Underworld

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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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

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.

Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.

Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.

Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…

A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.

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!

People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.

Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.
  • 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.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.
  • 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.”
  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….
  • 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.”
  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!
  • 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?”
  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.
  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.
  • 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?
  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”
  • 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.”
  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Music Question Challenge 2025

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Another blog meme! This one I found through Elena’s post, and honestly, I debated diving into this one, as it’s primarily made up of questions that I really don’t like — not because of anything wrong with the questions themselves, but because they’re so difficult for me to answer. :) But what the heck, let’s give this a shot.

One major disclaimer, though: Most of these answers could change at any moment depending on any number of reasons. This is a snapshot of a very brief moment in time.

What are 5 of your favourite albums?

Props to the original author for making this “five of your favorite”, and not “your five favorite”. That makes it easier (though not easy) to answer.

What are five of your favourite songs?

Albums was bad enough, but songs? This is where things really get difficult. Again, I appreciate that this isn’t supposed to be my five favorite songs, just five of my favorites.

Favourite instrument(s)

Cello, probably. I played violin (never terribly well) as a kid, and I’ve long wondered if I’d stuck with it more if I’d picked cello. As it was, my brother, who started with cello, went on to bass (both standup bass and electric bass guitar, depending on whether he was playing in an orchestra, a bluegrass band, or a punk band, any of which have been and still might be possibilities), while I started with violin and went on to DJing.

What song or album are you currently listening to?

Right at this moment, nothing. This week, it’s mostly been the six-disc 40th anniversary re-release of Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up last week.

Do you listen to the radio? If so, how often?

Not unless I happen to be somewhere where someone else has it on. What with the annoyance of commercials, the lack of stations that reliably play what I want to hear, and my extensive music collection, there’s just no reason to bother.

How often do you listen to music?

As often as possible. I used to have a near constant soundtrack going, but these days it’s primarily when I’m working or puttering around on my own.

How often and how do you discover music?

“How often” is a hard one to answer, as it just kind of happens when it happens. As far as “how” goes, sometimes it’s hearing something good when I’m out clubbing, sometimes friends introduce me to new stuff, and sometimes some other way.

I’m a big fan of compilation albums, and have a few labels on Bandcamp that I’ll regularly pick up annual or themed compilations when they appear. These days, those labels are Re:Mission Entertainment, Alfa Matrix, Artoffact Records, Infacted Recordings, and Sideline Magazine.

I also enjoy a lot of mashups and get a lot of those from Bootie Mashup. Since I don’t listen to the radio or much pop, mashups have introduced me to a lot of pop that I’d otherwise not have heard (and I’m often amused when I hear a song that I recognize but it sounds weird, and realize that I’m hearing the original when I’d only heard bits and pieces as used in mashups).

What’s a song or album that you enjoy that you wish had more recognition?

Many years ago, when I visited Germany in 1990 or ’91 (I can’t remember which trip this was), I discovered the band Poems for Laila and picked up their first two albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Fillette Triste (which doesn’t appear to be available as a YouTube playlist). I think both are extremely good, and have often recommended them to people, as they never got much play here in the United States (I’ve rarely found anyone else who’d heard of them).

What’s your favourite song of all time?

There is absolutely no possible way to answer this question. Too many possibilities, too many variables.

Has your taste in music evolved over the years?

Oh, absolutely.

Growing up, dad contributed a lot of rock, folk, and classic country, and mom contributed a lot of classical. Our family was very involved with the music in our churches. I spent many years in a local children’s choir (first the Anchorage Boys Choir, then the Anchorage Girls and Boys Choir when the two choirs (run by the same people) merged, and then as they changed their name to the Alaska Children’s Choir), which exposed me to a wide range of choral music.

As I grew, while I was certainly exposed to a lot of pop, I soon found myself being drawn to what was then termed “alternative” music. I started going to my high school dances, and though I was at first a definite wallflower, with regular “they’ll all laugh at me” thoughts keeping me off the dance floor, eventually I started heading out to the floor, and discovered a love for dancing.

High school dances encouraged my appreciation for pop, and after high school, I started exploring the local all-ages club, eventually finding Sharkey’s, which had pop upstairs and alternative down in the basement. Sharkey’s and the DJs there exposed me to both dance/electronica and goth/industrial, and I found my home.

Since then, I’ve mostly considered the goth/industrial and electronica/techno/dance genres to be my favorites, though I still have a love for, well, just about everything. While I used to profess a disdain for hip-hop and rap, there were always “acceptable” groups, and I’ve come to realize that there was a lot of unconscious and unexplored systemic racism and classism wrapped up in that, and I’ve been gaining more of an appreciation for both classic and modern rap and hip hop.

Eventually I found my way into DJing, and spent about ten years spinning at all-ages clubs in Anchorage as my alter-ego DJ Wüdi. Finding music for the clubs and picking up songs from requests exposed me to a lot more stuff I might not have found otherwise.

Basically, while there are certainly bad songs (though even many of those can be enjoyable at the right place and time), and lots of quite unfortunate artists (even when they produce tracks I like), there’s no such thing as universally bad genres.

Except for smooth jazz. The exception that proves the rule, right? ;)

Tag, you’re it

I’m not one for tagging people in these sorts of things, but if you come across this and want to play along, jump in!

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

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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….
  • 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
    • 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.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • 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.

    They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

    “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.

Linking

  1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

    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.

  2. 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.
  3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

    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.

Norwescon 46 Thursday Dance: Fandom Mash with DJ Wüdi

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It’s the Thursday night dance! On our first evening venturing Into the Wylde, who knows what manner of fantastical beings we will encounter… or we will be? Mix-and-match from whatever outfits you brought for the weekend to create mashup costumes, or wear something to represent your fandom(s), and come down and dance to a mix of dance tracks across eras, convention favorites, and all manner of mashups and oddities, all brought to you by DJ Wüdi!

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Not a Spotify Wrap-up

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Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.

Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.

That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….

Top Artists

Top Artists 549 total artists 1 The Orb 137 minutes 2 Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes 3 4 Dolly Parton 128 minutes Orbital 124 minutes 5 Underworld 89 minutes 6 Bonobo 71 minutes 7 Hooverphonic 69 minutes 8 Imperative Reaction 64 minutes 9 Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes 10 Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes 11 VNV Nation 50 minutes 12 Seabound 50 minutes 13 Front Line Assembly 46 minutes 14 Rotersand 44 minutes 15 Icon of Coil 44 minutes

549 total artists

  1. The Orb 137 minutes
  2. Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
  3. Dolly Parton 128 minutes
  4. Orbital 124 minutes
  5. Underworld 89 minutes
  6. Bonobo 71 minutes
  7. Hooverphonic 69 minutes
  8. Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
  9. Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
  10. Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
  11. VNV Nation 50 minutes
  12. Seabound 50 minutes
  13. Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
  14. Rotersand 44 minutes
  15. Icon of Coil 44 minutes

I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!

Top Songs

Top Songs 872 total songs 1 BAD GUYS FEELIN' ALRIGHT ELLE KING Feelin' Alright (from... Elle King 8 plays 2 Wide Open The Crystal Method 6 plays 3 Cuts You Up Peter Murphy 5 plays 4 Came Back Haunted Nine Inch Nails 5 plays 5 Dial8 Velvet Acid Christ 5 plays 6 Modern Love David Bowie 7 5 plays HOOVERPHONIC 2Wicky Hooverphonic 5 plays 8 IMMA ATE Express Yourself (Edi... Madonna Madonna 5 plays 9 The Night (feat. Aliso... Röyksopp 4 plays 10 Underworld I Exhale Underworld 4 plays 11 12 13 14 15 SOME NIGHTS INVNATION AUTOMATIC Spock VCMG 4 plays Eraser E Nine Inch Nails 4 plays Some Nights E Fun. 4 plays Gratitude VNV Nation 4 plays Funk 4 Peace... Fort Knox Five 4 plays

Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.

So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.

Difficult Listening Hour 2021.03.06

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Unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants, let’s-see-what-happens mixing. You never know what might fall into one of these!

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Difficult Listening Hour 2020.09.26

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Week twenty-nine of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. As a way of getting back into practice and doing something regularly, I’ve started doing regular Twitch broadcasts, now on Saturday afternoons. These are the results. Anything goes.

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Difficult Listening Hour 2020.08.01

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Week twenty-three of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. As a way of getting back into practice and doing something regularly, I’ve started doing regular Twitch broadcasts, now on Saturday mid-mornings. These are the results. Anything goes.

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