- ♿️ 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.
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🇺🇸 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.
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🎭 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
📚 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
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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POP Phone: Not going to lie, this is really tempting.
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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.”