The Family Plan

Weekly Notes: November 17–23, 2025

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  • 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…

  • 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

An AFT Washington Representation Authorization card with a pen next to it, sitting on a white marble tabletop.
About to sign my “yes” vote for unionizing.
Me, wearing a black cap and short-sleeve button-up shirt with mid-century modern sci-fi designs, droping my authorization card into a black metal mailbox.
Dropping my signed card into the collection box.

📺 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

  • 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.'”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

  • 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.”

Weekly Notes: November 3–9, 2025

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  • Work ramped up again a bit this past week, with two afternoons taken up by the DSSC fall meeting. Always good to connect with colleagues across the state, even virtually.

  • While we did most of our celebrating last weekend, Monday was my wife’s actual birthday. We both had to work, but had a nice dinner that evening, had some cake, and she opened her birthday presents.

📸 Photos

A snail crawls over a leaf-strewn path.
Of the various options for Pacific Northwest animals and bugs to be spotted on walks, I think this was the first time I’d spotted a snail.
A path bordered by low rock walls leads through trees, with every thing covered by fallen leaves.
So many leaves all over the place after last week’s storms. Fall happened all at once this year.
A small red heart with diagonal rainbow stripes against stone.
Spotted along the stone wall bordering one section of the walking path.
Something that looks like the decaying skull of a dog in the midst of thorny bushes.
At one point we both spotted something to one side of the trail that on first glance looked like a skull on a stick, or maybe a dead dog. When we got closer, we realized someone had shoved a Halloween werewolf mask into the bushes. Both creepy and funny, once we figured it out!
A clear, blue, and pink plastic multi-pointed star ornament hanging from a tree in the woods.
The holiday ornament sparkling from a tree branch was much less disturbing of a find.
A blue and yellow sculpted clay mushroom house sitting in a crack between stones in a rock wall.
As was the cute little mushroom house tucked into the rock wall.
A mossy rock wall receeds into the distance next to a path covered with fall leaves.
Just a pretty fall scene on our walk.

📝 Writing

📺 Watching

Since we were out and about with birthday celebrations last weekend, this weekend was a stay at home and watch movies weekend.

  • Alien: Romulus (2024) (I actually watched this one on my own): visually fun, but felt too much like someone just grabbed their favorite scenes and shots from every prior Alien film and strung them together.

  • The Family Plan (2023): An amusing “turn off your brain” action-adventure-comedy; perfect for a weekend afternoon.

  • Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025): A very satisfying end to the Downton Abbey saga. And since one of the presents I got my wife for her birthday was the full season set, now we can start over from the beginning….

  • Death of a Unicorn (2025): This was a really fun mix of comedy, horror, and fantasy. Neat design work for the unicorns, too. Definitely occasionally on the gory side of things, but if you can cope with that, it’s worth checking out.

🔗 Linking

  • Te-Ping Chen at The Wall Street Journal: They Tear Down Walls and Hire Architects to Make Room for Their Lego Worlds: I don’t have the disposable income to be able to afford this much LEGO or to devote this much home to storing LEGO, but as one of those “if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there would be signs” situations….

  • Christine Mi at The Washington Post: A week at sea aboard the last ocean liner: Very much in line with my our experience when we did this a few years ago. Worth doing once to have done it and had the pseudo-historical experience, but neither of us is particularly interested in doing this or any other cruise ship trip again.

  • Anil Dash: Turn the volume up.: “Today marked a completely new moment for New York City, and for America. There will be countless attempts at analysis and reflection and what-does-it-all-mean in the days to come, along with an unimaginable number of hateful attacks. But what’s worth reflecting on right now is the fact that we’ve entered a new era, and that, even at the very start, there are some extraordinary things that we can observe.”

  • Chirag Vedullapalli at The Seattle Times: This little-known position in WA is a huge democracy booster: “Each precinct is a civic block roughly the size of a neighborhood or two, with generally a few hundred to 1,000 registered voters. There are about 7,500 of these precincts in the state. Each precinct is meant to elect two people, one from the Democratic Party and one from the Republican Party, to the position of precinct committee officer. […] However, most people don’t know this role exists, and most precincts sit empty.”

  • Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo: Oh, What a Night!: “By now you know, Dems had a big night. We won the marquee races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey. We walloped the GOP on Prop 50 in California. We won down-ballot races and flipped lots of seats. And NYC has a young, charismatic Muslim mayor-elect—a historic first. ¶ There’s a lot to celebrate, so let’s start wide and work our way down!”

  • Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton at The Seattle Times: Barnes & Noble plans to return to downtown Seattle: “Bookworms, rejoice: Barnes & Noble plans to return to downtown Seattle, according to recent city filings.”

  • Tim Nudd at AdAge: Apple TV’s colorful new branding was built with glass and captured in-camera: “The five-second version of the new branding, which will run before Apple TV shows, nicely highlights the colored-lights effect. The lush visuals are meant to capture the platform’s cinematic ambitions and remind viewers that Apple TV is where prestige storytelling lives. ¶ Many might assume the visual effects were made digitally, but in fact, it was all done practically using glass and captured in-camera.”

  • Rachel Moody at The Daily Tar Heel: Column: “Low skilled” workers are a myth: “I have worked as a restaurant server and hostess. I’ve also worked as a research intern and an office assistant. The most difficult of the two categories? Food service, without a doubt. And yet those jobs were the worst paid.”

  • Ashifa Kassam at The Guardian: Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’: ““Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. ‘Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.’ ¶ That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. ‘Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,’ said Verbeek. ‘We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.'”

  • James Whitbrook at Gizmodo: 20 More Lego ‘Star Trek’ Sets I Want After the ‘Enterprise’-D: “As cool as those massive, pricey replicas can be, Star Trek sets could be so much more than ship models. For almost 60 years across dozens of shows and films, there’s tons of inspiration for sets that could fulfill a multiple range of price points.”

  • The Associated Press (no other byline) at NPR: Fedora man unmasked: Meet the teen behind the Louvre mystery photo: “For Pedro, art and imagery were part of everyday life. So when millions projected stories onto a single frame of him in a fedora beside armed police at the Louvre, he recognized the power of an image and let the myth breathe before stepping forward.”