Weekly Notes

Weekly Notes: February 23–March 1, 2026

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Hey, look, it’s an actual weekly update! Exciting stuff, this. (For certain values of “exciting”.)

  • 🇺🇸 So…we’re apparently at war again; illegally, again. I continue to be flabbergasted at how comprehensively the Republican party is just letting our mad king dictator do whatever he wants, no matter how destructive to the country or the world. If only we had an opposition party….

  • 🚗 After last week’s unexpected car adventures, which ended well, but were not exactly un-stressful, we’ve been taking it easy this weekend.

📸 Photos

The moon, with its craters and features nicely visible, against a black background.
The nearly full moon Sunday night was gorgeous.
A bag of potato chips, decorated with black, white, and purple imagery of lighting around a logo with highly angled text resembling Norse runic characters. The bag text says, "Norse Roots, Forged in tallow and flame, sea storm and pepper" around what appears to be a cow wearing a horned helmet.
I saw this on the shelves at Marshall’s (but did not buy it) and had a few moments of wondering why anyone would name their brand “horse roots”.

📚 Reading

Finished William Alexander’s Sunward, another of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. Just two to go and I’ll have them all read!

📺 Watching

  • We watched the first two episodes of the Scrubs revival, and so far, they’re off to a good start, feeling much more like the first few seasons of the original run than the last few.

  • This afternoon we watched the recent I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot/sequel. It was a mildly entertaining bit of nostalgia for ’90s teen horror, but with several plot holes. In the end, while it doesn’t need to be actively avoided, neither does it need to be intentionally sought out.

🎧 Listening

  • One more Difficult Listening Hour practice session went live today.

  • Friday Nine Inch Nails released a remix album version of the TRON: Ares soundtrack, TRON Ares: Divergence, which found its way into my library when I got home that day.

🔗 Linking

Culture

  • Colin Gorrie at Dead Language Society: How far back in time can you understand English? (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post. ¶ Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger).” I was fine through 1300, started struggling at 1200, and was lost at 1100.

  • David Smith at The Guardian: ‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback: “For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.¶ But the era of the ‘pocket book’ is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.”

  • Ryan Moulton: The Hunt for Dark Breakfast: “Breakfast is a vector space. You can place pancakes, crepes, and scrambled eggs on a simplex where the variables are the ratios between milk, eggs, and flour. We have explored too little of this manifold. More breakfasts can exist than we have known.”

  • Tom BH: The Longest Line Of Sight: “The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.”

Design

  • Paul Lukas at Inconspicuous Consumption: H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery (Internet Archive version of a Substack original): “Had Frank Lloyd Wright himself ever been responsible for an upside-down “H”? Wright died in 1959, so he had nothing to do with the most recent iterations of the lettering, but what about the earlier time periods?”

Film

  • Chloe Veltman at NPR: Found: The 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack: “The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès. […] The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely.”

Photography

  • Alan Taylor at The Atlantic: Different Views of the Winter Olympics (gift link; Archive.is version in case the gift link dies): “A collection of creative photographs from this year’s games featuring infrared imaging, vintage cameras, optical filters, digital composites, unusual angles, unexpected subjects, and more”

Software

  • Adam Grossman: Introducing Acme Weather: “Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.”

Biweekly Notes: February 9–22, 2026

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Maybe eventually I’ll get back to a weekly cadence? Maybe. We’ll see.

  • 👩🏼‍🏫 The biggest thing of the last two weeks at work was that my wife was awarded tenure! She’s been working towards that for a long time, and it’s great to see it finally happen. Of course, she was teaching when the Board of Trustees cast the vote, but I made sure to attend and text her as soon as the vote went through.

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the penultimate planning meeting for this year’s Norwescon. Just one more in March, and then the convention in April. This is crunch time, but it’s always an exciting crunch time.

  • 🚗 Here at home, our big adventure this weekend was going through with something we’d been considering for quite some time, and trading in our 2016 Chevy Sonic for a fancy new 2026 Honda Civic Sport Touring Hybrid sedan! We’d been looking forward to finally moving to a hybrid car for a while, we’d had a Civic before that we really liked, and the current model is one of the top-rated cars out right now, so we decided the time was right. It’s only been a day so far, but we’re definitely enjoying the upgrade. This is our second time buying a brand-new car, and it’s always fun driving a car off the lot when its odometer is still in the low two digits.

📸 Photos

My wife and I stand in front of a brand new white four-door Honday Civic.
Us and our new car. So shiny!
In a grocery store, I watch suspiciously as a robotic floor cleaner goes by our cart.
Our local Winco grocery store has this robotic floor cleaner (basically an overgrown Roomba) that wanders around the store. It’s both a little amusing and a little unsettling. I gave it several suspicious looks.

📚 Reading

I’ve finished two more of this year’s Philip K. Dick nominees: M. R. Carey’s Outlaw Planet and Christopher Hinz’s Scales.

📺 Watching

  • 🏂 We’ve been watching a bit of Winter Olympics every evening. We’re not huge sports people, and tend to prefer the summer to the winter Olympic games, but it’s still fun to tune in, pick a random sport, and watch a bit here and there.

  • We finished a rewatch of 30 Rock, which though not without the occasional stumble and cringe moment, is still really funny and overall still holds up remarkably well.

🎧 Listening

I’m getting started getting some practice time in before DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon, and as usual, am recording my practice sessions and uploading them. My first of this stretch got posted: Difficult Listening Hour 2026.02.16. More to come!

🔗 Linking

Accessibility

  • Fable: How early accessibility solutions evolved into core UX design principles: “In this article, you’ll discover ten historical product innovations born from the desire to make everyday experiences accessible to people with disabilities: The typewriter, audiobooks, the teletypewriter (TTY), autocorrect, text-to-speech, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the Clapper, GPS, online shopping, [and] the touch screen.”

Culture

  • Amanda Sakuma with Jan Diehm at The Pudding: Fit 4 A Teen: “I remember once being that teen girl shopping in the women’s section for the first time. I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I’m stuck with the countless ways that women’s apparel is not made for the average person, like me.”

Fandom

  • Trae Dorn: Fandom Spaces are Adult Spaces: “I’m not sure why I have to say this sometimes, but fandom spaces are adult spaces. What we consider organized fandom was built by adults, for adults. But there are people who forget this. Like I’ve seen people admonish adults for being involved with fandom, saying “adults should be doing adult things” (whatever the hell those “adult things” are), and I’ve seen kids lament growing up saying they’ll have to stop liking anime or comics or whatever property they’re passionate about. ¶ And I’m just like… no kid, that’s not how it works. That’s the opposite of how it works.”

Film

  • Todd Vaziri: The Myth of the “Jaws” Shooting Star: “…contrary to what the mythology might be, there is no way those two shooting stars you see in ‘Jaws’ were real-life shooting stars photographed in-camera during filming. Those shots contain animated effects work to simulate shooting stars.”

Local

  • Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Transit riders will be able to pay fares with credit, debit cards: “This new feature, which starts Feb. 23, comes as Seattle and the Puget Sound region prepare to host several large events in 2026, including the World Cup. With many international visitors expected to travel across the region, Tap to Pay simplifies transit and aligns with global expectations for convenient payment options.”

Politics

  • Mike Masnick at TechDirt: NBC Hid The Boos For JD Vance. Where’s Trump’s ‘Unfair Editing’ Lawsuit?: “This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn’t ‘be accurate’ or ‘be fair.’ The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.”

  • Jon Schuppe and Natasha Korecki at NBC News: Broken bones, burning eyes: How Trump’s DHS deploys ‘less lethal’ weapons on protesters: “NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents since the spring and found that Department of Homeland Security officers have repeatedly deployed ‘less lethal’ weapons in ways that appear to violate their own policies or general policing guidelines, unless they believed their lives were in danger. The review was based on interviews with lawyers, experts and protesters who were injured as well as witness statements, documents from criminal and civil cases and videos taken at protests.”

  • Jay Kuo: Censoring Colbert and Talarico (archive.is copy of a Substack post): “Last night, Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico, currently running for the U.S. Senate, appeared on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ to spread his message of hope and unity in the face of MAGA Trumpism. ¶ But millions who tuned in would not see that interview. That’s because the FCC blocked CBS, which owns ‘The Late Show,’ from airing it.”

  • Karl Bode at TechDirt: Department Of Education Forced To Back Off Illegal Plan To Be Racist, Sexist Assholes: “One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it. ¶ It happened again this week, when the Department of Education (DOE) was forced to back off of their illegal effort to permanently enshrine intolerance and ignorance across U.S. education standards.”

  • Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian: ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks: “She didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of an ordeal that would see Karen handcuffed, shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell, before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre. Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa.”

Software

  • Current: A new RSS reader that looks interesting.

Tech

  • Jordan Golson: What They Copied (Wayback Machine archive of a Substack post): “Then carmakers looked at a product that sold billions of units [(the iPhone)] and said, we should put one of those in the dashboard. But they took the wrong lesson. Your car isn’t supposed to do everything. It’s supposed to be a car. You need to adjust the temperature, change the volume, turn on the heated seats and keep your eyes on the road. These are not problems that require a general-purpose interface. They are problems that have been solved for more than a century — by knobs and buttons and switches — and the industry unresolved them in a decade.” I will never be in the market for a Ferrari, but this is a fascinating look at how Jonny Ive, famed for his design work at Apple, is working with them.

  • Angela Haupt at Time: The Internet’s New Favorite Insult: ‘Did AI Write That?’: “Across the internet, as tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini become part of everyday life, people are increasingly informing others that their words come across as AI output. You can practically feel the disdain through the screen: ‘Did AI write that?’ It’s not really a question—it’s a way of ending a conversation by casting doubt on whether someone deserves to be taken seriously.”

  • Richard MacManus at Cybercultural: 1994: Publishing comes to the Web — and design matters: “1994 marks the Web’s shift into a publishing medium. As site authors seek control over formatting and design, the WWW-Talk mailing list hosts an early debate over style sheets and presentation.” While I just slightly miss the 1994 cutoff of this article, my first website went up in 1995, and I have a 1996 archive still online.

  • Trae Dorn: Discord Just Showed Why We Need to Bring Back Forums: “Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share. ¶ Use the internet like it’s 2006.”

  • Thomas Germain at the BBC: I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes: “It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.”

  • Marcin Wichary: Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs Scheme: “The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks. Or, if where you’re going is up in hierarchy, well-designed URL will allow you to drag to select and then backspace a few things from the end. ¶ Flickr allowed to do all that, and all without a touch of a Shift key, too.”

  • tante: Acting ethically in an imperfect world: “I appreciate a lot of work Cory Doctorow has done in the last decades. But the arguments he presents here to defend his usage of LLMs for this rather trivial task (which TBH could probably be done reasonably well with traditional means) are part of why the Internet – and therefore the world – looks like it does right now. It’s a set of arguments that wants to delegitimize political and moral actions based on libertarian and utilitarian thinking.”

  • Victor Tangermann at Futurism: Realtor Uses AI, Accidentally Posts Listing for Rental Property With Demonic Figure Emerging From Mirror: “Renters seeking a new home in the capital made a horrifying discovery while browsing listings: what can only be described as an Eldritch horror poking her disfigured head out — from somehow both inside and outside — of a bathroom mirror.”

  • Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links: “The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. ¶ In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.” Ugh. I’ll need to figure out another source for linking to archived copies of paywalled/Substack-ed articles.

Biweekly Notes: January 26–February 8, 2026

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Once again, I missed a week. These things happen! So here we are.

The biggest bits of the last two weeks at work were two afternoons on Zoom for the winter DSSC conference, connecting with disability services workers across the state’s college system, and finishing my annual performance review. Both went well, and for the latter, everyone still likes me, and I have a good set of goals for the next year.

On the home front, our big adventure last weekend was heading into Seattle on Saturday for an(other) anti-ICE protest. This one was primarily organized by Seattle-area higher education unions, and was then joined by health care and tech unions. Ended up being larger than we expected at first, with a rally at Seattle Central College and then a march down to the Federal Building. No clashes, no issues, and a good gathering of like-minded educators (including a co-worker who came along with us), healers, techies, and whomever else wanted to join in. Photos are in this Flickr album.

I’d already had plans to head out to the Mercury to get some goth clubbing in that night, so rather than having me drive back and forth from home to protest to home to club to home, we just got a hotel room nearby. After the protest we got set up in our hotel room, had dinner at a local favorite restaurant (the Annapurna Café), and then my wife got a nice quiet night in a hotel room while I went out bouncing around in a dark goth-y club for a few hours. Sunday we had a lazy, slow morning, came back home, and that was that.

This weekend was a slow Saturday of chores and dozing in front of the Olympics. We’d watched the opening ceremony on Friday evening and, well, were more underwhelmed than overwhelmed.

Today we went out to see Cirque du Soleil’s Echo, which just opened here. Really, really neat show — this was our first time seeing a CDS show, and it was totally worth it.

📸 Photos

A protest sign being held up that says 'educators say ICE out!'.
It felt really good to be at an educator-driven rally. And I have to say, teachers seem to make better public speakers than many of the other people we’ve seen speak at these things. Nothing against energy and enthusiasm, but it’s nice when those are paired with oratory and writing skills as well.
Panoramic view of a large crowd of protesters filling a city street and two building plazas.
Part of the crowd at the Federal Building at the end of the march.
A bronze stature of Jimi Hendrix on a city street, decorated with several protest signs and with a whistle placed in his mouth.
Jimi joined the protest, even getting an anti-ICE whistle.
A urinal lit all in red, with an anti-splash mat featuring a drawing of Trump's face.
The urine anti-splash mats in the urinal at the Mercury make me snicker.
As musicians in dark outfits perform on a blue-lit stage, an acrobat hangs suspended in the air by her hair, legs stretched wide, one foot in front of her and her arms stretched back to hold her rear foot up behind her head.
Yes, this performer (and the other one still on the stage in this shot) is being suspended by her hair.
A musician stands in a spotlight on a dark stage, wearing antlers on their head and playing a cello.
Another nice touch; the music is performed live, instead of being pre-recorded, and the musicians are often integrated into the show.

📝 Writing

In addition to the little mini-review of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony already linked above, I also had a bit of a bit of a rant on Mastodon about modern Star Trek designing things that look neat rather than feel real. (I actually originally posted it on Bluesky, but it was on Mastodon where I actually got responses and engagement.)

📚 Reading

I finished my second of this year’s Philip K. Dick nominees, Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley’s City of All Seasons, and have started my third, M. R. Carey’s Outlaw Planet.

📺 Watching

We watched the one-off Muppet Show revival, and really enjoyed it. I’ve seen a lot of other people also saying how much they enjoyed it, so hopefully it does get picked up for a full revival.

🎧 Listening

I found a 2023 article where Consequence posted a list of their picks for the 50 Best Industrial Songs of All Time, and while like any such list, not every choice is one I’d make, it’s not bad. While reading it, I realized that I had most of the tracks on the list already, so I went on a small binge and picked up those I didn’t. So I now have a playlist to match the article, and have been enjoying it and the new additions to my collection.

Plus, these were released recently:

🔗 Linking

Accessibility

  • Accessible Social: “Accessible best practices for social media content: Learn how to create a more inclusive online experience one post at a time.”

  • Laura Kalgan: Accessibility for Everyone: A free edition of this 2017 book on accessibility. Some details might have changed, but accessibility best practices remain the same.

Culture

  • Dan Barry and Sonia A. Rao at The New York Times: The ‘R-Word’ Returns, Dismaying Those Who Fought to Oust It (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “For decades now, the ‘R-word’ has been regarded as a slur against people with intellectual disabilities — a word to be avoided. Yet it has had a striking resurgence, in part because people in high-profile positions of power and influence have chosen to resurrect it, often with an air of defiance.”

Local

  • Chris Megargee at the Shoreline Area News: ICE agents detain a Shoreline father: “A difficult day. Today I was present as ICE agents detained a father a mile from my house–while his two-year-old son sat scared in the backseat.” I heard about this from a friend on Facebook, who was one of the local community members who were observing.

Photography

  • Mitchell Clark at DPReview: “Throwing my camera was the right thing to do”: The photographers behind the viral protest photos: “By now, you’ve probably seen the viral photo of John Abernathy, an independent photographer, throwing his Leica M10-R to another photographer after being pinned to the ground by officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. It’s from a striking sequence of images taken by freelance photographer Pierre Lavie, which show Abernathy being tackled, locking eyes with Lavie – then a stranger – and tossing his camera and phone to him in an attempt to keep them from being confiscated. ¶ We caught up with both photographers to get the story behind the photos they took that day, see how they’ve dealt with suddenly having their work presented on a global stage, and talk about how this incident, and others like it, have affected how they cover protests and other similar events.”

Politics

  • Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. …what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.”

  • Daphne Carr at Pitchfork: Understanding the LRAD, the “Sound Cannon” Police Are Using at Protests, and How to Protect Yourself From It: “Short-term exposure to loud noise like the LRAD’s deterrent tone may cause a sensation of stuffed or ringing ears, known as tinnitus, which can cease minutes after the exposure or last for days. Other sound injury symptoms include headaches, nausea, sweating, vertigo, and loss of balance. Signs of more serious injury include vomiting and mucus or blood from the ears. Exposure to acute loud sounds can tear eardrums and destroy hair cells in the cochlea, which causes permanent hearing loss.”

  • Robert F. Worth at The Atlantic: Welcome to the American Winter (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as ‘engineered chaos’ produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.”

  • Cheyanne M. Daniels at Politico: Third ‘No Kings’ nationwide protest planned for March: “The group behind the nationwide ‘No Kings’ protests are planning their fourth demonstration of President Donald Trump’s second term — and are anticipating even greater turnout than their earlier rallies.”

  • Sarah Jeong at The Verge: Best gas masks: “There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.”

  • Mia Sato at The Verge: The rise of the slopagandist (gift link; here’s an archive.is link in case the gift link ever expires): “We mostly talk about it in the context of AI-generated material, but slop does not need to be synthetic — AI slop is just a subgenre of a larger type of content that is made quickly and cheaply and poorly. The same lukewarm financial advice peddled by thousands of literal talking heads on Instagram Reels is slop. Falsehoods and oversimplifications about breaking news or contentious celebrity drama that snowball to millions of views is slop. Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it. Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization.”

  • Christian Paz at Vox: Minneapolis is showing a new kind of anti-Trump resistance (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “In the Twin Cities area, meanwhile, this activism is well-organized; but it’s not a traditional, anti-government protest movement of the likes we saw during President Donald Trump’s first term. Some have called this new model ‘dissidence’ or ‘neighborism’ — or, more traditionally, ‘direct action.’ As one organizer described what’s happening in the city, ‘it’s kind of unorganized-organized.'”

Technology

  • Just the Browser: “Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you ‘just the browser’ and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations.” For Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox.

  • Minifigure Scanner: Use this website on your phone to check which figure is in that blind bag before you buy it.

Biweekly Notes: January 12–25, 2026

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It’s been quite a couple of weeks, hasn’t it?

Two weeks ago, I caught a particularly nasty cold. It was bad enough that we went by urgent care to get tested for flu or Covid. Thankfully, neither of those popped positive, so it really was just a cold, but it meant that I missed a couple days of work. If you can avoid getting the crud this winter (or ever, really), I recommend it; it sounds like everything that’s going around right now is knocking people on their butts.

Over the weekend, we went to the Cougar Mountain Zoo, which we hadn’t explored before. It’s a smaller zoo, but very cute, with a neat collection of bronze statues of animals scattered throughout the grounds. Photos are in a Flickr album as usual.

This past week at work went pretty well, wrapping up with an event where we collaborated with the neurodiversity in education support group Roots2Wings. Highline’s Accessibility Resources department was there in several areas; my area was tabling as part of an accessible technology immersive lab, along with representatives from several other schools and organizations. Not a bad way to wrap up the week.

Out in the wider world, of course, things continue to be an ongoing nuclear dumpster fire. Unsurprisingly, the link roundup at the end of this post will not just be longer than usual (given that this is a two-week catchup), but pretty focused on the wider political shitshow. Maybe eventually things will improve, but for now…oof. Take care of yourselves.

📸 Photos

A display of books in the college library, including titles like Fascism: A Warning, On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History, Fight Like Hell: The History of America Labor, and The United States Constitution.
I’m really appreciating this book display in the college library.
More books on display, including books on Nazi Germany, political campaining, one called How to Rig an Election, one called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, plusy resource flyers and multilingual Know Your Rights cards.
Another side of the table. Librarians don’t mess around.
A sign on a gate that says 'no running or teasing predators'.
The zoo’s warning signs kept making me snicker. Though, really, it’s not bad advice.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

🔗 Linking

I’m thinking I might start to try categorizing these, particularly when they get this long…

Art

  • Colin Warren at The Nation: Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit: “CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists? ¶ GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.”

Software

  • Unstream: Find your favorite music on alternative platforms, directly support the artists you love, and move off streaming.

  • Iceout.org: Tracking ICE sightings, interactions, and abductions across the country. “Our objective is to collect community-submitted information about possible ICE activity to help inform the public and raise awareness. All reports are reviewed by our moderator team before appearing on the map.”

Tech

  • Danielle Chelosky at Stereogum: Bandcamp Bans AI Music: “Bandcamp is banning AI music. ¶ The platform made the announcement today via Reddit….”

  • Amanda Silberling at TechCrunch: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by ICE, feds, and police: “Amazon’s surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement.”

  • Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over The World: “If markup is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markdown. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.” I’ve been using Markdown regularly for, well, decades now, since shortly after it was released, thanks to word spreading among the MovableType community. Nearly every post on this blog is Markdown (or a mix of Markdown and HTML).

Politics

  • Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: We’re all just content for ICE: “…ICE agents make no effort to hide what ‘side’ they’re on. I’ve seen up close how intertwined the twin engines of the Trump regime are. Brutal state violence and hysterical right-wing internet content work together in lockstep. According to The Washington Post, the agency is under pressure from The White House to create as much content as possible. Which is why ICE agents have a phone in one hand and a gun in the other. But it goes beyond that.”

  • Miles Klee at Rolling Stone: Professor Forbidden To Teach Plato Assigns Article About University Censorship Instead: “Rather than teach a different course, Peterson elected to revise his syllabus, replacing the Plato readings with an article in The New York Times about the university’s censorship of the original material. Administrators have approved the change, he says, and he’s looking forward to teaching it in the context of free speech and academic freedom issues. ‘It’s going to be very, very fun,’ he says. Students who received the amended syllabus also found it annotated to highlight exactly what the school had forbidden Peterson from assigning and which alternative material had been added as a result.”

  • Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court is about to confront its most embarrassing decision (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “It appears, in other words, that Americans around the time of the nation’s founding and the ratification of the Second Amendment were quite comfortable with laws banning gun possession on private land without the land owner’s permission. That should be enough to uphold Hawaii’s law under Bruen’s ‘historical tradition of firearm regulation’ standard. But it’s not that simple.”

  • Madison McVan at the Minnesota Reformer: In the car with the Minneapolis community patrols working to disrupt ICE operations: “Neubauer and O’Keefe started patrolling their south Minneapolis neighborhood recently as the Trump administration has ramped up its mass deportation campaign in Minnesota, sending in thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents, with more on the way. They are some of the many thousands of Twin Cities residents who have come together over the past year to protest ICE and divert the agents from their mission, often resulting in tense confrontations.”

  • Sarah Raza at the AP: Minneapolis duo details their ICE detention, including pressure to rat on protest organizers: “According to organizers and an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, immigration officers have also been surveilling activists who have been observing their activities in the Twin Cities, violating their First Amendment rights. And Sigüenza, who like his friend O’Keefe is a U.S. citizen, said an immigration officer who questioned him Sunday even offered him money or legal protection if he gave up the names of organizers or neighbors who are in the country illegally.”

  • Laura Jedeed at Slate: You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.: “Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.”

  • Solarbird: What’s Permuting Itself Around In My Head, Part Two: The Election: “Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. ‘Couchfucker’ Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question. ¶ So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is… ¶ …we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time.”

  • Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Everyone Knows Our Mad King’s Greenland Obsession Is Insane. Why Won’t Congress Stop It?: “A President who openly admits his foreign policy is driven by personal grievances over awards he didn’t receive is not fit for office. A President who threatens to invade NATO allies and won’t rule out military force against them is a danger to global stability. A President who doesn’t understand (or doesn’t care) that the Nobel Committee is independent from the Norwegian government has no business conducting diplomacy. ¶ These aren’t controversial statements. They’re obvious. Everyone knows it. ¶ But none of the political elite want to act.”

  • Sam Levin at The Guardian: ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials: “Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.”

  • Meg Anderson at NPR: The ICE surge is fueling fear and anxiety among Twin Cities children: “Parents, teachers, counselors and health care workers across the Twin Cities say many Minnesota children are living in fear or seeing those fears realized. They worry loved ones will be taken away, that they’ll witness violence, or get hurt themselves.”

  • Sofia Barnett at The Minnesota Star Tribune: Two women, detained by ICE, say they helped agent having seizure: “By the time emergency medical responders arrived, the women had been holding the agent steady for several minutes. They were detained but acting as first responders to the man who had detained them. ¶ Once the agent was transferred to medical care, Amundson and Zemien were placed into another vehicle and driven to Whipple anyway. ¶ ‘I asked if we could just go home,’ Amundson said. ‘I said, ‘We just saved his life. Is that cool with you?’ And they said no.'”

  • Derek Guy at Politico: There’s More to Greg Bovino’s Coat Than You Think: “Like field shirts, trenchcoats and combat boots, the greatcoat belongs to a shared military vocabulary that predates fascism and has been used by military forces around the world. […] Bovino’s coat may not be a Hitlerian symbol, but it is a symbol for something else: the increasing militarization of immigration enforcement.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with part of the article’s premise, that Bovino isn’t referencing the Nazi’s uniforms — from here, there’s no way to be sure, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was — but the history and fashion shift over the years is interesting.

  • Dan Sinker: We Are All We Have: “We are all we have and the more you do, today, to reach out in your neighbors, your town, your community, the better off everyone is. ¶ Right now feels impossible, and unfortunately there’s a lot of impossible still to come. There’s no fast fix, no one easy trick to defeating fascism. ¶ But. ¶ But honestly I’ve never felt more hopeful that we actually have what it takes. That we can do the impossible, even when it seems insurmountable. ¶ Because what it takes is us.”

Weekly Notes: January 5–11, 2026

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  • Made it through the first week of the quarter! It was definitely a busy week, but nothing major exploded, so I’ll count that as a success.

  • Saturday night we went out to see one of the 40th anniversary theatrical showings of Labyrith. I don’t remember seeing it in the theater when it came out — I would have been 12, so right in the target range, but I have no memory of doing so — and it was a real treat to be able to do this. It holds up well!

  • Sunday we headed up to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park for one of this weekend’s “ICE Out for Good” rallies. I’ve uploaded my full photo set to Flickr, as usual.

📸 Photos

Protest sign that says, ''the officer feared for his life' is so funny to me, because as a woman, if I shot a man in the face every time I've felt afraid, the streets would be lined with bodies'.
From today’s protest rally.
Protest sign that says, 'so much wrong, so little cardboard'.
Another good one.

📺 Watching

  • Labyrinth (1986), as noted above.

🔗 Linking

  • Niki Tonsky: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons: “The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. ¶ Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.”

  • Casey Newton at Platformer: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit: “For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge? ¶ Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds.”

  • Stefano Marinelli: The Virtue of Finished Things: “I received an email yesterday morning. It was a thank-you note for one of the open-source tools I created and maintain. The sender explained how useful the software was for their specific needs, and as always, this brought me an immense sense of satisfaction. ¶ But at one point in the email, a question appeared – one that has become a recurring theme in the modern software world: ‘I notice there haven’t been any new releases for about ten months. Should I consider the project abandoned?'”

  • Teresa Duryea Wong at Quiltfolk: One Year After an Uncomfortable Choice for Best in Show: “This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher. ¶ What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.”

  • Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero at the South Seattle Emerald: A Fistful of Loud: Seattle Neighbors Build Whistle Kits to Protect Immigrants From ICE: “‘By making noise, you bring visibility to what is happening on the street,’ said Kate Macfarlane, who started the WA Whistles project. ‘ICE relies on shock tactics and moving in very quickly … it turns [an] otherwise pretty silent abduction into a loud, highly visible opportunity for neighbors to rally.'”

  • WA Whistles: “Our purpose is to spread whistles throughout WA to help communities protect themselves against ICE.”

  • Joseph Cox at 404 Media: DHS Is Lying To You (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.”

  • Melissa Turniten at Fox9 KMSP: Minneapolis ICE shooting: Eyewitness accounts contradict ICE statement: “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls the claim the shooting was self-defense ‘bullshit’ and is a ‘garbage narrative’ after seeing video of the shooting. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also seen the video, saying ‘Don’t believe the propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.'”

  • Jennifer Mascia at The Trace: How Many People Have Been Shot in ICE Raids?: “Using Gun Violence Archive data and news clips, The Trace has identified 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire and another 15 incidents in which agents held someone at gunpoint since the crackdown began. At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”

  • Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.”

  • Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman at Wired: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance: “Two key elements of digital surveillance should be top of mind for protestors. One is the data that authorities could potentially obtain from your phone if you are detained, arrested, or they confiscate your device. The other is surveillance of all the identifying and revealing information that you produce when you attend a protest, which can include wireless interception of text messages and more, and tracking tools like license plate scanners and face recognition. You should be mindful of both.”

  • Joanna Kavenna at The Guardian: Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present: “From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?”

  • Ari Anderson at The Stranger: What I Learned About the Future at Seattle WorldCon: “Like the standing on threshold of a cosmic portal, Seattle’s convention center buzzed with bards, fae, aliens, monsters, warriors and spaceships, far away planets and misty forests, innumerable stories of heartbreak and triumph, all tantalizingly within reach between the covers of a thousand books.”

  • Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards: “Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.”

  • Julia Shumway at the Washington State Standard: Federal judge blocks Trump election order, siding with Oregon, Washington: “A federal judge in Washington state on Friday permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a 2025 executive order that sought to require voters prove citizenship and that all ballots be received by Election Day.”

Weekly Notes: December 29, 2025–January 4, 2026

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Happy holidays (part two)!

Well, we wrapped up 2025…and as happy as we were to see 2025 end, 2026 is already looking to keep the dumpster fires burning bright.

At work, the week was fine. Back in the office this week, though as it was still in the holiday break, it was another pretty slow week. Next week classes start, so things will pick back up again. The slowdown is always nice, but it’ll also be good to have things back to normal after the holidays.

Here at home, we had a nice quiet New Year’s Eve. It was even a bit quieter than we expected, as there weren’t as many local unsanctioned fireworks as there have been in years past.

Out in the wider world, though, we all woke up one morning just a few days into the year to discover that the US had invaded Venezuela and abducted its president and his wife. Because…sigh. We are continuing to speed run becoming everything as a country that I was brought up being told that we weren’t. And even though the older I get and the more I learn, the more obvious it is how far we always have been from the ideals we claimed to uphold, it’s still mind-boggling to be where we are now.

As I said on Mastodon: “I’m confused: Is being a brown-skinned person accused of being involved with drugs something that gets you kidnapped and forcibly kicked out of the country or kidnapped and forcibly brought into the country?”

Though really, after what we saw of Trump in his first term and so far in his second, the only thing that’s really surprising me about all of this is how many people are just…going along with it (most notably Congress — especially, but not at all limited to, the Republican party — and the Supreme Court). The system of checks and balances has apparently given up trying to either check or balance, and that’s perhaps the most troubling part of all of this.

📸 Photos

My wife's outstretched arms hold an iPhone taking a selfie, with her smiling face and me holding up my camera in front of my face visible on the iPhone's screen.
Got this really cute shot of Prairie getting a selfie of us as we were on an evening walk on the last day of 2025.
Selfie of me, a white man with greying red beard, weraing glasses and a black coat and hoodie with the hood up, and my wife a white woman with wavy blonde hair and glasses, both of us smiling.
And then this selfie on our first walk of 2026, during which I discovered that my new camera has an automatic selfie mode with a short timer that is activated when you flip the screen out and backwards.

📝 Writing

This week I recorded my responses to the current SFWA survey on AI use in the SFF writing/publishing industry, did my annual reading wrap-up for the year, and posted my resolutions for this year.

📚 Reading

Finished my last book of the year, Rough Trails by L.A. Graf, and my first book of the year, Thin Air by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, both parts of a six-book TOS-era Star Trek series.

📺 Watching

We watched two movies over the weekend:

🔗 Linking

NOTE: For regular readers (assuming there are any), a bit of clarification on how I link some items: I use archive.is for pages on sites that are paywalled (including sites that will only show content if adblockers are disabled) and for Substack pages (because Substack is another Nazi bar). Starting with this week’s post, I will also include links to the original pages, as not everyone has the same attitudes as I do about these things and may have subscriptions to the sites in question, not be as annoyed as I am at dealing with paywalls, ads, and the like, or have either accepted Substack as a “necessary evil” or are unaware of their problematic practices.

  • National Society of Tax Professionals: USPS Announces Changes to the Postmark Date System: “…while a postmark confirms the USPS possessed a mail piece on the date inscribed, that date does not necessarily align with the date the USPS first accepted possession of the item.” Potentially impactful in a number of important scenarios, including voting by mail. Undated informational page, but the rule took effect in November 2025.

  • Foz Meadows: Against AI (archive.is link of Substack original): “AI is unethical on a scale that SFF authors should be uniquely placed to appreciate, its evils mirroring metaphors that are older than our present civilization. AI is the cursed amulet, the magic mirror, the deal with the devil, the doppelganger that learns our secrets and steals our face; it’s a faerie illusion, leprechaun gold, the fox’s trick that gives rot the look of resplendence, the naked emperor parading with his cock out; it’s the disembodied voice that whispers let me in, the zombie virus that transforms the known into the unrecognizable, the corrupting fungi whose tendrils invade and poison. It’s the literal fucking One Ring, telling us that of course we’d use its power for good, compelling us to pick it up so that through us, it might do great evil.”

  • Chuck Wendig: My Open Letter to That Open Letter About AI in Writing and Publishing: “AI IS NOT INEVITABLE. ¶ The only strategy here is the sum total pushback against its uncanny horrors and its non-consensual intrusion into every corner of our world — it steals our content, guzzles our water, increases our power bills, is crammed into services we didn’t ask for it to be crammed into while also charging us more money for the “privelege.” There is no strategy here except to find the fields where the AI grows and metaphorically set them aflame. ¶ And shame and anger against corporate overreach is a powerful fire.”

  • Trekorama!: 3D walkthroughs of locations on various Star Trek ships, including the Enterprise 1701 (main bridge), 1701-D (main bridge, engineering, sick bay, Ten-Forward, transporter room, Picard, Data, Troi, and Worf’s quarters, and a shuttle), 1701-E (bridge), and Kelvinverse version (bridge and corridor), Defiant (deck one), Voyager (deck one, sickbay, transporter room, engineering, mess hall), Discovery (bridge, transporter room, mess hall, and corridor), and Klingon Bird of Prey (bridge), plus the real-world ISS.

  • David Reamer at the Anchorage Daily News: Termination dust: Its history, evolution in meaning and possible origin (archive.is link of a paywalled original): “…the history and evolution of termination dust as a turn of phrase offers education, enlightenment and entertainment. Over the decades, there have been changes in meaning and connotation. Throughout those years, it remains a significant detail of local history, a widely recognizable bit of slang whose lore maps closely against that of the town itself.”

  • Robin Young and Emiko Tamagawa at WBUR: ‘Wake Up Dead Man’: Rian and Nathan Johnson on blending mystery and faith in new ‘Knives Out’ movie: Brief but interesting interview touching on the religious motifs in Wake Up Dead Man.

  • John Scalo: Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?: “I think our helmet-clad robot friends might have been making a little joke that we’ve apparently all missed. The BPM of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is actually 123.45.” Fun bit of music trivia, plus a bit of a peek at the difficulties of having a computer do something that seems relatively easy for humans; in this case, determining a song’s tempo.

Weekly Notes: December 22–28, 2025

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Happy holidays (part one)!

This past week was, of course, Christmas week. One of the really nice things about working at Highline is that this entire week was designated a work from home week, and Wednesday and Friday (the two days on either side of Christmas) are considered “personal development” days, with a pleasantly broad definition of “personal development”. Email was monitored and work was done, but it definitely makes for a comfortably low-key week.

Our Christmas day was quite nice: Slept in as late as we could, had a fun breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate-infused butter and chocolate whipped cream (there was a bit of a theme there…), a comfortable walk around the neighborhood, opening presents, and a lot of relaxing and reading.

📸 Photos

A Nikon Z5II camera sitting on a green cushion with a Christmas tree just visible in the background.
My big present this year was upgrading my camera to a Nikon Z5II mirrorless camera, with the 24–50mm f/4–6.3 kit lens and the FTZ II adapter to allow me to continue to use my existing lineup of F-mount lenses.
A Nikon Z5II with an old 500mm reflex lens attached.
I did make myself laugh by half-seriously wondering if the Z5II is still a mirrorless camera if I attach a 500mm reflex lens to it (if you’re unaware, this is a catadioptric or mirror lens which, as the name implies, uses a pair of mirrors to pack a long telephoto range into a physically short lens).
Me aiming my camera at an odd-looking tree in a planter; the tree is bowed over into an arch shape, and there is a large holiday bauble hanging from the top of the arch.
Taking the new camera out for a first test run around our neighborhood. (Photo by my wife.)
Art installation of around 35 identical very cute little clouds with smiling faces hung evenly spaced and symmetrically from the ceiling of the Seattle Art Museum's lobby.
On Saturday we went up to the Seattle Art Museum, partly because it had been a few years, and partly as a good opportunity to take the new camera out for a spin. I posted a small set of photos from the museum to my Flickr account.

📚 Reading

  • I’m on a bit of a Star Trek binge to wrap up the year. Last week (though I forgot to include it in my weekly notes) I read Kij Johnson and Greg Cox’s TNG novel Dragon’s Honor; this week I’ve been working my way through the TOS “New Earth” series, getting through the first two of the six books, Diane Carey’s Wagon Train to the Stars and Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey’s Belle Terre. I thought I might get through the third book in the series today, but didn’t end up making it.

  • I also “finished” one I’ve been working on for a few months now (since this year’s major gift wasn’t a surprise), Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II. “Finished” is in quotes because as it’s something of a reference book, there were sections that I skimmed, and this is one that I’ll be sure to keep on my iPad to refer back to whenever I need.

📺 Watching

  • As befitting the season, we’ve binged our way through two seasons of The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition, which is just The Great British Baking Show but with American contestants. It’s a little jarring to be in the GBBS tent and hearing American accents, but it’s also really nice to see Americans in a competitive baking show actually being nice to each other (as is the standard for GBBS) rather than being snarky and rude to and about each other (as is the standard for, well, virtually every American reality show out there).

We’ve also watched several movies, two from the stable of holiday favorites, one new holiday favorite, and a couple that we’ve been looking forward to seeing. This week’s lineup was:

  • The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which is always good.
  • Violent Night (2022), which was new to us, but which we enjoyed more than we thought we would. It lives up to its title, but it’s a very fun holiday action/comedy.
  • Die Hard (1988), our annual Christmas Eve tradition (along with many others).
  • Fackham Hall (2025) has been on our radar for a while now, and it just became available to rent this week. It’s Downton Abbey meets The Naked Gun, and we laughed a lot — it will definitely eventually be going in our home collection once it’s available on physical media.
  • Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out film, is excellent. Continues the twisty mystery fun of the prior two, and incorporates some really neat political and religious commentary as well. Rian Johnson is so good at what he does (I need to go back and watch Brick again at some point, too).

🔗 Linking

  • Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central: Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025): Absolutely devastating zero-star review of James Cameron’s latest “Dances With Ferngully” film. “The indigenous people, the Na’vi, are giant blue cats who literally meld with the natural elements on their planet, Pandora, through their naked mole-rat tails, and boast of a harmonious existence that nonetheless requires a warrior class because those are the two things indigenous people in white fantasies are allowed to be: ferocious warriors and children of the Earth.”

  • Randall Munroe’s xkcd: Funny Numbers: “The teens picked a new funny number.”

  • Ben Keough at The New York Times‘ Wirecutter: The First Nikon Z-Mount Mirrorless Lenses You Should Buy (archive.is link): Now that I have a new camera, though I can use (and absolutely will be using) my existing F-mount lenses, eventually I’ll be adding newer Z-mount lenses to my collection. Time to start dreaming!

  • Barry Petchesky at Defector: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?: The annual report! “This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.”

  • Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian Magazine: A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda: I had no idea about any of this.

  • Infinite Ball Drop: “On New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball drops for only 60 seconds over a measly 139 feet. What if we extrapolated from that and covered the entire year?”

  • Robin Buller at The Guardian: How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very: “From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history. Protest has led to the passage of legislation that gave women the right to vote, banned segregation and legalized same-sex marriage. It has also sparked cultural shifts in how Americans perceive things like bodily autonomy, economic inequality and racial bias.”

  • Doug Henwood at Jacobin interviews Émile Torres: Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.: “…there’s also a kind of capitalist influence, the idea that human beings do not matter in and of ourselves. In this worldview, we matter for the sake of value, rather than value mattering for the sake of us. ¶ …we are just means to an end. The only end is value, this abstract yet quantifiable concept that should be maximized to the physical cosmic limits. We matter only as the conduits through which this value can come into existence.

Weekly Notes: December 15–21, 2025

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Work was rather uneventful this week, being the week between the end of the quarter and the week of the holiday break. Quiet, with time to putter around on the list of things that have been in the “lower priority” pile for a bit. Not bad at all.

Outside of work, much of the week was just watching the world around us slowly start to emerge from the flood waters. There’s still a lot of water around, and the rivers are still running high, but things are improving and most roads have reopened. Soggy progress is still progress.

Today we went down to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s The Nutcracker down in Federal Way. We enjoy the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s performances — they’re a Ukrainian troupe that’s now based out of Bellevue, with a blend of Ukrainian professionals and local students, so the individual dancers range from very good to very enthusiastic — and it’s always good to support local artists.

📚 Reading

Finished Catherynne Valente’s Space Oddity, the just-as-fun sequel to Space Opera. My only disappointment (and it’s not with the book) is that I was busy enough at last spring’s Norwescon where she was a guest of honor that I barely crossed paths with her and didn’t get to say how much I enjoy her work.

📺 Watching

Rewatched Better Off Dead for the first time in a few years, thanks to Royce pointing out that it’s a Christmas movie. Still one of my all-time favorites.

🎧 Listening

Bootie Mashup’s annual Best of Bootie Mashup album is out; so far I’ve downloaded it and added it to my library, but haven’t started listening through it yet. Looking forward to seeing if there are any gems to be inflicted on my unsuspecting audience at the Norwescon Thursday night dance this spring….

🔗 Linking

  • Jim Milliot with Sophia Stewart at Publishers Weekly: Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks: “The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks.” This is disappointing; I generally prefer the mass-market paperback size to the trade paperback size (same content, less money, and smaller, so more fit on my shelves).

  • Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek at Inside Higher Ed: No, Colleges Do Not “Over-Accommodate” (archive.is link): “…a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces…speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education. ¶ As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific ‘type’ of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the ‘Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?’ piece.”

  • Lane Brown at Vulture: The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy Did Stanley Kubrick warn us about Jeffrey Epstein?: I put no stock in the conspiracy theory (this one in specific, and conspiracy theories in general), but this is a fascinating story. I had no idea this was even a thing.

  • Emma Stoye & Fred Schwaller at Nature: The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks: “The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more.” Some gorgeous photos.

  • Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal: We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars. (archive.is link): “Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for ‘marketing purposes.’ It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear. ¶ Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.”

  • Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn at The Guardian: It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced: “In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off.”

Weekly Notes: December 8–14, 2025

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The big thing around here this week, of course, has been the weather. Specifically, a once-in-quite-a-few-decades atmospheric river that hammered Washington for the past week, with the particular area we live in being one of the harder hit. We’re fortunate in that we live and work on high ground, and while we do drive through the Kent valley to get between the two, our usual route hasn’t been directly affected (…yet…?). The rain slacked off this weekend, but there’s a second river due to start impacting us tonight, so we’ll see what happens next.

📸 Photos

A green painted steel bridge over a river well over its normal banks; an “8’ Head Clearance” can be seen under the bridge just a couple feet above the water level.
Today we went down to gawk at the Green River around the Meeker Street bridge, the Riverbend golf course, and the Old Fishing Hole park. This is definitely not what it normally looks like! In addition to these four, there are more on my Flickr account.
A pedestrian bridge over a river with a sign that reads “Logjam Ahead, Proceed With Caution” hanging under the bridge and partially submerged in the flowing water.
Normally, this sign would be pretty far above the heads of anyone boating down the river.
A golf course green partially covered with flood water.
Golf courses do usually have water features, but not like this….
Flood water flowing over a road, barely identifiable by a yellow stripe just visible under the water, from a park into a river.
Normally, the left side of this shot would be a river, the center would be a two-lane road, and the right would be the parking lot for a park, where you then walked down a hill to walk on a path around a small lake (or large pond).

🔗 Linking

  • stickertop.art: “Discover a unique collection of laptops adorned with creative stickers from around the world. This project celebrates the art and culture of laptop personalization each laptop tells a story through its stickers and gives us a glimpse of the personality of the owners.”

  • Ben Werdmuller: Why RSS matters: “[Its] invisibility has created a misconception, in some quarters, that RSS is a relic. But the opposite is true: we’ve never relied on it more. And as the social web fractures, as platforms wall off content, and as AI agents begin remixing everything they can ingest, our dependence on neutral, open standards for distributing information is about to become existential.”

  • Mallory Carra at The Guardian: Gen Zine: DIY publications find new life as a form of resistance against Trump: “Zines have made a resurgence in recent months as communities seek to share information, such as how to protect one another from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or how to resist the Trump administration outside No Kings protests…. ¶ Zine-makers and enthusiasts say that people are likely embracing the pen-and-paper medium again due to social media censorship, surveillance, doxing and the alleged suppression of certain topics on algorithms.”

  • Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography: “…typography can enhance your writing. Typography can create a better first impression. Typography can reinforce your key points. Typography can extend reader attention. When you ignore typography, you’re ignoring an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of your writing.”

  • Matt Gurney: ‘We will never fucking trust you again’ (archive.is link): “America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America’s recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally. ¶ The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won’t matter. ¶ Because ‘we will never fucking trust you again.'”

  • Dax Castro: A New Font, the Same Old Habit: Erasing People to Preserve Appearances: “Today, we do not pass laws banning people from public because of how they look. Instead, we often do something quieter and more subtle. We define professionalism so narrowly that people must adapt themselves, their tools, and sometimes their bodies to fit an aesthetic ideal. ¶ Dress codes that disproportionately punish certain hairstyles. Workplace norms that equate tradition with legitimacy. Design decisions that dismiss accessibility as selfish, optional, or visually inconvenient. ¶ Font decisions live in that same ecosystem.”

  • James Whitbrook at Gizmodo: The History Behind All the Cuts of the Original ‘Star Wars’: “The movie that made it to theaters was one of a thousand compromises, with things tweaked and cut and given up on as Lucas strove to realize his ambitious ideas on screen. The moment Star Wars hit theaters, the director was not done pushing what he could change, emboldened by its immediate success—establishing a long history of his revisits to the movie that changed his career forever. Here’s a timeline of the changes made, from 1977 to the film’s latest version streaming on Disney+.”

  • Joanna Slater at The Washington Post: Professors are turning to this old-school method to stop AI use on exams (achive.is link): “Across the country, a small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.”

  • Alexandra Petri at The Atlantic: Finally!! No More Woke Fonts! (archive.is link): “The Department of Homeland Security is getting rid of Futura and bringing back our medieval gothic blackletter favorites with a switch to Fraktur. “What do you mean, you’re bringing our medieval fonts back? What medieval fonts? What country do you think this is?” Germany, right? 1930s, right? If not, we’re going to be very embarrassed. In general, when selecting a font or making any other kind of design choice, think, Would this look out of place on a Leni Riefenstahl film poster?“

  • Ellen Scherr: Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore (archived.is link): “Research in neuroscience shows that as we age, the brain undergoes a process called synaptic pruning. Neural pathways that aren’t essential get trimmed away. Your brain is essentially Marie Kondo-ing itself, keeping what serves you and discarding what doesn’t. ¶ And all those neural pathways dedicated to hypervigilant people-pleasing? They’re often first on the chopping block.”

Weekly Notes: December 1–7, 2025

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  • Work has been busy with end-of-the-quarter things, but the highlight this week was a pre-opening tour of Sound Transit’s three new light rail stations, including the one directly across from Highline College. I brought my camera along, and have my photos of the new stations up on Flickr.

  • Saturday was this month’s Norwescon meeting, followed by our annual holiday party…and then after that, Caturday at the Mercury. On the one hand, it was a fun day; on the other, it was also a long day, and at 52, it’s pretty clear that I can do a Norwescon meeting or a night out at the goth club…but both on the same day is probably not a great idea anymore. (I’m not old. I’m just older. It’s different.)

📸 Photos

Black and white shot of a group of people walking along a sidewalk as seen from behind. Several have guide dogs, one has a white cane for the blind and is walking arm-in-arm with another person, and the person centered in the frame is wearing a fuzzy coat with a teddy bear pattern.
In the rain at the Federal Way light rail station as the tour was getting started.
A fisheye view inside a light rail train. A flexible section in the foreground is distorted to appear like a much larger tunnel, with passengers on seats stretching away into the far distance.
Since I knew I was going to be getting a lot of architecture shots, I brought along my fisheye lens (a Rokinon 8mm f/3.5) to play with. I really liked the sci-fi feel it gave this otherwise unremarkable flexible bit of light trail train car.
A concrete wall stretches into the distance, in the foreground is a PVC water drain pipe with a six-inch section missing that has a cut-up plastic water bottle being used as an improvisational fix.
This really made me laugh. Ingenious and effective as it is, I assume this fix is temporary.
A city street on a rainy day from the elevated platform of the light rail. Visible in the distance are the blue-and-green signs marking the entrance to Highline College.
Not a terribly artistic or visually interesting photo…unless you work at Highline College and are excited about our campus being within easy walking distance of Seattle’s light rail.
Four people seen from the shoulders down sitting in a light rail car, three of them with golden labrador dogs wearing "guide dog puppy" vests.
There were lots of very good doggos learning how to be guide dogs on this tour.

📚 Reading

Having needed over a month to get through my last book, it’s nice to have a week when I get through two (even if they weren’t exactly heavy-duty reading).

🔗 Linking

  • National Geographic: Pictures of the Year 2025 (archive.is link): “From thousands of images made by our photographers all around the world, we present the ones that moved and inspired us most.”

  • Steven Aquino’s Curb Cuts: Apple Releases ‘I’m Not Remarkable’ Short Film: “Messaging-wise, I’m Not Remarkable is, in fact, rather remarkable as it pushes back on long-held societal stereotypes about people with disabilities. It puts forth the idea that those in the disability community—yours truly included—are first and foremost human beings like anyone else who happen to use (Apple’s) technology to access a world unbuilt for us. We’re just people trying to live our lives like everyone else on this planet.”

  • Todd Vaziri’s FXRant: The “Mad Men” in 4K on HBO Max Debacle: “In one of season one’s most memorable moments, Roger Sterling barfs in front of clients after climbing many flights of stairs. As a surprise to Paul, you can clearly see the pretend puke hose (that is ultimately strapped to the back side of John Slattery’s face) in the background, along with two techs who are modulating the flow. Yeah, you’re not supposed to see that.”

  • Ardian Roselli: You Can’t Make Something Accessible to Everyone: “Because people have varying needs across disparate contexts from assorted expectations with unequal skill levels using almost random technologies, never mind current moods and real-life distractions, to suggest one thing will be accessible for everyone in all those circumstances is pure hubris. Or lack of empathy. Maybe a mix. ¶ I’m not suggesting that claiming something is “accessible” is an overtly bad act. I am saying, however, that maybe you should explain what accessibility features it has, and let that guide people. It’s more honest to them and you.”

  • The Associated Press: Raccoon goes on drunken rampage in Virginia liquor store and passes out on bathroom floor: “The masked burglar broke into the closed Virginia liquor store early on Saturday and hit the bottom shelf, where the scotch and whisky were stored. The bandit was something of a nocturnal menace: bottles were smashed, a ceiling tile collapsed and alcohol pooled on the floor. ¶ The suspect acted like an animal because, in fact, he’s a raccoon.”

  • Wokyis M5 10Gbps: I in no way need a docking station for my Mac Mini that looks like a classic Mac, complete with working 5″ monitor. But I sure am tempted!

  • Mel Mitchell-Jackson: why I am AI sober (archive.is link): “We feed these machines our ideas, our worldviews, and our creativity (yikes!), asking it to spit out efficient, productivity-maxxing, sales-converting, corporate-approved regurgitations of our perspective on the world. ¶ But creativity isn’t efficient. It requires failure. Mistakes are where we find our voice. It requires rest and meandering just as much as active production. If we choose to give up the struggle required to find our voice, we will uncover that these text and image generators are really just Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Yeah, we can walk through the new world expected of us by these corporate slop factories, but our voice is gone. We sacrificed it and sold it as data when we signed the terms and conditions. ¶ We’re abandoning boredom, connection with fellow humans, or time spent looking at nature as editors or collaborators. The use of generative AI in place of our creative intuition is a corrosive act of creative death. Tech tools can empower us, yes, but Large Language Models are a killswitch for our intuition. They support every idea with a resounding and enthusiastic ‘yes, what a great idea, let’s workshop that!’ They turn us so easily into hyper-productive content-creation slop machines. ¶ We are funneled into creating waste, not art. I am calling on you to resist using generative AI whenever possible. The rest of this essay is why.”

  • Allegra Rosenberg at Atlas Obscura: What ‘67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity: “The ’67’ phenomenon has been, much like the rest of Gen Alpha’s vernacular, attributed to algorithms and brainrot culture. But other than its initial spread via TikTok, there’s not much that separates “67” from centuries of absurd, nonsensical kid culture. ¶ This whole ’67’ thing may be foreign to you, but you probably grew up singing ‘Miss Mary Mack’ or shouting ‘Kobe!’ or drawing a Superman ‘S’ in your notebooks—or something along those lines. These are all examples of children’s culture studied by Iona and Peter Opie. And their work might be the key to finding the meaning within the seemingly meaningless ’67.'”