 Listening

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

🔗 Linking

Suzette Hackney at USA Today: Throngs of naked Portland bike riders offer a counternarrative to Trump’s about hometown: “If their naked bodies weren’t message enough, their signs made quite clear the intent. And many riders wore their messages painted on their bodies.”
Tom Bowman at NPR: Opinion: Why I’m handing in my Pentagon press pass: “Thomas Jefferson, no fan of the press himself, once wrote that our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, ‘and that cannot be limited without being lost.’ He knew a free and fair press is an essential safeguard to a functioning democracy.”
Einav Rabinovitch Fox at The Guardian: The not-so secret language of fascist fashion: “Fascism is back in style. Forget the old symbols: swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, skinheads’ shaved heads and combat boots. Extremism has a new look, and it is as fashionable as ever.”
Steve Salter and Kati Chitrakorn at CNN: Brands can’t choose their customers. So what happens when extremists wear their clothes?: “The American University’s Miller-Idriss traces the earliest uses of popular fashion brands as political symbols to early 1990s Germany, which saw a sharp rise in far-right street movements and violence following the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification.”
Christine Clarridge at Axios Seattle: Seattle expands real-time surveillance tools: “The City Council last month voted 7-2 to expand Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) coverage into the Stadium District, Capitol Hill nightlife area and around Garfield High School, giving the Seattle Police Department access to live feeds from hundreds of Department of Transportation cameras.”
Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo at Politico: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat: This has been all over the place in the past week, but if you haven’t seen it yet…wow. It’s as bad as you think, and probably worse.
POP Phone: Not going to lie, this is really tempting.
Laura Wynne in GQ: How Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails Changed the Sound of Movies: “After Reznor brought industrial grind into the mainstream, he became an in-demand film composer—and from Natural Born Killers to Tron: Ares, he’s done some of his best, most adventurous work for the screen. A definitive guide to Nine Inch Nails on film.”

📸 Photos

Wide panoramic shot of the Seattle Center's International Fountain crowded with post-march protesters, with the Space Needle in the background under a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.

People relaxing at the Seattle Center at the conclusion of the march.

It always amuses me when people only decorate one side of their cardboard, because it looks like they’re somewhat confused about their messaging.

A marcher in a crowd holding up a sign that says, "hot girls hate fascists".

This one, seen at the start of the march, made me laugh.

Wide shot of a lot of people wearing graduation robes and caps standing on paths between green hedges.

Students, staff, and faculty, lining up for the commencement processional.

An AV control room with three people watching lots of banks of monitors, most of which are showing an image of a graduation speaker at a podium with captions at the bottom of the image.

Since I’m part of the behind-the-scenes tech team (specifically for me, making sure captioning works properly), this was my view of the ceremony. Not a bad way to do it at all!

An AV control board with lots of banks of brightly colored and lit buttons, with a silver t-shaped control lever that looks suspiciously like the one used during the Death Star's firing sequence….

Unfortunately, since all of this equipment was actually in use, I couldn’t actually pretend I was firing the Death Star. (The shot of the Death Star weapon control lever being moved used a [Grass Valley 1600 video switcher](https://vizreef.tumblr.com/post/684661437770186752/grass-valley-1600-4p1l-broadcast-video-control), specifically, one from [KCET, Los Angeles’s PBS station](https://www.pbssocal.org/tv-talk/how-kcet-helped-destroy-alderaan).)

🔗 Linking

Sheena Goodyear at CBC Radio: Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened: “Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins’ house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener.”

Jack Tamisiea at Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia: “Every cockatoo exhibited slight variations in its plan of attack. But the general strategy was the same: Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up. As the parrots slurped water from the bubbling spout, their sharp beaks often left behind chew marks on the fountain’s rubber top.”

RSSRSSRSSRSS: Combine multiple RSS feeds into one unified feed.

Nikki Mccann Ramirez, Naomi Lachance, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez, and Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Birthday Parade Was A Gross Failure: “An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.”

Doug Landry on X (but this is a ThreadReader link): I just got back from the Trump parade and I have to say it was legitimately the worst executed mass attendance event I’ve ever seen. The full thread is worth reading for some seriously good schadenfreude.

Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes at Cornell University: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task: “While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.”