Norwescon is the Seattle-area SF/F convention I’ve been volunteering at since roughly 2010. Once a year, I go get geeky with about 2,500 of my closest friends at a local hotel for a weekend.
♿️ We made it through the first week of fall quarter! It was a busy week, with a fair amount of tech troubleshooting for faculty, staff, and students, but on the whole, it went pretty well.
🚀 The week was extra busy with a couple nights of evening Zoom calls, but the end result of one is that after fourteen years, I have finally turned over the social media manager position for Norwescon to someone else! I’m still on the team as an assistant/consultant/graphics person, but I’m not in charge anymore, which is a welcome step. (I didn’t mind doing it, but almost a decade and a half is a long time to be the primary online “voice” of the con, and I’m happy to let someone else with other ideas take over.)
🎻 Today we went into Seattle to see Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton with the Seattle Symphony. Music from 13 of the 17 films that Burton and Elfman have collaborated on, with a full symphony plus choir, and with a screen showing clips from the films interspersed with images of Burton’s character design sketches. Really well done, and the music was great. I was particularly pleasantly surprised with the section from Big Fish — I’ve seen it, but not anytime recently, and didn’t have any memory of the score, and it’s very different than Elfman’s other scores. I didn’t realize Elfman knew that there were that many major chords! ;)
📸 Photos
The show about to start.Before going to the symphony, we went down to look at the newly remodeled Seattle waterfront. It’s really nice!The Olympic mountains were really pretty this morning.It had been a while since we’d gone by the gum wall. It’s as appealing as ever! (My wife glanced up as I was working on this photo, and commented, “That’s disgusting. I looked up just in time to see my husband looking at dirty pictures on his computer…”.)
Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s, with the perennial classic: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers: “When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”
Varsha Bansal at The Guardian: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: “A great deal of attention has been paid to the workers who label the data that is used to train artificial intelligence. There is, however, another corps of workers, including Sawyer, working day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses. ¶ ‘AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,’ said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. ‘These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.'”
Deviating from the format this time, because this was Worldcon week! Which means this post will actually cover a bit over a week, and that it makes more sense to go day-by-day than the usually subject summary blocks. So! What did I do this past week?
Worldcon!
So, so much….
(This one is going to be long and photo-heavy.)
Monday was packing and putting the final touches on prepping to be away for a week, making sure the house was clean and ready for our eventual return. Necessary, but not the most exciting part.
Time to go! Normally we’d light rail our way to downtown Seattle, but this time we had enough luggage that we decided to use Lyft instead.
Our traditional kicking-off-vacation selfie.
We got to the hotel about noon, expecting to have to drop our luggage off until check-in time at 4 p.m., but they were able to check us in right away, which was great! We ended up on the 11th floor, with a nice view of downtown Seattle (though on the wrong side of the building to see the convention center).
The view from our room. Fun fact: I used to work in the basement of the building visible on the far left, when I was running a FedEx Kinko’s print shop there (before FedEx finally dropped the Kinko’s name…and I used to work for Kinko’s up in Anchorage, before FedEx bought them out).
We started with some food shopping at Whole Foods to make sure we had some reasonably healthy options in our hotel room, then headed over to the convention center to get our badges. Once we had those, it was up to the exhibit hall, so I could set up the display I was responsible for (about the Philip K. Dick award ceremony held at Norwescon each year) and drop off some material for another display that I have been assisting with (about the 1961 Seacon, the last Worldcon held in Seattle).
I hadn’t really realized just how many posters we had until I saw them all stacked up on that push cart. Thanks to my wife for this and the other photos of me doing things throughout this post!The only way to have any hope of displaying the posters was to put them both on the easels and on the floor leaning against the legs of the easels.Even doubling up, we had the posters stacked three and four deep, so I came through every day of the con and rotated the stacks so that all the posters were shown at least once.
Once my setup was done, it was back to the hotel with us. We had some dinner from the food we’d picked up earlier, and then my wife settled in for an evening on her own, and I walked from our hotel down to the Seattle Center’s Climate Pledge Arena to meet up with some friends and see Nine Inch Nails.
I’m wearing a shirt which I haven’t actually worn in 15 or 20 years, as it was getting too worn out to wear regularly. It dates from the mid-’90s; here’s what I wrote about it sometime before 1996: “A shirt created by Robin the Mad Photographer, one of alt.music.nin‘s regular denizens. The front is a collage of Reznor industrial heaters, with “hey, trent…is it me, or is it hot in here?” below. The back says, “alt.music.nin burning this whole world down.” Very cool, only available through Robin on the ‘net. According to a note I got from Robin along with the shirt, this is only one of two reznor heater shirts in Anchorage…and the other belongs to her sister! Woo…”
Now, friends and long-time readers may know that I’ve been a nin fan since shortly after pretty hate machine came out. However, this was the first chance I’d had to see them…and it was absolutely worth the thirty-something (oof) year wait.
We were way up in the stands, but still had an excellent view.
I’m not quite the rabid fan I used to be, having drifted away a bit over the years, and the set list was great for my tastes — lighter on more recent stuff (The Fragile and on), and heavy on the Broken/The Downward Spiral era, while still including really recent stuff like “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” from the upcoming TRON sequel, and of course, pretty hate machine classics.
More of the show.
I’m really hoping that there’s an official recording of the show released at some point, or that one of the many audience-shot recordings showing up on YouTube have good audio. While the whole show was good, they did a heavily reworked and modernized version of “Sin” that was incredible and that I’d love to add to my collection.
This wasn’t meant to last. This was for right now.
The show ended, I walked my friends to their car, and then walked back up the hill to our hotel, had some late night cake with my wife, and it was time for bed. (Did I mention that this was on one of Seattle’s occasional 90º+ days? Well, I know I hadn’t mentioned that, but now I have. Oof!)
Wednesday was day one of Worldcon, and it set the trend for the rest of the con, where I spent the morning tucked away in the Publications office making sure that the website schedule was up to date with the latest changes and that the daily ‘zine was uploaded. Once that was done…well, it was time for lunch, so back to the hotel we went for food and an afternoon nap.
The Seacon 1961 display.
After the nap, we went back to the convention center for a bit, and I found time to stop by the Seacon 1961 exhibit. This was a lot of fun to see completely put together. The whole thing started after I was asked to write a short article about the 1961 Seacon for our program book. After I turned in my copy along with a list of sources that I’d used, one of our editors realized that we were already in contact with Dr. Mary Cummins, who works at U. C. Riverside, home of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy. We reached out to her, and she spent much of the next few weeks curating an incredible collection of Seacon memorabilia for this display. From reproductions of attendee badges from F.M. and Elinor Busby, the Seacon program book, recollections of the convention, and much more, to original items like a surviving copy of Hugo award-winning fanzine Who Killed Science Fiction, an Analog magazine with the Poul Anderson’s Hugo-winning short story “The Longest Voyage”, and even Anderson’s Hugo award for that story (his first Hugo) loaned to us by his daughter, Astrid Anderson Bear, Mary did an incredible job finding all of this and curating the exhibit. Many thanks to Mary and Seattle Worldcon editor Ella Kliger for their work on this and allowing me to help inspire and participate!
The Amazing Stories magazine and the Hugo are the actual items; the copy of A Canticle for Liebowitz is a reproduction cover jacket.
Soon it was time for dinner, and then we headed over to the Sheraton Grand, home of Worldcon’s After Dark evening and nighttime programming, so I could set up for the opening night dance. I’ve been doing Norwescon’s Thursday night dances for a few years, so it seemed pretty natural for me to do Worldcon’s Wednesday night dance — I get another chance to relive my DJing days, I have the rest of my evenings free to attend other things, and my ego is fine with taking on one of the less attended dances. Setup was smooth (props to the team from Encore that handled our staging, lights, and event A/V needs), and about ten minutes after walking in, I was ready to go, with speakers making the right thumpy noises and the video screen behind me showing my graphic setup. I may not have the busiest dances, but I do have fun doing what I can to make sure I’ve got a good looking custom setup!
I’m really happy with my video backdrop. The main video in the background is a collection of sci-fi looking video loops I found. Layered over that at the bottom left is my DJ Wüdi logo, the Seattle Worldcon 2025 logo, and the QR code to allow people to send in requests. On the bottom right (partially obscured in this photo) is a cute “chibi” drawing of me in my kilt, standing with one leg up on a box, next to a penguin. Lil’ me is wearing a black t-shirt, with images that randomly change every 15 seconds. The graphics overlaid at the top are all pulled from the djay Pro software that I use, allowing me to display the cover art (which rotates as if on a turntable) and live audio waveforms for whatever songs are active, and the title and artist for the currently playing track displayed just under that.
People showed up right when the music started (sure, it was three to start with, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, and they went right to the dance floor), and I was able to keep a reasonably decent night going until just after midnight, when I decided I was tired enough to make my apologies to the five people left and call things done for the night. I had fun, and I got a number of nice comments that night and then off and on through the rest of the weekend from others, so I’d certainly call it a successful night.
Dance! Dance for me!
I did make some changes to my setup for this dance, and after reviewing how things went, have some ideas to adjust them for next year’s Norwescon (assuming I get asked back to DJ again, of course). I’m in the habit of creating some way of letting people send in requests before the dance, so I can be sure to have the right music on hand for the night. For this dance, I used the Lime DJ service, which on the whole, worked great — it’s entirely web-based, allowed people to send in all sorts of requests beforehand, and then on the night I locked it down so people could only request songs that I had with me, which they could do from a QR code I had printed on flyers scattered around the room. However, I found that I ended up with a 250+ song, 14-hour list of requests for a scheduled six-hour dance that only ended up going for four hours, and I had no real way of knowing if any of the people that sent requests in beforehand were actually there. It also made it difficult to see when new requests were added in the moment, since the list was so long. Next time, I’ll split the event into two forms: one for before the dance to collect “I’d like to be able to request this” suggestions, and one for at the dance, so I can more easily keep track of what’s actually being requested in the moment.
Additionally, Lime DJ allows people to vote up or down on other people’s requests. Up I’m fine with (“more people want to hear this, I should play it soon”); but voting someone else’s request down just seems like a dick move. I’m going to send in a feature request asking that it be possible to allow up-voting but disallow down-voting.
As always, I recorded my set so you can listen to all four hours of it if you’d like! It’s not perfect (they never are), it’s a bit poppier and less EMB/goth/angst-y than many of the sets I record for myself, and hopefully people enjoy popping it on in the background from time to time.
The first part of Thursday was much the same as the first part of Wednesday: Most of my time was spent in the publications office, making sure the schedule was up to date and getting the daily ‘zine remediated and uploaded, with breaks for food and afternoon nap time.
The evening presented two things that we were interested in seeing: The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE! and the masquerade ball and late-night dance.
Before the show started and during intermission, they played trailers for cheesy B-movies.
The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE! was a lot of very silly fun. It’s a musical send-up of the early ’60s sci-fi/horror B-movie The Brain (or Head) That Wouldn’t Die, and was a blast. A minimal stage enhanced by a video screen to provide virtual sets and a hilariously effective car crash scene, and lots of clever lines and laughs throughout. I don’t know if it will be playing anywhere locally or otherwise anytime soon, but if you happen to get a chance to see it, go forth and enjoy!
We may have missed the masquerade ball, but we were dressed for it and looked great!
The one minor downside was that the play ran longer than we expected, so by the time we got over to the Sheraton ballroom, the masquerade ball had wrapped up. But it was only a few minutes of changeover before DJ #CSharp got the late-night dance going, and we stuck around there until a bit after midnight. Besides, we were all dressed up for the evening’s festivities, so we had to spend some time out and socializing before going to bed!
The first part of Friday was much the same as the first part of Wednesday and Thursday: Most of my time was spent in the publications office, making sure the schedule was up to date and getting the daily ‘zine remediated and uploaded, with breaks for food and afternoon nap time.
Best part of Friday morning: Taking a moment to sit out on the main staircase by the windows, when I heard, “…Woody?!?” Months ago my old friend Cyan had mentioned that they’d be at Worldcon, but in all the run-up, I’d totally forgotten, so this was an incredibly fun reunion moment. We’ve known each other for 30-some years, since we were both running around in the ’90s alternative scene up in Anchorage, and it had been probably at least 15 years since we’d crossed paths in the real world. We each had Things What Needed To Get Done, so it was a brief hello, but we figured we’d have more chances to catch up later on in the convention.
So glad I’m still in touch with this wonderful person.
Friday night was the Masqeurade and John Scalzi’s dance. Though we’d originally planned to go to both, my wife had hit a bit of convention overload (lots of people, and we’re normally in bed at 8 p.m. and asleep by 9, so pushing past midnight for several nights in a row was taking its toll), so she took an evening enjoying a quiet hotel room on her own and I went off to the Sheraton on my own. I spent about an hour up at one of the room parties for the release of a ‘zine (Billions vs. Billionaires) and anthology (120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era) that Cyan had pieces in, and got to spend about an hour chatting and catching up with them more thoroughly than our earlier drive-by encounters had allowed, which was wonderful. Hopefully it won’t be another 15 years before we get to do that again! Eventually, I wandered down to Scalzi’s dance, found some friends, hung out, danced, and then made it back to my hotel to fall asleep just a bit before midnight.
Thanks to Michelle for this great shot of me and Crystal chatting during the dance!
The first part of Saturday was much the same as the first part of…well, you get the idea by now. :)
Conventions are getting more used to considering the physical accessibility of their hotels and convention centers, but how are we doing with digital accessibility? Ensuring that websites and web applications, email marketing, and distributed documents are set up to be compatible with assistive technology keeps our members with disabilities included throughout the year. Learn about the basics of document accessibility and get a grounding of what your publications and marketing volunteers should be aware of in order to make sure your convention’s materials are accessible to everyone. Handout: Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions (407 KB .pdf) or Digital Accessibility Basics Google Drive folder with more material.
Even though every room had its own captioning display (not visible in this shot), I made sure that I provided my own on-screen captions as well.
Since digital accessibility is my day job, I’ve been working on improving the accessibility of electronic materials for both Norwescon and the Seattle Worldcon, and this presentation was part of that outreach project. I go over the basics of why digital accessibility is important, give a brief demonstration of the NVDA screen reader, and then go over some of the basics of creating accessible documents. I think the presentation went well; only a few people were there, but those that were there that were interested and engaged, with good questions and comments. While it would have been nice if more conrunners had joined, this is only the second time I’ve done this presentation in the con environment (the first being last winter’s SMOFcon), and I know that more outreach along these lines is needed — and hey, it wasn’t an empty room, so I’ll still count it as a success!
I even had a good few minutes of post-presentation questions from the attendees afterwards.
Saturday evening, of course, was the Hugo awards ceremony and another chance to play dress-up! We found a group of friends to wait in line with and sit with (though we did get split across a couple rows), and had a good time at the ceremony.
We looked great!Thanks to Jon for this photo of my wife, me, Crystal, Eric, Teya, and Zerelina as we waited in line.
The ballroom looked great, and on the whole, as an audience member there in the moment, felt like it went pretty well. That said, there were a few hiccups, most egregious being that though most nominees with a large list of team members had their full team read out, the team for khōréō, which had a lot of non-Western names, was just clumsily read as “the khōréō team”…and apparently, this was the second time this happened to them. In an otherwise good ceremony, this stood out to me in the moment as an unfortunate choice. Should the khōréō team be nominated again in the future, I hope they get the full recognition they deserve, just as the rest of the group nominees did.
The stage shortly before the ceremony began.
The highlight for me, of course, was seeing Star Trek get its first Hugo award in 30-some years, for the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “The New Next Generation”…and then just a little later, its second of the night, for the Star Trek: Lower Decks choose-your-own-adventure style graphic novel, Warp Your Own Way! Star Trek has often been nominated for awards but rarely wins, and to have it win twice in one night, and for its half-hour animated comedy incarnation (which really is both excellent comedy and excellent Star Trek) was a real treat.
Hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, Seanan McGuire, Catherine McManamon, Cecilia Eng, and musical guest of honor Alexander James Adams opened the ceremony with a performance of “Down the Hugo Road”, a filk parody of “Down the Witches Road” from Agatha All Along.
After the Hugo awards, it was back over to the Sheraton for the Saturday night dance with DJ Dancin’ Dan, who used to be one of Norwescon’s regular DJs. It was good to see him doing his thing again, and as with the other dance nights, much fun was had bouncing around on the dance floor. My most amusing moment was having Taylor come get me when the Rasputin came on, suggest we go out into the center of the circle, and then say, “Okay, you lead!” “I lead? You asked me!” was my response, but we managed to pull it off for a few moments. :)
Taylor was dressed as Lucifer from Hazbin Hotel, which I know nothing about, but she looked great!
And then, back to the hotel so we could crash.
The first part of Saturday was…you know the drill.
Caitlin, Shelley, someone who I didn’t catch the name of, and myself; this year’s “’zine team”!
At least by this point, there were far fewer updates to make to the schedule, since we were down to the last day of the con, so we were able to find some time to wander through the exhibit hall (first my wife on her own as I worked, and then the two of us together) and do a little bit of geeky shopping, picking up t-shirts for both of us, some stickers and bookmarks, and some nice jewelry for my wife (including some great Star Trek delta logo earrings). I also stopped by the Seacon exhibit as Mary was disassembling it and was quite tickled to have her ask me to autograph my Seacon article in the program book.
Founded in 1978, Norwescon (NWC) draws thousands of Pacific Northwest SFF creators and fans each spring. But did you know that NWC grew out of a desire to bring Worldcon back to Seattle? Well, we’ve finally done it, so come hear how we got here… and what’s next!
Wm Salt Hale (M), Michael Hanscom, Taylor Tomblin, Tim Bennett
Tim, Taylor, Me, and Salt, ready to talk about Norwescon.
For the next hour, Salt, Taylor, Tim and I (along with help from other Norwescon people in the audience, including Don, Doug, Pat, Rob, Peggy, Sarah, and I may be forgetting some) talked about Norwescon’s history, where we’ve been, where we are now, and extrapolated a bit into where we hope Norwescon goes as we approach our 50th year and beyond. It was fun to do, and the audience seemed to be a nice mix of people who were familiar with Norwescon and people who didn’t know much about us.
I think I had two favorite moments from this panel. One was hearing from Sarah, who is relatively new to Norwescon, as she talked about how she found us and appreciated how we welcomed her in and how much that meant to her. The other was from a younger person in the audience who, after hearing stories from Tim (who attended several of Norwescon’s earliest years) about how as a teen he’d skipped out on his job at Jack in the Box to attend Norwescon with no budget, room, or parental knowledge, crashing with friends and figuring things out on a fly, responded with a heartfelt but very amusing, “I’m seventeen, and I just want to know how you got away with doing all that!” The ’80s were a very different time…. (It was also very nice to see Sarah immediately head over to them to talk to them and, I assume, extend a personal invitation on ways to attend and maybe get involved.)
The image on the screen is the cover of the very first Norwescon program book from 1978.
One thing that I didn’t think to mention during the panel that in retrospect that I wish I had: One of the things I’ve found I really value about Norwescon over the years has been how many of our guests of honor have become regular (or semi-regular) attendees and panelists in following years. While we are able to provide travel and lodging for our invited headlining guests of honor, we can’t do that for all of our attending pros and panelists, and I think it’s wonderful how many have such a good time as guests that they then volunteer to spend their own time and money attending and participating afterwards. I think it says a lot about how well run and welcoming the convention is.
Seattle Worldcon Chair Kathy behind the podium in the middle, with the department heads lined up behind her.
And not long after that wrapped up, we were off to closing ceremonies. I got to see a lot of friends up on stage, the convention wrapped up, and the gavel was passed off to next year’s LAcon V. We don’t know yet whether that will work into our travel plans, but whether we’re there or not, if you’re at all into the SFF fan world and have been to a Worldcon before or have yet to give it a shot, I recommend going if you’re able.
Happily, we’d been clever enough to save the protective cardboard sheets after unpacking all of these, so we could easily pack them all up again.
Of course, when you’re part of the organizing committee, the con doesn’t end when the con ends! Once closing ceremonies wrapped up, we headed down to the exhibition hall and packed up all of the Philip K. Dick award posters so they could go back into Norwescon storage. It just wouldn’t have been right to leave that for someone else (but I do have to thank Jeanine for getting started on that before we showed up).
So many posters! But really, it didn’t take terribly long to get them all packed back up.
After closing ceremonies, my wife went back to the hotel to relax, and I headed off to the dead dog party to have a couple hours of collective “oh my god, we actually did this thing” decompression with many of the on-site staff before heading back to the hotel and getting to bed.
And finally, it was time to pack up our stuff and head back home, with a very successful Worldcon behind us.
So many people put so much work into this, and I really think that while there were some stumbles here and there along the way, in the end, we put on a damn good show.
Though I wasn’t directly involved, I was thrilled with the captioning solution our team came up with. We had live, real-time captioning available in every panel room for the full convention. While we used CART (human) captioning for big events, most of the rooms used self-contained auto captioning systems that used Google software running on a Raspberry Pi, all on-device with no network access required. While not perfect (as with any automated captioning system), it worked well enough, and its very prevalence got a lot of compliments throughout the weekend.
My staff badge for the weekend.
Sometime on Friday or Saturday (at this point I’ve forgotten exactly when), Kathy found me and presented me with a “Hero of Worldcon” pin in thanks for the work I’ve done on the website and in various other ways over the past couple years. Apparently my name was put forward by a few people, too! Thanks to Kathy and to whomever suggested me for this — it means a lot to have gotten this.
On the one hand, I just do what I think needs to be done. On the other, it is really nice to get this kind of recognition.
There are so many people and friends to thank and recognize (and this won’t be nearly everyone; I’m just concentrating on those I worked most closely with over the past couple years, and may have forgotten some): Kathy for chairing this and herding all the cats, SunnyJim for handling programming and herding all the other cats, Michelle for her incredible work in heading up exhibits, Keith for the tech work and coming up with a great in-room captioning solution, Gail for handling the virtual side and being willing to work with me on making sure that her side of things tied into the main website and keeping accessibility in mind during all of it, Kathryn (and her predecessor) and Jesi for working with me on the accessibility of WSFS materials, and — last, but definitely not least (which always seems like a weird phrase to me, because it begs the question of who is least, but whatever…) — the Publications team: Kevin at the head, Caitlin and Shelley with the ‘zine, BE heading up editing the blog and all of our excellent contributors, Cheryl handling the newsletter, Tabby’s signs, Dawn taking on social media, and Cee for providing very appreciated help with the website. All of you are wonderful and contributed to a great experience.
Not a bad collection of ribbons, especially given how much time I spent locked away in the publications office!
I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!
♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.
🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)
This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.
🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.
🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.
🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.
📸 Photos
Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is _no way_ I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.
Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.
Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.
📺 Watching
Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.
I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.
🎧 Listening
I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:
Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.
Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.
Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.
🔗 Linking
Particularly interesting reads from across the web.
This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”
Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”
Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”
Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”
James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”
Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”
Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?
Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”
Really, this is one of those weeks that just boils down to being another week, without any noteworthy points.
♿️ As we’re approaching the end of spring quarter and commencement gets closer, I’m pretty constantly feeling like I’m just slightly behind where I should be with everything, Not enough to be in panic mode, just enough to never feel quite satisfied with the situation. Definitely looking forward to the summer quarter and hoping things slow down a touch.
🚀 Norwescon has just about wound down, with just this coming weekend’s post-con meeting to wrap things up until we spin up in the fall for next year. Of course, that means a little less for me, as the website needs to be archived and reworked; hopefully I’ll be able to arrange time with my team to start that work soon. The Worldcon situation has dropped down to a light simmer rather than a full boil, which is progress. Mostly, I keep watching what people write and constantly have to fight the temptation to jump in and correct mistaken assumptions or assertions. As satisfying as it might be in the moment, it wouldn’t actually help. Sometimes knowing that I’m better off keeping my mouth shut really sucks, though.
🏡 We spent part of the weekend cleaning up our little back yard for the summer and refreshing the herb and flower planters. (By which I mean, my wife did the planting, and I did the manual labor of moving planters around and hauling the old stuff out to the trash.) Hoping we have more chances to relax back there than we have for the past couple summers.
📸 Photos
Pansies at the garden center.Sitting for a moment between moving things around.One corner of our yard.Another corner of the yard.
Started Greg Cox’s Miasma, a Star Trek ebook novella.
📺 Watching
Lately it’s been a fair amount of old Hell’s Kitchen, because it can be entertaining to watch Gordon Ramsey yell at people.
🎧 Listening
VNV Nation’s “Construct” came out this week, and new VNV Nation is always good. I did see one friend describe it as “the new VNV Music Factory”, which is funny, but also not wrong, but y’know, I’m good with that. It’s like a review I once saw comparing KMFDM to a Big Mac: You always know that what you get is going to be maybe not not great, but big, cheezy, and acceptably satisfying when that’s what you’re in the mood for. VNV Nation isn’t the same sound, of course, but it’s kind of the same idea: You know what you’re getting, and it’s good comfort food (and occasionally really, really good, though I haven’t identified any tracks off this album that are particular standouts yet).
🔗 Linking
Joe Kissell at Take Control Books: Introducing MailMaven, a Better Mac Email App: “MailMaven is an email client for people who love email but want total control over every aspect of it. If there’s something you always wished your email app could do, Maven probably does it (or will before long). But it also does lots of things you never realized you absolutely need in an email app, and soon won’t be able to live without.” Mostly I’m fine with Apple Mail, but sometimes I wonder if something else might work better for me, and this one looks promising.
Niléane at MacStories: Are Pride Wallpapers and a Watch Band Enough in 2025?: “At a time when some trans people are actively seeking to flee the U.S. to preserve their fundamental right to a healthy, safe, and decent life free from the threat of President Trump’s actions, Apple doesn’t seem to be stepping up to its professed values to the extent that the situation requires.”
Erin Underwood at File 770: Op-Ed: About Choosing Convention Program Participants: “I understand the frustration and anger toward LLMs, but I think that we need to grant a little grace and understanding … and even kindness … to the people who are donating their time and putting their hearts, blood, sweat, and tears into trying to create these events that bring our community together.” Whatever your stance on generative AI and the Seattle Worldcon, this is well worth reading.
Adrian Roselli: Do Not Publish Your Designs on the Web with Figma Sites…: “…Unless you want to fail all the WCAGs, create litigation risk, close off opportunities in Europe, engage in reputational harm, and oh yeah, throw up barriers to your customers and users.”
Liv Lyons in The Thunderword, Highline’s student paper: Student panel leads from the front on IPSE Day: “Building 7 was the beating heart of campus one week ago, as the students and faculty who make up Highline’s Achieve Program embodied the tenets of accessibility, diversity, and self-acceptance, further highlighting the importance of Inclusive Post-Secondary Education (IPSE) Day at collegiate institutions nationwide.” Our students put on a great panel for IPSE Day!
Mac Themes Garden: “Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.” I miss Kaleidoscope, and really wish there was this sort of customization available for the modern macOS.
I Don’t Have Spotify: Paste in a link to a music track on one service, get links to it on other services. Handy for those of us who refuse to give Spotify money.
While not a bad week, this was a long week. Having just finished the four days of Norwescon, I had Monday off to rest, and then went right into three days of two combined work conferences for DSSC and WAPED. They were good, and it’s always good to connect with work colleagues from across the state, but oof. Even in different contexts, that was about a week and a half of being on.
This weekend we did as little as possible.
📸 Photos
One of my roles for Norwescon is as assistant historian (a side effect of running the convention’s online archives, and this year, I was given three and a half boxes with several decades of old convention ephemera. Lots was from Norwescon, but there was also a lot of stuff from other cons, including OryCon, CascadiaCon (the 2005 Nasfic), Westercon, the World Fantasy Convention, Worldcon, and bits and pieces from a few others. I’ve sorted through it all, and most of it I’ll try to pass off to more appropriate interested parties, but the Norwescon stuff will be slowly scanned and added to our archives. Lots of fun to see this old stuff!The Star Trek corner of my desk at work got a fun upgrade with the addition of a desk lamp with the TOS Enterprise dangling from the pull chain. A friend was decluttering, so I…well, I cluttered, but that’s okay.
Started Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. I’m almost done with the Vorkosigan Saga books, and the next book on my Hugo reading project is the second in Bujold’s World of the Five Gods series, so my current plan is to go ahead and finish off the Vorkosigan saga before moving on to her fantasy work.
Chrysalis Magazine: “Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults).”
Anne Minahan: “Martha’s Rules”: An Alternative to Robert’s Rules of Order (PDF link): “…Martha’s Rules…were developed by Martha’s Housing Co-op for families in Madison, Wisconsin. Martha’s Rules are not only an alternative to Robert’s Rules, but provide ideas for people in organizations who are committed to consensus decision-making and who want to make it work well.”
Catherine Zhu at CBC Radio: 45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved: “In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining, the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers. ¶ But the photo wasn’t taken on set with extras. It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone. But whose face was it?”
Tim Stevens at The Verge: The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen: “Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be….” I’m not at all a pickup person, so am not really in the market, but I’m rather fascinated by Slate‘s approach. Kinda wish there was a car version of this.
Lia Woodward and Leah Folta at McSweeney’s: This Five-Hundred-Word Bumper Sticker On My Tesla Explains Why I’m Not A Bad Person: “Before the last few months, Musk was only mean toward some people, and I hope you can understand that I and most people in my social circles were not among them. So when that suddenly changed for me this year, I was just as outraged as any of you, as evidenced by this five-hundred-word bumper sticker prominently placed on my Tesla.”
From Norwescon 47: Are you Team Enterprise or Team Skywalker? Do you dream of the final frontier, or a galaxy far, far away? Lightsaber or phaser? The Force or the Prime Directive? Let your attire display your affiliation as we dance the night away with DJ Wüdi!
One note: Due to technical issues that plagued the start of the dance, the first 20-some minutes of this has been reconstructed at home. Everything from 27 minutes on was recorded live at Norwescon. This also means there’s one duplicated track…have fun finding it!
This week was all about Norwescon! Well, Monday and Tuesday were normal workdays, but from then on, it was all con, all the time.
The Opening Ceremonies, with the guests of honor being introduced and briefly interviewed.
Wednesday: Day zero of con is load-in, setup, and generally getting things ready. I spent the morning at home packing up all my stuff, and at noon drove to pick up my wife from work, then she dropped me off at the hotel and headed home for a quiet weekend on her own. From there, it was a lot of wandering around and helping where I could help until I could check into my room, then more of the same.
Thursday: Day one of con starts with more helping with setup, plus a lot of general wandering around, saying hi to people, socializing with friends, and so on. I had two official duties for Thursday:
8 p.m.: Introduction to Fandom Dancing was my first time paneling at a convention…though rather than the usual “sit at a table and talk”, this was “play music and help teach people how to do dance”. We concentrated on the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Macarena, and Thriller, plus encouraging people to just have fun and get out and move and not worry about what you look like.
9 p.m.: Immediately following that was the Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Unfortunately, I had some technical issues that made the first 20-30 minutes really dodgy, with a lot of starting and stopping and apologizing as I tried to figure out why my headphones weren’t working, making it impossible for me to pre-cue and mix upcoming tracks. Everyone there understood that these things happen, and once I figured out a solution (though I still need to go back and experiment to really nail down what was going on so it doesn’t happen again), I got a good three-hour set in, going until 12:30 a.m., which is pretty good for Thursday night. I was a little frazzled from the clumsy start, so many of my ideas for what I was going to do disappeared from my brain and I know I didn’t play a lot of the tracks I had planned, but people danced and had fun, which was the important part. I recorded the set, and will have it processed and uploaded to my MixCloud page as soon as I can get around to it.
Friday: Friday morning I had free to wander and socialize, but the afternoon and evening of day two of the con was all about the Philip K. Dick Award.
3 p.m.: All About the Philip K. Dick Award is held on Fridays to give people a bit of a history of the award and introduce the attending PKD nominees and let them talk about their work for a bit. This year we had three attending nominees, Bora Chung, Tara Campbell, and Subodhana Wijeyeratne. Normally this panel is moderated by award administrator Gordon Van Gelder, but travel difficulties had him delayed, so I stepped up to moderate instead. I was a bit nervous, having only done one panel before (the prior night’s dance panel, where I mostly played DJ) and never having moderated, but I’d sat in on the panel enough to have a pretty good idea of what Gordon usually said. Between myself and a little assistance from audience members asking questions, we had a very nice conversation with the nominees.
4 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award social is a private event for the nominees to spend some time meeting and chatting with each other. I got them set up in the room, hung around and chatted for about half an hour, and then left them on their own as I headed down to my room to change.
5 p.m.: The Lifetime Member dinner is another private event for Norwescon’s lifetime members (a group I was inaugurated into two years ago) along with our guests of honor, PKD nominees, and charitable partner representatives. I had a table with all of the PKD nominees and their plus-ones, so we were able to continue the conversations from the prior couple hours as we ate. I left about 6:15 to head to the next room over to do some final setup, and then it was time for…
7 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony! This was my third year as ceremony coordinator, and after first-year jitters and second-year “we’re switching the room the ceremony is held in three hours before the ceremony” scrambling, this year went off smoothly and without a hitch. Our three attending nominees read selections from their nominated works, readers read for those nominees who were unable to attend, and it all went well. This year’s winners were Brenda Peynado for Time’s Agent and Adrian Tchaikovsky getting the special citation for Alien Clay, and though neither winner was in attendance, a good time was had by all.
At that point, I was done for the day, and spent the rest of the evening bouncing back and forth among the dance, room parties, and general socializing as I came across people.
Saturday: Day three of the con is normally a free day for me that I can spend doing whatever seems right in the moment. However, this year I was giving a presentation panel in the evening, and though I’d had “finish the presentation materials” on my to-do list for months…well, yeah. Sometimes procrastination bites us in the butt, and I ended up spending nearly my entire Saturday holed up in my room getting everything finished and ready to go. And so, finally, I emerged, got some socializing in, and then it was time for…
7 p.m.: Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites. This is essentially an adaptation of the kind of thing I do for my day job all the time, and a variation on a panel I gave at last winter’s SMOFcon and will be giving at Seattle Worldcon 2025 in August. For SMOFcon and Worldcon I aim it more at “why/how your convention can make your materials more accessible”; for Norwescon, I tweaked it a bit to be aimed more at authors, especially if self-publishing or marketing, and publishers. While I only had five attendees, all of them were interested and engaged with good comments and questions, and as this was the first time trying this out, with a somewhat niche interest, and programmed at 7 p.m. on Saturday against the masquerade, I’m counting it as a success, and hopefully will be bringing it back next year as well.
After the panel, it was another evening of floating among the dance, parties, and chatting with whomever I came across as the evening rolled on.
Sunday: And finally, it was Sunday, day four and the final day, with nothing on my schedule except packing up and loading out. I took the day slow, got packed up, and headed home just after the closing ceremonies. With that, another con was done!
📸 Photos
The now-traditional photo my wife takes as she drops me off for “nerd summer camp”.Star Trek poodle skirts!With T’Resik, who was stoically bemused by the shenanigans of the humans around her.I may have the smallest dance, since it’s on Thursday night, but in my not-at-all humble opinion, I have the best looking dance graphics!Philip K. Dick Award nominees Bora Chung, Tara Campbell, and Subodhana Widjeyeratne and myself at the All About the Philip K. Dick Award panel.Opening and welcoming the audience to the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony.
Radek Sienkiewicz: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?: “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making a logo that resembles an anus.”
Jeremy Reimer at Ars Technica: An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1: “In our new 3-part series, we remember the people and ideas that made the Internet.” I actually haven’t read this one yet, but want to remember to do so and continue on through the series.
🏚️ Ah, the joys of owning a 30-some year old house. We finally got around to having the bathroom fan replaced. We’d said to each other that we didn’t really think the fan that was there actually did much of anything (other than make noise), and the contractor had the same opinion, describing it as a “toy”. Now we have a new fan that’s larger, quieter, actually moves air, and vents into an insulated vent hose instead of the uninsulated one that was dripping condensation back into the bathroom during last month’s cold snap. Improvements have been made!
🕺🏻 Made it out to The Mercury on Saturday night for some stompyboot üntz-üntz gothclubbing time. A slow night, with some faces I recognized but not really anyone I knew, but the music was good and I got some good floor time in, so it was worthwhile.
⌚️🥱 Insert my biannual (semiannual? twice a year) rant on the evil that is daylight saving time, how much I hate the time change, and how frustrating it is that Washington voted to get rid of the time change years ago, but did it the wrong damn way, so it did no good. If we could just ditch DST and stay on standard time, this would all be done with.
📸 Photos
From my wife, amused by my lap full of Apples as I took the selfie to go with the blog post about the book I’d just finished.Decor at the Mercury.
📝 Writing
🚀 While I didn’t really write much of it (just the description for my accessibility panel), the schedule for Norwescon 47 went live this week, which was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes processing to convert the provided Excel spreadsheet to the HTML code that goes onto the website. It’s always fun to see this go up!
Started Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente, Norwescon‘s writer guest of honor next month.
📺 Watching
🇺🇸 We did not watch Trump’s State of the Union. Masochism just isn’t my thing.
We started Alone: Australia, where people with far more outdoor skills than we have get dropped in the middle of the Tasmanian wilderness to survive as long as they can. Because, yes, this is totally something normal people do.
We’ve also come back to season three of Evil. I kinda want the pop-up books (and love the way what’s essentially an opening sequence gag keeps getting worked into the action of the show).
🎧 Listening
We’re starting to get requests in for the Norwescon dances, which is always a fun way to be introduced to music I don’t know. So far, I’ve added the following to my collection:
April 9 is CSS Naked Day, which I should get in on: “The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. In the words of 2006, it’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is.”
Mozi: An interesting looking, privacy focused app to coordinate with friends for real-world encounters. An “I’m going to be in [place] at [time]” sort of thing. Currently iOS only, Android maybe in the future.
Priscilla Page, Mad Max: Fury Road: Excellent essay on the best of the Mad Max films. There was so much good analysis and commentary on this film in the months after it came out; diving back into that from a more recent perspective was a pleasure.
Norwescon 47 is coming up quick, and this year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling!
Here’s my (tentative, but should be pretty solid) schedule for the con; any time not listed here when I’m not sleeping, I’ll likely be found wandering the convention, hanging out with people, getting into ridiculously geeky conversations, enjoying the costuming, and generally seeing what’s going on:
Thursday, 4/17
Thursday night dance setup (7–8 p.m.): Making sure the noise goes boom as it should.
Introduction to Fandom Dancing (8–9 p.m., Grand 3): Teaching people how to do things like the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Thriller dance, and so on.
Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars (9 p.m.–1 a.m., Grand 3): I DJ. Noise goes boom! People boogie.
Friday, 4/18
A few Philip K. Dick award related things during the day.
Lifetime Dinner (5–7 p.m.): Munchies and chatting with other lifetime members, the guests of honor, and the Philip K. Dick award nominees.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony doors open (6:30 p.m., Grand 3): Welcoming all to the award ceremony.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony (7–8:30 p.m., Grand 3): Featuring readings of selections from the nominated works (read by their authors if attending) and the presentation of the the award.
Saturday, 4/19
Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites (7–8 p.m., Cascade 10): Aimed primarily at authors, especially if self-publishing, small publishers, but also for anyone distributing writing online. An overview of digital accessibility and tips on how to make sure that what is being published can be read by everyone, including readers with disabilities.
So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!
🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.
📸 Photos
Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.
Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.
🎧 Listening
I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.
For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.
“Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.
Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.
Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.
