♿️ Another quite busy week at work. Tuesday through Thursday mornings were the WAPED fall meeting; on various days this afternoon there were meetings with artists who are working with some of our visually disabled students on some tactile public art for the soon-to-open light rail station near the college, two training sessions on creating screen-reader accessible math equations in documents, and two public information sessions with a representative from the Secretary of State about Washington State’s accessible voting options.
Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.
Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.
Linking
Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”
Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”
Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”
Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”
Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”
♿️ 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.
🎭 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
I wrapped up professional development day on Friday with a walk around the pond in the wooded area on campus.It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!
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.
Tom Bowman at NPR: Opinion: Why I’m handing in my Pentagon press pass: “Thomas Jefferson, no fan of the press himself, once wrote that our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, ‘and that cannot be limited without being lost.’ He knew a free and fair press is an essential safeguard to a functioning democracy.”
Einav Rabinovitch Fox at The Guardian: The not-so secret language of fascist fashion: “Fascism is back in style. Forget the old symbols: swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, skinheads’ shaved heads and combat boots. Extremism has a new look, and it is as fashionable as ever.”
Steve Salter and Kati Chitrakorn at CNN: Brands can’t choose their customers. So what happens when extremists wear their clothes?: “The American University’s Miller-Idriss traces the earliest uses of popular fashion brands as political symbols to early 1990s Germany, which saw a sharp rise in far-right street movements and violence following the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification.”
Christine Clarridge at Axios Seattle: Seattle expands real-time surveillance tools: “The City Council last month voted 7-2 to expand Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) coverage into the Stadium District, Capitol Hill nightlife area and around Garfield High School, giving the Seattle Police Department access to live feeds from hundreds of Department of Transportation cameras.”
POP Phone: Not going to lie, this is really tempting.
Laura Wynne in GQ: How Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails Changed the Sound of Movies: “After Reznor brought industrial grind into the mainstream, he became an in-demand film composer—and from Natural Born Killers to Tron: Ares, he’s done some of his best, most adventurous work for the screen. A definitive guide to Nine Inch Nails on film.”
⌚️ “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.” — Ford Prefect, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I meant to do this last week, but somehow it just didn’t happen. So here we are!
🚀 Last weekend was the October planning meeting for Norwescon; this time held virtually over Zoom. I have a new person on the website team, and we were able to make some good progress on getting them up and running, and they’ve already started jumping in and making some page updates, so things are looking good there.
🕺🏻 I also got to go out to the Mercury for Caturday (or, well, since this was October’s, it was Baturday). Saw a few people, got some dancing in, and had a good night out.
🚨 This week, we had our first run-in with a jury duty scam call. Nothing came of it other than some stress and wasted time, but it wasn’t a fun thing to deal with. If someone calls or leaves you a voice mail saying that you’ve missed jury duty and must immediately pay a fine or be arrested, just hang up and report the call to the police.
📸 Photos
Standing directly under an electrical line tower during last weekend’s morning walk.Another shot from last week’s walk; a scenic spot at the top of a hill.During a walk around the pond on the Highline campus during lunch, I caught the movement of a bird landing in a tree. At first I figured it was one of the many crows, but then saw that it was a hawk. Just managed to get a picture before it flew off again.This weekend’s walk was a good one for mushroom spotting; apparently the recent rains brought them out. These were all over the place.Another kind of mushroom we spotted.
After hearing Blackbook’s “I Dance Alone” at the Mercury last Saturday and realizing I had another couple songs by them already in my collection that I’d picked up on samplers and enjoyed (“Love is a Crime” and “You Are Strange”), I went ahead and picked up their albums Confessions of the Innocent and Radio Strange. Really enjoying them both, and lots of these will be ending up in my regular rotation.
🔗 Linking
Stephanie Booth: Rebooting the Blogosphere, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: “What this is all about is figuring out how blogging can learn from what made “The Socials” (which became the big capitalist social networks we all know) so successful, to the point that many die-hard bloggers (myself included) got sucked up in the socials and either completely abandoned their blog, or left it on life-support. I believe that understanding this can help us draft a vision for how things in the “open social web” (I’ll keep calling it that for the time being) can work, now or in the near future, to give us the best of both blogging and the socials, without requiring that we sell our souls or leave our content hostage to big corporations.”
Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: UW students chase disrupter out of class: “A young man barged into a 400-person human sexuality lecture at the University of Washington on Wednesday, making what appeared to be Nazi salutes and hurling insults at the class. ¶ But it wasn’t security personnel who escorted him out of the Kane Hall classroom. It was the students and their professor.”
Seattle Indivisible: Seattle No Kings- Oct 18: The main page for next weekend’s No Kings protest rally at the Seattle Center.
Glenn Fleishman at Six Colors: Navigate your Mac without a mouse: “Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?”
Alice Strangman & Liza Groen Trombi at Locus: Seattle Worldcon 2025: Locus‘s writeup of the Seattle Worldcon. After putting about a year and a half into this (and with friends who have been working on it for a decade), it’s nice to see this writeup.
Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing: “This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” Written for Wikipedia, but is a good list of things to look for.
Rachel Saslow at Willamette Week: An Interview With the Portland Chicken: “When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [Secretary] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”
Decca Muldowney and Alex Hanna: Sora 2 Serves up More Slop: “The potential for misinformation and the ability to “flood the zone” with videos that throw doubt onto the authenticity of online content is evident. Moreover, shitty video-generation apps like Sora 2 don’t “democratize” art, they degrade human creativity itself.”
Christian Kriticos at the BBC: A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks: “At first, the durable plastic of floppy disks, popular from the 1970s to the 1990s, may seem more secure than fragile manuscripts. Paper rots, ink fades and runs. Synthetic materials can last much longer – that is, after all, why plastic pollution is such a concern. But the digital information saved inside these rigid cassettes is more vulnerable than you might think.”
♿️ 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.'”
♿️ Made it through opening week at work! (This is the week before classes start, filled with staff and faculty info and training.) Day two got a little crazy for me running around making sure that captions were up and running properly, but everything worked out in the end. Tomorrow, students are back and classes start!
💻 A particularly exciting part of the week was getting issued my new work laptop. My old one was a Dell something-or-other, my new one is an Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, and 1 TB drive. A very nice upgrade, prompted because I need to be able to work cross-platform for accessibility testing and document remediation, and this allows me to run Windows in a virtual environment inside the macOS. Haven’t gotten very far setting it up yet, but it’ll be very nice when it’s all set up.
📸 Photos
It’s spooky season! Our seasonal gnome garden gets some extra friends for the next month or so…plus, we got some fun new additions this year.This great bunch of evil mushrooms has been creeping out my wife for the past few weeks since we found it and tossed it on a shelf inside until it was time to set it out front.We definitely couldn’t resist this frankensnail (Frankensnail’s monster?) when we saw it.We’re less than three months away from the new Link light rail station across the street opening up, so we got paper craft train cars to assemble during our first day of all-staff events.
🎧 Listening
Nine Inch Nails’ Tron: Ares soundtrack just landed. I’ve only given it a quick run-through so far, but my first impressions are that it works really well as a follow up to Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, and has some really strong new NIN tracks, but I’m not yet entirely sure what I think of it as a NIN album.
🔗 Linking
There’s a bit of a theme to this week’s links that will be quite obvious….
💉 Last weekend we tried to get our Covid boosters at our local Walgreens and were turned down, even though Washington’s governor had put out a directive a few days before stating that everyone in Washington over six months old was eligible. So on Monday, we tried again at our local Safeway, which had no problems at all with giving us a Flu/Covid vaccine cocktail, so we’ve now switched pharmacies from Walgreens to Safeway.
Work was pretty uneventful, though this was the last week of the summer break; this coming week is our “opening week” with lots of staff and faculty welcomes and training workshops, and the week after that, students are back on campus. Back into the school year!
📸 Photos
I decorated my bandaids after getting my vaccines, just because I could.It’s spooky season, so it’s time for my small collection of ridiculously anatomically improbable skeletons to come back out onto my desk at work. The elephant is the newest addition.The ducks on our weekend walking trail were out in force on Saturday morning.
I finished two books this week; one was even non-fiction! Though as it was a behind-the-scenes look at Star Trek III, it was still solidly within my usual wheelhouse.
And I’ve just started Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, as a precursor to moving forward on my Hugo best novel reading project; this one isn’t a Hugo winner, but its immediate sequel is. With how much I enjoyed Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, which though sci-fi, combined two genres that aren’t my usual thing (military SF and romance), I’m curious what I’ll think of her in the fantasy realm, which is also secondary to SF in my interests.
📺 Watching
Two movies this week:
The Phoenician Scheme (⭐️⭐️⭐️): I am absolutely a sucker for Anderson’s quirky hyper-stylized films.
The Thursday Murder Club (⭐️⭐️⭐️): Take some of today’s most known British actors and let ‘em run around having fun in a murder mystery. Quite enjoyable.
🔗 Linking
Erin Reed: We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk’s Hateful Life: “Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. […] His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.”
Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'”
Identity 4: Racintosh Plus: Really impressive work putting a Mac Plus into a one-unit rack mount casing.
🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)
📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.
The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.
📸 Photos
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?
We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.
We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.
🔗 Linking
Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”
Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.
About a week and a half again, as I try to get back on a regular schedule after wrapping up Worldcon. And even this is getting posted a day late and backdated, because I had some Worldcon work come up yesterday evening that I had to pay attention to. Even when Worldcon is done, Worldcon isn’t done….
The past week really was about just getting back into the regular routine after vacation. Work was busy but uneventful, and at home, we were just relaxing and trying to stay as cool as we could during a late summer heat wave.
We did spend a day at the Point Defiance Zoo this past Sunday, which is always a fun thing to do, especially when they have a lot of new youngsters to see!
📸 Photos
The baby tapir isn’t a tiny tapir anymore, but it’s still quite cute, and one of my wife’s favorites.Pedro the penguin chick is almost the same size as the rest, but is still more of a silvery tone without the traditional black and white coloring.I got these anemone just as clouds of food was pumped into the tank; I love the otherworldly, alien look that I got by chance.Playing with long exposures and water, and like the way the running water almost looks like frozen ice.
I don’t know exactly when this happened, but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!
📚 Reading
Got through a few books, making up for the lack of reading during Worldcon.
This week’s link list includes some that I found during Worldcon week, but as I didn’t include a link list there, they get rolled into this week’s post.
Matt Wedel at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition: “The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke.”
How to Leave Substack: “You Should Probably Leave Substack. Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation.”
Mike Montiero: How to not build the Torment Nexus: “You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole. It will leave a mark. A memory. A scar.”
John Scalzi: Poking the Discourse Bear Re: “Classic” Science Fiction: “I’m 56 now, and if you’re recommending the same science fiction books to a ten-year-old today that would have been recommended to me when I was a ten-year-old — and were old and kinda dated even then — I think you should seriously reconsider recommending science fiction books to young readers.”
Tactile Maps Automated Production (TMAP): “TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Map files can be visually previewed, downloaded or emailed, then are ready to emboss.”
Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk at the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog: Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction: “The impact of technological changes on the consumption of speculative fiction should not be understated. We think its impacts have brought a broader public under the wing of fandom, prompting inevitable and uncomfortable splits within the subculture. Much as technological advances in the early 20th Century inspired a reactionary movement among painters and labour writ large, similar technological advances in the past 30 years have been at play in the formation of a reactionary movement amongst some groups of speculative fiction creators.”
Joshua Barnes at the Sydney Review of Books: Just a Little Longer: “Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.”
Contrast Grid: Creates a color grid with contrast ratios based on colors you input.
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!
Another somewhat delayed two-week wrap-up, because…
🚀 Worldcon is nigh! Nearly all of my outside-of-work brainspace has been been taken up with Worldcon prep and website updates, as we’ve been in the final crunch before the con kicks off.
📸 Photos
I voted! I hope you did too!Saw a curious raccoon on campus early one morning.
I started notes on the last two Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shows, but so far haven’t finished writing them. The short version: still enjoying, great show, good-naturedly grumbling about canon and holodecks showing up far too early.
🔗 Linking
I’ve saved some links, but they’ll get added to the next wrap-up, as I need to get back to prepping to head to the hotel and spending the next week at Worldcon!
